When you think of an expensive outfit, what comes to mind probably won’t be a hazmat diving suit designed to keep your entire body out of contaminated water. For some, however, this is the height of sexual attire, an expression of sexuality. At a time when the logic of free market and consumption has encroached upon every aspect of our lives, any of our private desires and pleasures, kinky or vanilla, normal or perverted, are all deeply embedded as part of contemporary capitalism and are constantly shaped by it.
Blog
Apprenticing Elsewhere
For the apprentice...who does not have the initial skills necessary to participate as a full member of a specific sporting practice, how are they to obtain the embodied knowledge of their interlocutors and understand what that knowledge says about their practice? This is where the concept of “apprenticeship elsewhere” comes into play.
My Stories of Struggle: Anchoring the ‘Personal’ in a Production Preoccupied with the ‘Propriety’ of ‘Science’
I conceive of the ‘personal’ as a reflexive device that is aligned with the outcome of empirically based observation. As I have stated, my awareness of my aversion towards the women I study works as a check on my personal biases and these biases may potentially function as points of access to analytical insight.
Ad-hoc Block: Dystopian Worlds and the War for Advertising
As artificial intelligence and algorithmic surveillance become more ubiquitous, we should really start to think about our relationship, not just to internet tracking and data collection, but to the fundamental relationship between audiences and marketing that these technologies are products of.
Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How It Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist
In many ways, Dungeon Masters are the ethnographers of their own worlds. Granted, we’re not exactly interviewing the people who populate them, and we’re inventing most of the traditions and customs out of the content in our own imaginations. But when it comes to building a narrative about people and their ways-of-being, there isn’t all that much difference between narratives of “a” world and narratives of “the” world. This is something we actually have in common with fiction writers as well. Ethnographies share, to an extent, certain characteristics of novels; such that both the author and the anthropologist are setting out to involve their readers in a particular time and place, with a particular group of people (set up as pseudonymous dramatis personae), all who will hopefully tell us something about ourselves in the end.
Metaphysics Is a Piece of Cake
...time is not natural: it is a social product. A year might be the duration that has elapsed as the Earth circles the sun, but our planet’s orbital position tends to have little bearing on how I conduct myself as a person. However, a New Year’s Eve party? There you’ll see me reflecting, resolving, disclosing, mourning, celebrating, making amends, taking chances, jumping into new beginnings, and, above all, falling back into the same old patterns. Time is made knowable through the procession of meaningful events that we use to punctuate its abstract passage.
Reflections on Novel Writing in Anthropology
Ethnographers have long struggled with the nebulous in-between spaces of science on the one hand, and story-telling on the other. It was what my frustrated seminar professor described as the tension between “a world” and “the world” in the writing of ethnography. Are we, the researchers, tasked to be faithfully re-creating the world as it actually was during our fieldwork? Or are we simply weaving a fiction; complete with dramatis personae, compelling character arcs, and promises of redemption that exist purely in a world of our own perspectives? Are we following the clues to solve our case, or are we leading our audience down a path that was already drawn from the beginning? A little of both and neither?
A Memory of History or History of Memory? – A War Memorial ‘Simpson and His Donkey’
I remember when I was a little girl, I was fascinated with war memorials. Stone colossi towering over people, gravely staring into the infinite as if seeing something none living can see. Looking at these selfless men and women who exchanged their mortal lives for the immortality of memory made me wonder why certain people and events are chosen to be remembered, and others – to be forgotten.
A Nation of Mini-Me’s: Why White Nationalists Need to “Save the Children”
The “great replacement theory”, “white genocide”, and “demographic winter” are all pseudoscientific conspiracy theories that did not begin, nor will they end, with Tucker Carlson or other FOX News personalities. Rather, they represent a number of deeply held American beliefs that remain at the very core of everything you’ve read in the news recently about abortion bans, anti-immigrant legislation, and conflicts over teaching race and history in public schools.
Living with Long COVID: A Reflection
As a COVID long-hauler, I inhabit a liminal space of intractable uncertainty with regards to diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and prognosis. COVID infections have blurred the boundary between the two kingdoms of the well and the sick. A new biosocial identity has emerged from the collective experience of long Covid on a global scale, where we exist ‘betwixt and between’ yet belong to neither kingdom.
The Familiar Strange 