By Vivienne Schröder For my master Anthropology at the VU Amsterdam, I am doing three months of fieldwork in San Francisco, where I am researching Tech Startup Culture. Through observations, informal talks and interviews like this one, I try to discover the daily practices and motivations of the humans behind the startups. My focus is mostly on the work-private life situation and the entanglement between humans and their business.
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By Alenka Mrakovčić We probably agree that language use is among the most taken-for-granted aspects of our daily lives. But what if within the language you use, you cannot find language uses that would represent you and your experience? How, then, does this impact the way you exist in the world? This was one of my main questions when I started working on my master thesis about trans experiences of language use.
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By Matthias Teeuwen Some time ago, I heard Tim Ingold deliver a lecture on the topic of light. I wondered: what could an anthropologist possibly have to say about light? Isn’t light more of a natural scientific thing to study?
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© Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy By Georgette Veerhuis It was around 10AM on Friday 19 January 2018 when Dolores suddenly rushed downstairs. ‘The Netherlands has gone mad!’ she yelled as she ran out…
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By Marina de Regt.
“Hodeidah is empty, Marina, there is no one there anymore”, says Noura to me this morning, in a short telephone conversation that is repeatedly interrupted because of the bad connection. Noura moved to Sana’a a week ago, fleeing the horrendous violence that has exploded in the city of Hodeidah since Thursday 14 June, the day before the start of Eid Al-Fitr. On that day the Saudi Led Coalition, mainly consisting of mercenaries and ground troops of the United Arab Emirates army, soldiers of the Yemeni National Army and Hiraak al-Tihama started the long planned attack on Hodeidah, Yemen’s main port on the Red Sea. In the past six months the United Nations and many humanitarian organizations have asked the Saudi-Led Coalition not to attack Hodeidah because 90 per cent of Yemen’s import, including most humanitarian aid goes through its port, but their calls have been to no avail. An attack on Hodeidah does not only lead to hundreds of thousands of displaced people who will flee the city, but also to a dramatic increase of famine and death in the country as a whole. Why is the international community unable or unwilling to prevent this from happening? And why do we hear so little about this humanitarian disaster in the Western media?
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By Herbert Ploegman Originally attributed to Winston Churchill, the statement “never waste a good crisis” has become an aforism that, by now, has been appropriated by many voices. The expression carries several layers, all of which contribute to its perceived versatility. Applying the statement to a research field in contemporary Greece may seem ironic or cynical, given the state of ‘crisis’ the country has gone through (or is currently under). Nevertheless, I feel confident enough to do this without too many scrupules. As an anthropologist having spent almost a year in Greece throughout the past few years, I believe that sincerely unpacking it in relation to the context of Greece would lead to remarkable insights about the country that many of us don’t have in Western Europe.
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By Jane M. Ferguson
This financial speculation essay acknowledges the inspiration of the Dick Jensen version of the song, “Try a Little Tenderness,” in its principal guiding pun; it is a suggested pairing to savour while reading.
Oh, they may be weary. You’ve reached the end of your stay at a small hotel in Myanmar. Your bags are packed; you’re ready to go. The manager at the desk, Ma Thuzar presents you a carefully handwritten invoice in English, with the total amount written at the bottom in US dollars. Fishing into your billfold, you retrieve your US cash and present the friendly woman with a $100 note. Ma Thuzar receives it in her right hand (her right forearm supported her left hand) and within the moment her polite expression transforms to a gaze of scrutiny. She holds the note three inches from her eagle eyes, verifying the year of issue and series. Her brow furrows as she visually traces the edges of the paper, studying its material integrity. Flipping the note over, her scanning eyes stop at a soybean-size ink stain in the lower right-hand corner. She flips the note again and sees that the stain has permeated both sides of it. Ma Thuzar places the banknote on the counter, “I cannot take this one. Do you have another one?”
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By Dominique van de Kamp During the pre-master of Social and Cultural Anthropology, we followed a course called “Core themes of Anthropology,” by Ton Salman. In our first class, he mentioned that every anthropologist would like to be a fly on the wall, almost invisible – however impossible *. From that moment on, we started calling ourselves the “Flies on the wall.”
Two years later, we handed in our theses and a great part of us went to celebrate together in Rome. There I wrote something about the flies on the wall, which turned out to be my notes of an engaged anthropologist:
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By Dominique van de Kamp UnDivided is a conference on how to explore diversity and promote inclusion in higher education, organised by a group of students from different universities in the Netherlands. This is a report of the day, which turned out to be the start of a promising dialogue between diversity commissions at different universities.
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