REDUX: “Cleaning Up the Streets” #AnthroState
Hillbrow, Johannesburg: It’s April 2008. I am in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel, one of Johannesburg’s most happening nightclubs since the Apartheid era. As with the Hillbrow…
Tag: politics
The state of the state in #Africa
How political authority and legitimacy are sustained in societies marked by socio-economic inequality and political exclusion has been a long-standing preoccupation in the social sciences. Especially …
Soft Power: The Over-Determined Politicization of Vulnerable in the #CDC7words by Elizabeth Bromley
At first blush, the inclusion of the word vulnerable alongside words like fetus, evidence-based, and diversity in the list of 7 words discouraged for use in budget documents…
Dust by Nick Caverly
The building pictured below sat near Mack Avenue on Detroit’s far east side and, according to the municipal government, was an environmental hazard. Following years of complaints from…
Public health politicised: A response to the politics of CDC language and implications for global health, wellbeing and inequalities by Ben Kasstan
In this response we address how the recent language controversy surrounding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) must be considered as part of a broader politicisation…
Beyond “Banned Words”: The CDC, Trump’s Anti-Science, and Anthropological Outrage by Charles L. Briggs
I am delighted that anthropologists joined the debate unleashed by a story published in the Washington Post on 15 December 2017, in which health reporter Lena Sun and…
The Politics of Explaining Taiwan
Mail to Taiwan often gets sent to Thailand Imagine if, when writing a paper on Donald Trump, you had to start your paper by saying the following:1 The…
Ep. #4 “Killer Docs, Imaginary Landscapes, Political Lies, and Emotional Risk:” this month on TFS
In this month’s panel discussion, Jodie (1:14) tells us about documents with agency: “Ideas just get up and grow legs, and they run away with themselves.” (Trigger warning:…
Justice, Science, and Pedagogy by Myrna Perez Sheldon
As we consider the role of justice in pedagogy and scholarship, I want to ask a simple but difficult question: What is our ethical task? Do we desire…
Unpicking an (A)moral Anthropological Stance: Ongoing violence in Myanmar
Author: Justine Chambers, Doctoral candidate with the Department of Anthropology, School of Culture, History and Languages (CHL) at the Australian National University. You can read more about her…
Turkey.
Gah. Still. No. Change. >Subject: Call for solidarity for the academics for peace on trial Dear colleagues, Our colleagues in Turkey are facing incredible repression under a populist…
Anomie and aftermath: the historical residue of Flemish nationalism in present-day debates on refugees in Belgium by Hunter Keys
I. ‘Everything is the same level as the ground’ As protests against Assad morphed into slaughter, Khalid[i] did his best to avoid fighting. At the time, he was…
Medical Student Activism: Political x Institutional x Personal by Robert Rock
Robert Rock and Nientara Anderson are medical students involved in a broad range of activism efforts at the Yale School of Medicine, including the US Health Justice initiatives…
No One Right Way to Peace
When the United Nations drafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it established a vision of peak humanity, articulating what the assembly considered appropriate rules for…
How Have Attitudes Toward Extremism Changed Over Time?
Words are more than their dictionary definitions. Amir Ridhwan/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. The …
Dump by Anne Berg
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the A…
Like a Skin
For those of us who have grown up in the ‘West’, we tend to think of religion as a customizable category. Some of us are born into a…
Urban by Claudia Gastrow
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in…
Is the United Nations Broken?
U.S. President Donald Trump excoriated the United Nations at the 72nd U.N. General Assembly in September. MediaPunch/Associated Press When the United Nations General Assembly convened its…
When the press covers news
Katie Sims / Sun Staff Photographer ROHINGYA Prof Urges Students to Consider Oppression of The Rohingya By Victoria Moore The Rohingya crisis has been termed a “textbook example of…
Digging Into the Myth of Timbuktu
Sometime around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on April 19, 1828, René Caillié emerged from the dark hull of the slave ship that he had boarded weeks before.…
Detritus by Sharad Chari
I employed the category ‘detritus’ in the early 2000s to diagnose the different kinds of residues of racial capitalism with which people struggled in the shadows of South…
Can We “See” Climate Change?
While standing on the Senate floor in Washington, D.C., in February 2015, Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma expressed his deep skepticism about climate change. “We keep hearing…
Anthropology Matters #AmAnth17
Open Anthropology Matters The October issue of Open Anthropology promotes material linked to the 2017 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Anthropology Matters (November …