All stories

At sunset, a large, gently rippling body of water reflects yellow, orange, and pink light. Small lights scatter along dark silhouetted mountains on the horizon.

Fishing for Dust

A poet-historian from Manipur, India, shapes tensions between violence and beauty into an allegory, calling residents and readers alike to stay awake.
A person wearing a long-sleeved black maxi dress and a red headscarf holding a green umbrella walks on a public street with a silver truck and several people in black hats, helmets, and khaki uniforms in the background.

08.03.2019

A poet-anthropologist from India recalls a checkpoint encounter in Sri Lanka, just months after the Easter Sunday bombings.
On a wood-paneled floor, four barefoot people wearing different outfits in shades of red, yellow, and blue dance in front of a gray wall. Captured in motion, and therefore blurry, each has several of their dance moves overlapping and visible at once.

Making Anthropological Poetry Reel

In featuring three SAPIENS poems, students in a digital anthropology seminar infused video reels for Instagram with vivid history and powerful emotions.
Between tall wooden walls, a child peers over a short wooden door. A pitch-black background is behind her.

A Mausoleum of Our Everydays/Nai nsang negu herouki

A humanities and social science doctoral student from Manipur, India, takes readers on a journey through ordinary moments interwoven with violence.
In sepia tones, a slightly blurry image features two people wearing head coverings and tunics seated against a blank wall. The one on the left holds up a piece of paper with a person’s face printed on it.

Earlier I Had Nightmares, Now I Have Insomnia

A Kashmiri poet-anthropologist records the restless despair many feel under Indian occupation.
Photographed from behind, two children wearing flip-flops hold hands and walk on a dirt trail between rows of tall trees. The taller child wears a skirt, and the other wears capris and a polo shirt.

A Long Road Ahead

SAPIENS’ 2023 poet-in-residence questions where peace of mind can come from for Indian-occupied Kashmir.
Several pink stemless flowers surrounded by white dust and yellow particles float in mid-air against a black background.

To Wear the Wind

A tribal scholar from the state of Nagaland in India engages with the loss of traditional cultural practices and locates the creation of a new world order where the “natural” is increasingly isolated from the “human.”
In a sepia-and-white color palette, two hands cup a pile of sand, much of which is falling between the fingers.

Cold Hubris and Fundo

A poet-historian reflects on the legacy of colonial-era collecting practices in Tanzania that tore Black Indigenous ancestors from their communities and history.
A photograph features a landscape lush with green grass with a body of water in the center and a large mountain range in the background. The mountain range is cut in half by a valley and topped with a sky full of white clouds.

A Love Letter to the Munay-Ki

A poet exuberantly gives thanks for the Munay-Ki rites enlivened across the ages and shared by the Q’ero people in the Peruvian Andes.
A close-up image features a large, dark-gray silver medal embossed with the profile of a crouching naked woman reaching for a child, with another child appearing behind her.

Post-

An Indigenous poet-anthropologist writes to her daughter of the limits of her motherly protection.
From behind, a photograph features a group of children wearing patterned hats and clothing—some with black backpacks—standing in a village square. All but a few children in the back of the group have both hands on their heads.

Looking for the Lepchas

A poet of the Indigenous Lepcha community of the Eastern Himalayas is looking to find herself as she grapples with the legacy of writings and material that speak “about” her community.
A zoomed-out photograph features white-capped mountains towering in the distance against a blue sky with light clouds. Flags of different colors and dark, sparse shrubbery are in the foreground.

Mayel Lyang

A poet of the Indigenous Lepcha community of the Eastern Himalayas ponders how to draw maps of the mind, heart, and soul that show her community’s heartland—an “eternal paradise.”
A picture features a sky with a large, slightly orange, billowing cloud at its center that morphs on its left side to look like the side profile of dark-skinned woman’s face. To the left of her is a bright-blue sky with clouds.

Indigenizing What It Means to be Human

SAPIENS offers a curated collection of poems and stories that center Indigenous values, worldviews, and insights, creatively reimagining anthropology and the human experience.
A large, sheep-shaped stone with etchings on its side sits on grass alongside a road where a car speeds by in a blur of orange lights.

How Gravestones Shaped as Sheep United the Caucasus

An archaeologist fascinated by a centurieslong memorial practice in Georgia considers how these unique gravestones reflect shared values and traditions—yet are sometimes destroyed in nationalist culture wars.
A photograph shows a crying person using a red cane to prop themselves up as they kneel in front of an assortment of flower bouquets, burning candles, and balloons arranged neatly on a sidewalk.

A Mass Shooting in the “Evangelical Vatican”

The recent violent attack on Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, happened in a place shaped by decades of anti-LGBTQ organizing by evangelical Christian groups.
A photograph features numerous light-purple ribbons tied into bows across the surface of a large, green wire fence.

Purple in Cycles

A poet-anthropologist speaks to the labyrinthine experiences of domestic violence—the entrapment, the hope for freedom.