Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
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…
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, …
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…
To document an inclusive and comprehensive queer history means to write about queer femininity and queer femmes. Depending on their perceived outward form, queer femmes are often the most hypervisible and overtly queer, yet at other juncture…
Gender, as broadly construed by Bantu-speaking peoples, is not fixed in the same way that it is in the West. This kind of gender flexibility is counter to binary gender concepts which classify gender into two separate, opposite, and rigid fo…
While Kenyan colonial subjects became citizens at independence, women were excluded from state resources, social services, and full political enfranchisement. This was neither the decolonizing future they had been promised nor the one they had envision…
This article explores the cultural significance of initiation rites among the Northern Sotho in South Africa, with a particular focus on the blending of symbolic gender motifs in rock art. Scholars on Northern Sotho rock art have associated …
This contribution to the special issue develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological …
This article takes its point of departure in the author’s research experience in matrilineal northern Mozambique in the early 1980s as an employee of the National Women’s Organization, the OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana). Confronted …
This article explores how multiple gendered times are brought to bear on the present in Yaawo oral history-telling about female leaders and gendered power in a more distant past. The dominant research narratives about gender and power in Afr…
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…
Las nuevas tecnologías en el campo audiovisual han permitido que proliferen películas basadas en las correspondencias fílmicas. Estas ponen en relación algo más que a dos remitentes. Las imágenes en movimiento y su sonido correspondiente viajan de un l…
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…