Anthropology Archives - Public Seminar

The Transformations of Katherine Dunham

The dance pioneer’s contributions to postmodern anthropology

June 11, 2024 • by Megan Robinson

The possibilities open to an anthropologist engaging with her fieldwork in a creative way is what drew me to the Dunham Technique in the first place....

Interviews

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Anthropologist Ruth Behar discusses writing across genres, making ideas accessible, and a new children’s book

July 6, 2022 • by Ruth Behar and Reeva Dani

Behar spoke with Public Seminar about writing for young readers, how people and their stories are intertwined in both fiction and anthropology, and the importance of telling stories with ethnographic accuracy....

When We Tell Stories, We Know What Happened

Uncategorized

How COVID-19 Became a Crisis

To understand what went wrong, look at how the problem is framed

November 3, 2021 • by Janet Roitman

We are in crisis. Nothing could be more self-evident: a global pandemic has ravaged the human species. But wait—what does it mean to call an open-ended event that is playing out over a period of years a “crisis"? If humans live with viruses, how is Covid-19, and the diseases it triggers, a crisis for the human species and our ...

History

Why Race Still Matters

We don’t need to know what race is — we need to know what it does

December 9, 2020 • by Alana Lentin

————— The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, ...

Anthropocene and Negative Anthropology

Return of Man

July 29, 2019 • by Hannes Bajohr

In contrast to the natural sciences, the question of official adoption plays virtually no role in the humanities, which have taken up the concept of the Anthropocene with relish. Its attraction lies in its omnicompetent radiance: Not only a geochronological coinage, it implies an ontology, a theory of history, and ...

Feature

Leaderless Crowds

Reflections on the Power of Affects, from Gustave Le Bon to Frédéric Lordon

July 5, 2017 • by Léa Barbisan

In his book The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch notes that even though “crowds and masses... seem to sustain themselves in the margins of contemporary sociological thinking... the mass media recurrently reports on new mass events, explicitly labeled thus, typically in the form of mass protests, mass disasters such as ...

Uncategorized

Pizza Rat, a Totem of Our Time

Humans, animals, and life in 2015

October 23, 2015 • by Dominic Pettman

For a brief moment in late September, New York City had a new celebrity: Pizza Rat. This furry character -- either endearingly repulsive, or repulsively endearing, depending on your sensibility -- appeared in most of our social media feeds after a quick-fingered commuter snapped ...

Education

On the Academic Calls to Boycott Israel, Part III

The Jewish Question and the debate over the Israeli academy

September 12, 2015 • by Netta van Vliet

The “Jewish Question” was defined in turn of the century Europe as a question about the manner and degree to which Jewish difference was compatible with the ideals of European modernity (Librett 2014) as well as with political projects that took shape with and against its geopolitical contexts (Bauer ...

Theory & Practice

On the Academic Calls to Boycott Israel, Part II

The Jewish Question and the debate over the Israeli academy

September 10, 2015 • by Netta van Vliet

After summarizing Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and dispossession of Palestinians from land and livelihood, the pro-boycott petition’s signatories declare: “As employees in institutions of higher learning, we have a particular responsibility to oppose Israel’s widespread and systematic violations of the right to ...

Theory & Practice

On the Academic Calls to Boycott Israel, Part I

The Jewish Question and the debate over the Israeli academy

September 9, 2015 • by Netta van Vliet

This post is the first part in a three-part series, which will be posted over the remainder of the week.

If Israel is a contentious topic of conversation in mainstream and alternative news media, in everyday exchanges at the grocery store or the dinner table, it comes ...