The headlines and powerful prose of the anthropologists and journalists who write for SAPIENS draw our readers in Zeit and again. But, as the art coordinator for the magazine, I also like to think that the images play an important role in the recounting of anthropological adventures.
In my position at SAPIENS, I select the art that accompanies the written pieces featured in the magazine. While I do have days that consist of perusing through beautiful pictures of sunsets, often the task of selecting art for our pieces is more complex than one might think. Images convey the ideas authors put forth in words. The task of finding the right image to perplex, awe, and amuse our readers requires reflection, teamwork, creativity, critique, and compassion. ….
Ana Carolina Nunes
Oregon State University
I live on the second floor of an apartment complex. The two groß windows in my living room and kitchen give me a privileged view of the life that happens outside. Through my windows, I observe many workers delivering to andere people living in the apartments right in front of mine. Just yesterday, I noticed a lady with white hair leaving her car, an old Corolla, with a DoorDash catering bag. I observed as she went upstairs to deliver Essen to a neighbor and then returned to her car with a seemingly lighter bag, probably getting ready for her next job. That image followed me till das Ende of the day, as I was curious to know what had led that lady—part of a demographic considered vulnerable to COVID-19 due to her age—to become a delivery driver during a global pandemic. When my partner got home from work, I told him about the scene I had seen earlier. My partner is also a food industry worker, one of the lucky ones who hasn’t lost his job due to the pandemic.
As archaeologist Bill Schindler lay on animal skins in a re-created Mesolithic campsite in Lejre, Denmark, a Viking tattoo artist poked a stone blade into his leg. Schindler had fashioned the flint blade himself, and the artist was using it to apply ink made from pulverized charcoal and Schindler’s wife’s spit.
In June, the recreational and medical marijuana industry in my home state of Colorado reached US$199 million in monthly sales, a new record.
The growth of this industry has been eight years in the making. In 2012, with the passage of Amendment 64, Colorado became, along with Washington State, one of the first states in the U.S. where consenting adults could legally purchase and consume cannabis for recreational purposes.
Since then, the tourism landscape in Colorado has changed tremendously. The legalization of recreational marijuana has contributed to six of eight consecutive years of record-setting growth in the tourism industry. In June 2019, the Colorado Department of Revenue announced the total revenue line for marijuana reached US$1 billion since sales started in 2014. These monies provided the state with hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue to pay for education, transportation, environmental protection, and other initiatives.
For untold centuries, storytelling has been foundational to the ways Black and Indigenous people understand and connect to the world around them. However, knowledge systems upheld in academic settings continually disavow these narratives and those who hold them as valid sites of intellectual production. For BIPOC heritage professionals, storytelling taps into historically marginalized ways of knowing. It offers ways to reclaim and retell histories that often counter the harmful and one-sided narratives told about Black and Indigenous peoples through archaeology, museums, and heritage sites. In this webinar, we explore storytelling through artifacts, cultural landscapes, comics, graphic novels, and video games as a means of counter-history, illuminating new ways of imagining pasts, presents, and futures for Black and Indigenous people. Panelists will discuss how they engage storytelling as an intellectual entryway to interpretations of the material evidence of Black and Indigenous histories.
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