Why is investing in and accumulating gold perceived as prestigious, but extracting it is seen as greedy? The gold industry, alongside nation-states, has marginalized the artisanal and small-scale…
After Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win, an anthropologist set out across the U.S. to understand the nation’s deepening divides. In the new book Something Between Us, he…
As the influx of processed foods threatens traditional diets in rural Mexico, an intergenerational community is forming to keep people healthy. Milpa is an ancestral way of farming…
An anthropologist investigates the impacts of increasing Chinese migration to and investment in Africa. In the last two decades, an unprecedented wave of Chinese investment and migration to…
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…
Amid a goddess worship revival, some feminists are revering the mother of Jesus as a deity, defying Christian doctrines and confronting the use of Mary as a handmaiden…
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the border of North and South Korea is the site of the longest ceasefire in the world. In this region, the effects of…
I met Jon Marks in 2015, when I enrolled in the Master’s program in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I had just finished a…
Traveling Treasures is a new project led by a team of anthropologists that puts Liberians directly in touch with their dispersed cultural heritage through immersive technologies designed to…
Unable to vote in her home country, a Venezuelan immigrant in Chile decides to organize her own mock election. In this episode, social anthropologist Luis Alfredo Briceño González…
Facing an increasing aging population and other societal shifts, people are looking beyond traditional family-based mortuary practices. ✽ It’s August in Tokyo—hot and muggy, as usual. So I’ve…
Lost in Paradise, anytime, anywhere (and online) In the morning light, yoga-clad tourists on vespas wind their way through the traffic in Ubud. We are in Bali, in…
On the May 12th, 2025 cover of Time Magazine, you will see a picture of a white wolf below the bold word Extinct slashed through with a red…
An anthropologist reckons with how digital media has changed youth gang culture dynamics—and what can be done to combat the spread of deadly rumors. ✽ In 2019, Luis…
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…
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…
An anthropologist reflects on the racist undertones of some U.S. efforts to eradicate the spotted lanternfly, an insect from Asia deemed invasive. ✽ A bright red flash whips…
In two erasure poems, a poet-anthropologist imagines alternative futures using text from the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British “sold” Kashmir to a despotic Dogra ruler.…
An anthropologist plunges into the world of Patagonian heavy metal music in Argentina to explore how the genre relates to language and cultural revitalization. ✽ I FIRST HEARD…
Using an ancient Arabic poetic form, a poet-archaeologist from Florida cycles through feelings of entrapment growing up queer in the U.S. South. But in the end, they celebrate…
Using an original poetic form, a poet chips away at a difficult history—becoming an agent of her own remaking and more than just an estranged daughter. “Debitage” is…
The Roti Collective, a community-based research project, explores the layered histories that brought a flatbread from the Indian subcontinent around the world. THE PERFECT BITE Roti, an unleavened…
The speaker in this broken sonnet form utters disobedience for structures that extract care in the Anthropocene. “Broken Sonnets for the Anthropocene” is part of the collection Poets…
When activist and anthropologist Graeber died unexpectedly in 2020, scholars gathered to mourn him. Contributors to a resulting volume, As If Already Free, reflect on his legacy. ✽…