1930-2024 Luther Paul Gerlach was born in Reading, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota in 1952. He then served in the US Army in for two years (1952–54) and as a government researcher in Germany before earning a PhD in cultural anthropology in 1961 from the University of London, with certificates in African and Islamic law and Swahili at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in 1958.  With the support of a Fulbright fellowship, he did fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa on the economy and society of the Digo and Duruma peoples ..read more

Notes on farm work in a rural town in southern Turkey. Çağla Ay was awarded the 2023 Photography Prize from the Middle East Section. In this piece, she brings us into her fieldsite of Finike.  Oranges grown in Finike, a small ancient town in southern Turkey, are known as Finike oranges, and are famous in the domestic market for their distinctive taste. Oranges are curious beings, not only because of the symbolic values attached to them and their economic value as the most cultivated commodity in town of Finike but also because they shape the meaning and materiality of the practi ..read more

Youth build multilingual lives that work for themselves rather than the workplace. A person that lives in a country shouldn’t be required to know another language to be able to sustain themselves. I shouldn’t have to say, “Wow, I was born speaking Spanish, but I have to learn another language to have a good quality of life.” —Miguel (18 years old) Miguel animatedly responded to the statement from Luis Abinader, president of the Dominican Republic, that “ningún dominicano que sabe inglés está bajo nivel de pobreza” (no Dominican that knows English lives below the poverty level). This headl ..read more

I have become the guy who takes photos of tacos. I never expected to be this person, but writing my dissertation on success, adaptation, and identity for Oaxacan chefs in Columbus, Los Angeles, and Oaxaca City, I have become enmeshed in this culture of capturing my dish before digging in. This has allowed me to capture the food’s brilliant colors: the reddish-yellow of the birria consomé, the yellow of the piece of pineapple on top of the pastor pork, the verdant green of the artfully streaked salsa verde on top.  But this photography goes much deeper than ca ..read more

1935–2024 Both the discipline of anthropology and the Agta Indigenous people of Casiguran, Philippines, lost a scholar, a friend, and an advocate in the passing of Dr. Thomas N. Headland on February 1, 2024. His wife and colleague Janet preceded him by one year. Tom served in the US Army 508 Airborne Regimental Combat Team from 1954 to 1956 and continued a passion for skydiving during his early years in the Philippines. He graduated from Bethel University in 1960 and was awarded an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawai’i in 1981 and 1986, respectively. He served as an SIL Int ..read more

Walking through my local Indianapolis grocery store, I can find an assortment of beers organized from big commercial brands like Heineken to popular craft brews such as Dogfish Head IPAs to regional favorites like Sun King ale. However, my view of these beers has been deeply impacted by my ethnographic research on beer and brewing in Ethiopia. Specifically, as I scan the beer shelves, I dwell on industry practices of commercial deception; the complex relationship between alcohol, conflict, and modernity; and the global appropriation and erasure of indigenous beers for profit. Regarding corpora ..read more

In July 2020, under the guidance of a dark and rainy sky, several Black community organizers and I led a protest with over 2,000 people in Gainesville, Florida. The gloomy yet hopeful air married their powerful voices, cries, and sweat. In a call-and-response, we almost entered into a trance by repeatedly chanting: “What do we want?” “Abolition” “And when do we want it?” “Now!” In the wake of state murders of numerous Black people, this seemingly simple yet radical statement caused a shift in the United States. Contrary to popular thinking, abolition is neither a catchy slogan nor a poetic m ..read more

If you had the opportunity to work at a restaurant where eating savory bites of smoked bison ribeye and maple roast duck was a daily occurrence, would you be compelled to take it? Though the perk of eating amazing food was not my main reason for beginning fieldwork in the restaurant industry, I certainly haven’t minded it.  For over two years, working at Owamni, a James-Beard-award-winning Indigenous restaurant, and NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), their partnering culinary nonprofit, has changed not only what I eat but when and how much. At the Minneapolis-bas ..read more

1950–2024 Rafael Sánchez Cacheiro, retired senior lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute, passed away on February 22, 2024, in Geneva, after a valiant battle with cancer. Born in Havana, Cuba, Sánchez lived briefly in Miami before his family migrated first to Spain and then to Venezuela. He obtained his formal education in Caracas, and then California, before moving to the University of Chicago to further his studies in anthropology, ultimately obtaining his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. Before joining the Geneva Graduate Institute, he taught at several institutions, including t ..read more

1944–2023 Karen Donne (Kaddee) Vitelli died on September 12, 2013, at the age of 79 in the town of Dresden, Maine, where she had been living since her retirement from Indiana University in 2006. Kaddee attended the College of Wooster in Ohio and spent her junior year at the study abroad program, College Year in Athens, where she would get firsthand experience in the classics and archaeology. After graduating from Wooster, Kaddee enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially attracted to underwater archaeology at Penn, Kaddee had to settle for land archaeology, as ..read more