Time and the Other Primates
books and arts Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 178 pages. 18th-Century Questions, 21st-Century Problems Influential circles in German philosophy have taken an American anthropologist into their hearts. A comparative psychologist and linguist by training, Michael Tomasello has served as co-director of the Max Planck Institute for […]
Anthropology Now and Then in the American Museum of Natural History
The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of […]
The Tintometer, Anthropology and the Science of Color
In 1898, physician and marine biologist A.C. Haddon set off with a group of scientists from Cambridge, England. They aimed to study the residents of what they considered the antipode — the opposite side — of the earth, in particular the Islanders of the Torres Strait, between New Guinea and Australia. The Cambridge expedition’s cargo […]
Good Earth: Exploring the Old Lead Belt
Lead mining in southeast Missouri is more than just an industry. It is an ingrained and defning aspect of the environment and community. In 1719, when French explorer Philip Francois Renault discovered high concentrations of lead in the region, he was unaware that he had stumbled across the largest lead deposit in the world. One […]
Elusive Caimans and the Anthropologist as Devil
books and arts Lucas Bessire. 2014. Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 296 pages. Dust In this poignant and insightful ethnography, Lucas Bessire invites the reader to enter a world of shame, violence and all-consuming dust. Haunting descriptions of the vast plains of the South American […]
Remains of the Day: A Native American Burial Discovered in San Francisco Is Shrouded in a Fog of Acrimony
On February 25, 2014, at eight in the morning, the sky had barely turned light. In a muddy excavation site five stories below street level, an equipment operator deftly maneuvered his skid-steer, bathed in powerful electric lights. After two years of digging through sand and mud, the excavation phase of the Transbay Project was only […]
The CRISPR Hack: Better, Faster, Stronger
Science fictions and fantasies are quickly becoming facts with CRISPR, a gene-editing technology that is opening up new horizons for the human species. Some dream of turning horses into unicorns, while others would like to normalize humans — eliminating rare gene mutations from our populations. Biologists are considering hacking the genomes of unwanted insects such […]
The Arts of Recognition
Abenójar, like many farming communities in the Spanish Province of Castilla-La Mancha, inhabits the past while also embracing the present. Its serpentine streets are lined with rows of uniform structures; the majority of homes were built or refurbished in the 1970s and 1980s. The architectural aesthetic feels recent and contemporary, not quaint and historic. Only […]
The Politics and Ecology of Water: Notes on the Drought in California
California is great in size and diversity, the third largest state in the union, with the largest population. The state is comprised of distinct regions and countless enclaves, from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles, from arid basins to frigid peaks, from immense agricultural flatlands to unyielding urban growth. Proposals to split the territory have endured […]
Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online
On March 5, 2015, Eve M. Kahn’s “Newsworthy Notes” in the Antiques section of the New York Times included an announcement for a local auction alongside two short articles, “Remembering Ragtime” and “Go raise a glass” [1]. “Art of Internment Camps Will Head to Auction” was the first public announcement that the Rago auction house […]