Pennsylvania, Data Centers, and Challenging Myths of America and Anthropology

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence, members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the government are rewriting and weaponizing history, narrowing the definition of who and what counts as American. Amid the celebrations, our team completed two years of fieldwork in Pennsylvania exploring the myths and realities of data […]

The post Pennsylvania, Data Centers, and Challenging Myths of America and Anthropology appeared first on Anthropology News.

Pamela R. Frese

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

(1952–2026) Pamela R. Frese, professor of anthropology at The College of Wooster, passed away on May 4, 2026, in Wooster, Ohio. Frese served her community for 40 years as a colleague, mentor, teacher, and “nourishing mother” inspiration for all who knew her. Pam Frese completed her undergraduate work at the University of Maryland and earned […]

The post Pamela R. Frese appeared first on Anthropology News.

Let Us Flourish!

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

Dear Reader, The public release of the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences on June 5, 2026, sent shockwaves through the academy, sparking immediate headlines and intense debate. At its core is a provocative charge: that the humanities and humanistic social sciences face a crisis of their own making, […]

The post Let Us Flourish! appeared first on Anthropology News.

A Response to the Report on the State of Scholarship

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

One of the first things we purportedly unrigorous humanistic scholars teach our students is that it is an elementary scholarly duty to quote authors correctly. If you edit a quote, you risk changing its meaning and you can misrepresent someone by taking quotes out of context. Unfortunately, the person (or AI agent) who was responsible for […]

The post A Response to the Report on the State of Scholarship appeared first on Anthropology News.

Anthropology and the Empirical

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

In January and February, and again in June and July, I spend hours reading evaluations of the 1600 research grant applications that the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research receives every year. In March and April, and September and October, I repeat the procedure for applications who make it to the final round.  Our reviewers ask […]

The post Anthropology and the Empirical appeared first on Anthropology News.

What is the Point of the Report on the State of Scholarship?

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

US Vice President JD Vance said, “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth,” and quoting Nixon, asserted that “professors are the enemy.” These statements stem from a belief that scholarly commitments to intellectual and representational diversity, structural equity, and the inclusion of historically unrepresented groups and voices have […]

The post What is the Point of the Report on the State of Scholarship? appeared first on Anthropology News.

A Conservative Hit Job in the Age of MAGA

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

The Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences is not a neutral audit; it is a tactical hit job on disciplines like anthropology. Hand-delivered to university chancellors and presidents—conspicuously bypassing the scholars, students, and research partners actually doing the work—this supposedly “fair assessment” is a political manifesto tailored to sanitize […]

The post A Conservative Hit Job in the Age of MAGA appeared first on Anthropology News.

How Anthropological Knowledge Gets Made

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

The Boghossian Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences, which singles out anthropology as overly politicized, treats its attention to race, gender, and colonialism as a recent departure from a purer, more objective tradition of disinterested inquiry. That history does not hold up. Franz Boas spent much of his career […]

The post How Anthropological Knowledge Gets Made appeared first on Anthropology News.

Critics in Glass Houses

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

The conclusive statements about anthropology in the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences do not fit my own wide experience of the field or its practitioners. Nor, I think, do the writers of this Report demonstrate the rigorous scholarly standards that they extoll.  From 2005 until 2019, I held the position of […]

The post Critics in Glass Houses appeared first on Anthropology News.

An Archaeology Worth Doing

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

“American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing.” Gordon Willey and Phillip Phillips open their book, Method and Theory in American Archaeology, with this line of thought inspired by Phillips’ 1955 article outlining the significance of general anthropology to archaeological praxis. Today, American archaeology asks questions that move us beyond the dictums presented in 1958 while continuing to […]

The post An Archaeology Worth Doing appeared first on Anthropology News.

Who Gets to Draw the Line?

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

Anthropology, Objectivity, and the Politics of Knowledge A recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, commissioned at the request of the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University, does not have particularly nice things to say about anthropology. It describes anthropology as one of the “most extreme cases” […]

The post Who Gets to Draw the Line? appeared first on Anthropology News.

Suspension

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

We started the Rowasu’u collaborative digital archive—a project that returns decades of anthropological research materials to the communities they document in Central Brazil—in 2023. Our A’uwẽ (Xavante, Indigenous) collaborators are used to projects that are proposed but never started, launched but fizzle as institutional priorities shift, or take years for regulatory approval. The leaders of […]

The post Suspension appeared first on Anthropology News.

Wildlife densities, swamp ecologies, and ontological politics: Pluralizing how large mammals are known and valued in the Republic of Congo’s only Community-Based Protected Area 

Journal of Political Ecology Article Feed Published: Categories: English · Spanish

At the Lac Télé Community Reserve (LTCR)—the Republic of Congo’s only community-based protected area in the seasonally flooded Likouala swamp forests—conservation management remains tenuous: stable large-mammal populations, particularly the reserve’s r…

“Deportation Assistants”: US Police Collaboration with ICE Today

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

The sight of masked immigration agents rampaging through cities, ripping people of color from their cars and homes, and killing at least ten people on the streets has sown terror and mass outrage across the US. Innumerable abuses by the second Trump administration’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP) have, naturally, thrust […]

The post “Deportation Assistants”: US Police Collaboration with ICE Today appeared first on Anthropology News.

Michael Eugene Harkin (1958–2026)

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

On August 2, 2026, Michael Eugene Harkin passed away in Laramie, Wyoming. Born in Muncie, Indiana, on August 16, 1958, Harkin received a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in international studies and English. He then pursued a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, receiving his […]

The post Michael Eugene Harkin (1958–2026) appeared first on Anthropology News.