Listening Against the Threshold of Pain
SAPIENS’ 2025 poet-in-residence situates her listening in Kashmir and Germany during and after her fieldwork, contextualizing her contributions to SAPIENS this year. If you missed Uzma Falak’s …
SAPIENS’ 2025 poet-in-residence situates her listening in Kashmir and Germany during and after her fieldwork, contextualizing her contributions to SAPIENS this year. If you missed Uzma Falak’s …
Ruling the Mongols of Manchuria by Jiani He examines how language shaped imperial governance and nation-building in late Qing borderlands. He’s detailed and valuable linguistic history reveals t…
An anthropologist-poet listens to echoes of laughter and other sounds of crossings in Kashmir. In the house once occupied by soldiers laughter echoes as three women sing Yamberzal…
An anthropologist participates in the Houston Pride Parade, offering dance, music, and prayer with others to counter intensifying oppression faced by queer and Latine communities. ✽ Along Allen…
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians have been gathering to support the war effort by creating camouflage nets for fighters on the frontlines. ✽ On a hot…
“I don’t think I could ever be convinced to use an iPad as a replacement,” said Elisabeth Dorion [1], a songwriter, composer, and musician based in Toronto, in…
In a personal essay, an anthropologist reflects on her family’s dual Syrian and French heritage. ✽ Throughout my early childhood, I did not hear my mother’s accent. Other…
An anthropologist unpacks how colonial histories and racial and class hierarchies shape who is allowed to desire and accumulate gold today. ✽ In July 2018, my fiancé and…
Lee Johnson 2025 Mixing Memory & Desire: How History Shaped the Foods of the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica & Miami, Florida: Ian Randle Publishers. xxi + 334 pp 6″x…
Alana Lentin‘s The New Racial Regime interrogates contemporary modes of weaponising race to uphold white supremacy, from the the “war on woke” and its countermovement to the backlash…
A legal scholar turned anthropologist connects South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past to corruption she witnesses while shadowing parole officers. ✽ I am sitting in the back of…
As all-out genocidal violence against Palestinians continues in Gaza, an anthropologist calls attention to how the Israeli state operates through quieter, bureaucratic means to displace and dispossess…
As judges scout new restaurants to evaluate in U.S. cities, an anthropologist investigates the elite, Eurocentric history of the Michelin Red Guide and how it became the ultimate…
In The Great Betrayal, Fawaz Gerges examines the reasons for consistent political instability in the Middle East since the early 20th century. Examining Western intervention, domestic authoritarian ru…
Report｜The Relevance of Post-colonial Imagination in 21st Century Asia 2025-05-26 Topic｜The Relevance of Post-colonial Imagination in 21st Century Asia Date/Time｜2025/5/26 09:00-18:00 (T…
A Tanzanian poet unseats the illusionist tale of the mission museum of the Archabbey of St. Ottilien in Germany. ✽ brick and mortar like skin and bone wisps…
An anthropologist investigates how archaeology helped the U.S. colonize the Panama Canal Zone—just as the current U.S. government threatens to retake it. THE GREATER UNITED STATES The United…
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/circulations/paper Rachel Apone: Thank you for this creative, rich, and thought-provoking book! The book offers a fascinating argument about the history of Tok Pi…
A linguistic anthropologist explores the queer Ballroom scene in San Juan—and how performers are incorporating critiques of colonialism into the art form. “READING” ABOUT HER FASHION I look…
A poet-anthropologist listens to an accidental field recording from Kashmir: What might be dismissed as noise becomes a way to unsettle the settled—making audible dispossession and theft, stealth…
A lawyer and anthropologist examines the history of the longest road in South Africa and why a proposed extension may repeat past violence. While researching the history of…
A Tanzanian historian and poet conjures alternative engagements with Black African women who were marginalized by violent colonial histories and imprisoned in the archives. As the 2024 poet-in-residen…
An anthropologist investigates the ongoing impacts of the U.S.-based United Fruit Company’s fraught 1940s preservation of an ancient Maya site in Guatemala. The United Fruit Company was a…
For the eighth season of the SAPIENS podcast, we’re meeting at a crossroads of cultures—past and present—in search of humanity’s collective destination. Culture is a force that makes…