Author: Managing Editor

Sustainable Finance: The Executive (Dys)function of Climate Governance?

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection. In early October 2023, I arrived in Tokyo for the first time, as a financial professional and a graduate student in anthropology studying sustainable finance. Somewhere along my fieldwork journey, my attempts at breaking into the […]

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Kimberly Eison Simmons: An Anthropologist of Blackness, Diasporic Belonging, and the Politics of Natural Hair

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

The Anthropology News Interview In-depth conversations with the people who make anthropology tick. Doing anthropology isn’t always fun, but some of the people doing it are absolute delights—and they have a lot to say about their research, the state of the discipline, and, naturally, their favorite foods. Welcome to The Anthropology News Interview, where we sit down with some of […]

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Air Conditioners and Other Bad Environmental Objects 

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection. “In the past, a lot of money for capacity building has been spent on foreign consultants who fly in for a week and stay at five-star, air-conditioned hotels.” The audience, a group of environmental professionals, academics, […]

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Social Fires in Belém do Pará

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

COP30 beyond the Documents This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection. 20 November 2025. The eve of the final day of COP30 in Belém do Pará. The heat was intense. I was in the Country Pavilion in the Blue Zone, an area reserved […]

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The Second Círio

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This piece is part of a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection. Since 1995 world leaders have descended each year on a chosen city to discuss the fate of the biosphere at the annual “Conference of the Parties” to the UN Framework Convention on […]

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Anthropology at the “Sites” of Climate Governance

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

This piece is the introduction to a collection of Anthropology News articles on Climate Governance. Click here to read other articles in the collection. As a graduate student attending a climate meeting for the first time, I did not know what to expect. I hustled down a street in Katowice, Poland, in the early morning […]

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What The System Leaves Behind

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The story of four boys, one wrongful accusation, and a cycle of violence that outlasted every attempt to stop it. It was still hot outside when Luis Alberto Quiñonez—whom everyone called Sito—reached Grant Avenue, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 8, 2019. His girlfriend Arianna’s mother had been evicted that day, […]

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What Death Leaves Behind: The Social Afterlife of HIV Mortality in Tanzania

Managing Editor Published: Categories: English

Global health often treats death as the endpoint of disease. Mortality marks the conclusion of an epidemic, the final outcome in surveillance reports, and the measure against which interventions are evaluated. Yet during fieldwork in the wards of Buguruni and Vingunguti in Dar es Salaam, where many families live with the enduring consequences of poverty […]

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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 […]

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Pamela R. Frese

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(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 […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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Anthropology and the Empirical

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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 […]

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

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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An Archaeology Worth Doing

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“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 […]

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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” […]

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Suspension

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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 […]

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“Deportation Assistants”: US Police Collaboration with ICE Today

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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 […]

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Michael Eugene Harkin (1958–2026)

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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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In Memoriam: Dr. Wayne Warry (1953–2026)

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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 […]

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Our Gregorio Cortez

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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 […]

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