Here’s What Happens to Your Body When You Cut Out Alcohol for 30 Days
Though the benefits can vary widely from person to person, taking a monthlong break from alcohol can do your body good. Getty Images Cutting out alcohol if you…
Tag: Blog
Science as an Orientalizing Field
Science is a Western form of knowledge production and can be divided into three forms: 1) science as a set of methods for investigating the world we inhabit,…
Teaching Anthropology through Sequential Art (Part II)
By Andrew Gilbert In Part I of this essay, I discussed the design and goals of a new course I had developed on graphic novels in an upper-year…
Teaching Anthropology through Sequential Art (Part I)
By Andrew Gilbert This short two-part blog post is a set of reflections on the value of teaching with sequential art, the result of a course I recently…
Collecting Relationships: the Phenomenon of Ooshies
Anthropologists have long acknowledged that ownership is a far more complex phenomenon than it seems at first. What on the surface appears to be a relationship between you…
Other People’s Clutter
perhaps the most perplexing item she had kept from her time was the empty casing of an artillery shell from World War Two. She told me that many…
“It’s a lot of sand”: An anthropological take on Trump’s Syrian withdrawal
That Syria has “a lot of sand” is meant to stand in for its lack of value. As a place that is sandy, it is not worth US…
Calling it out: Our Australian rules?
The documentaries about Adam Goodes capture and abbreviate an array of events on and off the ground that might make recognising and responding to racism seem straightforward. The…
Interrogating the Concept of Categories – an Interview with Lochlann Jain
Stanford University anthropologist and artist, Lochlann Jain, speaks with Anne Brackenbury (former editor at University of Toronto Press who launched the ethnoGRAPHIC Series) to talk about Jain’s new…
In University Restructures, is Trauma too Strong a Word?
I would argue that the unhappy academics were creating and adding to what I described in my thesis as affective swirls of discontent, and that they were doing…
William Suárez-Gómez and Ismael García-Colón: Puerto Rico: Resistance in the world’s oldest colony
In July 2019, Puerto Rico was in turmoil. An organic movement asking for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló emerged throughout this US colonial territory. After 12 days…
Beyond the sensory art of sorting fruit
Sorting fruit may be a sensory art, and it is possible to get entirely lost in the aesthetics of skilful hands and the physicality of localised knowledge. But…
The Liminality of Grief in Trauma
As time continues to press forward after the April 30 shooting at UNCC, I have continued to reflect, think about my experience, and discuss the experiences with others…
“We will give to you so that you can give to us”: A Tale of Two Manuscripts
I debated for quite a long while as to what kind of second project I thought would be the most useful, given the circumstances. … My main concern,…
The arguments against climbing Uluru… and why people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones
Author: Dr. Yasmine Mushbarbash, senior lecturer in anthropology at the Australian National University. The focus of her ethnographic work has been on Warlpiri people living in Yuendemu, in the…
Ståle Knudsen: Debts and the end for infrastructure fetishism in Turkey
The immense new Istanbul Airport, additional spectacular bridges over the straights, the Marmaray metro/train tunnel under the Bosporus, high-speed trains, highways, extension of the Istanbul metro ne…
White Men and Their Toxic White Fragility
It has been several months since the shooting in my classroom at UNC Charlotte where two of my students were killed, four were physically injured, and an untold…
The one thing that changed everything: Complex illness & the functional fallacy of a singular cause
When I asked my research participants what they felt had caused theirs or their patient’s schizophrenia, it was often put down to one thing or another, rather than…
I did it for the data
As an ethnographer of porn, I entered the field with some hard limits and never crossed them. I never ended up doing anything I regretted, but the pressure…
Religion and politics in the US: How the Christian Right moves away from Jesus
Along with an anthropology degree, I also completed a degree in philosophy with a focus on philosophy of religion. My primary interests in that are theodicies (excuses for…
Paying back or paying forward: What does it mean to give?
I was lucky to have Mexican friends to put me up, ferry me around, shower me with food and attention, without asking for a thing in return. It…
Eating Iran: From the delicious to the inedible
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…
On Being Declared Missing in the Himalayas
Neither the Fulbright Commission overseeing my work nor the US Embassy in Kathmandu could contact me and, in the interim, the three other visitors to Mustang had all…