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…
Tag: anthropology
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…
Review: Egg (Object Lessons)
Egg (Object Lessons) Nicole Walker. London: Bloomsbury. 2017. 154 pp. ISBN 9781501322877 Leslie Carlin (University of Toronto) When my children were small and I kept frequent company with Mother…
Review: Hippie Food
Hippie Food: How Back to the Landers, Longhairs and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat. Jonathan Kauffman. New York: William Morrow, 2018. ISBN 978-0062437303 Richard Zimmer (Sonoma State Univers…
Taussig’s negative sublime
From Palma Africana (2018) “irradiation of the negative sublime”… “With this admittedly top-heavy phrase I am referring to the death pall cast by the (X)paras and palm plantati…
What FoodAnthropology Is Reading Now, September 10, 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…
Drawing as Possibility: A Review of Andrew Causey’s Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method
By Karina Kuschnir This review was first published in Portuguese by Mana, 24 (1), 271-275. During these somewhat discouraging times, Andrew Causey offers us a gift. Drawn to…
Ep. #21 Misogyny, irrational politics, the ontological turn, and multi-media learning: this month on TFS
Jodie (1:04), drawing on the book Down Girl by Australian philosopher Kate Manne, starts us off by asking what misogyny is, and how we should tackle it as…