PODCAST
Articles published on our platform are read out loud and turned into podcasts. We also record interviews with our collaborators and contributors. You can find all our audio content here.
AnthroArt
AnthroArt – Action for People and Planet is an initiative of three applied anthropology organisations – Antropedia, Namla and Ambigrama – that aims to create an international platform for connecting anthropology and art, with the purpose of deepening awareness about inequality and our relation with the environment and driving change across three geographies: Romania, The Netherlands and Portugal, as well as beyond.
Living in Precarity – How Social Canteens and Soup Kitchens Contribute to Community Solidarity – Beatrice Manole
Creating spaces of solidarity for the most vulnerable is key to ensuring that some form of social justice is achieved, in a society where socio-economic policies and social attitudes are not the most favorable towards these categories. This article looks at how social canteens and soup kitchens contribute to creating such spaces, focusing on a specific category of vulnerability, homelessness, as a case study. Homeless persons belong to a social group extremely prone to poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion, with difficult or very low access to basic needs such as housing, food, belonging, and security. The purpose of this research is to understand to which extent food access initiatives build spaces which can offer a sense of inclusion and safety to their beneficiaries, while altogether meeting their food needs.
Article by Beatrice Manole, illustrated by József Vass
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Creating spaces of solidarity for the most vulnerable is key to ensuring that some form of social justice is achieved, in a society where socio-economic policies and social attitudes are not the most favorable towards these categories. This article looks at how social canteens and soup kitchens contribute to creating such spaces, focusing on a specific category of vulnerability, homelessness, as a case study. Homeless persons belong to a social group extremely prone to poverty, discrimination, and social exclusion, with difficult or very low access to basic needs such as housing, food, belonging, and security. The purpose of this research [...]
January 20, 2025
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Why is menstruation considered to be something shameful? As a cis-woman I have experienced and seen how menstruation is depicted around me, either in whispered voices and jokes or perfectly concealed in the commercials. This question was the starting point of my research, only to find out that menstruation is a lens that reveals a range of social inequalities experienced by women. In my qualitative research, I have talked with ten women (ages 50 to 81) regarding their experiences of menstruations during the communist period in Romania in order to better understand the historical context of menstruation in Romania. In [...]
January 20, 2025
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With ten children in their household, a family from Bucharest could not remember how many times they were evicted. Dorina and Ioan kept on hiding and moving because of fear of having their kids taken by the social care department. They feared the public institution that was meant to give support to people in their situation. They also had to navigate the constant pressure from Local Police which would fine them for their informal work or their living in abandoned homes. What are the challenges imposed by the politics of the daily life of the urban poor? Who are the [...]
January 20, 2025
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A growing critical heritage scholarship interrogates the facets of socio-economic, cultural and even spatial exclusion involved in heritage-making and in preserving the integrity and authenticity – particularly of built heritage, historic monuments or cultural landscapes. In the case of a high-profile UNESCO site in rural Transylvania, most residents have limited (or dissonant) access to the cultural landscape they inhabit. However, this has not led to open contestation and residents have accepted to live with the official heritage enforced by a local minority – the very few remaining heirs of the Saxon settlers who built the village back in the thirteenth [...]
January 20, 2025
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The article examines how women in different socio-political contexts in Romania have engaged in football and how they negotiated their path in spite of the systematic and systemic disregard of their participation. For over five decades thousands of women have practiced organized football, however their place as athletes remains marginal not only in a male dominated sport but also in the collective imagination. The Romanian Football Federation has no official records of women’s football before 2014. Current initiatives of development are many times met with reluctance from the actors involved in the world of football and the public. Based on [...]
January 20, 2025
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The intersections of anthropology, inclusion, and accessibility in urban public spaces is the focus of this article, by delving into the Spaces4All project implemented in Lisbon, Portugal. It begins by emphasizing the importance of inclusion and addressing inequality in modern society, highlighting the role of anthropology in understanding, and tackling social issues. The article discusses the significance of ethnographic fieldwork in uncovering barriers faced by marginalized groups, particularly those with reduced mobility, in accessing public spaces. It outlines the methodology employed in the Spaces4All project, including fieldwork, mapping of accessible routes, and collaboration with disability support organizations. Through its process, [...]
January 19, 2025
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The “Same Same – A Capacity Building and Empowerment e-mentorship Program for People with Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities (IDD)” is a Program with the objective to test the reliability and effectiveness of a Training and Empowerment Program for Mentors and to provide people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to lead their peers, with or without IDD. An ethnographic research and report was carried out, with a focus group created to answer and investigate these problematics and questions, a survey of the specific needs and support that individuals with IDD need to develop new skills, knowledge [...]
