The mugshot was invented in the 1880s. A century later, face surveillance has gone digital but remains as flawed as ever.
Tag: Ethnography
History Can Answer the Inexplicable: An Interview with Madeline Hsu
“The longer history of hostility toward foreigners remains latent. It has not gone away.”
Leaving Orthodoxy, Again
Losing faith in Orthodox Judaism is an old story. But today it’s often the “heretics” who rely on faith, and the “faithful” who draw on science.
Chicago Yesterday and Today: A Conversation with Carlo Rotella
Carlo Rotella is a professor of American studies, English, and journalism at Boston College; he’s also one of the most talented writers in the humanities ...
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 ...
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 ...
Zora Neale Hurston Against the World
Throughout her life, Zora Neale Hurston held fast to a belief in the individual’s power against seemingly insurmountable forces, especially institutional racism ...
Zora Neale Hurston in the Making
Zora Neale Hurston’s second trip to Africatown was a chance for redemption. An earlier visit to the settlement outside Mobile, Alabama, had produced ...
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 ...
Virtual Roundtable on Engaged Scholarship and Teaching
With political divisiveness and gaps in access to higher education intensifying, the imperative for universities to interact meaningfully with local and global communities has perhaps never been greater ...
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 ...