Pathways for the Post-COVID New Old World
Part 5 of 5 of the COVID-19 Series. Some are openly proclaiming, “you don’t want to waste a crisis,” as they calculate how the crisis could become a…
Tag: state
Allegro vivace… the Italian laboratory, for better or for worse
This little essay was conceived wandering in the Swiss countryside. I’m on sabbatical leave and my whole work and travel program has been disrupted by the measures taken…
Eerie desires for the authoritarian state. Covid-19 updates from Italy.
I have been – like anyone else in Italy – in quarantine for the past three weeks. Optimistically, Italy will be on lockdown for the next two…
The return of the plague-spreader
Written in lockdown amid the pandemic, this post speculates about the political and epistemological implications of ‘middle-class’ reactions to the present crisis. It is also a cry of…
On being voices of prudence in times of a pandemic – #Corona
Many academic disciplines have a lot to say these days about COVID-19. There are the medical experts, of course, epidemiologists, virologists, microbiologists, weighing in on the validity of…
#Review: State of Rebellion
In State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic, Louisa Lombard moves away from an anthropological tendency to study the margins and interstices of the…
#Review: The Truth About Crime
What is ‘crime’? A social pathology? A violation of social order? The object or raison d’être of law enforcement? How can we best conceive of crime, criminality, and…
Living a good life through infrastructure. A Review of three recent monographs on Central Asia
This post belongs into a series of posts on the workshop “The Future of Central Asian Studies” organized by Prof. Dr. Judith Beyer and Prof. Dr. Madeleine Reeves…
#Review: The Force of Custom: Law and the Ordering of Everyday Life in Kyrgyzstan
The Force of Custom presents a strongly grounded ethnographic argument for the rethinking of ‘customary law’ as a category in the anthropology of law. How does an understanding…
Call for #Reviews: #AnthroState #Africa
As we start into 2018, we seize the opportunity of this post by Thomas Bierschenk and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan on their influential edited volume States at Work to…
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 …
Is the United Nations Broken?
By Ronald Niezen When the United Nations General Assembly convened its annual meeting this September, amid growing nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, U.S. President Donald…
Axel Rudi: Independence from Whom? The Aftermath of the Kurdish Referendum
In the future, people will say, “On the 16th of October, it happened again.” The Kurds were once again betrayed by the international community. Afraid of losing their…
Johan Fischer: Veg or non-veg? On fieldwork and food in India
Reporting from an ongoing fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, the central topic of this piece is the ways in which the vegetarian and the nonvegetarian are understood, practiced, and…
James C. Scott: A brief history of flight from the state
James C. Scott rethinks refuge (primarily in mountain territories) and the flight of the state in the context of his later ideas on where others seek refuge…swamps, marshes,…
Trump’s Wall and the Dictator Aesthetic
Well, look, we’re going to have a border. It’s going to be a real border, and we’re going to build a wall and it’s going to be a…
The Happiness Fetish Revisited
In response to several surveys that attempt to quantify happiness, Ryan, Adam, and Aneil spend this episode of This Anthro Life exploring happiness through the lens of fetishism.…
Happy New Year from Allegra!
After a well deserved break during the holiday season, Allegra is back and full of energy for yet another exciting year! We have lots of wonderful stuff –…
United we stand, divided we fall
by Filippo Osella If there is a lesson to be learnt from the long 2016 it is that there is more than one way to disgrace oneself. Calling…
On capitalist utopia and the rightful share
by Deniz Seebacher & Julia Büchele The title of James Ferguson’s latest book (2015) draws from (arguably) “the world’s most widely circulated development cliché”: Give a man a fish,…
Invisible Government, Conjured Markets
by Bennett Heine Among political and social scientists in recent decades, the phrase ‘give a man a fish…’ has become more a prompt than a platitude, its pregnant ellipses…
Economic Citizenship and Resource Nationalism
What is resource nationalism, and why is it important? One of Wikipedia’s shortest entries, “resource nationalism” nonetheless appears in 372 files published by WikiLeaks. Resource nationalism seems t…
#Review: On the State. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992.
As stated on its back cover, in this book the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) investigates the state’s ‘extraordinary power of producing a socially ordered world without…