Each year in India more than two million people fall sick with tuberculosis (TB), an infectious, airborne, and potentially deadly lung disease. The country accounts for almost 30 percent of all TB cases worldwide and well above a third of global deaths from it. Because TB’s prevalence also indicates unfulfilled development promises, its control is …

An innovative approach to studying Neanderthal hearths has been hailed as a "major" breakthrough in archaeology, promising to shed new light on the behaviors of prehistoric humans. This groundbreaking research, published in the journal Nature1, utilized advanced dating techniques to analyze hearths at the El Salt site in Spain, revealing intricate …

The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability; state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers used nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed pre-Hispanic monuments for tourism, and anthropologists studied and ph…

Robert, Aaron, and Jonny have a completely reasonable conversation about what's happening in Gaza. While listening, why not do something productive like donate to Medical Aid for Palestinians, UNHCR, or any number of other groups trying to materially improve the conditions of people who are the latest victims of the United States military-industria…

The New Timeline of Horse Domestication Recent research1 has upended previous assumptions about the domestication of horses, revealing that humans first domesticated these animals around 2200 B.C., a full millennium later than traditionally believed. This finding emerges from a comprehensive study of ancient horse DNA, which sheds new light on the …

Alan McGowan delves into Franz Boas’s dual identity as both a scientist and a political activist, shedding light on how his work transcended academic boundaries to make a profound impact on society. In The Political Activism of Anthropologist Franz Boas, Citizen Scientist (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2024), McGowan provides a comprehensive overview o…

In this episode, we speak with Martin Eggen Mogseth and Fartein Hauan Nilsen about their first edited volume, Limits of Life: Reflections on Life, Death, and the Body in the Age of Technoscience (Berghahn Books, 2024). The book explores how fundamental concepts such as life, birth, selfhood, religion, death, and ancestry are being reshaped in an er…

In this episode, fellow podcasters, Frankie Younger and Dr. Anthony Jerry share how they combined podcasting with community engagement to create podcasts as archival spaces for the voices of historically marginalized communities.Di Society for Cultural Anthropology

In the 10th episode of PUAN podcast, co-host Saumya Pandey speaks with Geoscientist Jakob Steiner and Historian Lachlan Fleetwood on the 19th century imperialist traditions of remaking the Himalayas as geographical frontiers. We reflect on the genealogy of this Himalayan-frontier science. Jakob and Fleetwood discuss the fragile instruments and mode…

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (Liveright, 2024) takes Syria’s refugee outflow as its point…

Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks to Jennifer Hart, Professor and Chair of the History Department at Virginia Tech, about her work on the history and ethnography of mobility and infrastructure in Ghana. Hart’s newest book, Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press…

Newburgh is a small postindustrial city of some twenty-eight thousand people located sixty miles north of New York City in the Hudson River Valley. Like many other similarly sized cities across America, it has been beset with poverty and crime after decades of decline, with few opportunities for its predominantly minority residents. Sixty Miles Upr…

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Depar…

In this podcast episode, Professor Burlingame illuminates the differences, and similarities, between ethnobotany and folk medicine. This podcast is a must for anyone looking to be inspired by a deeper understanding of how and why humans use plants for health and healing. (10 minutes and 08 seconds) Mentioned In Episode: "The Medical Anthropology Se…

What is social mobility? In Social Mobility (Polity Press, 2023), Anthony Heath, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford and Yaojun Li, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, explore and explain this concept, setting out why the idea matters for both social scientists and the general reader. The book draws …

In Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke UP, 2024), Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence…

In this podcast, Professor Burlingame teaches you about ethnobotany through a medical anthropology focus on medicinal plants. Use the knowledge you gain in this episode to positively inspire you on your health and wellness journey. (8 minutes and 45 seconds) Support the Show. BOOK A FREE CALL with me to discuss your Masterclass possibilities! Maste…

In Disability Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp chronicle and theorize two decades of immersion in New York City’s wide-ranging disability worlds as parents, activists, anthropologists, and disability studies scholars. They situate their disabled children’s lives among the experiences of advocates, families, experts, activists, a…

Nisrin Elamin is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto whose work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging, and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. Elamin joins the Ufahamu Africa podcast for this episode focused on the conflict in Sudan. Books, Links and Articles “Recent protests in …

In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press, 2020) anthropologist and activist Sa’ed Atshan explores the Palestinian LGBTQ movement and offers a window into the diverse community living both in historic Palestine and in diaspora. His timely and urgent account contends that the movement has been subjected to an “empire o…

Castoffs of Capital: Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh (U Minnesota Press, 2022) examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention onto the lives of older women aged out of factory wo…

For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they …

An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be (Routledge, 2023) is designed to provide the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the intersections of language, inequality, and social justice in North America, using the applied linguistic anthropology (ALA) framework. Written in accessible language and a…

An anthropologist walks into a grocery store—no that’s not the start of a joke, that’s the true story of how Cathy Stanton came to be involved with Quabbin Harvest, a food co-op in the former mill town of Orange, Massachusetts. Part memoir and part history, Stanton’s new book Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer (University of Massachusett…

Ancient viruses that integrated into the human genome millions of years ago may influence the risk of mental health conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. These viruses, remnants of retroviruses known as human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), can exhibit abnormal activity levels in individuals genetically predisposed to…

Lahore's Hall Road is the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road's traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as devote…

Prof. Dr. med. Harald Matthes begleitet seit Beginn der Covid 19-Pandemie Menschen, die sich nach einer Infektion mit dem Virus oder nach einer Impfung dagegen nicht vollständig erholt haben oder sogar noch schwerer erkrankt sind. In dieser ersten Folge der Serie «Mensch und Gesundheit» aus der Redaktion der Medizinischen Sektion am Goetheanum besc…

In this episode of the Anthropology in Business podcast, Jay Hasbrouck speaks with Matt Artz about his career as a business anthropologist. They also discuss the evolving role of anthropology and insights in business, the second edition of his book Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset, and how ethnographic thinking can help organizations n…

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to n…

Jonny, Robert, and Aaron talk the ultimate sin: Selling out. Is there a counterculture? Are we all the sellout hobo from They Live? What are our personal brands? All these questions - and more - are asked in this episode of Stupid Anthropology. Oh yeah, we're Stupid Anthropology now. We will miss Rachel, but she's off to bigger and better things in…

Indonesia is the world's second largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 202…