Anthropology
Sarah Phillips Kurt Vonnegut was a prophet, albeit a satiric and stridently earthly one. Vonnegut’s 1965 book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: Or Pearls before Swine diagnosed and warned us about the growing problems that got us where we are today. Those problems were (and are) unfettered free market capitalism, run-away greed, income and wealth inequality, and media-palooza.1 I …
Sarah Phillips Dr. Angela Hoenikker Conners, PhD Planet Titan (previously of 4918 North Meridian Street Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, Planet Earth) Mr. Jonah Breit San Lorenzo, Planet Earth (Forwarding Service Requested) Dear Mr. Jonah Breit (“dear” in this case being over-generous): No doubt you will be surprised to hear from me, convinced as you are that I met my demise …
Sarah Phillips Kurt Vonnegut was the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union in the 1970s,1 and it will not surprise Vonnegut fans to learn that he predicted his own success. In Mother Night (1961), the protagonist Howard W. Campbell, Jr. provides a fictional account of one Stepan Bodovskov’s (plagiaristic) literary success in Russia, in particular the success …
Sarah Phillips Anthropologists think a lot about bodies. Biological anthropologists are interested in the adaptation, variation, and evolutionary history of humans and their relatives, looking at the bodies of humans and our ancestors, living and extinct. Medical anthropologists investigate the human body from a range of perspectives, focusing on how perceptions and experiences of the body and of …
Anthropology in Vonnegut’s Player Piano Sarah D. Phillips It is widely known that after the war Kurt Vonnegut studied on the GI Bill for a master’s degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago. He struggled in the program and never wrote an accepted thesis, though the department awarded him the MA degree a full 25 years later, …
