Category: Reading Lists
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Anthropologies of the Future
Felix Ringel Department of Anthropology Durham University & Sonja Moghaddari Department of Sociology and Social Research University of Trento June 2020 The future is in crisis, or at least that is what many people around the world think and feel in the late-liberal, post-industrial era. Climate change, economic crises, the failure of both, the developmentalists…
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Anthropological Engagements with the Far-Right
Antje Berger, Annika Lems and Christine Moderbacher Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle February 2020 The world is facing a period of dramatic social and political change. Perceived crises, combined with the intensification of social inequality have caused discontent to grow to such an extent that political commentators speak of an “existential crisis” or…
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Histories of Energy
Nandita Badami Department of Anthropology University of California, Irvine January 2020 Over the past decade, a growing number of social theorists have pointed to the urgent need to theorize energy in the context of dwindling reserves of coal and oil. Within anthropology, Dominic Boyer has stressed “the staggering significance of energy as the undercurrent and…
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Understanding Kashmir
Radhika Gupta Faculty of Humanities Leiden University December 2019 While colonial representations of Kashmir were fixated on it either as an idyllic paradise or an area that held significance in the shadows of the “Great Game,” postcolonial engagement was unable to escape methodological nationalism. Knowledge on the region has been suffocated by the over-abundance of…
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The Ethics of Care
Patrick McKearney Department of Social Anthropology University of Cambridge June 2019 In her reading list, I was amazed by how elegantly Megha Amrith held in tension the multiple meanings of care and the diverse bodies of literature that intersect in the anthropology of care. I doubt I can repeat the feat. So what I want…
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Care
Megha Amrith Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity April 2019 If care is in some way fundamental to understanding how we relate to one other and the world around us, then it has always been intrinsically a part of the anthropological endeavor. Yet it is only recently that we are…
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Afrofuturism & “space is the place”
Sabine Mohamed Heidelberg University & Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity December 2018 “Speculative Fiction that addresses African–American themes and addresses African–American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African–American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be…
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Virtuality and corporations
Mike Prentice November 2018 Every once taken-for-granted domain in anthropology—family, religion, nature, time—has become subject to epistemological or ontological re-evaluation, and with good measure. Strangely, the business corporation has remained an enduring analytical fixture on the anthropological landscape. Even as virtual organizations and paper companies have widened our view of the form corporations take, the…