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In the concluding part of our discussion of her new book A Magpie’s Tale, Anna tells us about the family she stayed with for the best part of a year – with sometimes as many as ten people in their small, two-room house – and how dramatic economic and political changes drastically changed the lives of many Kazakh families in Mongolia.
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.
Continue reading “AUTHOR INTERVIEW(part 1): Anna Odland Portisch on A MAGPIE’S TALE”
Continue reading “Marcel Mauss, a gift to the social sciences”
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.