Catherine Rhodes on her book, Undoing Modernity
Interviewed by Kristina Jacobsen Kristina Jacobsen: Your book takes up two longstanding interests of anthropology: Indigeneity and modernity. Did you originally set out to study these topics o…
Tag: modernity
Courtney Handman on her book, Circulations
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/circulations/paper Rachel Apone: Thank you for this creative, rich, and thought-provoking book! The book offers a fascinating argument about the history of Tok Pi…
In memoriam James Ferguson
by Freek Colombijn and Marjo de Theije – Renowned anthropologist James (Jim) Ferguson passed away on 14 February 2025 at 65. He obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology…
Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage – review
In Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, Michael Herzfeld considers how marginalised groups use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state a…
Joshua Babcock takes the page 99 test
“It’s about sarees or some shit.” This sentence—probably my favorite in the dissertation—comes from a group interview with Chand Chandramohan, Diva, and Seelan Palay, the organizers of Singapore’s…
Sarah Muir on her new book, Routine Crisis
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo69688117.html Interview by Kabir Tambar Kabir Tambar: Routine Crisis is about the aftermath of the economic collapse in Argentina in 20…
The Nature of the Copy
From the dead center of an all-white eye, a lone sapling rose two feet tall. Cyclical ridges and valleys, etched in bioplastic by an unseen watchmaker, encircled the…
What Is This Lahu Thing Called Love?
How pop music videos perform a simultaneously Lahu and modern identity. As the music video begins, we see a young man waiting anxiously, peering through a gate. A…
Infrastructure after disasters
On October 21, 1868, at approximately eight o’clock in the morning, a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault near Oakland, California shook the Bay Area. The earthquake caused…
A Note on MUHUM
Muslim Humanitarianism – short MUHUM – is a platform that seeks to foster debate on the complex relationship between charity, philanthropy, humanitarianism, development and Islam. In anthropological a…
Living a good life through infrastructure. A Review of three recent monographs on Central Asia
This post belongs into a series of posts on the workshop “The Future of Central Asian Studies” organized by Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer and Prof. Dr. Madeleine Reeves…
Speaking Of Jinn…
I recently participated in a podcast about jinn, material culture and modernity and globalization on the Archaeological Fantasies podcast. Here’s their episode notes: Magical Jinn and where …
Are The Media Using The Wrong Yardstick To Measure The Revolution?
The concept of “revolution” used by Western media to report on the so-called “Arab Spring” (itself a term coined by the Western media) is rooted in understandings of…
Summary of Classical Sociological Theory
The basic premise of all classical sociological theory is that the contemporary world is the outcome of a transition from “traditional” to “modern” societies. Explain how Karl…
NO WALL TO LEAN ON #newtonloss
Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?… Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing…
Latour’s new book assembles big names to “Reset Modernity!”
MIT Press has its new site live for Bruno Latour’s new book Reset Modernity! The book has many leading thinkers making contributions; description below for what looks like…
21st century ‘barbarians’: Modernity, the breeding of fighting bulls and EU farming subsidies
This is an extended version of an article orginally published in The Conversation. I am grateful to the editors there for their support and for helping myself and…
Routines of everyday life
It is a classic observation of anthropologists that we seek to document the everyday activities of people within various cultural contexts in order to provide evidence for making…
Vortrag: Indigene Modernität durch digitale Medientechnologien?
Budka, P. 2015. Indigene Modernität durch digitale Medientechnologien? Infrastrukturentwicklung, Technologieaneignung und soziokulturelle Praktiken im Nordwestlichen Ontario, Kanada. Vortrag im Colloq…