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…
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…
How Conspiracy-driven theories help the Trump administration reject science. After the unprecedented flooding in Houston due to Hurricane Harvey, Michael Mann, a leading scientific voice on climate ch…
For those who don’t know, I live, work, teach, and do research in a predominantly Chinese speaking environment. Although you are probably aware that learning Chinese is hard,…
I see shows like Star Trek as emblematic of a transitional period in American masculinity — at least on TV. The 50’s would have been pure Kirk, with…
Well, look, we’re going to have a border. It’s going to be a real border, and we’re going to build a wall and it’s going to be a…
Last October in the vice-presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, moderator Elaine Quijano brought up the “issue of law enforcement and race relations.” Only a few…
8 Labels I Never Want to Hear Again There are several words that have gained in popularity over the last few years that I don’t ever want to…
President Introduces New Term into Counterterrorism Lexicon President Trump embarked on his first international trip since moving into the White House after a special counsel was appointed to…
Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki chronicles a charming and, indeed, remarkable friendship that developed between two five-year-old boys—one (Sadiki), the son of a traditionally…
News of the upcoming Richard Bauman Lecture in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University is now circulating on campus. Here are the details about this year’s talk…
That democracy means different things to different people is a truism so obvious as to be banal. But the intercultural problem that raises remains perpetually interesting: what do…
By: Elisa (EJ) Sobo The US cannabis landscape is shifting quickly, and so is the way we talk about the plant and its uses. The push to end…
The Intersection of Language and Geography When most people think about linguistic geography, if they think of it at all, they think of dialect atlases such as the…
In the weeks leading up to the publication of Through the Lens of Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Evolution and Culture by Robert J. Muckle and Laura Tubelle…
Jennifer Jackson passed away in May of this year at the young age of 39. Here is an excerpt from the obituary that ran on Anthropology News: We…
In a previous post, I described the process of an ‘Ethnocharrette’ – essentially a strategy that incorporates aspects of design methodology into anthropological practice. As part of a…
Encounters with art and design by an anthropologist and curious non-expert in visual culture. Since starting to work alongside an artist and a designer, I’ve become more aware…
With Netta Avineri and Eric J. Johnson, I’ve addressed a report in the Washington Post on the many contextual factors affecting children in poverty. The well-intentioned plans to teach…
Challenges to authoritarian states’ control of language can be so complex that they exceed the states’ ability to manage them all. Electronic expression of resistance and increasi…
The sexual lives of others. It may seem a new and tantalizing topic for an ethnography, yet this particular genre has a long history in anthropology. In the…
As a high school student, I remember the excitement of going door-to-door to solicit signatures on petitions of various sorts. Adding one’s name to a list of other…
New research claims that saying “Ow” really can ease the pain. Why am I skeptical? Or, rather, why am I skeptical that this works globally? For one thing,…
Racist claims to the contrary (as in the Urban Dictionary’s definition of Ebonics as “A poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of English”), it’s good…
Why are people poor? Why do children of the poor not thrive? The latest explanation for why children coming from disadvantaged households do not rise in this land…