How to Pitch: A Guide for Anthropologists
Writing a pitch involves untangling your ideas into a clear message. mikroman6/Getty Images So, you think you have the seeds of a great essay or opinion piece. Maybe…
Tag: Language
Why Write for SAPIENS?
In the summer of 1960, Jane Goodall left England for what is now Gombe National Park in Tanzania. With the aid of legendary paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, Goodall was…
Farmer Talk
Facing language problems in Peru’s new coffee economy During a recent trip to the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Southern Peru, I hiked out to a remote corner of the…
What’s Left Unsaid When a Language Dies
“Transition” by Papua New Guinean artist Philemon Yalamu. From Papua New Guinea: A New Dawn by Fondazione Imago Mundi/Luciano Benetton Collection. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Languag…
Why Do Virtual Meetings Feel So Weird?
[no-caption] Anna Shvets/Pexels It’s morning in Houston, Texas, for Jeremy* and his team of engineers, and nearly evening in a small town north of Bucharest, Romania, for Costa…
How to Write an Essay: A Guide for Anthropologists
[no-caption] FilippoBacci/GettyImages For academics used to the idea of “publish or perish,” writing may seem to be a well-practiced and even perfected skill. But trying out a new…
What White Power Supporters Hear Trump Saying
President Trump frequently uses language that White power extremists understand as expressing support for their views. Angus Greig Donald Trump’s path to the U.S. presidency in 2016 was…
Why Capitalizing “Black” Matters
An intergenerational photo of a Black family in Texas captures the enduring legacy of both community and family. Thomas Barwick/Getty Images In the last few weeks, major media…
What Does Baseball’s Bilingualism Reveal?
Dominican-born Yordano Ventura, Kansas City Royals’ starting pitcher, holds up a Dominican flag following the team’s World Series victory in 2015. (Ventura died tragically in 2017.) Shane Key…
When Deafness Is Not Considered a Deficit
Music rattled the windows of the one-room schoolhouse that was now serving as a dance floor for nearly the entire village, a population of about 100 people. Masato,…
One
“The sea cannot know itself as yet unborn until the eye of the storm passes above its tumultuous skin, blinking.” I remember when lions came for the weak…
Siege
Philonise Floyd, brother of George Floyd, who Minneapolis police brutally killed on May 25, testifies at a hearing on police accountability held by the House Judiciary Committee. Erin…
Why “We” Isn’t for Everyone
[no-caption] Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. On the face of it, there seems to be no…
What Is Anthropology?
The “study of humanity” applies to many fields, but anthropology looks at people in a unique way. Orbon Alija/Getty Images What is anthropology? The word “anthropology” literally means…
Why Capitalize “Indigenous”?
(no-caption) Alison Wright/Getty Images Ask SAPIENS is a series that offers a glimpse into the magazine’s inner workings. Some readers may have noticed that SAPIENS uses a capital…
Blinded
For the past eight years, I have had the opportunity to bear witness to the metamorphic stages of the construction of Doha, the capital of Qatar, a peninsular…
Grass Trilogy
If you missed the “Introduction to Grass Trilogy,” you can find it here. By Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar Translated by Jessica Madison Pískatá 1. Grass O grass—presently my dear father,…
Introduction to Grass Trilogy
The sacred mountain Altan Ovoo rises in the Dariganga region of eastern Mongolia. Jessica Madison Pískatá I first arrived in eastern Mongolia in August 2011 by way of…
i. will. cross.
I wrote my poem “i. will. cross.” at a site called the Line of Control, the ceasefire line that exists as a de facto border between Indian- and…
Yoik
Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the far north of Scandinavia, people belonging to the Sámi ethnic group herd reindeer. Nowadays only a minority of Sámi people still…
Symbolic confusion and how to flirt with emoji 
A couple of years ago, I started flirting with people online. Pretty much everyone. In nearly every conversation. I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t start it. But…
The National Lynching Memorial Speaks to My Black ’Bama Body OR Imma Be Here Forever, You Gon’ Remember This
A young African American man visits the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Bob Miller/Getty Images There was a pulsing I felt, a pulsing I…
Why Poetry + Anthropology?
[no-caption] Kim Herbst When a barbed-wire de facto border lights up but throbs with blood, when a lynching memorial veins into memories and questions of the soul, when…