Sean McEnroe recalls his childhood experiences with firearms, and explains how these memories, both troubling and nostalgic, inform his research on magical practices and military technology on colonial frontiers.
Category: Behind the Scenes
If you are curious about the special labor that goes into producing each new issue of CSSH, or about the unseen deployments of theory and method that go into our individual essays, this feature will provide a regularly updated tour of our extended work space.
Folding and Collaborating
Robert P. Weller and Keping Wu describe their collaborative research and writing process, sharing how they came to folding as an analytic framework and envisioning how it might be further applied.
Opera and Anthropology: An Unexpected Conversation on Producing Knowledge about Others
Aeron O’Connor discusses opera as an object of anthropological enquiry and the subject of anthropological self-reflection.
The Double Act: Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke discuss the merits and surprises of collaborative research
Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke take us behind the scenes of their collaborative work as a textualist and anthropologist studying religious authority.
Certainty, doubt, and ethnographic knowledge production
Agnieszka Pasieka follows up with former fieldwork consultants (far-right activists in Italy), prompting reflection on the limits of ethnographic knowledge production.
From Thrift to Austerity
Catherine Alexander shares the initial fieldwork breakthroughs and subsequent scholarly pursuits that led to the nuanced understanding of thrift she presents in her CSSH essay, “The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate.”
Better late than never – and winding up better
Barbara Metcalf describes the frustrations and breakthroughs over nearly forty years that brought her to the conclusions in her 2022 CSSH article, “A Sovereign and Virtuous Body: The Competent Muslim Woman’s Guide to Health in Thanawi’s Bihishtī Zēwar(1905).”
Killing Heroes – How Martyrdom and Revenge Complicate the Relationship between History and Memory
On the 101st anniversary of Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial for the assassination of Talat Pasha, Alp Yenen calls for a post-heroic rethinking of history and memory to overcome the “martyr-avenger complex.”
“Feeling Under Pressure”: Realities of Sex, Love, and Dating in Urban China
Jean-Baptiste Pettier describes the central role of parents in the choosing of life partners in urban China, a surprising finding that altered his research trajectory.
Uncomparable, incomparable things
Courtney Bender’s recent CSSH article, Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse (63-4), reads like a detective story, with new mysteries on every page: an intriguing discovery in the archive, a forgotten painting by a famous artist within, an unsigned message in a foreign script on the cover. Here, the author discusses the analytic tool that helped her piece together and interpret…