Palladium

For as long as any of us have been alive, we have seen an ever-changing series of popular predictions for how industrial technology is about to destroy civilization. Nuclear war was supposed to kill everyone, whether by literally exploding all of civilization or by irradiating the world’s surface or by nuclear winter. Toxic pollution and resource depletion were supposed to le...

One of the things I’ve heard Americans say again and again is that “we don’t have an accent”—a statement which suggests that our culture is homogenous and nondescript. This is a profoundly annoying and difficult thing for an anthropologist to parcel given that with each culture you have to figure out its underlying logical structure. This is something that cultures overtly sh...