Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale review The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This article was first published in The Ecologist.
Graeber and Wengrow’s new book is energetic, committed and kaleidoscopic, but also flawed.
Continue readingKatharina Anetzberger
This interview was first published in the Austrian socialist magazine Linkswende as Frauen in Afghanistan. You can read it in German here.
LINKSWENDE: Since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, the situation of Afghan women has come back into focus. How does this situation look like at the moment concretely?
NANCY LINDISFARNE: I think a place to start is that we need to understand what does actually happen with the Taliban and the actual defeat of the US, militarily and politically. So we’ve got a group pf people who have fought a guerrilla war and they have actually taken over a government with the idea of continuing to be not democratic but ruling a state. And they couldn’t have done this without – nobody wins a guerrilla war, certainly not one where the two sides are so disproportionately powerful and weak – without popular support. And that means that people all over the country have decided that the Taliban are a better deal than either the occupation government or the warlords.
Continue readingKatharina Anetzberger
Based on the experiences and incidents she collected during her field studies in Syria, anthropologist Nancy Lindisfarne wrote Dancing in Damascus, a collection of short stories, in the late 1980s. [This review first appeared in German here in the Austrian socialist magazine Linkswende.]
Nancy Lindisfarne actually wanted to use the visit to a fellow student in the Syrian capital Damascus as an introduction to studies on the working class there. By chance, she got caught in the middle of the marriage policy of a wavering middle class, which fluctuated between tradition and “modernization” according to the Western model. In nine short stories, she describes the everyday life of a society under dictatorship, tells of the search for identity, gender roles, and the struggles for a self-determined life.
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Anne Bonny Pirate 