A Strange Past Returns Strangely
The last time I heard anyone utter the name, Przemysl, I must have been ten or eleven years old. In his thickly Yiddishized English, my maternal grandfather must…
Tag: Linguistic Anthropology
Ten Treasures (and a Bonus): A Selection of Anthropological Gems You Might Have Missed from the Past Few Years
I began interviewing authors of fabulous new anthropology books for this space back in 2016. While completing 11 interviews, I also amassed a backlog of more terrific books…
Why “is this fascism?” is the wrong question: a foray into the everyday life of political concepts
Street art, Oaxaca City, Mexico. 2007. Photo: Ryan Anderson. By Louis Philippe Römer Activists, politicians, and public intellectuals have turned to the word “fascism” to analyze the intensified…
Dialogues on Artificial Intelligence
In December 2020, a group of social scientists gathered virtually at the LSE Department of Anthropology to discuss the relationship between data science and the social sciences. We…
Farmer Talk
Facing language problems in Peru’s new coffee economy During a recent trip to the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Southern Peru, I hiked out to a remote corner of the…
The Poetics of Internet Memes
By Kai Blevins I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference…
Sign Languages as Disaster Entertainment
Sign language interpreters have become social media celebrities of our coronavirus moment. But signing is not a form of light entertainment; it should be lifesaving information. Dutch health…
Stars—They Talk Just Like Us!
How an Instagram-based gossip franchise allows celebrities to manage the authenticity of their public personae. They go to the market! They pump gas! They explore the park! One…
Tea Fit for a Queen
Tea sipping has a distinctly queer pedigree. To serve tea properly, one must be skilled in the art of verbal delivery. During last summer’s Women’s World Cup, Alex…
BONUS EPISODE: Faire une anthropologie multilingue, avec Monica Heller et Émilie Urbain: TFS in French
Monica Heller est professeure en anthropologie linguistique à l’Université de Toronto (Canada). Émilie Urbain est professeure adjointe de linguistique au département de français de l’Université Carlet…
“Yes, We Can” and the Power of Political Slogans
“Hey Joe, instead of saying, No we can’t,” retorted Senator Kamala Harris to Vice-President Joe Biden. “Let’s say, Yes, we can.” With that single line, Harris resurrected an…
What to Call US Border Detention Centers?
The controversy over the term “concentration camps” stems from the connotations it carries, setting up analogies that risk hyperbole and overlook the complexities of historical comparison. The governm…
Speak the Names of Those Who Were Lost
Naming can dignify, disparage or even deny one’s social standing. Days after the horrific attack on the Christchurch mosque in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about…
Government Of, By, and For the Trolls
Countering Trump begins by recognizing his role as troller-in-chief. The United States and the world have now spent two years trying to figure out how to deal with…
A Demagogue’s Words Matter
Trump’s immigration metaphors set a divisive tone from the top. Trump wields demagogic rhetoric like a marketing tool, ramping up prejudicial appeals in the closing days of the…
Speaking with Silence
Silence can be a powerful communicative tool in today’s political landscape. Words take center stage in the verbal sparring of the Twitter age. Against the backdrop of Trumpian…
Re-enacting memories by Elinor Ochs
One way to ‘think with dementia’ is to phenomenologically shift from ‘memory’ to ‘remembering’ and to mine ‘remembering’ for its qualities and potentialities as socio-culturally limned experience. Whe…
Reclaiming “Allahu Akbar” from Semantic Pejoration
Allāhu akbar, the Arabic phrase meaning “God is the greatest,” has gained connotations in US public discourse that differ vastly from its meaning among Muslims. Understanding this process…
The Word: Rhetorics of Resistance in Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale
By Emma Louise Backe Dolores Abernathy—titular host in HBO’s Westworld series—spends most of the second season with a gun on her hip and a constellation of blood spattering…
How “Fake News” Lost Its Meaning
Collins Dictionary named “fake news” its 2017 word of the year, an easy choice given the word’s “unprecedented usage increase” of 365 percent over the previous year. Collins…
#MeToo Holds Lessons for Political Resistance
How to Stop the Normalizing of Trump. Remember when everyone feared the “normalization” of a Trump presidency? Well, it’s gotten to the point where the US president can…
A Theory of Propaganda for the Social Media Age
Intertextuality and the propagation of disinformation Propaganda typically refers to manipulative techniques and misleading messages used to gain public acquiescence for a political cause, especially …
The Anthropology/Poetry Nexus–An Interview with Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor
Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe? Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus. Her advanced degrees include an MFA in poetry . . . and a…
The Storm After Maria
Puerto Rican Aftermath Puerto Ricans are US citizens. Puerto Rico is a colony. The tensions encompassed by these two facts were extremely clear in the federal response to…