What Is Freedom in a Brazilian Favela?

In a new book, Minoritarian Liberalism, an anthropologist explores how favela residents of Rio de Janeiro create their own versions…

Peeling Back the Myth of a “White” Midwest

The popular image of the U.S. heartland as only a place of rural, hardworking white farmers has always been a…

Indigenous Mapmaking, or Bringing a Dead Map to Life

In a new book, an anthropologist explores how oil palm plantations in West Papua are upending Indigenous Marind communities’ ways of life. In this excerpt, Marind villagers call upon their plant and animal kin to confront a map used by the oil palm industry.

Reinterpreting Life and Death in Ancient Nubia

In the Nile River Valley, powerful yet misunderstood civilizations flourished thousands of years ago. Now bioarchaeologists are rethinking funerary rituals and life in ancient Nubia, and empowering local Sudanese scholars.

Hard Water

A poet-anthropologist honors World Poetry Day with a piece that imagines alchemizing the suffering and devastation of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

More Than a Mountain

In this podcast episode, listeners learn about Dzil Nchaa Si’an, a sacred mountain in Arizona that Apache tribal members depend on and deeply value. The mountain has also become a site of resistance.

Reviving Huaycán—and the Community That Surrounds It

A small group of passionate young people, led by a local anthropologist, is organizing to protect an ancient site in Peru, and educate their community.

A Lens on Cyprus Reunification

An anthropologist walks around the circumference of this Mediterranean island, photographing people separated by political conflict and reflecting on the ties that bind divided communities.

A Genetic Chronicle of the First Peoples in the Americas

In a new book, an anthropological geneticist writes a 36,000-year history of how and why ancient peoples migrated into North and South America and made the continents their home.

A Hidden Figure in North American Archaeology

A Black cowboy named George McJunkin, who died 100 years ago, found a site that would transform scientific views about the deep history of Native Americans in North America.