Tag Archives: Postcolonial

Features

The archaeology of past futures, or fieldwork by fragments

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This article is part of the series:

This series is an exercise in fieldwork through material fragments – of coming to grips with the present pasts of scientific institutions in the ‘tropics’. It is about what biomedicine leaves behind – rusted instruments, congealed and unlabeled bloods slides – and the losses, pleasures, failures, and desires these leftovers relay. It is about photographs, blueprints, monuments and archives – …

Books

Angela Garcia’s The Pastoral Clinic

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The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

by Angela Garcia

University of California Press, 2010. 264 pp., US$24.95 (paperback).

 

Angela Garcia’s magisterial, unsettling account of heroin addiction among a Hispanic community in Espanola Valley opens with a description of Nuevo Dias, a rural detoxification facility for drug users.  Accepting the executive director’s challenge to “work” …

Lectures

Videos from "Science and Technology Studies: the Next 20 Years"

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This past April Harvard’s Program on Science, Technology and Society hosted a conference “reflecting on the past twenty years of STS graduate study, and looking ahead to the next twenty.”  As the organizers explained in the meeting abstract:

“The meeting is in part a stock-taking. After two decades of increased
public funding for STS, what can we say about

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Lectures

SPA Panel on Political Subjectivity – April 1, 2011, Santa Monica

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This article is part of the series:
The biennial meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology this year took place from March 31 to April 3 in Santa Monica, California. Below you will find audio recordings of a panel myself and Byron Good had put together on the topic of political subjectivity. Terry O’Nell requested that her presentation not be published here due to ethical concerns regarding …
FeaturesTeaching Resources

Teaching Critique of Humanitarianism: A Syllabus for Comparative Study

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This post was contributed by Chris Garces (Cornell University)
Garces Comparative Humanitarianism



“Comparative Humanitarianism,” viewable and available for download above, expands upon my lower-division undergraduate seminar, “Love™, Ltd.: Charity, Philanthropy, & Humanitarianism,” which I taught at Cornell and Sarah Lawrence College successively over the last two years (2008 and 2009). To my surprise, this latter course attracted the largest number

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Features

Ethnography and the somber realities of "intervention"

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In this weekend’s LA Times Angela Garcia reflects on the ubiquity of addiction and its attendant crisis in New Mexico’s Espanola Valley, where she conducted fieldwork for her recently released book The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010).  Garcia, a medical anthropologist at Stanford, notes that the Espanola Valley “has the …