Pesticides: can’t live with them, can’t live without them
In Sri Lanka, producers of the illicit liquor kasippu sometimes suspend a bottle of pesticide above the vat during the fermentation process. It is believed the kasippu will absorb the potency of the pesticide and add to its strength, increasing drinkers’ intoxication and pleasure. But there is also a danger the …
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter
W. W. Norton, 2013, paperback, 627 pages.
Incomplete Nature is a big book, literally and conceptually. The subtitle “How Mind Emerged From Matter” hints of a grand synthesis and Terrence Deacon, chair of University of California–Berkeley’s anthropology department, presents a dense argument which defies usual labels. The result is part …
In today’s “Top of the heap,” Ken MacLeish, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University, takes us into the world of war (and post-war) memoir, fiction and ethnography, also introducing us to some conceptual texts he’s been thinking with.
Danny Hoffman, The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia…
While the AAAs were winding up in Chicago, participants in the workshop, A Home for Science: the Anthropology of Tropical and Arctic Field-Stations, started to make their way north to an even colder part of the world. Hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, co-organized by Wenzel Geissler, John Manton, Ann Kelly and Gro …
Editor’s note: In the wake of all the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked four scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the reading …
Editor’s note: In the wake of the discussion about the ‘ontological turn’ at this year’s American Anthropological Association conference, we asked several scholars, “which texts or resources would you recommend to a student or colleague interested in the uses of ‘ontology’ as an analytical category in recent work in anthropology and science and technology studies?” This was the reading list …