An Anthropologist’s Obsession with Outlander
I have been on hiatus from blogging for some time, mainly due to two factors. First, I launched a public anthropology podcast, Anthropologist on the Street (huzzah!), which…
Tag: anthropology
Latino Memphis
By Simone Pierre Delerme Memphis’ Summer Avenue has become an enclave with a concentration of Latino-owned restaurants and small businesses. Along the corridor, one will find some…
Gun Violence in American Schools
There is something terribly wrong going on in American schools today. A silent epidemic is spreading throughout the country like a cancer. What does it say about a…
What FoodAnthro is Reading Now, May 1 2018
A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to dberiss@gmail.com or…
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.…
Ep. #13 TFS presents Anthropod: “Podcasts and Pedagogy: audio in the anthropology classroom”
“Storytelling: that’s part of the power of podcasts, and just the power of ethnography in general, to really have people tell their own stories. And I think it’s…
Mushies
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has written an amazing book. The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) is all about forests and foraging and revitalising teaching and diasporas…
Fear and Loathing in Atlanta
Content warning: racism, violence, mention of miscarriage. I was on my way to the airplane that would take me back home, to Canada. I boarded the train between…
What FoodAnthropology Is Reading Now, April 23, 2018
David Beriss A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to…
At(tending) to Anthropological Language
The way anthropologists write and speak to each other about our work is a lot like memes. By memes I mean those bits of text and image used across…
CHNY Scholars Grant Awards 2018
From the Culinary Historians of New York, small grants of interest to SAFN readers who are engaged in current research projects. They do not have to focus on…
MOOC “Sustainable food systems: a Mediterranean perspective”
This is an announcement for a free, on-demand, on-line, course on sustainable food systems. It is an intriguing model for providing certain kinds of education about food (and…
Ep. #12 Cultural imaginaries, deepfake videos, hatred in anth, & social dissociation: this month on TFS
This month, Ian (1:12) asks how we should engage when people describe their culture one way, but our observations of their behavior don’t match those descriptions. What is…
A Call for Blog Posts!
A Call for Blog Posts on Certain Timely Themes! We invite anthropologists of any persuasion to contribute to a dialogue about contemporary cultural issues! The current cultural conversation…
A Pretext for Plunder? Environmental Change and State-Led Redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon
Gordon Ulmer, Sydney Silverstein, and I just published a short article (with lots of photos!) in the latest edition of Anthropology Today. It examines how projected environmental changes…
Book Review: Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power by Timothy Pachirat
In Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power, Timothy Pachirat offers an experimental contribution to scholarship on social science methodology. Written in the form of a play,…
Anthropology Is Boring: Bring Other Books
I was determined to make sure that I was never bored during my fieldwork. Vibrant informants and constant social interaction were to be the key to my successful…
The Personhood and Rights of Apes
I spent the earliest part of my career as an anthropologist studying captive chimpanzees at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, NC. While there, I always made a…
Lee Hoffer on the Opioid Epidemic
Last week, the OSU Undergraduate Anthropology Club invited Lee Hoffer, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, to give a guest lecture on the opioid epidemic.…
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…
Ep. #11 Alternative worlds: Ghassan Hage talks multiculturalism, teaching the enemy, & thinking in public
“Any concept — capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. — leaves an excess that it is the aim of anthropology to unearth. These are spaces that are not dominated by whatever’s…
The Bitcoin Controversy
Most people have already heard of Bitcoin. However, very few know what it is or how it originated. Many people know that it is some form of “cryptocurrency”…
Postdoc Opportunity in Sustainability & Food Security
We have received notification from Katarzyna Dembska, BCFN YES! Coordinator, of the latest edition of their postdoc program in sustainability and food security. This is clearly a great…
AAA CFP: Time and Power in Agrarian Environments
CFP: AAA 2018 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, November 14-18, 2018 San Jose, California Organizers: Natalia Gutkowski (Harvard University) and Ashawari Chaudhuri (MIT) Time and …