#Review: Living by the gun
Outside observers have often interpreted Chad’s long history with rebellion as reflective of internal chaos and questionable moralities. Marielle Debos nuances these superficial understandings with ri…
Outside observers have often interpreted Chad’s long history with rebellion as reflective of internal chaos and questionable moralities. Marielle Debos nuances these superficial understandings with ri…
Information and communications technology (ICT) has been hailed as the holy grail of “transformational development”, the source of growing innovations (such as the sending of remittances through mobil…
Ellen Messer Hughes, Holly (ed) 2017. Best Food Writing 2017. New York: Da Capo Press. Highly recommended as enjoyable, informative companion reading for your travels, because it can be consumed…
books & arts Deepak Singh. 2017. How May I Help You? An Immigrant’s Journey from MBA to Minimum Wage. Oakland: University of California Press. 305 pages. I am…
Julie Archambault’s Mobile Secrets is an ethnographically vivid and distinctive contribution to the ever growing anthropological literature on the topic of youth in Africa. Whilst ethnographic a…
Monrovia Modern is a beautiful and perceptive book that describes the limitations and contradictions of architectural forms of political and urban imaginations in Monrovia. It will appeal to…
By Erica Lorraine Williams I recently spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the end of an incredibly busy semester, and I had recently finished reading Bianca…
I’ve been slacking on writing book reviews and so I need to get back to it so the next several posts will be just that (unless something happens…
As a contributor to a recent issue in Cultural Anthropology noted, enough attention has been devoted to sovereignty over the past 15 years to constitute a “turn” in…
Working the System is a great book. It holds the promise of its subtitle and offers a deep ‘political ethnography of the new Angola’. Through rich ethnographic snippets…
In Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Naomi Haynes provides a compelling ethnographic study of the centrality of Pentecostal Christianity in contemporary Zambia.…
Jan Chipchase is a leading design researcher. Some of you may have come across his work on the anthropology of mobile phones. I discovered it by chance while…
In her new book, Kirsten Doughty provides us with an ethnographic account of the paradoxes, contradictions and omissions of remediation processes in post-genocide Rwanda. More precisely, by analyzing…
From patronising hierarchical superiors to casual, zero-hour contracts, to pension cuts, we are witnessing in many countries the entrenchment of a two-tier system of academia, with increasingly few…
What is ‘crime’? A social pathology? A violation of social order? The object or raison d’être of law enforcement? How can we best conceive of crime, criminality, and…
Those of the general public who have heard of milk kinship usually regard milk kinship as a feature of “primitive”, “tribal” lineage-based societies, often semi-feudal, with residues almost…
This post belongs into a series of posts on the workshop “The Future of Central Asian Studies” organized by Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer and Prof. Dr. Madeleine Reeves…
Nearly three decades ago, my grandfather took me to the local pharmacy in Broadway, NC to get ice cream (it had an ice cream bar!). While there, I…
Central to the capturing cover-image, the downhill stone-paved street of the Pazari district of Gjirokastër, south Albania, reflects the orientation of Dimitris Dalakoglou’s book The Road: An Ethnogra…
The book “Political and Legal Transformations of an Indonesian Polity: The Nagari from Colonisation to Decentralisation” by Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is a result of…
The Force of Custom presents a strongly grounded ethnographic argument for the rethinking of ‘customary law’ as a category in the anthropology of law. How does an understanding…
The first time I read Coming of Age in Samoa was in my Intro to Anthro course. My teacher — and future mentor — was a social anthropologist…
Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution tells a tale in graphic novel form of two (fictional) girls, one American and one Egyptian, who each faces…
A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat, Eric Holt-Giménez, Monthly Review Press, 2017. Jo Hunter-Adams Working in food studies often means grappling…