Author: Guest Contributor

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

By Guest Contributor | 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 Guest Contributor | 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 Guest Contributor | 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 {+}

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 {+}