Alisse Waterston

Published: Jan 01, 2015 by Anthropological Quarterly
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: History, Sociology, Military & Security Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Area Studies

This is a story of an old man whose travels through the 20th century were marked by sorrow, humor, tragedy, and transformation. In the strands of this tale, we see processes of structural violence and social suffering. Memory, interpretation and narrative can take us towards destruction, ethnocentrism, the worst of nationalism and war, or towards understanding, empathy, justice.

Published: Oct 01, 2014 by Open Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: Geography , History, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Archaeology

World on the Move suggests change, a process of transformation. In its speediness, the pace of change today is almost incomprehensible. It is also about activity—the movement and circulation of people, ideas, languages, and things, including food, cloth, oil, wood, weapons, money, and these days, investment capital. Sometimes and in some places, the movement is free flowing, crossing borders; in other times and places, movement is held up or stopped altogether...

Published: Mar 01, 2014 by SACC Notes: Teaching Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: Anthropology - Soc Sci, Archaeology

The AAA publishing program operates in context of an ever changing technological and market environment involving shrinking library budgets, the expansion in the number of new journal titles, new technology, and new reader expectations, including open-access. I review challenges and opportunities for the AAA publishing program in context of the discipline as a whole and describe some specific steps taken by the association that have implications for anthropology’s future.

Published: Mar 01, 2014 by Open Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: Health and Social Care, Anthropology - Soc Sci

On March 23, 2010, US President Barack Obama signed into law The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The brouhaha around health care reform had been brewing for years, and wouldn’t end the day the President signed PPACA. Some might argue the real battle had begun that day. Others would recall two decades earlier when oppositional forces converged to defeat the 1993-1994 Health Security Act. Indeed, efforts at national healthcare reform went back even further, by at least seventy years.

Published: Oct 01, 2013 by Open Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: History, Sociology & Social Policy, Military & Security Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Archaeology, Area Studies

News headlines unveil the surface but do not answer important questions about the large territory that is violence. The surface lends itself to easy explanations that I suspect nobody really finds all that convincing or relevant. Most anthropologists avoid such totalizing statements that tend to end discussion and erase history and context. Instead, they approach the subject systematically, building and arranging the knowledge they have acquired…

Published: Apr 01, 2013 by Open Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: History, Sociology, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Archaeology

In spring of 2013, marriage was brought to the United States Supreme Court in two important cases with implications for the right of same-sex couples to marry. The justices may have found the anthropological record useful and relevant to their deliberations: across time and place there is enormous diversity in this thing we call marriage, an arrangement that always stands in relationship to other social, political and economic conditions...

Published: Apr 01, 2012 by North American Dialogue
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci

Those of us who study and write about urban poverty and poor people have a major dilemma: how do we write engaging narrative combined with critical poverty theory together in one book?

Published: Oct 01, 2008 by Social Analysis
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: Sociology, Sociology & Social Policy, Middle East Studies, Military & Security Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci, Area Studies

This article centers on discussions around 'accountability' as it pertains to war: accounts of war, accounting for war, what war accounts for, and accountability, including anthropological accountability. It reviews explanations for the causes, patterns, and practices of war, and for the occurrences of specific wars. It discusses impunity as systemic and strategic and considers the responsibility of anthropology and anthropologists in facing up to the most significant crises of our times.

Published: Jan 01, 2008 by Transforming Anthropology
Authors: Alisse Waterston
Subjects: History, Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology, Sociology & Social Policy, Anthropology - Soc Sci

I use Karen Brodkin's How Jews Became White Folks as an analytic compass to consider the question: Are U.S. Latinos becoming "White"? The purpose of this paper is to meet the question head-on and to help unravel some of the complexity and contradictory issues related to the changing status of a historically marginalized and heterogeneous ethnic group within a society that operates in a Black/White racial binary.

Published: Sep 01, 2007 by American Anthropologist
Authors: Alisse Waterston and Antigona Kukaj
Subjects: Education, Sociology, Military & Security Studies, Anthropology - Soc Sci

This article is a reflection by a teacher and a student on "structural-violence pedagogy," the process of teaching and learning about the structures of inequality implicated in various forms of social violence, including those of everyday life, massacre, and genocide.