Combating Anti-Black Racism in Brazil and Beyond
Protests against police violence in Brazil, like this march commemorating the life of a Black youth killed in his home, help speak to the transnational nature of anti-Blackness…
Tag: Culture
Being Clear-Eyed About Citizen Science in the Age of COVID-19
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…
A Nepalese Region Reclaims Its Holy Water
The Budhi Gandaki River, shown here downstream from Nubri Valley, rushes with icy turquoise water. Madison Wrobley “I’ve been told this is the longest suspended water system in…
How Rats Are Overturning Decades of Military Norms
In some parts of the world, giant rats are being enlisted to detect postwar land mines. APOPO At the third stop at the APOPO Visitor Center in Siem…
The Problem With Abstract Threats
[no-caption] Angus Greig Everyone seems to have a story about the moment when the novel coronavirus pandemic stopped being an abstract problem “somewhere out there” and started being…
#Review: Contesting Leviathan
In Contesting Leviathan, a reference on both the mythical sea-serpent and Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy, Les Beldo seeks to provide a multi-faceted view of the Makah whaling conflict,…
Haitian Deportees Face an Unconscionable Crisis During the Pandemic
The Trump administration has deported more than 240 Haitian nationals from the U.S. back to Haiti—a country that has a weak health care system and few resources to…
Hush-Hush, a Pale-Horse Cometh: Mirabilis Manducat
[no-caption] PhotoTalk/Getty Images “O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum …” —Saint Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century I did not know well my Uncle-Cousin Ron. He was my mother’s cousin. He…
What Parsnips Taught Me About Nature
Growing and harvesting this food helped the author connect with nature. Stuart Lang As the rain fell on my hands, washing away the soil, I threw the last…
The FBI’s Repatriation of Stolen Heritage
The sewing kit above is one of multiple items from a massive private collection held in Indiana that the FBI helped repatriate. This particular item is now in…
Can Protestors Humanize the Police?
Watch this video. In it, a group of young Black Lives Matter protestors in Charleston, South Carolina, take a knee, facing a line of police in riot gear.…
End of Season Message: June 2020
The Familiar Strange · End of Season Message: June 2020 Just like that, we have already made it through half of what can only be described as a…
Police Violence and the Pandemic
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Jen Shannon interviews Laurence Ralph, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. Ralph is also a co-director of Princeton’s Center on Tran…
How Elders Make Us Human
[no-caption] Matthias Zomer/Pexels On March 23, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sparked controversy and outrage by suggesting that older people in the United States might be willing to…
Is Celebrity Attention Helping or Hurting Amazonian Peoples?
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…
Can an “Invasive Species” Earn the Right to Stay?
Macaques sit near Florida’s Silver River. Rachel Simmons/Flickr Steve Johnson never thought he’d have to worry about death threats, not in his line of work. Johnson is a…
Why Are Sports Fans So Bereft Without Live Games?
The Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee, sat empty in March following the cancellation of the Southeastern Conference’s basketball tournament amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Andy Lyons/Gett…
Is the Pandemic a Chance to Challenge Global Inequality?
Migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan crowd a detention center in Greece in 2016. Milos Bicanski “Gulzar, get up! Gulzar, get up!” Saba Khan remembers shouting. Then she turned…
Preppers and the Pandemic
[no-caption] Angus Greig With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, the SAPIENS podcast is going viral. In this first episode of season 3, SAPIENS hosts Chip Colwell and…
Searching for the Sources of Water Scarcity
Residents in Mumbai collect water at a community tank. Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images Nikhil Anand, an environmental and urban anthropologist, grew up in Mumbai, India. In 2007, after studyi…
COVID-19 and the Turn to Magical Thinking
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of unprecedented shock and trauma for many Africans. European invaders appeared, armed with guns for which African spears…
Confronting the Colonial Legacies of Museum Collections
Berlin’s Humboldt Forum opened its doors to the public for a special event in 2019, even as construction on the building continued. David von Becker/SHF Art historian Bénédicte…
Coronavirus Is Killing the Hope of Asylum
As orders to “stay at home” swept across the globe in March and April, some questioned what those mandates meant for people without a place to call home,…
