The (Im)Possibility of Decolonizing Anthropology
When it comes to “decolonizing” Anthropology, diversity or decolonial initiatives often change very little or nothing at all. I suggest that anthropology is currently facing the dilemma of…
Tag: Blog
International Development and Poetic Practice: An Online Classroom Activity
Anne Schiller – George Mason University Cultural anthropology courses frequently satisfy world cultures requirements, attracting enrollments from across the university. My 150-seat online introduct…
SAR Field Trips: A Wonderful Combination
Guest post by Jean and John Berghoff. New to membership in 2021 and seeking opportunities to better understand the Native American h…
Welcome Back to the Teaching Culture Blog!
After a two-year hiatus, we’re delighted to announce the relaunching of UTP’s Teaching Culture blog. We are mindful of the incredible changes and challenges that have occurred and/or…
History, Historians, and Video Games
Caroline Wazer at Lapham’s Quarterly (via this on Metafilter), a discussion of three reviews of games in the Assassin’s Creed series in the American Historical Review, and video…
Bring Me the Head of Norman Vincent Peale: Self Care and the American Obsession with the Power of Positive Thinking
I don’t know when I first heard the term “toxic positivity” but it was sometime after my father was diagnosed with advancing dementia and before my own initial…
Learning from Desert Dwellers: Patty Limerick and C. J. Alvarez on Life in a Desert Nation
Drought is now a way of life. As a result, argue Patty Limerick and C. J. Alvarez in their recent Washington Post article, people throughou…
Is GPT-3 the end of literature?
From Spacewhy on Medium: Most of the content generated is bad, like a repetitive HAL 9000 in its death agony—the program is in beta—but every once and a…
How to Publish Your First Book: SAR Press Talks to Rashmi Sadana
The mission of SAR Press encompasses not only publishing research at the forefront of anthropology and Southwest and Native studies, but al…
Too Fat to Be an Anthropologist
In what now feels like a lifetime ago, I was having one last catch up with a mate from my PhD cohort before we both set off for…
Sandro Mezzadra: Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class
Identity and class While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can…
Scholar, Mentor, Trailblazer: Linda Cordell’s Influence on Contemporary Archaeology
Guest post by Emily Santhanam, SAR Anne Ray Intern 2020–2021 Women in archaeology have come a long way. They now comprise half of al…
Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…
Resident Scholar Profile: 2021–2022 Weatherhead Fellow Benjamin Junge
Fieldwork is much more than just collecting data. —Ben Junge “Brazil has been a p…
If You’re Seeing This, You Are on Ex-Mormon TikTok
You might not realise it, but you probably follow a Mormon lifestyle blogger on social media. It’s an aesthetic: the specific way knee-length dress is paired with an…
Teaching through Tension at the Crossroads of America
Valerie Miller1, Shradha Naveen2, Amanda Waller3, Jennifer L. Johnson4 Purdue University. mill2206@purdue.edu (corresponding author) Purdue University. snaveen@purdue.edu Purdue University. wallera@p…
Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes…
Island cooking. Portraits of Sāmoa told through food
What does Sāmoa taste like? Taro? Palusami? Chop Suey? I’m sure if you were to ask 100 different Sāmoans, you’d get 100 different answers. Pasifika peoples, just like…
IARC Collections Highlight: Diné History and Adaptation
Guest post by Sháńdíín Brown, 2020–2021 Anne Ray intern The Diné are resilient people and know how to adapt to hardship. Before Euro…
Reconnected in a Disconnected World: The Role of Objects in Shaping Practices
Our local streets became our sole stomping ground, yet walking the same route everyday had some unexpected gains. On these very streets, actually on the very ground, something…
A Rat’s Journey There and Back Again
In early August of this year, my partner and I took a much needed vacation to South Padre Island. While visiting, we decided to go snorkeling in Laguna…
Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism
QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologi…
Breath-taking
Himalayan travelogues are full of stories. For the most part, those stories fall into a specific genre, one that I tend to refer to as “my magical adventure…
Teaching Empathy with Anthropology
BY: Mitchell Ma, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto Empathy is defined as sharing and understanding others’ emotions. Although the ability probably predated the human species, the term “empathy”…