The Khanty Bear Feast revisited
The honored bear’s head (Photo Antti Tenetz) I have visited the Western Siberian Khanty in the vicinity of the oil towns in the Surgut region for twenty years…
The honored bear’s head (Photo Antti Tenetz) I have visited the Western Siberian Khanty in the vicinity of the oil towns in the Surgut region for twenty years…
by Rebecca Prentice It’s been three years since the most deadly disaster in garment manufacturing history: the April 24, 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building…
Yet another parenting article popped up in my Facebook feed this week. Not a How-To parenting article, which is annoying enough, but a You’re-Doing-Everything-Wrong parenting article. Generation X’s…
Just in: “This week Ellen Carey talks about her beautiful and ground breaking work, and Rob Green articulates the downfall of the art economy and closing of his…
A shorter version of this post will soon appear online as a podcast, in coordination with the motion put to a vote among the membership of the American…
Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions presents this essay by Lisa Rofel and Daniel Segal on the debasement of the political debate about the boycott by…
For Quartz, I wrote about the very misleading 5% unemployment rate, a statistic which discounts 1) the long-term unemployed and the lowered labor participation rate 2) the explosion…
For the Globe and Mail, I wrote about the New York primary, in a piece published the day before. The piece discusses not only the candidates — three…
Monika described her style to me as “a good mix of ’90s, classic style, and a little bit of western minimalism.” I’m not sure what western minimalism is,…
There are different ways in which the war in Syria and the ensuing refugee crisis can be made sense of anthropologically. When a crisis looms large on the…
Welcome to the first stack of ‘In the Journals’ for April! It’s a bumper crop, so find a cosy corner and some coffee to comb through it all.…
Scholars, Scribes, and Readers: An Advanced Course in Arabic Manuscript Studies6-10 June 2016, Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, UK The Islamic Manuscript Association, in cooperation with Camb…
When Jon was a PhD student at Edinburgh University in the early 1990s, there was a running joke about the possibility of developing a project on ethnoscatology –…
On September 21st, 1971, David Phillip Vetter was born with SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency). This rare hereditary immune disorder prevented him from fighting off infections caused by everyday…
The title of this post – and its contents – was inspired by an anecdote I wrote about in an earlier post in my field blog. Before I…
By Andrew Ross Sushi served on conveyor belts. Robot restaurants and robot theater. Toilets that automatically open themselves upon room entry. For visitors of Tokyo (and to an…
The little village of Pa Lungan sits in a grassy clearing, high in the hills of Malaysian Borneo, in a region called the Kelabit Highlands. The people here—a…
April brings many special issues! We’ve already highlighted themed issues on insurance and digitized health, and here are two more themed issues to know about: this month’s História, Ciênc…
Editor’s note: We received this letter, signed by the authors listed above and by nine anonymous authors, as a reply to our earlier Debate Forum. After far too…
Natalie Chaidez is the show runner for Hunters (Mondays, 10:00 eastern, SyFy). Recently Sean Hutchinson asked her what she was aiming for. Our idea of aliens is cliched, she replied. She wanted to &#…
“You’re the lady that taught us about the bones last year,” one of the students exclaimed as I made my way through the door of Bedford Village Public…
The Open-Mic Anthropologist The first time I performed stand-up comedy was in December 2015, at an open-mic club called On the Rocks. Gripped by nerves, I worried I…
Earlier this year, I observed that there are two kinds of scholarly overproduction, “herd” overproduction and “star” overproduction. I’d like to come back to that line of…