Category Archives: Social activism

Chants at Columbia U

Have Students Stopped Reading? Thoughts on Some Protesters’ Outrageous Chants

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,

Does “Reasonable” = Racist?

What can anthropology contribute to the critical conversation about race in America, following the welcome jury decision in the Derek Chauvin trial? After they amassed and presented a week’s worth of technical details–medical, anatomical, temporal, legal–in the end, the prosecuting attorneys’ case against Derek Chauvin rested on a simple claim:

Long Past Time for the 25th Amendment*

There will be plenty of time for Biden to use his extraordinary faith and energy and creativity to think about how this divided nation might be healed. For now, there is only one first step to be taken, and taken today. Trump must be removed from office. Now. * “.

When Women’s Laughter Keeps Men in Line; or, What Gathering-Hunting Women of Central Africa Have in Common with Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, et al.

Among the Mbendjele gathering-hunting people who live in the Republic of Congo, “women’s laughter manages to keep men in line.” Drawing from ethnographic research by Jerome Lewis, anthropologist Chris Knight relates that among the Mbendjele, “senior women exercise a special privilege, seeing it as their enjoyable role to bring down

Environmental Anthropology: An Ethnographer’s View of a Cove Cleanup

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

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.  

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

Poems about Refugees

Adrie Kusserow is one of an increasing number of anthropologist-poets.  Or maybe more anthropologist-poets are just willing to come out of hiding. Either way, I was delighted to catch up with Adrie and interview her about her wonderful book of poems, Refuge, that was published by Boa Editions (a leading literary publisher)

An Anthropologist at the Women’s March on Washington, Part 2: The Posters

  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

An Anthropologist at the Women’s March on Washington, Part 1: Finding Communitas, Feminist Style

(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