Why a Mexican Village’s DIY Cellphone Network Matters
A campesino checks his cellphone while working in the fields outside of Talea de Castro, Mexico (the mountain village in the distance on the upper left). Agustine Sacha…
A campesino checks his cellphone while working in the fields outside of Talea de Castro, Mexico (the mountain village in the distance on the upper left). Agustine Sacha…
In an interview for the University of Vienna’s Uni:view Magazin, I am talking about the edited volume Theorising Media and Conflict (Berghahn Books, 2020), its purpose, conclusions and…
Writing a pitch involves untangling your ideas into a clear message. mikroman6/Getty Images So, you think you have the seeds of a great essay or opinion piece. Maybe…
In the summer of 1960, Jane Goodall left England for what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania. With the aid of legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, Goodall was…
An often underestimated but critical element of academic endeavour is communication. There is no doubt that many academic books and articles are dense and impenetrable, written in jargon-laden,…
[no-caption] FG Trade/Getty Images The headlines and powerful prose of the anthropologists and journalists who write for SAPIENS draw our readers in time and again. But, as the…
“Transition” by Papua New Guinean artist Philemon Yalamu. From Papua New Guinea: A New Dawn by Fondazione Imago Mundi/Luciano Benetton Collection. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Languag…
View of Pentecost. © Hannah Sibona By Hannah Sibona In 2020, a face-to-face meeting, more often than not, means screen-to-screen. The global pandemic, social restrictions, and the ‘new…
Right now, many of us are reevaluating what it means to be connected. In the United States, we often think of connectivity as having wireless broadband service, or…
[no-caption] Anna Shvets/Pexels It’s morning in Houston, Texas, for Jeremy* and his team of engineers, and nearly evening in a small town north of Bucharest, Romania, for Costa…
[no-caption] FilippoBacci/GettyImages For academics used to the idea of “publish or perish,” writing may seem to be a well-practiced and even perfected skill. But trying out a new…
An intergenerational photo of a Black family in Texas captures the enduring legacy of both community and family. Thomas Barwick/Getty Images In the last few weeks, major media…
Dominican-born Yordano Ventura, Kansas City Royals’ starting pitcher, holds up a Dominican flag following the team’s World Series victory in 2015. (Ventura died tragically in 2017.) Shane Key…
Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato,…
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration made plans for the orderly evacuation of U.S. cities in the event of an imminent nuclear war. Supposedly, city residents with odd-numbered…
How can anthropologists approach the influence of economists? The COVID-19 pandemic and how to mitigate its effects is only one recent public and policy issue on which anthropologists…
In March 2011, one of the strongest earthquakes on record struck the Fukushima Dai’ichi Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Japan. Combined with a subsequent tsunami, the disasters triggered…
[no-caption] Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. On the face of it, there seems to be no…
Indigenous peoples in Brazil are dying from COVID-19 at twice the rate of the rest of the country’s population. Here, Indigenous nurses accompany an elderly woman for testing…
The “study of humanity” applies to many fields, but anthropology looks at people in a unique way. Orbon Alija/Getty Images What is anthropology? The word “anthropology” literally means…
(no-caption) Alison Wright/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Some readers may have noticed that SAPIENS uses a capital…
Protests against stay-at-home orders to prevent the spread of the coronavirus have occurred across the country, as shown here in front of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing.…
The year is 2018. The world’s leaders are gathered, yet again, to try to solve the crisis of climate change. But this time, the United Nations secretary-general is…