Photo by Noam Galai Women (and some men) with signs, as far as the eye could see. In my first post about the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, I chronicled the social and emotional ties I saw created in this space of massive communitas, feminist style. Here, I
(photo by Alma Gottlieb) The doors of our metro car opened and closed, opened and closed with increasingly alarming dysfunction. On any other day, the many more dozens of people jammed into our subway car than (for safety reasons) should have occupied our tight, air-deprived space would have panicked–jostled, elbowed, and accused one
Interested in learning some behind-the-scenes stories about how “A World of Babies” came into existence? Check out a new interview with my co-editor, Judy DeLoache, and me in a newsletter published this month by the Jacobs Foundation, a private organization (based in Zurich, Switzerland) dedicated to improving the lives of
Dear Dean and Mona, At four years old and ten months old, you are both too young to understand why the grown-ups around you keep talking about confusing words like “deeply flawed candidates” and “misguided pollsters.” But sooner than I’d like, the realities of yesterday’s vote will begin affecting
Dear Nathaniel and Hannah, I am sorry that my generation has failed you. We have bequeathed you a world that has too many problems, too much fear, and too much hate. Dad and I tried to raise you to see the good in people, to understand others’ perspectives, to argue for fairness
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
Symbolic anthropologists, take note. What’s in a symbol? Everything, when it comes to politics. Especially, election-year politics. And especially when a major political candidate claims ignorance of centuries-old symbolism used to discriminate against an oppressed minority. Was Trump being anti-Semitic, or was he being stupid, when he Tweeted an accusation
A shorter version of this post has just appeared online as a podcast, in coordination with the motion put to a vote among the membership of the American Anthropological Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Here’s the text . . . The first thing I want to say is that
Honored to have an interview I recently did with Dallas Tatman (an MA student in African Studies at the U of Illinois) unexpectedly show up, to my surprise, on the NPR’s StoryCorps website.
An impressively interdisciplinary team of geneticists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, and geologists has just published an article detailing the genetic makeup of a man who lived in Ethiopia some 4,500 years ago. Why is this relevant today? The analysis shows close genetic ties between some contemporary Sardinian farmers, German farmers from