Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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The post Going Native: Reviewer 2 appeared first on Anthropology News.
Dr. Wayne Warry, distinguished medical anthropologist and pioneer in Indigenous and rural health research, passed away on August 4, 2026, leaving behind an enduring legacy of community-engaged scholarship, health-equity advocacy, and dedicated mentorship across Canada and the United States. Dr. Warry earned his BA (1975) and MA (1976) from McMaster University before completing his doctoral […]
The post In Memoriam: Dr. Wayne Warry (1953–2026) appeared first on Anthropology News.
When I, as a new graduate student, first walked into Renato’s office in Fall 1983, I could not help noticing that it was full of cardboard boxes with file folders and books. I did not know it at the time, but the boxes were a manifestation of Renato’s rebirth as he engaged academics after a […]
The post Our Gregorio Cortez appeared first on Anthropology News.
Hitesh was twenty years old when he received a thick envelope at his door in a western Indian city. It was not like the official kinds from the bank but looked like a long letter from an old friend. He checked the address, the postcode, the house number. All his. But something was unfamiliar on […]
The post What Is Your Mother’s Name? appeared first on Anthropology News.
Editor’s Note: This piece is the third in SAFN’s 2026 Anthropology News series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven’t already, check out the previous installments by Janita Van Dyk, and by Janet Chrzan. Orders-In Nico and I have been standing awkwardly in the kitchen for what feels like an eternity. This is the first time I’m joining […]
The post Temporal Distortions in the Time of Ghost Kitchens appeared first on Anthropology News.
I am a PhD student who studies language, culture, and processes of youth marginalization and belonging in London schools. In this article, I reflect on how ethnographic methods have shaped my engagement with grassroots education networks, drawing on two summers of preliminary linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in East London from 2024-2026. Before turning to research, I […]
The post Using Ethnography to Listen and Learn from London Grassroots Educational Justice Networks appeared first on Anthropology News.
My “news” is at least two-hundred-years old. However, as current news can only mean something in relation to context and history, we can use my old news to place the recent attack on Anthropology in the “Vanderbilt Report” within a longer historical arc. Looking squarely at the early formation of anthropology one must admit that […]
The post Conflicting Nineteenth-Century Paths to North American Indigenous Languages and Voices appeared first on Anthropology News.
La Ruan said he was destined to live a lonely life. It would be better, he told me, to find a wife, secure companionship, and perhaps raise children. During my visits to his hometown, we spent long afternoons talking in his adobe house at the center of a Mixtec community nestled in a valley of […]
The post Citizenship Before Love: Queer Desire, Duty, and Indigenous Sovereignty appeared first on Anthropology News.
In 2021, the BBC News released a video about a Chinese father making medicines at home to save his son. The father, Xu Wei, was around 30 years old, living in southwestern China. In 2020, his nine-month-old son had been diagnosed with Menkes syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that prevents the body from absorbing copper. Doctors told […]
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We write at a moment when the violence of war is reverberating across regions, institutions, and everyday life. Ongoing wars in the Middle East have laid bare the genocidal tendencies of both global and regional powers. In Gaza, Israel’s ongoing assault—enabled and sustained by Western military and financial support—has involved the systematic destruction of the […]
The post Political and Legal Anthropology at Times of War, Rising Authoritarianism, and Resistance: APLA Section Co-Editors’ Introduction appeared first on Anthropology News.