
The Fish Trap
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…
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…
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> Open Anthropology on Gender, Language, & Power Following the March 2019 Open Anthropology issue on Walls, Fences, and Barriers:…
I have never lost my childhood habit of beachcombing for special rocks and shells, and I think of ethnography as involving a similar process of collecting bits of…
[no-caption] Bill O’Leary/Getty Images Sitting in a packed hotel lobby café in Washington, D.C., in 2009, I leaned closer to the literary agent I was interviewing for my…
As part of the Enduring Voices project, Abamu Degio (left) listens to a recording of herself singing a traditional Koro song, with linguist David Harrison (right). Jeremy Fahringer,…
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to…
An article grabbed my attention last year but it took a while for me to realize why. The title, “Neanderthals Self-Medicated for Pain” examined research findings analyzing Neanderthal…
Silence can be a powerful communicative tool in today’s political landscape. Words take center stage in the verbal sparring of the Twitter age. Against the backdrop of Trumpian…
Museum objects such as this painting—Frieze of Dancers, by Edgar Degas—are often impressive and beautiful. But what do they tell us about the cultures that created them? Andrew…
Australia’s iconic Opera House is lit up with an art installation called Songlines during a festival in 2016. For Aboriginal Australians, songlines are memories of routes through landscapes—which…
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning in a context where a language…
[no-caption] Science Photo Library/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. We all know that parrots can tal…
On the last day of my introduction to anthropology class, we watch scenes from the documentary Trekkies. Students grin at the sincere folks dressed as Starfleet officers and…