Sebastian Junger’s The Last Patrol, A Dialogue
War does not simply shape, shepherd, and injure bodies, or mold and undermine psyches in a unidirectional fashion. Through countless contradictory and incomplete processes, war excites bodies, cultivates capacities, gives value to things, provokes subjective interpretations of surprising behaviors, and forms connections. —Kenneth T. MacLeish, Making War at Fort Hood The first things I noticed […]
Experiencing the Divine
Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford, writes in the NYTimes about faith and the experience of divine forces: To experience God as walking by your side, in conversation with you, is hard. Evangelical pastors often preach as if they are teaching people how to keep God constantly in mind, because it is so easy not […]
Rouhani’s Visit to the UN
Narges Bajoghli, an anthropology PhD student at NYU, writes in The Guardian about Iranian winds of change: Students, activists, artists, and political prisoners rallied behind Rouhani just before the 13 June vote to bring him a 51% victory, hoping to bring about change and some breathing room in Iran again. Ahmadinejad’s presidency was characterized by […]
The Power of Humor
Angelique Haugerud, a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, writes in the Huffington Post about politics, satire and Jon Stewart: Why do dictators fear laughter? Consider Jon Stewart, who returns to his anchor desk on The Daily Show on September 3, after a summer hiatus to direct a documentary film. Toppling governments is not his […]
Labor Day
Krystal D’Costa writes in Scientific American about Labor Day: There’s no question that technology has helped to create a safer workplace. But there’s also no question that technology is changing the workplace—as well as the laborer. In the coming years, we’ll have to redefine what it means to work because there is no question that […]
Bollywood and Violence
Irfan Ahmad, a political anthropologist, writes in Al-Jazeera about Bollywood and violence in India: On July 31, a shocking incident took place at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of South Asia’s top universities. In a dastardly attempted murder, shortly before noon, Akash Kumar, 23, and a student of Korean studies, entered the classroom […]
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 […]
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 […]