“On Bread Alone”: A Deeper Cut
Photo Neni Panourgiá. Necromancer (The Oracle of the Dead) by the river Acheron, Greece. Jugs that held cereal and other seed offerings to the shrine. 14th-13th century BCE.…
Tag: history
Unearthing the Origins of Plantation Slavery on São Tomé
The African island nation played a central—but little-known—role in the rise of the global sugar trade based on enslaved labor. To uncover this past, a team launched the…
Living as Stateless Palestinians in Jordan
Israel’s war on Gaza that erupted in 2023 continues a long history of systemic displacement of Palestinians. Over 2 million Palestinian refugees currently live in Jordan in indefinite…
Poems of Witness and Possibility: Inside Zones of Conflict
Anthropological poems from around the globe speak to people’s creative will, resistance, and resilience—and the significance of our shared humanity. ✽ In July 2023, SAPIENS put out a…
Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage – review
In Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage, Michael Herzfeld considers how marginalised groups use nationalist discourses of tradition to challenge state a…
Tackling the Wreckage of War
An archaeologist traces how rubble from World War II bombings helped turn London marshlands into a footballing utopia. This article was originally published at The Conversation and has…
Documenting the Kashmir Conflict Through Poetry
SAPIENS’ 2023 poet-in-residence sketches the history she speaks to in three poems from Indian-occupied Kashmir. “Speak up for your lips are not sealed, and your words are still…
Black Japanese: the African Diaspora in Japan
Written by Neil Turner Almost three decades ago, while at graduate school in California studying anthropology, I had a colleague …
Anthropologists on Palestine
Amid the war on Gaza and long before, anthropologists have been speaking out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Here’s a curated list of their perspectives as scholars and…
The Vibrant Worlds of Batuan Paintings in Bali
A new multimedia project connects the development of a Balinese regional painting style with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, who began commissioning art in the region in…
Dismantling the Walls in Our Heads
The Berlin Wall fell more than three decades ago—but political, social, and economic divides between East and West Germany continue to reverberate, even among those born after Reunification.…
Orderly Britain: How Britain Has Resolved Everyday Problems, from Dog Fouling to Double Parking – review
In Orderly Britain: How Britain Has Resolved Everyday Problems, from Dog Fouling to Double Parking, Tim Newburn and Andrew Ward explore how ordinary social behaviours – including queuing, drinking and…
What Ancient Egyptians Knew About Meteorites—Long Before Modern Astronomers
An Egyptologist’s study of hieroglyphic texts has revealed that ancient Egyptians likely understood the celestial origins of iron-rich meteorites. ✽ “(The king) Unis seizes the sky and splits…
Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge – review
In Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, João Biehl and Vincanne Adams assemble reflections on the role of anthropology in understanding healthcare in today’s world of…
Embracing Formal Rituals For Stronger Ideas and Connections
Punting on the Cam: A punter sharing Cambridge history with a couple under the Bridge of Sighs on the Cambridge University campus. I just spent a summer studying…
Nationalism in the Vernacular: Tribes, State and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India – review
In Nationalism in the Vernacular: Tribes, State and the Politics of Peace in Northeast India, Roluahpuia considers how oral culture has shaped the nationalist imagination of the Mizo, an indigenous po…
My Life in Fragments by Zygmunt Bauman – review
My Life in Fragments presents the life and thought of the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman through an assemblage of letters he wrote to his daughters. Combining biography and broader reflections…
Open for Business: London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class
Why do most historical accounts fail to mention women? And not only women but just about every ordinary non-famous non-rich person that ever was, even in accounts of…
In the House that Jack Built
The heat promised to be oppressive in the courtyard of the house that Jack built. Yet there was hope as guests…
Fake, Real, Real, Fake: Salvarsan on the US Medical Market
A Swindle Exposed 1913, Chicago: A reporter, assuming the name Edward Donlin, enters a downtown medical establishment that has advertised widely in Midwestern newspapers offering Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s…
Who wants to go to Essex? A walk in Rochford town and by the River Roach
My title is a paraphrase of Margaret Thatcher’s dissing of Hackney, but prejudice against Essex is knee-jerk amongst loads of middle class folks who didn’t like her. Much…
Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity
In Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity, Wei Yu Wayne Tan considers what it meant to be blind in Tokugawa Japan (from 1600 to 1868), including how a strong guild structure p…
Scientists Uplift Indigenous Human-Horse Histories
An archaeologist and Lakota genomics scientist explain how combining archaeology, DNA, and Indigenous knowledge can help revise colonial human-horse narratives largely associated with the western U.S….
The Heaviness
A multidisciplinary poet-scholar and suicide attempt and multi-suicide loss survivor unveils complex anthropological threads that shape suicidal ideation. ✽ Worldwide, most people know someone who ha…