In existence for more than 70 years, the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is the site of the longest ceasefire in the world. What can this region teach us about the long, intended—and unintended—consequences of this form of a truce?

In this episode, sociocultural anthropologist T. Yejoo Kim uncovers how residents have been surviving through decades of sonic violence and propaganda, and explores  recent developments in such long-lasting psychological warfare.  She also details how a former excavationist remembers discovering human remains at the DMZ. Even after more than 70 years, the ceasefire allows war to reverberate through the skies and unsettle the earth below.

T. Yejoo Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist researching the political economy of the Korean DMZ. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation builds upon the anthropology of borders and the economy, diaspora and transpacific studies, and critical disability frameworks. Her research has been funded by Fulbright and the Korea Foundation.

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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.

In this episode, social anthropologist Luis Alfredo Briceño González talks about his experiences as a foreign researcher in Chile. During his fieldwork, he met Marta, a Venezuelan woman residing in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Santiago. Marta and her family held a mock election to protest not being able to vote in their home country during the presidential elections in 2024. Through her story, Luis discusses the enduring emotional and political ties that migrants often have with their home countries.

Luis Alfredo Briceño González is a doctoral candidate at the Potificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on migration and auto-constructed settlements in contexts of informality. He conducted fieldwork in Santiago de Chile, a city that has become an important host to migrants in South America. Before his Ph.D., he worked as a research assistant on the Latin American Anti-Racism in a “Post-Racial” Age project.

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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.

When it comes to the division of labor in hunter-gather societies, the stereotype is generally that men hunt and women gather. But when a recent study claimed that women in hunter-gather societies hunt just as much as their male counterparts, the finding made news around the world. But why does gender equality in the past matter so much today?

This episode focuses on the complexities of work, gender, and power throughout human evolution. Evolutionary anthropologist Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias guides us through what these can tell us about gender roles in humanity’s past and the origins of uneven power dynamics.

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias is a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research aims to reconstruct the past of contemporary hunting and gathering people from different places in Africa to better understand the processes that shaped the enormous genetic and cultural diversity on the continent today. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining genetic, ecological, and archaeological analyses with ethnographic fieldwork among hunter-gatherer populations in the Republic of Congo. Previously, she worked in the Yucatán Peninsula, studying the drivers of linguistic diversity.

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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.

Since its emergence in 1960s Harlem, the LGBTQ+ “ballroom scene” has expanded into a transnational subculture. For outsiders, understanding how a ball functions can take time. 

Join linguistic anthropologist Dozandri Mendoza as they “walk” us through a night at a kiki ball in Puerto Rico. They introduce us to DJs, commentators, performers, and the Boricua Ballroom children who are refashioning the techniques of their trans-cestors. Dozandri guides us through both the expectations of those on the sidelines of the ballroom runway and the anticolonial political meanings behind the Puerto Rican ballroom scene. 

Dozandri Mendoza is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Their doctoral research focuses on trans forms of creative expression in the Puerto Rican ballroom scene. Dozandri explores the representation of Puerto Rican linguistic practices in the archive of ballroom history. They also examine what verbal and embodied art forms such as reading, throwing shade, commentation, and walking a category teach us about diasporic memory, decolonial critique, and trans survival. Their work centers around a multimodal and performance-based ethnographic installation called the “Kiki Ball del Palabreo” held in Puerto Rico in 2023. Dozandri’s research has been supported by a Society for Visual Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation Fellowship, the Duberman-Zal Fellowship from the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies, and grants from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB. 

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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 United Fruit Company was a U.S. multinational corporation and at one time, the largest landholder in Central America. To maintain authority in this part of the world, the company stamped out labor reform, collaborated with U.S.-backed coups, and, oddly enough, invested in archaeology. Why?

In this episode, anthropologist Charlotte Williams explores the company’s role in preserving the past. She discusses United Fruit's botched conservation project at the Maya site of Zaculeu and the ongoing impacts of that program. 

Charlotte Williams is a Mellon Democracy and Landscapes Initiative fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2024–2025), and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how archaeology as a discipline has been used in U.S. imperial projects, with a focus on how the United Fruit Company used archaeology to grow territorial power in Central America. Charlotte has worked on community museum projects, coordinated decolonizing museum programs, and co-curated an independent art exhibition.

