The Island That Became a Natural Experiment. Social scientists rarely get a clean baseline. Cultural change usually arrives gradually, through trade, migration, schooling and conversation, and by the time anyone thinks to measure it the "before" has already gone. Fiji was an exception.

Quiz Challenge Start Challenge /* ---- LOCAL THEME TOKENS (edit these to retheme the whole quiz) ---- */ .qz-wrap{ /* Neutral "museum vitrine" pastels — calm, archival, non-clichéd */ --qz-accent: #6E8FA0; /* dusty slate-teal — primary…

An anthropological reading of purity, danger, and why the same small area of human anatomy attracts rules almost everywhere. In Brief Every documented human society regulates the pelvic region and chest in some way — but almost none of them regulate it the same way. Mary Douglas argued…

Visitors filing into the House of the Vettii at Pompeii tend to stop about two paces inside the door. On the right-hand wall of the entrance passage sits a painted figure weighing part of his own body against a sack of coins on a set of scales. Modern tourists laugh, or blush, or take a photograph…

Modification of the genitals is one of the older subjects in cultural anthropology, and one of the most carefully documented. Across published ethnography, researchers describe practices that alter, mark, or remove parts of the external female anatomy, carried out for reasons a community explains…

Almost everyone recognizes the drawing: a man with four arms and four legs, stretched inside a circle and a square, staring out from posters, textbooks, and the Italian one-euro coin. Far fewer people know what Leonardo's Vitruvian Man was for — or what it was, and was not, claiming about the human…

Walk down almost any street in Roman Pompeii and you would meet the same image again and again — carved above a doorway, set into a paving stone, cast in bronze and hung at a shop's entrance. To a Roman eye, the phallus was not primarily an erotic picture. It sat closer to a road sign, a lucky…

Every society that keeps records has held opinions about the human body, and almost none of those opinions agree. What one community reads as a sign of wealth, health, or fitness to lead, another reads as a warning.

Quiz Challenge Start Challenge /* ---- LOCAL THEME TOKENS (edit these to retheme the whole quiz) ---- */ .qz-wrap{ /* Neutral "museum vitrine" pastels — calm, archival, non-clichéd */ --qz-accent: #6E8FA0; /* dusty slate-teal — primary…