Category Ethnography
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 […]
Review: Crumpled Paper Boat
By Fawzia Haeri Mazanderani ***Originally published in LSE Review of Books*** Writer James Agee, when commissioned to bring back an enticing story for Fortune magazine about impoverished farmers in the US South during the Great Depression, expressed a desire to ‘tear up a clump of earth with a hoe, put that on a page and […]
Review: Ayya’s Accounts
**Review first published in Pacific Affairs 1926, Vol 89 (3): 696-698.** by Geert De Neve Ayya’s Accounts is a most wonderful product of listening, narrating and co-writing between Anand Pandian, an anthropologist of Tamil descent born and bred in the US, and his grandfather, Ayya – as he is respectfully called by the family – […]
Harman’s Speculative Realism in Ethnographic Methods
by Rowan Jaines There is an epistemological problem that sits at the heart of modern rational thought and permeates anthropological thought, methodology and analysis. We can call this, the problem of ‘the one and too many.’ Jarvie stated that the general formulation of this problem goes something like this: ‘Is the world just one […]
