The Limitations of Compassion in International Volunteering
On April 15, 2013, at 2:49 p.m., two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The effects were physically devastating — three dead and hundreds injured, some requiring amputations. The psychological effects were equally traumatic, if less quantifiable. The reactions of the city, the state and the nation were quickly visible […]
Jews in Bukhara
Alanna E. Cooper, an anthropologist and a Jewish cultural historian, began her research on an old Central Asian Jewish community because of a small and curious dictionary: I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was […]
Spirituality
Spirituality is not what it once was – that much is certain, according to anthropologist Peter van der Veer. Working at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, he has examined the significance of the spiritual and its transformation processes in modern societies using the example of China […]
Solidarity and Redemption at MetLife Stadium
Dr. David J. Landes is an anthropologist studying Orthodox Jewish culture. Last Wednesday David joined 90,000 orthodox Jews in a spectacular religious ritual at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. He shared his fascinating field notes with The Talmud Blog: Over the past several decades a new ritual has taken hold within the Orthodox community, […]
China and the Olympics
Anthropologist Susan Brownell studies sports and the Olympics: My question, "will the Olympics change China, or will China change the Olympics?" was really an attempt to prod my audiences to think about the bigger question of the implications for the developed West of China's rise, because Westerners seemed so concerned about the question of whether […]