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Juneteenth (19 June) is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. In the spirit of this day, we are featuring an excerpt from “The triple-sidedness of “I can’t breathe”: The COVID-19 pandemic, enslavement, and agro-industrial capitalism” by Don Nonini (published in Focaal, Vol. 2021: Issue 89).
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”
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”
Courtney Work is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnology, National Chengchi University (Taiwan). She studied at Cornell University, and has published multiple papers on the intersections of religion, traditional practices, and the politics of land, global development, and climate change. She is the author of the forthcoming title Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia, a new volume in our Asian Anthropologies series.
Michael Meng and Adam R. Seipp
The writing of German history since 1945 has often, if not excessively, been shaped by critical and negative attitudes; or, as Baruch Spinoza would put it, by excessive fear and sadness in the face of human suffering. Ruination, mourning, absence, destruction, and failure are the leitmotifs of postwar German historiography. Amid this chorus of negativity, however, a few exceptions stand out. One of whom is our mentor, Konrad Jarausch, who over the past decade or so has written several books on Germany’s transformation into a rational democratic society––the very society that Spinoza suggests can achieve peace insofar as it frees people from the negative and divisive emotions of sadness and fear.
Continue reading “Freed from Fear and Sadness: The New Germany”