In juli 2017 was het eindelijk zover. Na maandenlang hard werken was dit het moment om onze masterscripties in te leveren. Ik herinner het mij nog alsof het gisteren was. Al voor openingstijd stond ik zenuwachtig voor de deur van de printshop om mijn scriptie te laten printen. Toen ik naar de afdeling liep hield […]
Weaving the world through storytelling
‘So what is it that you do, as an anthropologist?’ A question that I, as a young aspiring anthropologist, still frequently struggle to answer. I don’t know what to say because so many things come to my mind that I don’t know where to start. I sense a similar feeling when somebody asks me why […]
The Environmentalist
The changes that I have applied in my daily life over the past years in order to contribute to a healthier environment, and that I have seen so many others in my surroundings make too, made me wonder about ‘our’ position in the current climate debate. With us, I mean people privileged enough to have […]
Parliament of things and enactment of third entities: object-subject/subject-object encounters from Cuban urban gardens to United States’ robotic labs
ABSTRACT Things/objects/materials/nonhumans are integral components of everyday material ecology of humans. The nonhuman elements contribute to sociality, socialization and configuration of political subjectivities. We explore the dynamics of subject-object relationships via ethnographies of urban gardens and robotic labs. We trace the dynamics of man-plant relationships in urban gardens of Cuba and engineer-humanoid relationships in the […]
Book review: Organized Violence After Civil War—The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America
Organized violence after civil war—the geography of recruitment in Latin America, by Sarah Zukerman Daly, Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 315 pp., £ 20.99 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-107-56683-5, (hardback) ISBN 978-1-107-12758-6 In her book, Organized Violence after Civil War, Sarah Zukerman Daly sheds light on the geographical aspects of postwar thinking in a way, previously neglected in […]
The Urban Gardens of Havana: Seeking Revolutionary Plants in Ideologized Spaces
This book relates stories of everyday life revolving around small-scale urban gardens in Central Havana and focusing particularly on that of Marcelo, a seventy-four-year-old revolutionary and gardener. The urban gardens are contested spaces: though monitored and controlled by Cuban state institutions, they also offer possibilities of crafting life in resistance. The experiences the authors narrate […]