The Many Lives of a Face Mask
An anthropologist explores how the COVID-19–era surgical face mask went from a health precaution to a fashion choice among women in Peshawar, Pakistan. ✽ ON A HOT AFTERNOON…
An anthropologist explores how the COVID-19–era surgical face mask went from a health precaution to a fashion choice among women in Peshawar, Pakistan. ✽ ON A HOT AFTERNOON…
Through her field recordings, SAPIENS poet-in-residence for 2025 listens to murmurings of clay, debris, and time in Kashmir’s Tsaar. ✽ 1 The shared taxi meanders through Tsaar— resting…
Two ethnographic filmmakers enter the government maze in India, documenting how citizens make claims on the state while imagining alternate bureaucratic encounters. ✽ Enter the Reception Room, and…
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…
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 offers a lens on how losses from war dramatically alter a family—and a society. ✽ BEFORE I FORMALLY BECAME an anthropologist, my mom and I lived…
Fifty years on, Vietnam is still reckoning with the long-term ecological toll of U.S. warfare—a grim warning as Israel and Russia unleash similar destruction in Gaza and Ukraine.…
An anthropologist discovers diasporic flights—including her own—that begin at and return to the waters of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. ✽ WITHIN A FEW HOURS…
In the Sikkim and Kalimpong Himalayas in Northeast India, supply chains are often interrupted by changing monsoon systems that damage highways. Responding to uncertainty, communities are reclaiming an…
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…
An anthropologist explores how a phone call home may seem simple but carries layers of meaning for migrating nurses and their families in India. ✽ SOON AFTER I…
Protestors against the U.S.-enabled genocide of Palestinians face federal charges in New York City. Why do universities repress contemporary struggles for social justice while valorizing historical on…
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…