Last week in my ANTH 300 class, we watched “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” a talk given by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who heads up Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography program. I found the section on the “Numa Numa” video phenomenon, in which Wesch calls the original video’s star, Gary Brolsma, “the first guy on […]

In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai examines “the complex nesting of imaginative appropriations that are involved in the construction of agency in a deterritorialized world” (1996:61). Following Appadurai, I argue that in analyzing The Pussycat Dolls’ reworking of “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire,” it is too simplistic to write it off as a bastardization of […]

In “Culture, Globalization, Mediation,” William Mazzarella traces the effects of globalization on anthropology to a shift in the 1990s that initially placed the onus of representing locality back on the informant. This later prompted a greater need for reflexivity, both on the part of the informant and—significantly for Mazzarella—the ethnographer (Mazzarella 2004). Mazzarella aligns this […]

In “Alms Dealers,” which exposes the potential of humanitarian aid to cater conflict, Philip Gourevitch asks, “Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress?” (2010:105) When reflecting on the media’s coverage of the ongoing cholera epidemic in Haiti, we must similarly consider whether the end result is […]