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…
Tag: politics
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 …
Three Lessons I Learned From Charlottesville
White supremacists surrounded counterprotesters at the University of Virginia campus on August 11. Shay Horse /Associated Press On the evening of August 11, a torch-bearing mob assaulted …
Visual Anthropology Of The Egyptian Revolution (And Beyond)
A special issue of the journal Visual Anthropology brings together seven scholars exploring visual aspects of political contestation in the Middle East, especially the Arab Spring. The issue …
The Restitution of the Dead
On the 7th of September 2017, Syrian national Mouaz Al-Nass, a singer and drummer, recorded and then uploaded a video of himself reciting the adhan, the Islamic call…
Were Peace Medals the Price of Loyalty?
Gift-giving is common to all human societies; it’s one of the behaviors that makes us human. We give gifts to celebrate holidays, birthdays, and weddings, not to mention…
Soe Lin Aung: Three theses on the crisis in Rakhine
By now, the main contours of the recent events in Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, are well-known. On August 25, an insurgent group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya…
How Did Humans Get So Good at Politics?
Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, hugs his son Donald Trump Jr. during a rally at Ohio University Eastern Campus in St. Clairsville, Ohio, in June 2016.…
More than Local Arrangements: How Conference Logistics Can Speak to Values by Sarah Pickman
In the fall of 2016, my colleagues Tess Lanzarotta, Marco Ramos, and I met as the core organizers for the “Critical Histories, Activist Futures” conference to hammer out…
Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence by Sarah Pickman
A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup…
Surplus value and care
D.D.Kosambi’s summary of Buddhist political economy circa 500bc. From ‘The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline’ 1964. (P113 1996 reprint by Vikas Publishi…
Fake News: Questions and Resources for Back to Class and All Year Round
Ah, fake news. As a phenomenon, its truthiness is both fascinating (from an epistemological perspective, at least) and highly troubling (from the perspective of anyone who cares about…
Web Roundup: Opioids as a National Emergency by Katherine Warren
After several years in the headlines, the U.S. opioid crisis has been in the news this summer as the federal government debates its status as a national emergency.…
Wrestling with “The Donald”
Nothing better epitomizes the content-free showmanship of President Trump’s governing style than the White House Rose Garden ceremony he held in May after the House passed their version…
Statues – 1970 Kolkata.
Mrinal Sen’s great film Interview begins with a few shots of the removal of colonial statues from the Maidan in Calcutta, shipped off to a closed space in…
Teaching Disability Studies in the Era of Trump by Pamela Block
In spring semester of 2017 we (Pam Block and Michele Friedner) co-taught the graduate course “Conceptual Foundations of Disability Studies.” Though the readings were the same as in…
Syllabi resources for challenging systemic racism, colonization, and more
In the wake of the horrific, racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia this past weekend, it is important for anthropologists to think about our voice in university classrooms as…
The Ku Klux Klan and the Value of Shame
A recent Ku Klux Klan rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, drew close to 1,000 counterprotestors. Steve Helber/Associated Press On July 8, Charlottesville, Virginia, witnessed the value of…