Hi everyone, hope the first week of August is not beating down on you too hard! Here are your readings for the week.

As the 2016 Summer Olympic games begin this week, Gregory Mitchell observes the effects of mass sports tourism on the lives of sex workers in Brazil.

Durkheim and the “collective effervescence” has picked up some steam to explain the popularity of Trump. However,  Religion Dispatches looks at the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer and The Golden Bough to explain Trump as a magician-king.

When kawaii becomes kawai. The immaculate construction and cuteness of bento lunch boxes are used as markers of social status among Japanese parents and a source of shame for more humble lunches.

The linguistic diversity of indigenous people in Mexico is gloriously animated in several short films that seek to preserve endangered languages.

The Nation profiles the lives of several Korean adoptees in America and the struggles that follow. Alyssa Jeong Perry cites University of California, Irvine anthropologist Eleana J. Kim and her book Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging (which I am currently reading and highly recommend).

See you next week!