Does Generosity Come Naturally?
[no-caption] Marcel Hirshegger/SAPIENS When anthropologist Cathryn Townsend headed into the field in 2009 to study generosity, she knew the project was for her. That’s because she was the…
[no-caption] Marcel Hirshegger/SAPIENS When anthropologist Cathryn Townsend headed into the field in 2009 to study generosity, she knew the project was for her. That’s because she was the…
A group of women and children from the Ik tribe share a meal. Cathryn Townsend In January 2016, Cathryn Townsend set out to live among “the loveless people.”…
This is the second in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of…
On October 21, 1868, at approximately eight o’clock in the morning, a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault near Oakland, California shook the Bay Area. The earthquake caused…
“Bees know best,” beekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina tend to say. Keen observers of hives, Bosnian beekeepers take bees as knowledgeable beings. The bees, they say, concoct complex hive substances,…
Jonathan Bethard’s life is anything but dull. He analyzes human remains to determine people’s identities, understand their lifeways, and figure out how they died. And while his work…
On a cold, wet afternoon in February 2014, Andrew Mathews stood on a mountain in Tuscany and looked out over the valley below. An environmental anthropologist and a…
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Listen to the companion episode of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human! Back in 2008, Chad Huddleston was driving home from work when he saw a stra…
After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, many locals channeled their frustrations and sense of humor into creating and sharing memes. Ricardo Arduengo/Getty Images On September 20, 2017, Hu…
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS My first encounter with a group of preppers in St. Louis, Missouri, started at the bar of a restaurant about a decade past its prime.…
When Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 4 feet of rain over parts of Houston in August, the National Weather Service needed two new colors for their rainfall maps:…
Research findings on three early Native American cultures from the southwestern United States show how each responded to environmental challenges in different ways that dramatically altered their…
Theresa Dardar stands for a portrait on her dock in Louisiana’s Pointe-au-Chien Indian community in January 2017. Edmund D. Fountain This article was originally published at FERN and has…
Kiribati, a Pacific island nation that may become uninhabitable because of climate change, is just one of the threatened landscapes featured in The Anthropologist. Kyodo/Associated Press …
Road infrastructure, hydroelectric development, and climate change all factored into the floods and landslides that struck the Indian Himalayas in 2013, killing at least 5,748 people. Paul Co…
Hurricane Katrina rearranged Katie Williams’ home on its foundation. Katie and her family had the capacity to reclaim their lives, but the disaster recovery system sabotaged their cultural…
Over the past two decades, considerable attention has been given to the multiple interactions between gender and disaster. Yet the study and integration of gender in disaster and…
In the state of Arizona, all able-bodied incarcerated people are required to work. Most prison jobs are monotonous and consist of low-skill, assembly line–style labor. The hourly wage…
Following Katrina, progress rebuilding New Orleans has been uneven. In the Lower 9th Ward, house foundations are still a common sight. Max Becherer/Associated Press When Hurricane Katrina…
The days following Nepal’s devastating, 7.8 magnitude earthquake on April 25, 2015, passed for me in a blur of sleeplessness and checking Facebook. I ached to be there.…