Embracing the Poetry of Being Human
A contributor to a special series on decolonizing anthropology rejects the discipline’s colonial and racist roots and instead pursues ways of doing science that center human liberation and…
Tag: colonialism
Can Anthropology Be Decolonized?
In recent years, anthropology has increasingly reckoned with its colonial and racist roots. In a special forum, scholars weigh in on what “decolonizing” means—and share their visions for…
Indigenizing What It Means to Be Human
SAPIENS offers a curated collection of poems and stories that center Indigenous values, worldviews, and insights, creatively reimagining anthropology and the human experience. ✽ Anthropology’s fraugh…
Review: Palm Oil
Max Haiven Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire. Pluto Press, London, 2022. ISBN 9780745345826. Leonidas Vournelis (Baruch College) Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire explores an…
Reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism in a Chemistry Lab
Pollution is Colonialism book cover Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in…
A Native Alaska Community’s Reckoning With Vaccine Hesitancy
An anthropologist’s research with Tlingit communities in Alaska shows they have good reasons to be skeptical about vaccines. They know their history. ✽ New COVID-19 boosters are now…
The Aztec Antichrist Chronicles Indigenous Resistance and Religious Conversion
An exceedingly rare notebook from 16th-century Mexico contains plays about the Antichrist told by the Aztecs’ descendants. An anthropologist recounts his rediscovery of the notebook and explains the…
What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature
In Melanesia, Indigenous communities developed elaborate rituals to bring themselves material wealth starting in the late 19th century. These practices reveal a profoundly important and universal soci…
How Can Societies Decolonize Conservation?
Two archaeologists reflect on how social hierarchies harm biodiversity and how to move away from conservation efforts based on colonialist values. ✽ When I (Tim) arrived in Hanalei,…
Why Indigenous Fire Management Works
Three researchers use a study of the cypress pine in Arnhem Land, Australia, to explain why large-scale, institutional fire management is inferior to sustainable cultural burning. This article…
Derogatory Place Names Need Indigenous Revision
Changing offensive place names on public lands is a strong move toward decolonization. But to heal relationships and address ecological crises, non-Native people must do more. ✽ On…
Confronting Xenophobia Through Food—and Comics
An anthropologist who migrated from India to the U.K. uses his research to illustrate how fellow migrants from India maintain cultural heritage through hard-to-find ingredients. ✽ Before I…
Valentina Napolitano & Kristin Norget: Pope Francis, Reconciliation, and the State
At the end of July, a remarkable event unfolded in three distinct but significant sites in Canada. Pope Francis, the Argentinian current supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic…
Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet: Post-Colonic Pandemic Biopolitics by Warwick Anderson
Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily w…
Jonathan Parry: The Burdens of the Past: Comments on David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
Image 1: Book cover of Lost People David Graeber’s Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar began life as his University of Chicago doctoral thesis.…
The Shitty Affairs of British Colonialism in Malaya: Manicuring “Native” Agriculture through Race-Specific Livestock Interbreeding
In January 2020, I accidentally came across a series of photographs at the UK National Archives documenting agricultural and livestock experimentation in 1930-1940s British Malaya. The peculiarity of…
Acts of Occlusion
Occlusion is a term that describes a technique of erasure. Here, I show how occlusion works specifically in International Development discourses to set the terms of morality, dominance,…
Acts of Occlusion
Occlusion is a term that describes a technique of erasure. Here, I show how occlusion works specifically in International Development discourses to set the terms of morality, dominance,…
Barney Bate’s book, Protestant Textuality and the Tamil Modern
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33334 Hannah Carlan interviews E. Annamalai, Francis Cody, and Constantine V. Nakassis Hannah Carlan: Bernard Bate’s posthumous book Protestant Textu…
Naming the Virus, Becoming the Virus: Affective Forces of Threat from Hà Nội to Atlanta and the Possibility for Anti-Racist Solidarities
“Chống dịch như chống giặc” (“Fight the pandemic like an invader”) has become Vietnam’s slogan in its battle against COVID-19. From the pandemic’s onset until April 2021, Vietnam…
Reading Lists: Residential Schools and Canadian Colonialism
Content warning: this article covers topics of colonialism and genocide in Canada. In early June of 2021 news reports emerged about the remains of Indigenous children buried in…
The German Catechism
For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore…
Reading Lists: Waste Colonialism and Palestine
When there’s conflict, academics and teachers will often put together a reading list or syllabus to show the breadth and depth of knowledge on a topic that is…
Substance Use and Abuse in Guyana’s prisons: self-medication by inmates
This oped was written by our research team from the University of Leicester and University of Guyana The ‘Survey of Individuals Deprived of Liberty: Caribbean 2016-2019’ produc…