Anthropology Magazine
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How Virtual Reality Is Restoring Liberia’s Culture
Traveling Treasures is a new project led by a team of anthropologists that puts Liberians directly in touch with their dispersed cultural heritage through immersive technologies designed to bridge continents and histories.
In Japan, Rethinking What It Means to Care for the Dead
Facing an increasing aging population and other societal shifts, people are looking beyond traditional family-based mortuary practices.
When Calls for Vengeance Go Online
An anthropologist reckons with how digital media has changed youth gang culture dynamics—and what can be done to combat the spread of deadly rumors.
A Poetics of Liberation: An Imagined Archive
A Tanzanian historian and poet conjures alternative engagements with Black African women who were marginalized by violent colonial histories and imprisoned in the archives. As the 2024 poet-in-resident at the magazine, she imaginatively reaches for new possibilities.
Expanding worlds by exploring everything human.
Spotlight
HONORING EARTH DAY
How to Make Climate Change Feel Real
On Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, anthropological research reveals how complex, global problems can be made tangible through experience, empathy—and play.
Introduction to Grass Trilogy
SAPIENS celebrates Earth Day 2020 with a poet-anthropologist’s translations of three rapturous poems by Mongolian author Ochirbatyn Dashbalbar.
What Parsnips Taught Me About Nature
One anthropologist’s research on Community Supported Agriculture—which saw him wrestling with parsnips and talking to leeks—spurs thoughts on closing the gap between Western urban life and the natural world.
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With the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program guides anthropologists on accessible writing and podcasting for nonacademic audiences.
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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human, the magazine’s podcast, speaks with anthropologists from around the globe to help us uncover what makes us human.
Anthropological poems have the potential to transform ways of thinking and being in the world.
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Learn how to write for general audiences with the SAPIENS Public Writing Training Program, a self-directed course.
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EXPLORE ANTHROPOLOGY
ASK SAPIENSThe broad field of anthropology studies “everything human,” focusing on what makes different people human in their own distinctive ways.
What Is Anthropology?
The broad field of anthropology is the science of humanity that studies “everything human,” focusing on what makes different people human in their own distinctive ways.
What Is Linguistic Anthropology?
Linguistic anthropologists study language in context, revealing how people’s ways of communicating and expressing themselves interact with human culture, history, politics, identity, and much more.
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 Do Archaeologists Do?
Archaeologists use a wide variety of methods to explore a fascinating range of topics about human history, culture, and behavior. Here’s an overview of the ways archaeologists preserve heritage and how you can work in this field.
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The Hopes and Hazards for AI in Reconstructing Ancient Worlds
An archaeologist explains how generative artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape our views of ancient people, arguing that a critical perspective is needed to use this technical innovation and avoid misrepresentations.
“Stop This Invader!”—The War on Spotted Lanternflies
An anthropologist reflects on the racist undertones of some U.S. efforts to eradicate the spotted lanternfly, an insect from Asia deemed invasive.
Erasure I and Erasure VI
In two erasure poems, a poet-anthropologist imagines alternative futures using text from the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, through which the British “sold” Kashmir to a despotic Dogra ruler. The poems are from a six-part series titled Song of the First Spring.
How Heavy Metal Fuels Indigenous Revival in Patagonia
An anthropologist plunges into the world of Patagonian heavy metal music in Argentina to explore how the genre relates to language and cultural revitalization.
Tallahassee Ghazal
Using an ancient Arabic poetic form, a poet-archaeologist from Florida cycles through feelings of entrapment growing up queer in the U.S. South. But in the end, they celebrate love for this place—and that “most of us are breathing.”
Fighting for Justice for the Dead—and the Living
A group of forensic anthropologists argues their field must reject the myth of pure objectivity and challenge systemic inequities through advocacy and activism.
Debitage
Using an original poetic form, a poet chips away at a difficult history—becoming an agent of her own remaking and more than just an estranged daughter.
Tracing Roti’s Pasts, Presents, and Futures
The Roti Collective, a community-based research project, explores the layered histories that brought a flatbread from the Indian subcontinent around the world.
