English abstract: A paper arguing the relevance of a cognitive narratological perspective and a retrospective stance attentive to hindsight bias in order to clarify the debate on racial differences and population diversity in biology. The issue is discussed with reference to the dichotomy between ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ in paleoanthropology as…[Read more]

In this contribution, I take up Michael Nijhawan’s focus on the embodied aspects of memory and time he elaborates so insightfully in “The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations”, specifically his invocation of, via Veena Das’s work, of Bergson’s distinction between translational and rotational time. Drawing on examples from my ow…[Read more]

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), news media frequently report on events in which groups exchange gifts as compensation for alleged harms. In news narratives of this type, compensation is a metaphor for the contact between liberal and relational social orders. In this way, news media in PNG produces knowledge of what it means to be a citizen in a society…[Read more]

This work discusses the processes of celebrating funerals among the Akan people, some Akan belief systems and modern trends that have evolved in funeral ceremonies. It also demonstrates the complexities involved in organizing the funeral from the day of death culminating into the celebration of the final funeral rite. The actual purpose of funeral…[Read more]

This paper compares anthropomorphic power-figures from the Vodun and Kongo cultural areas. Vodun is practised along the Guinea Coast of West Africa (especially in Benin and Togo) whereas the Kongo religion is native to the west coast of Central Africa (especially the two Republics of the Congo and northwest Angola). First, overlaps in belief and…[Read more]

Since 2007–2008, American undergraduates’ media ecology has changed dramatically without an accompanying transformation in how they use media to end relationships. The similarities in people’s breakup practices between 2008 and 2018 reveal that, regardless of what social media is used, American undergraduates turn to media in moments of break…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: En este retropost de 2010 hablamos de Miguel de Unamuno y de su doble escepticismo, escepticismo ante la fe y ante el ateísmo. Es un libro desilusionado, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir—desilusionado con las creencias religiosas, y desilusionado con el ateísmo. Una vez perdida la ilusión en redimir a la humanidad en este o en el otro…[Read more]

This piece is part of APLA’s newest Speaking Justice to Power Series, which focuses on Kashmir and marks the one-year anniversary of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the constitution (August 5, 2019).

The paper focuses on the issue of witchcraft at the Gold Coast and Asante in particular. Information from archival sources and secondary sources has been gleaned to form a historical narrative covering the period 1907 to 1940. The dilemma of the indigenous people concerning witchcraft, the attempts of Indigenous Priest Healers (IPH) to cure and…[Read more]

Although the United Nations has called for a global ceasefire during the pandemic, Kashmiris are bracing for a new wave of violence as India accelerates its settler-colonial ambitions.

While World War II was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, the onset of the Greek Civil War in December 1944 marked the beginning of the Cold War. For the people of Greece, the civil war would continue the devastation that the Italian, German, and Bulgarian occupations had initiated. The civil war’s catastrophic cleavages in Greek society are…[Read more]

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

Literature on traditional medicine in Africa is diverse and broad but most are country based, regional based or time based. There is the need for a systematic review that focuses on the nature of traditional medicine and its healers, the impact of the changing society on traditional medicine, and an analysis of same based on scholarly literature.…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Este artículo comenta y desarrolla una noción semiótico-comunicativa introducida por Erving Goffman en su libro ‘La presentación de la persona en la vida cotidiana’ (1956). A lo que se comunica oficial o explícitamente en una interacción social hay que añadir lo que se comunica discreta o indirectamente a través de una serie d…[Read more]

Notes from Northrop Frye´s seminal volume in archetypal/anthropological criticism, “Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957. Rpt. 1971. 383 p). Notes taken by J. A. García Landa c. 1985, edited with illustrations for online publication 2018-20. Parenthetical pagination numbers refer to the quotations and text f…[Read more]

This chapter is an updated and newly illustrated version of “Islam, Sound and Space: Acoustemology and Muslim Citizenship on the Kenyan Coast,” originally published in the volume _Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience_ (2013, ed. Georgina Born, Cambridge University Press).

This essay explores the internal diversity of Islam in the Caucasus.

Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan: both are futurologists who theorized about the impact of information exchange on societies. In the late 1960s, Toffler came up with the concept of future shock, while McLuhan “invented” the global village. I dared combining these two concepts into a sort of “theory of everything” to explain political process…[Read more]

Public health in twenty-first century Ghana is mired with several issues ranging from the inadequacy of
public health facilities, improper settlement planning, insanitary conditions, and the inadequacy of laws
and their implementation. This situation compared to the colonial era is a direct contradiction.
Development in the pre-colonial era to…[Read more]

Book review. Kate Langdon & Vladimir Tismaneanu “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.