Category: General

“It’s like… ‘You’re welcome. Love, science’”: On Doing Critical Anthropology when the Enterprise is Under Attack

Next month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first ever working draft of our species’ entire genetic code. It was a major milestone in the Human Genome Project (HGP), the ambitious international effort which began in 1990 and which remains one of the largest collaborative biology projects in history. The announcement was the subject of much fanfare, making the front page of the New York Times and the cover of TIME (headline: “Cracking the Code!”). In an offical ceremony marking the occasion, President Bill Clinton was joined in the East Room of the White House by NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, the ambassadors of France, Germany, and Japan, and, via satellite, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The President proudly summarized its top-line finding: race was indeed skin-deep, a trivial outer difference belying a profound biological sameness. (read more...)

Laughter and Dreaming of Wins in Recovery

“Hannah, roll a six!,” Mahad, Alliance Wellness recovery program resident, pleaded as the game of Ludo intensified. Ludo, a strategic and competitive board game, was popular among Somali American men, such as Mahad, who were in the process of renegotiating their dependency on substance use. These men also held vivid memories of playing Ludo in Somalia and neighboring countries that they moved through as they sought asylum from Somalia’s civil war. I first heard about Ludo when I began fieldwork at Alliance Wellness, a recovery program for an East African communities that was developed out of community need in Bloomington, Minnesota. With increasing rates of opioid related addiction and deaths among Somali Americans, Yussuf Shafie recognized a need for culturally appropriate therapy and recovery programs for Somali Americans in Minnesota (Feshir 2019). (read more...)

Data Centers, Transnational Collaborations, and the Differing Meanings of Connection

Data centers are in the news. You have probably read or heard about them. It’s as if with the snap of a finger the news cycle has changed, and the latest trend is to focus on the need to develop infrastructure to power data centers, in the US at least, where one of us is writing from. A data center is a facility where data is processed or stored, or where computer power is redistributed, where “the cloud touches the ground” (Johnson 2023: 6-7). By focusing on the history of the data centers we research, our goal in this piece is to demonstrate how they are built on top of existing infrastructures, and do not exist in thin air. (read more...)

From Bin to Bank: Recycling Household Waste in Urban Indonesia

Every Thursday at 9 o’ clock in the morning, housewives from a residential neighborhood on the outskirt of Jakarta gather at their usual spot at the “Love Earth” waste bank (bank sampah). It is a small lot in the corner with a humble setup with a hut, a shed, and sacks of recyclables. Whoever arrives first begins sweeping the area and wiping the table, often damp from the last night’s rain and scattered with fallen leaves. One after the other, more women trickle in, each carrying a bag of recyclable waste from their households on foot, on motorcycles, or, more rarely, in cars. At times, items left by their neighbors—bundles of empty water gallons, piles of flattened cardboard boxes, or bottles of used cooking oil—wait to be weighed and sorted. The volume and the types of recyclables gathered each week may vary; yet food, tea, and chatter are invariably shared among those present. (read more...)

Who Will Protect Andean Potatoes in the Near Future? Uncertainties About the Next Generation of Native Potato Conservationists

This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. Rene Gomez was one of the most renowned potato curators at the International Potato Center (CIP, Centro Internacional de la Papa in Spanish). Potato curators provide reliable advice in safeguarding the CIP collection, carrying out key activities such as the acquisition, registration, cleaning, storage, regeneration, and distribution of seeds and other planting materials. Gomez’s 35-year journey with CIP left a remarkable legacy among potato conservation experts. I met him in February 2023 during my dissertation field work in Peru. I spent many hours listening to his life story, during which I learned how his work was connected to CIP’s history and research, about his dedication to his work, and about his concern for the future of potato curation. “We are an endangered species, us taxonomists and curators,” he mentioned. Gomez was worried about the precarity of the field, particularly the lack of young people who would continue his work after his retirement. (read more...)

Following Primates

Each day weaves its own tale, and no two days unfold alike in the Mandal Valley. The Mandal Valley is like any central Himalayan valley, rich and teeming with small villages, its air soaked in the mystical scent of its culture and tradition. The landscape of the valley is a gradient of human agricultural activity merging into the surrounding forest. It is the southern entry point to the adjacent Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary (Srivastava et al., 2020). Every morning, the villagers in this valley would take up their daily chores. A script was followed. Cleaning up the cowshed and tending to the cows, walking to the forest to collect wood, dry grass, and fodder, heading to the village market or Gopeshwar, the nearest town, or working the agricultural fields. In Mandal valley, there were a handful of activities likely to happen as the day unfolded. And yet, every day would unfold (read more...)

The Limits of Identity: How Race and Gender Constructs in Biometric Technology Narrow Who We Are

This article provides a brief look into the ways identity can be constrained with regard to biometric technology.  It discusses technological limitations where biometric identification systems may fail to represent a person’s full identity, including bias in recognition as well as the inability to capture complex and changing human characteristics.  It also touches on political dimensions, where legal systems and governments may place limits on how identity is recognized and documented, particularly in the case of gender recognition. (read more...)