In Japan, Rethinking What It Means to Care for the Dead
Facing an increasing aging population and other societal shifts, people are looking beyond traditional family-based mortuary practices. ✽ It’s August in Tokyo—hot and muggy, as usual. So I’ve…
Tag: urban
Built on silt, but gold.
Calcutta Research Group Talk JH and questions for the Making and Unmaking of Cities series of CRG, done March 29 2025 (but the intro promised Samata Biswas but…
Technokratische Traumzeit in Malaysia
The kind people at Heidelberg dug this out of the drawer the mice keep for snacking in the lean times. I did not have a digital copy before…
3 Ritwik Ghatak Films not to miss
english subs are hard coded on all three
Thirty Minute Methods: TDTU XH&NV hosts -Rachel Tough
Recorded February 18 2025 at Ton Duc Thang University, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities.
some random thoughts on coffee…
some random thoughts on coffee… My interest is more (only) as a consumer, but coming from Australia, the speciality coffee thing seems to have hit early with the…
Living With Parakeets and Other Migrants
Amsterdam, like other European cities, hosts growing populations of non-native parakeets. An anthropologist unpacks what shifting attitudes toward these birds reveal about humans. ✽ When I came to…
Storm City. “Việt Nam Cố Lên”
After an amazing match… in which Xuan Son bent his leg way out of shape, and that final rolling goal… I’d watched the second half of the game…
Recall the comparative turn
Comparison rebooted as participatory research did not quite take off as a turn (not only through lack of time and funds) but thankfully it is still bubbling away…
Alphabet City
. Years later, the city was curated by someone enamoured of De Chirico and retro TV like Sesame Street – brought to you by the alphabet. Not alphabet…
Contexts for Distraction
Very different very the same – distraction is not just distraction, it is systematic and you probably miss the point of blaming the lower orders for rioting at…
SCULPTURE INNOVATION REFLEXIVITY
Here is Antony Gormley’s presentation of work at the ISSH2024 conference at Ton Duc Thang University this weekend just gone. This was the 3rd International conference on Innovations…
Albania’s Waste Collectors and the Fight for Dignity
An anthropologist shines a light on Romani and Egyptian recyclers whose work has been made illegal, calling for a new way of viewing humanity’s garbage. ✽ One afternoon…
Baltimore’s Toxic Legacies Have Reached a Breaking Point
In a new book, an anthropologist reveals the heavy tolls industries have placed on residents in this eastern U.S. city. Here, she explains how these burdens have only…
Adolfo Estalella and Alberto Corsin Jimeniz on their book, Free Culture and the City
Cornell University Press Nomaan Hasan: I want to begin with the observation that the ethnographic attention of this book is devoted to the minor. At the very outset…
Bila Mwili
A poet-historian in Tanzania remembers those who have passed but who are still nearby. “Bila Mwili” is part of the collection Poems of Witness and Possibility: Inside Zones…
What It’s Like to Grow Old on the Margins
In a brief documentary, an anthropologist provides a glimpse into the precarious lives of poor older Peruvians whose experiences mirror those of countless elders around the world. ✽…
The Rumour of Calcutta at Foreign Publishers Agency on Jawaharlal Nehru Road. In the window! – after 27 years.
From a time before the city had a five word name (K.F.K.A.C), photogenic proof of the rupee version of Rumour in the window, re-released after 27 years…
Inside Mexico City’s Surveillance State
An anthropologist investigates how one city’s rapidly expanding video surveillance system is transforming criminal investigation—sometimes in deeply flawed ways. ✽ In September 2022, a criminal prose…
The rumour of The Rumour of Calcutta is true
Seen in the wild in India//purchased with rupees by a close friend from a close friend who runs a bookstall – I notice the cover has with a…
Book Review: Citizen Designs: City-making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand by Eli Elinoff
In Citizen Designs: City-making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand, Eli Elinoff explores citizenship struggles and the political engagement of residents living in Northeastern Thailand. Unlike tra…
Excavating a 19th-Century Detroit Saloon
A filmmaker highlights the work of urban archaeologists digging a woman-owned business opened in the late 1800s. In this short documentary, Wayne State University archaeologist Krysta Ryzewski and…
The Rumour of Calcutta update
27 22 years ago my first book was typeset and laid out in the days before electronics – well, an electric typesetting machine was plugged into a wall,…
