Oregon Catholic Indian Education History
The Catholic Indian education program was initially supported by a policy decision by the U.S. Department of War in 1819. Then the USDOW was in charge of Indian…
Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How it Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist
By Holly Walters “Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional creation adults openly embraced as “real,” while deliberately ignoring or minimizing its creator, and this fetishization has continued for…
NBN Classic: Josh Reno, “Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness” (U California Press, 2019)
This episode proved remarkably popular, so we’re reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time. Seven decades of military spending during the…
Filippo Marsili, “Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to ‘Religion’ and Empire in Ancient China” (SUNY Press, 2018)
Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to ‘Religion’ and Empire in Ancient China (SUNY Press, 2018) offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in…
Truth and Responsibility
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” ― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God “Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology…
Why Targeting Heritage Is a Crime Against Humanity
“A barbarian is someone who looks at culture and finds no beauty at all. A barbarian looks at a mosque or a burial mound, and dreams only of…
Book Review: The Use and Abuse of Music: Criminal Records by Eleanor Peters
In The Use and Abuse of Music: Criminal Records, Eleanor Peters introduces music as a powerful instrument for thinking critically about crime and its contested meanings, while also…
Kenneth R. Valpey, “Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics? Why are cows treated with such reverence in the Indian context? Join us as…
Archaeology Is Having a Great Century So Far
Nearly a century ago, the focus of human origins research shifted from Europe to Africa—such as to the Oldupai (Olduvai) Gorge in Tanzania, one of the cradles of…
Collecting waste in Sicily: old and new ways
BY FREEK COLOMBIJN Every human settlement has to think of a way to dispose its solid waste, but each place finds its own particular ways to do this.…
Vom Lob der Offenheit. Sprechen über Krebs und Tod
Offenheit im Umgang mit Krebs gilt als neu. Doch diese Wahrnehmung trügt, das Sprechen über die Diagnose wurde nicht immer tabuisiert. Über die wechselvolle Geschichte des Sprechens und…
Chelamela and Chemapho of the Long Tom Watershed
Chelamela and Chemapho Kalapuyans The Long Tom Watershed was the original homeland to two major tribes of Kalapuyan Indians, the Chelamela and Chemapho tribes. The Chelamela occupied the…
Honey and Poi featured in USCJ’s “Journeys”
Honey and Poi is a history of my synagogue in Hawai‘i. I helped research it and Matt, my collaborator and friend, wrote it. In a short column for…
Reclaiming Reciprocity in Video Sharing Environments
By Patricia Lange, California College of the Arts in San Francisco [In this new series, part of the Digital World category, we publish author commentaries on recently published…
Meet Our 2020 Contributing Editors!
As we begin another exciting year here at Platypus, we’d like to introduce you to our new group of Contributing Editors. Contributing Editors are responsible both for producing and…
¿Está el enemigo? que se ponga: la guerra absurda.
“El hombre nace esclavo, débil, insuficiente y dependiente, sometido e imperfecto. En resumen, nace imbécil” afirma tajante el filósofo italiano Maurizio Ferraris en el libro “La imbecilid…
Marcel Danesi discusses his book on memes and pop culture
https://brill.com/view/title/54309 Interview by Leila Mzali Leila Mzali: How did you initially become interested in the study of youth and pop culture? How did you realize that memes, while…
Unhealthy at the Health Fair: A personal account of chronic illness and disability in the field
Bio: Samantha Streuli is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego. Her research centers on a vaccine-promotion health intervention taking place within the Somali refugee community…
Brands and the Business of Relationships with Bill Fleming
Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers. On…
Narges Bajoghli, “Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic” (Stanford UP, 2019)
Narges Bajoghli’s gripping new book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford UP, 2019) presents a riveting ethnography of pro-regime media networks in Iran, and…
Sending surplus food to charity is not the way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
While giving food that would otherwise go to landfill to hungry people may be a convenient part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gases, it will do little…
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT is available for pre-order now!
My new book, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT, comes out April 7! You can preorder it now: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT is a history of the past forty years…
Homosexuell in einer chinesischen Familie – Der schwierige Weg zu sich selbst
Während die Gesellschaft in China Homosexuelle weder offen ablehnt noch offen toleriert, ist die Akzeptanz innerhalb der Familie selten gegeben. Ob man sich gegenüber seinen Eltern zu seiner Homosexua…