Tim Watson’s Culture Writing surveys the border between anthropology and literature in the years following World War II. Watson provides illuminating ...
Tag: Anthropology
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 ...
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 ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at AAA
The American Anthropological Association’s 116th Annual Meeting was brimming with how can we even? under the Trump administration. The theme ...
No Peace for Refugees
This past June, the Supreme Court temporarily reinstated a version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from six Muslim-majority countries. The “Muslim ban” made good on Trump’s campaign promise to ...
Dependent Contractors
“Are you tired of hearing that the 21st century is the century of the entrepreneur?,” asks a Fast Company article. “Well, get used to it,” it continues, “because the jobs are gone, and if it’s ...
Turn, Turn, Turn
You have to feel a certain degree of pity for revolutionaries. Perhaps there is even something tragic about them. There is glamour in throwing off the old order, yes, and there is the thrill of both ...
The Book That Made Me: A Sociologist
A renowned American sociologist reflects on the book that persuaded him to abandon a career playing bar piano in Chicago ...
Against Civility
Donald Trump and his global populist counterparts, such as Farage in England, Orbán in Hungary, or Duterte in the Philippines, gain popularity through rhetoric ...
9 Great Novels About Anthropologists
The 115th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association is underway in Minneapolis. How we wish we could be there to study that fascinating tribe, Homo anthropologus, in its natural ...
The Fabric of the Times
In recent years we have watched hoods become wholly emblematic of social uprisings, political movements, and unrest. Sometimes overt, at other moments they work silently in the background—not wholly ...
Waste, Value, and Environmental Racism in the Southwest
On August 5, 2015, a team contracted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate a leak at the Gold King mine in Silverton, Colorado, accidentally breached the mine, sending three ...
Where do Morals Come From?
The social sciences have an ethics problem. No, I am not referring to the recent scandals about flawed and fudged data in psychology and political science.1 I’m talking about the failure of the ...