More specifically concerning: anthropology
twigs
15 October 2003, around 18.25.
Prisoners in Bangladesh pleading for their lives in a news photograph from the London Daily Express, 20.xii.1971.
pedant
4 December 2003, around 10.05.
One of the strangest footnotes I have ever written: On the knee as a seat of power, see Deonna (1939); on the knee as a gathering place for seminal fluids, see Onians (1951): p. 173–86. This lends credence to the theory that one channels the powers beyond when writing, because really, I don’t think I […]
inquiry (8)
22 January 2004, around 9.33.
These people have excellent sculptors and professional designers. Their pipes, tomahawks, sticks, spoons carved out of horn, etc., embellish our ethnographic collections. —Marcel Mauss (2004.11, p. 43f.)
… of undarkness
3 September 2007, around 21.52.
The adequacy of the cultural categories of, in this case, university England, to provide a frame of intelligible reasonings, creditable values, and familiar motivations for such oddities as poison oracles, ghost marriages, blood feuds, and cucumber sacrifices recommends those categories as of somehow more than parochial importance. Whatever personal reasons E-P may have had for […]
Crambe repetita (18)
15 December 2010, around 11.09.
Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing.
bridging the gap
22 June 2021, around 10.56.
This a juxtaposition of two quotations about the philosophical necessity for cognitive leaps, from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Henri Bergson.