Raising My Children in an Ableist World
In a new book, an anthropologist and father of three, including a daughter with Down syndrome, reflects on the pressures of parenting. Excerpted from An Ordinary Future: Margaret…
Tag: kinship
Speaking in Tongues
A scholar from Nagaland in India offers visceral, familial insights on language and culture loss in her Indigenous tribal community. ✽ My poem “Speaking in Tongues” explores the…
Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova
In Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova, Eleanor Knott presents a comparative study of how people living in Crimea and Moldova identified with Russia and Romania, respectivel…
Ancient DNA Supports Swahili Oral Traditions
Two researchers explain how ancient DNA research is helping to restore the origin story of the Swahili people along the coastal region of East Africa. This article was…
Sticky Relationships at Wartime
Chimit, a Buryat professional in his late 20s, had been considering moving to Europe for at least a decade, but this plan proved hardly feasible with his low…
How a Song Bridged Diné and Ndebele Worlds
An anthropologist recounts a magical moment of songwriting collaboration between Diné (Navajo) and Ndebele artists gathered for the WOMAD Festival in South Africa. ✽ In October, I traveled…
How Diverse Was Medieval Britain?
An archaeologist explains how studies of ancient DNA and objects reveal that expansive migrations led to much greater diversity in medieval Britain than most people imagine today. This…
The Family Lives of the Last Neanderthals
Two anthropologists explain a novel genetic analysis of ancient DNA and artifacts that suggests Neanderthals in Siberia lived in close-knit communities. This article was originally published at The C…
Purple in Cycles
A poet-anthropologist speaks to the labyrinthine experiences of domestic violence—the entrapment, the hope for freedom. ✽ During the final week of domestic violence awareness month in October, I…
REVIEW: The intimate life of dissent
The Intimate Life of Dissent examines practices of refusal and resistance through the friendships, kinships and solidarities which withstand and obstruct them. The authors of this edited volume…
Trust: A Pragmatics of Social Life?
Trust exposes and discloses the social. But the heterogeneity and even excessiveness of meaning in the concept—its overdetermination, its multifariousness and multiformity, its downright fuzziness—sug…
Are Insomniacs Overthinking Sleep?
From WiFi-enabled sleep trackers to wearable brain-altering apps, sleep technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated. But is the antidote to insomnia far more ancient? ✽ You will likely spend…
Being Like Family: Humanitarian Mobility and Metaphors of Kinship across Asia
In this webinar series, we explore the relationship between mobility and humanitarianism in the course of four episodes. We – this is Till Mostowlansky, an anthropologist at…
Heritage out of Control: Buddhist Material Excess in Depopulating Japan
Inherited Buddhist objects and their associated ritual care connect the dead with the living. Buddhist things are not only material. They contain spiritual and emotional power, even when…
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War by Andrew Brandel
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
Social Life of Chronic Living by Peter van Eeuwijk
Chronicity, ageing, and social life Old-age related health conditions evolve into both a dynamic and an inert chronicity which, in the end, produces a particular quality of life…
#BookReview: Being a Parent in the Field
In 2017, my colleague Philipp Zehmisch and I had to cancel a panel on love and family relationships in ethnographic fieldwork, due to a lack of participants. Fabienne…
Thinking with a Database
In 2019, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority notified television channels that they were not allowed to host the Pakistani Senator Hafiz Hamdullah on air. The reason: Hamdullah…
Don’t make me laugh: How getting it wrong shapes interspecies entanglements in the Batek’s forest
“yeʔ kan plŋal!” “lawac!” “hɛy yeʔ leh!” “Don’t laugh!”, “It’s taboo!”, “We shouldn’t!” Naʔ Srimjam kept admonishing us one afternoon that she, her sister Naʔ Badək, and I,…
Elizabeth Fox takes the page 99 test
I have been fascinated by Mongolia’s capital city since my first visit in 2012. Despite my familiarity with the anthropological literature, on arrival in Ulaanbaatar I was utterly…
Of grandparents, memories and the pandemic by Tannistha Samanta
While growing up in a small town in the eastern state of Bengal (India), our summer vacations would be spent in Kolkata at the maternal grandparents (or mamar bari,…
El Virus: A Contagion of Racism & How Networks of Care Can Stop It by Argenis Hurtado Moreno
My mother FaceTimed me a month ago and asked if I needed her to ship me hand sanitizer from Phoenix to Oregon. I thought it a silly question,…
A home for Sofia: Family, disability and housing in times of Zika epidemics by Barbara M. Marques
For English click here. A casa de Sofia: família, deficiência e moradia nos tempos da epidemia do Zika Rumo à realização do sonho Caía uma chuva fina. Acordei…
What is Anthropology? A Summary Review of the Second Edition by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
I found it helpful when Eriksen drew the line in the sand about the fundamental questions that anthropology concerns itself with. Here’s his Big Three: 1) What is…