Category: Blog Post

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

By Bhargabi Das | 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 Bhargabi Das | 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 Bhargabi Das | 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 {+}

The search for the worst anthro job ad: An interview with Dada Docot

By Ryan | March 8, 2022

In September 2021, Dada Docot sent out a half-serious tweet about finding the Worse Anthro Job Ad for 2021. The post got attention, and the search took off. The two threads of the search (for gathering nominations and announcement of results) registered about 173,536 impressions as of February 2022. The search received a total of $129 from 24 supporters (4 postdocs, 3 researchers, 4 asst profs, 3 assoc profs, 3 PhD students, 2 VAPs, 2 full profs, and 2 alt-ACs). {+}

Brazil is going to eat you up! {part 4}: the cosmopolitical photographies of the Yanomami by Claudia Andujar

By Caio Flores-Coelho | February 8, 2022

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Claudia Andujar’s works, built within the struggle of the Yanomami people. This analysis will be based on the “postmodern” turn, where we have a clash, enunciated by Flusser (2002), between the agency of the photographic device and the photographer’s counteraction to it, as the ideal way to establish photographic narratives with meaning. That do not just mimic reality, but stablish a “post-photographic” mimesis (FONTCUBERTA, 2010, 2014a, 2014b). The “becoming” in this analysis {+}

The Possibility of Anthropological Micropublishing

By Jeremy Trombley | January 13, 2022

As one of the longest-running anthropology blogs around, Anthrodendum has been a space where many conversations about open access, and alternative forms of publishing and communication have taken place. I’ve been involved in some of those conversations over the years, especially in dialog with Ryan who shares my enthusiasm for weird, experimental projects that neither of us has any time for. In that spirit, as a recently-added “dendrite,” I want to try and keep those kinds of conversations rolling on {+}

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 {+}

Fragments of Reparation & Recognition in the Golden State

By Ryan | October 8, 2021

On September 30, California Governor Gavin Newsome signed Senate Bill 796 into law, which authorized the return of Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of the Black landowners who were dispossessed of the property in the early 20th century. Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia has covered this story as it has developed over the past year. Her reporting builds upon the work of historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose book “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim {+}

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 {+}

Behind Many Masks: An Ethnographic Account of a Pandemic Borderlands

By Christian Elliott | June 30, 2021

In June of 2020, four months into a global pandemic and a month after I graduated from college (via a YouTube livestream while sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room), I decided to apply to be a U.S. Census Bureau Enumerator. In college I’d learned the decennial count’s importance in determining state and local budgets and, as a bit of a geography nerd, had often used Census Bureau data in G.I.S. mapping projects. Applying felt like a way {+}