What Dog Breeds Say About Race
In the Philippines, the most sought-after dogs are those that have a breed—and preferably a certificate that proves their provenance. Be it Alaskan malamute, German shepherd, or Siberian…
Tag: relationships
Unlikely Blessings
[no-caption] Glenn H. Shepard Jr. When I discovered the poetry of Paul Celan as an undergraduate, I had little idea his words would later guide me through dark…
How Cellphones Make and Break Human Connections
Cellphones have become an integral part of many people’s lives. Towfiqu Barbhuiya/EyeEm/Getty Images Cellphones have come to occupy increasingly important roles in everyone’s lives, from …
Arrival Waters
[no-caption] Traumlichtfabrik/Getty Images I am about 70 years away from the experience that led to this poem and about 50 years away from anthropology. Some 20 years ago…
Mucus Passports: Mobility in the Time of COVID-19
[no-caption] Bim/Getty Images GUARANTEE “Have you gotten your COVID-19 test result already?” Vijay (a pseudonym) asks me while ringing up my bill at his salon. “Yes,” I answer.…
What Problems Does Organic Cotton Solve?
[no-caption] Andrew Flachs One warm afternoon several years ago, I was walking with Korianna,* a farmer in Telangana, India, when I smelled something bad. The scent of diesel…
Heart of Stone
“The world is thus ‘animate.’ ‘We’ are not the only kind of we. The world is also ‘enchanted.’” —Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human Anthropologist…
Love Poem for the Shape of the Field
[no-caption] Johannes Plenio/Pexels The sun opens, shutters. The social scientist wants to know where to look, keeps widening her gaze. Over here on the earth, a girl fries…
Does Love Always Come Before Marriage?
Thousands of couples were wed in a mass ceremony in South Korea on February 7, 2020. Some of them had only met a few weeks earlier, after being…
Is Love a Biological Reality?
Helen Fisher knows more about love than most. As a biological anthropologist who studies the topic, she has been a chief scientific adviser to the internet dating site…
A Radical Recentering of Dignity
A protestor in 2020 in Santiago waves the Chilean flag. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images In an interview during October of 2019, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera made a statement that…
Why Losing Bonds Sports Fans
Football fans respond to their team during a match. Motortion Films/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. …
#Book Review: Animal Intimacies
The creative disentanglement of human-animal relationships in Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan is an important addition to the multispeci…
Do Twins Share a Soul?
I have a clone. He’s an identical twin brother, really. But as monozygotic twins derived from one fertilized egg, we share the exact same genome. Since birth, we…
Finding Calm—and Connection—in Coffee Rituals
When I arrived from the Philippines to the airport in the city of Gondar in northern Ethiopia early last year—before the pandemic started—I was greeted with an intensely…
Connection, Inc.: Fast Times for Online Dating in the Age of Quarantine
Online Dating Goes Back to the Future Have you noticed an uptick in move-ins or engagements in your social circles lately? How about divorces? While everyone seemingly dreads…
The Pandemic and the Process of Becoming
Anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on transitional states may shed light on people’s pandemic experiences of the betwixt and between. Pixabay/Pexels As a parent of two kids in elementary…
The Casual Menace of a Trump Rally
After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, supporters of president-elect Donald Trump packed the Giant Center (shown here) for a victory rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Anand Pandian Thin…
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 COVID-19 Is Changing People’s Relationships With Houseplants
“Since when did people start naming plants?” my mother asked me. We were at the dining room table, scrolling through pictures of plants on my iPhone. The photos—close-ups…
My Nonbinary Child
[no-caption] Andrew Hasson/Getty Images “Mom, how do you know you’re a woman?” Sarah, my only child, startled me by asking this question during a telephone conversation this spring.…
What Milk-Sharing Communities Reveal
[no-caption] Getty Images Heather Wascak was devastated. In 2014, within days of giving birth to a baby girl, Lucia, she was aching to be with her child. “She’s…
Archaeologists Respond to the Black Lives Matter Movement
Students work with archaeologist Alexandra Jones (center) on an excavation at the Estate Little Princess plantation in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Archaeology in the Community Amid th…
#Review: Animal Intimacies
In her book Animal Intimacies Radhika Govindrajan takes us through a series of human-animal relations in India’s Central Himalayas, the Kumaon division in the hills of Uttarakhand. Each…