#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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 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,…
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…
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.…
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 –…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Review of Bourdieu, P. (2014). On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992. P. Champagne, R. Lenoir, F. Poupeau, & M. C. Rivière (Eds.). London: Polity.…
When we raise questions about the assumed figures of the ‘smuggler’ and ‘trafficker’, we must also in parallel raise questions about agencies, officers, policies, and discourses of the…
Anthropologists have been studying the various phenomena associated with states and ‘state-like’ structures for a long time (cf. Fortes 1940, Leach 1954). It was only in the last…
Last 11 November, Angola celebrated forty years of independence—a memorable date. However, these celebrations have been overshadowed by a movement of contestation that has turned a spotlight on…
With the recent default on debt payment (see Franqui Rivera and Colón-Garcia 2015), Puerto Rico became a failed state. State failure is the inability or incapacity of a…
Ever felt like the best conversation at the party is happening in the next room? When I did my field research in an urban neighborhood in Java some…