It is both impressive and depressing how frequently scholars of color are Othered by anthropology. For many, the tales of alienation are too numerous to count; we are made to feel strange so reg...
In this time of fake news and alternative facts coming from the White House as well as some media, what can we as scholars contribute to challenge this? In this time of amplified racist hate and ...
https://savageminds.org/2017/09/18/resources-for-understanding-race-after-charlottesville/
Just when you think that The Bell Curve has been thoroughly debunked, it rears its ugly head…again. It’s like a weed that just won’t go away–and that should give us something to think abo...
https://savageminds.org/2017/04/04/this-week-in-anthropological-rebuttals-to-charles-murray/
Various bits of social media began vibrating rapidly recently when it was discovered that white supremacists had fooled Google into providing inaccurate information about Boas and cultural relati...
https://savageminds.org/2017/03/06/editing-wikipedia-writing-letters-to-the-new-york-times/
There’s a certain trope that has been going around for years, and it has hit a peak these days as many people express their collective shock and surprise at recent events here in the USA. The n...
https://savageminds.org/2016/11/23/the-social-role-of-anthropologys-racist-uncle/
For some people, the election that just took place might seem like just another choice between the lesser of two evils. One more election that we all learn to deal with, but that won’t fundamen...
https://savageminds.org/2016/11/12/anthropology-november9-race-denial-work/
A strong media push by the Sage Foundation has put Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s book The Asian American Achievement Paradox into the public sphere in the past couple of days, garnering an op...
At this point the debate about Alice Goffman’s book On The Run looks something like this: Goffman writes a successful ethnography. Journalists are peeved that Goffman followed social scienc...
Notes and Queries in Anthropology
In librarian parlance entities, whether books or journal articles or whatever, can be said to have an “aboutness.” And as a cataloger its my job to describe that aboutness with subject headin...
https://savageminds.org/2015/06/16/thinking-about-race-like-a-cataloger/
Pierre Bourdieu, in his famous critique of structuralism from Outline of a Theory of Practice, says: only a virtuoso with a perfect command of his “art of living” can play on all the resource...
https://savageminds.org/2015/06/16/the-limits-of-the-virtuoso/
This is Part III of an interview with Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, who is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her 2011 book, Labor and Legality, explores the work and so...
I think there are two very different ways of talking about race and racism which frequently get conflated, and I think this confusion is responsible for a lot of wasted energy in various online d...
https://savageminds.org/2015/02/09/race-is-a-technology-and-so-is-gender/
This is Part II of an interview with Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, who is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her 2011 book, Labor and Legality, explores the work and soc...
Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her 2011 book, Labor and Legality, explores the work and social lives of undocumented busboys in Chicag...