Source here I get why social justice-oriented college students are furious with Israel. (I am, too.) I get why they are protesting to support Palestinians’ right to an independent homeland. (I support that, too, though the boundaries are up for negotiation.) While I find it a deeply offensive, emotion-based tactic,
I began interviewing authors of fabulous new anthropology books for this space back in 2016. While completing 11 interviews, I also amassed a backlog of more terrific books whose authors I planned to interview. One thing led to another, and my embarrassingly accumulating backlog fell hostage to a pandemic. I’ve
August 8, 2020 Ed Bruner passed away yesterday, at 95–peacefully, at home. I wish my daughter and I could have been with him, but–Covid. Ed started out as my senior colleague in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois. He soon became a mentor, then writing/editing buddy, then dear
Daniel Jordan Smith has been conducting research in, and writing about, West Africa since 1995. His first book, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria, was a compelling work narrating the daily experience of interrelations between morality and economy, seen from the bottom up. It won
Anthropologist Helena Wulff has been conducting research on youth culture and multiple art worlds (especially in Western Europe) for over thirty years. Wulff’s recent book, Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017), brings an anthropologist’s questions to the world of contemporary literature. In a review of her new book for
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), has gained wide attention for re-theorizing a classic, out-of-the-way place as existing within the modern and the global.
The end of history The clash of civilizations The coming anarchy Soft power We’ve all heard these trendy mottos, and most of us have probably cringed. Anthropologists know the world as an infinitely more complex place than such simplistic catch-phrases and predictions can possibly describe. Yet simplistic catch-phrases and
The novel, Euphoria, by Lily King, published in 2014, became a national best-seller and won several major literary awards. Based loosely on a brief period in the life of Margaret Mead as she hesitated between Reo Fortune (to whom she was married) and Gregory Bateson (who the couple met while conducting
Today, I began a new series on my blog: interviews with anthropologists about their new books! We anthropologists often write wonderful books . . . that find too few readers. What better way to find new readers for a book than to interview its author? I begin this series by
Kristen Ghodsee’s new book, From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press (in 2016). The discipline of anthropology desperately needs good writers. Our writings are often so dense, jargon-packed, and off-putting that I sometimes fear we deserve our reputation