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Where Sanskrit Meets Silicon: A Study of Hinduism in the Heartland of Information Technology
Get PDFBook review of: Srinivas, Tulasi. The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018
Cayenne and the transatlantic world-economy. From interdependence to commercial self-organization?
Get PDFGuyana’s colonial history started from an unfavorable place in the geopolitical context created by the European trade interests of the 17th century. The introduction of a slave system began with the decimation of almost all the native groups, thus starting the coercive trade whose exclusive goal was to provide profits for the metropole. To understand the origins of the particular social group that emerged from this systematic exploitation and forced labour, one needs to take an interest in the European economic system. Such a study considers the reification of discourses that are often contradictory to those written by the hand of the system of l’Exclusive
Resistance and Insistence: Studying Identity Through Commodity Trends Review
Get PDFFennell's research explores the matierial culture of two distinct communities in Nineteenth-Century Virgina and Illinois. He exposes the ways that ethnic and racial identities intersect with consumer choices, and was used to uplift smaller, oppressed communities
Embracing democracy and market economy: lessons from Kyrgyzstan
Get PDFWhere Are All Our Sheep?: Kyrgyzstan, A Global Political Arena is a result of ten years multi-sited fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan (2001 - 2010), namely in the Naryn region in the north, its capital Naryn and Bishkek, the country's capital. From the observation of the summer lifestyle of livestock herding up to the top politicians of the country and foreign election observers, Petric explores the social change in the country and its actors by adopting a holistic approach. Opening to the world after the independence for Kyrgyzstan in 1991 meant introducing the market economy and democracy which led to an important movement of people and ideas
Perceptions of “Intra-disciplinary” Unity and Division
Get PDFThese “Thin Partitions:” Bridging the Growing Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology co-edited by Joshua D. Englehardt and Ivy R. Rieger seeks to reexamine if and to what extent the sub-disciplines of Anthropology have become disjunctured. Specifically, Englehardt and Rieger (2017) sought to evaluate the historical, contemporary, and future relationship between cultural anthropologists and archaeologists. The edited volume contained twelve single or co-authored chapters, which sought to engage with the idea of “intradisciplinary” theories as a viable tool for unifying theoretical divisions (Englehardt and Rieger 2017). Englehardt and Rieger offered a new and welcome perspective on a debate now spanning decades and across multiple journal articles, books, and special issues (i.e. Ortner 1984; Watson 1995; Gillespie et al. 2003). All of these works have focused on one central question: are anthropology’s four sub-fields unified in their goal of understanding the full breadth of the humanity? Conflicting answers to this question arise every few years as if to demonstrate the continuing ontological reflectivity woven into the fabric of anthropology. Ideally the “…roles, goals, and foci of anthropology’s four primary subfields [should] complement and weave back into each other, forming a complex disciplinary whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts” (Englehardt and Rieger 2017, 4). The editors both argue that the commonalities within each sub-field’s history, theories, and methods define anthropology as a unified discipline seeking to understand the human cultural experience from different modes of inquiry
Energy Complicity in Trinidad
Get PDFBook review of Energy Without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity written by David McDermott Hughes (2017) Duke University Pres
Following Human Hair to Unexpected Places: A Review of Emma Tarlo’s Engtanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair
Get PDFCentering around the trade in human hair, Entanglement follows Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, and Gastón R. Gordillo’s Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as multi-sited, interdisciplinary ethnographies centered around a thing or category of things. All three have received recent acclaim from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology; both Tarlo’s and Tsing’s books have been awarded the Victor Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing, Tsing in 2016 and Tarlo in 2017, while Gordillo received an honorable mention. Clearly a popular trend in current ethnographic writing, Tarlo demonstrates the vast potential of such an approach by constructing a nuanced and complex, yet cohesive narrative that traces the commodity pathways of human hair (and sometimes also animal hair) into surprisingly intimate encounter
The Social Life of Data
Get PDFReview of Biruk, Crystal. 2018. Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018
Structural Conditions of the Mind: Global Contexts, Concerns, and Solutions for Global Mental Health from Medical Anthropology
Get PDFBook Review of Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspective