November 9th, 2016 found me as shocked and depressed as any Hilary Clinton supporter — and not only because the xenophobic, racist, sexist, and generally despicable Donald Trump had just been declared the winner of the U.S. presidential election. The anthropologist in me was also alarmed for my discipline. We
Recently, I checked in with Dr. Bjørn Westgard, to see how he was doing. Back in the ‘90s, Bjørn was enrolled in a wildly demanding, combined M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois, where I had the pleasure of serving as his academic advisor. After completing his medical school coursework,
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
The curse of the anthropologist: finding culture everywhere in nature. Publicly posted signs reinvent the medieval European town crier, or the West African village drummer Today, the coastal neighborhood in which my husband and I now live hosted a cleanup in a nearby cove. Of course, this effort
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
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
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
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
Yes, I’ve retired from full-time teaching. Yes, I sometimes miss it, and may well return to the classroom from time to time. For now, I was tickled to read of the impact that a research methods class I taught a few years back has had on a student. Apparently, he’s