"The book that really got me hooked to anthropology as an undergrad student was Death without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. The way she forces you to understand something you’d almost want to not understand – the fact that some mothers in a desperately poor slum in the North-East of Brazil don’t weep over their children’s death – is very powerful, as is the way she lays bare the injustice and absurdity of the supposedly rational state medical system operating in the area.

Having grown up in the Philippines where there is a lot of desperate poverty of the kind Scheper-Hughes describes and where there’s also all kinds of discourses circulating that try to blame poor people themselves for their poverty – and try to uphold clever state policies as the solution – it was a real relief to read a book that squarely took the side of the oppressed and so sharply criticized the state. I’ve eventually moved more towards Marxian anthropology than Scheper-Hughes but I do retain the aspiration in my research to understand the world from the perspective of the oppressed and to, from that vantage point, contribute to the intellectual effort of dismantling the legitimating discourses of overarching power structures – especially global capitalism. What I enjoy about teaching is the chance to help students with similar aspirations develop their capacities and, more in general, to stimulate students to become curious about a whole range of things they might have earlier taken for granted.

And I'm glad that in doing so I can draw on the experience I got from the many different countries I've lived in, including Chile, Hungary, South Africa, the US, India, and Cuba."