Category: Magazine Articles

From Household Budgets to Saving the Planet

Published in Gods & Radicals Press: It’s good to save, right? For example, it is wise and responsible as to ‘save for a rainy day’. If you have the means, it may well be prudent to do so. It makes sense to increase your income in comparison to your outgoings, how much you earn in…
The Blue Roots of Green Crisis

Published in God’s & Radicals Press. Some people collect data about carbon-dioxide concentrations and surface temperatures and observe the phenomenon of global warming. Other people spy on tigers and observe that they are endangered. Numerous scientific papers and reports have been published about such observations. In the process of writing up these documents, reporting on…
Europeans and Omicron: The Children of Hercules

Published in Gods & Radicals Press: This pandemic isn’t a random mutation of Nature. It’s a living product of imperial imagination In Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, I combed through 12,000 years of evidence on how people have related to ‘Nature’. Notably, a key shift toward a binary between people and ‘Nature’ was the ‘othering’…
Living with our (pre) histories

Once upon a time, there were simple hunter gatherers who survived day-to-day. Then someone invented agriculture and humans became farmers. Farming allowed humans to become sedentary, store grains and accumulate a surplus. This enabled humans to urbanise, build cities and create states. Civilisation was born. Rulers were also born to protect this social evolution of…
Our Lives Pivot on Origin Stories – Reading Circle

I used to wonder why superhero franchises spend so much time on origin stories. The focus on an individual’s trauma at the expense of attending to the social context. The time spent on flashbacks. Entire movies given over to the dawn of a hero. The answer I think is that these origin stories create a…
Containing Covid19 in the UK

Published at Mutual Interest Media. This was written before testing became more widely available in the UK when it mattered In collaboration with Laura Burke and Charles Beach Back in March as SARS-CoV-2 was integrating itself into the population of the UK, we – a couple of anthropologists – put our heads together to evaluate…
David Graeber: The Uncertainty of Being Human

Published in Gods & Radicals Press. A couple of weeks ago I was wondering: is there anyone outside of family and friends I would really miss if they died? In the sense that I would feel painfully adrift. Like finding a void where a guiding star had been. The first person I thought of was…
Death to the Intelligent Designer

Published in Gods & Radicals Press Did you ever play the popular 90s computer game ‘Lemmings’? It involved little anthropomorphized lemming creatures endlessly born onto your computer screen. Your job as the computer player was to use the limited options available to command the Lemmings to build bridges, parachutes and use other tools and infrastructures.…
Don’t Shoot the Messenger! Invasive species and halting biodiversity loss

Published in Gods & Radicals Press. Halting biodiversity loss is demanded by XR alongside other climate movements. But who decides what halts biodiversity loss? Most of these movements directly address established governance actors. At best XR proposes legally binding citizen assemblies informed by expert knowledge. So who is going to hear these demands in these…
Fieldnotes: Hunting in Northern Cyprus

Published at Allegra Laboratory. November 2015; I proceeded ten metres behind Ertan Abi for much of the morning, a place in which I was not directly within the firing line but could also observe acutely what was going on. Before proceeding from where we disembarked from his vehicle, everyone had confirmed and asked each other in short…