In Iron Age Britain, Descent Was Matrilineal
New analyses from Iron Age burials reveal that women remained in their natal communities and provided the key to kinship. The findings offer essential clues about gender roles and social structures in ancient Europe.
Broken Sonnets for the Anthropocene
The speaker in this broken sonnet form utters disobedience for structures that extract care in the Anthropocene.
David Graeber’s Lasting Influence on Anthropology and Activism
When activist and anthropologist Graeber died unexpectedly in 2020, scholars gathered to mourn him. Contributors to a resulting volume, As If Already Free, reflect on his legacy.
Connecting Local Communities to Paleoanthropology in Kenya
On Rusinga Island, a grassroots group is celebrating the field assistants who helped find famous fossils and inspiring future generations to study science and ancient history.
Pequi Winds
A poet-anthropologist reflects on the resistance of rural women in the Brazilian Cerrado whose wisdom and knowledge help cultivate life amid the devastation of large-scale plantations.
Launching Starship in South Texas
An anthropologist witnesses the first integrated flight attempt of the world’s largest rocket—and the wide range of responses it elicited from people.
A Spacecraft’s Dance From French Guiana to Jupiter
As the European Space Agency launches its flagship mission to explore Jupiter’s moons, an anthropologist explores the gap between launch enthusiasts and local residents.
The First Space Launch for Mauritius
An anthropologist recounts how a small island nation built and deployed its first satellite—and what their effort says about unequal access to the growing space economy on Earth.
How Cosmic Explorations Are Reshaping Life on Earth
In a series of essays, a collaborative research project brings together “space anthropologists” to investigate how communities around the globe are grappling with the current boom in outer space exploration.
Emic/Etic
A poet-anthropologist offers an “anti-glossary” to contest ways of knowing in social science that objectify people(s) into categories.
Envisioning a More Empathetic Treatment of Great Ape Remains
Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.
Were Twins the Norm in Our Primate Past?
New research uncovers how the last common primate ancestors typically birthed twins until evolutionary pressures began to favor singletons—likely driven by the advantages of birthing larger, brainier offspring.
Passing Notes
The speaker of a poem refuses linguistic erasure, passing secret notes with untranslated lines in Korean—keeping the language alive during Japanese occupation.
How a Megadam Disrupts the Flow of Water—and Money
In Northeast India, a controversial hydropower dam moves toward completion—causing great uncertainty for downstream dwellers whose livelihoods depend on the river.
Cómo una megarrepresa interrumpe el flujo de agua —y dinero—
En el noreste de la India, una controvertida represa hidroeléctrica avanza hacia su finalización —provocando una gran incertidumbre entre los habitantes de las zonas situadas aguas abajo, cuya subsistencia depende del río—.
The Vanishing Traces of Our Earliest Ancestors in Indonesia
A paleontologist journeys through Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago in search of Homo erectus remains, but uncovers how environmental devastation has erased much of the region’s history.
Heaven on Earth and Jesus Is Palestinian
A poet calls readers to act in the face of interconnected violence, exploitation, and privilege.
The Battle to Protect Archaeological Sites in the West Bank
An archaeologist from Palestine is urgently working to assess archaeological sites in the West Bank devastated by destruction and looting amid Israel’s ongoing war in the region.
The Strange Power of Laughter
An anthropologist explores laughter as a far more complex phenomenon than simple delight—reflecting on its surprising power to disturb and disrupt.
An Order for My Backpack and Three Stages of Nowhere
A poet moves through rituals of silence and erasure that permeate the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
El orden de mi mochila y Tres etapas para nada
Un poeta recorre rituales de silencio y omisión que permean la prisión militar estadounidense en la Bahía de Guantánamo, Cuba.
Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, an anthropologist explores how the Shuar people are betting on dragon fruit cultivation to reclaim economic autonomy and political sovereignty.
My Errant Uterus
In a time of heightened threats to reproductive rights, a women’s health scholar and mother of two comes face to face with her uterus.
Translation Notes
A translator’s notes are refashioned into a poem calling for justice for Indigenous peoples in the Philippines displaced by a megadam.
