The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), bordering Bangladesh, India and Myanmar, has always been represented as the region of ethnic conflict and insurgency in Bangladesh. It is the home to eleven indigenous groups of people collectively known as Pahari. Since the migration from neighbouring states of Arakan of…

Dear all,

I was fascinated by a talk that Bill Maurer gave about his latest research with regulators and practitioners in the payment industry. First of all, his 'opening up' of the black box of (electronic) payment is worth mentioning. Payment is not merely the 'reading of the debit/credit card', but several 'stops' (such as the payment device, the 'switch' deciding whether it is debit or credit etc) accompany the transfer along the 'rail'. All of those stakeholders have…

Recently, two gang rapes took place – one in Delhi and the other in Rangamati. In the first case, a 23-year-old Delhi medical student was raped on a running bus on December 16 by six men and then was thrown off on the street. The victim later succumbed to her injuries and died in Singapore. In the second case, a Marma school-girl of class-eight was gang raped on December 21 in Rangamati. Three “Bengali settlers” raped the 14-year-old girl and then killed her. Both the incidents were quite…

The Royal Anthropological Institute’s Education Department is putting together a printed publication that will go out to schools and colleges teaching anthropology and for future outreach events.  We are interested in publicising the fantastic and important work that anthropologists are doing around the world and are looking for some interesting photographs that we can use for the publication along with a short description.

Submission guidelines- what we are looking…

Here is an essay on this topic. I would be interested in your comments, responses, reactions, etc.

Could it be that close kin ties produced by endogamy inhibit democracy? Some evidence points in that direction. From a network analysis perspective, I would add the suggestion that the association of democracy with individualism points to the importance of weak [out-group], as opposed to strong [in-group] ties. I note, too, that I once heard it asserted that parallel cousin marriage is common in Southwest Asia, a.k.a., the Middle East. Could kin ties be a factor in the difficulty of creating…

If you work as I do on the anthropology of the Caribbean, then Marcus Garvey and Garveyism cast a long shadow. By any standards Garvey's legacy is worthy of reflection. Reading Colin Grant's fine biography gave me pause for thought regarding Garvey and also the excuse to put those thoughts into a review for the OAC. Garvey was the leader of the largest black internationalist movement that has ever existed, but a movement of a unique kind. Most of the internationalisms of the Twentieth…

In many of our discussions we see the meme that describes anthropology as a tool of first imperialism and then globalization. We now have an opportunity to reflect on the experience of those who entered the field and participated in U.S. government-funded research and outreach programs in the 1950s and 60s. Forwarded from EASIANTH:

ROBERT BAYARD TEXTOR (1923-2013): IN MEMORIAM

Robert Textor, one of the first anthropologists to carry out…

Preamble: An immensely significant phase of science is emerging. It explains why things exist the way they do. Its purview includes everything from the tiniest of subatomic particles to plant and animal species, planets and beyond. The…

Ronald Coase, an American economist of British origin, won a Nobel prize for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper "The nature of the firm" (1937). He is now 102 years old and has just announced his desire, with a young Chinese associate, to found a new journal called "Man and the economy" (well he was born in 1910).

A century ago, Alfred Marshall, author of Principles of Economics (1890) and Keynes' teacher at Cambridge defined economics as “both a study of…

What this Atlantic piece is talking about, anthropologists and regular folk have known practically and intuitively for a long, long time. 

But to argue with the Master these days, you must address him in his two languages, economese and legalese. That is why our digital mentor Keith Hart once concluded that "anthropologists who master the basics of game theory and have access to a brain scanner may once again be granted space in economics journals for an elegant demonstrations…

I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, the human economy and the history of money. I have also published two short biographical articles on him. I have contributed in this way to the recent outpouring of…

From the online Journal of Social Structure

ABSTRACT: Advances in text analysis, particularly the ability to extract network based information from texts, is enabling researches to conduct detailed socio-cultural ethnographies rapidly by retrieving characteristic descriptions from texts and fusing the results from varied sources. We describe this process and illustrate it…

My essay, “Writing Against Identity Politics: An Essay on Gender, Race, and Bureaucratic Pain,” appears in the latest issue of American Ethnologist (Volume 39, Issue 4). Here is its abstract:



Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—or what, arguably, can be seen as torture—might seem strange. But for single Mizrahi welfare mothers in Israel, somatization of bureaucratic logic as physical pain precludes…

two lovers separated during the nationalistic shifts of the balkan wars exchange a handkerchief....again, this follows on from my last post on fabric and ritual...

The song whose lyrics I published in my last blog post is this one, from a Turkish soap opera broadcast several years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQiv8Aq3CXA

At the moment I am grappling a bit with Clifford Geertz in an attempt to get a firmer background in classical anthropological texts, although of course that can be both a blessing in a curse. On the one hand I am learning the language of Anthro and its ancestor cult (!) but I also risk adopting ideas that have been morei ntegrated, critiqued, surpassed etc...by now. I risk being out of touch. Oh well!

While looking at Geertz have the impression that my emphasis on contextualization is…

The Greenwall Report  (click here for PDF) is titled Enhanced Warfighters: Risk, Ethics, and Policy. It addresses ethical and policy issues arising from military-supported research and development programs designed to enhance the physical and cognitive performance of soldiers using mechanical, chemical or biological means. Much of the discussion is devoted to the concept of "enhancement" and how it differs…

The Economist's obituary for Alfred Hirschman attributes to Hirschman the idea that systems from which the disgruntled can exit can achieve a perverse stability, in which those capable of revolution leave the scene and leave those less capable at the mercy of the incompetent and corrupt. I find myself thinking about those of us with the…

Mais oui, dey tried to teach me

how to read back at school.

Mais book learnin’ didn’t stick wit’…