General | Platypus

Searching for Microbes with No Name: The Labour of Sampling and the Making of Scientific Value

 Victor Secco  July 7, 2026

It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s sampling site on the north coast of Belgium. We sat in silence in the car, part of the early-morning mood and a sign of how tired and overworked we felt most days for the last month. Outside the car’s window urban and green fields landscapes alternate on our way. As we reached closer to our destination the song “A horse with no name” by George Martin started playing on the radio. Slowly the lead-scientist in the field started humming the song and then singing along quietly, as we all followed her humming, the mood inside the car completely changed. We were ready for another long day out in the elements—thorny bushes, light rain, cold wind—collecting soil, sand, water and air in search of microbes with no name. (read more...)

Collaborating with Precarity: Anthropology on Crip Time

 Seon Shim  July 2, 2026

이 글은 한글로도 제공되고 있습니다.

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Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short-term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish on institutional time threaten our ability to do sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, a tension that raises a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short-term, and unequal academic landscape? (read more...)

Between Cure and Care: Governing Bodies in Türkiye’s Hybrid Medical Landscape

 Şafak Kılıçtepe, Emine Onculer Yayalar  June 24, 2026

Bu içerik türkçe olarak da mevcuttur.

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What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. Officially regulated since 2014, it now encompasses everything from acupuncture and cupping to phytotherapy and leech therapy, all performed legally only by licensed physicians in certified facilities. On paper, it sounds like a tidy administrative solution. In the field, it turned out to be anything but. We began to understand this early, in a clinic in Ankara, when one of the physicians who had helped draft the original regulations leaned back in his chair and said: “GETAT is the best name.” The term, he explained, had not emerged locally, but was shaped through years of visits to countries known for their traditional medicine systems: China, India, Thailand, Germany. “We looked at how they classify it,” he continued. “What counts as traditional? What counts as complementary, holistic or integrative? You cannot just translate these things. You have to adapt them.” The controversy over the label itself signaled historical and sociological divisions around medical knowledge and expertise. (read more...)

Delivering in Delhi: Ethnographic Reflections on Working with the Food Delivery Platform

 Vageesh Vishnoi  June 22, 2026

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It was 38 degree Celsius, another day of scorching heat in Delhi in the month of June when I decided to go out and book my first order for a popular food delivery platform. It came after weeks of procrastinating to work as a delivery rider following a growing body of research on platform mediated labour where researchers worked as riders to learn about the latent work realities of the platforms (Timko & van Melik, 2021). Moments before the commencement of work, I was enjoying myself cruising on the roads of South Delhi on my rented e-bike, when my excursion was immediately interrupted by the urgency-inducing notification informing me about the imminent order. As I accepted the order, I was directed to the ‘Bikkgane Biriyani’, a cloud kitchen in South Delhi for collecting the parcel. (read more...)

Noclipping into the Contemporary: Anthropology in the Backrooms

 Aaron Neiman, Erin Coleman  June 17, 2026

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Released theatrically late last month, Backrooms, the latest horror film from A24, is a bona fide blockbuster. The film grossed $81 million domestically and $118 million internationally in its first three days, making it by far the studio’s most successful opening weekend, more than tripling its previous record set by 2024’s Civil War. Within its first week, users on the film-based social media site Letterboxd had collectively logged over half a million viewings. (read more...)

A Progress Without People: Six Decades of Living Next to India’s First Nuclear Power Plant

 Prerna Gupta  June 15, 2026

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In October 2022, just as the monsoon was ending, Kalpana pulled me and my field partner, Sandeep, into her house in the rehabilitated village of Popharan, one of the five villages we visited to understand people’s experiences of living next to India’s first commercial nuclear power plant. Popharan was relocated in 2002 to make room for Units 3 and 4 of the Tarapur Atomic Power Station (TAPS). These rehabilitated villages flood severely every monsoon. Kalpana showed us the marks that water had left all across her house; her furniture was entirely ruined. During the worst weeks of the rains, she told us, her sons had to carry her and her grandchildren out of the house to keep them from drowning. Virendra Patil, who has spent two decades advocating for the rehabilitated villagers, walked us past rows and rows of houses abandoned due to their poor construction, each crack in their walls overtaken by plants and shrubs that grow at an astonishing rate in the wet coastal climate of Maharashtra. (read more...)

Viral Afterlives: Toponymy of Zoonotic Ruptures in West Malaysia

 Nga Shi Yeu, Nga Shi Yeu  June 12, 2026

本文亦提供繁體中文版。

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In early 2026, as reports of the Nipah virus outbreak in West Bengal surfaced, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control responded with a swift escalation of prevention measures, designating the pathogen as a Category V notifiable infectious disease. In an island nation where the pig-farming industry remains a cornerstone of both the economy and cultural diet, this classification represents the highest tier of state concern, mobilizing an apparatus of epidemiological surveillance and media speculation. Yet, as these institutional gears turned, the discourse spilt over into the digital sphere. Online, the virus animated civic narratives inflected by biosecurity anxiety and the fraught moral politics of naming. (read more...)

Cartographing the Brazilian Manosphere: Toponymic Aliases in a Public Forum

 Leonardo Thibau  June 10, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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Canal do Búfalo was a prominent Brazilian online community in the 2010s, composed almost entirely of men. In this forum, members symbolically identify themselves as “buffaloes,” drawing inspiration from a story popularized by figures such as the American motivational speaker and entrepreneur Rory Vaden (2020). This metaphor concerns how buffaloes and cows respond to storms. While cows tend to move away from the storm, prolonging their suffering, buffaloes move toward it, crossing through more quickly. In the context of this community, this image embodies an attitude toward adversity: confronting problems head-on, with resistance, courage, and a willingness to endure difficult situations rather than avoid them. (read more...)