This year, we at Somatosphere are trying an experiment in academic mentorship. Two of our regular contributors and editorial collaborative members, Emily Yates-Doerr and Matthew Wolf-Meyer, are hosting a panel designed to ease early-career anthropologists (broadly defined) into academic publishing. The idea is to bring together scholars interested in analyzing cognition or cognitive-related practices ethnographically (see the CFP below), with …
Author Archives: Emily Yates-Doerr
George, the dog
Babe, my grandpa, was born on the kitchen tiles of a small Seattle home. His dad, whose own grandpa had run a seedy downtown brothel, would disappear and reappear throughout his life. But Babe was not like the men who came before him. He spent his youth delivering newspapers and parking cars to support his mother, went to war when …
Respect, care, and labor in collaborative scholarly projects
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
The ethnographic case: series conclusion
This entry concludes the series “The Ethnographic Case” which ran every other Monday between June 2015 and July 2016. The bookCase, which holds 27 cases, can be accessed here.
One day, early on in the series, we received two submissions. Their similar anatomy was striking. Each featured a medical waiting room. Someone entered the space with a gift …
The bookCASE: Introduction
This post is an introduction to our new series, The Ethnographic Case.
We launch this series with a question: What is an ethnographic case? As ethnography is a process and practice of authorship, this question produces another: What can it be made to be?
This series explores what cases can generate, and our reasons for resisting or embracing them …
Scale
Guatemala, 2013.
Someone had drawn two footprints on green construction paper and taped it to the back of a box of cornflakes to show patients how to stand. In one corner the person had written out the word Nutrición; in another, perhaps because the impending task was at once ridiculous and frightening, the person had placed a sticker of the …