A Story of Icelandic Skulls

Members of an encampment at a public university in New York City are on trial for felony charges. In 2024, students across the world launched encampments to challenge university financial ties to Israel in response to the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban public university system in the United States, celebrates and valorizes its long and storied history of activism. However, the administration reacted differently during the 2024 police raid on the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at its flagship campus in Harlem. Comparing the CUNY student movements of the mid-1990s and 2024, this episode asks: What are the conditions in which institutions like the university choose to repress struggles for social justice? At what point do stories of struggle become institutionally palatable? Thayer Hastings is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. He is a scholar of political anthropology, the anthropology of colonialism, and Middle East and Palestinian studies. His dissertation focuses on how everyday modes of documentation in contemporary Jerusalem, where Palestinians have to prove their presence to the Israeli state in order to maintain access to their homeland, change the way political belonging is understood. Our thanks go to Prison Radio, which published the speech Mumia Abu-Jamal gave to the CUNY encampment in April 2024. All audio samples used in this episode are from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of April 2024. These artifacts were collected and preserved by the CUNY Encampment Archive. The CUNY Digital History Archive is a rich resource that provided much crucial background information for the social movement history of CUNY activism. * SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The gold industry, alongside nation-states, has marginalized the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector for decades, but now things seem to be changing. The industry has realized that engaging with the ASM sector could be more beneficial for their reputation than excluding it. While once ASM was viewed as a risk, now it is seen as an opportunity. Anthropologist Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa spent more than 20 months studying the gold value chain and the actors involved in it. In this episode, she explores this recent shift around ASM and its unintended consequences. Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa is a Colombian anthropologist and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research explores the labor, ethics, and affects that make gold a valuable substance demanded by the tonnes. She draws from her multifaceted ethnographic research among bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs who work on a gold mineral traceability project in Colombia and financiers who work on responsible gold sourcing in London, Switzerland, and Paris. . She is the founding director of the Laboratorio de Antropología Abierta (Open Anthropology Lab), an organization in Colombia that, since 2018, produces audiovisual content for nonacademic audiences to increase the impact of academic research. Check out these related resources:

Milpa is an ancestral way of farming in Mexico and other regions of Mesoamerica that involves growing an assortment of different crops in a single area without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. This provides people in the region with a wide variety of foods and a balance of nutrients. In recent years, with the introduction of farming based on synthetic herbicides, milpa has changed, and land is used to grow just a single crop. This change in agriculture has led to the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, which is impacting the nutritional health of the people. This change in agriculture, together with the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, is affecting the nutritional health of the people. In this episode, bioanthropologist Anahí Ruderman shares her experiences working with a milpa growing community in Veracruz, Mexico, that is resisting the food of globalization as it tries to cook up a healthier future. Anahí Ruderman is an Argentinean biological anthropologist with a Ph.D. in biological sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She is currently an associate researcher at the Instituto Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas of Argentina. Anahí is interested in processes related to the nutritional status and diet of contemporary populations in Latin America in the context of globalization and food transitions. She uses analytical tools from different disciplines that range from human evolutionary biology, population genetics, and human ecology to history and sociopolitics. Check out these related resources:

In the last two decades, an unprecedented wave of Chinese investment and migration to Africa has transformed many economies on the continent. But this has also provoked a storm of controversy, as some criticize the situation as exploitative neocolonialism. Others defend this migration as development assistance and an act of solidarity between regions jointly victimized by European colonialism. In this episode, anthropologist Justin Lee Haruyama takes us to Zambia, where Chinese investment is bringing two cultures together in the country's mines. Justin speaks with local Zambians and researchers on Chinese migration to examine the complicated impacts Chinese activity is having in Africa today. Justin Lee Haruyama is a British Columbia–based writer, researcher, and anthropologist. He is a fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and incoming assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Program, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Justin’s research examines the controversial presence of Chinese migrants and investors in Zambia today. His writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The South China Morning Post, Anthropology News, Somatosphere, Cultural Anthropology, and elsewhere. Check out these related resources:

While researching the history of parole in South Africa, a lawyer and anthropologist discovers the origins of the N2 road, which she drives everyday. Now interested in this highway’s history, she explores how this and other roads were used to expand territory and exploit people during South Africa’s colonial periods under Dutch and British rule, and how they kept people separate during the country’s apartheid government from 1948 to 1994. In the present, she learns of a new highway project that threatens to repeat this legacy of racist displacement. Nicole van Zyl is a South African lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral research explores connections between the first systemized forms of early release from incarceration and the modern practice of parole. She is interested in how incarceration as punishment communicates belonging and exclusion from society, and how this relates to present-day conflicts around South Africa’s land redistribution as an atonement for colonial and apartheid crimes. Check out these related resources: