I am currently working on a project about the role of Sari Saltik (Bektashi) shrines in Turkey and the Balkans in the overlapping of shared pilgrimage practices, shrine appropriation and relationships between narrative and spatial practice/ritual. If anyone has any thoughts on these sujects, please let me know.

I am still refining many of my thoughts, to be honest. But my intention is bring all of this to a focus on how we perceive the binary oppositions of pluralism and…

London is a lonesome city. Walking down to Holborn station after a day's study and a drink, a friend of mine told me that he he used to have many friends in his hometown. There, he had things to do and places to go when he had nothing special to do. When he broke up with his girlfriend, there were people who would take care of him. But here in London, he had either his girlfriend or nothing at all. He said, he is learning how to live on his own.

"Yes, you are right. I all the time…

From what I found myself writing:

Remembering one book I read years ago. It was about nationalim and the importance of language's role in it. There the author argued, as I remember it, there can be bi-(or more) lingual people, but even they tend to identify themselves with only one language, with which they can feel at home. Hence the expression mother tongue...

After two months since I had arrived in…

+ Some editing works and fictional elements added

Text messages between two postgraduate students living at the same university hall

Me: What are you up to today? Anything fun?

S1: I'm Walsh

Me: You mean you're in Wales?

S1: Yeah. How's it going?

Me: Bored. Thought I…

Found in Fast Company, this article has a lot to say to us who like to argue fruitfully and especially perhaps to those among us looking for careers in applied anthropology.

I want to shared with all the members my last published article. This its the abstract.

Among the first projects of German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche as head of the Museum de La Plata’s Department of Anthropology in Argentina was his research on the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, deemed evolutionary ‘relics’ of humanity. The article explores the role of shows and exhibits as spaces where science was popularized and where late nineteenth- and early…

Im in the last pages of Objectivity from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison.

In this book the autors chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences—and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.

Im glad to discover the threatened reading of this analysis…

Medical Anthropology is particularly relevant because medicine is something that runs through all people's lives. Universally, all people experience states of illness that deviate from what they define as healthy. I have always found that so fascinating, particularly because it imbues people with a certain sense of difference that can be both stigmatizing as well as powerful, in some senses.



I am interested in the intersections between transcultural psychiatry, altered emotive…

The experience of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs as a circulating commodity at the global scale has been documented by journalists, but it is an area not widely explored by anthropologists. Most anthropology (see Sue Estroff) has ethnographically assessed psychiatric wards and other sites of medical care in the United States and Western world, but aside from the work of Arthur Kleinman in China, it seems that most psychological anthropology addresses cross-cultural emotion states (Unni Wikan,…

I'm off-work on Wednesdays.  I spent the entire morning with my folks today enjoying my mother's Filipino brunch.  A brunch at my parents' household always ends with coffee and my father's argumentative discussion of what he reads from the day's news.  He passed The New  York Times to me after my second gulp.  He wanted me to read what he highlighted with a pencil, "Why I'm Leaving Goldman…

My book on BVI social history, entitled "Slavery, Smallholding and Tourism: Social Transformations in the British Virgin Islands", released two weeks ago in eBook format for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple iBook/iTunes readers, is now also available online from Amazon and Barnes & Noble in both paperback and hardcover print editions.



Slavery, Smallholding and Tourism is a study in the political economy of development of the British…

Presentación:

Es un dispositivo ideológico sempiterno la deshumanización del enemigo. La justificación de los actos tomando como base una condición de inferioridad, que avale un tratamiento diferente, se basa en ese presupuesto…

As I begin this week, I remember a conversation I had with a doctoral student friend last night who is struggling to finish his PhD. While I managed to meet my deadlines fairly well during my PhD, that was defiinitely an exception. In general, I have also struggled with procrastination, as I believe we all do at some point and I gave some thought to whether there is a vlaue to taking a psychological approach to research. In other words, its helpful to look at what in your life is taking your…

I’ve been away from the OAC for a while, but those of you who may have read my blog posts or have communicated with me in the past may well know that last year my thinking was rather infected by Deleuze and Guattari. Well, now there’s a new infection from which I’m suffering: Baudrillard, in particular his work on ‘The Political Economy of the Sign.’ This work has thrown up a few questions, or problems, for me and I was hoping to open up a couple of points to wider discussion in order to…

In the Theory for Anthropology Group, we have started a discussion of model thinking, i.e., using models, which, as statistician George E.P. Box put it "are always wrong but sometimes useful" to think about social and cultural processes. The discussion was stimulated by my discovery of Scott Page's free…

Cairo, March 2012

The man was in his mid-forties maybe. He was a Member of Parliament and part of the Islamist party that forms the second most important bloc in the House of Representatives. A few days ago he appeared in the media claiming he had been attacked, beaten in the face, and robbed of a large amount of money he had locked up in his car. Not long afterwards, a call came into the radio from a surgeon who works for a fancy local hospital that is…

For over a year now, I believe, I have had a page here at OAC and, for most of that time I have also been thinking about making my research more accesible online via blogging. For the time being, I think that I will be using OAC's blog to see if it works well towards this goal.

My plan at the moment is to spend some time here mainly discussing my work in the sociology department of the newly founded Suleyman Sah University in Istanbul where I currently work as an assistant professor.…

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS: Edited book on “FIELDWORK EXPERIENCES”

Editors: Z. Nilüfer Nahya, Rabia Harmanşah

 This book aims to provide an inside view of the problems, ambiguities, dilemmas and loneliness that foreign anthropologists face before and during conducting field studies in Turkey. It will open up discussion on the individual dimensions, such as ethnic-religious identity, gender, political views, physical-emotional challenges, moral dilemmas of the anthropologist, as…