“There is no world.” The troubled imagination of a hipster band
In 2013 I moved to Riga, Latvia for an entire year to teach and proceed in a self-constructed ethnographic project. At times dreams came true, yes, they did,…
Tag: Uncategorized
Foreign Hands Duking It Out Over Democracy In Egypt (and Elsewhere)
Of course “foreign hands” seek to influence Egyptian politics. The question is: are they succeeding? Yes but not always the ways they want to, suggests a series of…
New Book On Revolutionary Egypt (With A Chapter By Yours Truly)
I have a chapter in this new book on the Egyptian revolution. In 2012 I traveled to Oxford University to participate in an interdisciplinary conference on the Egyptian…
WHY BRANDS NEED TO DO MORE THAN LISTEN
Listening to consumers in order to ‘get closer’ and understand their needs is a common term that I hear within the worlds of branding, marketing and innovation. This…
‘Mellencamp’s classroom tape’
John Mellencamp is one of my favorite rock singers. I find it fascinating how he depicts urban life. It is well-known that in his songs he delivers sharp…
Did Hosni Mubarak Play the US?
Was Hosni Mubarak a savvy politician who played the Bush administration? A new analysis says “yes.” Whatever one wants to say about Hosni Mubarak, one has to acknowledge…
Citizenship Versus Denizenship
What is the difference between people who live in a nation state as members with rights and responsibilities, and those who live there without accepting such rights and…
A tale of two signs — and two cities
My latest for the Guardian is on the “Black Lives Matter” and “We Must Stop Killing Each Other” signs that are planted on lawns throughout the St. Louis metropolitan…
Recordkeeping, Part I: How I got into Anthropology
I am currently drafting a chapter on the purpose of and problems with community studies. It is for a volume being put together by the anthropologists Billie Jean…
Al-Sisi On-Line: Egypt’s President On Social Media
In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak notoriously was anything but sophisticated in his understanding of social media. Seeing it as a toy available only to an educated and relatively…
A Nation Rising: Review Essay
Over at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (an open-access journal), our sister-scholar Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer has a new review essay published. Itʻs about A Nation Rising (Noelani …
Corporate Mortality and the Culture of Failure
Sizes of some 30,000 companies traded publicly on US markets from 1950-2009, measured by their sales (controlling for inflation and GDP growth). The relatively rapid growth of smaller…
bridging the “language gap”
An invited forum on the so-called “language gap”has just appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology . My piece is titled “‘Wordism’: Is There a Teacher in the House?”…
A Ritual of Power
The recent #Caribbeanfutureforum silenced a large volume of voices. Here’s how and why Power has many definitions. One way anthropologists talk about power is the “power matrix,…
Sex and temperament: Mead, Bateson and Fortune, New Guinea, 1933.
It was the most complicated of things, a love triangle involving young professionals who were meant to collaborate, and who did, but whose contrasting personalities and diverging agendas immediately…
A Collaborative Blog about Multispecies Engagements …
The idea of setting up a blog dedicated to multispecies engagements emerged in the course of conversations at an ESRC-funded Scottish Training in Anthropological Research (STAR) workshop, and…
20 Jahre Radio Blau! – Wir feiern mit!
Unbekannte Klangwelten – DIY Selbstbau-Workshop Kontaktmikrofone FREITAG, 22.05.2015/ 14-17 UHR/ ORT: HAL ATELIERHAUS, HILDEGARDSTRASSE 49/ Wolltest du schon immer einmal Eis schmelzen hören und in u…
More on the Andijon massacre
I have an op-ed about the Andijon massacre in the New York Times: On May 13, 2005, military forces dispatched by the government of Uzbekistan fired on a massive…
Jilted…
In Zasulauks neighborhood In Lady Baiba’s living room a flimsy photo hangs on the wall of a large companion on Candera street. She never misses the chance to…
Motherly Advice from an 82 Year-old Beer Lover
The original post for this article can be found here: http://www.letsgraba.beer/post/118477180588/motherly-advice-from-an-82-year-old-beer-lover, a Tumblr page dedicated to the love of beer. I have …
The payday loan crisis
My latest article for the Guardian is on the explosion of payday lending, which is a huge problem in Missouri and in the U.S. in general: I am…
The 2015 British election and the UK’s creeping constitutional crisis
In the late 90s I met the US ambassador in Paris. He asked what Tony Blair was going to do with the pound/euro issue. I said the question…
The Andijon Massacre: Ten years later
May 13, 2015 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the Andijon massacre: the day military troops in Uzbekistan shot and killed over 700 Uzbek citizens gathered at a…