Ed Bruner: In Memoriam
August 8, 2020 Ed Bruner at his home in Illinois (2005) Ed Bruner passed away yesterday, at 95–peacefully, at home. I wish my daughter and I could have…
Tag: Academic Career
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
What Anthropology Teaches Us about COVID-19, Part 4: A Conversation with Physician-Anthropologist, Dr. Bjørn Westgard
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program…
Birth as Ritual/Ritual as Birth
Cultural anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, is considered by many as the Queen of Childbirth Studies. A Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of…
Environmental Anthropology: An Anthropologist’s View of a Cove Cleanup
The curse of the anthropologist: finding culture everywhere in nature. Today, the neighborhood in which my husband and I now live hosted a cleanup in a nearby cove.…
Doing Development the Right Way: A Conversation with Charles Piot
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity…
The Anthropology/Poetry Nexus–An Interview with Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe? Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus. Her advanced degrees include an MFA in poetry . . . and a…
Do All African Immigrants Arrive Sick, Desperate, and Empty-Handed on the Shores of Europe? Ask Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg!
The lives, status, and image of immigrants may constitute the single-most urgent human issue of our time. In an arresting and captivating new study of Cameroonian mothers now…
Is History Over? How Can Power be Soft? Ask Ulf Hannerz
The end of history The clash of civilizations The coming anarchy Soft power We’ve all heard these trendy mottos, and most of us have probably cringed. Anthropologists…
A Review of “Euphoria” by Lily King
I should say from the outset that I enjoyed the book. I read it in a week. At the literary level, it’s wonderfully written. I didn’t find myself…
Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read
Kristen Ghodsee’s new book, From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press (in 2016). The discipline of…
Thinking about Our Shared Common Ancestry–Pausing to Reflect Back on My Career as an Africanist
Honored to have an interview I recently did with Dallas Tatman (an MA student in African Studies at the U of Illinois) unexpectedly show up, to my surprise,…