On a Wednesday morning the primary healthcare clinic in a small rural South African town is busy.1 A line of caregivers, mostly women, wait with babies and small children for routine check-ups and immunisations. In the adjacent waiting room patients sit or stand outside a door marked ‘Chronic Clinic’. A nurse is taking blood pressure readings and recording the numbe…
Fifty years after her first fieldwork with Ju/'hoan San hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Megan Biesele has written this exceptional memoir based on personal journals she wrote at the time. The treasure trove of vivid learning experiences and nightly ponderings she found has led to a memoir of rare value to anthropology students and academics as well as to general readers. Her experiences focus …
On a recent visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, I lingered a little while longer than usual in my favorite exhibit: the Sant Ocean Hall (see oppo-site page). Wandering with no telos in mind, I let myself bask before bioluminescent beings, tremble in awe at the improbability of the extremophiles, and gaze up like a supplicant at the model of Phoenix, a North Atlantic…
The world is facing a biodiversity crisis and around 1 million animal and plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction (IPBES, 2019). Trees are highly visible in most landscapes and are excellent biodiversity indicators. They are ecologically, culturally and economically of vital importance and yet there have been surprising gaps in knowledge of the diversity, distribution, abun…
Perhaps the best way to approach this volume on Buddhist statecraft is with the following observation in mind: the proper functioning of the state is a Buddhist concern. Throughout the history of the tradition, Buddhist have engaged questions of statecraft in their creation and propagation of texts, doctrines, rituals, institutions, and visual cultures. Political actors have, in turn, employed …
Few visitors to art museums walk in expecting to find thirtyplus middle school students acting as their own docents, leading their peers through discussions of what they see and wonder about in works of art from abstract expressionism to wood turn-ings, to sculptures by Rodin. But for close to ten years, we led seventh and eighth grade students through patterned closeviewing and dialogical …