Anthropology News

When I, as a new graduate student, first walked into Renato’s office in Fall 1983, I could not help noticing that it was full of cardboard boxes with file folders and books. I did not know it at the time, but the boxes were a manifestation of Renato’s rebirth as he engaged academics after a tragic loss. Renato invited me to read through the materials in the boxes that would f...

Hitesh was twenty years old when he received a thick envelope at his door in a western Indian city. It was not like the official kinds from the bank but looked like a long letter from an old friend. He checked the address, the postcode, the house number. All his. But something was unfamiliar on the cover—the name to which it was addressed. “Madhavi.” Who was Madhavi? Hitesh t...

Editor’s Note: This piece is the third in SAFN’s 2026 Anthropology News series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven’t already, check out the previous installments by Janita Van Dyk

I am a PhD student who studies language, culture, and processes of youth marginalization and belonging in London schools. In this article, I reflect on how ethnographic methods have shaped my engagement with grassroots education networks, drawing on two summers of preliminary linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East London from 2024-2026. Before turning to research, I sp...

My “news” is at least two-hundred-years old. However, as current news can only mean something in relation to context and history, we can use my old news to place the recent attack on Anthropology in the “Vanderbilt Report” within a longer historical arc. Looking squarely at the early formation of anthropology one must admit that there is no golden age to return to in which sc...