An earlier version of this post first appeared on the author’s site, Aesop’s Anthropology.
What just happened in Anthropology? In the 2013 annual meeting there were zero abstracts or paper or panel titles featuring the word “Anthropocene”; this year there were 64! Compare that with “multispecies,” which has held steady at between 16-23 invocations after it first made its appearance …
If there really has been a ‘collaborative turn’ between the social and biological sciences, then the stakes of that turn are still very much to be negotiated. ‘Collaboration,’ of course, is not a practice or a structure simply to be aimed for: like all ethical and methodological commitments, collaboration is made in the turning – and thus the actual forms …
“Tolerance” never made it into Raymond Williams’ Keywords, a rare mistake: it should have been a tempting subject for his critical sensibility.[1] By the late-eighteenth century, the word often had come to substitute in English for the older “toleration,” meaning forbearance, patience, and indulgence of the opinions of others. Later, physiologists took up its connotation of the endurance …
What is biodeterminism? Has it ended and did it ever exist? Earlier this month at Aarhus University, these seemingly straightforward questions resulted in three days of fascinating conversation during a conference titled “The End of biodetermism? New Directions for Medical Anthropology.” The event, co-organized by the Centre for Cultural Epidemics (EPICENTER), the Interacting Minds Centre for the Study of …
As someone who thinks and works on the edges of the social sciences I am always curious about—and fascinated by—the ways in which ideas, feelings, propositions, demands, and attachments of various kinds have dynamically contributed and continue to contribute to articulating both the knowledge-practices of social scientific disciplines and the habits or ethical sensibilities that inform those forms of inquiry …
Hoses spraying disinfectant, white spacesuits, and police roadblocks: these are the tangible technologies of expertise in West Africa. Amid images of ongoing efforts to contain Ebola, I find myself asking: What is the role of the medical anthropologist in a global health emergency? What expertise can we contribute? As of 1 October 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) counts 7178 …