The final station by Susanne van den Buuse
The sun wakes her up. But Mrs Wijngaard keeps her eyes closed. She is 90 years old and sits quietly in her armchair in her apartment in the…
Tag: anthropology
Burning down the house: When crisis becomes daily life in early-onset dementia by Silke Hoppe
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not…
George, the dog by Emily Yates-Doerr
Babe, my grandpa, was born on the kitchen tiles of a small Seattle home. His dad, whose own grandpa had run a seedy downtown brothel, would disappear and…
Strangers in unfamiliar environments: Struggles for subjectivity in a dementia care ward by Ingunn Moser
During fieldwork on dementia care in a nursing home, I was struck by the complex and layered orderings of space, time and subjectivity in daily life on the…
Thinking with spirits by Kristine Krause
During my first visit to Ghana in 1998, I was involved in a research project that looked at possible co-operations between healers and psychiatric clinics. I stayed in…
Refraction of daily life by Jeannette Pols
Attending to what makes up ‘the everyday’ has long been a challenge for scholars in the social sciences. [1] Researchers from different disciplines and perspectives have explored how mundane…
Truth of History
This title is nearly an oxymoron. There are historic truths, but what we known of history is an invention of mostly people who did not personally experience that…
Vlad Schüler-Costa: Academic precarity and the false coin of our own dreams
A specter haunted EASA2018—the specter of precarity. Like a “frightful hobgoblin” (that, one could argue, is a more suitable, if inaccurate, translation of Marx’s Gespenst), it appeared in…
De institutionalisering van salafisme – Een bespreking
Auteurs: Martijn de Koning (Universiteit van Amsterdam / Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) Annelies Moors (Universiteit van Amsterdam) Thijl Sunier (Vrije Universiteit van Amsterdam) Ongeveer twee weken …
Did Einstein really say that?
The phenomenon of online diffusion of misattributed quotes is so widespread that got its own dedicated meme. You may have seen a picture of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th…
The Development of Food Anthropology: Richard Wilk
Welcome to the inaugural interview in what will be a series of videos with founding folks working in the field of food anthropology, which is meant to document…
The Proust Questionnaire: Dr. Richard Wilk
The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not originally devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering…
The Value of Anthropology: My Story
Dr. Agustín Fuentes argues that it is human creativity that is the defining characteristic of our species ( see my review of The Creative Spark here: Book Review- The Creative…
Help make TFS better and WIN!
It’s our 1st birthday in 2 weeks time (nooo, say what?? Where did that year go?) and a birthday is always a good time to take stock. Are…
The fool with the watering can, or asynchronous time travelling by Jeannette Pols
One of the most bewildering and fascinating things about spending time with people with dementia is that they can rapidly travel through time. This was most clear with…
Six photos of my father at 91 by Alessandro Duranti
I have chosen to tell a story based on six photographs I took of my father, Ivio Duranti (1918-2009) in the last year of his life. He was…
Re-enacting memories by Elinor Ochs
One way to ‘think with dementia’ is to phenomenologically shift from ‘memory’ to ‘remembering’ and to mine ‘remembering’ for its qualities and potentialities as socio-culturally limned experience. Whe…
“I do want euthanasia, but not now.” Timing a request for euthanasia with dementia in the Netherlands by Natashe Lemos Dekker
Sitting on orange seats in the corridor, Ms Verbeek, her niece Hannie and I are waiting for the general practitioner. Ms Verbeek seems a little restless and is…
Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home by Laura Vermeulen
We knew each other from the drop-in centre. Aspects of our daily life concerns had been shared. ‘We’ were drop-in centre participants: the majority had been diagnosed with…
Refraction of time by Jeannette Pols
On a Thursday evening, five men gather around a dinner table. Their host, a scientist from Surrey, England, has left them a note telling them to begin eating…
Ep. #22 Just the way things are: Steve Woolgar talks mundane governance, & the rules that run our lives
“Although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable… it’s actually quite dangerous, too.” Steve Woolgar, emeritus professor at the Saïd School of Business…
Review: Food in Zones of Conflict
Food in Zones of Conflict: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Paul Collinson and Helen Macbeth. Berghahn Books. 2014. 252 pp. ISBN 978-1-78238-403-8 Jacquelyn Heuer (University of South Flor…
Palma Africana – Taussig
For my notebook on glossy anthropology, this incandescent page from Michael Taussig’s New 2018 book discusses a brochure promoting the devil’s own crop – (the world choking slowly…
Tribes Made Conscious Decisions and Travel in Annual Circuits
In anthropology there is a term “Seasonal Round” that describes, or attempts to describe, the annual movement of the tribal peoples throughout their lands. This term is now…