Happy Holidays!
This year, 2020. … the less we speak of it, the better, right? Still, it needs to be said that: In the face of…
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Jihad, universalism, and the Left: A conversation with Darryl Li
Since its publication in 2019, Darryl Li’s The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press) has been the focus…
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Casting Out the Disabled and Ill Immigrant: The Legacies of Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901
Collectively, immigration policies function to perform national sovereignty by reinforcing the division between citizen and migrant, usually conflated with ‘native’ and ‘outsider.’ While the…
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Escape, Exposure, and Life on the Pacific Crest Trail
An act of walking into the wilderness implies an act of walking out of somewhere or something. The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which extends…
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On unsolicited nostalgia and Tinder frustrations
‘I’ve been here before’ – the feeling of the present being firmly rooted in the past can be intense and disorienting. It is difficult…
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A Possible Anthropology with Anand Pandian
Anand Pandian speaks to Allegra editor Ian M. Cook about his latest book A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times (Duke, 2019). Special guests…
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Heeding anthropological mottos in the study of law
When: 11 December 2020 / 2-3.30 pm CET Link: https://zoom.us/j/93210372616… ID: 93210372616 Password: 4JzWZ6 Abstract Even though I have been based in a school…
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The Ethnographer’s Catch 22
Did I hear a knock at my door? I stopped what I was doing, listening more attentively. South Africa had been on lockdown…
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Idols that ring hollow
For the occasion of this year’s Durga Puja festival in Kolkata, the likeness of a migrant woman was chosen for a much-celebrated idol of…
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Today’s Totalitarian Menace
Wherever one looks across the globe today democracy is in decline and trends towards what was once called “totalitarianism” are on the rise. In…
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Connected by extension – How paying connects old regimes and new isolations
The situation in Myanmar during and shortly after my fieldwork in March 2020 reminded me of the uncertainty of knowledge and call for…
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Me
In the depths of the Depression, two girls were born to Jewish parents in New York City. One, in 1933, was Ruth Bader, later…
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