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…
Tag: kinship
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…
We Tricked them-We Are All One People
Aunt Pat in a low whispering voice was speaking to me before a Culture Committee meeting at Grand Ronde. Pat Allen was the chair and I was vice-chair,…
Toxicology and the chemistry of cohort kinship by Janelle Lamoreaux
Birth cohort studies are characterized as longitudinal investigations of research subjects with at least one common characteristic, usually being born in the same time and place. Such studies…
Introduction: Excavating and (re)creating the biosocial; birth cohorts as ethnographic object of inquiry and site of intervention by Sahra Gibbon
Longitudinal birth cohorts are increasingly recognised as important for understanding how biological, social and environmental processes interact over time and contribute to health inequalities. Birt…
Representing Diverse Bodies in Medical Illustration
In 2016, just before I began my dissertation fieldwork, a trio of young medical illustrators presented a panel on “Normativity and Diversity in Healthcare Imagery” at the annual…
Remembering the Forgotten Chinese Railroad Workers
Chinese workers with the Central Pacific Railroad camped close to Brown’s Station, Nevada, in the 1860s. Alfred A. Hart In 1864, 15-year-old Hung Lai Wah and his older…
A Daughter’s Disability and a Father’s Awakening
[no-caption] Thomas W. Pearson The nurse gently lifted Michaela onto my partner’s bare chest, a newborn embraced by her mother for the first time. I marveled at the…
Native Kinships and Wealth among the Middle Chinookans
Native kinships are incredibly complex. They do not follow the nice neat patterns of kinship that Americans have adopted from their European ancestors. Native peoples did not only…
Splice of Life by Lisa Jean Moore
A Birthday Present Georgia, my middle daughter of three, is a combination of my DNA and identity release[1] donor #2817[2]. Unlike her sisters who both have the advantage…
#Review: White Gold. Stories of Breast Milk Sharing
Those of the general public who have heard of milk kinship usually regard milk kinship as a feature of “primitive”, “tribal” lineage-based societies, often semi-feudal, with residues almost…
Ep. #8 Savage Bitcoin, hamster flushing, scholars at work, and New Mandala: this month on TFS
This month, Ian (1:25) digs into Bitcoin, arguing that the cryptocurrency is no different than regular currencies, and can be analyzed along all the same lines: symbolically, materially,…