Back to the Present

What do anthropologists mean when we talk about the present? In 2024 we may think we know. Even as we have turned to haunting pasts and menacing futures, our methodological [...]

We enter the kumina circle seeking fellowship, communication, and guidance, shuffling counter-clockwise to the heartbeat and tack-a-tack rhythm of the drums toward a transcendence of Western logics of personhood and [...]

In anthropology, recent debates on precarity have helped theorize a diversity of human experiences, highlighting their nuances and complexities. However, recent discussions have often tended to foreground the novelty of [...]

Every Wednesday during my first winter in Jerusalem, I met with Umm Atef, Umm Abed, and Umm Ali to visit the places of water in the village of Silwan, their [...]

“Revolutions are consummately about time” (Scott 2014, 15); and, as Hannah Arendt argued—they are “the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of a beginning” [...]

When I wrote this sentence, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, had just had his fingerprints taken. The pundits on the news channels are both salivating at [...]

How can revolution have a consequential presence without being recast as the prequel to—or a break from—the liberal democratic present? In post-revolutionary Tunisia, the democratic present became a key site [...]

Each student in the cohort of 15 students I met at Phoenix High1 in central London navigated five different first or preferred languages during the first workshop and throughout our [...]

A banner drop in downtown Yangon, Myanmar following the coup of February 2021. Photo via Chulletin. On February 19, 2021, eighteen days after Myanmar’s military seized power in [...]

On March 11, 2011, a mega-earthquake struck Japan. Unforeseen high tsunami waves engulfed entire towns along the Northeastern coastline, black liquid washing away houses, cars, and bodies in a heartbreaking [...]