Travel Writing

Culture Shock and the Unlearning of Eating Your Shell

I I’ve always been tickled by the question “what do you do?” How this query usually comes during the small talk phase of interaction, sometime after weather or sports and before becoming lifelong friends, could mean “what do you like to do?” or “what do you do for a living?” Though I often try to […]

Arana

Don’t Forget to Check Spiders for Your Shoes

y sin que olviden sus típicas arañas… José Alfredo Jiménez If you’d have known the fame these suckers had, you wouldn’t have ushered so many outdoors when you’ve found them posted up perpendicular to the floor in the shadow on the back of your dresser, or in the perpetually dusky corner of your shower stall. […]

Dining and Desire At the End of the World

Una Vision del Futuro, Sin Titulo by Zev Gottdiener First there is a mountain/then there is no mountain/then there is! – Donavan Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think. -Octavio Paz You’re sitting in a restaurant with […]

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Dealing with difference: ecology, material culture, and cross-cultural comparison.

by Zev Gottdeiner Often, we think about cultural difference as having to do with the apparent. We focus on surface assumptions like language, geography, phenomenology, or metaphysics. This distinction frames how we view difference. That this mode of belonging to something whose borders we have come to accept operates on every aspect of our lives […]

Dreaming Up Place

by Zev Gottdiener Dreaming Up Place: Landscapes Through Time, and The Politics of Sustainability. Sitting under a faction of the ubiquitous bougainvillea streaming low across a friend’s yard, you have a front row seat to the march of a changing landscape. The once forested view of the past, across the dirt path recently figured with […]

Remember to Check Your Shoes for Spiders

by Zev Gottdiener . . . (don’t worry, they’re not THAT poisonous) Better yet, like the geckos and everything else that doesn’t automatically, bite, sting, swarm, or generally feast on you, spiders feast on those that do those things. Put the sweet potatoes in the dying coals so tomorrow . . .       […]