The right to dignity: Housing struggles, city-making, and citizenship in urban Chile
How do poor people in the burgeoning cities of the Global South assert their right to housing and to the city? How do they constitute themselves, and demand…
Tag: #bureaucracy
Crooked Cats
This book is a rich cultural analysis of how people live with big cats in India in times of the Anthropocene and climate change. As people are increasingly…
How to use health technologies to “kill one little deer in the dark forest”
There is a global push towards making AI more ethical and transparent. As critical contributions on the topic of AI have pointed out: even when computational applications are…
Making medicines trustworthy: pharmaceutical technologies of trust and regulation
How do globalised health regimes create and shape landscapes of medical regulation and patient safety? This essay asks about the many ways in which patients, consumers, health advocates,…
“Is it really organic?”
Ethnographic moments spark curiosity and puzzlement, spur the search for new understanding, and are almost always seen to be some of the most generative parts of anthropological fieldwork.…
Humanitarian Techniques of Trust
“Trust in humanitarian action” was the top item on the agenda of the 33rd international conference of the Red Cross movement which took place in Geneva in December…
please use your discretion to adjust your hope
any day or part day that the individual sees their child in person in the UK counts as a day on which they see their child in the…
Extractivism en Papier: Chronotopes of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Australia
What if the greatest legacy of uranium mining is not its localized radioactive toxicity, but the seemingly mundane set of bureaucratic practices it catalysed? In this post, I…
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…
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.…
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…
#A future history of water: Andrea Ballestero’s response
When encountering the generosity of brilliant colleagues, one can only start with gratitude. Add to that a historical moment when a virus has reconfigured the languages, spaces, and…
The only lesson is that there aren’t enough jobs
Every so often something happens that perfectly encapsulates the consumptive death rattle that is the job market in higher education. A few weeks ago, the department of anthropology…
Mediating Mobility: Migration and Brokerage at the Borders of the State
Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) will present on ‘Mediating mobility: Migration and brokerage at the borders of the State’. Elizabeth Challinor (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) will ac…
A Future History of Water: An Interview with Andrea Ballestero
A Future History of Water By Andrea Ballestero, Rice University 248pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press § Colin Hoag spoke with Prof. Andrea Ballestero about her recent book…
#Open Call: Allegra Lab / EASA LawNet webinar series in honour of Sally Engle Merry
This series of online, public seminars features presentations that examine the current state of legal anthropology. We welcome contributions from anthropologists working on ‘the law’ in the broad…
#Failures: Failed to belong – (Re)Negotiations of care in a Tanzanian social welfare office
Every day, women, men, and children sit on the wonky wooden benches in front of the social welfare office, patiently waiting to present their matters to one of…
#Reviews: Dispossessed
Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Dispossessed considers the 2008 subprime crisis through the eyes of Sacramento homeowners and the daily work of bank officers tasked to…
Call for reviews: Law, technology, Bureaucracy
Our new Book Review Team has expanded with the arrival of Emilie Thévenoz (Thank you Emilie for joining us!), which means we are now able to publish more…
The Knot of Ecological Time: An Outlet, an Election, and an Irrigation Office
By Maira Hayat, Stanford University § In 2015, local elections were held in Pakistan, ten years after the previous ones in 2005 during General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule.…
Vijayanka Nair takes the page 99 test
My dissertation is an ethnographic study of India’s Aadhaar (foundation) program, a colossal technocratic project that seeks to redefine how the Indian state (over)sees its population. Under the…
#Review: Rules, Paper and Status
The arrival of a ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ ‘asylym seeker,’ or the European ‘Other,’ is too familiar to us from political debates. The stage for this spectacle of ‘crisis’ and…
Informed Consent Statement for Readers of This Column
You have been selected to receive this column because you are a reader of Anthropology News. Take your time to read this statement and ask the editors any…