Yellow fragmentation
By Irene Stengs. Bangkok, Sunday May 5. With hundreds of others, I am queuing to enter the restricted area around the Grand Palace where the Royal Land Procession…
By Irene Stengs. Bangkok, Sunday May 5. With hundreds of others, I am queuing to enter the restricted area around the Grand Palace where the Royal Land Procession…
https://unmpress.com/books/exchanging-words/9780826358530 Meghanne Barker: This book moves, part by part, from within the park to outside of it, until we end up in France. How did you decide to…
[no-caption] Kazuo Honzawa/Getty Images During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon…
Luger, M., Graf, F., & Budka, P. (Eds.). (2019). Ritualisierung – Mediatisierung – Performance. (Ritualization – Mediatization – Performance). Göttingen: V&R Unipress/…
Together with Martin Luger, I am organizing a lecture on ritual and religion in social and cultural anthropology at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the…
Scientists have thought about burial—the act of interring a dead body—as a distinctly human behavior. So what happened when a group of paleoanthropologists discovered a primitive hominid that…
A young girl attends a Día de Muertos celebration in Mexico dressed in a Halloween costume. Peter Langer/Getty Images Wendy Fonarow arrived in Mexico City late in October…
[no-caption] Marc Lester/Getty Images In the Siberian Arctic, the Ob River flows lazily across vast, cold stretches of tundra. In the city of Salekhard, Russia, where it meets…
[no-caption] Andrew Baker/Getty Images Objects—pieces of paper, coins, lumps of precious metal—may serve as currency and represent specific monetary values, but what underpins the exchang…
Hey Listeners, we wanted to share some news. As you have probably noticed, TAL has been slow to post as of late. Both Ryan and Adam have finished…
Mass suicide is not as uncommon as you’d think nor is it a modern phenomenon or even an event confined to crazed cults. Mass suicide is defined simply:…
What describes your life? Is it a camera? A football? Maybe a plane? I have a hard time picking an object that sums up my life, but some…
This week, the last male northern white rhino, Sudan, finally died from age-related complications along with a newly developed infection on the back of his right leg. To…
This past Friday night, my Disney-obsessed best friend dragged me to watch Coco with her at Harland Cinema. Okay, okay, you got me, she didn’t have to drag…
A couple of months ago, I attended the funeral of a friend. Howard was almost 90 years old when he died, and not only did he live longer…
Ivory beads and ochre—affixed to the pelvic bones of a child—likely decorated the burial clothing of this 10-year-old interred at Sunghir some 34,000 years ago. E. Trinkaus/Trinkaus and…
A group of hard-working young market traders in Antigua, Guatemala, take a break to smash cascarones over each other’s heads. Dawn Starin Right now, families throughout the Americas…
Death is something that is unavoidable. Whether you have experienced the death of a close one or have yet to do so, it is a universal experience. However,…
In the fall of my sophomore year, my friend Kalyssa, who attended Georgia State University, killed herself. While suicide is in itself worthy of a discussion post, I…
[no-caption] Paul Keil One evening in August 2014, a wild elephant was accidentally killed in Gajbari village* in Assam, a state in northeast India. He was a young…
These “oracle bone” fragments, some of which show an ancient Chinese script, are housed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The pieces here are just a tiny…
[no-caption] Buppha Wuttifery/Getty Images The holiday season is here. That means presents under Christmas trees, next to menorahs, accompanying Kwanzaa candles, traded at white elephant …
Students from the author’s class on death and dying explore Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anita Hannig Back in February, on a chilly, windy afternoon in Cambridge,…
To Hopi traditionalists—Hopis who practice traditional culture—the humble one-seed juniper tree has deep cultural meaning. Mark Sykes A rumbling, low boom unfurled over the land like a cu…