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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.

Culture is a force that makes us who we are. It drives social interactions and relationships, shapes beliefs and politics, ignites imaginations, and molds identities. Cultural conflicts are at the heart of many crises facing the world—increasing inequality, persistent bigotry, ecological collapse.

In this season of the podcast, we’re investigating these intersections of culture: how past flashpoints echo into today, how present flashpoints are forging our futures. Through the lens of anthropology, we will examine what happens when human cultures meet, merge, and clash—and what these encounters reveal about humanity’s shared fate.

Join Season 8 host Eshe Lewis and the latest cohort of SAPIENS public scholars fellows as we journey across continents to uncover where cultures collide.

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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.

Host Myra Flynn unpacks one soul food recipe: collard greens, with local and world-renowned chefs, and even her own mother. Together they explore how the history of a once undesirable food mimics the resilience, innovation, and perseverance of a once considered undesirable people.

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Homegoings is a: Podcast, TV show, and event-series where no topic is off the table, and there’s no such thing as going too deep. Host and musician Myra Flynn brings you candid conversations about race with artists, experts and regular folks all over the country about their literal skin in the game—of everyday life.

Can museums and archaeology harm the dead?

An Indigenous archaeologist from Brazil challenges traditional approaches to studying human bones. Her work reveals how standard practices—such as assigning catalog numbers to ancient bodies—are violent and biased. As she encounters the remains of a 700-year-old child in a university museum, their stories intertwine, highlighting issues of ethics, coloniality, and ethnic erasure. This encounter prompts a discussion on how archaeology and museums can address historical wounds and counter the silencing of Indigenous histories.

Mariana Petry Cabral is a Brazilian archaeologist whose research interests focus on Indigenous archaeologies, collaborative practices, and how people produce and use historical knowledge to understand who they are. She received her Ph.D. from Universidade Federal do Pará (Brazil) and is a permanent professor of the department of anthropology and archaeology at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil). She was a visiting scholar at Brown University in 2023 and is working on a project about the relevance of archaeological narratives about the past to imagine more inclusive and diverse futures.

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As a form of popular culture, comics have provided humor, action, and entertainment to readers of all ages and across generations. But comics also intertwine art and humor to creatively make political statements, challenge media censorship, and address controversial issues of the times.

This podcast episode focuses on how comics can be tools for social action and transformation by highlighting the life history of the first woman Pakistani comic artist Nigar Nazar and her character Gogi, whom she created in the 1970s. Gogi comics shed light on important themes of education, health, rights, and other critical women’s issues in Pakistan and the broader Muslim world and how they are transforming over time.

Join cultural anthropologist Sana Malik and host Eshe Lewis as they talk about Gogi, the transgressive potential of comics and art, and how comics are relevant in Pakistan today amid new social movements and the social media boom.

Sana Malik is a cultural anthropologist who studies women’s political agency in urban Pakistan. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. Sana’s dissertation draws on the anthropology of rights and social movements, social generations studies, and feminist ethnography to explore how activists and ordinary women engage in movements for social justice and rights in urban Pakistan.

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Where is your smartphone right now?

If you’re like most smartphone users in the United States, it’s probably within a few feet of your reach, if not sitting in your hand. In the last 15 years, smartphones have quickly, seamlessly, and profoundly been embedded in the daily lives of most Americans. There are now few, if any, domains of modern life that are unaffected by smartphone use.

This episode explores our interactions and relationships with these pocket-sized computers we call smartphones through the research of Alberto Navarro, a doctoral student at Stanford University. Drawing from inventor Steve Jobs’ view that the computer represents “the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds,” Navarro explores what computers represent for humans in evolutionary and energetic terms.

Alberto Navarro is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. He is interested in how tools allow humans to flexibly modify the structure and functions of their bodies and minds. Following in the anthropological tradition of making the familiar strange, his dissertation explores ways in which smartphone use in the United States is transforming many of the most basic features of human existence and experience. He believes improving our relationship with smartphones is one of the most impactful things we can do to enhance our everyday performance and well-being.

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