The representation of Africa in Hollywood movie Black Panther.
By Rhoda Woets Almost every month, I join a small group of anthropologists from the VU to go to the movies. Last month, we went to the action…
Tag: Africa
Humanitarian diagnostics for sleeping sickness in Uganda by Jennifer Palmer
Map of sleeping sickness RDT availability (red dots) in the north-western region of Uganda hosting refugees from South Sudan. In 2015, the majority of refugees in this region…
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.…
Diagnostics without diagnosis: RDTs for Sleeping Sickness in Uganda by Shona Lee
Diagnosing sleeping sickness (also known as human African trypanosomiasis (HAT)) is complicated, requiring the alignment of clinical suspicion with serological, parasitological, and molecular confirm…
Laboratory capacity building and the open hardware movement by Louise Bezuidenhout
Through my work in African laboratories I am regularly made aware of the challenging equipment shortages faced by research laboratories in many low/middle-income countries (LMICs). This extends far…
ReEBOV: Developing an Ebola rapid diagnostic test at research ground zero by Imogen Bevan
Expired ReEBOV tests in a hospital laboratory in Sierra Leone. Photograph by Ann Kelly In June 2015, as Sierra Leone and Guinea was experiencing new surges in clusters…
Tijo Salverda: Aiming to keep capitalist accumulation in check: The role of the global land rush’s fiercest critics
This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne). Following the…
Conjuring Madness: Self/Non Self and Mental Illness in Post-Apartheid Namibia by Mattia Fumanti
Il convient plutot de s’attacher à ce que signifie ȇtre un homme, avant de problématiser la folie en terms de santé et maladie, Ludwig Binswanger, Le Rȇve et…
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…
Georg Materna: “Two tribes of capitalists”: Neoconomists and politiconomists in a Senegalese marketplace
Research on capitalism commonly distinguishes between neoclassical economics and political economy. If neoclassical economics have dominated scientific debates since the 1930s at the latest, the ninet…
Reversed rushes? Expulsion as a dominant feature of gold miners’ mobility in Guinea and Mali
By Matthieu Bolay, Université de Neuchâtel When I was carrying out fieldwork in Guinea and Mali between 2010 and 2014, some ministry officials, with whom I discussed the topics…
DragNet: February 1 – February 15, 2018
Image from ACLU.org For this dragnet update we have several fascinating articles to highlight. Among the stories from the United states was an article on the NYPD’s unofficial power…
Heike Becker: “Global 1968” on the African continent
Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the “West” and in the “East,” “Global 1968” has become the catchphrase to describe these…
Blue binders of white donors: sorting race out in South African IVF by Tessa Moll
Miracle babies. The microscopic enchantments of embryos. The image of a woman holding that much-desired infant. In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is replete with awe-inducing imagery, often bordering…
From the Field: Mfuwe, Zambia
by Esther Mulders For the past two years, I’ve been volunteering in Zambia with Studio Zambia, a Dutch non-profit organisation that I co-founded in 2016 and currently co-run.…
Beach by Meg Samuelson
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as…
Texting Like A State: mHealth and the first thousand days in South Africa by Nanna Schneidermann
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone? For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in…
Call for #Reviews: #AnthroState #Africa
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential edited volume States at Work to…
Revisiting ‘States at Work. Dynamics of African Bureaucracies’
‘States at Work’ aims to contribute to the academic debates on processes of state-building in Africa, and, among development practitioners, on the role of the state in development,…
Beauty by Lynn M. Thomas
In the late 1990s, a group of Japanese researchers set out to investigate whether small-scale gold mining operations near the shores of East Africa’s Lake Victoria were resulting…
The state of the state in #Africa
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Especially …
Residue by Gabrielle Hecht
Waste and toxicity are foundational categories of knowledge for the Anthropocene. Consider how natural scientists approach the topic. Empirically, the “great acceleration” they’ve identified correspon…
Everything You Thought You Knew about Orphans in Africa Is Probably Wrong
Policy makers, development workers, orphanage voluntourists, missionaries, prospective adoptive parents: ignore this book at your peril. “AIDS orphans” are commonly imagined as the…
Drift by Charne Lavery
The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste—including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the…