In response to Jeffrey Gettleman’s NYTimes article “Future Kenya Port Could Mar Pristine Land“:
I lived in a traditional house in Lamu for a bit and also did a home-stay with a Muslim man’s “second wife” and I think gettleman is romanticising this ‘culturally pristine’ site where socially sanctioned (informal) slavery still exists, Muslim women hardly [...]
Footnotes
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Lamu
Check out my new post “Fun is Political in a Safe-Haven for Anti-Chavistas, Catholics and Witches” at Blue-Eyed Devil: Witnessing Life Under Chavez.
Also on Blue-Eyed Devil, you’ll find:
“What 1 Pen and 2 Power Cords Cost Us”
and
“My first week in Caracas“
Notice
I have created a blog only pertaining to my time spent in Venezuela. All subsequent posts will be accessible here
Notes from Caracas
After having returned from 5 months of fieldwork in rural Poland where I encountered the horrors of post-socialist transition (still underway), I am excited to start my year living in Venezuela where Chavez has been unveiling the road to socialism for the past 11 years. I hope to be (not the first, but one nonetheless) a [...]
Communism Still Matters
This is in response to Slate article: Anne Applebaum: 1989 And All That (special thanks to Dr. Frank Popper at Rutgers and Princeton universities for pointing it out to me).
Applebaum is correct: Communism still matters in Eastern Europe (and in the West) but I disagree that there really ought to be a controversy taking place as [...]
Open-Air Tannery in Fez
A beehive-like, pungent, sheep and lamb skin tannery (with poor working conditions) in the centre of the windy streets of Old Town Fez. The entire production process was basically laid out on worker homes’ rooftops.
The Last Gospodarsz and his Horse
During the course of my ethnographic fieldwork in northwest Poland, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. W. (and Basia the pregnant horse who) happens to be the last gospodarsz (or self-sufficient small-scale farmer) who still performs free services for the families who gave away their inventories and land back to the Communist government in [...]
American Flag From Norway
While embarking on a fieldwork-related errand one day, I asked Mrs. S., a local mushroom-picking expert, if she knew what that head scarf represented. She quite frankly admitted that she had no idea but that it was a remittance hand-me-down from her family of migrant workers who worked on large private farms in the Norwegian [...]
Potato Thieves
This is a field which prior to 1989 was a 100+ hectare PGR (a state farm). These PGRs had their workers living on the state property. After 1989, the PGRs became privatised but the PGR workers stayed on the property (some purchased their PGR homes, while others are still paying “rent” to the government Agencja [...]
Dassanech Haircut
It feels great to have been part of a group who partook in excavating the oldest human footprints in modern anatomy (see National Geographic article here) under Dr. Harris. During the course of the paleo-anthropological dig in Illeret, Kenya with the Koobi Fora Field School (with the support of the National Museums of Kenya), we were lucky [...]