An Immigrant’s View of “Amrika”
books & arts Deepak Singh. 2017. How May I Help You? An Immigrant’s Journey from MBA to Minimum Wage. Oakland: University of California Press. 305 pages. I am in an electronics store in the shopping mall near my house. While staring perplexedly at a display of cell phone accessories, I am approached by a store […]
Lissa and the Graphic Novel Form: An Appreciation
Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution tells a tale in graphic novel form of two (fictional) girls, one American and one Egyptian, who each faces different medical dilemmas. Set largely during the Egyptian Revolution, it reveals through the personal stories of the two characters — composites invented by the authors and drawn […]
“Not All Suffering Is Illness; Some Suffering Is Political”: The Ambit of Radical Care
Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay. 2016. A Labour of Liberation. Regina, SK, Canada: Changing Suns Press. 68 pages. A Labour of Liberation, published by the new Changing Suns Press, is a slim, signicant book that takes seriously health care as labor — raced, gendered, classed labor — while holding up the specificity of what that labor is: care. […]
Facing the Future
books & arts John Urry. 2016. What is the Future? Malden, MA: Polity Press. 226 pages. One of the greatest rewards of reading John Urry’s latest and, unfortunately, last solo-authored book, is that it so vividly reflects the kinds of concerns and commitments that led him to become one of the most influential sociologists of […]
Time and the Other Primates
books and arts Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 178 pages. 18th-Century Questions, 21st-Century Problems Influential circles in German philosophy have taken an American anthropologist into their hearts. A comparative psychologist and linguist by training, Michael Tomasello has served as co-director of the Max Planck Institute for […]
Elusive Caimans and the Anthropologist as Devil
books and arts Lucas Bessire. 2014. Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 296 pages. Dust In this poignant and insightful ethnography, Lucas Bessire invites the reader to enter a world of shame, violence and all-consuming dust. Haunting descriptions of the vast plains of the South American […]
Thinking with Bats, Forests and the Cosmos
Thomas Nagel. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press. 128 pages. Eduardo Kohn. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Oakland: University of California Press. 288 pages. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception […]
NAFTA’s Highway of Death
Books and Arts: Reviews of Books, Articles, the Arts, and More! Shaylih Muehlmann. 2014. When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Oakland: University of California Press. Anna Ochoa O’Leary, Colin M. Deeds and Scott Whiteford, eds. 2013. Uncharted Terrains: New Directions in Border Research Methodology, Ethics, and Practice. Tucson: University of […]
::antropologi.info:: Social and Cultural Anthropology in the News
Check out this post about alternatives to our current dominant economic system on the anthropology blog ::antropologi.info:: ” Use Anthropology to Build a Human Economy Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, economists and activists have come together and written a citizen guide for a human economy. In The Human Economy more than 30 authors from 15 countries show […]
The Keeper of the Kris
**This is a special feature from the 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 were alive today, Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, would be 67. The president’s mother was portrayed in Obama’s […]