Spelling a Nation’s Name
Ruined buildings serve as reminders of the lives lost and displaced by the Kosovo War more than two decades ago. Erina Baci I’ve been rewriting a grant application…
Tag: Ethics
When the Gift of Immigration Comes With Strings
[no-caption] Rachaphak Kitbumrung/Getty Images A year ago, I found myself trying to ease the tension rising in a makeshift classroom in Istanbul, Turkey, where I was a volunteer…
From the Margins to the Mainstream: Black and Indigenous Futures in Archaeology
Widespread protests against police violence and anti-Black racism have recently swept the globe. In the wake of protests in May and June, specifically, many citizens and communities looked…
Pain-Free Mouse, being ‘human,’ and more-than-human ethics
The Voigt-Kampff test as seen in Blade Runner (1982). All copyrights to film held by Warner Bros. In the opening scene of Blade Runner, a fictional diagnostic called…
What to do with the predator in your bibliography?
In the early summer of 2020 I submitted what I presumed was a final round of extremely minor revisions to an article that I’d been working on in…
"The Camera is our Weapon": Kayapó video warriors featured in new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
The Kayapó (Mebengôkrê) people of Brazil are living proof of the resistance and adaptability of Indigenous cultures. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York …
Who Gets to Study Whom?
[no-caption] recep-bg/Getty Images About a decade ago, Chisomo Kalinga was in a bind. The medical humanities scholar, then a graduate student at King’s College London, was looking for…
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…
Why “We” Isn’t for Everyone
[no-caption] Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. On the face of it, there seems to be no…
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…
Ethical inversions due to COVID-19: Pandemic and local ironies in managing responsibilities by Viviana L. Toro Matuk
On Friday March 21th 2020, the Fula men, who live in the town of Gabu, in the northeast of Guinea-Bissau, did not meet to pray in their mosques.…
A Curator’s Search for Justice
In October of last year, I found myself with my family in the heart of a sacred forest of the Mijikenda people of Kenya. One of the elders…
Research ethics, violated
Recently on a scholar’s email listserv dealing with Myanmar (Burma) issues, I learned that at some universities in Australia, Singapore, and beyond, scholars intent on doing work in…
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,…
Ethnography at an Impasse? Fieldwork Reflections During a Pandemic
As COVID-19 disrupts life for billions of people around the world, it also calls into question the very notion of fieldwork and compels us to reflect on the…
The Use of Money to Maintain Connection (and Toilet Paper)
When I received an email containing one of the first Covid-19 payment memes—“How do you wish to pay?”, with an image of Visa, MasterCard, and a roll of…
Will “Faith Not Fear” Spread the Coronavirus?
U.S. President Donald Trump spoke at an evangelical megachurch in south Miami in January 2020. Lynn Sladky/AP Photo As Easter fast approaches, epidemiologists and observers worry that the…
Are slum tours doing more harm than good?
by Rachel Jackson Last year, I spent several months working in an NGO in Peru. Before travelling home, I decided to take a trip to Brazil and spend…
Is It Ever OK to Publish Photographs of Human Remains?
[no-caption] Jonas Androx/Pexels Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Death is an experience that binds all of humanity. Everyone dies.…
The Future of Social Media in Anthropology
From the conclusion to my contribution on “Social Media” in Wiley’s “The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:” Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact…
Innocent images? The ethics of sharing your children’s photos online
There are collections of embarrassing childhood photos stashed in most parents’ homes. Everyone remembers an instance when those photos unexpectedly appeared in ways that were awkward or humiliating,…
Dark Patterns, or Shades of Grey?
Screen Time app. Credit: Apple Press Kit Auto-playing videos. Bottomless social media newsfeeds. Accentuated “I consent” buttons. The internet may appear as a Choose Your Own Adventure, but…
Restoring Dignity to Stolen Ancestors
A man stands on the farm in Sutherland, South Africa, where a medical student once unethically exhumed nine bodies for scientific study. Je’nine May/UCT Almost 100 years ago,…