Summer reading lists vs. What Actually Happened
Ah, summer reading lists: Elaborate plans for personal enrichment and literary sophistication made in the spring and carried out… when? It’s easy to find tons of summer reading…
Tag: books
Alberto Prunetti’s “Amianto. Una storia operaia” by Cinzia Greco
Amianto. Una storia operaia by Alberto Prunetti Edizioni Alegre, 2014, 192 pages. Amianto. Una storia operaia (Asbestos. A Working-Class Story) is written by Alberto Prunetti, an Italian writer…
Sarah Pinto’s Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India by Saiba Varma
Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, 283 pages. Sarah Pinto’s extraordinary ethnography, Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in C…
An anthropology beyond nature and culture? Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson’s edited volume, Biosocial Becomings. by Perig Pitrou
Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology Cambridge University Press, 2013, 288 pages. This essay originally appeared in Portuguese in the journal Mana. Translation provide…
A photo fell out of a book…
My book group (I say with inner pleasure at finally belonging to one) usually decide on books to read for the coming months by asking for suggestions from…
Writing, writing, writing
Writing looms large in my life now. I’m getting better at it than I was. I like short form [140 characters] but adore longer form, like blogs. And…
Daniel Jordan Smith’s AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria by Darja Djordjevic
AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria. University of Chicago Press, 2014, 208 pages In Daniel Jordan Smith’s AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face:…
Pixelization in Crip Time: Disability, Online Sociality, and Self-Making in Russian Apartments by Cassandra Hartblay
Vakas is a Russian man in his 30s with a traumatic brain injury acquired during childhood. He spends most of his days in his room in his family…
Heather Paxson’s The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America by James Babbitt
The Life of Cheese Crafting Food and Value in America University of California Press, 2012, 332 pages. Heather Paxson’s The Life of Cheese might seem like an odd…
Elizabeth Lunbeck’s The Americanization of Narcissism by Jonathan Sadowsky
The The Americanization of Narcissism Harvard University Press, 2014, 384 pages. Historians have not handled psychoanalysis very well. The clumsy reductionism of much of the psychohistory movement is…
Irina Sirotkina’s Shestoe chuvstvo avangarda: Tanets, dvizhenie, kinesteziia v zhizni poetov i khudozhnikov by Michael Gordin
Shestoe chuvstvo avangarda: Tanets, dvizhenie, kinesteziia v zhizni poetov i khudozhnikov By Irina Sirotkina Izd. Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2014, 280 pages There are few topics i…
Chinese political scientist endorses positive sides of European colonialism
I am reading Wang Yizhou’s book Creative Involvement: The Evolution of China’s Global Rise (as is often the case, the book is in Chinese but also has an…
Interview: "Researching fashion means researching inequalities"
Anthropologist Tereza Kuldova, author of many book reviews here on antropologi.info has recently defended her PhD-thesis Designing Elites: Fashion and Prestige in Urban North India”. Now she has…
An Indefinite Marriage? Culture and/vs. Social Closure in a Romanian City
Those who work on power and its dimensional and disciplinary ramifications are the privileged audience of this post. Apologies to all others, but what I want to do…
An Indefinite Marriage? Culture and/vs. Social Closure in a Romanian City
Those who work on power and its dimensional and disciplinary ramifications are the privileged audience of this post. Apologies to all others, but what I want to do…
An Indefinite Marriage? Culture and/vs. Social Closure in a Romanian City
Those who work on power and its dimensional and disciplinary ramifications are the privileged audience of this post. Apologies to all others, but what I want to do…
An Indefinite Marriage? Culture and/vs. Social Closure in a Romanian City
Those who work on power and its dimensional and disciplinary ramifications are the privileged audience of this post. Apologies to all others, but what I want to do…
Culture and utility
Re-reading a chapter in Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason, Le Penseé Bourgoisie today I could have cited multiple chunks of though-provoking writing. Instead, here’s a simple …
Good News Roundup
There is way too much stuff going on in my life and work these days. Most of it is really good stuff, but it is hard to keep…
Who Do We Write For?
As anthropologists, who do we write for? Scholarly articles are typically written for one’s fellow academics. But what about books? Book-length ethnographies are the cornerstone of anthropology. These…
What are traditional societies for?
From a great review of Jared Diamond’s book The World until Yesterday, by Wade Davis in The Guardian “Traditional societies do not exist to help us tweak our…
What is happening to Europe (or to its Nation-States)?
Gustave Moreau – “Europe et le taureau” (1869)
What is happening to Europe (or to its Nation-States)?
Gustave Moreau – “Europe et le taureau” (1869)
What is happening to Europe (or to its Nation-States)?
Gustave Moreau – “Europe et le taureau” (1869)