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…
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…
Introduction: Understanding as Resonance Aja Smith and Anne Line Dalsgård In this third section of the thread, Understanding as Resonance, the essays explore that which happens when words…
In a reflection of and paying respect to the collective nature of thinking, we have chosen to cite central aspects of the reviewers comments in each section. We…
An anthropologist uses explicit insults to get students thinking about gender and power in everyday language. Plus, a brief explainer on the slang term “sus.” ✽ “Insult me,”…
Anyone who spends time in Mexico City will spend much of it in traffic. One of the most clogged cities in the world, residents will lose on average…
SAPIENS offers a curated collection of poems and stories that center Indigenous values, worldviews, and insights, creatively reimagining anthropology and the human experience. ✽ Anthropology’s fraugh…
In a year of continuing global conflagrations, anthropologists investigated a wide range of pressing and curious questions about humanity’s past, present, and future. Here are the editors’ picks…
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…
An anthropologist argues that unfair portrayals of North Korea as a hopelessly irrational hermit state has huge implications for policy and security. ✽ This month, North Korea tested…
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 exceedingly rare notebook from 16th-century Mexico contains plays about the Antichrist told by the Aztecs’ descendants. An anthropologist recounts his rediscovery of the notebook and explains the…
A 16th-century play written by the descendants of the Aztecs after the Spanish conquest dramatically reveals Indigenous people’s responses to their religious conversion. Excerpted from Aztec Antichri…
Researchers in artificial intelligence have made extraordinary strides in mimicking human language—but they still can’t capture the parts that truly make language human. ✽ The story begins with…
For deaf people in the U.S., accessibility has become synonymous with provisioning professional sign language interpreters. But in everyday life, deaf people’s experiences of “access” often include mo…
At a Comic-Con, or comic book convention, in Los Angeles in 2010, the trolley signs were in Klingon. Doug Kline/The Pop Culture Geek Network/Flickr This article was originally…
This article was originally published at Knowable Magazine and has been republished with Creative Commons. Most languages develop through centuries of use among groups of people. But some…
This handwritten example of Vai script dates to around 1850. British Library/Wikimedia Commons In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling…
SAPIENS magazine is an online portal for readers to better understand the world and what it means to be human. AerialPerspective Images/Getty Images WHAT IS SAPIENS MAGAZINE? SAPIENS…
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…
Picture a traffic light. This isn’t a trick question. We want you to visualize some sort of box housing three lightbulbs, each behind a colored filter: red on…
Our team—Dr. Margaret Noodin, Christine Weeber, and Jason Vasser-Elong—invites submissions of original, unpublished pieces for the Indigenizing What It Means to be Human: Stories, Poems, Dreams, and M…
Last year, the Allegra Lab began a thematic thread showcasing a selection of the wonderful “academic fictions” written by students as an assignment for the course on “Cities,…
Since SAPIENS launched in 2016, several social media outlets have been central to the magazine’s promotion strategy. Every week, we publish multiple posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram…
[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…