Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2021 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
November 2017 Dear Yaye, I am writing to you because a week ago, Babacar returned. Babacar Diop, I think I might have written to you about him,…
PART I Two Years Ago It was a hot day in July, and clocks were striking eight. It had been fifteen years since the Pacifying Police Units (UPPs)…
Dramatis Personae Heitor: a 13-year-old boy Mr. Gomes, his father: a waste handler, working at a garbage dump Ms. Gomes, his mother: a dry cleaner, working from home…
On January 30, 2021, more than 8000 inhabitants of Göttingen, Germany, had to evacuate their homes. Four suspected WWII bombs had been detected underground, and in order to…
It was an ordinary, unseasonably cool, summer day in a sleepy town just forty minutes outside of Berlin. Oranienburg once was home to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of…
In What is Water? The History of a Modern Abstraction, geographer Jamie Linton (2010: 14) describes “modern water” as the following: “an abstract, isomorphic, measurable quantity that may…
We are often told that Jordan is one of the most water-poor countries on the planet and it is hard not to recognize the truth of this…
Budka, P., & Povoroznyuk, O. (2021). Reflections on the InfraNorth workshop “The Global Economics and Geopolitics of Arctic Transport Infrastructures”. InfraNorth – Building Arc…
Budka, P. (2021). Anthropological notes on digital and transport infrastructures in remote communities. Paper at Anthropology of Technology Conference, Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University, 4-5 Novembe…
Andrea Ballestero (2019). A Future History of Water. Duke University Press. As I write these lines, my home city, Madrid, is covered in a thick blanket of snow.…
Andrea Ballestero,(2019). A Future History of Water. Duke University Press. I have an exercise I like to assign to my students, one that I have adapted from Donna…
As I finished reading Ballestero’s A Future History of Water, the world observed World Water Day 2021. Organized by the United Nations, it has been observed annually each…
It was already dark when I entered the small shop in the informal camp in rural Lebanon, where Khulud was waiting for customers. This was my first return…
The Obamas and the Bushes continue across the bridge. (Public Domain) There are places and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites…
So-called ‘ghost towns’ attract people in a certain sense, the ailing beauty of their ruins and the atmosphere of silence that is so different from the silence that…
Ethnographic film is blooming Ethnographic film, however loosely defined, is blooming. While to track and map the entire production of ethnographic film appears next-to impossible, I want to…
On June 8, 2021, Amazon deployed an “opt-in” way for people to enable the company to expand its private network into communities, creating infrastructure to peddle even more…
An article with a rather long history has come out on the International Journal of Communication: titled Gateways, sieves and domes: On the infrastructural topology of the Chinese…
On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume…
There were three lanes at the checkpoint in Turpan—an old Uyghur-majority oasis city on the northern reaches of the Taklamakan Desert in Northwest China. Two lanes were fitted…
Even before the pandemic hit Brazil’s favelas, residents began organizing to protect themselves — against both the novel coronavirus and the government’s active suppression of effective public …
Stuck At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship…
Call for contributions! Over the past two decades, a proliferation of critiques have emerged from a body of critical inter-asian scholarship to challenge, revise, and situate the conventional…