Anthropology News

After two decades of expansion, China’s real estate economy slumped into a prolonged recession. Beginning from 2020, small and big developers, trapped in debt accumulated over the previous aggressive cycles of profit accumulation, abandoned works on ongoing housing projects, leaving hundreds of apartment buildings unfinished. Most apartments in the abandoned projects were already sold through home presales, and a significant number had been sold to migrant families buying their first h

The 25th anniversary of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) this year offers an occasion to take a longer view on anthropological research and the historical record at a moment when both have come under increasingly complex pressures. This essay grows out of a set of overlapping intellectual commitments that have taken shape over time. As an anthropologist who has been on the faculty of a history department for nearly twenty years, now with a joint appointment in anthropology, I have

A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, and a year into my fieldwork in Sheet’ká (Sitka, Alaska), I spoke with Lorena about COVID-19, vaccination, and public health policy. Lorena, a pseudonym for a Tlingit elder, was worried about the virus. But perhaps she was more worried about how the longer histories of settler infectious disease management shaped and might continue to shape Indigenous life. Wondering aloud about the pandemic and its governance, Lorena mused, “Is this a

Dr. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, a cultural anthropologist, social activist, and scholar of women’s and queer studies, died on May 23, 2026, at the age of 86 after struggles with Parkinson’s. Bobbi Prebis, labor activist and her partner of 50 years, pre-deceased her by several months. Liz was a brilliant, generous, and lively thinker who enjoyed the generative spaces of working with others. She was gifted at bringing people together and fostering curiosity and growth; she was the beloved mentor t

The post Going Native: Food for Thought appeared first on Anthropology News.

We’re halfway through 2026! If you follow the news it may feel like it’s been a lot longer, but hopefully you can take a break to check out the most-read AA articles published so far this year. Indigenous Futurities: Theorizing Futurity in the Past and Present Lindsay Martel Montgomery, Heather Law Pezzarossi Feelings Without Emotion: Rethinking Male Friendship and the Value of Personal Reticence Thomas Yarrow Welcome to the Anthropozine! DIY Booklets as an Alternativ

We’re halfway through 2026! If you follow the news it may feel like it’s been a lot longer, but hopefully you can take a break to check out the most-read AN articles published so far this year. Ten Things Anthropologists Can Learn from Creative Writing By Nomi Stone & Ro Skelton Ten Things Anthropologists Can Learn from Creative Writing Curated Collection: Anthropology of Iran Curated Collection: Anthropology of Iran Responding to State Terror in the US By Carolyn Ro

One evening when leaving campus, I received an email that I’d long been dreading: the anthropology department where I worked, along with several other departments, would be retrenched in the context of the university’s budgetary crisis—a formal process, often caused by financial exigency or declining enrollment, where institutions reduce programs, services, or staff—including tenured faculty—to cut expenses. While social science disciplines are often cast as particularly “problematic,” these pol

“The first night, the kids just cried,” Priya told me. “They didn’t stop.” We were speaking a few weeks after February 28, 2026, when the escalating US-Israel-Iran conflict reached UAE airspace and interceptor missiles broke across the sky above Abu Dhabi. A couple in their thirties, originally from the UK, Priya and Prashant had moved to the Emirates for work years earlier. For their children, the crisis was terrifying: loud emergency alerts, house-shaking explosions, all of them sleeping in

The following is an edited conversation between Ana Croegaert, president of Society for the Anthropology of North America, and section co-editors Tannya Islas and Liliana Ramirez. The discussion explores what it means to do North American Anthropology historically, today, and future directions for the discipline.  Introduction Can you tell us more about yourself and your work?  Yeah! I am an anthropologist and an ethnographer, and I would say my work lies at the intersection of mig

A Rendering of the American Political Economy of Healthcare An easy way to get physicians talking about clinical documentation is to ask about the electronic health record system (EHR). If you hear enough, mostly complaints, you start to get a sense of how intertwined the practice of medicine, the health informatics industry, and federal policy are. I asked one physician to create a chart for a hypothetical new patient to help me understand. StatusICD10 descriptionOnsetResolvedICD10 CodeAc

This is a conversation between a student and a teacher. It takes place over an undefined period. Some of it on Zoom, some of it in passing at a convention center. Some of it took place years ago but reappears now. We talk about three subjects or topics: multimodality, fieldwork, and pedagogy. Partly because the teacher is interested in the work of their student. And partly because the student realizes the value of pedagogy. We question the stability of the student and teacher as “pair”, because

1947–2026 Joachim Voss, whose research and leadership expanded understanding of sociocultural dimensions of agriculture and development, died April 5. He was 79. An eminent scholar of Central Africa and Southeast Asia, he also served many years in distinguished international leadership roles. Voss had a highly distinguished career as a sociocultural anthropologist who worked outside the discipline in international development research institutions. He served as director general of the Cent

Curated Collections highlight articles published in the last decade from our AnthroSource archives that speak to urgent issues in the present, offering insight into current events unfolding around the globe. From movements for racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty to the social implications of climate change, technological transformation, war, migration, and public health, these contributions demonstrate anthropology’s enduring relevance and responsibilities. This collection, on AI, showc

Kay B. Warren, Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ’32 Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Brown University, died on April 17, 2026. She received her BA at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and her MA and PhD in 1974 at Princeton. She joined the faculty first at Mount Holyoke and then at Princeton in 1982, where she was the founding director of Women’s Studies. She served as chair of anthropology at Princeton from 1984-1988, before joining the faculty of Harvard’s Department of An

(1942–2026) Barbara Richey MacRoberts, age 83, passed away peacefully at her residence in Shreveport, Louisiana on April 10, 2026. Barbara was born June 30, 1942, in Tucson, Arizona. She lived a long, full life in which she pursued many interests. She was surrounded by her friends in her final months. Barbara received a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from the University of Arizona. At the University of Arizona, she met her future husband, Michael H. MacRoberts. They married on May 16, 19

This past fall I returned to Princeton after three years of retirement to teach eighteen-year-olds about the self. My colleagues were consumed by one question: how do you stop students from using AI to write their essays? The seminar turned out to be one of the best I have taught in thirty-five years.  The course was a First-Year Seminar on the formation and transformation of the self, drawing on original texts in anthropology and psychoanalysis. My aim was to develop what I call people

Editor’s Note: This piece is the second in SAFN’s 2026 Anthropology News series on Temporality in Food Anthropology. If you haven’t already, read the first installment of this series by Janita Van Dyk here.  We’ve been using phrases such as “unprecedented times,” “unusual times,” or “challenging times” to capture the profound and destabilizing changes wrought by political actions over the last year, during the second Trump administration. Science research has been attacked and defunded, medic

Nyekuol, a young South Sudanese man living in the war-devastated Upper Nile region of South Sudan, spent years trying to find ways to send money to family members who had been displaced by the fighting that had begun in 2013. This was a risky endeavor. In one attempt to send money, he had sent cash on a civilian bus, a standard means due to the lack of banks and wire services in the region (and in the country as a whole). But on the way, the bus was ambushed by armed men. Two of the fleeing pass

In a southwestern Virginia county, yellow yard signs, bumper stickers, and billboards pepper lawns, cars, and roadsides. They read, “Don’t Nuke SWVA” and were distributed by a coalition of grassroots organizations resisting local development plans for data centers that could be powered by small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). State bodies have targeted the Virginia coalfields for data centers and SMRs since at least 2022 when former governor Glenn Youngkin announced that Virginia’s first S