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…
Tag: history
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…
The Breath We Leave: SAR Literary Day 2023
It was the kind of morning best spent in a worn chair next to a lamp reading a good book. Rain pelted at the r…
The Rebellion Recorded on the Rosetta Stone
An archaeologist explains how recent archaeological finds in Egypt expand our knowledge of a violent revolt discussed on the now-famous Rosetta Stone. This article was originally published at…
When I See Spring in Your Eyes/yeli bU’ vuċh canen Ạċhen mnz nō bhar
A poet-anthropologist from Indian-occupied Kashmir speaks of hope as inherited through memories of resilience in the past and present. “When I See Spring in Your Eyes” is part…
How to Resist Policing: The Practical Meanings of Towel Masks for Student Protesters in Late 1960s Japan by Shunsuke Tanaka
Masks have long been a symbol of resistance movements around the world, especially in East Asia. As early as the 1960s, protestors in Japan began wearing masks during…
Edgar Morin’s Leçons d’un siècle de vie by Robert Dingwall
Leçons d’un siècle de vie. Morin, Edgar. 2022. Paris: Pluriel. Edgar Morin is probably the most influential French sociologist that the English-speaking world has never acknowledge…