January 19, 2025
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Ethnotheatre is a critical world-making practice that combines ethnography, social knowledge and the performing arts. As an art-based methodology, it aims to research a common ground with a group of people to adapt these observations and knowledge to an aesthetic performance as the practice of participant observation, and the anthropology toolkit methodology. In the transition to the 21st century and the disciplinary areas of theatre, education, health, and oral history, ethnotheatre begins to be thought and conceptualised as practice and methodology. As a case study, an ethnotheatre project in prison wants to understand how inmates relate to and act about [...]
January 19, 2025
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The project called “Workshop on Anthropology and Photography” (WAF) is related the work done during 8 months, from March to September 2023, in a small town near Lisbon (Portugal) in a public primary and secondary school, with a particular characteristic: being a multicultural school, attended by children of many nationalities other than Portuguese, with a high number of immigrants and refugees (migrants). It uses the scientific line of Applied Anthropology (AA), not just a branch or specialization of anthropology, but the epistemological principles, methodologies, and objectives through which the anthropologist deals with his or her subject of interest, whether it’s [...]
January 19, 2025
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The history of the Portuguese presence in Asia has been the subject of study of numerous analysts from various perspectives. It is well known that during just a few years Portuguese had managed to create several commercial, political, and administrative establishments. This was only possible through the displacement of people to fill in the administrative positions, but also to guarantee the safety of the establishment This paper focuses on how the rise of these posts and trading centers resulted in the birth of Creole communities, namely one residing in Tugu, in Indonesia, characterized by a unique culture embedded from a [...]
January 19, 2025
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The article tackles physical activity inequalities, both socio-economical and gender, in preschool and school age children. The undisputed benefits of physical activity on physical and mental health are well documented. So why is it that most children in industrialized countries are failing to meet weekly physical activity guidelines? The answer is complex and nuanced, but may lay in the ever pervasive and entrenched issue of health inequality. Families are often presented with “simple steps” (that promote the simplicity of individual behavior) to reinforce the ease of participating in daily physical activity, such as taking public transport or walking in nature. [...]
January 19, 2025
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This article is the result of ten years of work as a social interventionist with women in situations of social vulnerability, based on the premise: Which of my experiences as a social interventionist in the last ten years can contribute today to empower other individuals to also become social interventionists and develop actions aimed at women in situations of social vulnerability? The aim of this intellectual effort was, through my autoethnographic account, to construct material that could inspire others to also become social intervenors, focusing on the development of actions for marginalized women. I’ll firstly present an autoethnography as an [...]
January 19, 2025
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This article examines the potential benefits of creating a virtual gallery as a response to health crises, remote areas, and the elderly population, with a focus on addressing inequality and promoting social inclusion. The study explores how virtual reality technology can effectively break down physical and geographical barriers, facilitating access to diverse artistic expressions and encouraging participation within communities. Also problematizes the significance of the virtual gallery in providing access to the arts for marginalized populations, promoting interest and curiosity in various artistic forms, and fostering community engagement. A text by Silvia Raposo llustrated by Lídia Belchior. [...]
January 19, 2025
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Anthropology is the discipline of counterintuition. It seeks to find the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the incomprehensible. When finished, the process starts again, this time in reverse. In the hope that a synthesis will manifest itself. In this article we propose to look at participatory art, changing the turns. What kind of art is this, the ‘non-participatory’? What does dissent flee from? For this purpose, we will use our work in participatory art projects in the last two years (Wame l Anthropology Public) as fieldwork. In a contemporary era during colonial deconstruction, grappling with identity movements, [...]
January 12, 2025
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The article discusses how older adults act as social intermediaries in Romanian farmers’ markets. The conclusion focuses on the violent effects of the gentrification of farmer’s markets on vulnerable age groups, causing social exclusion. A text by Florin Dumitrescu llustrated by Alexandra Cărăvan [...]
January 12, 2025
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In the last two decades, since Romania’s EU accession, Cortorari Roma from the South of Transylvania have been performing a new procurement activity, begging in the streets of Western Europe. During my PhD fieldwork I myself became an apprentice to a family bagging in Italy. This piece shows that contrary to wide spread conceptions of beggary as a non-lucrative activity, Cortorari experience it as a kind of work located in the flesh and the body. When they go begging, Cortorari renounce their colorful attire for the worn-out beggar’s garb which symbolically veils their ethnic identity. This article contends that begging [...]
