Misinterpreting People
Anthropology has long ago dispensed with the notion that there is any ‘one’ truth. But I think most ethnographers still hope that in describing a group, the people…
Tag: Fieldwork
MeToo Anthropology
I’ll spare you the worst of it but I will tell you that, some agonizing moments later, I was able to reach my field knife while he was…
Role-playing urgency: bridging climate change knowledge and action?
Image: Adam Fleischmann “What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education,…
Feelings in the field: reflections on fieldwork in murk-o
Image: Nick Seaver (https://twitter.com/npseaver/) My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy.…
Arctic Youth well-being project participating in circumpolar comparison
The team of the joint Finnish-Russian project studying well-being among youth in Arctic Ria Adams presenting her work within WOLLIE on opportunities and threats for young people’s well-being,…
Musings from the murky middle ground of climate science and action
Image: NASA (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glacial_lakes,_Bhutan.jpg) “There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking …
1.5ºC: The Future and Present of Anthropology in an Era of Climate Change
Image: Trent Schindler, NASA/Goddard/UMBC (https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/climate-sim-center.html) Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann Early Saturday morning, October 6,…
Ep. #25: Zombie nouns, meaningful objects, biopolitics in politics, and value trials: This month on TFS
This month Julia (0:59), starts us off with a discussion about zombie nouns – non-nouns that have been turned into nouns – such as sociality, relationality, neoliberalisation, and…
A new book about Yukaghir people
Our anthropological team would like to congratulate Dr Cecilia Odé with her new book Life with the Yukaghir: North-East Siberia’s oldest tundra people. The book was published this summer…
Dis/ability to do Fieldwork
Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal, Canada. They are currently researching how UK asylum tribunals consider religion and conversion, with a focus on…
Thinking pain by Annelieke Driessen
Care worker Annika announces that she does not want to go to Mr Moran. “He always complains.” “I’ll go”, says her colleague Robin, and turning to me he…
Taking part in and being part of giving birth: Enacting participation in a midwife-led birth situation by Annekatrin Skeide
According to her midwife Jana, Mira’s was a textbook birth: it was quite fast, even for a second birth, and proceeded without any complications. In reflecting on her…
Opening up shrinking life-worlds by Maarten van Westen
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions. Obsessive-Compulsive Disord…
Peripheral participants: Thinking through distortion, displacement, nullification by Henrik Vigh
Warm haze As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to…
Fed up security officers and drunk policemen in Nairobi by Francesco Colona
Greenwoods is a neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya, dotted with diplomatic residences. At the time of my research on public-private assemblages of security provision and the reconfiguration of citizenshi…
Refraction of participation by Jeannette Pols
Refraction of participation What does it mean to participate? What does participation do?[1] The etymology of ‘participation’ traces from the Latin word participationem, which translates as ‘sharing, …
Post-Bureaucratic Stress: Reflections on getting a police check in Vietnam
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…
The House by Laura Vermeulen
The question of how Willem was coping, alone in the big house, had come to concern many of those surrounding him. Over the past couple of months, Willem…
The final station by Susanne van den Buuse
The sun wakes her up. But Mrs Wijngaard keeps her eyes closed. She is 90 years old and sits quietly in her armchair in her apartment in the…
Burning down the house: When crisis becomes daily life in early-onset dementia by Silke Hoppe
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not…
George, the dog by Emily Yates-Doerr
Babe, my grandpa, was born on the kitchen tiles of a small Seattle home. His dad, whose own grandpa had run a seedy downtown brothel, would disappear and…
Strangers in unfamiliar environments: Struggles for subjectivity in a dementia care ward by Ingunn Moser
During fieldwork on dementia care in a nursing home, I was struck by the complex and layered orderings of space, time and subjectivity in daily life on the…
Thinking with spirits by Kristine Krause
During my first visit to Ghana in 1998, I was involved in a research project that looked at possible co-operations between healers and psychiatric clinics. I stayed in…
Refraction of daily life by Jeannette Pols
Attending to what makes up ‘the everyday’ has long been a challenge for scholars in the social sciences. [1] Researchers from different disciplines and perspectives have explored how mundane…