This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars and artists to discuss Todd Meyers’s All That Was Not Her (Duke 2022). A profoundly introspective and original book, All That Was Not Her traces a relationship between an anthropologist and his interlocutor that equally verges on friendship and antagonism. Eschewing well-trodden anthropological approaches which focus on identity or suffering, Meyers delves into …
This article is part of the following series: Ask-Me-Almost-Anything (AMAA): Centering Student Engagement with Ethnographic Monographs
Questions developed by the members of CU Denver’s ANTH4600/5600, S2021: Kaylynn Aiona, Delilah Chavarria, Darcy Copeland, Keaton Green, Ari Jones, Caitlin Konchan, Chris Kuelling, Kuba Kwiecinski, Rosa Lawrence, Destinee Murray, Alexa Powell, Benin Rahma, George Sanchez, Emma Vittetoe, Renee Watson, and Abby Welch
Instructor’s note: Reading “Inequalities of Aging” during an ongoing pandemic and struggles for racial justice lent Elana …
This article is part of the following series: The Age of COVID-19
Survival. Perhaps the word carries more weight today than ever. We are all engaged in this exercise of collective survival. Many of us have found ourselves forced to become accustomed to the unwelcome novelty of the burden of extreme uncertainty. And it is only now that we can understand what it means to live in vulnerability. We now found ourselves …
In Nicholas Bartlett’s meditative and poignant ethnography about former heroin users in Gejiu, China, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Post-Reform China (University of California Press 2020), he writes of arriving too late to the scene of the epidemic. Heroin use was widespread in this tin mining region in the 1980s, had peaked in the 1990s, and was …
Emily Ng’s A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (University of California Press 2020) is like a fine wine—complex, compelling, and exquisitely crafted. While I can only savor a few of its offerings in this short review, I hope to entice a proper read. And following the provocation for this forum, I will try to …
Felicity Aulino’s Rituals of Care: Karmic Politics in an Aging Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2019) intricately traces the habituated practices of care in Thailand. Following family caregivers, volunteers, healthcare workers, and the elderly, she examines how indigenous theories of the mind, self, and morality shape quotidian actions of care and how these theories and actions delimit political possibilities for change. …