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.…
Tag: identity
Trashing an American Icon
Anthropologist Derek Freeman became Margaret Mead’s biggest critic, trying to undo her research in American Samoa and her reputation as a famed anthropologist. Who was Derek Freeman, and…
We Need to Tell Our Own Stories
In the controversies swirling around Margaret Mead’s work in American Samoa, one set of voices has too often been left out: that of Samoans. Sparked by a provocative…
To Wear the Wind
A tribal scholar from the state of Nagaland in India engages with the loss of traditional cultural practices and locates the creation of a new world order where…
Speaking in Tongues
A scholar from Nagaland in India offers visceral, familial insights on language and culture loss in her Indigenous tribal community. ✽ My poem “Speaking in Tongues” explores the…
Bringing Nhakpoti, the Kayapó Story of Star Girl, to the Screen
Over years and across long distances, an international filmmaking team collaborated to bring to life the origin story of how agriculture came to Kayapó communities, Indigenous peoples in…
What Pots Say—and Don’t Say—About People
Archaeologists long abandoned the simple notion that “pots are people”—that people’s identities directly correspond with the pottery they made and used. What, then, can ceramics reveal about past…
Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova
In Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova, Eleanor Knott presents a comparative study of how people living in Crimea and Moldova identified with Russia and Romania, respectivel…
A knot in the throat, or that time a gangster died of appendicitis
Based on “Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)” by Zilberg Elana. I had spent the last…
Book Review: Gender, Race, Identity & Batman in Gotham City Living
By Alissa Whitmore McCrystal, Erica. 2021. Gotham City Living: The social dynamics in the Batman comics and media. New York: Bloomsbury. Erica McCrystal’s ambitious Gotham City Living:…
Feeling What We Are/A’yel jtaleltik
An anthropologist and writer from the Tseltal community speaks back to a colonialist history of suppression—instead claiming his identity, language, and people. “Feeling What We Are/A’yel jtalel…
Giving Winter a Funeral in Transylvania
In a village in Romania, residents maintain a centuries-old carnival tradition called farsang to mark winter’s death. ✽ As the morning sun ambles over blunted cliffs, whips break…
Unfinished adulthood: discontinuous precarities as epistemic opportunities
This post is part of our Encountering Precarities series. The thematic thread engages with the multiple and asymmetrical forms of precarisation and vulnerabilisation involving both ethnographers and t…
Two Myths Fueling the Conservative Right’s Dangerous Transphobia
An anthropologist attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—ground zero for the current onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation in the U.S. HOW THE RIGHT DEMONIZES TRANS PEO…
How Do We Heal?
A poet-anthropologist who is a Passamaquoddy tribal member lights a path toward healing both within the field of archaeology and in reflecting on the voices and presence—past, present,…
Looking for the Lepchas
A poet of the Indigenous Lepcha community of the Eastern Himalayas is looking to find herself as she grapples with the legacy of writings and material that speak…
Seeker of Life/Kawsay Thawiq
A Quechua poet and linguist speaks to the conflicting feelings some Indigenous groups experience when non-Native paleoarchaeologists and others visit their communities for research projects. “Se…
The Path
A poet-anthropologist reflects on the musings of an older Noni woman from Cameroon who critiques anthropology’s past as a handmaiden of colonialism in responding to her daughter’s chosen…
Mayel Lyang
A poet of the Indigenous Lepcha community of the Eastern Himalayas ponders how to draw maps of the mind, heart, and soul that show her community’s heartland—an “eternal…
Rock Drawings
A Tohono O’odham poet and linguist reflects on the stories and wisdom ancestors communicated—how people survived, how they dispersed and differentiated, how they remember. “Rock Drawings” …
Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela
While a graduate student in social anthropology, Moisés Lino e Silva’s curiosity about the scarcity of freedom and lack of liberty in Brazilian favelas led him to Rocinha,…
Rhyme & Reason: Poetry as a Cultural and Communal Bridge
In this upcoming free live event, SAPIENS 2022 Poet-in-Residence Jason Vasser-Elong celebrates the end of his residency with a discussion of poetry as a dialogue across the ages.…
A Major Museum’s Attempt to Center Native American Voices
Chicago’s Field Museum recently unveiled their new Native North America Hall, redesigned with input from Native collaborators. But does it go far enough to address past harms? ✽…