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; …
Author Archives: Tomas Matza
Introduction: The Cabinet
Cabinets of curiosity are at the historical heart of scientific and medical enterprises. They remind us that the modern effort to know, and perhaps understand, always departs from the same shore: collection. Such cabinets were described as curiosities (“wunder”) because they also elicited affects of amusement, surprise, amazement, desire, and disgust. For example, the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, …
Book review: Zigon’s "HIV is God’s Blessing"
This article is part of the series: From the Somatosphere archives
Jarrett Zigon. “HIV Is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 280 pages. $24.95.
Reviewed by Tomas Matza (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University)
Anthropologists have taken a keen interest in the way that the collapse of the Soviet Union has impacted the everyday lives of the people living in that region. The fact …