Images and notes overwhelmed my various forms of media: I was flooded with New Zealand. My heart was flooded, my being was flooded, and I knew, once again, we could not sink, but had to float. Quietly float. Unobtrusively float. Since 9/11, I could no longer float with a voice. And so I left it to those who were too young to know what it meant to have that voice stripped and to be disappeared. And I watched as it {+}
I was first introduced to anthropology at community college. It was…eye opening. Anthropology challenged the insufficient, limited political and historical education I’d received up through high school. It mattered, and it changed how I looked at the world around me. But there were problems. Blind spots. I learned a certain version of anthropological history and theory. My introduction to the field was what I would call “Boasian Triumphalism,” which effectively depicted anthropology as a heroic discipline that corrected the wrongs {+}
This is a guest post by Dr. Devin Zane Shaw, who teaches at Douglas College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We settlers face a choice: decolonization or white supremacy. We have made excuses for too long. We already have ample evidence of the recent rise of the far right in North America. On the one hand, we have seen the normalization of white nationalism and white supremacy in political discourse; on the other, the mobilization of the alt-right and other {+}
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 {+}