What happens when thinking of soil as a living being and force, with whom the human world needs to repair and rebuild ties?
Tag: Anthropology
Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
For the Slow Work of Critique in Critical Times
With so many crises—environmental, humanitarian, racial, viral, and economic—the work of “critique” can seem to be a luxury. But is it?
Bunkers, Buffers, Borders
“Flagged for deportation, I was hurtled into my own little nightmare, an absurdist take on all the immigration tragedies raging across the world.”
Listen to the Birds
Avian flu came from environmental devastation, an increasingly interconnected world, and a growing population—just like COVID-19.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
In the Library of Lévi-Strauss
The walls were lined with books, as one might expect. Among them were a number of wooden masks, woven baskets, and a tapestry of a bodhisattva. The desk was ...
Inside the Map: On Two Novels by Pola Oloixarac
One of Jorge Luis Borges’s most enduring fictions is the one-paragraph story “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Exactitude in Science”). Structured as a fragment of ...
Marriage and Other Shams
In the early 1980s, an Indian guru homesteaded a tract of ranchland in rural Oregon, building a utopia equipped to withstand both HIV and American hypocrisy. Armed with free love and even freer ...
Public Thinker: Stuart Kirsch on Engaged Anthropology
Stuart Kirsch began his career as an anthropologist doing research on myth ...
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
Anthropologists and Novelists
Tim Watson’s Culture Writing surveys the border between anthropology and literature in the years following World War II. Watson provides illuminating ...
Conjuring Anthropology’s Future
I suspect that I was invited to review Magic’s Reason because it is largely about stage magic and stage magicians, a topic on which I once wrote a book myself ...
“The Horticulturalist of the Self”
In a 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag hailed the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major early works into English, unabashedly calling the ...
Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation ...
Saba Mahmood and the Paradoxes of Self-Parochialization
Saba Mahmood died on March 10, 2018, at the age of 57. Born in Pakistan, she ...
Virtual Roundtable on “The Mana of Mass Society”
Many of anthropology’s terms of art are taken from afar. Especially in the half century after 1870 ...
Muslim Fashion Is Now Mainstream
Modest Fashion is having a moment. From London catwalks, which hosted the first branded “Modest Fashion Week” in February this year, to gyms and running ...
Down with the Scribes!
Mesopotamian scribes knew a story about the invention of writing. According to this story, the momentous event occurred in the city of Uruk, where King Enmerkar coveted treasures from the neighboring ...