While the magazine has closed, its living archive endures—open to all and preserving the many ideas, voices, and discoveries that deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.
A movement in 1990s India illuminates the allure of vagueness from our leaders.
How Fracking’s Appetite for Sand Is Devouring Rural CommunitiesSmall towns in western Wisconsin are being divided by a little-known mining boom. An anthropologist who lives in the region set out to understand why.
Meet Archaeology’s Beer Can ManOne scholar has found in the humble, rusty beer can a trusty time capsule.
How Chinese Immigrants Built—and Lost—a Shellfish IndustryThey founded California’s first commercial abalone fisheries, but after a few short decades, they were forced out by institutional racism. Let’s not repeat the same mistakes with current and future immigrants.
Is the United Nations Broken?Anthropologists turned the U.N. into a field site. Their studies highlight the U.N.’s fragility, but we shouldn’t give up on the organization just yet.
Life and Death After the Steel MillsIn her study of a community devastated by industry’s flight, anthropologist Christine Walley raises questions about how to create and support meaningful work in a postindustrial world.
Iceland’s Forgotten FisherwomenMany Icelandic women fished in the 18th and 19th centuries, but their work has been largely unrecognized. Why did these female seafarers fade from the country’s memory?
The Surreal World of MoneyWithout the material value of a literal coin, we are left to trust in the symbolic relationships that give meaning to money.
Cooking Up an International Market for QuinoaIn Peru, a chef and an agronomist are using the kitchen of a five-star hotel to create an appetite for threatened varieties of a traditional crop.
The Moral Code of Chinese Sex WorkersA researcher immersed herself in the “sisterhood” of China’s female sex trade—and came away with an appreciation of its rules of conduct.
