Europe’s Other Walls
The Berlin Wall has always had multiple lives. Beyond its fall lies a story of proliferating borders and exclusions. “Berlin is not the same without a Wall,” said…
Tag: Featured Posts
Walls of Expression and Dark Murals Tourism
Notes on the Battle of Cable Street mural—a colorful depiction of the day anti-fascists faced down by Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts in London’s East End. The west wall of…
Explosive Landscapes
Walls are but the most visible parts of militarized borders. The Berlin Wall did not fall; it was demolished, first by hammer-wielding locals, then by state bulldozers, which…
Walls beneath the Waves
Geoarchaeological analyses in New York Harbor reveal intriguing evidence of past oceanic transgression even as we fortify our coasts for the future. Millions of people live, work, and…
Feminist Anthropology Is Teamwork
As the launch of Feminist Anthropology was becoming visible in 2019, I found myself working on its editorial board with colleagues with whom I had collaborated over the…
Dear Graduate Student…
Dear Graduate Student, Here we are, well into another semester. Many of you are in the field already or preparing for the field. If you are already there,…
Providing Accessibility as a Meeting Attendee
You’re getting ready for the Annual Meeting! Great! Do you ever wonder about who goes and who doesn’t go? And why? As anthropologists, we are trained to analyze…
Fieldnotes on Bribes, Smiles, and Myths
This summer, a new billboard in Vilnius Old Town, caught my eye. A healthy-looking man was pointing his finger up and informing Lithuanians, “Don’t Believe the Myths—patients are…
Household Workers’ Struggle for Equal Rights
Domestic labor in urban Latin American life takes center stage in the film, Roma. “Have you seen Roma?” This is perhaps the single most prevalent question I get as…
“Yes, We Can” and the Power of Political Slogans
“Hey Joe, instead of saying, No we can’t,” retorted Senator Kamala Harris to Vice-President Joe Biden. “Let’s say, Yes, we can.” With that single line, Harris resurrected an…
Virtual Attendance Pilot Project Slated for 2019 Annual Meeting
At the request of the Members’ Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee (MPAAC), AAA is offering a “Virtual Attendance” pilot project in conjunction with the 2019 Annual Meeting in…
Teaching Literature on the Arabian Peninsula
Even after 15 years of teaching literature on the Arabian Peninsula, I still worry about finding the right texts for my students. They are majoring in English language,…
Witnessing Puerto Rico, Recognition, and Feeling in the Wake of Hurricane Maria
As the plane descended to land in San Juan’s Airport in August 2018, almost a year after Hurricane Maria jolted Puerto Ricans on the island and elsewhere, I…
You’ve Attended Some Awesome Sessions. What Next?
Current and former students at Simon Fraser University tell us where to eat, drink, and pet cats in Vancouver. #AAACASCA British Columbia is host to more than 400,000…
Bienvenue/Welcome to Vancouver
CASCA Local Organizing Committee members Pamela Stern and Jaime Yard on what to do in Vancouver this November. #AAACASCA The 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association…
The Verbal Art of Kichwa Reclamation
Ecuador’s Indigenous languages are varied and contested. What can poetry and curing chants tell us about the experience of language change and the people working to reclaim them?…
Rapping in Sakha
In Yakutsk, hip hop can be poetic, nostalgic, and even subversive. What can this inventive genre say about language relocalization and maintenance? A crowd gathers at Muus Khaia…
The Joy of Dialects
What a froggy mystery in Papua New Guinea can teach us about the pleasure and power of language diversity. Polopuak—frog. Since 2010, I have been working with Kala…
Going Native…In Other Words
The “Going Native” cartoon for this issue of Anthropology News was an exercise in celebration of the International Year of Indigenous Languages, personal discovery, and reverse linguistic imperialism…
Language Lessons
A documentary film shows the challenges faced by Soli children as they learn in a language that is not their own. But does the future have to be…
Indigenous Languages through a Reclamation Lens
The United Nations’ International Year of Indigenous Languages is likely to reproduce the colonial logics that underlie dominant narratives of language disappearance and loss. It doesn’t have to…
Indigenous Survival Politics in the Promotion of a National Discourse
In January 2018, 10 members from an Ainu traditional performance group, Sapporo Upopo Hozonkai (Sapporo Upopo Preservation Society, hereafter SUH), traveled from Sapporo, the capital city of Hokkaido…
Rapping Blackness
As a biracial man, there’s something visceral about being in a room full of black people of all shades, from across the United States—all of whom have dressed…
CFP: GOSSIP
iStock Psst, have you heard? We’re making a gossip issue. For our January/February issue, Anthropology News is indulging in some loose talk and tittle-tattle. Whether you have…