The main challenge in running a seminar on the anthropology of attention is that such a thing doesn’t exist.* While anthropologists often think quite deeply about attention, worrying about our own noticing practices or what our interlocutors focus on, we rarely write about the concept head-on. When we do write about attention, we rarely problematize it in the way we …
Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan and Stanley Ulijaszek (eds.)
Routledge Series in Critical Food Studies, 2018, 234 pages
A Swiss academic scans the barcode on her plastic water bottle. The bottle touts itself as ‘Swiss mountain water’, but the app that decodes the barcode quickly dispels that image: the company is a subsidiary of …
Vakas is a Russian man in his 30s with a traumatic brain injury acquired during childhood. He spends most of his days in his room in his family apartment. Occasionally, he convinces his parents to let him go out. Or, he tricks them and slips away when his mother is at work or his father isn’t paying attention. Vakas is …
This month’s web roundup will take a brief look at the body in the face of big data. You may have heard that a panel from the recent Theorizing the Web conference held in Brooklyn featured a dynamic talk by sociologist Dr. Janet Vertesi on pregnancy and big data. When Dr. Vertesi found out she was pregnant, she sought …
The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry is devoted to “Cultures of the Internet” – also the title of the 2011 McGill Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in Cultural Psychiatry at which many of the papers were originally presented. In our introductory essay to the issue, Laurence Kirmayer, Sadeq Rahimi and I examine some of the issues which the Internet and other …
A small-town high school in western New York became the focus of news media attention from late 2011 to early 2012. Nearly two dozen teens and one adult, all but one female, exhibited spasmodic movements and vocalizations with no easily detectable cause. The outbreak provoked a cascade of conflicts, leaving them largely unresolved even as the symptoms subsided and life …