In the antipodean winter of 2018, I vividly remember sitting in my friend Eli Elinoff’s office on the 10th floor of Murphy building (which houses the anthropology programme) on Victoria University’s campus in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Eli, like me, was far from ‘home,’ and we talked about recent news from home – about aging parents taking care of …
This article is part of the following series: Book forum
Two decades ago, Lawrence Cohen’s No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things challenged the ways in which we think about aging and senility, kinship and its undoing, medicine and the nation, language and the possibilities of ethnographic writing, and what it means to do the anthropology of South Asia. But its 300-odd pages contain much …
This article is part of the following series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Bubble, bubble, Mum, Mum, give bubble!
The task of keeping a two-year-old busy at home during a national ‘Level 4’ lockdown to prevent the spread of global virus, involves a lot of play with bubbles. We have a bubble machine that runs soap water and our kid can run through it for 15 minutes, enough time for me to reply …
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; …