anthro{dendum}

No Open Access Today, Anthropology: On the latest AAA-Wiley Announcement

By Ryan | June 15, 2022

Last November, it looked like some good things were on the horizon for Open Access and the American Anthropological Association’s publishing portfolio: At this morning’s #AAA2021Baltimore roundtable on #OpenAccess publishing at @AmericanAnthro, Director of Publishing Janine McKenna announced plans to transition to #OpenAccess beginning in 2023. AND EVERYONE CHEERED. — Dr. Z (@leah_zani) November 18, 2021 Everyone cheered, including me. After years of back and forth, it seemed that the AAA was finally going to make the shift to Open {+}

Sexist methods of warfare: How does war affect women?

By Guest Contributor | June 6, 2022

Anthrodendum welcomes Aleksandra Cejovic, a Montenegrin anthropologist based in the United States whose work is focused primarily on female embodied experiences, mainly menstrual and sexual health. Sexist methods of warfare: How does war affect women? by Aleksandra Cejovic It is not an understatement to say that war is a force of destruction that reaches everyone who is in its realm of actions. Still, data shows that around 70 percent of those killed and 76 percent of those displaced in today’s {+}

‘GUILTY’ daughter-researcher: Ethnography, familial politics, and guilt

By Bhargabi Das | May 9, 2022

By Bhargabi Das I would like to begin by giving a little context of my research and my family and possibly how they overlapped over the course of my fieldwork. My research looks at char areas in Assam, India. Chars are river islands and are extremely unstable, undergoing constant erosion. In Assam, the chars are largely inhabited by Bengali Muslims whose ancestors were encouraged to come during colonial times to increase productivity from such fertile riverine lands. However, as more {+}

Tales of ‘Mala-Bori’: Marginalized Muslim char women and population control policies in Assam, India.

By Bhargabi Das | May 2, 2022

By Bhargabi Das The summer months in the chars of western Assam, India where my ethnographic fieldwork was based, are only of respite because of the calm breeze by the river, and conversations over jaggery tea. Because of my positionality, it was easier for me to strike up conversations with the Bengali Muslim women in the chars than men, particularly surrounding sexual health. I was interested in bringing up conversations of sexual health because chars are known as spaces where {+}

Marginalized Ecologies and Education: An Ethnographic snapshot from the Chars of Assam

By Bhargabi Das | April 25, 2022

By Bhargabi Das The strikes in UK by teachers made me think of the precarious life-world of teachers in a different context, somewhere more closer to home. In 2011, the Assam government introduced the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) scheme through which eligible teachers after passing the Test are appointed by it in various government schools in Assam. In December 2019, when I was in the middle of my two-year long ethnographic fieldwork in the chars of western Assam, India, I {+}

The search for the worst anthro job ad: An interview with Dada Docot

By Ryan | March 8, 2022

In September 2021, Dada Docot sent out a half-serious tweet about finding the Worse Anthro Job Ad for 2021. The post got attention, and the search took off. The two threads of the search (for gathering nominations and announcement of results) registered about 173,536 impressions as of February 2022. The search received a total of $129 from 24 supporters (4 postdocs, 3 researchers, 4 asst profs, 3 assoc profs, 3 PhD students, 2 VAPs, 2 full profs, and 2 alt-ACs). {+}

The cosmopolitical photographies of the Yanomami by Claudia Andujar

By caogris | February 8, 2022

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Claudia Andujar’s works, built within the struggle of the Yanomami people. This analysis will be based on the “postmodern” turn, where we have a clash, enunciated by Flusser (2002), between the agency of the photographic device and the photographer’s counteraction to it, as the ideal way to establish photographic narratives with meaning. That do not just mimic reality, but stablish a “post-photographic” mimesis (FONTCUBERTA, 2010, 2014a, 2014b). The “becoming” in this analysis {+}

The Possibility of Anthropological Micropublishing

By Jeremy Trombley | January 13, 2022

As one of the longest-running anthropology blogs around, Anthrodendum has been a space where many conversations about open access, and alternative forms of publishing and communication have taken place. I’ve been involved in some of those conversations over the years, especially in dialog with Ryan who shares my enthusiasm for weird, experimental projects that neither of us has any time for. In that spirit, as a recently-added “dendrite,” I want to try and keep those kinds of conversations rolling on {+}

Vignettes on Change and Permanence in India and eastern Africa

By Guest Contributor | December 10, 2021

By Jonathan Walz In recent decades, people and places in India and eastern Africa have, with increased frequency and scale, been impacted by environmental disasters, population growth, magnified social and economic inequality, and the influences of tourism and extractive capitalism, often layered over on-going cultural or religious contests and/or imperial and colonial debris from past experiences. These vignettes attempt to capture a selection of such trends in three cases that stoke internal societal debates and practices at the intersection of {+}

Fragments of Reparation & Recognition in the Golden State

By Ryan | October 8, 2021

On September 30, California Governor Gavin Newsome signed Senate Bill 796 into law, which authorized the return of Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of the Black landowners who were dispossessed of the property in the early 20th century. Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia has covered this story as it has developed over the past year. Her reporting builds upon the work of historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose book “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim {+}