Europe’s Other Walls
The Berlin Wall has always had multiple lives. Beyond its fall lies a story of proliferating borders and exclusions. “Berlin is not the same without a Wall,” said…
Tag: In Focus
Walls of Expression and Dark Murals Tourism
Notes on the Battle of Cable Street mural—a colorful depiction of the day anti-fascists faced down by Oswald Mosely’s Blackshirts in London’s East End. The west wall of…
Explosive Landscapes
Walls are but the most visible parts of militarized borders. The Berlin Wall did not fall; it was demolished, first by hammer-wielding locals, then by state bulldozers, which…
Walls beneath the Waves
Geoarchaeological analyses in New York Harbor reveal intriguing evidence of past oceanic transgression even as we fortify our coasts for the future. Millions of people live, work, and…
The Verbal Art of Kichwa Reclamation
Ecuador’s Indigenous languages are varied and contested. What can poetry and curing chants tell us about the experience of language change and the people working to reclaim them?…
Rapping in Sakha
In Yakutsk, hip hop can be poetic, nostalgic, and even subversive. What can this inventive genre say about language relocalization and maintenance? A crowd gathers at Muus Khaia…
The Joy of Dialects
What a froggy mystery in Papua New Guinea can teach us about the pleasure and power of language diversity. Polopuak—frog. Since 2010, I have been working with Kala…
Going Native…In Other Words
The “Going Native” cartoon for this issue of Anthropology News was an exercise in celebration of the International Year of Indigenous Languages, personal discovery, and reverse linguistic imperialism…
Language Lessons
A documentary film shows the challenges faced by Soli children as they learn in a language that is not their own. But does the future have to be…
Indigenous Languages through a Reclamation Lens
The United Nations’ International Year of Indigenous Languages is likely to reproduce the colonial logics that underlie dominant narratives of language disappearance and loss. It doesn’t have to…
CFP: GOSSIP
iStock Psst, have you heard? We’re making a gossip issue. For our January/February issue, Anthropology News is indulging in some loose talk and tittle-tattle. Whether you have…
What’s in Your Bag? 2019 Edition
From Amann, Jordan, to marine environments of the Dominican Republic, anthropologists open their field bags to reveal notebooks, recording equipment, reminders of home, and even a speargun. What’s…
What Are Anthropologists Reading, Watching, and Listening To This Summer?
Deborah Thomas As editor of American Anthropologist, much of my summer reading ends up being article submissions, from which I learn a ton! Aside from that, however, I…
CFP: What’s in Your Bag, Anthropologists? 2019 Edition
Do you have a field notebook you can’t do without? A set of tools of sentimental value? A camera that has never let you down? Diapers for the…
The Figueroa Flock
In Queens, a pigeon is one of the multispecies family. Emily Leshner and Ben Boteler Negrito lives the life of a typical New Yorker; he wakes, eats, goes…
South America’s Golden Fleece
In the Andes, a fine fleece is highly prized. Yet, scientists’ understandings of genetic variation and classification diverge sharply with local herders’ relations with their herds. The guanaco,…
Performing Penguin Care
In the bright waters of the aquarium, penguins and their keepers propose a fishy utopia. Pushing through the glass doors of the aquarium, it’s always the smell that…
Anthropology…in Theory
Bernard Perley © 2019 Bernard Perley is Maliseet from Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada. He teaches courses in linguistic anthropology and Native American studies at the…
Observations on Rastafari Cosmopolitics from the Caribbean
Rastafari-grounded and Caribbean imaginative reinventions have long influenced the evolution of Caribbean ethnography. They could inspire a decolonial anthropology for this century. “I am Ethiopian j…
Resisting Indigenous Erasure from Alcatraz Island to Elizabeth Warren
A critical look at anthropology and 50 years in the fight for Indigenous sovereignty (1969–2019). Indians must be redefined in terms that white men will accept, even if…
The Way We Were?
The radicalism of the 1960s transformed anthropology. But ours was not the racist, exoticizing, colonial project it was imagined to be. The 1960s—Vietnam and resistance to the war;…
Upsetting the Canon
Teaching anthropology offers a site for critical intervention. So what should we be reading with our students? A critical and reflexive anthropology requires, beyond the self-indulgent condemnation of…
Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me/Meditations on Inheritances and Lineages, Anthropological and Otherwise
Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me Silence chose me I didn’t choose silence silence immobilized me I could not breathe in my own skin without breaking the…
Comedic Lies as Transitory Truths
Why are stand-up comedians better anthropologists than, well, anthropologists? And what happens when a Danish anthropologist takes the mic? Anthropology News recently decided to no longer accept prank…