January 12, 2025
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This is the story of my (non)-interaction with the Hungarian far-right paramilitary groups, during their ‘war’ against Roma people in countryside Hungary in 2011. Some context first: I began researching the Hungarian far-right in 2009. I had mainly two reasons for doing this: on the one hand, I was interested in how people come together in groups that challenge the state’s monopoly on violence, and perform security tasks, such as defending villages, neighbourhoods and other public spaces; on the other hand, I wanted to use my research to understand and help curb down the rise of hyper-nationalism and neo-nazism in [...]
January 12, 2025
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In this article, I will examine working conditions, vulnerabilities, and social exclusion, experienced by Romanian migrants working in the Agro-Food sector in the Netherlands. Within the agricultural industry, there is a common presence of prime technical progress, a sector where immense resources go to innovations and research, but also a sector of evermore precarious forms of employment. Therefore, I argue rising debates about the success story of Dutch agriculture must relate to the work narratives of the seasonal and flexible migrant workers that sustain the sector. I will analyze the complicated dynamics of the production process in agricultural labour to [...]
January 12, 2025
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What is hate? How are the objects formed towards which it is directed? And why do sex and sexuality figure so centrally in defining the essential Otherness of various objects of hate in the contemporary world order? In this essay, I seek less a set of firm answers to these questions. Instead, I propose an exercise in the ethnographic imagination—a way to begin addressing them in more nuanced ways. Such an approach shall help us understand better how hate and its targets emerge and possibly also formulate different critiques of social inequalities premised on hate. A text by George Paul [...]
January 12, 2025
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Starting in 2012, I began to study artistic events taking place in domestic spaces. From the repeated contact between hosts-artists and audience in domestic settings, inclusive social spaces emerge which I call homemade culture bubbles. In this text, I posit that they constitute a subcultural solution (Cohen, 1955) through which people interact and associate with those who share the same maladjustment, in this case, to the conventions of the art world. Apart from events organized within totalitarian regimes, adjustment is not a negative, but a readjustment. Through homemade culture events, host-artists send a simple message to the art world: art [...]
January 12, 2025
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In this paper, I ponder a research project that I was a part of, during my employment at a research consultancy. I want to use it as a case study, to raise some ethical questions I have no definite answers to: how do we do research on diversity & inclusion, particularly for public policy, and how do we do it in an ethical way? And what are the best/right policy choices? When it comes to the positionality of a research consultant and policy advisor in housing (this was my job title), how could I have ever known for sure if [...]
January 29, 2024
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Showing our vulnerabilities is hard. However, not doing so will undeniably compromise our possibility to connect with others. In this essay, I share my experience in a week’s research in a community home located in Amsterdam. The story that happens in De Meevaart is a gateway to talk about emotions and about the power that having resources and company to experience emotions can have for social inclusion. Article by Luiza Fonini, illustrated by Studio Sonsuz, read by Luiza Fonini https://theanthro.art/working-out-inclusivity-through-emotions-the-power-of-vulnerability-luiza-fonini-illustration-by-studio-sonsuz/ [...]
January 29, 2024
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As an anthropologist I believed that ‘culture’ is what makes humans exceptional compared to other living beings. Research on social learning and cultural traits among animals, however, shows that ‘human abilities’ are found among animals as well. It states that humans and animals are more alike than different. These findings invite us to learn to understand animals’ intelligence through the setting of their ecology, instead of from the human point of view. But are humans capable of empathizing with animals in that way? It is an instinct of human evolution to attribute human-like traits and behaviors to animals. This tendency [...]
January 29, 2024
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What happens when an etic category or label like “first-generation students” enters public discourse? In the Netherlands, public discussions of first-generation or first-in-family students and their predicaments have arisen in recent years. But few people grow up thinking of themselves in those terms. Not a common identity-marker, the concept is introduced in other moments, like in news items or in participatory research projects. But to what effect? And does it stigmatize or help? Article by Lieve de Coninck, illustrated by Eline Veldhuisen, read by Rosalie Post https://theanthro.art/first-generation-student-a-helpful-or-stigmatising-label-in-dutch-student-life-lieve-de-coninck-illustration-by-eline-veldhuisen/ [...]
January 29, 2024
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In the West of Amsterdam there is an area that used to be occupied by light industry, but which since has been designated as a new area for housing development. Surrounding the area is a working-class neighbourhood with homes built in the first half of the 20th century. Rather than giving corporate developers free range, the municipality has also given space to citizen initiatives and community development. One project to come out of that is a climate neutral neighbourhood that aims at self-sufficiency. This essay is about in- and exclusion dynamics in sustainable innovation trajectories. As we will show, class [...]
January 29, 2024
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