This paper explores how human language arose from the fusion of biological vocal learning and cultural storytelling. Vocal learning provided the neural flexibility for imitation and sound control, while storytelling, especially in communal firelight settings, gave those sounds purpose and meaning. Drawing on neuroscience, primate studies, and ethnographic evidence, I argue that language evolved through a feedback loop between brain and culture: the ability to imitate enabled narrative, and narrative refined communication. The firelight environment fostered imagination, empathy, and social cohesion, transforming sound into story and story into language. In this view, language is both a biological inheritance and a cultural creation, an evolutionary dialogue between imitation and imagination.

Melting glaciers have been used as indicators for global rising temperatures for decades, often reduced to their receding status and disappearing beauty. Today, mountainous communities from Nepal to Sweden are organising glacier “funerals” to bereave their national losses. These contemporary ceremonies serve as mechanisms to cope with communal anxiety around water preservations and cultural conservatorship. However, not all are mourning. Deep inside the Himalayan mountains of Pakistan, locals from Gilgit-Baltistan are hosting glacier weddings– a 600-year-old indigenous ice grafting practice that honors the matrimonial union of female (mo gang) and male (po gang) glaciers. This technique produces artificial “baby” glaciers that combats water scarcity and prevents glacial lake-outburst floods (GLOFs).

This paper illuminates the ecological resilience of the Balti communities and investigates socio-ecological threats looming human-beyond-human practices. As ice continues to recede and floods displace millions globally, how will mountainous communities progress from ice celebrations to memorials and beyond?

This paper examines the residential courtyard of the Pearl Garden (明珠花园) apartment complex in Guilin, China, as an incubator of dense informal social networks and flexible identity creation. Utilizing four months of ethnographic participant observation and informal interviews, I argue that sociality and identity construction are negotiated through “third spaces” and collaborative labor.

The research analyzes how the courtyard’s "collision spaces" facilitate a feeling of belonging and fluid identity formation, where children learn performative belonging, language socialization, and language gatekeeping to become socially legible. By navigating the labor of switching Mandarin and the local Guilin dialect (桂林话), I show that the transition from stranger to neighbor (雅阁) requires an active, flexible performance of identity. These findings suggest that neighborhood belonging is built through the constant, collaborative work of residents across generational lines. By centering the socialization aspects of the courtyard, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how anthropology can map the invisible infrastructures of cooperation that sustain urban communities.

Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with local theater artists and theatergoers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this study explores the way that performers and audience members collaborate to create a deeply meaningful liminoid experience that sets southern Vietnamese modern theater apart from its northern counterpart. The theater genre that I focus on is kịch nói, or contemporary spoken drama. Shaped by local cultural traditions and globalized encounters with Chinese merchants, French colonists, American soldiers, and diasporic Vietnamese communities, kịch nói has grown in popularity among Vietnamese urbanites despite the rise, in recent decades, of alternative modes of entertainment linked to new information communication technologies. Live theater offers audiences well-crafted dramas and comedies through which they can escape reality and revel in imagined worlds. However, audience members of southern kịch nói do not passively witness drama, as performers often strategically break from character to directly address them in a mode of live interaction. Regardless of the plays’ setting, the comments, jokes, and real-time banter that punctuate performances often allude to current celebrity gossip, political events, trending pop songs, and other popular topics. These interludes reinforce a pre-existing bond that performers and audience members form through now social media-mediated fandoms and fan culture, whose history, however, goes back decades before the age of new information communication technologies. They also create moments when audiences and performers can focus on and empathize with one another over collective anxieties about globalization, power and authority, modernization, and urbanization.

The experience of southern kịch nói resembles Victor Turner’s characterization of liminality and liminoid as a temporary break from the banality of everyday life characterized by heightened emotions, play, social taboos, and deep communitas. Yet it deviates from Turner’s view in the degree to which the communal experience is heightened through reference to everyday urban life and the pop culture that infuses it. This reality-groundedness—anachronistic references, live interactions, and off-script dialogue—intrudes upon the play’s fictional world and transgresses both Western and traditional Vietnamese theatrical norms. However, such transgressions might not be evidence of resistance, for any artistic choices have to take into account the omnipresent state censorship and the risk of government crackdown. Neither are these transgressions evidence of a minority counterculture, for they have become widely institutionalized in and characteristic of southern theater, giving it a unique regional flavor. This tendency to incorporate elements of reality, strategically placed in the script, can be traced back to the unique historical circumstances out of which kịch nói emerged in the pre-unification South before 1975, when the Vietnam War ended, with little governmental direction or funding and much competition from foreign entertainment. It showcases creative, entrepreneurial efforts to attract audiences and sustain a vibrant audience-centric theater and fandom culture, which increasingly sets southern Vietnamese theater apart from its northern counterpart. 

