Africa is a different place from how it is often portrayed in the popular media. Thanks to sound economic policies in many countries over the past decade or so, Africa has been able to withstand this crisis much better than has been the case in the past. The fact that the crisis hit Africa anyway does not… Read More »
Check out this brilliant post by Ryan Anderson, an anthropology grad student.
1. The black damsel in dating distress 2. A Berlin cafe establishes a no child section 3. What other countries think of the United States of America 4. A credible scenario for World War III?
In a beautifully written piece over at the New York Review of Books blog, Tony Judt discusses what identity means in a cosmopolitan world. H/T Aleksandra Gadzala For a further discussion/problematisation of the concept see ‘Beyond “Identity”‘, by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper. Ungated pdf version available here.
While the Nigerian Civil War devastated Igbo business activities across Nigeria, and precipitated a mass return of Igbo migrants to their home area, it also laid the foundation for a consolidation and rapid development of Igbo informal enterprise, which has had integrative rather than divisive social and economic consequences for Nigeria as a whole. Operating… Read More »
If you count the book sales on Amazon and plot them according to frequency, the curve hugs the vertical and horizontal axes, indicating a few very large numbers (the blockbusters) and many small ones (the ‘long tail’ of books like yours and mine). This is a typical manifestation of something called a ‘power-law’ distribution. This… Read More »
Our hunch is that its place [culture in development] has already shifted since we wrote Seeing Culture Everywhere. On the one hand, there is China and David Brooks. On the other, there is a new trend in “development thinking” around the World Bank and elsewhere (like Narayan. Pritchett and Kapoor’s Moving out of Poverty and Jessica… Read More »
Sola Odunfa, Nigerian journalist, writes in an article on the BBC website: I often ask myself: Should Nigeria break up, how many countries will it produce? I am not aware that any three of its more than 200 ethnic groups sincerely agree so much as to come together in a peaceful independent state. There is… Read More »
“Recycling Textile Technologies” A workshop to be held at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, on June 14th 2010 This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers who work on textile recycling, including anthropologists, geographers, historians, political economists, designers, and materials scientists. This is with a view to develop a research agenda that explores innovation… Read More »
… is the title of a review of anthropologists Jean and Jean Comaroff’s book, Ethnicity, INC. An excerpt of the review: From the very beginning of their study, the authors ask us to take a step back and stop thinking about ethnicity only as a political tool. Rather, we should extend new attributes and opportunities… Read More »