American culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery
[this post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn] When the Harvard Business School invited me to teach a few years ago, I had one question. “Why?”…
Tag: Uncategorized
Pacific salmon declines and the thread-bare promises of modernity
By Neil Nunn, University of Toronto§ At every turn in my research examining the politics of mine-waste, salmon have spoken to me. They speak through a groundswell of…
Environmental Anthropology: An Anthropologist’s View of a Cove Cleanup
The curse of the anthropologist: finding culture everywhere in nature. Today, the neighborhood in which my husband and I now live hosted a cleanup in a nearby cove.…
Fear and Loathing in Atlanta
Content warning: racism, violence, mention of miscarriage. I was on my way to the airplane that would take me back home, to Canada. I boarded the train between…
“The View From Flyover Country”: Interviews and reviews
What a week! My book “The View From Flyover Country” is now a critically acclaimed best-seller — again. This collection of essays on the erosion of institutions and…
Elective Affinities: Fragility and Injustice in the Field
Luisa Enria is a lecturer in International Development. Her work focuses on political violence, humanitarian emergencies and citizenship in Sierra Leone. 2017. They say they can’t tell if I…
The ethics of mediation in conservation spaces
The author of this article prefers to remain anonymous. *** While states, extractive industries, pharmaceuticals, and trophy hunters continually occupy positions as amoral, neoliberal agents, the rol…
Through the looking glass: learning to do ethnography with children and their families
Nieves Galera Nieves trained in Psychology, and is currently a PhD student at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology of Autonomous University of Madrid. Using a sociocultural and e…
Orientalized Gender and the Field
Salma Moustafa Khalil *** During my Masters program, I went to Leipzig to conduct my Masters fieldwork. My interest was in the memory of the GDR and how…
Pregnant or fieldworker; should ‘all foreseeable risks’ be avoided in the field?
Emmanuelle Roth is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. She currently conducts fieldwork in Guinea on the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak. She is interested in viral surveillance,…
David Loher: Complicity or pragmatism? A labor movement and its fight against the asbestos industry
This post is part of a feature on “How Capitalists Think,” moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (University of Bergen) and Tijo Salverda (University of Cologne). This contribution…
When Expectations Do Not Match Reality
Over the course of this class we have read and seen many examples of how different people relate to death. That being said, there has always been a…
Listening to the practice
Listening to the practice – an anthropological method. By Júlía Birnudóttir Sigurðardóttir Selecting a field for my master study wasn’t simple. I had many ideas – too…
Sierra Leone General Elections 2018 – A personal diary, by Diana Szanto
On the 4th of April, I was sitting on the veranda of a restaurant in Lungi and watched mesmerized the police officer next to me who, in his…
Welcome to the Authoritarian Kleptocracy, Part XXVI
This week my book “The View From Flyover Country” gets released in print for the first time. This collection of essays on the collapse of institutions and trust…
Do we really want to live forever?
Society has always been an obsession with immortality, with living forever and never having to fear death. This fascination with immortality can be found throughout legends and stories,…
Today’s Forecast: Heavy rains, rising seas, and floating bodies
While scouring the internet for additional information for my Op-ed, I came across an article onan un usual consequence of inclement weather: floating caskets. I’ve never heard…
Are Selfies Worth the Risk?
What would you do for the perfect selfie? The emergence of the front-facing camera has revolutionized the way we make memories and document our lives. We can’t go…
The Anthropologist in the March For Science: An Interview with Valorie Aquino
This post was submitted by Dr. Andrew Tarter, a Gender and Social Inclusion Advisor in the Global Development Lab at USAID. Valorie V. Aquino—an anthropology doctoral candidate at…
Review: Cultivating Development
by Esther Mulders David Mosse’s groundbreaking book, Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice (2005, Pluto Press), focuses on the complex link between policy and practice in…
Blogging on MENA TIDNINGEN
Dear Friends of Tabsir, If you wonder why I hardly post on Tabsir these days, it is because I blog mainly on the Swedish website MENA Tidningen. Check…
Like this blog post or you will die in your sleep tonight
The year is 2007. Your razr–hot pink–chimes. You just received a message. There is a blurry image of a girl you’ve never seen before. The text underneath reads: This…
Immortality: no longer fiction?
The great unknown associated with dying has resulted in a societal fascination – no, obsession – with death. Death is everywhere from our newsfeeds, to our music, to…
Death Machine
Right to die groups over the year have tried to portray death as a positive experience. They want to desensitize the general public to death, removing the negative…