In November 2016, I flew to Zurich to deliver a talk on my work on Métis legal-ethical paradigms, prairie fish, and the Anthropocene. When we booked the tickets earlier that summer, it didn’t occur to me that I’d asked my hosts to book my travel for the night of the US Presidential election. So, as I set out from Ottawa, the Canadian capital, on the evening of November 8, I entered a strange and disorienting patch of space time that {+}
Medical anthropology has come a long way from its initial focus on the interpretive dimensions of health and sickness. The Medical Anthropology series from Rutgers University Press provides a showcase for contemporary explorations of lives lived through the intersection of everyday practices, transnational health systems and global inequalities. Fistula Politics. Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger by Alison Heller is an ethnographic account of the experiences of women left incontinent by injuries they sustained through giving birth {+}
“What does it mean to know climate change?” ask Henderson and Long in a 2015 piece for this site’s Anthropologies #21. Researchers on science education, they ask this question to explore what we can do to ensure “knowledge of climate change” becomes “knowledge for social action.” This is no small task—for educators or anthropologists. It has largely shaped my own research, the preoccupations of those with whom I work and climate politics in North America writ large. As Henderson and Long duly explain, {+}
My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy. I’ve just woken up, am standing in my friends’ apartment. M and F have graciously agreed to host me for umpteenth time in what feels like as many months. It’s not yet 8am. F is in the shower, M is making a weak cup of coffee. M and I are discussing what the hell it is {+}
In August of this year, the Washington Post published an article by John Tibbets and Chris Mooney that discusses sea level rise and eroding home values. The piece opens with the case of Elizabeth Boineau, who once hoped to sell her home in coastal South Carolina for one million dollars. But because of climate change–and subsequent rising seas–the value of her home dropped so dramatically (she reduced the price eleven times), she has finally decided to just tear it down. {+}
It’s been a long time since I wanted to write something on the current political climate in Brazil. But I always faced two main problems: I’m a Brazilian, but not a Brazilianist academic and I wanted to be brief. The second issue was far more difficult, because all I could think of were too complex and all lines I wrote always tried to make me submerge in History. In true, I only intend to talk about Brazilian’s new elected far {+}
In the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to read some really fantastic graphic novels, including a few that will be of interest to anthropologists. As we enter the gift giving season I thought I might share with you the cream of the crop. Who doesn’t love giving books? Its like they don’t even count against your gift budget! Go ahead get a couple for yourself, I won’t tell. If you’d like to know more about a title feel {+}
“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified {+}
Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business {+}
For much of my work, archival records provide important context for interpreting the documents I receive under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This context takes different forms in different circumstances. These archival documents provide information on the personal or daily lives of individuals of interest, on interactions with other anthropologists, on the larger social context shaping research, or sometimes archives hold parallel unredacted documents complimenting those appearing in FOIA document releases. Like any detective work, by far most of {+}