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@thegeekanthropologist
Talking out of both sides of your face: Discursive duality in the actual play gaming space
By Steven Dashiell Tabletop role playing games (TRPGs) have been around for over a half century but have experienced something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century, with new generations of players embracing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with fervor. As popularity grew, so did visible outcroppings that merged love of tabletop games with the technology and multimedia realities of…
Cooking One’s Way Through The Climate Crisis: Book Review of C. Pam Zhang's Land of Milk and Honey
By David Sutton A number of scholars in Anthropology and related disciplines have posed the question  “What is the Future of Food?” in our times of polycrisis and a seemingly broken food system (see for example, Sophia Roosth’s (2013) discussion of the ambitious aims of Molecular Gastronomy, and Ben Wurgaft’s Meat Planet (2019), among others). One way to address this question is through the…
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Planet of the Apes, Animalization and the Visual Politics of Occupation
By Emma Louise Backe When War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) concluded, Caesar had successfully led his people to a place where they might be able to build a new ape society without the violence of human interference, one in which the motto of “Ape Together Strong” could provoke a different manner of politics and sociality entirely. Caesar’s death, given his central role throughout the…
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Book Review: Gender, Race, Identity & Batman in Gotham City Living
By Alissa Whitmore McCrystal, Erica. 2021. Gotham City Living: The social dynamics in the Batman comics and media. New York: Bloomsbury. Erica McCrystal’s ambitious Gotham City Living: The Social Dynamics in the Batman Comics and Media (2021) aims to trace the evolving representation of identity and criminality in the Batman universe, from the first comics in 1939 through 2019’s Joker film. The…
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Book Review: Beyond colonial futures – Ethnofuturism and World Beyond: An Anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative FictionÂ
By Christopher Marcatili McGavin, Kirsten (ed.). 2022. World Beyond: An anthology of Papua New Guinean Speculative Fiction. Sydney, Aus: Hibiscus Three. In the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Aula walks the jungles accompanied by her large magpie, Ko. There she hopes to find the spirit, Large Bird, and ask him to protect her from Kiki, the chief’s son. Far away in time, but perhaps…
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SpaceX’s biggest rocket flies for the first time: But Do We Understand What This Actually Means?
By Anna Szolucha We’ve just launched a rocket into orbit so why is the way we think about technology so fundamentally wrong? A historic launch Regardless of what one thinks about Elon Musk’s growing techno-industrial imperium, this week’s orbital launch attempt of the Starship/SuperHeavy system built by SpaceX has already made history. With its 33 Raptor 2 engines that can generate 7,590…
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The Siren: A Requiem for Colonialism through Love Death Robots
By Savannah Mandel “Jibaro” makes me wonder if we should listen more closely to the call of Sirens. This 17 minute long, Love Death Robots episode has me asking if the intent of such creatures of folklore is truly malicious. Have we been championing a different evil all along? Are there not wicked motives shifting beneath the surface of those sailors and knights who pillage all that is gold and…
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Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power's Complicated Penumbra
What the Rings of Power tells us about LOTR's legacy, the warscapes that informed Middle Earth, and our understandings of good and evil.
By Emma Louise Backe I, like so many “elder Millennials” raised on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even the 1977 Hobbit animated movie, eagerly anticipated the release of Amazon’s Rings of Power. I remember sneaking sandwiches into the theaters when The Fellowship of the Ring was released; playing a Fellowship computer game in the basement of my friend’s house, getting too…
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We Make the Gods We Want to Have
We Make the Gods We Want to Have
After the release of the first deep field images produced by the new James Webb Space Telescope, a Twitter account playfully pretending to be the telescope posted the following: https://twitter.com/JWSTscope/status/1546646337545850880 Cute, of course, and not meant to be taken too seriously, despite the subtle flex of the telescope’s observational powers. But as someone interested in…
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Book Review: Played Out - Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
By Samuel Gerald Collins Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. After taking a beating from video games, table-top games have made a startling come-back over the last twenty years, buoyed by a strong growth of Eurogames, imaginative indie titles and by a gaming world looking for variety. In…
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Book Review: The Truths of Monsters
Book Review: The Truths of Monsters
By Vivian Asimos Limpár, Ildikó (2021) The truths of monsters: coming of age with fantastic media. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc. Positioned in the intersections of Monster Studies, literature studies and psychology rests The Truths of Monsters – a textual analysis of the role of monsters within young adult fantasy and science fiction novels, and some television shows. Limpár explores…
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Introducing a New TGA Editor: Connor Martini
Introducing a New TGA Editor: Connor Martini
I’ve yet to meet an academic who is not a geek. What it means to be either an academic or a geek is, by necessity, flexible and inconsistent, but I stand by this one data point, gleaned from a casual ethnography of my peers, colleagues, and mentors. Despite how many fellow D&D players, Trekkies, comic book fans and anime nerds I’ve come across in conference halls and classrooms, very few of them…
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Multiverse of Madness and the Problem of Mother as Monster
Multiverse essentially abandons Wanda’s complexity, reducing her simply a mother without her children willing to sacrifice everything to get them back. Why this mother monster trope is problematic, especially in a potentially Post-Rose world.
By Emma Louise Backe Wanda by César Castillo Marquez Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is essentially a horror movie with the trappings of Marvel’s characteristic action sequences. The film is directed by Sam Raimi, who made his name in the superhero genre with Tobey MacGuire’s Spiderman, but has been cutting his teeth on horror since the 80s with films like Evil Dead (look out for a…
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Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Problems of Magic Bullet Heroism
Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Problems of Magic Bullet Heroism
By Emma Louise Backe Spider-Man: No Way Home is an adventure further into Marvel’s Phase 4 Multi-Verse, but the movie itself has some surprising messages about public health and the impulse of a curative heroism. After Mysterio reveals Peter’s identity to the world—his last act of sabotage after framing Spiderman for the drones he launched in Far From Home—Peter scrambles to maintain some sense…
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Screen Memory, Social Distancing & Speculative Fiction: The Geek Anthropologist 2021 in Review
Screen Memory, Social Distancing & Speculative Fiction: The Geek Anthropologist 2021 in Review
2021 wasn’t quite the year we anticipated, nor does the conclusion of the year feel like it does justice to the warped sense of time, distance, and stasis we have perhaps felt in the Longue durée of COVID-19. Yet 2021 also gave us new ways to think about virtual presence and digital connection through Minecraft; the role of a mediated and mediatized grief in Wandavision; the Marxist politics…
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TGA Seeking Editors!
The Geek Anthropologist is seeking qualified individuals to join our Editorial Board. As an Editor at TGA, responsibilities include: recruiting new contributors and content for the blog and assisting with the writing and editorial process for contributors, as well as writing your own pieces for TGA if you’re feeling inspired. You will also communicate regularly with other members of the Editorial…
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Anthropological Speculative Fiction: The Ice of Thalassis
Anthropological Speculative Fiction: The Ice of Thalassis
By Esther Stoppani 001897 The first thing I feel upon waking is the cold; the freezing-hot sensation of blood rushing in my veins. My head feels gummy, and when I open my eyes the lights of my hibernation quarters are blinding, burning my eyes. My hands shake as I clear my head and pull myself up into a sitting position. There’s an alarm screeching at me, coming from the console to the left of…
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