Author: Guest Contributor

More than arm’s length: reimagining rituals in a technologically mediated pandemic-centric era

By Guest Contributor | June 13, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes guest blogger Dr. Caitlin E. McDonald, a digital anthropologist at Leading Edge Forum, a technology industry research organization, and a trustee for Ellpha Citizen, a charity leveraging the power of data science and AI to create a more gender balanced world, faster. Caitlin earned her PhD following dancers around the world and across the internet, understanding how information flows for cultural bodies of knowledge like dance are impacted by technoscapes (the digital world around us). @cmcd_phd on Twitter. {+}

Home, Work, Homework, and Fieldwork

By Guest Contributor | June 12, 2020

by Yukun Zeng (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) China was the first country hit by COVID-19. Due to the government-enforced Wuhan lockdown and strict self-isolation, most Chinese people—including me—have stayed at home since January, becoming pandemic spectators, both national and global: reading news, watching the case numbers waxing and waning. In this spectatorship, only macro-scale actors like governments and WHO seem to do the real work. As China’s situation has improved, and China became seen as an expert {+}

The Social Meanings of Food in a COVID-19 World

By Guest Contributor | June 11, 2020

Anthrodendum welcomes guest blogger Rituparna Patgiri, a doctoral student in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. She is interested in Cultural Sociology and her MPhil work was on the social nature of food in India. She has published her research work on food in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, Allegra lab, Digest, and Youth Ki Awaaz. The Social Meanings of Food in a COVID-19 World by Rituparna Patgiri The global {+}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Classification During Quarantine

By Guest Contributor | June 8, 2020

[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 Phillip Kulubya, {+}

Disaster, Dystopia, and Disphony

By Guest Contributor | June 5, 2020

by Pranathi Diwakar (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) My last day of “fieldwork” was on March 14th, 2020. A chart-topping Gaana singer from the 1990s had agreed to meet with me, and what was supposed to be a casual chat ended up becoming an impromptu house concert for an audience of one—me. Gaana is a musical style that acquired prominence in 1980s Chennai with the cassette revolution, but it originated in the early 20th century as a funeral {+}

I Suddenly Thought of Your Face

By Guest Contributor | June 2, 2020

[Bricoleur is the pen name of an anthropologist and blogger who also goes by the pseudonym, Ma De-wa. A frequent contributor to the anthropology group blog published in Taiwan, guavanthropology, Bricoleur is also a photographer and a connoisseur of bad puns. They are currently collecting a list of media personalities who have a degree in anthropology. As is the practice on guavanthropology.tw, they contribute to the group blog without revealing their identity. I have followed that practice in my translation {+}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Quarantined Bodies: Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle

By Guest Contributor | June 1, 2020

Pandemic Productivity

By Guest Contributor | May 29, 2020

by Hanna Pickwell (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) There were two moments when it became clear that the dissertation project I had developed for four years was not going to happen in the way I had planned. The first came at the beginning of February, when I received notice that, out of concern for our safety in the wake of the first outbreak of COVID-19, the granting agency supporting my work was ordering all grantees to leave China {+}

Quaran-Teens 2020: Materiality and Production in Pandemic: A High School Perspective

By Guest Contributor | May 25, 2020

Connecting through the Layered Traumas of Fieldwork

By Guest Contributor | May 22, 2020

By CD Green (Fieldwork in a Time of Coronavirus series) Within the span of two hours on April 15, I received two coronavirus-related alerts from the Kanaky/New Caledonian news. The first was a notification about another day with zero new cases of the virus—the small Pacific island had been relatively protected up to this point. The second was an announcement: according to the Overseas Minister of France, the referendum on Kanaky/New Caledonia’s independence from France would continue as scheduled on {+}