All stories

Taken from an upward angle, a photograph features a shirtless person wearing a red, blue, yellow, and black feathered headdress, colorful bracelet, and several beaded necklaces. They are holding a yellow and green flag.

Reading the Future of an Amazonian Mine

In Ecuador, Shuar people, an Indigenous group in the region, face increasing threats to their ways of life from industrial mining. But some find strength and courage to resist through knowledge gained by using hallucinogenic plants.
On the left, smoke billows out from the top of several large smokestacks on a long sandy shore that a few people are walking along. On the right, over dark blue water, an orange sunset illuminates a pier in the distance.

Between the Lines

A poet-anthropologist in Israel looks to his students and their surroundings, calling for “seekers of peace” to create lifelines across social and geopolitical divides.
A crowd of adults and children wearing T-shirts, flip-flops, and denim shorts or sarongs looks at a water tap with the word “Italy” stamped on its side and a giant silver lock on it.

Strange Future

A Nigerian eco-activist and poet wonders what future lies ahead in the face of climate change impacts and resistance to large-scale emission reductions.
A pair of hands arrange two placards covered with images of two different people’s faces on a table covered with a black tablecloth.

Restoring Faces and Dignity to Skeletal Remains

An anthropologist explains how a South African university used community-driven research to honor human remains acquired unethically.
From an aerial view, several people in long-sleeved shirts, khaki pants, and boots are shown standing inside a rocky cave. One person in the center carrying a camera points at two sites, one with each hand.

Dating the Arrival of Modern Humans in Asia

A team of researchers explains how the discovery of a human skull and jawbone helps push back the timing of modern humans’ migration into Southeast Asia.
Surrounded by gray cobblestones, two black kettles sprinkled with ash sit over blackened logs and open orange flames. Two pairs of sneakers on people’s feet are visible just behind the fire close to another kettle.

The Heaviness

A multidisciplinary poet-scholar and suicide attempt and multi-suicide loss survivor unveils complex anthropological threads that shape suicidal ideation.
The photograph features an aerial shot of a circle of drums on dirt ground sparingly covered with grass and green leaves. Wooden drum sticks are arranged across the drums’ tops to form a star shape.

How Do We Heal?

A poet-anthropologist who is a Passamaquoddy tribal member lights a path toward healing both within the field of archaeology and in reflecting on the voices and presence—past, present, and future—of Indigenous peoples.
A photograph features several people wearing caps, sports jackets, khaki pants, and rainboots gathered on a mountainside plot of dirt, grass, and trees. Several are carrying wooden sticks.

When Disaster Tests the Strength of Human Cooperation

In the Andes, minga, a form of collective labor, has existed for centuries, often helping communities weather disasters. But how does it work in practice?
paleo processing foods - Fascinated by humanity’s use of technology to gather and prepare food, Schindler has re-created a variety of hunting and cooking tools from the past 3 million years.

5 Questions About Eating Like a Human

In this upcoming free live event, archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef Bill Schindler will discuss his new book, Eat Like a Human: Nourishing Foods and Ancient Ways of Cooking to Revolutionize Your Health.
A landscape image shows a blue sky with clouds over rocks leading out to water and mountains in the distance.

Dressing Fish

The Sugpiaq people in south-central Alaska have faced Russian colonialism, American assimilation policies, and Native American boarding school violence. A descendant and anthropologist-poet claims a radical presence in looking to the past and the future.

How to Survive Climate Change in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands

As erosion and rising waters threaten the Sundarbans, an anthropologist advocates for new, bottom-up approaches to living in a changing landscape.
An enormous, swirling white cloud rapidly travels over an ocean.

One

An anthropological poem journeys to the eye of the storm to understand how “race” has no biological basis—and is instead rooted in discrimination. What future for our species?
Despite relatively modest rates of surgical success, women often do find that hospitals become sites of transformation—places to refashion their bodies, if not surgically then through careful self-management. By sharing techniques with one another, women learn how to dress, bathe, walk, sit, and cover themselves in order to conceal their incontinence. When women finally return home, they can often “pass” if the surgery was not successful. But concealment comes at a high price to women’s psychosocial health, since those who are most successful in concealing their conditions are often seen by their kin and communities as having rejected vital tenets of relational reciprocity.

Spaces of Waiting: Obstetric Fistula in Niger

The work of a medical anthropologist offers a window into the world of Nigerien women who live with obstetric fistula.