Why Anthropology Still Matters: Paul Stoller
Upon receiving the Anders Retzius gold medal for his significant scientific contribution to anthropology, Paul Stoller reflects on the meanings of the discipline and ponders over its value in this market economy with anthropologist, Gina Athena Ulysse, in her new interview series, Why Anthropology Still Matters on Huffington Post. Read the entire piece on the […]
Dig Wars!
The American Anthropological Association has written to the Travel Channel objecting to and asking for changes in the TV show “Dig Wars,” in which contestants are sent to various locations with metal detectors to see if they can locate and dig up antiquities. The material they dig up is called “loot,” and is evaluated for […]
Outreach and Activism in Lebanon: A Dynamic Struggle for Gender Equality in Wake of the Arab Spring
Editor’s Introduction: From an anthropological perspective, “education” embodies more than just formal schooling. In this post from Lina Abirafeh, a Gender Based Violence specialist working with the United Nations, we are introduced to the kinds of collaborative, culturally responsive campaigns designed to promote gender equality and end violence against women in the Middle East. To […]
A Challenge for Visual Journalism: Rendering The Labor Behind News Images Visible
The Chicago Sun-Times’ decision to shut down its photography department to satisfy audiences “consistently seeking more video content with their news” is sad but not surprising. As an anthropologist who studies the changing culture of photojournalism and the rise of the visual content industry, the newspaper’s turn towards multimedia and video on the one hand […]
The Dark Side of DIY in Photojournalism and Photographic Ethnography
Though DIY (do-it-yourself) is generally celebrated as empowering and democratizing, the recent layoff of the entire photojournalism staff at the Chicago Sun-Times is a potent indicator of the dark side of this popular ethos. The elimination of skilled, full-time jobs in favor of part-time, freelance, and unpaid labor is a familiar post-industrial pattern. In this […]
The Language of Superman
What does a language sound like when it only exists in written symbols? The producers of this summer’s blockbuster Superman movie, Man of Steel , ran into this problem when it comes to the native language of Krypton, the fictional and faraway planet where Superman was born. So they turned to the Okanagan Valley, where University of […]
Nanotechnology and Religion
Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, studies relations between nanotechnology and faith: Until now, religions have been remarkably silent on nanotechnology, Toumey points out. Nothing compared to the harsh bioethical controversies about in vitro fertilisation in the Catholic world, for example. "Nanotechnology is a heterogeneous body of sciences and technologies: […]
April 2013
Volume 5 / Issue 1 / April 2013
Binge Watching
Grant McCracken discusses binge watching at wired.com Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt. […]
What Jason Richwine Should Have Heard from his PhD Committee
In one of the latest academic-cum-political dust ups, Jason Richwine, formerly of the Heritage Institute, co-authored a study estimating the “cost” of regularizing the immigration status of the undocumented. Imagined by the Heritage Foundation as a high profile and hard-hitting attack on proposed immigration reform, the study was widely criticized by both liberals and conservatives […]