Tag: anthropology

AUTHOR INTERVIEW(part 1): Anna Odland Portisch on A MAGPIE’S TALE

ANNA ODLAND PORTISCH has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Brunel University. In her new book A Magpie’s Tale: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia she recounts her time living with a Kazakh family in a small village.

It’s fascinating (“Can you imagine a stranger showing up on your doorstep and asking to stay for a year?”) and highly evocative (“It was so cold that night, the next morning the driver had to bring the engine back to life by lighting a small fire underneath the car”) and it gave us so much to discuss that we’ve split our discussion into two parts.

Anna’s story begins here and Part Two will follow very soon.

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Neriko Musha Doerr discusses “Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus”

Neriko Musha Doerr is Assistant Professor at Ramapo College. Her publications include Transforming Study Abroad: A Handbook (Berghahn, 2020), The Global Education Effect and Japan: Constructing New Borders and Identification Practices (Routledge, 2020), The Romance of Crossing Borders: Studying and Volunteering Abroad (Berghahn, 2017, with Hannah Taïeb), and Meaningful Inconsistencies (Berghahn 2009).

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Talking Ritual with Robbie Davis-Floyd

Robbie Davis-Floyd is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology. She is the author of many books including Ways of Knowing about Birth: Mothers, Midwives, Medicine, and Birth Activism (2018, Waveland) and Birth as an American Rite of Passage (1992,2003, 2022). Her new book, co-authored with Charles D. Laughlin, is Ritual: What It Is, How It Works, and Why.

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Disasters, Risks, Responses, and Recovery

“As disasters are increasing in number and intensity, so too will be the need for reconstruction…”

So reads a line from the blurb of Making Things Happen, Jane Murphy Thomas’ account of post-earthquake reconstruction in Pakistan. And, sadly, how prescient it was, for her book was published just weeks before the same nation experienced a new disaster, the terrible flooding that left more than 10% of it underwater.

Here we have gathered our most recent volumes on the subject of disaster in its many awful forms (earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis, nuclear accidents, chemical spills, and more), and on our approaches to risk management, and the many challenges of post-disaster reconstruction.

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