Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine
After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the…
Tag: Blog
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations]…
Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to…
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism
The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar…
Citational politics in tight places
How might we improve citational politics in “tight places” where not only the norms of citation but also the structure of knowledge or research overdetermines what might be…
PT Position: Research Assistant, Nunavut Arctic College North by North Research Program
We are looking to hire several Research Assistants to help us conduct a systematic literature review to look at the role of Nunavut Arctic College in research, and…
Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East
Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko. I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-…
Derek Hall: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey
David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that…
The Weight of History: Doing Fieldwork as an Ethnic Chinese Researcher
I have been asked about my research in China as a researcher from Taiwan by my colleagues in the US. One of them commented: “It’s not common for…
David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement
Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti. David Harvey prepared this text for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. We publish…
Paul Farmer (1959-2022) and SAR
Paul Farmer on the SAR campus, 2006. Photo credit: Katrina Lasko Dr. Paul Farmer, humanitarian, physician, and anthropologist, died in his sleep on February 21 in Butaro, Rwanda,…
Massimiliano Mollona: Why the End of Work Will Not Be the End of Capitalism
One of the lowest moments of my undergraduate studies in Economics back in the 1990s happened whilst reading Tom Peters’ Liberation Management (1992), where the management guru/McKinsey-associate pro…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bullshit Jobs
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Massimiliano Mollona & Andrew Sanchez When David Graeber published his article ‘On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs’ in Strike! in 2013, he knew he st…
Mellon Foundation Awards $1.5 Million for Groundbreaking Digital Project Focused on Enslaved Native Americans
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1.5 million grant to fund Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Americans Enslaved, an…
Academic Authority and Institutional Power in Anthropology
Recent events have raised perennial questions about academic authority and institutional power in anthropology. There are persuasive allegations about more than one famous anthropologist—most recentl…
Guidelines for Collaboration: Museums and Communities Seeking Equitable Change
Dolores Lewis Garcia and Claudia Mitchell during a collections review at the Indian Arts Research Center. Guest post by Emily Santha…
#Hackademics- Hacks for Succeeding in Academia #1: Balancing Family Drama Trauma Fieldwork & Teaching
I recently participated in a webinar with the American Association of Biological Anthropologists and the Sausage of Science Podcast. We discussed mental wellbeing in academia and Dr. Rebecca…
Michael Herzfeld: The Slyness of Stupidity: A Commentary on David Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules”
David Graeber’s wide-ranging – and, appropriately, sometimes wildly swashbuckling – set of essays sketches his anarchist utopia by default, as a social world free of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy, he…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Bureaucracy
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussant: Michael Herzfeld If the previous week in our series focused on the imagination, this week considers what for David Graeber was its antithesis: bureaucracy.…
Michael Edwards: Graeber, Leach, and the Revolution in Myanmar
I would never have expected Ruth to join the revolution. But then so much of what’s happened in Myanmar this past year has been somehow unexpected, from the…
Matan Kaminer: Marxist anthropology in a world of surplus population: Reflections on a Frontlines of Value workshop
I was recently privileged to participate in a workshop about the Marxian concept of the “surplus population,” convoked by Stephen Campbell, Thomas Cowan, and Don Kalb as part…
Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws: Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity
David Graeber’s work is often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of…
David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar: Myth and Imagination
Chair: Alpa Shah Discussants: Giulio Ongaro and Megan Laws & Michael Edwards In a short essay published after his death, David writes that “Good ideas rarely, if ever,…
Ayça Çubukçu: On “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology”
Published in 2004 in the inspirational context of a veritably exploding anarchism around the world, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (referred to here on as Fragments)is…