Category Archives: Intercultural communication

An Unlikely but Necessary Conversation: When Enemies Meet

It’s so easy to see our enemies as — well, enemies. What does it take to re-see them as human? Late in life, Erika Jacoby and Ursula Martens took an incredible journey. Not the sort of journey that takes you by jet halfway around the world. No, the sort of

Remembering My Friend, Véronique Amenan Akpoueh (d., Aug. 3, 2023)

Ours was not an ordinary friendship. Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for 14 years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and intellectual companionship kept us going. Véronique and me in the village (1993) (photo by Philip Graham) Initially, Véronique (given that personal name in the

A Tale of Two [Unvaxed] Women

We needed to find a new plumber. I called around. The first business that seemed willing to clean our boiler and replace a problematic hose spigot had availability soon. Before settling on a date, I remembered to ask the woman answering the company’s phone–let’s call her, Mary–a non-plumbing question: Will

Doing Development the Right Way: A Conversation with Charles Piot

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 Anthropology/Poetry Nexus–An Interview with Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Can artists and social scientists inhabit the same universe? Melisa (“Misha”) Cahnmann-Taylor embodies that nexus. Her advanced degrees include an MFA in poetry . . . and a PhD in educational linguistics. She’s published plenty of scholarly work in academic journals and books (about language learning, sustainable or fragile states

Everything You Thought You Knew about Orphans in Africa Is Probably Wrong

Policy makers, development workers, orphanage voluntourists, missionaries, prospective adoptive parents: ignore this book at your peril.   “AIDS orphans” are commonly imagined as the most vulnerable of the world’s most vulnerable populations.  In a provocative new study, anthropologist Kristen Cheney  challenges just about everything we thought we knew about the children

Interview with Perry Gilmore about “Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki”

Kisisi (Our Language): The Story of Colin and Sadiki chronicles a charming and, indeed, remarkable friendship that developed between two five-year-old boys—one (Sadiki), the son of a traditionally pastoralist Samburu family in Kenya working as a wage laborer for wealthy British landowners; the other (Colin), the son of a white