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…
Tag: Fieldwork/ethnography
AMAA on Inequalities of Aging: Paradoxes of Independence in American Home Care by Elana Buch
Questions developed by the members of CU Denver’s ANTH4600/5600, S2021: Kaylynn Aiona, Delilah Chavarria, Darcy Copeland, Keaton Green, Ari Jones, Caitlin Konchan, Chris Kuelling, Kuba Kwiecinski, Ro…
Cues for Ethnography in Pandamning Times: Thinking with Digital Sociality in the Covid-19 Pandemic by Alder Keleman Saxena
Covid-19 has made the world strange. For many, efforts to stall the pandemic have initiated an unprecedented enclosure of our lives within the familiar walls of our homes,…
Flipping the Script of the Disaster Flick by Elizabeth Durham
For Cameroonians faced with the realities and stereotypes of their country’s armed conflict, watching COVID-19 hit New York City before Yaoundé is cinematic catharsis. The WhatsApp messages start…
When Crisis Brings Us Closer: Reflecting on Family, Fieldwork, and Faraway Homes in the COVID-19 Pandemic by Sophie Chao
As the COVID-19 pandemic gains momentum, various forms and scales of lockdown and self-quarantine are being imposed across the world to halt the spread of the virus. With…
Searching, Studying and Doing Sociology in the Medico-Legal Borderlands by Laura Bisaillon
Medico-legal borderlands? What is this nebulous sounding compound concept, “medico-legal borderlands”? How has it been used by social scientists whose ethnographic studies scratch at itches in the…
Time, Regained by Kevin Karpiak
The following is taken from the forthcoming book, The Police Against Itself: Reassembling French Liberalism “After the Social,” an ethnography of French police administrative reform, the vicissitudes …
Funny, Awkward, Tender, Focused: Drawing Bodies by Andrea Ford
Drawings from my research on childbirth in California created an opportunity for sharing reflections on fieldwork and “seeing.” Birth is a highly mediated experience, with ubiquitous images of…
On Thinking with People and their Escapes: A Review of Unfinished through Storytelling by Onur Günay
Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming João Biehl and Peter Locke, editors Duke University Press, 2017. 400 pages. If hierarchy is the key to sociological knowledge production, what…
Graphic Anthropology Field School by Kim Tondeur
The Graphic Anthropology Field School (GrAFs) is a project launched by Expeditions, an independent network of scholars in the human sciences. For 11 years, we have been holding…
Tarek Elhaik’s The Incurable Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts by Christopher Fraga
The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts by Tarek Elhaik Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 198 pages Tarek Elhaik’s first book—an ethnographic examination of multi-media a…
Extractivism, Refusals, and the Mining of Failure by Teresa Velasquez
Is ethnographic research analogous to a gold mine project, an extractive industry that makes a social and material landscape knowable, and hence governable? Is knowledge construction a veil…
Book Forum–Jeanne Favret-Saada’s The Anti-Witch by Eugene Raikhel
In The Anti-Witch, Jeanne Favret-Saada revisits fieldwork she first described in her classic Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage in a more reflective mode and conceptually ambitious…
Michele Friedner’s “Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India” by Cassandra Hartblay
Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India by Michele Friedner Rutgers University Press, 2015, 216 pages An Indian coffee shop franchise advertises their practice of hiring deaf baristas –…
Making Cases for a Technological Fix: Germany’s Energy Transition and the Green Good Life by Jennifer Carlson
This is a story of women who invoke another woman’s psychosomatic distress to make a case for the green good life and its possibilities. Hailing from a northern…
Kelly Ray Knight’s addicted.pregnant.poor by Kirsten Bell
addicted.pregnant.poor By Kelly Ray Knight Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. …
Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald’s “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity Across the Social and Neurosciences” by Jörg Niewöhner
Rethinking Interdisciplinarity Across the Social and Neurosciences by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald Palgrave (Pivot series), 2015, 160 pages The first thing you notice when picking up a…
Book Forum—Anand Pandian’s “Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation” by Todd Meyers
Anand Pandian’s Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation is a fascinating and truly inspired inquiry into questions of experience and the media through which experience is rendered…
Summer Roundup: The Ethnographic Case, Part 1 by Deanna Day
In June, we debuted an extensive new series on Somatosphere, The Ethnographic Case. Edited by Emily Yates-Doerr and Christine Labuski, the series is organized on an expanding, virtual…
Summer Roundup: Inhabitable Worlds, Part Two by Deanna Day
Continuing our summer roundups, today we are highlighting a second set of essays from our Inhabitable Worlds series, brought to us by editors Michele Friedner and Emily Cohen.…
Summer Roundup: Inhabitable Worlds, Part One by Deanna Day
Continuing our summer roundups, today we are highlighting a first set of essays from our Inhabitable Worlds series, brought to us by editors Michele Friedner and Emily Cohen.…
Top of the Heap: Elizabeth Lewis by Hannah Gibson
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Elizabeth Lewis, who is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Texas at…
Summer Roundup: Bioculturalism by Deanna Day
We continue our set of summer roundups by focusing our attention on a series of interviews conducted by Jeffrey G. Snodgrass. Snodgrass spoke with William Dressler, Emily Mendenhall,…
Kalpana Ram’s “Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern” by Mythily Meher
Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern by Kalpana Ram University of Hawaii Press, 2013, 336 pages Spirit possession is a familiar anthropological interest. But…