Introducing Lucy Dean

I want to introduce all of you to my student, Lucy Dean, who during her short stay here in rural highland Bolivia certainly got her ethnographic feet wet. In a mere ten days, Lucy has experienced a great deal.  LanPeru lost her luggage.  Rather than wait an unknown amount of time for it to appear [...]

Experience acquiring a Bolivian tourist visa as US citizen

Since many of our readers want to know about visa requirement to go to Bolivia, I thought I should share my recent experience entering the La Paz airport. You can review the requirements for a US citizen requesting a tourist visa here.  You’ll need a passport, application form (available on the website above; print one to [...]

“Little Globalizations”

A lot of globalization literature focuses on what I would call “Big Globalizations.”  George Ritzer worries about the McDonaldization of Society while James Watson’s edited volume Golden Arches East shows how McDonalds has become localized throughout Asia.  Now, I love Watson’s book — I teach chapters from it in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class [...]

Llama meat in La Paz’s tourist district, June 2010

This is, in part, a shameless plug for Helen Haines and my upcoming edited volume Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World. In it, anthropoloigists discuss frankly what it’s like to be offered unfamiliar foods and how we can turn that discomfort into methodologically useful data.  The book is aimed at [...]

Introducing Kyle Piispanen, and other news

Hello GTers and readers!  This academic year has clearly been a busy one for many of us, given the silence here.  Kate and I are both in our first year in tenure-track positions, Miguel is in a new job, and many other things are going on in our lives.  Hopefully we’ll be more talkative in [...]