What Indiana Jones Gets Right About Archaeology
As Dr. Jones returns to the big screen, a real archaeologist acknowledges the movie franchise’s shortcomings while espousing its merits. DR. JONES RETURNS Pop culture’s most famous archaeologist…
Tag: media
Do Washing Machines Belong in Kitchens? Many Brits Say “Yes.”
An anthropologist moves from Canada to the U.K. and finds herself reflecting on what home design patterns reveal about a society. Excerpted from Silent but Deadly: The Underlying…
Godard’s “British Sounds” link updated
Godard “British Sounds” From 2009: You can find Jean-Luc Godard’s “British Sounds” in all its glory now. It is worth watching all the way through – from the…
Going beneath the surface: The subtler messages about forced displacement in ‘The Swimmers’
The screen is dark, the music sombre. There are sounds of muffled voices and explosions. The dark screen breaks to reveal blue skies as the words “2011: A…
Five Highlights From the 2023 RAI Film Festival
This March, SAPIENS is partnering with the Royal Anthropological Institute’s RAI Film Festival to celebrate anthropological documentaries. ✽ The art of anthropological documentary filmmaking is thriv…
Picturing the Deep Universe Is Deeply Human
The James Webb Space Telescope’s stunning photos require extensive image processing—revealing as much about humanity as about the universe. In July 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled “Webb’s…
When Life Imitates Art in Ukraine
Photographs from Russia’s war on Ukraine dissolve an archaeologist’s fondness for a Soviet-era sculpture. ✽ On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine. Counter to Russian President…
New in Paperback: Theorising Media & Conflict
The edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (Berghahn Books, 2020) is now available in paperback.The volume’s introduction by Birgit Bräuchler and me remains openly accessible. Abstract …
Pawn or War Crime? – you choose who gets voted off the island (two votes allowed per person)
Secret weapons sales (not so secret) and fancy dress panto season – really beyond the pale (white supremacy evil tricksters all). Justification here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/1…
Against Charity
I wrote my first book as a critique of charity work in Kolkata, India. I attempted a critique of western ‘charity’ workers helping those they saw as the…
Elizabeth Ellcessor on her book, In Case of Emergency
Interview by Volha Verbilovich New York University Press Volha Verbilovich: Emergency media are cultural and temporal. In Case of Emergency develops these definitions, revealing the history…
Oct 22 1965 Sydney arrests
The report on this 1965 anti-war protest is marginally better than most current press release churnalism, of course it favours the Police and the future PM McMahon (who…
The Dangers of Ancient Apocalypse’s Pseudoscience
Reviewing Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, an anthropologist explains how its host Graham Hancock devalues both archaeology and Indigenous heritage. This article was originally published at The Conversa…
Tim Page
Fighting the lurgie seemed the right time to read Tim Page’s book on train trips in Vietnam 20 years after his war photo stint – the Dennis Hopper…
Global South Asia on Screen
Did I mention the yellow cover version out with Aakar books in India? https://www.aakarbooks.com/details.php?bid=875 https://www.aakarbooks.com/details.php?bid=875
What Commentators Get Wrong (and Right) About North Korea
An anthropologist argues that unfair portrayals of North Korea as a hopelessly irrational hermit state has huge implications for policy and security. ✽ This month, North Korea tested…
Patricia Lange discusses The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Media-Anthropology/Costa-Lange-Haynes-Sinanan/p/book/9781032007762 Media is fundamentally about connection. Around the world, life is being…
When Women Answer the Call of Duty
From Syria to Ukraine, the sight of women taking up arms to fight for a cause calls audiences to attention. Why? ✽ In 2019, the video game Call…
What’s Behind the Backlash to Lightyear’s Animated Kiss?
What do Twitter debates over Disney-Pixar’s recent family film tell us about today’s parenting politics in the U.S.? ✽ On June 17, Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation…
Global South Asia on Screen
The full wraparound cover: https://www.aakarbooks.com/details.php?bid=875
Ethnographic Monographs – or now for something else?
By Herbert Ploegman; Didi Boldewijn, Maya Roettger and Lorenzo Horwitz; Alice Riva, Claudia Rapisarda, Elisabeth Jongmans and Jasper Schotte; Ashley Prather and Maira van Emden Two crumpled up…
Immensely facilitated
VLUU L210 / Samsung L210 A scrap from a 1996 notebook, it was sent to the aut-op-sy listserve: In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels formulated a paragraph…
How Dr. Li Wenliang Went From a Whistleblower to a National Hero
A memorial at Wuhan Central Hospital in Hubei province, China, honored Li Wenliang, who died on February 7, 2020. STR/AFP/Getty Images On January 3, 2020, Li Wenliang, an…
Noah Aromand on his book, Fixing Stories
Interview by Susan Seizer https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/fixing-stories/3A0E3C4880CBDC00252AEC4EBE11B9E2 Susan Seizer: Please briefly explain your choice of the term “fixers” and desc…