Episode 9: The humanness of humanity has a history
In the 9th episode of PUAN podcast, co-host Saumya Pandey interviews anthropologist Mark Goodale on the history of human rights. The humaneness of humanity has a history. And…
Tag: political economy
On borrowed time: Living with chronic terror in the United States’ insulin crisis by Erin V. Moore
As the United States began closing its borders in March 2020, Americans with diabetes, already under threat from the coronavirus, faced another pandemic hazard: pharmacies were regularly running…
‘Race,’ ‘Diversity,’ and the University
If this was a good time for Canadian academia, you would not be able to tell from the blanket of almost absolute silence that has been pulled over…
Pauline Destrée: Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana
Africa’s Green Energy Revolution In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass…
Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober: Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences
Stuck At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship…
Mao Mollona: Fully Exterminated Communism, or Anthropology in the Time of Cholera
Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London One thing is sure. If just briefly, the pandemic struck at the heart of capitalism. It paralysed the economy, broke the bureaucratic machine…
Don Kalb: Covid, Crisis, and the Coming Contestations
Don Kalb, University of Bergen At some point in late January I told my family over WhatsApp with the Marxist bluster they usually enjoy from me that if…
Purpose of Living Anthropologically
In a time of global convulsion, I’m rethinking the purpose of Living Anthropologically as a blog and website. And yes, that image up there is borrowed from the…
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber: “A Matter of Priority”: The Covid-19 Crisis in Indonesia
Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, University of Cambridge COVID-19 is wreaking havoc in Indonesia. The government ignored the crisis for too long, relying on a dubious religious discourse of divine pro…
Ramesh Sunam: The Precariousness of Migrant Workers in Japan amidst COVID-19
Ramesh Sunam, Waseda University, Tokyo Suraj (name changed), arrived a year ago from Nepal to study at a Japanese language institute in Nagoya, Japan. He was working part-time…
Andrea Tollardo: No return to old normalities: Reflections on a time of passage in locked down Italy
At the end of February, the center of Italian capital encountered an unexpected problem. Not an unforeseeable one, but one that was not previously thought possible in the…
Sandro Mezzadra: Politics of struggles in the time of pandemic
A prolonged wait at the pharmacy, a long queue before entering a supermarket. Experiences like this, today increasingly common, can help us to see how the spreading of…
Book Forum: Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay by Andrés Romero
Introduction Daniel Renfrew’s Life Without Lead: Contamination, Crisis, and Hope in Uruguay (2018) is a masterful undertaking on the anthropology of disaster and its everydayness. An ethnograp…
Trade
Issues of trade have come to renewed attention, as the global trading system has been rocked by upended agreements and cries for economic populism. Anthropology has long been…
Boundaries, Borders, Walls
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> [Image Credit: Lupe Flores, No Border Walls, 2016. Images for Fencing In Democracy organized by Miguel Diaz-Barriga and Margaret…
Publicity or Marginality? On the Question of Academic “Silencing” in Anthropology
Abstract What is “silencing” and is it out of place in the contemporary North American university? How do “silencing” and “public anthropology” intersect? What are the roles of…
Vlad Schüler-Costa: Academic precarity and the false coin of our own dreams
A specter haunted EASA2018—the specter of precarity. Like a “frightful hobgoblin” (that, one could argue, is a more suitable, if inaccurate, translation of Marx’s Gespenst), it appeared in…
Farmers & Foodies of the Future (FFF)
Update August 2018: This guest post by Robert Seguin on “Farmers and Foodies of the Future” was originally written in August 2015. Three years on, a post by…
Anthropology & US Immigration
Update July 2018: This post was originally written in 2013 in an attempt to bring an anthropological perspective on studying immigration to what looked like could have been…
Fiona Murphy: When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy
Something smells of bullshit. It has for a long time. Caught in the spectacular entanglements of the neoliberal university, academic work is being actively “bullshitized.” Audit cultures, the…
Anthropology on Immigration
Stand with Migrants Against Fascism In 2011 the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a General Statement on Immigration. This 2011 statement was a testimony to a need for…
Anthropology on Immigration
Standing with Migrants In 2011 the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a General Statement on Immigration. This 2011 statement was a testimony to a need for rethinking immigration…
Venezuela & Anthropology
Will Venezuela Recover? As Venezuela holds elections on 20 May 2018, questions of “Will Venezuela recover?” or “Will Venezuela collapse?” arise. When seen in a regional context…
What if people stop funding the U.S.?
What happens if the US runs out of money? This post is a part of a series examining the possibility of a rather quick US collapse, rather than…