Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article complicates the dominant narratives of territorial conflicts between indigenous communities and mestizo campesinos in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Biosphere Reserve. I suggest that the framing of these conflicts as “interethnic” obscures how class …
(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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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 […]
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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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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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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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.
Why was the civil society unable to mobilize effectively against democratic backsliding during Rodrigo Duterte’s administration in the Philippines (2016-2022)? What are the challenges and opportunities for civil society in the post-Duterte period? A…
This article examines anti‑racist efforts in two schools located in structurally disadvantaged suburbs of Swedish cities. Most pupils in these segregated schools come from low‑income, migrant‑background families. Data were collected using et…
This study discusses gendered patterns in quality‑of‑life pursuit amongst Swedish lifestyle migrants in Portugal through quantitative analysis of 543 survey respondents in a convenience sample. Using binary probit regression models, we inves…
Global South cities such as Old Dhaka face persistent challenges in providing basic urban services, including drinking water, sanitation, electricity, and waste disposal. Access to these services is unequal, with limited resources disproportionately di…
PRECIGOUT F. 2026. Entreprendre en charité ; Dynamiques et contradictions d’un dispositif d’aide alimentaire, Paris : l’Harmattan. 214p.
Dans son ouvrage, Frédéric Précigout plonge les lecteur·ices au cœur de l’action sociale contemporaine…
PRECIGOUT F. 2026. Entreprendre en charité ; Dynamiques et contradictions d’un dispositif d’aide alimentaire, Paris : l’Harmattan. 214p.
Dans son ouvrage, Frédéric Précigout plonge les lecteur·ices au cœur de l’action sociale contemporaine…
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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How do foreign policy disputes between host and home states affect external voting? Since the early 2000s, Turkey has adopted a proactive diaspora engagement policy to not only enfranchise nonresident citizens more effectively but also mobil…
Recent shifts in return policy have altered the legal reception and treatment of migrants worldwide. This article examines how policy documents from forced return operations construct human rights, authority and interculturality. Using criti…
This article examines Finnish political discourse on recent migration events on the eastern border of the European Union and explores its broader societal impacts. Using discourse analysis and a theoretical framework of securitization and ‘o…
Religion has emerged as a potential barrier to integration in increasingly diverse European societies. While existing research on intergroup relations mostly focuses on majority members’ attitudes toward religious or ethnic minority groups, …
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…
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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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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