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” …
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” …
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,…
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.…
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? ✽…
An anthropologist recounts a magical moment of songwriting collaboration between Diné (Navajo) and Ndebele artists gathered for the WOMAD Festival in South Africa. ✽ In October, I traveled…
Linguistic anthropologists study language in context, revealing how people’s ways of communicating and expressing themselves interact with human culture, history, politics, identity, and much more. W…
An anthropologist who migrated from India to the U.K. uses his research to illustrate how fellow migrants from India maintain cultural heritage through hard-to-find ingredients. ✽ Before I…
By Irene Stengs On 1 September 2022, the Dutch Central Organisation for the Meat Industry (COV, Centrale Organisatie voor de Vleessector), a partnership consisting of organizations involved in…
In a new book, Minoritarian Liberalism, an anthropologist explores how favela residents of Rio de Janeiro create their own versions of liberty—even under conditions of violence, poverty, and…
SAPIENS’ poetry editor and inaugural poet-in-residence break down what makes certain poems anthropological and explore how poetry has the potential to transform ways of thinking and being in…
The popular image of the U.S. heartland as only a place of rural, hardworking white farmers has always been a larger-than-life myth. In a new book, Imagining the…
An anthropologist traces the origins and world travels of one of his favorite kinds of plants. ✽ As someone who grew up in the Philippines, I have always…
Door Ton Salman en Marina de Regt Er spelen al een aantal jaren stevige debatten over de vruchtbaarheid van identiteitsdenken als politieke strategie, als strategie om te strijden…
The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period…
I remember when I was a little girl, I was fascinated with war memorials. Stone colossi towering over people, gravely staring into the infinite as if seeing something…
In the book Ethnicity and Democracy, Mona Chettri offers a rich ethnography originating from fieldwork conducted in three EH borderland areas: Darjeeling (India), Sikkim (India), and Ilam in…
This rock art in Australia features four of Josie Maralngurra’s hand stencils. The Pathway Project This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under…
Archaeologist Atilio Francisco Zangrando, foreground, has excavated along the Beagle Channel, or Onashaga in the Yaghan language, since 1998. Katrina Pyne This article was originally publ…
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, or NAGPRA, is supposed to curb the illegal possession of ancestral Native American remains and cultural items. But…
Religious commodification is an arena that has gained increasing interest among social scientists, especially where religious symbols and artefacts are being appropriated by both adherents and non-adh…
Enslaved people built the Rotunda at the University of Virginia in the 19th century. Chrispecoraro/Getty Images Go to undergrad, go to graduate school, get a Ph.D. heft onto…
By Benjamin Koponen On January 22nd, 2022, an elderly white woman punched me in the arm while I, a black man, was biking to help a friend paint…
A photo installation by artist Glenn Morey explores how Korean adoptees in the U.S. grapple with questions related to belonging, identity, and family. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images On a…