Teaching “Anthropology for Liberation” in 2025 with “The Good Ancestor Game” by Tina Ngata and Tāwhana Chadwick
Playing this game in class was the highlight of my 2025 teaching year.
Playing this game in class was the highlight of my 2025 teaching year.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ “The last hereditary Welsh prince, Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis castle as a craggy fort in the 13th century; the estate was his reward for abandoning…
Anthropologists, somewhat unconsciously, remained for a long time in the position of conservative culture camp commandants—overseers of a pickled-in-aspic view of ‘the native’ that was no…
In Two Paths to Prosperity, economists Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini examine why Europe and China took such different development trajectories, pointing to the contrasting social…
On December 8, 2025, a brief video video was disseminated on You Tube, X and other social media to mark the first anniversary of the overthrow of the…
This post examines how the new Syrian state seeks to reconstruct public memory through revisions of public-school curricula in a period of profound political and social transformation after…
Since Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown as President of Syria in early December 2024, the political situation in the country has been volatile. Although a new group of powerholders…
John Tolan’s Islam: A New History from Muhammad to the Present offers a sweeping account of Islam’s evolution, highlighting influential figures, sectarian divisions, and global expansion. Though it…
It’s a time when the Winter Olympics captivate so many of us, and we’re glued to our televisions, heartspounding with excitement. I, too, watch the winter sports competitions,…
Men are not trash. Perpetuating that narrative helps normalize rape culture by making it seem like it’s just inherent to their nature. It’s not, and we’ve gotta stop…
Ching Kwan Lee’s Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Decolonization Struggle combines history, ethnography and sociological analysis. According to Lucas Tse, the author’s account of political tra…
An archaeologist unspools the story of a female leader buried over 1,000 years ago on the Tibetan Plateau. A TOMB IN THE HIGHLANDS In 2005, a truck rumbled…
In a perhaps misguided effort to preserve love of writing, enthuse about independent critical mental facility, to “exercise the metaphoric muscle”, as Mick Taussig would say, and just…
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/apv.12445?domain=author&token=4C3TESRPRVSEVSXAETSN Abstract: This paper considers a course on critical thinking in Vietnam with a case s…
An environmental anthropologist investigates deep-time, mythical, and contemporary relations between seals and Orkney Islanders. SEAL SONG One gray afternoon, I saw a seal lying on a rock, eyes…
Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria by Jiani He examines how language shaped imperial governance and nation-building in late Qing borderlands. He’s detailed and valuable linguistic history reveals t…
This is from the summer of 2025—attendance at two conferences, one Inter Asia Cultural Studies, the other on Islands at Jeju. A squib commentary, well organised events, notable…
The novel, Heap Earth Upon It, set in a remote village in Ireland 1965, explores the repression of sexual freedom and queerness in a society in the grips…
Liberals—defined as people with progressive social beliefs who generally support capitalism implicitly because they don’t know what it is or because they have a poor understanding of it,…
SAPIENS poet-in-residence for 2025 listens to a chorus of dreams in her field recordings from Kashmir. ✽ “Dreaming has a share in history.” —Walter Benjamin, Dream Kitsch …
In Rejkjavik, the well-known Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed a beautiful house that is all about Nordic countries cooperation, the “Nordic House”. We had the honour to be…
Contesting Indonesia by Kirsten E. Schulze proposes a compelling framework of a national imaginary for understanding Islamist, separatist, and communal violence in Indonesia, grounded in interviews an…
Indignity: A life Reimagined by Lea Ypi explores the period of transition between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime in…
Click here for a the youtube class lecture of the material (or follow the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqaDtCHDXQ0&t=78s) Contents