Category Ethnography
The Illusion of Eternal Independence: Exploring Alternative Approaches to Ageing
by Chloe Place ‘Buenas noches’, I say for the fifteenth time, planting the last round of goodnight kisses on everyone’s cheeks. I have spent the evening with a large extended family who are taking part in my research in a small Andalusian town. Spain currently holds the crown for the highest life expectancy of any […]
The Story of our Fashion Fast!
by Rebecca Prentice, Hannah Amey, Maeve Devers, Rifka Fehr, Olive Howland Milne, Alfred Lewis, Phoebe Marsh, Joana Pereira and Amelia Yates As eight first-year anthropology students and one lecturer at the University of Sussex, we are doing a ‘fashion fast’ between now and Easter. This means we commit to wearing only 6 items of clothing for 6 weeks, […]
‘More Anthropologists on Wall Street Please’ Revisited
by Silvia Irina Berástegui In October of 2011, The Economist published an article called “More Anthropologists on Wall Street Please” in which the author, one ‘M.S.’, responded to a declaration by the Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, that funding for liberal-arts disciplines in American state universities should be reduced and given instead to the sciences. Governor […]
The bodies of question – An anthropology of post-surgical complications
By Luke Walker Nothing is quite as ubiquitous as the body. Over the years, anthropology has dragged the body in all kinds of directions, thus making it a formidable epistemological concern in its own right. Once regarded as an implicit taken for granted feature of social life, the body is now what anthropologists use to […]
Facilitating community integration one bat at a time
By Elisa Sandri The Brighton Table Tennis Club (BTTC) is a table tennis club located in the area of Kemptown (Brighton). It was founded in 2007, aiming to use table tennis as a vehicle for community integration and well being. Originally, the BTTC engaged young people from disadvantaged backgrounds living in the local community. More […]
Review: Le plus beau métier du monde
** This article first appeared in Allegra. Republished here with permission ** by Miriam Odoni Giulia Mensitieri’s book “Le plus beau métier du monde” Dans les coulisses de l’industrie de la mode examines labor in the cultural and creative industries. Analyzing fashion as a system, Mensitieri focuses on the workers involved in immaterial labor. Since […]
From the Field: A drive through north western Afghanistan
by Magnus Marsden I am often asked what it is like to do fieldwork in Afghanistan. To give a sense of doing fieldwork in the country today, I provide an account of a two-day trip in the northwest of the country that I made in October 2017. The road connecting Mazar-e Sharif – northern Afghanistan’s […]
Rethinking chronic illness and ethnography
by Luke Walker Since my diagnosis with Crohn’s disease in 2015, I have started to re-think the relationship between chronic illness, disability, and protest in a series of blogs. Recently however, I find myself akin to the same existential crisis occupied by most anthropologists; whether my interpretation of what is a still misunderstood illness holds […]
Agency, Upkeep, and Neglect in North Carolina Farm Labor Camps
by Bennett Heine In a recent article in Human Organization, co-authors Thomas Arcury, Sarah Quandt, and I draw from interviews with migrant farmworkers to conclude that agency matters. It matters for the day-to-day material well-being and dignity of farmworkers and their families; for researchers looking to situate the lives and struggles of migrant farmworkers within […]
Me Too Anthropology
TW: Rape, abuse, misogyny; CW: cis-gendered language by Elizabeth Beckmann Just over a week ago the #MeToo campaign, originally pioneered by black activist Tarana Burke over ten years ago, hit social media in the wake of news stories of Harvey Weinstein and the women he raped and sexually abused over the course of his career in […]
