In 2017, the recently elected Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales launched a nutrition campaign called Crecer Sano: Niñez con futuro (Grow Healthy: Childhood with a Future). Backed by a World Bank loan for $100 million, his program was based on a widely accepted idea that financial investment in children’s early life yields a long-term payback—it’s a good return on investment, to …
This year, we at Somatosphere are trying an experiment in academic mentorship. Two of our regular contributors and editorial collaborative members, Emily Yates-Doerr and Matthew Wolf-Meyer, are hosting a panel designed to ease early-career anthropologists (broadly defined) into academic publishing. The idea is to bring together scholars interested in analyzing cognition or cognitive-related practices ethnographically (see the CFP below), with …
This article is part of: Thinking with dementia → Daily life
Babe, my grandpa, was born on the kitchen tiles of a small Seattle home. His dad, whose own grandpa had run a seedy downtown brothel, would disappear and reappear throughout his life. But Babe was not like the men who came before him. He spent his youth delivering newspapers and parking cars to support his mother, went to war when …
As members of Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, we have been following the unfolding crisis surrounding Hau with profound concern (Agro 2018, Flaherty 2018). As others have noted, this crisis has revealed multiple structural issues that deserve intense engagement beyond the specifics of the individual case: open-access (OA), digital scholarship and publication, yes, but also academic power, precarity, and vulnerability; …
Plastic Bodies is an extraordinary monograph, produced from a decade of careful engagement with techniques of place-making, othering, and ethnographic theory. Anthropology at its very best, this is work that makes evident the plasticity of the binary. Through gripping stories of the self in the other, the here in the there, nature in artifice, and the beauty in mess, readers …
This article is part of: The Ethnographic Case
This entry concludes the series “The Ethnographic Case” which ran every other Monday between June 2015 and July 2016. The bookCase, which holds 27 cases, can be accessed here.
One day, early on in the series, we received two submissions. Their similar anatomy was striking. Each featured a medical waiting room. Someone entered the space with a gift …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology