Confronting Xenophobia Through Food—and Comics
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…
Tag: identity
“The Netherlands Meat Land” Campaign: Towards an Ethnography of Meat
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…
What Is Freedom in a Brazilian Favela?
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…
What Is Anthropological Poetry?
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…
Peeling Back the Myth of a “White” Midwest
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…
Why Do (Some) Humans Love Chili Peppers?
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…
Identiteitspolitiek tussen recht, rechts en averechts
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…
Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?
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…
A Memory of History or History of Memory? – A War Memorial ‘Simpson and His Donkey’
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…
Book Review: ‘Ethnicity and Democracy in the Eastern Himalayan Borderland’
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…
The Amazing Archive of First Nations Stories Written on Stone
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…
The Yaghan Rise Again
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…
Repatriation Is Our Future
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…
A Trinket, a Trifle, and a Novel New Disciple: Fandoms and Consecrated Commodities
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…
Predominantly White Institutions’ Overtures to Black Students OR This Is What They Tell You Without Telling You
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…
The flea, the canyon, and racism: Reflections on outrage
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…
Transracial Adoption and the Limits of Love
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…
Bend like a Willow Tree
‘Watch out, we’ll catch every one of you!’ Hamza’s shrill voice echoed in the stairwell, and through the opening, he saw a swarm of children scattering to hide…
Dear Yaye
November 2017 Dear Yaye, I am writing to you because a week ago, Babacar returned. Babacar Diop, I think I might have written to you about him,…
Academic Fictions: A ballad of Kochi
Come oh villagers, come to the port Carry your sickles and scythes, sticks and rocks Come to the port, our city has fallen!! Our little city by the…
The Politics of “Ukraine” Versus “the Ukraine”
[no-caption] TheKit_13/Pixabay This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. For most of the 20th century, English speakers re…
Listening to Metal in the World: Music, Identity, and the Other
“Hey Jarrod, you like world music right? Check out this Mongolian band called 13th Bell”. I received this text a few weeks ago and was quite piqued by…
Untangling Race From Hair
Descriptions of hair have long been knotted with false notions of race, but new research points to empowering ways of viewing this emotionally charged physical trait. D3sign/Getty Images …
Danko Šipka on his book, Lexical Layers of Identity
Author Interview by Nikolina Zenovic Nikolina Zenovic: You have written extensively on lexicography, lexicology, and lexical conflict, particularly in the context of Slavic languages. How does…