A Peak at Two “Miao Albums” with a Group of SIMA Colleagues
Working with the graduate students participating in the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology is a pleasure. The students who are attending in order to gain skills for their…
Tag: china
Death in Mazar-I Sharif
by Magnus Marsden The brutal killing of up to 140 Afghan Army soldiers on April 22nd at an army base located near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in…
Donald Trump, Empire, and Globalization: A Reassessment
“Hey, I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” Donald Trump recently declared, “I’m both”. The only way in which the two (seemingly contradictory) positions can be reconciled is by…
Funeral Home Makes Missing Body Parts
A funeral home in Shanghai, China has started a 3D printing repair service in an attempt to repair damaged or disfigured corpses. Body mutilation is very common in…
Grounded Dreams?
Hong Kong and Hollywood face the challenges of a globalizing movie economy. Hortense Powdermaker’s analysis of a Hollywood movie industry driven by extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and crisis in…
China’s East Wind Blows… To Barking, London
by Magnus Marsden Magnus Marsden and Diana Ibañez Tirado anticipate the arrival of the ‘East Wind’ freight train in London from the Chinese city of Yiwu. As much…
Some thoughts on film in ethnography
Still from ‘Inside the Mind of Favela Funk’ By Ina Keuper On 7 December the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology organized its second Ethnographic…
Conference Report: 6th annual Asian Food Study Conference, Kusatsu, Japan
While there are many conferences of potential interest to food anthropologists, last weekend (December 3-4, 2016), I attended a conference that I found particularly useful and inspiring: the…
Taking Why We Post to China
Although the Why We Post project is primarily an attempt to study the use and consequences of social media, there were other broader aims. Particularly, the hope that…
Donald Trump and Empire: An Assessment
“There is something unseemly about a nation conducting a foreign policy that involves it in the affairs of most of the nations of the world while its own…
Why We Post Tour of Chinese Universities
Between 12th-24th September 2016, Professor Daniel Miller and two researchers on the Why We Post project, Tom McDonald and Xinyuan Wang, will give a series of talks about…
Top of the Heap: Matthew Kohrman by Hannah Gibson
[For this instalment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with medical anthropologist and Associate Professor Matthew Kohrman from Stanford University.] Summer has arrived in North…
When Nature Has to Conform to Culture: Highly Sensitive People in a Nonsensitive Culture
Elaine Aron’s book The Highly Sensitive Person was like my own personal Da Vinci Code—riveting, compelling, and totally solved a mystery about myself I didn’t know existed. My…
Inequality and “the Global Question”
To mark the publication of Global Inequality, the first book in UTP’s new Anthropological Insights series, author Kenneth McGill explains the process of writing a book about inequality…
Roundtable Report: “Globalization of Asian Cuisines”
To celebrate the publication of “Globalization of Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Culinary Contact Zones,” three of the edited volume’s authors—Stephanie Assmann, James Farrer, and David Wa…
Fictional #Fictions between China and Arstotzka
One interesting way to (momentarily) close this thematic week about living fictions (one that could also speak to many other thematic weeks here on ALLEGRA, e.g. smugglers; being…
On Chinese Pedagogical Legalism (and its Anthropological Ghost) #fictions
“You have already been incredibly faithful towards the man. And you have been following all the relevant rules for establishing a co-operative. Now, what you need to do…
Selfies | 自拍
In “Dim Stockings”, a short chapter included in his The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben takes a cue from the prosaics of a stockings advertisement to discuss the commodification…
A close-up look at Chinese social media platforms
Tom McDonald and Xinyuan Wang introduce China’s social media platforms Chinese social media is remarkable because despite extensive media coverage and academic research, these platforms remain s…
10 Trillion Gallons of Water Should Drown China’s Yangtze Gorges World Heritage Application
The Three Gorges Dam Main Wall, 2006. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons The Yangtze River begins in the Tibetan Plateau and flows eastward into the East China Sea at Shanghai. …
In the Journals – November 2015
Welcome back to In the Journals, a look at recent publications in the world of security, law, crime, and governance. November has brought forth a number of engaging and…
Java and Mongols in the Medieval European Sources
In 1292, towards the end of his reign, Khubilai Khan sent a fleet of ships from Quanzhou in southern China to invade East Java, then governed…
Java and Mongols in the Medieval European Sources
In 1292, towards the end of his reign, Khubilai Khan sent a fleet of ships from Quanzhou in southern China to invade East Java, then governed…