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Labor and Legality

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

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Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine

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

Thought Provokers
Ethiopia Engraved

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

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Knowledge and Global Power

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

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Ethiopia Photographed (1867-1935)

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

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Growing Up in New Guinea – Margaret Mead

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

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