News
Rosalind Morris's film, We are Zama Zama, has been named an official selection and finalist in the competition for 'Best Feature Documentary' at the Annual Copenhagen Film Festival. The film made its debut at the ENCOUNTERS International Documentary Film Festival in June. For more on the film, visit the website.
Danielle Carr, doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, has published a review essay in The Nation, entitled 'A Virus without a World: The Politics of Science Writing.' Read Danielle's thoughtful response to Carl Zimmer's new book, Planet of Viruses, here.
Considering writing a senior thesis? Look at what some of our great anthropology majors are doing now.
Columbia University Press has awarded its 2021 Distinguished Book Award to Partha Chatterjee for I Am The People. The collection of essays was originally presented as a sequence of lectures in the context of the Department's annual Ruth Benedict Lectures Series, in 2018. They were the second in the annual series.
The prize was recognized at a ceremony in Low Library, October 27, and Lila Abu-Lughod, representing Anthropology and Timothy Mitchell representing MESAAS, received it on Partha Chatterjee's behalf since he was unable to get an appointment for a visa application to return to the U.S. in time.
Eleni Myrivil, who obtained her PhD from Columbia's Department of Anthropology in 2004, is at the forefront of efforts to mitigate climate-related heat crises. Appointed as Chief Heat Officer in Athens in 2021, she was elected to the Athens City Council in 2014 and served as a deputy mayor from 2017 to 2019, focusing on the city’s resilience amid climate change.
For more on Eleni Myrivili's path-breaking efforts to bring anthropology to bear on the most pressing problems of the times in Greece, read the article in the New York Times.
The General Anthropology Division (GAD) has long supported innovative scholarship that transcends the seemingly all too rigid boundaries that divide the various fields of anthropology.
The department is thrilled to announce that Omer Shah has been named an Early Career Fellow by the Department of Anthropology, and that Hadeel Assali is the recipient of an ACLS postdoctoral fellowship as part of the "Emerging Voices on Environmental Justice" program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Read about Xenia Cherkaev (Anthropology PhD, 2015) and Elena Tipikina's two-sided book about one-sided surfaces. It has two beginnings and no end – and it's bilingual, in English and Russian, comprised of two parallel texts, neither of which is a translation of the other. Published by Borey-Art, St. Petersburg and the Museum of Organic Culture, Kolomna. The story appears on our Alumni: Beyond Columbia page as part of this website's section devoted to Graduate Student Life.
Partha Chatterjee's new book, 'The Truths and Lies of Nationalism, as narrated by Charvak,' has just been published in India by Black Swan. It will be released in the US, in March 2022, by SUNY press. From the back cover: "While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript. On a closer look, that indeed turned out to be the case…"
From the nomination: 'Why do so many nation states struggle to accommodate minorities? Mahmood Mamdani argues in Neither Settler Nor Native that the colonial “define and rule” attitude towards ethnic or religious minorities lives on in postcolonial states. Such politicisation of identity (you could even call it identity politics) often leads to extreme violence. Mamdani includes the US as a settler-colonial nation due to its treatment of Native Americans, who still do not have full constitutional protections. Some hope, Mamdani thinks, lies in the post-apartheid South African model.'
Rosalind Morris's documentary film, 'We are Zama Zama,' will have its world premiere at the ENCOUNTERS International Film Festival in South Africa, June 10 - 21. 'This is a great honor,' says Morris. 'ENCOUNTERS is one of the premiere documentary festivals in the world. Equally important is the fact that the film, which is of and about lives in South Africa, will appear in that country first.'
The festival is geoblocked, which means only people resident in Africa can obtain tickets.
In this interview conducted by Lila Abu-Lughod on October 17, 2020, Palestinian artist Rana Bishara discusses the three artworks that appear on the covers of volume 41 of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, as well as numerous other multidisciplinary and multimedia artworks she has made and exhibited from the 1990s to the present, focusing specifically on art as a form of political activism.
See the full article here, which is open to read until July.
Marilyn J. Ivy's article, 'This is (Not) a Gallows' appeared in the most recent 'Editor's Forum' of Cultural Anthropology.
Please see the following for both Undergraduate and Graduate course descriptions for Fall 2021 in the Anthropology Department.
Maria José de Abreu has written a piece for Society of Cultural Anthropology, entitled "Rabble-Rousers Without Exception." To read the piece, please follow the link here.