Raising My Children in an Ableist World
In a new book, an anthropologist and father of three, including a daughter with Down syndrome, reflects on the pressures of parenting. Excerpted from An Ordinary Future: Margaret…
Tag: Culture
Do Strict Criminal Penalties Protect Animals From Abuse?
In Mexico, a growing animal protection movement often promotes harsh criminal punishment for those who abuse animals. But are these strategies working, or do they lead to further…
Inside Mexico City’s Surveillance State
An anthropologist investigates how one city’s rapidly expanding video surveillance system is transforming criminal investigation—sometimes in deeply flawed ways. ✽ In September 2022, a criminal prose…
Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality – review
In Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality, Shenila Khoja-Moolji recounts how Ismaili women, displaced from East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s,…
Through Film, Discovering Hope in the Face of Environmental Destruction
In the midst of acute eco-anxiety, can community-based filmmaking help young people imagine a different future? FILMMAKING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE A group of 12-year-olds enters a decrepit building…
Nationalism in the Vernacular: Tribes, State and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India – review
In Nationalism in the Vernacular: Tribes, State and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India, Roluahpuia considers how oral culture has shaped the nationalist imagination of the Mizo, an indigenous po…
SAPIENS Is Going Viral
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic struck humanity. The SAPIENS podcast explores anthropological insights into what this crisis taught humanity about our evolution, how we deal with abstract…
The SAPIENS Podcast Is Back
Why can eating insects be so gross? Who were the ancient Denisovans? How are dreams shaped by culture? Are people naturally generous? The SAPIENS podcast is back, exploring…
A Trailer for Everything Human
What makes you … you? Is it your DNA, culture, environment? SAPIENS hosts Esteban Gómez, Jen Shannon, and Chip Colwell speak with anthropologists from around the globe to…
How Eugenics Shaped the U.S. Prenatal Care System
Black women in the U.S. are far more likely to die from complications related to pregnancy and birth than White women. Two scholars explore how the discrediting of…
Bringing Nhakpoti, the Kayapó Story of Star Girl, to the Screen
Over years and across long distances, an international filmmaking team collaborated to bring to life the origin story of how agriculture came to Kayapó communities, Indigenous peoples in…
Imagining Other Worlds at the India-Pakistan Border
For decades, soldiers at the border between Attari, India, and Wagah, Pakistan, have staged an elaborate ceremony for onlookers. An anthropologist reflects on the ceremony as a legacy…
Writing Indigenous Oral Tradition to Fight a Dam
In the northern Philippines, the Isnag are documenting their Traditional Stories to sustain their culture and fight a legal battle against dams that would inundate their homelands. ✽…
Remembering my Friend, Véronique Amenan Akpoueh (d., Aug. 3, 2023)
Ours was not an ordinary friendship. Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for fourteen years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and inte…
Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)
View from the upper deck of Oracle Park, 2023. Photo: Ryan Anderson. A couple months ago, just after the 2023 baseball season started, I was sitting in the…
The Persistence of Fukushima’s Fisherfolk
In a new book, an anthropologist with long-term ties to northeastern Japan shares stories of how fishing communities have continued making a living in uncertain waters after the…
Cold Hubris and Fundo
A poet-historian reflects on the legacy of colonial-era collecting practices in Tanzania that tore Black Indigenous ancestors from their communities and history. ✽ Euro-American colonial collections o…
What Spider Games Say About Arachnophobia
Many people around the world fear spiders. But in the Philippines, the tradition of spider wrestling often brings people and arachnids in close proximity. ✽ A fear of…
The Urgency of Envisioning a World Without Police
An anthropologist working in Baltimore argues that safety for Black communities requires an end to policing. That also means taking a hard look at how policing intersects with…
A Call for Anthropological Poems From Within “Zones of Conflict”
SAPIENS is seeking poetry submissions for a curated collection that will publish in early 2024. Deadline September 15, 2023. SAPIENS magazine invites creative works for the upcoming poetry…
Fair and Balanced—Weighing Coca With a Wipi in Peru
An Andean community’s use of weighing scales shows how meanings of fairness and justice differ across cultures. THE WIPI SCALE IN PERU On a cool spring morning in…
Collaborating So a 200-Year-Old Pipe Can Continue Its Work
A museum curator and a First Nations leader explain how a treaty pipe, sold at auction, exemplifies a new path for repatriations in Canada. A PIPE’S HOMECOMING In…
The Heaviness
A multidisciplinary poet-scholar and suicide attempt and multi-suicide loss survivor unveils complex anthropological threads that shape suicidal ideation. ✽ Worldwide, most people know someone who ha…
Do Washing Machines Belong in Kitchens? Many Brits Say “Yes.”
An anthropologist moves from Canada to the U.K. and finds herself reflecting on what home design patterns reveal about a society. Excerpted from Silent but Deadly: The Underlying…