Journal Blog
With the destruction of Gaza by Israel under way and the humanitarian situation in the occupied Palestinian territories worsening day by day, a recurrent question is raised in mainstream media, TV shows and many academic circles: Is Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on October 7 proportionate or not? Some say it is. Others say …
On Thursday evening October 26, EU member states finally agreed to a formal declaration calling for ‘humanitarian corridors and pauses’ of the shelling in Gaza. The declaration also expressed concerns for the ‘deteriorating humanitarian situation.’ While some have celebrated this move as a display of European unity and care for Palestinian lives, other have criticised …
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 …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. “The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there”, Gandalf noted turning his glance towards the moonlit window. “You’ll have a tale or two to tell of your own when you come back”, he …
Continue reading “‘I’ve seen things …’ and other pleasures of war”
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. Traditional war practices, such as killing are not easily linked with sexual intimacies in war. The image of a soldier is that of a rough-ridding macho-man driven by the desire to kill characterised by bigotry. While this …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. There has been significant scholarly interest in the militarised and enclaved spaces of international intervention and war(Chandrasekaran, 2010; Fisher, 2017; Weigand and Andersson, 2019). Afghanistan’s “kabbuble”, Baghdad’s ‘Emerald City’, or Mogadishu’s airport ‘green zone’, are among the …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. War and waring are extremely playful events. Warriors playfully lighten the burden of brutalities that either their anticipation hunts them or they are exposed to in combats. However, warriors’ playfulness is considered intensely transgressive fun by civilians …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. The experience of military violence during the German ISAF operation has not only been essentially new to German society and the armed forces but also and particularly to the Bundeswehr soldiers. For the first time since the …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. Yugoslav historiography counted seven major Axis military operations undertaken against the Yugoslav partisan forces during the Second World War. Each of the offensives had as its goal elimination of the partisan resistance and the pacification of the Yugoslav countries. …
This blog post is part of the Experience of War conference, March 24, 2023, funded by the WARFUN project. Soldiers participate in wars for various reasons, some of which are historically, politically and culturally contingent, and others shaped by individual circumstances and dispositions. While research on the U.S. and U.K. militaries has often highlighted soldiers’ desires …