What can be the fate of humanity?
What can be the fate of humanity? There has been a lot of attention paid recently to the question of “Peak Oil” worldwide, and what our industrial civilization…
Tag: philosophy
David Graeber’s hidden truth – the lessons and limits of anarchism
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World brings together a selection of writings spanning two decades by the renowned anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber. According to Danny Dorling’s revie…
Bad Marxism
Thinking of returning to this problem of time – how everything has got more urgent, but nothing is moving at all – hyper-stagnation. From the reviews of Bad…
Working day – time sucks, colour coded stomach-turning adulterations of food…
“In ‘The Working Day’, Marx reports that the appointment of Mr. H. S. Tremenheere as Commissioner of Inquiry coincides with the occurrence of “several public meetings and ……
Saving Time – research theme
The one thing I am urgently trying to write is a text on the need for time (I don’t have time to write it, so there’s the problem).…
The Growth of Malignant and Exclusionary Social Movements
Written by Colin Greer & Eric Laursen Editor’s note: This is the second of three articles on the role of …
Against Better Judgment – review
Anthropologists have often explained human behaviour as though people predictably act in their own interests. But in Against Better Judgment, Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H. A. Evans compile researc…
Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge – review
In Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, João Biehl and Vincanne Adams assemble reflections on the role of anthropology in understanding healthcare in today’s world of…
China – do we care?
Some of us Arctic anthropologists may not have China on the immediate radar of their interest. However, China has become an increasingly important player in the Arctic, through…
Multiple Modes of Being Human
(Editor’s Note: This blog post is part of the Thematic Series Data Swarms Revisited) Evolution (photo by and copyright of Oliver Berger) In the last couple of years,…
Epidemic Philosophy by Warwick Anderson
Can a virus ever prompt good philosophy? Within weeks of its emergence, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was galvanizing celebrity European philosophers and social theorists, most of them men in…
Science as an Orientalizing Field
Science is a Western form of knowledge production and can be divided into three forms: 1) science as a set of methods for investigating the world we inhabit,…
Marxism is amphetamines, biopolitics is cocaine: Social science theories as drugs.
Okay so hear me out, I have a new bit: Social science theories as drugs. Biopolitics is cocaine. I like it in small doses, and I can see…
#Review: After Ethnos
After Ethnos is a philosophically sophisticated provocation and inspiration towards a new mode of anthropological analysis that breaks free from the classic conflation of anthropology with ethnography…
Decolonizing Primatology: Part I
We all have texts that are formative in our academic, professional, spiritual, personal, mental, and philosophical lives. There are a few books that I can point to as…
“Radical Bricoleurs”: On Doing Science, Community Life, Activism and Bureaucracy in Mozambique
By Anselmo Matusse, University of Cape Town § One day I was walking with Mr. Angelo, 69 years old, a former Renamo soldier, demobilized in 1994, who is now…
Populations, Race, and The Sorites Paradox
The sorites paradox (also called the paradox of the heap) refers to a particular logical contradiction that arises from the analysis of vague terms (Sainsbury, 2009). Terms like…
Fall Semester, 2018 Courses
I am very excited to have three new preps for Fall, 2018. Course overviews are below. LBST 2213: Now this is not a new prep as I have…
The Paradox of Hyper-connectedness and Solipsism in Contemporary America
Try walking around the mall, on a crowded sidewalk, or through a university campus and there is one thing that stands out: people are engulfed in their phones.…
On Thinking with People and their Escapes: A Review of Unfinished through Storytelling by Onur Günay
Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming João Biehl and Peter Locke, editors Duke University Press, 2017. 400 pages. If hierarchy is the key to sociological knowledge production, what…
The Personhood and Rights of Apes
I spent the earliest part of my career as an anthropologist studying captive chimpanzees at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, NC. While there, I always made a…
Butler on nonsystematic writing
I’ve been re-reading Butler’s work lately because I’m thinking about political mimesis, and I was struck along the way by her very frank and admirable comments about the…
CFP: Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics
We have received the following call for proposals from David Kaplan, which may be of interest to FoodAnthropology readers and researchers: Call for proposals: Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural…
What students say education is for
Sometime earlier this spring I asked the students in my Digital Cultures class to each write down a sentence (on a post-it) about what education was for. “Education is…