Settler Atmospherics

Settler Atmospherics

This essay is part of an online supplement to the Openings collection on “Chemo-Ethnography,” which was edited by Nicholas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey and featured... More

Reflections on Ethnographic Writing Today

Reflections on Ethnographic Writing Today

Serving as the jury for this year’s Gregory Bateson Book Prize gave the four of us a remarkable opportunity to take the pulse of the discipline. It provided a r... More

Executive Disorder: Living the Ban in Seattle

Executive Disorder: Living the Ban in Seattle

When I first met Rami, I could tell that he was overwhelmed. For the last few months, he and his staff at the Iraqi Community Center of Washington (ICCW) have b... More

Race-ing Fargo

Race-ing Fargo

On July 25, 2017, what started as a parking dispute in Fargo, North Dakota turned into a verbal altercation between Amber Hensley, a white woman from the small ... More

Activist Mobilities and the Viacrucis Migrant Caravan

Activist Mobilities and the Viacrucis Migrant Caravan

As we arrive at the first checkpoint in Huehuetan, Chiapas, everyone seems to hold their breath, uncertain of how the authorities are going to respond when a gr... More

Fieldnote as Political Weapon: James Comey’s Ethnographic Turn?

Fieldnote as Political Weapon: James Comey’s Ethnographic Turn?

Watching the testimony of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey live on television, I came to realize—one more time and with politic... More

Race and the Good Liberal

Race and the Good Liberal

The black man is perfect, cried James Baldwin. Surely he knew the pitch of his prose. Those like me—the middlebrow intellectual, proud reader of Black thought—t... More

Guiding Lines

Guiding Lines

The author guidelines for Postmodern Culture, by its own account one of the first scholarly journals to be published on the Internet, includes the following not... More

Reflections on a Multimodal Experiment: On the Golden Snail Opera

Reflections on a Multimodal Experiment: On the Golden Snail Opera

At a snail’s pace . . . how long can we humans live that way—or if not live, at least look at a patch of silty ground under the water of a rice paddy? There’s a... More

The Banality of the Anthropocene

The Banality of the Anthropocene

I want to propose an Anthropocene territorialization and a subject-making project in which anthropologists might want to engage. The territory of which I write ... More