Our Digest for May…some plants, animals and the non-human. A free e-book on tobacco, others on ethnographic film archive, links to blogs and interviews on subjects such as decolonizing the classroom, intimacy and ecologies!
/Articles
Doing ethnography with and around plants? Check out the plant ethnography special edition at Anthropology Today.
While thinking plants, let’s think some animals this month:
“Animal Transference and Transformation Among Wounaan” by Runk, Ismare and Conquista in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
“Animal’s atmospheres” by Lorimer, Hodgetts and Barua in Progress in Human Geography.
“Interspecies Engagement in Medical Anthropology” by Leslie Sharp in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
And finally, the anthropology of traps in the Journal of Material Culture.
/Books
Andrew Russell’s Anthropology of Tobacco: Ethnographic Adventures in Non-Human Worlds. And it is open access! Support OA!
We think this is going to be an important book! Katherine Groo’s Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive.
For those of us digging back into a bit of Mary Douglas and thinking about purity and danger, and looking for a counterpoint/straw man/update…what have you, a free e-book (for May) of Valerie Curtis’s Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat: The Science Behind Revulsion.
/Blogs
If you are teaching, you may like to read this interview with Girish Daswani on decolonializing the classroom.
Cultural anthropology’s “Embodies ecologies” series curated by Andrea Ford, probes “the relationship between changing bio-scientific ideas about bodies and the lived realities of bodies in contemporary societies”.
Emma Kowal’s blog at The Familiar Strange’s on how she weighted combining political activism and anthropology in her work on progressive white Australian anti-racists, a debate that always remains relevant.
Polar, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review now features the “ethnographic explainers” on their website. Read here from anthropologists about current political issues all over the world.
The “Intimacies of Dissent” collection of the American Ethnologist edited by Tobias Kelly explore “how dissent is both enabled and restricted by our most intimate ties”.
Listen to Judith Beyer’s keynote on the art of listening in “On little and grand narratives in Central Asia” at Allegra Lab’s website.