Dear Li,
In a previous book forum, Angela Garcia wrote her response to Lisa Stevenson’s Life Beyond Itself in the form of a letter. I loved her approach for the way it revealed the sociality that often nurtures our work. Letters also involve a special kind of intimacy, as Laurence Ralph shows in his recent book—that of one …
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; …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
Cabinets of curiosity are at the historical heart of scientific and medical enterprises. They remind us that the modern effort to know, and perhaps understand, always departs from the same shore: collection. Such cabinets were described as curiosities (“wunder”) because they also elicited affects of amusement, surprise, amazement, desire, and disgust. For example, the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, …
This article is part of the following series: From the Somatosphere archives
This article is part of: Transcriptions
Jarrett Zigon. “HIV Is God’s Blessing”: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 280 pages. $24.95.
Reviewed by Tomas Matza (Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University)
Anthropologists have taken a keen interest in the way that the collapse of the Soviet Union has impacted the everyday lives of the people living in that region. The fact …