War and its absurdities
When Nadja was evacuated from the bomb shelter in eastern Ukraine, she took her cheese with her. She took the cheese from Luhansk to Kharkiv and almost to…
When Nadja was evacuated from the bomb shelter in eastern Ukraine, she took her cheese with her. She took the cheese from Luhansk to Kharkiv and almost to…
My podcast with Ahmed AlMaazmi and Tamara Fernando is posted online on the New Books Network.
Ethnographic moments spark curiosity and puzzlement, spur the search for new understanding, and are almost always seen to be some of the most generative parts of anthropological fieldwork.…
According to the latest report released by Switzerland’s main organic certification agency (BioSuisse), the country currently holds the world’s largest numbers in organic consumption per resident. In …
After a long drive, Sheila and I arrive at the gates of a sprawling fifty-one square mile Malawian sugar plantation that belongs to Africa’s largest sugar company. An…
Traditional farming in al-Ahjur, Central Highlands (photography by Daniel Martin Varisco) The early major civilizations in the Middle East and Asia with their head start several millennia ago…
Every year, after Easter, hundreds of families from all over Ukraine gather in the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation. People converge toward the now-deserted area to perform rites called…
If you are bored with what you cook, give this rather ancient set of recipes a try. Read all about it on the MyMet website.
There is a fascinating Facebook site on old photographs of Jerusalem. Below is one of the images. Note the Victrola.
This is a great idea. Back to the human roots of agriculture… Read about it here.
Here are several early 20th century postcards showing life in and around Baghdad.
The British Government issued an official handbook on Yemen in 1917. This has recently been uploaded to the Qatar Digital Library. One of the sections gives a general…
Check out this report in The Guardian on what may be the oldest site for producing beer in the world. Of course it was discovered by archaeologists…
The image above, a drawing from the 1850s, epitomizes how the camel has been imagined for everyone in America, the West and just about everywhere outside the area…
reaping There is an early 1920 video on Youtube with views of agriculture, bread making, spinning and weaving in Egypt at the time. No details are provided on…
Cairo around 1920 In 1921 one of the many geographical/travel books published was the The Human Interest Library: Visuali?ed Knowledge (Chicago: Midland Press). In volume IV there is…
There is a recent documentary on the Zabbalin garbage collectors of Cairo, produced by RT.
If you are strict about halal foods or kosher foods, pork is probably not on your normal grocery shopping list. But there is something about the taste of…