Thought Provokers
People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
In 2019, Joseph Stiglitz published “People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent.” The book covers a wide range of topics, largely on contemporary American policy while also highlighting their histories – and is overtly political (Trump comes up frequently, throughout). The author provides an analysis of the challenges as well as potential […]
Labor and Legality
I spent much of the summer looking for good ethnographies that would be suitable for first year undergraduate students – essentially a book that is not written for anthropologists, not heavy with theory, while still presenting the value that ethnography can offer. Gomberg-Munoz’s Labor and Legality (2011) fit that well. The book also provides insight […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Ethnography #Mexico #Migration #United States
Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine
de Waal, Alex. 2018: Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. Cambridge: Polity Press. 264 pp. $24.95. ISBN: 9781509524679 As available: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1464993419836552 Readers with an interest in the topic of famine will have frequently come across the name Alex de Waal throughout the past three decades. As a researcher, practitioner and advocate, de Waal has […]
Tags: #Alex De Waal #Ethiopia #Famine #Food Security #Mass Starvation
Ethiopia Engraved
When European travellers and writers came to Ethiopia before the age of photography, the made engravings of what they saw. Richard Pankhurst and Leila Ingrams collected these engravings, from 1540 to 1900, and published them in “Ethiopia Engraved: An Illustrated Catalogue of Engravings by Foreign Travellers from 1681 to 1900” (1988). The period following this […]
Tags: #Ethiopia #Ethiopia Engraved #History #Leila Ingrams #Pankhurst
Knowledge and Global Power
When I picked up “Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South” (2019), by Collyer, Connell, Maia and Morrell, I had high expectations. We need more in-depth analyses of how knowledge is produced, disseminated, validated and valued, particularly from the perspective of the Global South. It begins: “The former imperial powers of the […]
Tags: #Academia #Global South #Knowledge #Knowledge Production #Publishing
Ethiopia Photographed (1867-1935)
Richard Pankhurst and Denis Gerard are well known to Ethiopians and those interested in Ethiopia. One of the many publications in their names, is “Ethiopia Photographed: Historic Photographs of the Country and its People Taken between 1967 and 1935” (1996). The book has a brief historical introduction, and it followed by hundreds of photographs spread […]
Tags: #Denis Gerard #Ethiopia #History #Pankhurst #Photography
Growing Up in New Guinea – Margaret Mead
Margaret Mean is one of Anthropology’s focal early theorists. She has penned a number of books covering issues of childhood, gender, age and aging and sexuality. Amongst her fieldwork, she worked in New Guinea, during the period between WWI and WWII. The resulting book, “Growing Up in New Guinea” (1930) explores the educational process of […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Ethnographic #Ethnography #Growing Up in New Guinea #Margaret Mead
The Challenges of Drought
Ethiopia and its people struggle with food insecurity and recurring drought. What are the pathways to overcome these challenges? Access to land, the establishment of justice, the creation of cooperatives, agricultural input distribution, farmer training, environmental rehabilitation, irrigation infrastructure, building institutional capacity, creating effective governmental structures. These are components of the narrative we hear in […]
Two Arabs, A Berber and a Jew
Writing anthropological and ethnographic research can be quite challenging. The experiences are so rich that one may not know where to begin and where to end. In “Two Arabs, A Berber and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco” (2016), Lawrence Rosen provides an exemplary model for anyone grappling with these questions. To do so, he […]
Tags: #Anthropology #Islam #Lawrence Rosen #Morocco #Muslims
Rural Development Options
In 1990, Ethiopia was on the cusp of a major transition. The military government was on the way out and the EPRDF would come to power in the following year. It was in this year that “Ethiopia: Options for Rural Development” (1990), edited by Siegfried Pausewang, Fantu Cheru, Stefan Brune and Estetu Chole, was published. […]
Tags: #Development Studies #Ethiopia #Fantu Cheru #Rural Development #Siegfried Pausewang
About me
Logan Cochrane
Associate Professor at HBKU in the College of Public Policy. He is an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at Hawassa University (Institute for Policy and Development Research). Over the last fifteen years, he has worked in Afghanistan, Benin, Burundi, Canada, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Logan acts as a consultant for governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations, seeking to create bridges between research and practice.
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