The content of most library exhibitions tantalises. It’s like food you can look at but not eat: single spreads or isolated leaves of manuscript – nothing you can dip into or flick...
Freud takes it for granted that masculinity is the defining human condition, that all children begin life by imagining themselves as little men. When girls get round to noticing their lack of a...
It’s a male thing, misogyny. No matter where you look, then or now, here, there and everywhere, up ethnographic hill, down historical dale, men disparage women. In his trawl of...
At the end of her lively, well-researched and wide-ranging inquiry into the ‘hush’ she believes surrounds the subject of menstruation in America, Karen Houppert thinks about her...
All afternoon I watched three shadows moving beneath us. Mine in front, Akbar’s at the rear and between us the mule’s: its shadow legs, twenty feet long, jerking like a spider’s...
‘A folk memory of industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country,...
On my way to kill myself one hot day in July 1991, I stopped to fill up with the petrol necessary to see the job through. An old woman with heavy shopping bags was trying to cross the road. She...
According to the hype for this excellent biography of Colin Turnbull, he was one of the ‘most well-known anthropologists’ of the 20th century, along with Margaret Mead and Louis...
Cass Sunstein seems to believe that exposure to unsought information or divergent opinions is for most people like advertising: they can’t avoid it, as the price of getting what they are really after;...
Ever since the invention of the first moving-image camera, there has been a feeling among anthropologists that film-making should form part of their ethnographic work. But exactly what this...
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
What is progress in psychoanalysis? One of the arguments most commonly used by advocates of psychoanalysis during the recent ‘Freud wars’ has been to reproach their adversaries for...
In 1917, a pair of teenagers who had lied about their ages to join an ambulance unit destined for the Western Front found themselves in the same training camp in Sound Beach, Connecticut. One of...
Khan always answered telephone calls during sessions. When Winnicott rang up I could clearly hear both sides of the conversation, so presumably he angled the phone towards me. Winnicott spoke respectfully...
Get into the car sometime and drive out of town. Once you have got past the suburbs, and the industrial estates, and the home-made signs (‘Buy British’, ‘Our Beef With...
Synaesthesia, for those who don’t know, is ‘a confusion of the senses, whereby stimulation of one sense triggers stimulation in a completely different sensory modality’, so that...
‘A bastard is a bastard no matter what,’ says the man who gives me directions to Peckham Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after...
But who is to know whether your garments are jumble-sale ‘finds’, or luxury items in the ‘pauperist’ style bought off the peg at Harvey Nicks?