Best Critique

Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist whose research addresses criticism, justification, capitalism, institutions, and moral disputes. With Laurent Thévenot, he wrote On Justification, which analyzes how people defend claims by appealing to different shared orders of worth rather than to a single un...

James Clifford is an American historian and cultural critic who served as a prominent professor in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is best known for co-editing the influential 1986 volume "Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnograph...

Paul Rabinow was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recognized for his contributions to the anthropology of the contemporary. He gained early recognition for his 1977 book "Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco," which provided a critical, introspective...

David M. Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Chicago who pioneered the symbolic approach to studying kinship. In his 1968 book "American Kinship," he analyzed how biological concepts like "blood" function primarily as cultural symbols of unity. He lat...

George E. Marcus is an American cultural anthropologist and a foundational figure in the postmodern critique of anthropology during the late 20th century. He is best known for co-editing the highly influential 1986 volume "Writing Culture" with James Clifford, which challenged traditional claims to...

Renato Rosaldo is an American cultural anthropologist whose fieldwork with the Ilongot people of the northern Philippines produced influential work on culture, emotion, and power. His essay 'Grief and a Headhunter's Rage' examined how his own bereavement following his wife's death during fieldwork r...

Wang Chong was a Chinese philosopher and poet who lived during the Eastern Han dynasty from 27 to roughly 97 CE. He is best remembered as the author of the Lunheng, a comprehensive text that critically evaluated the philosophical and religious beliefs of his time. In this work, he argued against wid...

Nadia Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian-American anthropologist and a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is best known for her 2001 book 'Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society,' which analyzes how Israeli archaeology has hist...

Paulin Hountondji was a Beninese philosopher whose work addressed African philosophy, epistemology, and the institutional conditions under which knowledge is produced. He became especially influential through his criticism of ethnophilosophy, which treats collective cultural beliefs as a unified phi...

September 12th: A Toy World is a browser-based newsgame created by Gonzalo Frasca and released in 2003 by the group Newsgaming. The player can fire missiles at terrorists moving among civilians, but the blasts also kill bystanders and cause mourners to become terrorists. Presented without a conventi...