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.…
Tag: cultural anthropology
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…
Of Diapers, Potties and Split Pants
Understanding Toilet Training around the World May Help Parents Relax I recently published a piece on The Conversation about toilet training in a global context. You can read the…
THE OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY COOPERATIVE: Towards an Online Public Anthropology
We attempt here to explore the relationship between anthropology, social media and public engagement through a web-based network that we helped to found and manage. We argue…
Preface to the Coming World Crisis
Trump’s election has accelerated talk on the left of the end of (neo-) liberalism and the rise of fascism in the West. The prospects for world war seem…
What Anthropologists Really Do
The Summary The new anthropologist is a self-appointed people’s representative in the double sense of writing them up and acting as their advocate. And anthropology is a sort…
Do All African Immigrants Arrive Sick, Desperate, and Empty-Handed on the Shores of Europe? Ask Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg!
The lives, status, and image of immigrants may constitute the single-most urgent human issue of our time. In an arresting and captivating new study of Cameroonian mothers now…
Mess in the Middle East
Many people throughout the Western world do not understand what is happening in the Middle East. Much of the confusion stems from a misunderstanding of the complicated relations…
Is History Over? How Can Power be Soft? Ask Ulf Hannerz
The end of history The clash of civilizations The coming anarchy Soft power We’ve all heard these trendy mottos, and most of us have probably cringed. Anthropologists…
The Second American Revolution
Well, it only took about two-hundred and forty years but the greatest fear of the writers of the Constitution of the United States has taken place. A rich,…
Anthropology for Liberation readings
Next trimester I’m teaching a new course, Anthropology for Liberation. Here’s the course description: How can anthropology advance human emancipation from racism, gender inequality, class …