On 11 December 2006, Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, appeared on television dressed as a military commander and announced that he was ‘declaring war’ on organised...
According to the myths, Philip will bestow on his followers prosperity – endless kava roots – and freedom from sickness, old age and death. Godhood might bring about the same for a man in a family...
In 1957, in a remote village on the south coast of Bali, the young anthropologist Clifford Geertz was watching a cremation ceremony spill down a hillside when the crowd suddenly parted,...
Nathan Filer seems, by all accounts, a very nice man. Despite being given a six-figure advance from HarperCollins for his first novel, getting glowing reviews, winning the Costa Book Award and...
I return to the complete mystery of why some people are knocked flat and incapable by what seem like only the mildest of dysfunctional backgrounds, compared to others whose childhoods were devastated by...
In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or...
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives what Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster call a ‘fascinating short interpretation’ of Hamlet, from which they take their title. They...
Kimberly Theidon is an example of a new breed of anthropologist, one bearing some resemblance to a political activist. Her book is part of a series of studies in human rights but one of the...
The age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of shadows, seemed purpose built for me.
Trying to get the DSM right, in revision after revision, perpetuates the long-standing idea that, in our present state of knowledge, the recognised varieties of mental illness should neatly sort themselves...
The South African anthropologist Isak Niehaus has been interested in magic and its role in the organisation of social systems for 25 years. He has explored the workings of circumcision lodges,...
In late February I resigned in protest from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on two grounds. The first was the academy’s recruitment of anthropologists to do research designed to...
No one recovers from the sadomasochism of their childhood. We may not want to think of the relations between parents and children as power relations: indeed it may sound like a perversion of...
The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not,...
In a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the February 1927 issue of the Journal of Educational Research, the psychologist Guy Whipple announced that ‘the age-old perplexity of heredity has been...
A huddle of elderly people trudge through ankle-deep snow, pushing a wooden freight car along a barely visible set of tracks. The women are wrapped in headscarves, the men wear fur hats and thick...
Back when the Independent was young and thriving, the paper used to sponsor lunchtime ‘theatre conferences’ at the Edinburgh Festival in association with the Traverse. The description...
Ferdinand de Saussure, who died in 1913 at the age of 55, sowed the seeds of structuralist thought that first took root in linguistics, then effloresced throughout the 20th century in fields as...