Cultivating Peace in the Heart of the Balkans
[no-caption] Robin Albarano On November 28, 2016, Mile Milošević, president of the Serbian War Veterans’ Association, traveled to Sarajevo, where he met with Enver Krluć, president of the…
Tag: history
Creating Bodies, Creating a Nation: How the Idea of the Straight, White, Muscular Male Body Shaped America by Ketil Slagstad
Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique Rachel Louise Moran University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 224 pages. 1. When Michelle Obama launched the “Let’…
Who Decided It Was Bad to Be Fat?
In 2009, supermodel Kate Moss caused a stir when she categorically stated that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” As jaw-dropping as the sentiment might have seemed…
Fat Gets No Respect (But That Should Change)
Every human has it. But nearly every human society sees it differently. Fat. What purpose does it serve? In this video, a collaboration between SAPIENS and Aeon, anthropological…
Book Review: “How to Think Like an Anthropologist”
After each semester I evaluate what did and didn’t work in my classes. I didn’t teach Introduction to Anthropology for Fall 2018 so I had an extra semester…
For One Forensic Anthropologist, Resilience Is Bone Deep
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…
America’s Postindustrial Futures
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.…
Liminality: Unfixed Culture, Unfixed Selves
by Gertrude Lamare It was June of 2015, and we were on the road, travelling down to Umwang village in Assam, to witness the completion of a much-delayed…
Is Space a Human Place?
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS From space junk and the International Space Station to space colonization and SpaceX, space is becoming a more human place. What will it mean when…
Waste colonialism
Waste colonialism refers to how waste and pollution are part of the domination of one group in their homeland by another group. The concept has been gaining traction…
The Skeletons in the Museum Closet
Museums are full of wonderful things. From the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum to the Folsom point at the Denver Museum of Nature &…
From Crystal Skulls to the Caste War
Intersections of Tourism, Archaeology and Heritage in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico Figure 1. Tourists admire the “El Castillo” pyramid at the site of Chichen Itza in Yucatán,…
Review: Making Milk
Cohen, Mathilde, and Yoriko Otomo. Making Milk: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Primary Food. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. ISBN: 9781350029965 Kerri Lesh Center for Basque Studies…
How Men Stole Civilization
Museum objects such as this painting—Frieze of Dancers, by Edgar Degas—are often impressive and beautiful. But what do they tell us about the cultures that created them? Andrew…
The Oldest True Stories in the World
Australia’s iconic Opera House is lit up with an art installation called Songlines during a festival in 2016. For Aboriginal Australians, songlines are memories of routes through landscapes—which…
Revisiting Geno-colonization: Senator Warren and “Native DNA”
I woke up this morning to the news that Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test “providing strong evidence” that she has a Native American ancestor 6-10…
Patient Zero and the Making of a Myth: History as an Archaeology of the Present by Ketil Slagstad
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic Richard A. McKay University of Chicago Press, 2017, 400 pages “An innocent he was not. He eventually told…
In Spain’s Silence, Francisco Franco’s Memory Echoes
People make the fascist salute on November 20, 2011, at the Valley of the Fallen—the basilica near Madrid, Spain, where the country’s former dictator Gen. Francisco Franco is…
Why Can’t Most Humans Drink Milk?
[no-caption] Axel Schmidt/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. A solid white mass found in a broken jar …
The Mastodon in the Room
[no-caption] David Williams/SAPIENS Humans may have been in North America much earlier than previously thought. Here’s the evidence: chipped rocks, crushed mastodon bones, and reliable da…
Truth of History
This title is nearly an oxymoron. There are historic truths, but what we known of history is an invention of mostly people who did not personally experience that…
How Do We Know Which Historical Accounts Are True?
It all started with a stray goat. On an otherwise nondescript day in the spring of 1947, a young Bedouin boy searched for a goat that had strayed…
The End of the World As We Know It
[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…
The what and the why of Discard Studies
We tend to think that we are familiar with waste because we deal with it every day. Yet, this is not the case–most aspects of waste are entirely…