An Archaeology of Marijuana
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record. The growth of this industry…
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record. The growth of this industry…
In The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea, economic anthropologist Hannah Appel closely examines the operations of US oil companies in Equatorial Guinea, not only…
In The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction, Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham unpack the ‘how’ of the gig economy through quantative datasets and ethnographic vignettes from countries includ…
Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato,…
How can anthropologists approach the influence of economists? The COVID-19 pandemic and how to mitigate its effects is only one recent public and policy issue on which anthropologists…
In Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India, Michael Levien examines how the shift from state-directed capitalism to neoliberalism in India from the 1990s has led to…
[no-caption] Angus Greig SAPIENS host Chip Colwell interviews Elic Weitzel, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, about his recent article for SAPIENS tha…
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…
The impressive temples at Angkor Wat make it famous—but there is much more to the site. Vincent Gerbouin/Pexels Over a thousand years ago, the ancient Khmer civilization emerged…
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…
Source Painting by John William Waterhouse, 1896, (Public Domain) In the classic origin tale of “The Box” and its seductions, Pandora is driven by curiosity—a distinctly feminized will…
The world is in the grip of a serious pandemic as a novel virus sweeps from continent to continent, causing cases of sometimes-deadly COVID-19. Yet much of the…
Chocolate comes from processing the seeds found in the fruit, or “pods” (shown here), of the cacao tree. USAID/Flickr A fine piece of chocolate tickles your tongue with…
It may sound strange, but wouldn’t it be nice if Trump’s disconnect between endless economic growth and environmental crisis stemmed from pure ignorance. At least if this was…
The destruction of forests contributes to widespread drought through atmospheric processes that can seem like sorcery. Pixabay/Pexels To Indigenous Marind communities living in West Papua…
Wheat is now a favored crop in many parts of China. Jie Zhao/Getty Images Today China is the world’s biggest consumer of wheat, which the country uses to…
“I can only work cash-in-hand [načerno] for the rest of my life,” Nina[1] told me as we were sitting in her kitchen drinking black coffee while she was…
Using a remote-sensing tool called lidar, archaeologists can see what lies hidden underneath dense vegetation. This lidar image reveals the grand plaza of the Maya city of Tikal…
Public parking spaces in Seattle have become crowded with resident campers who have few other options. Graham Pruss This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been …
In Cochabamba, Bolivia, people’s acceptance of taxes owed varies widely. Miranda Sheild Johansson In the midsize Bolivian city of Cochabamba, informal work is the norm among the lowest-pa…
SAPIENS host Jen Shannon goes on a mission to find out how quinoa travels from farmers’ fields in Huanoquite, Peru, to markets in Lima and the U.S. She…
Frank stands at the site of his last job, which was at a chemical company. Chloe Ahmann In 1963, Frank* was fired from his job at American Dredging.…
People collect water from a pump in a small village in Mozambique. Graeme Robertson/Getty Images Roxana* and Rajah are neighbors who live on the outskirts of Nampula City…
[no-caption] Ezra Weiss This September, as Hurricane Florence bore down on the North Carolina coast, it spread a soup of stinking effluent from at least 110 lagoons on…