On January 1, 2016, the Baltimore Sun marked the end of the city's "deadli-est year." In 2015, Baltimore counted 344 homicides-nearly 90 percent of them caused by gun violence.1 The historically high number of deaths drew condemnation nationwide. Decrying that "too many continue to die on our streets," the mayor fired the chief of police. Maryland's governor called the murde…
This collective volume celebrates that 75 years ago the foundation was laid for the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The contributions to this volume exemplify the evolution of the academic disciplines of anthropology and development studies at Radboud University in the course of its history. Radboud University itself celebrate…
This is a book about The Disabled Child. It is not a book about any particular child or any particular disability, but a book about a figure I call The Dis-abled Child that emerges from the stories parents tell about their real-life children with disabilities. This is a book about an expectation, an idea, and an ideal that is produced and reproduced in stories parents …
These three alarming vignettes might appear, on one level, to reflect quite dif-ferent concerns: abortion, surrogacy, and adoption. But a closer look reveals some deeper connections, and it is these deeper, more insidious connections that this collection of essays explores: the asymmetrically distributed privilege and precarity within which reproductive choices are made, the confluence of diffe…
After decades of skills policy centred on getting as many young people as possible through higher education, there is now an emerging shortage of skilled workers in many countries. The question of how to achieve the right balance between types of work in a society is a question which transcends national borders and, as this book will show, one that requires …
“How is it between us?” is the question I would like to consider as the most fundamental of all ethical questions. I will take this consideration up through an engagement with a debate concerning transcendence and the transcendental that has arisen recently within the anthropology of ethics1—though what is at stake within this debate has repercussions for the disciplin…
In 1975, a reviewer for the Toronto Sun reported on a live performance by Lata Mangeshkar, then the reigning playback voice of Hindi cinema, during her first North American tour. “Lata Mangeshkar is what is known as a ‘playback singer,’” he wrote. “That is the vocalist who replaces the voice of the leading lady [in a film] whenever she breaks into song. …
auguration, on 28 November 2011, I received this text message2 calling on the people to make Zinder a “ghost town”. The message was one of several circulated prior to the inauguration which named oil-related grievances, attacked the incumbent govern-ment of new President Mahamadou Issoufou (since March 2011), and called on the population to resist and fight.When Papa arrived …
I have a confession. I’m not a gamer. Or so I thought. I was having thisconversation with a good colleague of mine, sat outside the train stationin a surprisingly sunny Sheffield: “Really” he said, looking puzzled, “noteven something on your phone?”“oh well, now you come to mention it.....”.That was the point I realised that perhaps I was a gamer after all, justa particular sort. …
y first trip to Amsterdam was for a couple of days in the autumn of 2003. A second-year student at the University of Georgia, I was studying abroad at Oxford, just a few hours by air from Amsterdam. Years before, I had learned how to smoke marijuana and enjoy its effects, probably too much so.1 For stoners like my former self, visiting Amsterdam’s coffeeshops is a recreational pi…