Category Archives: Anthropology

AI helped me with this post. A question is live when knowing the asker’s politics does not let you predict his answer. That test disqualifies a great deal of what anthropology currently treats as its cutting edge, and it clarifies … Continue reading →

The Fargo Women’s Health Organization opened in 1981. It was the first place in North Dakota to perform abortions in the open, and within months it had cut a line through the city. On one side stood the women who … Continue reading →

In 1981 a young Colombian with a master’s degree from Cornell University took a desk inside the National Planning Department in Bogotá. He had the training for the job. He had studied chemical engineering in Cali, spent a year in … Continue reading →

In May of 2024 a man of seventy-five walks into the village school at Sevettijärvi, in the far northeast of Finnish Lapland, carrying notebooks he filled more than fifty years before. The pages hold fieldnotes from 1971 and 1972, written … Continue reading →

A man stands at the counter of a one-room office in a district town in western Uttar Pradesh. He has come about his land. A clerk called the patwari keeps the register that records what he owns, and the register … Continue reading →

The macaques come down from the trees at Padangtegal when the first tour buses reach Ubud. Agustín Fuentes (b. July 30, 1966) sits against the temple wall in the shade, a notebook on his knee, and watches them work the … Continue reading →

In the fall of 1968 a small woman in a floor-length gown walks onto a stage at the American Museum of Natural History and sets the point of a forked walking stick on the boards. She stands five feet two. … Continue reading →

Franz Boas fought his first duel at nineteen, over a piano. He had arrived at Heidelberg in 1877 and split the rent on the instrument with a classmate who hammered at it for hours. The students downstairs complained. Boas took … Continue reading →

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote: My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary … Continue reading →