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…

The English word for the forbidden arrived by ship. During his third Pacific voyage in 1777, Captain James Cook recorded the Polynesian term tapu in his journals, describing a system of restriction he could observe but not translate.

Every society moves its children into adulthood, and a surprising number of them do it through the body. A boy is cut, a girl is secluded, a young man is tattooed, a young woman is bathed and dressed and presented.

In October 2013 the British Museum opened Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, a survey of Japanese woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books produced roughly between 1600 and 1900. It ran until 5 January 2014 and was curated by Timothy Clark, head of the museum's Japanese section,…

Most ancient civilizations hand historians one kind of evidence and expect them to make do. Sometimes it is a wall of images with no explanatory text. Sometimes it is a body of literature with almost no surviving artwork.

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…