Venture Capital’s Due Diligence, or Ethnography’s Adversarial Twin?
On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in…
On a crypto builders’ night in late September 2023, I lingered in the crowd after the event. It was hosted in a crypto company’s newly renovated office in…
This picture from Vellapallam on the Bay of Bengal coast tells a story. While the obvious one is a story on the invisible gendered labour aspects of fishery,…
A few months ago, I underwent four surgeries to remove two wisdom teeth. Long and painful, they took from me solid parts with strange shapes — a friend,…
There were thunderstorms threatening to cancel the classic contest between the beloved Tigers and the dreaded Giants. But the rain stopped right before the ball game started and…
I was clicking through a game studio’s website when an image caught my eye. In a warm, cozy office, several people sit in front of their laptops, heads…
Aysel brought out her candles wrapped in stretch wrap and put them on the coffee table in the middle of our interview. She was very proud of showing…
Photo caption: Ainu musician Oki plays the tonkori during a performance in New York on June 4, 2026. (Photo not for sale)(Photo courtesy of Richard Termine/The Japan Society)(Kyodo)…
Image: Inō Tadataka (1745-1818), the famous Japanese surveyor and cartographer whose bronze statue resides in the Tomioka Hachiman Shrine grounds in present-day Monzen Nakacho, joined…
This post started after talking with my friend and colleague, Inge. Since we probably wouldn’t see each other for a while during the summer break, she asked me…
When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also…
It is a winter day. Workers at the dump are busy emptying trucks, sweating profusely as the sun beats down on all of us. The smell of the…
It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s…
For the first part of this two-part interview, visiting scholars Elif Gül and Melina Gioconda Davis sat down to discuss the research projects that brought them to the…
Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short-term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish on institutional time threaten our ability to do sustained…
Read the transcript here. Dr. Luis Felipe R. Murillo is a brilliant author and anthropologist. I sat with him to chat about his new book Common Circuits: Hacking…
It was 38 degree Celsius, another day of scorching heat in Delhi in the month of June when I decided to go out and book my first order…
In October 2022, just as the monsoon was ending, Kalpana pulled me and my field partner, Sandeep, into her house in the rehabilitated village of Popharan, one of…
In early 2026, as reports of the Nipah virus outbreak in West Bengal surfaced, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control responded with a swift escalation of prevention measures,…
Canal do Búfalo[1] was a prominent Brazilian online community in the 2010s, composed almost entirely of men. In this forum, members symbolically identify themselves as “buffaloes,” drawing inspiratio…
In the summer of 2015, I was a first-year graduate student when I joined a field project at La Ferrassie, a Neandertal’ site tucked into the Périgord region…
New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives…
In November 2025, in Rio de Janeiro, the seminar (in)SAM — “Food (in)Security Under the Microscope: Rethinking the Relationship Between Food Systems, Microorganisms, and Sanitary Norms” — …
Joginder Kaur (54) had no formal schooling. For her, phone calls always meant pressing the green button to receive a call. Dialling numbers or navigating menus were not…
When I first arrived at the makerspace known as Fab Casa del Mig, in the Sants neighborhood of Barcelona, I crossed a large urban park called La España…