Daromir Rudnyckyj: When is inflation a problem?
Amidst the media frenzy in recent years regarding inflation, it is worth asking when, and for whom, is inflation actually a problem? As economists are quick to point…
Tag: Features
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Mélissa Gauthier: Inflation as pressure: coping mechanisms from Eastern Cuba
When the daily Miami-Santiago de Cuba flight landed in Cuba in May 2024, a passenger at the back of the plane shouted in Spanish: !Ya llegaron los dolares!…
Eva van Roekel: Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela
A few months before the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented globally I travelled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil for a stint of ethnographic fieldwork about the complex…
Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans: Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation
The election of Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding anarcho-libertarian, to the Presidency of Argentina promises to cement Argentina’s status as a prime experimental site for inflation-tackling policies…
Harry Pettit: Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy
In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000…
Alexandrine Royer: ‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations
I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the…
Steffen Köhn: Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy
Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S.…
Ståle Wig, Sian Lazar and Eva van Roekel: The social life of inflation: introduction
After a period of relatively low inflation in many economies in the Global North, inflation has once again become a major world concern. The COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted…
Adia Benton: Humanitarian vernaculars (and the racial vernaculars of humanitarianism)
While explaining the origins of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony to an interviewer, the labour historian Michael Denning (2023) suggested taking a Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is…
Ezgi Güner: Islamic Humanitarianism and Renegotiating the Boundaries of Turkish Whiteness in Africa South of the Sahara
The silence around the salience of race in development and humanitarianism (see White 2002, Kothari 2006) has lately been interrupted by an increased attention to white saviourism, especially…
Patricia Ward: Power, Pace, and Place: Local Consultants and Racialized Expertise
Critical scholars recognize humanitarianism as a racializing project rooted in colonial and imperial relations, in which classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘loc…
Allison Stuewe: Humanitarian Erasure: Marriage Practices of Iraqi Yezidi Refugees and Germany’s Integration Courses
The German governing coalition explicitly considers refugee integration to be a humanitarian project based on an obligation to care for others because of their shared humanity. Notably, however,…
Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May: Taxonomies of Difference and Inclusion: Notes From ‘Other’ Humanitarianisms
The call for looking at taxonomies of difference in global humanitarianism is a powerful reminder to consider how differences—as well as, we argue, affinities—shape humanitarian practices. Prompted by…
Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima: Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism
Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern …
Maddalena Gretel Cammelli: Reflections on contemporary fascism
It was 2009 when, while living in a squatted house in the Montreuil, a leftist banlieue on the East side of Paris, I was asked how it was…
Giacomo Loperfido: Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason
I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic)…
Don Nonini and Ida Susser: Introduction: Fascism, Then and Now
On November 14, 2023, at the University of Toronto, we, the conveners of the Political Economy Discussion Group, an informal transnational group of anthropologists working in political economy,…
Book forum: Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her by Eugene Raikhel
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was…
How to Resist Policing: The Practical Meanings of Towel Masks for Student Protesters in Late 1960s Japan by Shunsuke Tanaka
Masks have long been a symbol of resistance movements around the world, especially in East Asia. As early as the 1960s, protestors in Japan began wearing masks during…
Diffracting Trauma in the Global South between biology and culture / Difractar La Noción de Trauma en el Sur Global entre biología y cultura by Benjamin Hegarty
Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the w…
Writing Life (no. 21): An interview with Ruth Behar by Natashe Lemos Dekker
Image 1: One of Ruth’s writing spaces filled with family and childhood photos, art and objects that inspire her and that are filled with memories. On the laptop…
The emergence of multimorbidity as a matter of concern by Esca van Blarikom
Multimorbidity, or the co-occurrence of two or more long-term health conditions in one person, is seen as one of the greatest challenges to contemporary healthcare services. As the…
Writing Life No. 20: An Interview with Emma Kowal by Carina Truyts
Figure 1: Emma Kowal writing her thesis in 2006 with 7-month old Maya in Darwin, Australia. Image: supplied. One evening in December 2021, in a small South African…
Making embryos lively: The politics of embryo personhood when fertilization happens under a microscope by Manon Lefèvre
On May 25, 2022, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest ban on abortion to date, a policy that prohibits the termination of any pregnancy “from…