Parting with the Class of 2024 has been the hardest in my teaching career. As I woke up, the dark gray sky seemed on the verge of tears....

It was a typical day in Oregon in mid-May: drizzles, clouds, five minutes of sunshine, drizzles again. I don’t know how many of us...

Human-Sized Heros in Anime ULTRAMAN (2019) and Japan Sinks (2021) A persistent cold that waylaid me over the winter holiday break was a...

Missing Photographs Speak Loudly of My Family Legacy. In her recently published book Shadow Traces, Elena Tajima Creef examines the...

Arlie Hochschild's call to "scale the empathy wall" gives us a lot to think about in the current state of political discord in the United...

For the long stretch of this fall, the weather was unusually warm even for the inland region of Southern California. Day after day the...

My sister's self-inflicted death symbolizes the cost of "Bubble" economic boom My sister chose to end her in the late December, 2012 - so...

"Okay, Boomer" - are we really sure about that? In one of the many holiday gatherings that happen around the university near the end of...

My hometown is dying - literally - as memory of modernity withers away. It occurred to me all of a sudden. I was standing at the busy...

This has been an oddly quiet Presidential election year. No doubt much of it has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic. Politics feed on what...

Read the transcript of my podcast presented at the online conference, "Raising Our Voices," American Anthropological Association, November, 2020. Anthropology is everyone’s one-hit wonder. We’ve all had the same conversation, at a wedding reception, a holiday dinner table, a cashier’s line at the grocery store. As soon as people find out that we teach anthropology, they start reminiscing about that one anthropology class they took in college. “It was soo interesting,” they gu

Colleges, professors struggle to find the best way to teach in uncertain times. Online or not online – that is the existential question...

James Clifford and George Marcus ushered in an epoch in cultural anthropology, when they published a co-edited volume Writing Culture in 1986. In a nut shell, Clifford and Marcus challenged the positioning of anthropology in academia as “science” based strictly on empirical data. Instead, they sought to redefine it as an interpretive endeavor, in which the author-anthropologists are not the detached and objective observer (characterization that was typical throughout the firs

It's 6:30am and the sun is just coming up. The park looks deserted in this chilly, wet morning, except for a grey Toyota in the parking lot with two surf boards strapped on the roof and clothes draped over windows -- a tell-tale sign that someone spent the night there. I zip up my down jacket and pull out a push broom from the back of my car. As I look around the courts, I notice the early morning light is reflected on the giant puddles that form after each rain. I drop my