Links & Contents I Liked 412
Hi all, It feels like a lifetime since I posted my last weekly update with all the terrible news that is coming in from Afghanistan, Haiti & so…
“The Truth Is Not Known”: COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy as a Failure of Biomedicine’s Moral Legitimacy in Zambia by Justin Haruyama
Over the course of the last several months, a series of chilling videos have been shared across Zambian social media, purporting to link COVID-19 vaccines with a global…
Matthew Flisfeder, “Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media” (Northwestern UP, 2021)
One of the most fundamental aspects of modern life is that much of it is lived on and through social media. We create profiles, post pictures, update stories,…
Tom Mould, “Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America” (Indiana UP, 2020)
It is a familiar story: A recipient of public assistance funds is caught buying expensive steaks, seafood, or other luxury foods with food stamps at the grocery store.…
Emalani Case, “Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki” (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case draws on her own life experiences to explore the politics and ethics of … Visit…
“Stop the Shot”: Resistance through Science, Religion, and Law
On August 4, an interesting event took place: “Stop the Shot”. This was a video press conference organized by the Truth for Health Foundation in the US, which…
Animating Stories of Global Migration
Who gets to tell the story of human migration around the globe? And what kind of story is it? The Story of Migration, an animated short illustrated by…
Book Review: The Daily Lives of Muslims: Islam and Public Confrontation in Contemporary Europe by Nilüfer Göle
In The Daily Lives of Muslims: Islam and Public Confrontation in Contemporary Europe, Nilüfer Göle explores the everyday experiences of Muslims in a number of European countries. While commending…
Å be eller to be? – språklige fallgruver
Kontrastiv lingvistikk er en del av språkvitenskapen som fokuserer på forskjeller og likheter mellom språk, for eksempel ut fra fonetikk (uttale), semantikk (betydning) og morfologi og syntaks (dvs.…
Kristin Hanssen, “Women, Religion and the Body in South Asia: Living With Bengali Bauls” (Routledge, 2020)
Noted for their haunting melodies and enigmatic lyrics, Bauls have been portrayed as spiritually enlightened troubadours traveling around the countryside in West Bengal in India and in Bangla……
Paul Michael Hedges, “Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies” (U California Press, 2021)
This innovative coursebook introduces students to interdisciplinary theoretical tools for understanding contemporary religiously diverse societies–both Western and non-Western. Using a case-… Visit New Books in Anthropology for the…
Spirits, Development and Chinese (Hydro)power: Ethnographic (Hi)stories from Upland Laos
In the extreme north of Laos, in Phongsali Province, lies a tiny village home to around 24 households. Until recently it was a monoethnic Khmu village. The Khmu…
Rebecca Friedman, “Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Russia” (Bloomsbury, 2020)
From the nostalgic landed estate with its backward gaze to the present-focused and efficient urban apartment to the utopian communal dreams of a Soviet future, the idea of…
Los talibán y la modernidad
Foto Saeed Achakzai/Reuters Pocos días después del atentado del 11-S en Nueva York, el 24 de septiembre de 2001, publicaba este artículo en El Mundo, sobre alguno de…
On Drones and Ectoplasms: Breath of Gaia
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Painting form the art project On Drones and Ectoplasms: Breath of Gaia. ©Angeliki Malakasioti…
Bolo Tie Highlights: An IARC Collection Reflection
Duane Maktima. Bolo tie + buckle, 1974, detail. Silver, turquoise, gold-lip mother-of-pearl, ironwood, coral, leather. SAR.1989-7-177AB. Ph…
Sobre el "satanismo" de ofitas y naasenos
Comentario para Alfred Gormariz, estudiante del Grado de Antropología Social en la Universitat de Barcelona, enviado en julio de 2019 SOBRE EL “SATANISMO” DE OFITAS Y NAASENOS Manuel…
What Indigenous Languages Reveal About Bear Genetics
[no-caption] Alh1/Flickr This article was originally published at Hakai Magazine and has been republished with permission. Along the central coast of British Columbia, grizzly bears go by…
Illustrating ASSA’s findings with comics – part 3
By Georgiana Murariu & Laura Haapio-Kirk In this blog post, we present the third comic in our ASSA comics series – this time set in Lusozi, a neighbourhood…
Weed or Not Weed?
Weeding is an exercise in anthropology. How do we know what’s a weed? The great French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, organized his 80-year career around one foundational principle: R…
The Ghost of Amanullah: Afghanistan Redux
The Khyber Pass in 1923 Historians generally assume that “modernity” jump-started in Afghanistan in 1919 with the crowning of Ghazi Amanullah Khan as emir and later as king…
Haunted by My Teaching Skeleton
Museum storage facilities, such as this one in Germany, often hold the remains of human beings. Jens Büttner/Picture Alliance/Getty Images There is something unsettling about being alone …
P. J. Boczkowski and E. Mitchelstein, “The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now” (MIT Press, 2021)
Increasingly we live through our personal screens; we work, play, socialize, and learn digitally. The shift to remote everything during the pandemic was another step in a decades-long…
Nicola J. Smith, “Capitalism’s Sexual History” (Oxford UP, 2020)
As ongoing controversies over commercial sex attest, the relationship between capitalism and sexuality is deeply contentious. Economic and sexual practices are assumed to be not only separabl… Visit…