Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article is an exploratory study of the history of carnival as a popular festival in late colonial Lourenço Marques (contemporary Maputo), the capital of Mozambique. Drawing on archival sources and on oral history interviews, it explores the carniv…
Over the long term, Africans socially constructed time and gender through struggle and invention, the stuff of history. But to get at this broad salience we must toggle between scales of region and period, among different kinds of evidence, and among t…
This special issue seeks to problematize the way that time and gender – and their relationship to each other – is conceptualized in prevailing historical narratives about African pasts. Often we take these notions for granted in our practices of resear…
Editorial to the September issue of 2023.
Jacinta, deaf from birth, chose to give birth to her own baby at home without her hearing aids. Fu-Yu assisted and took photos of the process. This is a Photo Essay about alternative possibilities to biomedical childbirth. We share our experience throu…
Over the last several decades, epidemics of chronic kidney disease of unknown aetiology (CKDu) have appeared in Mesoamerica, North Africa, and South Asia. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a CKDu-affected village in Sri Lanka, I explore…
L’European Journal of Turkish Studies republie, sous la forme de deux numéros « Varia », un ensemble d’articles parus « isolément » (stand-alone articles) au cours des dix premi…
L’European Journal of Turkish Studies republie, sous la forme de deux numéros « Varia », un ensemble d’articles parus « isolément » (stand-alone articles) au cours des dix premi…
Introduction to the Special Section ‘The Long Shadow of Fake Drugs and the Social Lives of Fake-ness’, guest edited by Sarah Hodges and Julia Hornberger.
Life with dementia urgently needs to be reimagined. The dominant social imaginary of dementia perpetuates a story in which people with dementia cannot have a life that is ‘good’. In this Position Piece we draw from eight letters written for the Dementi…
In Tanzania, as COVID-19 emerged and became a pandemic, many claims about the fakeness of virus-related news began to appear in the digital media. These claims, or what I refer to as ‘fake-talk’, served to expose and discredit ostensibly false informat…
In this article, I look at Indian pharma ‘dossiers’—the bundles of paperwork that testify to pharmaceutical quality and adherence to regulatory standards—and how they illustrate a wider and ongoing shift from a paradigm of drug safety to one of drug se…
Editor’s foreword Think pieces Some refinements of the interpretation of the spell against samauna disease from the London Medical Papyrus Alexander Akulov In the London Medical papyrus there are two spells in the Kaftiw/Minoan language. The spell against samauna disease is a spell in the Kaftiw/Minoan language: this spell comes immediately after the spell that […]
In a world seemingly awash with fakes—or at least accusations of fake-ness—it is not only difficult to discern what is ‘real’ but also to know what to make of such a proliferation of worries about fakes. In this article, a manifesto of sorts for the Sp…
Parents of a child diagnosed with a rare inherited metabolic disease (IMD) are required to actively participate in their child’s treatment, by managing the risk of metabolic crisis and ensuring that they adhere to a stringent diet. In this Research Art…
Body modifications such as tattoo, scarification and body suspension represent not only aesthetic interventions, they can also be social practices with which to challenge and transcend the body’s limits, operating on the perception of wellbeing and mou…
Intrigued by geneticists’ framing of new gene names as somehow devoid of meaning, I set out to explore how patients and families make sense of naming practices in the field of genomic medicine. The aim for ever-more precise disease categorisation has r…
L’European Journal of Turkish Studies republie, sous la forme de deux numéros « Varia », un ensemble d’articles parus « isolément » (stand-alone articles) au cours des dix premi…
L’European Journal of Turkish Studies republie, sous la forme de deux numéros « Varia », un ensemble d’articles parus « isolément » (stand-alone articles) au cours des dix premi…
In this article we comparatively explore experiences and notions of retirement in two ethnographic sites of Milan, Italy, and Yaoundé, Cameroon, by paying attention to how grandparenting is perceived and practiced in relation to kinship roles and respo…
Taking a comparative approach to two field sites – Shanghai in China and Dublin in Ireland – this paper explores the relationship between ageing, home, and the impact of the smartphone on domestic space. Although Shanghai and Dublin are extremely diver…
Successful aging and active aging policies frame independence in old age as an expectation and a virtue in opposition to the once desired reciprocity between generations. Due to digitalization trends worldwide, mastering digital skills becomes another …
This article offers a comparative ethnographic study of ageing as both category and experience. Drawing on simultaneous 16-month ethnographies conducted as part of the ASSA project, we focus on how ageing is being re-defined in eight contexts around th…
This introduction provides a basic description of the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing (ASSA) project, including the project’s range of field sites, methods, and ethics. I compare this project with prior comparative studies in the anthropol…
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