Two Lessons I Learned about the Transfer of Power while Living in Africa
1. The moment that any transfer of power occurs from one individual or regime to another is fraught—ritually, sociologically, emotionally. Why? This …
Was ist los in Erfurt? The East German Past and the Democratic Crisis of the Present
Are the “East Germans” just bad democrats who mourn the GDR? And is the “West” completely blameless in the Erfurt debacle? Not …
Agnieszka Pasieka: Who is afraid of fascists? The Polish independence march and the rise of the (far?) right
“Polish leaders marched with the far right” was perhaps the most common description of the massive demonstration that took place in Warsaw …
Populist Protest and Counter-Protest in Germany
Protesters disrupt Pegida-inspired rallies with their own rowdy demonstrations. The sound of a man yelling rapidly and angrily into a microphone pierced …
The Strange Public Afterlife of Anthropological Theory
Didier Fassin, in an important recent intervention, directed our attention to the “public afterlife of ethnography.” We as anthropologists do not and cannot …
An Anthropologist at the Women’s March on Washington, Part 1: Finding Communitas, Feminist Style
(photo by Alma Gottlieb) The doors of our metro car opened and closed, opened and closed with increasingly alarming dysfunction. On any …
UK should Remain in the EU to stop the global advance of the far right
Tomorrow the British will go to the polls to decide whether UK should stay within the European Union or not. I truly …
Democracy after Sanders: building a progressive alternative, beyond social media and mass rallies
Check out my latest piece on Sanders and the US presidential race, published by openDemocracy on 26th May. Here is a short …
Far right Front National first party in French regional elections
Very bad results in France’s regional elections: exit polls set xenophobic far right Front National (FN) first nationwide with over 30% of …
We Are All Africans
An impressively interdisciplinary team of geneticists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists has just published an article detailing the genetic makeup of a …