I Was Penalized for Learning a Language at Home
A researcher explains why the Fulbright-Hays fellowship should change its rules that have kept native and heritage speakers from working where their languages are spoken. ✽ Each year,…
Tag: Science
What Ancient Egyptians Knew About Meteorites—Long Before Modern Astronomers
An Egyptologist’s study of hieroglyphic texts has revealed that ancient Egyptians likely understood the celestial origins of iron-rich meteorites. ✽ “(The king) Unis seizes the sky and splits…
The Hidden Ancestry Extracted From an Ancient Pendant
An anthropologist explains how new forensics tools offer unprecedented answers to questions about who likely held or wore Stone Age objects. This article was originally published at The Conversation …
Extinguishing the Idea That Hobbits Had Fire
Research has overturned earlier claims that a diminutive human relative, Homo floresiensis, lit fires—but big stories die hard. SMOKING HOT HOBBITS When you think “the hobbit,” a certain…
Piecing Together the Puzzle of Oman’s Ancient Towers
In recent years, the Omani government has invested in archaeology and heritage tourism to boost its economy—renewing interest in mysterious 4,000-year-old stone towers that dot the Southeastern Arabia…
Why Store 41,000 Bison Bones?
An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains. In the 1970s, archaeologists…
What Bigfoot Teaches Us About Public Mistrust of Science
In the 1960s, credentialed scientists, including physical anthropologists, hunted for the legendary Sasquatch. How did they fall for the hoax? ✽ In the late 1960s, Bigfoot seemed to…
Radio Guest: “Anthropologist traces the “multi-species politics” of javelinas and humans”
I was a guest on the Marfa Public Radio show, Nature Notes, discussing my research on human-javelina relations in Texas. Listen for a sneak peek at some of…
Slow Death by Volcano
A biocultural anthropologist shares new research on the surprising long-term hazards of volcanoes in Iceland—and how to address them. THE RISE OF ICELANDIC VOLCANOES In the fall of…
Science and “Alternative” Science; or, some Quick Meditations on the Virtues of a Feedback Loop
Many non-Western epistemologies and healing systems have long posited close ties between mind, body, and emotion. Or, rather, these outlooks have categorized as a single feedback loop what…
Dissertation Manuscript Outline: Human-Javelina Relations in Texas
Humans and Javelinas: Something Something… I need a title … This study is motivated by the broad pressing question: How do we live in a world full of…
The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems
During my master’s degree, I wanted to study the idea that some social media platforms had tools for guiding users’ behavior in a certain direction. Even though this…
Transpositioning, a Hypertext-ethnography
This is a work of hypertext-ethnography. It is based on my research of a small genetics laboratory in Tokyo, Japan where I am studying the impact of the…
Dissertation Update: “On Anthropomorphism”
I’ve sent off the first section of my dissertation to my advisor. This section is going in the introduction around the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study.Next…
Picturing the Deep Universe Is Deeply Human
The James Webb Space Telescope’s stunning photos require extensive image processing—revealing as much about humanity as about the universe. In July 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled “Webb’s…
Why I Study Human-Animal Relations as an Anthropologist
Anthropology is the study of humans, or as Dr. Jon Marks says: “the study of who we are and where we come from.” I consider it to be…
Did Humanity Really Arise in One Place?
New evidence is prompting researchers to rethink Homo sapiens’ origin story—and what it means to be human. ✽ As a university student in the early 2010s, I recall…
When Coffee Is Like Angel Cake With Strawberry Jam
An anthropologist delves into the rarefied ritualistic world of specialty coffee, where highly trained brewers and judges compete to determine which beans reign supreme. Excerpted from Making Better…
Reading Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism in a Chemistry Lab
Pollution is Colonialism book cover Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron 2021) uses plastics to trace pollution in fish stomachs in Newfoundland while showing how this pollution is embedded in…
Making a Multispecies Community in the Texas Hill Country: AAA2022 Talk
Below is a recording of the talk I am giving in person at the 2022 annual American Anthropological Association meeting on November 10. Video of my talk
What Cargo Cult Rituals Reveal About Human Nature
In Melanesia, Indigenous communities developed elaborate rituals to bring themselves material wealth starting in the late 19th century. These practices reveal a profoundly important and universal soci…
Why AI Will Never Fully Capture Human Language
Researchers in artificial intelligence have made extraordinary strides in mimicking human language—but they still can’t capture the parts that truly make language human. ✽ The story begins with…
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…
