"Grieve well and you grow stronger". Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well...

"It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist's dream". So begins "Palma Africana", the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to w...

"The Passion Book" is the most famous work of erotica in the vast literature of Tibetan Buddhism, written by the legendary scholar and poet Gendun Chopel (1903-1951). Soon after arriving in India in 1934, he discovered the "Kama Sutra". Realizing tha...

How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy...

While the sequencing of the human genome was a landmark achievement, the availability and manipulation of such a vast amount of data about our species has inevitably led to questions that are increasingly fundamental and urgent: now that information...

In February 2016, a multidisciplinary team of geologists, biologists, social scientists, and local residents explored the rivers, forests, and human communities of a remote area in northern Amazonian Peru, along the Putumayo, Algodon, and Mutun river...

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, "Phantom Africa" is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal – by turns melodramatic, self...

Who owns the past and the objects that physically connect us to history? And who has the right to decide this ownership, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? Is it the museums that care for the objects...

For sale in CIS only! Bruno Gutmann (1876-1966) was a German Lutheran missionary. In 1902 he went to Chaggaland on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Deutsch-Ostafrika (now Tanzania) and stayed with brief interruptions for 36 years. Owing to his "inte...

Self-harm is thought by many to be a modern epidemic: a phenomenon of the late twentieth century, a symptom of extreme emotional turmoil in young people, particularly young women. Yet it was 150 years ago, within early asylum psychiatry, that self-mu...