What happens when the field is not entirely foreign but you might be? Dispatches from the Field

Tanzania is not my home country. But it is not an abstract elsewhere either.

Francesca Sofia Selano • September 10, 2026

Psychologist, Surveyor, Journalist, Historian?: The Illegibility of Anthropology in the Field

Inquiries about an anthropologist’s purpose reveal a lot about why anthropology remains illegible to people working for the welfare of Muslims in Hyderabad, India. This blog post reflects on a common question asked by my interlocutors over different ethnographic settings: “What do anthropologists even do?”

Arman Hasan • 24-06-2026

After Method: Sensing Darjeeling through Friction

In this second part of the blog series, Abhimanyu and Anna revisit the multimodal outcomes of their experimental workshop, Sensing Darjeeling, proposing that each sensory experience found its own mode of expression, and that attending to these differences reshapes our methods of inquiry.

Anna Notsu + 1 other • 11-06-2026

Sensing Darjeeling: Spatial rethinking of the Himalayan town

In January, the NWO-funded project Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas held an academic workshop in Darjeeling, followed by an ethnographic workshop, Sensing Darjeeling. This blog reflects on this event and its sprouting outcomes.

Anna Notsu + 1 other • 21-05-2026

Looking back on the second Leiden Anthropology Conference

When CADS convened the first Leiden Anthropology Conference in 2020, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology – home to 57 people – aimed to create a community for the one hundred anthropologists or so working in the Leiden and The Hague faculties, museums, research institutes, and PhD programs.

Cristina Grasseni + 4 others • 30-04-2026

From buckwheat to white rice: transforming food systems and multispecies relations in rural Bhutan

Elena Neri, a visiting PhD fellow at Leiden University, explains her research on transforming food systems, multispecies relations, and more-than-human health in a community of rural villages in western Bhutan, where she carried out fieldwork between March 2024 and March 2025.

Elena Neri • 07-04-2026

For an Anthropology of Geopolitics

There has been an outpouring of grief among Shi‘i Muslims across the world at the death of Ayatollah Khamenei. An anthropology of geopolitics that foregrounds relational geographies and granular analyses of ordinary peoples’ interpretations of world events can help better understand this mourning.

Radhika Gupta • 17-03-2026