Purple in Cycles
A poet-anthropologist speaks to the labyrinthine experiences of domestic violence—the entrapment, the hope for freedom. ✽ During the final week of domestic violence awareness month in October, I…
Tag: relationships
Unsung Native Collaborators in Anthropology
Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead could not have achieved success without their local assistants’ insider knowledge and extensive labor. ✽ Growing up a Brown girl…
What Is Cultural Anthropology?
Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the dizzyingly diverse ways people live today, including how they think, act, create, struggle, make meaning, and organize their societies. WHAT IS CULTURAL…
Excavating My Dad’s Life
An archaeologist navigates her dad’s passing by using the methods of her discipline to preserve his office and gain insight into the mysteries of his personality. ✽ In…
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…
Difficult Truths: Confronting Irish Industrial Schools
[no-caption] Matt Anderson Photography/Getty Images This article was originally published at Otherwise magazine and has been republished with permission as a lightly edited excerpt. CONST…
Difficult Truths: Confronting Irish Industrial Schools
This article was originally published at Otherwise magazine and has been republished with permission as a lightly edited excerpt. CONSTELLATIONS The 1918 Spanish flu altered the course of…
What Ancient Stone “Swiss Army Knives” Mean
Multipurpose ancient stone tools harbor more clues about human sociality than initially meet the eye. Paloma de la Peñ This article was originally published in The Conversation and…
What Ancient Stone “Swiss Army Knives” Mean
This article was originally published in The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Humans are the only species to live in every environmental niche in the…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
[no-caption] The Real Tokyo Life/Getty Images Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig.…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig. Used with permission of the publisher,…
Haunted by a Secret War
In Old Sepon in Savannakhet province, Laos, a temple wall riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel scars hints at war’s remains. Leah Zani Excerpted from Strike Patterns: Notes…
Unmasked: Illustrating COVID-19 in Okoboji
[no-caption] Aaron Gronstal These illustrations tell the story of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in a small tourist town in the Iowa Great Lakes region: my…
Nurturing Autism Acceptance in Indonesia
Idris (right), a teenager on the autism spectrum, visits a local mosque in Indonesia to pray with his father. Elemental Productions On a typical day, Wawan, a teenager…
Transracial Adoption and the Limits of Love
A photo installation by artist Glenn Morey explores how Korean adoptees in the U.S. grapple with questions related to belonging, identity, and family. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images On a…
Hard Water
I. That cloud hovering looks like it came all the way from Ukraine, sadness has darkened our skyline. The rain is hail shattering the landscape into pieces of…
What Chimpanzees Know About Giving Medicine
Chimps exhibit unique behaviors in different communities, such as these who clasp hands while grooming one another. P. Gagneux/GMERC This article was originally published at The Conversat…
Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (center), actor Robert Redford (left), and historian Lola Van Wagenen (right) attend “A Future With Alternatives,” a symposium held in 1978 in New York City.…
What’s the Appeal of Deep Voices in Men?
Deep voices, like singer Barry White’s bass-baritone, are seen as appealing across a variety of cultures and sexual identities. POP-EYE/ullstein bild/Getty Images For many people, Barry W…
How Filipino Sailors—and Coconuts—Helped Create Mexico’s National Drink
While visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, last year, I joined a mezcal tasting tour. The guide, Antonio, asked participants to introduce ourselves. When I told everyone I was an anthropologist…
Five New Year’s Rituals of Renewal
In Auckland, New Zealand, Māori people celebrate the rising of Mataraki, also known as the Pleiades star cluster, as the start of the new year in July. Hannah…
I Carry My Grief With Me, but I Also Carry My Joy
When you lose someone the future dies. Or, at least, the one with them, that you thought about with them, in it. I imagine any relationship that ends…
Lessons We Learn
“Lessons We Learn” is part of the collection Lead Me to Life: Voices of the African Diaspora. Read the introduction to the collection here. The past flashes like…
The Sisters of Loretto Share a Kinship With the Earth
The Sisters of Loretto, a women’s religious community, prioritize environmental stewardship at their working farm in rural Kentucky. Cody Rakes This month, global delegates have been gath…