Afghanistan’s Global Entanglements
by Magnus Marsden For many viewers in the West, the horrific scenes at Kabul airport in August 2021 appeared to suggest that after a brief period of international…
Tag: ethnography
Too Fat to Be an Anthropologist
In what now feels like a lifetime ago, I was having one last catch up with a mate from my PhD cohort before we both set off for…
Illustrating ASSA’s findings with comics – part 5
By Georgiana Murariu and Laura Haapio-Kirk In this blog post, we present the fifth comic in our ASSA comics series, set in rural Ireland. The comic below highlights…
Fetishes or Cyborgs? Religion as technology in the Afro-Atlantic space
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Exú, the trickster god, Axé Ilé Oba – São Paulo (photo by Giovanna Capponi)…
EP#81 Lifeworlds & Studying Aoetorea: Susanna Trnka on Traversing Multiple Lifeworlds & Publics
The Familiar Strange · EP#81 Lifeworlds & Studying Aoetorea: Susanna Trnka on Traversing Multiple Lifeworlds & Publics We’re back this week with Joe’s first interview! For this episode,…
Sudan: Its diversity, economics and history
by Jehron Muhammad KHARTOUM, Sudan—Nothing says diversity like Sudan. Once Africa’s largest country, now divided by neocolonial and neoliberal machinations … More
#PoliticalEngagements: Digital Engagements
For many social anthropologists working on different forms of political expression, online settings have become an inextricable part of their research sites, a trend further entrenched by the…
Ep# 79 A Journey to the West: Nicholas Ng on the Music of the Teochew Diaspora in Western Sydney
The Familiar Strange · Ep# 79 A Journey to the West: Nicholas Ng on the Music of the Teochew Diaspora in Western Sydney We’re back this week with…
Feeling Digital and Reimagining Fieldwork during COVID Times
Yichen Rao, Anna Castel & Lili Almási-Szabó* During the outbreak of COVID-19, everyday life has been modified in accordance with the protocols that every country has implemented. These…
Will “Only Murders” be funny? It depends.
Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez to star in the new show Only Murders. Variety tells us that the new show called Only Murders and staring Selena…
Book review: Citizen Designs (2021) by Eli Elinoff
The University of Hawaiʻi Press has been publishing some excellent books lately, including Eli Elinoff’s first monograph, Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (20…
Like, Share, Comment, and Follow: Labor and Capital on Instagram
Screenshot of the Instagram profile of the influencer discussed in the blog. Social media content creator Ishita Mangal (@ishitamangal) uploaded a post with multiple slides on her Instagram…
Strange Bedfellows: On Trauma and Ethnographic Vulnerability
I never expected that laughter would be part of the solution. I had set out on fieldwork with rather vague notions about the importance of sensitivity and silence…
Knowledge Production, Toxic Corporate Capital, and the Anthropologist’s Entangled Ethics
The dominant disciplinary literature on cultures and practices of extractivism relies on a separation of “the field,” and the insights gained there, from our professional lives as anthropologists…
Aging in a Digitalized World: Beyond a User/Non-User Framework*
Sophie Colas** Engagement with digital technology takes numerous, often very abstract and tenuous forms that sometimes involve the intervention of other people. Such multiple engagement with digit…
Writing Life No. 15: An Interview with Kalindi Vora by Alberto Morales
Kalindi’s laptop sits inside her car, which serves as a writing space sometimes. The last time I spoke to Kalindi in person was at the Society for the…
Ethnographic Poetry and Academic Writing: A Reflection
“Whatever your eye can see, it’s vecik.” This line resonated with me while I was conducting my fieldwork in Taiwan with the indigenous Paiwan village known as Paridrayan.…
Days of Their Lives: The Limits, Possibilities, and Parallels of Media-Ted Research during a Pandemic
On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume…
Writing Life No. 13: An interview with Matthew Wolf-Meyer by Matthew Wolf-Meyer
From the bottom left, clockwise: my writing board (which currently has a note from my kids and a note about a future paper to be written), a stack…
Ep #75 The Anthropologists Perspective on Nomadland & Commodified Mothers: This Month of TFS
The Familiar Strange · Ep #75 The Anthropologists Perspective on Nomadland & Commodified Mothers: This Month of TFS This month familiar stranger Tim kicks us off by pondering…
Writing Life No. 9: An interview with Danya Fast by Robert Lorway
It is 11 am in Vancouver. Danya sits at a desk beside a large window that looks out onto tree tops and electrical wires. Rain pools in the…
Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew
By Adam Fleischmann The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high…
How Can You Approach the Field Digitally? Reflections on Using Social Media Profiles in Ethnographic Research*
Simone Pfeifer** Smartphone. Image by Ulf Neumann. As contact restrictions tightened last year with the developing pandemic, ever more colleagues began asking me for advice on “how t…
Reviews: Theorising Media & Conflict
This post compiles extracts of published reviews of the edited volume Theorising Media & Conflict (eds. P. Budka & B. Bräuchler, Berghahn Books, 2020). Younes Saramifar (Free University…