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For the ethnographer, an ongoing relationship with her field can be bitter-sweet and difficult to sustain in the long term. Rarely does the anthropologist continue to reside in…

In the Netherlands, citizens are under a legal obligation to insure themselves through a private insurer. Health insurance is thus entangled with both the realm of the state…

Constitutional rights Established in 1988, the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil guarantees the right to health and guarantees that everybody living in Brazil has access to…

A new crop insurance scheme Early in 2016 the Indian Government, with much fanfare, announced a new crop insurance scheme meant to alleviate the growing risks of agriculture and…

‘Burial market’ in New Orleans In the early stages of my year-long fieldwork project, filmmaker Brechtje Boeke and I made a short documentary on what is known as…

The 'black box' The approval of the Italian Competition Law in August 2017 sparked off a controversial debate around car liability insurance and the employment of a technological…

Volkskrant article  On 24th March 2018, De Volkskrant, a leading Dutch newspaper, published an article about the bioenergy investments of Addax Bioenergy and its successor Sunbird Bioenergy in…

Failure is full of unanticipated potential. Being able to recognize and adapt to these failures depends on many factors, not least a combination of fortune and experience. The…

Karaoke on Sunday Dina and I are in a karaoke room with five friends. Like Dina, they are Indonesian women who work in Singaporean households as domestic helpers,…

In part 1 of this blog series on Multimodal Ethnography, I provide a gloss of some of the key issues transforming visual anthropology and other practice-based disciplines. With these…

It’s that time of the year again. The days are short and cold, and we are looking forward to Christmas – the most wonderful time of the year,…

‘A vibrant mode of scholarship’ Practice-based research has emerged as a vibrant mode of scholarship at the intersection of scientific methodologies and aesthetic experience. While b…

Muslim girls and young women are increasingly active in kickboxing in the Netherlands. While some join mixed-gender sessions, gender-segregated training sessions have lowered the threshold for many wo…

In brief, Orphan Black follows a group of female clones in their quest for knowledge of their own biology. These women were created in the 1980s as a scientific…

A battle of words A group of 30 honours students (3rd year) of Leiden University’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences paid a 4-day visit to Barcelona. The aim…

Politics and/or knowledge There is lively debate about the authority of knowledge. Several movements within universities argue that academic knowledge is a form of colonisation. At the University…

Alternative agro-food networks A growing literature identifies alternative strategies for self-provisioning: i.e., for procuring food and other goods and services in a consciously oriented way (for e…

Who do we commemorate? Every year, the same questions pop up during the first days of May. Who do we commemorate on 4 May (Remembrance of the Death)?…

When I went to Costa Rica to do the fieldwork that eventually allowed me to pursue my MA degree in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, I did not…

Emancipation through finance? When India woke up on 9 November 2016, people learned that their 500 and 1000 rupee notes had become worthless. The Indian government and proponents…

New religious movements The sweeping generalization that God is disappearing from the Netherlands seems to affirm the idea that modern secular nations like the Netherlands are finally being…

The national animal  On a small piece of grassland near a small village in South Nepal, a local man offers the body of a dead cow to the…