In the spirit of Saint Valentine’s Day, celebrated February 14th, we’re pleased to feature an excerpt from “Dating Love: A History of The Love-Lock Custom,” Chapter 1 of Unlocking the Love-Lock: The History and Heritage of a Contemporary Custom by Ceri Houlbrook.
As a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, social arrangements allowing people to carry on despite the restrictions on mobility forced upon them became predominant across the world. From work (home office) and education (home schooling) to birthday parties, meetings, conferences and political campaigns (Zoom, etc.) diverse aspects of life were reoriented to adapt to the requirements of “social distancing” – although this term is a misnomer, since the actual challenge consists of overcoming physical distance. Even countries that are leaders in high-tech have had a hard time adjusting, since they had failed to consider the necessary widespread availability of equipment, training and creativity to remotely organize a community, its social life and leisure for long periods of time.
Continue reading “TRANSBORDER MEDIA SPACES: AYUUJK VIDEOMAKING BETWEEN MEXICO AND THE US”
Exchanging Objects and my broader research agenda considers how and why certain objects left museums, institutions so often associated with preservation, archiving, and keeping. It can be an odd thing, to go to a museum to intentionally study things that aren’t there. When the idea for this research was suggested to me by anthropologist Nancy Parezo, I admit I was first puzzled, then intrigued.
Continue reading “On Archival Access in a Pandemic”
On 17 May 1946, the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) was officially founded. Over the course of the following four decades, the studio produced nearly 700 feature films, as well as hundred of animation and documentary films. By the time it was finally privatised and sold following German reunification, DEFA was one of Europe’s largest film studios.
Continue reading “The 75th anniversary of the founding of the East German film studio DEFA”
Excerpted by Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography by Rolf Hosfeld, Translated from the German by Bernard Heise
Karl Marx was born May 5, 1818. As a young man he was a journalist and an editor for Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal-socialist newspaper published in Germany. The paper was previously edited by Adolf Friedrich Rutenberg, who favored opinionated feuilletons, before Marx replaced him and gained recognition for his practical, evidence-based approach.
Moses Hess was the first communist Karl Marx personally encountered. Both were from the Rhineland, came from bourgeois families, and were under the influence of Hegel’s philosophy. Marx made an “imposing impression” on Hess upon their first acquaintance in September 1841. After their initial encounter Hess had the sense of having met the “greatest, perhaps the only real philosopher now living,” one who would soon—Hess was referring here to the lecture halls of Bonn University—“draw upon him the eyes of Germany.”
Continue reading “Karl Marx as a Young Journalist”
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF ACHIEVEMENT
Edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta Moore
Vol. 2, Wyse Series in Social Anthropology
What happens when people “achieve”? Why do reactions to “achievement” vary so profoundly? And how might an anthropological study of achievement and its consequences allow us to develop a more nuanced model of the motivated agency that operates in the social world? These questions lie at the heart of this volume. Drawing on research from Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America, this collection develops an innovative framework for explaining achievement’s multiple effects—one which brings together cutting-edge theoretical insights into politics, psychology, ethics, materiality, aurality, embodiment, affect and narrative. In doing so, the volume advances a new agenda for the study of achievement within anthropology, emphasizing the significance of achievement as a moment of cultural invention, and the complexity of “the achiever” as a subject position.
Available in eBook and paperback
Love-locking, the attachment of a padlock to a public structure, is the forte of the traveler. Although not exclusively a tourist custom, it is a popular practice for people visiting a new place and wanting to leave their mark on it. The love-lock has become the inverted souvenir: left behind rather than taken away, but still a token of experience. And social media brims with photographs and videos of tourists locking their love on bridges and monuments – photos and videos that become the modern-day postcard, conveyed to family and friends back home.
Continue reading “Ceri Houlbrook: Love in the Time of Covid”
Mark-Anthony Falzon
My interest in, and love for, nature go back to my early childhood. There was something Victorian about the books I read on butterflies: they contained descriptions and beautiful illustrations of (British, usually) species, but they also taught you how to catch butterflies, kill them using potassium cyanide, and set them on mounting boards. I wondered why our local chemists would not supply me with potassium cyanide, and experimented with alternative methods. My butterfly collection became a source of mounting unease in my teens, when I joined two societies for nature and bird conservation. I realised that, while both were rooted in the same passion, collecting and conservation could be hard to reconcile. By the time I joined the Malta Ornithological Society (now Birdlife Malta), I knew which side I was on. I wrote angry missives to the press, joined street protests and did everything I could to thwart the murderous designs of Malta’s thousands of hunters.
Continue reading “Birds of Passage: Hunting and conservation in Malta”13 August 2020
Continue reading “A Taste for Oppression”Raul Hilberg’s path-breaking 1961 study The Destruction of the European Jews rightfully remains on the reading list of any serious student of the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Hilberg’s insistence on European Jews‘ alleged “almost complete lack of resistance” has been subjected to frequent scholarly criticism. He partially based this claim on a cursory reading of petitions: “Everywhere, the Jews pitted words against rifles” and “everywhere they lost.”
Continue reading “Do Petitions matter? Rethinking Jewish Petitioning during the Holocaust”