Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
The revolution in information and communications technologies, which had so much promise for broadening access and participation in scholarship, certainly seems much darker and more ominous now. Socia…
Tag: Top News
The New Elite’s Battle Against Affirmative Action
The Harvard University Affirmative Action lawsuit says more about wealth than about race. What little solace we had from Abigail Fisher losing her anti-affirmative action case against the…
Non-Modern Humans Were More Complex—and Artistic—Than We Thought
Fossil and archaeological evidence suggests that our ancient relatives found innovative ways to make and share meaning. A recent exhibit at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas,…
Where Do We Come From?
The idea that a single population was the ancestor of all living humans is neat and convenient, but it is not consistent with the data. The origin of…
Picking a Bone with Evolutionary Essentialism
There is more to our evolutionary history than a single origin in Africa. In the past year, at least four fossil finds have been billed as overturning the…
Through Dappled Light
Homo naledi hints at the wonders of what we have yet to learn about human evolution. A common teaching analogy in paleoanthropology is that of the drunk looking…
Great Ape Haters
Isaiah Nengo on racist tweets, evolutionary misconceptions, and his ancient ape skull discovery. In a tweet from 2013, Roseanne Barr called former United Nations National Security Advisor Susan…
Call for 2019 Opinion Columnists!
What do you want to see in AN? Have you been wishing for a column that probes the anthropology of climate change or stand-up comedy or the tech…
Call for Proposals: From 1969 to 2019
1969—Stonewall, British troops sent to Northern Ireland, Equal Employment Opportunity, Biafra, Woodstock, Shirley Chisholm becomes the first Black congresswoman, the Apollo 11 moon landing, combat dea…
Fifty Years of Refuge in the Gaza Camp
This article is part of the Maintaining Refuge series. For stateless Palestinian refugees in Jordan, ordinary life can be an extraordinary accomplishment. The Gaza Camp (mukhayyam Gaza) is…
Australia’s Values-Based Asylum Activism
This article is part of the Maintaining Refuge series. Part one of the series can be found on AnthroSource. Activist appeals to moral and national ideals hold lessons…
For the Love of Football
After sitting through exactly 70 minutes of meetings and film-watching, the players made their way out to the practice field by 8:30 a.m., equipped in pads and helmets.…
Communicating in Times of Crisis
What anthropologists can do to support asylum seekers and the interpreters who serve them. It started with people tagging me on Facebook during the first few days of…
Euphemisms for the Global Other
I recently attended a conference in Copenhagen about sustainable consumption where I kept hearing “the Global South” used to refer to poor people in general, to low income…
Creators of the Contemporary in Africa
In Ghana, the creative culture and the contemporary art sphere is in a period of exponential growth and reconfiguration. Across Accra and Kumasi, the contemporary creative scene has…
Reclaiming “Allahu Akbar” from Semantic Pejoration
Allāhu akbar, the Arabic phrase meaning “God is the greatest,” has gained connotations in US public discourse that differ vastly from its meaning among Muslims. Understanding this process…
Dancing with the Spirits
In a present colored by forces of globalization and the Anthropocene, Masewal dancers reconnect with their spiritual landscape to visualize alternative futures. Mexico today is gripped by a…
Biocommensurations
Psychiatry is in crisis because it failed to integrate symptom classifications with biomarkers. Its future depends on finding new ways of bringing disparate insights together. Any kind of…
What’s in Your Bag, Anthropologists?
From the Andean highlands to Appalachia, anthropologists from across the discipline open their field bags to reveal favorite pens, recording equipment, emergency granola bars, and—of course—scarves. W…
Ambivalent Spaces in the (Neo)Liberal Arts
How do we respond to the pressure to become responsibilized faculty members in today’s market-driven college context? What is the future of anthropology at liberal arts colleges in…
Inside the Annual Meeting Scheduling Process
The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) 2018 Annual Meeting in San José is on the horizon, and we couldn’t be more excited for the dynamic and diverse collection of…
Written in Blood
How my research on DNA ancestry tests became fake news. When I was sent a link to a Snopes article asking, “Did DNA Testing Companies Admit to Altering…
Senegalese Football’s Impossible Dream
After a sixteen-year absence, Senegal’s football team returned to the World Cup, but their sporting success belies the risks and uncertainties of an unequal global sports industry. A…
Posting at the Margins
The “memeification” of political discourse in the 2018 Mexican presidential elections. Brandon Hunter-Pazzara “Okay, let’s start the memes,” posted a member of a community Facebook page in the…