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…
Tag: Culture
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…
Book Review | Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination Against Immigrants by Donghyun Danny Choi et al.
In Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination Against Immigrants, Donghyun Danny Choi, Mathias Poertner and Nicholas Sambanis present the results of field work experiments conducted in Germany to understa…
Feeling What We Are/A’yel jtaleltik
An anthropologist and writer from the Tseltal community speaks back to a colonialist history of suppression—instead claiming his identity, language, and people. “Feeling What We Are/A’yel jtalel…
Why Nahua Pilgrims Carry Thousands of Papers Up Sacred Peaks
Along mountain pilgrimages, two anthropologists learn how an Indigenous Mesoamerican religion helps people practice a reciprocal relationship with the Earth. Based on Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Na…
Giving Winter a Funeral in Transylvania
In a village in Romania, residents maintain a centuries-old carnival tradition called farsang to mark winter’s death. ✽ As the morning sun ambles over blunted cliffs, whips break…
A Love Letter to the Munay-Ki
A poet exuberantly gives thanks for the Munay-Ki rites enlivened across the ages and shared by the Q’ero people in the Peruvian Andes. “A Love Letter to the…
The Anthropology Professor in an Amazon Warehouse
To learn what conditions are really like for Amazon workers, an anthropologist has joined their ranks. ✽ My first day of work in an Amazon warehouse I was…
Culture and Personality with special emphasis on Margaret Mead
Culture and Personality Culture and personality is the name of a broad unrecognized movement which brings cultural anthropology, psychology and psychiatry together from about 1928 to…
When I See Spring in Your Eyes/yeli bU’ vuċh canen Ạċhen mnz nō bhar
A poet-anthropologist from Indian-occupied Kashmir speaks of hope as inherited through memories of resilience in the past and present. “When I See Spring in Your Eyes” is part…