By Isaac Gagne | Comparisons are invidious. I encountered this statement early in my anthropological training when reading classic ethnographies that were written within the framework of evolutionary anthropology.
By Shehab Ismail. The city of Cairo was surrounded by human-made mounds composed of rubbish and debris that had been piling up on the same spots for centuries. This blog post narrates how the author encountered the rubbish mounds during his research on the history of sanitation in Cairo. It explores two materials that were commonly found in the city’s dumpsters: archeological finds and organic fertilizers.
By Sarah El Bulbeisi. Since 1947, more than 700,000 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in what is now Israel, and have become refugees. As a traumatic experience, the Nakba has become a crucial part of the collective memory and the identities of the Palestinians.
Interview with Samuli Schielke. Samuli Schielke’s latest book, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (AUC Press, 2020), is a vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states. It investigates the imagination that migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home.
By Simon Rowedder | If we remember that those we study are also studying us as well as themselves, and that they are all engaged in the human exercise of understanding the play of cultural difference and similarity, we may be able to contribute to making comparison the fruitful, congenial, and open-ended conversation that the discipline’s ethical as well as intellectual commitments demand.
By James D Sidaway and Franz Waldenberger | How and why do we compare in the social sciences and humanities? These are enduring questions. On 2nd and 3rd December 2019, a group of scholars affiliated with the Max Weber Research Group at the National University of Singapore and researchers from the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) met at the DIJ in Tokyo to compare notes on comparisons.
Nevin Şahin is a research associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. She completed her PhD in Sociology in 2016 upon her research on music and power among performers of Mevlevi music,...
By Anindita Majumdar Once identified as an emerging transnational industry, the commercial surrogacy arrangement in India was more than mere commerce. It also involved the birth of kin and relationships...
On 11th and 12th April 2019, the workshop “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East” will take place in Berlin. It is organized...
This article is part of the TRAFO series Emerging Topics. Insights from ‘Behind the Scenes’. Today, we put the spotlight on the Exploratory Workshop “Exploring Networks of Transnational Surrogacy”, which...
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research is a platform for scholars in the humanities and social sciences who are interested in transregional exchange and research on current issues. TRAFO is the blog of the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin) and the Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (Bonn).
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