Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing, part of the GAD of the American Anthropological Association | castac.org |
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Today on #Platypus, Aylar Abdolahzadeh traces what ancient campfire debris reveals about human resilience. From striking sparks to keeping a flame alive, fire is a learned skill, and archaeological evidence shows that Neanderthals used it flexibly.
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/trac...
CASTAC
Today on #Platypus, Alejandro Cerón examines how epidemiologists navigate the tension between technical expertise and political objectives towards outbreak mitigation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Guatemala and the enduring myth of John Snow.
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/outb...
Today on #Platypus, Cristian Gustavo Gutiérrez asks: are emerging biotechnologies transforming disability into something to be prevented, corrected, or eliminated?
From prenatal screening to AI genome prediction, new technologies are reshaping which bodies are considered desirable, productive, and "normal."
Read the full post here: blog.castac.org/2026/06/is-t...
Today on #Platypus, Ana Paula Perrota, @leodupin.bsky.social and Rosângela Cintrão explore how industrial sanitary norms render traditional food cultures illegal in Brazil, and what that reveals about whose knowledge counts in global food safety regimes
Read the post: blog.castac.org/2026/06/food...
Today on #Platypus, Debjani Chakraborty explores how mobile phone affordances are reappropriated across rural Indian contexts, sometimes as tools of navigation and aspiration, and at other times as mechanisms of surveillance and moral scrutiny.
Read the full post: blog.castac.org/2026/05/dome...
New reproductive and bodily intervention biotechnologies not only promise to cure or prevent diseases, but are also shaping a new regime of bodily normalization that redefines which lives are desirabl...
