The juxtaposition between reliance on Noah’s anthropological skills and the presumed lack of relevance this discipline has to broader society ultimately makes for good comedy. Reading the subtext…
“Look at the numbers!” Who hasn’t heard or even said that phrase during a debate? Does your company evaluate your work with performance indicators? We tend to take…
For the apprentice…who does not have the initial skills necessary to participate as a full member of a specific sporting practice, how are they to obtain the embodied…
I have been asked about my research in China as a researcher from Taiwan by my colleagues in the US. One of them commented: “It’s not common for…
Himalayan travelogues are full of stories. For the most part, those stories fall into a specific genre, one that I tend to refer to as “my magical adventure…
yelling, crawling and rolling. Later, they begin to show some animal-like behavior: hissing, roaring and moving on all fours. This is my fieldwork. The place is Java, the…
“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.…
Some months ago, I went for an early morning run with a mate at my fieldsite. After a short trot together, she left for work, and I decided…
The notion of the Unreliable Narrator is, for me, not a critique of the perceived moral failings of the anthropological project, but a methodological narrative construct integral to…
My own fieldwork experience, like many others, demonstrates a blurring in what is ‘professional’ and ‘personal’, what is ‘leisure’ and ‘work’, whether you are researcher, student, or known…
Anthropologists sometimes study sensitive topics and it is therefore not uncommon for ethnographic work to attract serious criticism along such lines. In a recent social media thread, I…
perhaps the most perplexing item she had kept from her time was the empty casing of an artillery shell from World War Two. She told me that many…
As an ethnographer of porn, I entered the field with some hard limits and never crossed them. I never ended up doing anything I regretted, but the pressure…
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…
Neither the Fulbright Commission overseeing my work nor the US Embassy in Kathmandu could contact me and, in the interim, the three other visitors to Mustang had all…
I surprised myself by not hesitating. Spinning around, I headed straight back toward one of those that had followed us into the alley—a woman in dark robes, eyes…
My heart was broken not by leaving individual people, but by leaving something much bigger. It takes us too long in anthropology to learn that the communities we…
Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin etymology of ‘mundane’ is ‘of the…
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning in a context where a language…
It’s been years since anthropology set aside the fantasy of “the field” — a bounded research site, where the locals, and the researcher studying them, are insulated from…
During my 15 months of fieldwork in Iran, the gripe that a bachelor’s degree was now equivalent to that of a high school certificate from a few years…