Anthropology Magazine

Matryoshka Song

Poetry

  • Four painted Russian dolls of different sizes lined up from largest to smallest frozen in a block of ice.

    Matryoshka Song

    An Indigenous anthropologist-poet speaks to the Russian colonization of Alaska from 1784–1867 and how stereotypes and histories shape the lives of Indigenous women.

  • 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.

  • Ethiopia

    A poet-anthropologist from Nigeria recollects the symbolic power of Ethiopia in the time before his country’s independence from Britain in 1960.

  • Horizon No Less Curved

    A poet-anthropologist grafts her story to that of Toutswemogala Hill, an archaeological site in Botswana from Early Iron Age pastoralists who lived in the region from the 600s through the 1800s.

  • Unlikely Blessings Glenn H. Shepard Jr.

    Unlikely Blessings

    When the unthinkable happens, how do we even speak? A poet-anthropologist finds a way through a poem written during his infant son’s chemotherapy treatments, caught in the haunting terrain between hope and despair.