Standing in the Need : Communication Failures That Increased Suffering after Katrina "FEMA has took over this parish. We know what we need to do and how to do it, but you know, what can we do when somebody else is calling the shots?" -Buffy (November 2005) Katrina tore into the Gulf Coast in 2005…
Health Workers’ Lives On The Line Photo courtesy of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Used with permission.In December, nine Pakistani health workers, most of them women, were murdered as they went door-to-door delivering polio vaccines to the children of their neighbors….
Arming Ourselves to Death When I was a graduate student I remember reading an account by an anthropologist of Africa who watched helplessly as local communities responded to a virulent epidemic by coming together not to develop public health measures but to identify and kill…
Gambled Away: Video Poker and Self-Suspension Natasha Dow Schüll Patsy, a green-eyed brunette in her mid- forties, began gambling soon after she moved to Las Vegas from California in the 1980s with her husband, a military officer who had been restationed at Nellis Air Force Base. Video…
Alex Edmonds “A Right to Beauty” Featured Article A Right to Beauty Alexander Edmonds While living in Rio de Janeiro in 1999, I saw something that caught my attention: a television broadcast of a Carnival parade that paid homage to a plastic surgeon, Dr. Ivo…
U.S. Border Troubles: From Pakistan to Akwesasne Recent protests in Karachi against continued U.S. drone strikes should serve as a reminder that the violation of international law and Pakistani sovereignty in the interests of U.S. security predates the recent discovery and killing of Osama bin…
What Might The Media’s Short Term Attention to Disasters Tell Us About Ourselves? One of the most interesting turn of events during the current nuclear crisis in Japan is how by Thursday, March 17, 2011 the ongoing drama of the catastrophe was displaced from the headlines by stories about the rebellion in Libya. Just as it…
Highway 60 Visited: Part 2 This continues our special essay by our new editor, Assaf Harel. Part 1 was posted on Thur, March 3rd, please click here to read Part 1. Two units of security forces remained in the area. Partly police partly military unit, the notorious…
Highway 60 Visited: Part 1 Highway 60 coils through the southern hills of Hebron and Judea, dissolves into Jerusalem, reemerges from it toward Samaria, and as it nears the biblical Mounts of Blessing and Curse, it escapes the West Bank. Roughly reflecting the ancient Route…
The Keeper of the Kris **This is a special feature from the newest September 2010 issue of Anthropology Now. In "The Keeper of the Kris," Janet Hoskins reviews Ann Dunham Soetoro's book, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.** If she…