Those in power almost always want to stay in power and they have the official means to manipulate the system in ways that underwrites the status quo.  Let’s take an example from the Arab Spring in Egypt.  As reported on Al Jazzera, the ruling military tribunal in Egypt released details about the districts and rules governing the upcoming 2011 parliamentary elections.  They way they decided to map out the districts and write the governing rules of each favored the election of…

An anthropologist studying political economy in ethnographic situations or by reading history can get a perspective on the locus of problems in contemporary society.  The problem is that anthropologists are almost never consulted in these matters – economists are.  As a rule, they lack the ethnographic and historical insights a seasoned anthropologist gets from doing fieldwork and reading history.  History is important and it can teach us many things. This applies to what I see happening in…

Before one tritely dismisses the term Casino Capitalism, one should read the book by that title by Susan Strange.  Furthermore, the analogy between a casino, where the odds are stacked against most players; and the capitalist world is apt.  For example, much of the crisis of the moment began with powerful men betting with our futures.  William Cohan (2010) largely attributes the fall of Bear Stearns and its disastrous results for the rest of us to a lack of supervision of greedy folks at…

See? I always knew you had a little bit of coyote in you.

When you see the light of a star what you are actually seeing

is the impulse that your optic nerve makes of it, like a dawg star,

or, in other words, you cant' be Sirius. There is always paws in between.

Chegamos em Matão - SP dia 05/06/2010 por volta das 8 horas da manhã. O objetivo era entrevistar três pessoas que participavam ativamente da organização do Corpus Christi na cidade. Matão é conhecida nacionalmente pelos famosos tapetes feitos pela comunidade nos últimos 62 anos para a celebração deste acontecimento religioso.

Meu grupo, formado por mais 7 pessoas, deveria abordar os seguintes temas: ritual, parentesco e cultura material. Eu fiquei responsável pela entrevista…

Jacques Bouveresse 

Tradução: Priscila Santos da Costa

Se existe um ponto em comum entre Bourdieu e Wittgenstein, é que ambos possuem uma consciência aguda da ambiguidade da palavra “regra” ou daquilo que eu prefiro chamar de sentidos diferentes, e talvez até muito diferentes, com os quais a palavra “regra” pode ser empregada. Bourdieu já citara, no Esboço de uma Teoria da Prática, a passagem das…

One thinks no better then one can write, and for the simple reason that one’s audience, one hopes, is not exclusively in one’s own head.[1]

This paper reviews the works of Roy Wagner (1938-) and Marilyn Strathern (1941-) contrasting them with the kind of anthropological studies published in the United States at the time (henceforth referred to herein as “post-modernist”) such as The Invention of Culture…

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones

Act 3, scene II of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. 

     Inequality can generate fascism from either end of the political spectrum.  Let me give you first fascism coming from the American right some eight decades ago and then a contemporary example from South Africa.

The 1930s in…

Revista Conexões Parciais

Revista digital de antropologia e filosofia (BETA)

Sobre a Revista…

When I was 4 years old an erroneous miracle happened. After a long vacation my late father decided to resume in the duty of his job. His office was 140 km. or so away from our native home. He asked my mother to check the date of his journey in the calendar. My mother erroneously selected the date next after the real date. On that day, the very train my father used to board for his office collided with another train taking many lives.

Alexander Fleming in medicine, Rontgen in physics,…

The Shaman as a Maker of Worlds: Creativity and the end of History

Joanna Overing

"One example was the use by an old man of the metaphor 'distant Guakamaya widowed red person' (otoaerae tuarekua) to express 'let us go bath' (ahe tiahae, or ' let us go to the…

Tanto em A palavra escrita e a não-escrita, Ítalo Calvino como em O Trabalho do antropólogo: olhar, ouvir, escrever  de Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, está posta a existência de dois mundos que se relacionam, mas que nunca chegam a se identificar completamente: o mundo da escrita (ou “ estar aqui”) e o mundo não escrito, o vivido (ou “estar lá” e a conseqüente utilização das faculdades da percepção).

O mundo real –não-escrito – é aquele cujo…

Maybe one does not wish to draw

What it is seem

Maybe one wishes to draw that

Which is thought or how

It is thought



One’s thought are only mist

and

Suddently,

There is nothing left



to say



However, when one distances oneself

From paper, pen and charcoal

A world is found within,



populated



The rest of the time,



nothing.



How is it possible, then

This creative desert…

I look at my hands,
Elles font plus partie
Of my existence
Que moi même

I catch myself in being
Body, walls, l'autre
It's all here, I'am ahead.

Da Costa, 2009

Recently, Naked Capitalism reported a London study entitled Bankers-Anthropological Study (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/14/bankers-anthropological-study-joris-luyendijk).  In it the Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendijk indicates that while bankers are widely reviled, he is finding them to be very…

If you teach a course on family and are looking for stereotype-busting material on parent-child relationships, you might consider these photographs of Japanese parents and children from Bruce Osborn's Oyako series. (via Majirox News).

How many of them seem typical of what you imagine parent-child relationships should be? Why? Or why not? What is the visual evidence on which you base your…