A collection of 18 posts
How Margaret Mead’s romanticised account of Samoan life became the founding myth of cultural determinism—and why it endures despite having been thoroughly debunked.
Napoleon Chagnon documented a society in which violent men enjoyed greater reproductive and marital success. Some of his academic colleagues never forgave him for it.
The homogenisation of culture begins with the loss of language.
Death, DNA, and the culture wars.
A new book describes the crackpot anthropological theories that Nazis used to justify their belief in Aryan racial superiority.
To suggest that a spirited discussion of the importance of sex and gender in archeology threatens “scientific integrity” is to misunderstand the nature of science.
Six imperial rulers expanded the Mexica domain from 1430 until 1519, until the Spaniards first set foot in Tenochtitlan and disrupted the Aztec imperial agenda.
Jennifer Raff’s Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas was published with much fanfare in February, garnering a rave New York Times review. And as of this writing, it is listed as one of the top 10 books about genetics on Amazon. The success reflects the fact that the
In January, as reporters were celebrating the first woman—and also the first transgender person—to win more than a million dollars on Jeopardy!, I was reading up on the discrimination still faced by biological women who toil away in my own fields of endeavor: anthropology and archaeology. This discrimination
While he may have seemed like something of an (enormously) overachieving dilettante to some, there was in fact a unity to his life and work.
The January 6th riot does make for a visually dramatic backdrop to an exploration of the fascistic strain in modern populist politics.
The most expansive interpretations of NAGPRA’s provisions now serve to place Indigenous oral traditions, which typically include religious stories, on equal footing with traditional forms of scientific evidence such as DNA analysis.
In the north, the Maritime Archaic gave way to Pre-Dorset Palaeoeskimos (as they are known in the literature) that had recently arrived from Siberia.
Remembering one of the last titans of anthropology.
At the height of the #MeToo scandal in 2018, when dozens of actresses were coming forward with sordid testimonies about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation, a much more obscure scandal was unfolding around an academic journal involving the anthropologist David Graeber. The journal—HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory—was imploding