A Claxonomy of Mexico City’s Traffic
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…
Tag: Language
Indigenizing What It Means to Be Human
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…
Best of SAPIENS 2022
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…
How a Song Bridged Diné and Ndebele Worlds
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…
What Commentators Get Wrong (and Right) About North Korea
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…
What Is Linguistic Anthropology?
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…
The Aztec Antichrist Chronicles Indigenous Resistance and Religious Conversion
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…
Aztec Antichrist: A Performance of the Apocalypse
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…
Why AI Will Never Fully Capture Human Language
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…
How Deaf and Hearing Friends Co-Navigate the World
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…
What Klingon and Other Constructed Languages Reveal
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…
What Klingon and Other Constructed Languages Reveal
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…
What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing
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…
What Is SAPIENS Magazine?
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…
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…
Does Green on COVID-19 Maps Mean What You Think?
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…
Call for Submissions: Indigenizing What It Means to be Human: Stories, Poems, Dreams, and Memories
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…
Academic Fictions: 2022
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,…
How to Promote Research on Social Media
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…
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…
Why English Might Let Go of “He” and “She”
Pronouns are giving us trouble. English speakers face a dilemma. The current structure of our language is exclusionary with regard to gender: The personal pronouns “she” and “he”…
Coming Soon: The MultiRepository
This post introduces a new collaborative project coming soon to CASTAC: an archive of online platforms that highlights how researchers have utilized different communicative modes and media in…
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War by Andrew Brandel
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
Can Indigenous Language Comics Save a Mother Tongue?
This comic book reimagines the oral traditions of Mexico’s Ñäñho people, introducing mischievous creatures called Tlaloques, which inspired the toy at left. María Gámez Tlaloc is a tempes…