Journal Blog
Laura Nader, in a 2013 interview (De Lauri 2013)—the message of which is no less salient today—stated: “For me anthropology is the freest of scientific endeavors because it potentially does not stop at boundaries that interfere with the capacity of the mind for self-reflection. This is a moment for new syntheses in a world that …
Continue reading “Climate Change and Retreatist Anthropology”
Summary: Conversational artificial intelligence is often a form of storytelling, and underlying some of AI’s stories is an artificial ethos that could be insidious. I am a cultural anthropologist and I’ve been ruminating on the cultural impact of artificial intelligence. I recognize AI’s potential for increasing knowledge, productivity, and generating medical breakthroughs. There is no …
Introduction In 1980 I wrote a piece called “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women.” In it I posited that control over women in the West and East was accomplished by pointing the finger at the Other. See, say the Egyptian pundits, “the West controls women by taking away the family name in preference to …
Continue reading “Reproductive Rights and the Power of Comparison”
On Unsustainable Refugee Livelihoods and the Politics of Time in Humanitarian Governance. Estella Carpi with Amina al-Halabi[1] In this short article, in an attempt to question the politics of time that humanitarian governance implicitly rests upon when managing refugee lives, we question the contradiction residing in imposing long waits on refugees who are selected for …
Introduction November 2022, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I am sipping evening tea with Dario, an electrician from Ukraine, one of the 25 seafarers working on board a the liquified natural gas (LNG) carrier I have been living and conducting ethnographic fieldwork on for almost a month. During this time, I have …
In what ways can Laura Nader’s concept of “harmony ideology” (1990) help us shed light on an ongoing international legal dispute over genocide accusations? In her village ethnography from rural southern Mexico of the 1960s, Nader demonstrated that Talean Zapotec judges were “active in articulating a harmony model for dispute resolution” in order to prevent …
Continue reading “Harmony ideology at The Hague: Myanmar before the International Court of Justice”
The following interview was recorded at the House of Literature in Oslo on October 15, 2019. The interview has been transcribed by Gard Ringen Høibjerg (INN University College), and edited and amended for clarity by Sindre Bangstad, David Scott and Antonio De Lauri. Sindre: First of all, David, I am going to cite one of …
Continue reading “Illumination in Dark Times: David Scott on Stuart Hall”
In this blog post I would like to share my personal experiences of carrying out qualitative research in what contemporary scholars call the “Global South” (Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt) and the “Global North” (Australia and the United Kingdom). To convey my message clearly, I adopt the classical political geography of “South” and “North” with …
Negli ultimi quindici anni, le politiche del lavoro in Bosnia-Erzegovina hanno conosciuto un processo di umanitarizzazione. Con ciò mi riferisco al crescente utilizzo di sentimenti morali nelle rivendicazioni politiche dei lavoratori, in particolare l’uso delle emozioni che dirigono la nostra attenzione alla sofferenza degli altri e ci fanno desiderare di porvi rimedio (Fassin 2012: 1). …
When I met Margaret Mead in the 1970s I felt like I was in the presence of a superstar. Here was an anthropologist with an international reputation who was willing to put her career on the line by criticizing the war in Vietnam, supporting the campus protests of university students, and promoting the rights of …
Continue reading “Public Anthropology: Engaging Social Issues in the Modern World”