Sylvain Perdigon
@sylvain_anthro
Anthropologist in Beirut. The picture is by Bashar Taleb in Gaza.
I am working on the hours of footage we shot while working with Levantine shepherds & their flocks during the Summer transhumance for 'the Sheep from the Future' (@future_sheep) in the highlands of Lebanon in 2021. In this thread I'm going to post some beautiful images I find..1/
When you watch things like that, you realize that a lot of the AI discussion nonsense would be spared if anthropology was taught as a matter of course at college level education, but also, sadly, if anthropology taught itself in a way a bit better than it tends to do now.
Geoffrey Hinton says AI may already be developing emotions. “In terms of cognitive behavior, it could be just like us when it comes to emotions.” He collapses the line between real and simulated -- by defining feeling as learned behavior. If that's true, AI may already qualify…
""Eat a chicken leg in my stead. Do as if it was me eating it. Please. Please." Read this below and use the translate tool if you can't read French.
Aujourd’hui, j’ai appelé mon oncle à Gaza. Cela fait quatre jours qu’il n’a rien mangé. Sa voix était faible, sans énergie, teintée d’un désespoir qu’il tentait de cacher. Il m’a demandé doucement : « Est-ce que tu as du poulet chez toi ? » J’ai eu peur de répondre. Je ne…
Can't stop thinking of this guy I saw driving a cybertruck in Hamra, Beirut tonight, and how every night he plugs it into a mazout generator.
Eichmann in Chantilly, VA.
“What he was really interested in, he said, was parlaying his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs.” nplusonemag.com/online-only/on…
Israel killed 63 people in #Gaza this morning, before I even started preparing #breakfast for my kids. some burned in schools they were sheltering in. Others trying to get aid packages to feed their families. It has been like this almost every day for almost two years.
My friend (& once student) Shatha from Jenin asks that you have her brother Assem in your prayers if you pray. Read his story, bcz it's the story of one unique individual like you or me, & at the same time one story amongst 1000s of such stories. God bless Assem & Shatha & Jenin.
My brother, the prisoner Assem Hanaysha, has lost the ability to walk due to nerve damage in his foot; most likely caused by scabies, which he contracted inside the Israeli's prisons. A lawyer, who visited another prisoner in the same section, passed on a message from Assem,…
It's super niche but this groundbreaking study on whale language published earlier this year totally vindicated Bateson's hypothesis in his late 1960s most lovely text on cetacean communication that cetacean language had to be digital like verbal language. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
103 killed in Gaza in last 24 hours. A colleague was telling me today that for the so-called 12-day war the orders of magnitude are 600 killed in Iran, 30 in Israel, and 1000 in Gaza, but the latter don't count any longer, it is teaching and being taught to be indifferent to it.
NEW: 103 Killed in Gaza in Last 24 Hours The Health Ministry in Gaza reports 103 Palestinians killed and 219 wounded over the past day in ongoing Israeli attacks. Many more remain trapped under rubble or on roads inaccessible to rescue teams. ➤ The minimum toll since Oct. 7…
Old enough to remember the world, one month ago, when the ongoing daily destruction of Gaza and its people, including dozens of them every day at food aid points, cast a shadow on all others news, good and bad. (86 killed on Tuesday according to Haaretz). haaretz.com/middle-east-ne…
Yesterday, the last warning came from Nasser Hospital: “In 24 hours, there will be no formula left for premature infants.” Not a metaphor. Not exaggeration. A clinical fact. And the response? Silence. Not one truck. Not one crate. Just the silence of steel-hearted men, satisfied…
From Lebanon it's quite beautiful to watch Iranian opponents abroad denouncing the attack against Iran and stating with absolute clarity that whatever change you aspire too, it will never ever come from aligning yourself with a murderous genocidal drive giving itself free reign.
The mother of all Freudian slips: “Israel has also spread chaos, terror, and suffering throughout the region” — US Ambassador at the UN Security Council meeting on Iran. Sometimes, the truth slips through...
Israeli military @IDF tweeting a map of Israel which is not the map of Israel. (h/t @Alonso_GD )
🚨All of Israel is under fire as Iran fires projectiles🚨
Don't make geopolitics the next story. Remember the destruction and agony of Gaza every day.
Immediately after attacking Iran, the Israeli military issued a mass expulsion order covering the vast majority of the Gaza Strip, with the aim of concentrating the population in a small unlivable cage.
Starving Gazans packed behind fences for a scrap of aid. This isn’t relief—it’s humiliation and dehumanization by design. History won’t forget who watched and did nothing.