Author: Guest Contributor

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 {+}

Archaeologists for Trans Liberation

By Guest Contributor | August 6, 2021

By The Black Trowel Collective To be an archaeologist is to revel in the diversity of human expression through time. Trans perspectives and voices add necessary further dimensions to our understandings of the past. We are inspired by the high-profile bravery and strength of trans people, such as Olympic weightlifter Laurel Hubbard and soccer player Quinn, and by the everyday resilience and determination shown by our trans and gender diverse comrades, students, friends, family, and colleagues. The Black Trowel Collective {+}

Why do I keep finding masks in Naupaka? An anthropologist observes mask use by tourists in Hawaiʻi

By Guest Contributor | July 5, 2021

By Emily Creek Disclaimer: Even as I write this the CDC has changed guidelines for vaccinated individuals. At the time of writing Maui county had implemented a secondary post-arrival test while the State of Hawai’i now has a vaccine passport. In July the rules will change again, and Hawaii will begin accepting all vaccines as a way of being exempt from being quarantined. At the time of writing this essay, COVID mask mandates in Maui county remained in place…you are {+}

Climate Change and COVID-19: Online Learning and Experiments in Seeing the World Anew

By Guest Contributor | May 1, 2021

By Adam Fleischmann The site is easy to access. Just a short walk and I’m there, immediately confronted with two large rectangular windows. The large window up high and on the right is mostly opaque, save one dominating feature: a single, dark line scorches across its surface like a comet’s tail, bottom left to top right. The window on the left is less subdued, less ominous. Graceful curving layers of color arc to the right and skyward, almost topographical in {+}

How a legacy of colonialism hinders vaccination efforts in Indigenous communities

By Guest Contributor | April 17, 2021

By Soham Govande Today, hopes are held high that the COVID-19 vaccine will gradually bring an end to the pandemic. Due to systemic health disparities, disadvantaged groups such as Indigenous peoples have especially suffered this past year—both biologically and culturally. Hence, vaccination efforts in these communities must be successful to prevent further damage. Yet, the lack of trust between Indigenous communities and governmental programs stands as a significant challenge to overcome. Health Disparities in Indigenous Communities Why is vaccination so {+}

Why “is this fascism?” is the wrong question: a foray into the everyday life of political concepts

By Guest Contributor | March 10, 2021

By Louis Philippe Römer Activists, politicians, and public intellectuals have turned to the word “fascism” to analyze the intensified mobilization of the far-right and the radicalization of the GOP during the Trump presidency. Others vehemently object and see this new usage of “fascism” as incorrect. This already heated debate further intensified after the United States Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Much of this debate revolves around the prescriptivist premise that there is a correct language for naming and describing {+}

Quaran-teens Class of 2021: COVID-19’s Impact on Our Everyday Use of Technology

By Guest Contributor | January 21, 2021

[The following students are high school seniors Class of 2021 at “KTH School.” As part of their International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology class, they conducted a collaborative visual auto-ethnography of their experience of hybrid schooling from August to December 2020. Each group focused on a particular conceptual theme to analyze in the blog.] By Elizabeth Surbrook, Logan Honshell, and Elle Nienhuis In this time of COVID-19, we mainly rely on technology to communicate with one another. Technology can be {+}

Quaran-Teens Class of 2021: Challenges to Identity

By Guest Contributor | January 14, 2021

[The following students are high school seniors at “KTH School” taking International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology. After their final IB exams were cancelled, they decided they would like to do an auto-ethnography of their life in coronavirus quarantine. They have collected data for three weeks (including photographs, screenshots of social media and virtual school, interviews, and personal reflections) and written anthropological analyses focused on different terms (communication, society, belonging, materiality, classification, the body, health, and conflict).] By: Jad Hamze, {+}

Quaran-Teens Class of 2021: Covid’s Impact on Social Relations

By Guest Contributor | January 7, 2021

[The following students are high school seniors Class of 2021 at “KTH School.” As part of their International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology class, they conducted a collaborative visual auto-ethnography of their experience of hybrid schooling from August to December 2020. Each group focused on a particular conceptual theme to analyze in the blog.] By: Kewe Chen, Cristian Gonzalez, and Kortni Owens Human culture is made up of varying complex social relationships found in every social group around the world. {+}

Collaborative Ecologies: Anthropologies of (and for) Survival in the More-Than-Human City

By Guest Contributor | October 6, 2020

Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest contributors Noah Theriault and Alex Nading. Noah is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. Alex is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. In cities around the world, waste-management systems depend both on the labor of officially sanctioned garbage collectors and on that of “informal” garbage pickers who gather and sell recyclables. In 2008, garbage pickers in and around the Nicaraguan capital of Managua began to organize. Their livelihoods were {+}