What is the Museum Anthropology Review Business (Labor) Model?
Alternate title: How to give away $99,000 worth of articles. Although it has become normalized in open access/scholarly publication reform discussions to speak in this way, it often…
Tag: cultural anthropology
What is the current status of confidentiality and non-disclosure policies at HAU?
What is the current status of confidentiality and non-disclosure policies at HAU? Why can’t the policies be published? Those are my questions. This is my context. Alex Golub…
A Quick Trip to Beijing
Late last month, I was fortunate to have a chance to return quickly to Beijing as a member of an Indiana University delegation visiting the Chinese Academy of…
Shaligrams Featured on “The Familiar Strange”
Hey everyone, My work on Shaligram stones has been featured on the popular anthropology blog The Familiar Strange. Check it out. “Living Fossils” — The Familiar Strange
Anthropology and the New Human Universal
World society today resembles nothing so much as the eighteenth century ancient régime that Kant had every reason to believe had been abolished by revolution. Now a rich,…
Becoming White
Policing Whiteness Karen Brodkin’s 1998 book, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America was a crucial entry in a genre of studies…
An Anthropologist’s Obsession with Outlander
I have been on hiatus from blogging for some time, mainly due to two factors. First, I launched a public anthropology podcast, Anthropologist on the Street (huzzah!), which…
Gun Violence in American Schools
There is something terribly wrong going on in American schools today. A silent epidemic is spreading throughout the country like a cancer. What does it say about a…
Environmental Anthropology: An Anthropologist’s View of a Cove Cleanup
The curse of the anthropologist: finding culture everywhere in nature. Today, the neighborhood in which my husband and I now live hosted a cleanup in a nearby cove.…
Doing Development the Right Way: A Conversation with Charles Piot
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity…
The Bitcoin Controversy
Most people have already heard of Bitcoin. However, very few know what it is or how it originated. Many people know that it is some form of “cryptocurrency”…
#Podcast Interview Round Up: The Best of February
Did you forget to give a Valentine’s Day present to your ears? Don’t worry, because you can still make amends through the gift of anthropology podcasts. Yes, it’s…
How Academic Hierarchy Shapes the Distribution of Precarity
Yesterday, Cultural Anthropology updated its recent forum on academic precarity with several additional essays, including one that I wrote about the role that academic hierarchy plays in shaping…
CfP for AAA2018: Inter-topia: Productive tensions within the collisions of techno-utopianism and techno-dystopianism
Panel Organizers: Jeremy Trombley (SUNY Cortland) and Angela VandenBroek (Binghamton University) Sites of digital technology development are immersed in competing techno-utopian and -dystopian ideolog…
Brazil’s Dichotomous Treatment of Corruption – PT 3
Brazil had an opportunity to be a leading, democratic, Latin American country but it lost its sense of direction. The political system designed to assist emerging countries grow…
DragNet: January 16 – January 31, 2018
Image from projects.bettergov.org DragNet is back, with a recap of a number articles that came up last month in our twitter feed. In World News, we have a…
Brazil’s Dichotomous Treatment of Corruption – PT 2
After the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the Liberal Front Party (LFP), Democratic Social Party (PMDB) and Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) dominated the government of Brazil.…
Fieldwork: Introduction (12/13-18)
Skip ahead six paragraphs (bypass those marked with an hash mark #) if you want to go straight to the start of the fieldwork stories. If you would…
The Anthropology/Poetry Nexus–An Interview with Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe? Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus. Her advanced degrees include an MFA in poetry . . . and a…
The Ethnic Costume Museum at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (12/9)
In the previous post in this series, I described how my traveling companions and I visited Beijing’s 798 Art Zone. (For the series in order, see 1, 2,…
Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, Revisited, Again (12/9)
After visiting The Museum of Women and Children (See part 3 here), our group checked in with the Beijing arts neighborhood known as 798. (For background on 798,…
Five Years of Teaching Culture
Five years ago this fall we launched an experiment. As an editor at a university press, with an interest in ethnographic methods and a mandate for publishing teaching-oriented…
Everything You Thought You Knew about Orphans in Africa Is Probably Wrong
Policy makers, development workers, orphanage voluntourists, missionaries, prospective adoptive parents: ignore this book at your peril. “AIDS orphans” are commonly imagined as the…