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Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the diverse ways people live today, including how they think, act, create, struggle, make meaning, and organize their societies.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Heaven on Earth and Jesus Is Palestinian
A poet calls readers to act in the face of interconnected violence, exploitation, and privilege.
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.
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.
Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through
In a themed collection, poets trace contours of power to critique colonialism, environmental destruction, and social violence while transforming the landscape of possibilities.
Home-Carrying—A Repatriation Trip to Vanuatu 100 Years in the Making
An anthropologist and poet reflects on a journey of return that tells a larger story about human connection, acts of Indigenous solidarity, and the potential for repair within anthropology.
Living With Parakeets and Other Migrants
Amsterdam, like other European cities, hosts growing populations of non-native parakeets. An anthropologist unpacks what shifting attitudes toward these birds reveal about humans.
Best of SAPIENS 2024
Anthropologists from around the globe brought dazzling insights and deeply reported concerns to the digital pages of SAPIENS magazine.
Unwrapping Operation Christmas Drop
An anthropologist takes a critical eye to a long-running holiday tradition: a U.S. military mission that drops toys and supplies throughout Micronesia.
Survival Notes
Black African women in former colonial centers such as London gesture to subversive ways of communicating with those imprisoned in archives across generations.