IFKA Community Services is an East African-focused community resource centre, run by a former court translator and the daughter of a prominent local grocery store owner, which operates out of the basement of a Main street storefront in Lewiston, Maine. On weekends, the center is rented out as an event space for birthday parties, weddings, funerals, and other functions. IFKA, which translates to "mother earth" in Somali, was built from relationships the organiser has developed within her community over decades. The center stands as a formal structure, transforming decades of informal service into community-driven infrastructure. Monday through Friday, students are shuttled in after school to work on math, reading, and language skills. Throughout these hours, the intercultural space is transformed as whiteboards are set up, pens, paper, and textbooks are brought out; the space is no longer an empty room but a classroom. Here, the students, all enrolled in local multilingual classes, are at ease. Many of whom rarely raise their hand in class, speak freely, joke around with their peers, and have to be told to focus by their tutors. This paper has been developed using a desire-based model, putting the voices of partners at the forefront. In conversation with organisers, it was clear they needed one thing above all else: funding. Thus, this project serves as an ethnographic account of the resource center, with the intention of providing written materials for grant applications. Each chapter centers on a particular "event" held at IFKA, analyzing the conditions of voice, language, and kinship. This includes narratives of tutoring sessions, translation services, political engagement, and celebrations. Through need-based programming, the center becomes embodied by the Lewiston East African community as a means of making space and cementing belonging in a city that has long been home.

This paper explores language revitalization in France, focusing on the Breton language. I assess the success of a multi-decade-long collaborative effort to preserve regional language and culture by focusing on the Diwan schools, a public system of dual immersion bilingual schools initiated in the 1970s. The Diwan schools operate within a nation-state that has long prioritized the French language over endangered regional languages. Nevertheless, Diwan schools have thrived, as a crucial component of local residents’ broader agenda for language and cultural revitalization. My paper builds on an academic year of research at Gettysburg College that involved review of primary sources by Breton activists and educators at Diwan available online, along with review of local French newspapers. I examine the dynamics of language revitalization by focusing on the people who lead this collective effort, the motivations of parents who send their children to Diwan schools, and the educational policy context in which Diwan schools have operated and spread. After five decades, Diwan schools have had a meaningful influence on the students and their worldviews. Additionally, I examine the challenges that Diwan schools face and the stakes that the language has in preserving Breton culture.

The way in which we communicate extends beyond just the meaning of the words we use. The choice of one word over another can quickly change the meaning in unintended ways, which can cause confusion or miscommunication. The tone in which we speak can also drastically change the way our meanings are perceived. As anthropologists, there is a very fine line between relaying the histories of those we collaborate with and retelling somebody else’s story in our own words.

Drawing on experience working in the hospitality, medical and emergency response fields, these small changes can have major impacts on the ways that we are understood and drastically change the way a situation is understood. These small misunderstandings can quickly pile up and entirely change the narrative, something that can dramatically change the outcome of an interaction.

Radio remains a vibrant resource to the residents of Montserrat and to thousands of Montserratians in the diaspora whose connection to their island homeland is maintained by streaming Radio Montserrat’s daily broadcasts. A radio program, the Carnival Train, was planned as a short-lived prelude to the island’s 2020 December carnival season, featuring remembrances of music from villages across the island, but particularly from those southern portions of the island inaccessible as a result of volcanic eruption and population displacement. Within two weeks of its broadcast, the program proved so popular that it continued every Friday night for more than two years with shows lasting as long as five hours. This paper explores how at a time when Montserratians were separated because of the global pandemic, they came together on the radio to share stories of people and places lost to both time and volcanic disruption. “Conductors,” former residents of the village under discussion in a particular show, would initiate the conversation and listeners would call into the show, text, or email and share experiences of their home villages, recalling a particular cricket pitch, band, memorable character, or weather event. Show host Little Lenny would greet on island listeners and those in the United Kingdom, Canada, United States, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and together they would take part in what Tim Ingold calls “wayfaring” as a means to reinhabit through storytelling these places lost to circumstance. Week by week, the “train” wound around this small 39 square mile mountainous island to provide community and affirm belonging to this altered, yet beloved landscape.