The Shrine of Nabi Hud
One of the most impressive architectural sites in Yemen is off the beaten track in the Hadramawt, about 90 miles north of al-Mukalla. This is the shrine of…
One of the most impressive architectural sites in Yemen is off the beaten track in the Hadramawt, about 90 miles north of al-Mukalla. This is the shrine of…
For an impressive website devoted to the heritage of Damascus, check out “Damascus Heritage.” There are several Youtube videos accessible from the website. I especially like the im…
There were many books written by Christian missionaries and clergy during the 19th century. While the text itself has long since been outdated, the engravings are still fascinating…
Sometimes it only takes a “spark,” a “simple, focused intervention,” a “single stroke of genius,” or “the single prick of a needle” to release the flows and create…
“Miss Nina, time to wake up! First bus leaves in half an hour!” Nina opened her eyes halfway, and nodded assent. “OK honey, I’ll check on you in…
Design by okb-buro.com The first time I approached the new General Referral Hospital in Niamey in June 2018, I thought it looked like a prison building, huge and…
In 1991 while on a World Bank consultancy in Aden, I had an opportunity to visit al-Shihr on the Hadrami coast. Here are some scenes from that trip.…
Cairo around 1920 In 1921 one of the many geographical/travel books published was the The Human Interest Library: Visuali?ed Knowledge (Chicago: Midland Press). In volume IV there is…
On November 21, 2020, protestors flooded the historic and political center of Guatemala City over the congressional approval of a budget bill of nearly twelve billion dollars (or ninety-nine billion…
Design by okb-buro.com Hand sketches shown in with this article are by the author from her fieldwork in Yangon in 2020. All images copyright by Nora Wuttke. The…
Designed by: okb-buro.com/ Earlier this year, the world became familiar with the facade of Britain’s St Thomas’ Hospital when, in late March, it became the backdrop for breaking…
Interview-review of Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (Winner of the Early Career Scholars Award 2018 of the European Association of Social Anthropologists) Keiti Kljavin, Lecturer at…
Data Threshers “Data Threshers” is a simulation portrait that experiments with the representation of metabolic conflicts in multiple scales of time, space, and perspective. Formally, the video takes…
Over the past two decades, infrastructure has emerged as a central concept in a larger conversation about architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Providing citizens with reliable infrastructure systems…
Forest analysis of scorched earth. Courtesy of Daniele Profeta. Princeton University, 2015. On an early January morning in 2015 a group of lawyers from the Guatemalan NGO Mujeres…
“A barbarian is someone who looks at culture and finds no beauty at all. A barbarian looks at a mosque or a burial mound, and dreams only of…
I’ll show you a place, high on a desert plain / Where the streets have no name … —U2, The Joshua Tree, 1987 I recently flew over two…
At the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, we have already had some very special public events at this fall semester. If you’ve attended some of these events, you…
Photo by Jorge Villatoro: Ravine in Zone 3, Guatemala City Deep, canyon-like ravines fracture forty-two percent of Guatemala City. Covered in thick, wet, and dense foliage, these ravines…
Happily, next month I will again teach a graduate course in material culture studies at Indiana University. In that context I will be even more interested than usual…
Biosphere 2 is an Earth systems research facility on occupied Tohono O’odham land (in so-called Oracle, Arizona, just north of Cuk Ṣ…
Skip ahead six paragraphs (bypass those marked with an hash mark #) if you want to go straight to the start of the fieldwork stories. If you would…
This briefer note is the second on our recent trip to China. The context for this travel will come (I hope) a few posts down the road. For…
This post is about a portion of my recent trip to China. The main focus of this trip was collaborative ethnographic research in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, but…