Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt: On the importance of ambiguity in an authoritarian state
In 1931, an American newspaper competition asked its readers to submit the best use of the word denial in a […]
Waiting for ghosts
I am walking along a road on the outskirts of Leh town, in the Himalayan region of Ladakh. It is
Against making sense: Appreciating absurd roundabouts in Malaysian Borneo
In Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, I found a musical roundabout. Large loudspeakers turn this otherwise
The sound of the absurd: Learning to listen in the Emergency Room
It was a crowded, freezing Monday morning in late January, in the large university hospital in northern Italy where I
The folly of little kings
On Monday, May 25th, 2020, Cuba’s new president, Miguel Diaz-Canél, involuntarily found himself in the spotlight. Diaz-Canél had become the
War and its absurdities
When Nadja was evacuated from the bomb shelter in eastern Ukraine, she took her cheese with her. She took the
“Great job, mommy!” On the absurdity of teaching Ethiopian women to breastfeed
One scalding hot June day in 2014 in a remote village health post in North Shewa, Ethiopia, I attended an
Of rails and rubbish: critique and the absurdity of cleaning days
In January 2020, the Senegalese President Macky Sall announced a nation-wide ‘Cleaning Day’. Together with a ‘Zero waste’ campaign and followed
The violent face of bureaucracy
Whenever I meet Merule, a 42-year-old Nigerian citizen living undocumented in Milan, Italy, I am struck by the number of
Anthropology and absurdity: Introduction
Anthropology is often seen as the discipline that makes “the strange familiar and the familiar strange”. Here, however, we are