When We Come to Anthropology, Elsewhere Comes with Us
Ethnography’s power comes from the margins. Not the center. A glance at my watch revealed that my colleague was already five minutes over his thirty-minute allotment. Students from…
Tag: race
Creating Bodies, Creating a Nation: How the Idea of the Straight, White, Muscular Male Body Shaped America by Ketil Slagstad
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique Rachel Louise Moran University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages. 1. When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’…
Top Articles of 2018
As the year winds down, Anthropology News rounds up our most popular articles of 2018. From critical reflections on the discipline and experiences of it, to grappling with…
Navigating Silicon Valley’s Contradictions
Silicon Valley’s workers must maneuver their way through this place of diversity and discrimination, capitalist aims, and countercultural aspirations. You can spot the extremes on the street in…
“The Workingmen’s Colony”: Labor Conflict and Historic Preservation in Campbell, Ohio
In August, I visited the town of Campbell, a former hub of Ohio’s steel industry. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company established operations there in 1902, on the banks…
Great Ape Haters
Isaiah Nengo on racist tweets, evolutionary misconceptions, and his ancient ape skull discovery. In a tweet from 2013, Roseanne Barr called former United Nations National Security Advisor Susan…
Race, Rural Livelihoods, and Contested Conservation Landscapes
A visit to Basu Farms in Pembroke Township, about 60 miles south of Chicago, provides a glimpse into the entanglement of land tenure, black history and self-determination in…
The Hidden Resilience of “Food Desert” Neighborhoods
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Even before Ashanté Reese and I reach the front gate, retired schoolteacher Alice Chandler is standing in the doorway of her brick home in Washington,…
The Banality of Lost Guns: Producing Null Data Sets by Kristin Doughty
On the evening of June 6, 2016, a man with a concealed carry permit misplaced his loaded 9mm Kahr handgun in the middle of a park filled with…
Wizards, Vampires, Klingons, and Other Alternative Cultures
On the last day of my introduction to anthropology class, we watch scenes from the documentary Trekkies. Students grin at the sincere folks dressed as Starfleet officers and…
Biology, Race, and “Orientalism”
Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978 and is highly influential, both in post-colonial studies and social theory. Said argues that through the construction of the ‘Orient’ (the East) a…
Book Review: Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies and a Culture of Migration by Sin Yee Koh
In Race, Education and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies and a Culture of Migration, Sin Yee Koh offers a study of the migratory trajectories of tertiary-educated mobile Malays…
What FoodAnthropology Is Reading Now, July 12, 2018
David Beriss A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to…
Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson’s Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine by Naomi Zucker
Subprime Health: Debt and Race in US Medicine Nadine Ehlers and Leslie R. Hinkson (editors) University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 256 pages “The focus on race in medicine and the…
Written in Blood
How my research on DNA ancestry tests became fake news. When I was sent a link to a Snopes article asking, “Did DNA Testing Companies Admit to Altering…
We Need to Talk About “Gun Violence”: Reflections on Terminology and Contexts of Violence by Joe Anderson
Among the many political challenges of our time, gun violence in America has emerged as one of the most divisive. A retreat into partisan communities prevents us from…
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…
That Most Dangerous, Sacred American Space, the Bathroom
Binary clarity at an Interstate comfort station. “Ladies” to the left, “Gentlemen” to the right. Courtesy Robert Myers. uncommon sense Spoiler alert: In Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho, Janet Leigh…
Science as a Structure of Violence
The study of human diversity and subsequent racialisation of people has been examined and critiqued but has escaped interrogation as an institution by which structural violence is enacted.…
A Brief History of Race in the Western Thought
Race, as a concept, has important ontology in American society. In order to understand the relationship between race, genetic research, and the American class structure, it is necessary…
Becoming White
Policing Whiteness Karen Brodkin’s 1998 book, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America was a crucial entry in a genre of studies…
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 Labor of Racism
By: Dána-Ain Davis One night in early 2018, a doula-friend of mine, Josie who is white, sent me a photo of a Black woman sitting in a wheelchair.…
Starbucks Enlightenment
Image credit: “Starbucks, Race and ‘Corporate’ Anthropology,” CFM Public Affairs Blog (March 2015). Is Anthropology better than Starbucks? In late March 2018, anthropology rais…