Category Archives: Main Story

Teaching Comics in a Medical Anthropology and Humanities Class

True or false: Stick figures effectively convey complex emotions and experiences.

If you were to ask me this question a year ago, I would have confidently replied “false.” That was before I stumbled across Allie Brosh’s web comic “Hyperbole and a Half.” Brosh chronicles her adventures with cleaning, dogs, and depression through a crudely drawn pink stick figure with a strange yellow triangle atop her head. The triangle is supposed to be a ponytail, but it is open to interpretation. read more…

  • dateMarch 16, 2015
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  • posted byColeman Nye
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Reflections on Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Culture

Who is the man behind Superman’s cape? It depends on where you read superhero comics! In Lebanon, he is Nabil Fawzi, and he was so well adapted as an Arab character, that most comic fans did not realize that he was a translation of the Anglophone Metropolis’s Clark Kent.

Brown University’s Middle East program hosted a symposium on February 27 entitled Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture—a title that co-curator Mona Damluji, a historian of visual culture, described as a “provocation” to raise questions about what is Arab or not about this rich archive. read more…

  • dateMarch 9, 2015
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  • posted bySherine F. Hamdy
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Learning Graphic Novels from an Artist’s Perspective

About five years ago, I was hit by a bolt of lightning. It happened on an otherwise normal workday, while I was struggling to tame what was becoming an increasingly unwieldy project. In a single bright flash, I pictured the entirety of my project in the form of a graphic novel. Establishing shots that parachute the reader into a specific place. Close-ups that bring the reader into the mind of a person. Simplifications that focus attention. Relationships among people inscribed in gestures, pose, action. Panels whose very internal composition and arrangement on a page move the reader through multiple perspectives. Pages whose layout make an implicit argument about how one thing is connected to another. In my mind’s eye, the exaggerated staging of sequential snapshots could lift my story out of the sticky slowness of explanation. read more…

  • dateFebruary 27, 2015
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  • posted byStacy Leigh Pigg
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“You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it”: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method

My teacher Linda Schele said those words to me years ago when teaching me about the iconography of ancient Maya sculptures. She’d given me an assignment: to make sense of the carved stone monuments from the ancient site Quirigua, in south-east Guatemala. All I had were photocopies of Alfred Maudsley’s 1880s photographs, and I was having trouble distinguishing meaningful elements from the convoluted Baroque tendrils and curls on these elaborate carvings. I brought my photocopies to her house, and the first thing she did was put one on a light-box, taping a sheet of tracing paper on top, saying, “You’ll never see a thing just staring at it on paper! You’ve got to draw it if you want to see it.” read more…

  • dateFebruary 20, 2015
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  • posted byAndrew Causey
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Happy International Anthropology Day!

We thought that February 19th—National Anthropology Day—should be a day for thinking about not just what anthropology has been but what it might become. And so we invited the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography to talk a little about who they are and what they do in supporting a more creative ethnographic practice. Because we can all stand to be more imaginative about the work we do. read more…

  • dateFebruary 19, 2015
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  • posted byAnne
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