Epidemics and Xenophobia by A. David Napier
In June 2015 The Bellagio Task Force on Epidemics and Xenophobia met to discuss the resurgence of xenophobia across the globe—one most recently prompted by fearful and unsympathetic…
Tag: history
The Price of Freedom
What do the end of slavery and the European financial crisis have in common? Recently, the BBC ran a two-part documentary in the UK on how slave owners…
The Price of Freedom
What do the end of slavery and the European financial crisis have in common? Recently, the BBC ran a two-part documentary in the UK on how slave owners…
The Price of Freedom
What do the end of slavery and the European financial crisis have in common? Recently, the BBC ran a two-part documentary in the UK on how slave owners…
Why I Like Ancient History
It would be fair to say that, of all the things in the world, I am most interested in the human lives that were lived before about…
When White Privilege Goes Wrong
What is white privilege and how does it operate… Over the last two weeks, the international news cycle has, without hardly ever naming it, been focussed on some…
When White Privilege Goes Wrong
What is white privilege and how does it operate… Over the last two weeks, the international news cycle has, without hardly ever naming it, been focussed on some…
CFP: Envirotechnical Histories of Waste Management — ASEH 2016, Seattle
The papers in this panel will approach and explore solid waste management histories as enviro-technical systems riddled with political, social, economic, and identity questions.
Caribbean military encounters
How the relationship between the Caribbean and foreign military forces in the 20th century had many different incarnations and forms, and left lasting legacies… The Caribbean Studies Ass…
The Corruption Complex
The cultural logics of corruption and how they can be found in T&T Writing about corruption from the petty to the massive in Africa, anthropologist Jean-Pierre Sardan proposed…
Island Southeast Asian Geology & Volcanic Explosions
I've been trying to read as much as I can about the geological history of Southeast Asia for the book I'm working on. It's a fascinating topic: island…
Cultures of Dependency
fundamental social change is hard to achieve because cultures of dependency are deeply entrenched in the local political culture. In political theories of social change like Marxism, under…
The Return of the Colonial
What logic connects Ferguson, Gaza and east Port of Spain? What cultural logics connect recent confrontations in Ferguson, Gaza, and east Port of Spain? The short answer is…
berners-lee on snowden
It’s been almost eight years that I ↵last quoted ↑Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, here at xirdalium. On 1st August 2006 I republished the following…
Verklempt: Historically Informed Digital Ethnography
I’m not one to speak about theory and method in the abstract. But when I am asked about my method, I typically respond that I use historically informed…
Podcast: DNA Ancestry Testing and the Legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
To listen again to my discussion with Bernice Bennett about my current study on the social impact of DNA ancestry testing in the Americas, as well as related research into the…
‘Gene driven change is much more the norm’
A tweet was directed my way by ziel (@yourlyingeyes). I had tweeted in response to some new HBD silliness that in most cases a genetic explanation is worth…
Where do we get our technologies from? (Answer: everybody else)
How much of your success comes from your ability to read? Would you be able to feed and clothe yourself without the help of others? Would you have…
‘HBD’
There is a small but rather vocal group of people variously associated with the human sciences who declare that almost everything humans do is related to and primarily…
The Culture Concept
The culture concept — which overtime has been contrasted, combined, and entangled with the related concepts of society, personality, identity, symbolism and practice — weaves together the history…
How scholars in the Middle East developed anthropology more than 1000 years ago
Anthropology emerged in a relatively high scientific level in the wider Middle East before it existed as a discipline in the West. Therefore, the label of colonialism often…