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
Climate Preconstruction in Coastal Africa
The climate crisis is upon us. Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heatwaves and fires are increasingly wreaking
Letter from Gaza with a response from New York
The Institute of Women’s Studies (IWS) at Birzeit University in Palestine has launched “Women’s Testimonies from Gaza”, a project aiming
On an abyssal edge: a streak of blood, and absence
The murdered is carried on the shoulders. In haste, a cadaver shrouded in white is slipped into an indoor mass
How South Africa rescued humanity (and International Law) at the International Court of Justice
Since the creation of the United Nations, and in line with the civilizing mission’s rhetoric used to justify colonialism, racist