Review: Animal, Vegetable, Junk
Mark Bittman. Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of food, From Sustainable to Suicidal. Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, Boston and New York: 2021. ISBN: 9781328974624. pp.364. Richard Zimmer (S…
Tag: economics
How Cellphones Make and Break Human Connections
Cellphones have become an integral part of many people’s lives. Towfiqu Barbhuiya/EyeEm/Getty Images Cellphones have come to occupy increasingly important roles in everyone’s lives, from …
Review: Meals Matter
Michael Symons, Meals Matter: A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy Columbia University Press, 2020. 376 pp. ISBN 9780231196024. Raymond D. Boisvert (Siena College) In 1947 the American p…
What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?
[no-caption] Andrew Flachs One warm afternoon several years ago, I was walking with Korianna,* a farmer in Telangana, India, when I smelled something bad. The scent of diesel…
Book Review: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics by Charles Camic
In Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics, Charles Camic challenges the longstanding portayal of economic theorist Thorstein Veblen as a maverick outsider. Tracing the development of …
Finding Calm—and Connection—in Coffee Rituals
When I arrived from the Philippines to the airport in the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia early last year—before the pandemic started—I was greeted with an intensely…
Tackling Care and Capitalism in College Football
Despite the health risks, many college football teams, such as the Stanford Cardinal (pictured here), have continued playing throughout the fall season. Bob Drebin/Getty Images A few mont…
An Archaeology of Marijuana
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record. The growth of this industry…
Book Review: The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea by Hannah Appel
In The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea, economic anthropologist Hannah Appel closely examines the operations of US oil companies in Equatorial Guinea, not only…
Book Review: The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
In The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham unpack the ‘how’ of the gig economy through quantative datasets and ethnographic vignettes from countries includ…
When Deafness Is Not Considered a Deficit
Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato,…
Anthropology and Economics in the Public Eye
How can anthropologists approach the influence of economists? The COVID-19 pandemic and how to mitigate its effects is only one recent public and policy issue on which anthropologists…
Book Review: Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India by Michael Levien
In Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India, Michael Levien examines how the shift from state-directed capitalism to neoliberalism in India from the 1990s has led to…
Could the Coronavirus Pandemic Be Good for the Environment?
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Chip Colwell interviews Elic Weitzel, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, about his recent article for SAPIENS tha…
Is the Pandemic a Chance to Challenge Global Inequality?
Migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan crowd a detention center in Greece in 2016. Milos Bicanski “Gulzar, get up! Gulzar, get up!” Saba Khan remembers shouting. Then she turned…
How Kings Created Angkor Wat—Then Lost It
The impressive temples at Angkor Wat make it famous—but there is much more to the site. Vincent Gerbouin/Pexels Over a thousand years ago, the ancient Khmer civilization emerged…
Searching for the Sources of Water Scarcity
Residents in Mumbai collect water at a community tank. Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images Nikhil Anand, an environmental and urban anthropologist, grew up in Mumbai, India. In 2007, after studyi…
Un/boxing Fulfillment: A Field Guide to Logistical Worlds
Source Painting by John William Waterhouse, 1896, (Public Domain) In the classic origin tale of “The Box” and its seductions, Pandora is driven by curiosity—a distinctly feminized will…
Why We Buy Weird Things in Times of Crisis
The world is in the grip of a serious pandemic as a novel virus sweeps from continent to continent, causing cases of sometimes-deadly COVID-19. Yet much of the…
The Bitter Side of Cocoa Production
Chocolate comes from processing the seeds found in the fruit, or “pods” (shown here), of the cacao tree. USAID/Flickr A fine piece of chocolate tickles your tongue with…
“We will always put economic growth ahead of environmental concerns”
It may sound strange, but wouldn’t it be nice if Trump’s disconnect between endless economic growth and environmental crisis stemmed from pure ignorance. At least if this was…
Corporate “Sorcerers” Reveal the Magical Power of Capitalism
The destruction of forests contributes to widespread drought through atmospheric processes that can seem like sorcery. Pixabay/Pexels To Indigenous Marind communities living in West Papua…
Why Did Chinese Farmers Switch to Wheat?
Wheat is now a favored crop in many parts of China. Jie Zhao/Getty Images Today China is the world’s biggest consumer of wheat, which the country uses to…
Glimpses of Life in Indefinite Debt in the Czech Republic
“I can only work cash-in-hand [načerno] for the rest of my life,” Nina[1] told me as we were sitting in her kitchen drinking black coffee while she was…