A Brief History of Race in the Western Thought
Race, as a concept, has important ontology in American society. In order to understand the relationship between race, genetic research, and the American class structure, it is necessary…
Tag: history
Lessons on Social Difference from an Ancient Maya City | Ryan Collins | TEDxBrandeisUniversity – This Anthro Life
Hey Listeners, we wanted to share some news. As you have probably noticed, TAL has been slow to post as of late. Both Ryan and Adam have finished…
Agustin Fuentes’s The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional by Charles C. Roseman
The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional Agustín Fuentes Penguin, 2017, 352 pages Agustín Fuentes’ The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (Fuentes, 2017)…
In the Land of the Mammoth Eaters
[no-caption] Sarah Gilman In the oaken hills of central Texas between Austin and Waco, a spring rises along a tangled fence line, watercress waving downstream. Water comes up…
“Linnaeus in Sápmi: Generating Knowledge in Transit”
The Anthropology Research Team is very happy to welcome you all at the Arctic Centre for a joint presentation by Professor Elena Isayev and Professor Staffan Müller-Wille, both…
Is Cyclical Time the Cure to Technology’s Ills?
The world changed dramatically on June 29, 2007. That’s the day when the iPhone first became available to the public. In the 11 years since, more than 8.5…
Archaeology’s Search for History Hidden in Ice
When Ötzi the Iceman, the most complete Neolithic mummy ever found, melted out of the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, the field of “ice patch archaeology” was born. In…
How a Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Decades of Drought
[no-caption] Tuul & Bruno Morandi /Getty Images The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid…
Andrew Lakoff’s Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency by Christos Lynteris
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency Andrew Lakoff University of California Press, 2017. 240 pages. Let us be frank: it is hard to think preparedness…
What Did Ancient Romans Do Without Toilet Paper?
We’ve all been caught unawares by our digestive tract at one time or another. It happened to the Nash family several months ago. We were nearing the end…
Hobbes the Science Fiction Writer (Part I)
It is common to meet people who believe that much of the world is beset by “tribalism” and that the only thing holding back the chaos of a…
‘Enlightenment’ now and empathy later? by Agustín Fuentes
Steven Pinker wrote Enlightenment Now thinking he was making the case for “reason, science, humanism, and progress.” But instead produced a 556 page text filled with some interesting…
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
…May ’68, Nuit Debout and Romanticizing Struggles by Jade Ascencio In 2016, the Nuit Debout movement in Paris installed its headquarters only two stops away from my place.…
Plumbing the Depths in Lahore
Waste water inspections open up questions about bureaucratic processes and interactions. In the summer of 2015, the top tiers of the Punjab political and civil administration met in…
Reaching Out, Looking In: On Research, Refusal, and Responsibility by Tess Lanzarotta
The papers in this series, “Critical Histories, Activist Futures,” have captured some of the exciting conversations that took place during a conference titled “Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Sc…
How Billy Graham Married Evangelism and Anthropology
In 1960, Billy Graham met with Maasai people while preaching throughout Africa. James Burke/Getty Images On March 2, millions watched the funeral of the Rev. Billy Graham, one…
Research Moving Forward: The Social Construction of Down syndrome
I’m at the point where I’m beginning to plan out my next research project. I’m finishing up work on one manuscript (Genocolonization) and writing another with my partner…
Racism by any Other Name Is Still Racism
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed and issued Executive Order 9066 in the name of national security.…
Brave Community: Teaching Race in the American Classroom w/ Janine de Novais – This Anthro Life
Welcome listeners to the second installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new…
Transcontinental Travel—2,000 Years Ago
Two thousand years ago, a sophisticated people lived in the rolling hills of the greater Mississippi River drainage in North America. Most of their sites are concentrated in…
Ep. #7 The knowledge we value: Dipesh Chakrabarty talks the contentious politics of knowledge production
“Doing history ideally is like doing anthropology of people who are gone, except that you don’t have native informants, you only have these written fragmentary sources. But the…
Living and F*cking with Acronyms: A response to Dennis Altman’s call to rethink LGBTI
Last week Australian academic Dennis Altman published a provocative piece in The Conversation, suggesting that it was time to re think the label LGBTI. In the place of…
What Really Happened on Easter Island?
The famous statues of Easter Island have long been a source of awe and wonder. John Elk III/Alamy Photos This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been…
Book forum — Alondra Nelson’s The Social Life of DNA by Eugene Raikhel
In The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome, Alondra Nelson traces the multiple ways in which genetic testing and related technologies have become…