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…
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…
[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…
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…
(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…
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…
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,…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
[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…
An equatorial moon arcs above the Upper Rio Negro region of Brazil. Glenn H. Shepard Jr. The U.S. poet-physician William Carlos Williams once described a poem as a…
Gossip and rumor are important informal modes of communication, influencing public opinion and individual actions. But, the distinction between information and falsehood can be difficult to see. Is…
Joan Gross I just returned to my dissertation fieldwork site after 38 years. Back in the 1980s I examined the use of the regional Gallo-Romance dialect, Walloon, in…
Hawaiian language teacher Nako’olani Warrington instructs 9-year-old Maleka Benjamin at an immersion school in Honolulu. Lucy Pemoni/AP Photo In the 1970s, the Hawaiian language seemed po…
On any given day, people throng the busy market in Concepción, Paraguay. Shoppers peruse the multicolored array of fruits and vegetables and occasionally pause to chat with the…
This illustration represents how Indigenous peoples around the globe, as highlighted by depictions of a few specific communities, are striving to keep endangered languages alive as dynamic source…
Bhutanese Nepali performers—including Shyam “San” Rai at center—pose at a cultural festival. Katie Reilly When Shyam “San” Rai was 8 years old, he and his family were forced…
My dissertation, titled “Language Use and Global Media Circulation Among Argentine Fans of English-Language Mass Media”, explores the links between globalization, media/pop culture, and language throu…
[no-caption] Marcel Hirshegger/SAPIENS Remember the meme #TheDress? Was it white and gold, or blue and black? With the help of Nicola Jones, a freelance science journalist who writes…
[no-caption] Complot/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. In a manifesto posted online shortly before he…
Page 99 of my dissertation, titled Multilingual Practices, Education, and Identity in Pune, India, is a first attempt at bringing readers into an ethnographically informed composite sketch…