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.”

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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).”

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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…

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An Ilex Counterpoint

Christine Folch compares the trajectories of yerba mate and yaupon, stimulants she explores in her 2009 and 2021 CSSH essays, to understand why yaupon never took off.

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Death and Burial: The Affinity of Journalism and Ethnography

In this companion essay to his recent CSSH article, “Burying “Zik of Africa”: The Politics of Death and Cultural Crisis,” Wale Adebanwi discusses the insights revealed by returning as an anthropologist to events first explored as a journalist.

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“Battle of Agencies” Released

Ali Sipahi describes how the Gezi Park protests of 2013 transformed his thinking about the 1985 massacres of Armenians in Harput, Turkey, analyzed in his recent CSSH essay, “Deception and Violence in the Ottoman Empire: The People’s Theory of Crowd Behavior during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895.”

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