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UC Berkeley Anthropology

@calanthro

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We are the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Anthropology!

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If you’ve ever watched a movie or played a video game about ancient humans, you’ve likely seen the archetype: muscular hunters hurling spears to take down charging mammoths.

Decades of popular media have glorified these violent depictions of how human ancestors lived. But these long-held tropes don’t hold up against basic physics or oral histories from around the globe.

Now, Berkeley archaeologists are setting the record straight.

In this 101 in 101 video, our series where a Berkeley expert explains an aspect of their work in 101 seconds, UC Berkeley archaeologist Jun Sunseri shares a pivotal technology that allowed human ancestors to survive — ground-planted pikes.

More explainer videos at the link in our bio: https://bit.ly/4bMwNlL

[Video description: A man is speaking to camera and demonstrates ancestral hunting tools. Visual depictions of ancient humans hunting mammoths and other large creatures appear throughout.]

#UCBerkeley #101 #Anthropology by @calanthro

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Tomorrow (October 15, 2025) in the Constance Chiang Pan Anthropology Reading Room (AAPB 230) at 5pm! guided refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars since the Syrian catastrophe. Through an ethnography
of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular
frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between
national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are
illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across
the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow
of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.

Basit Kareem Iqbal is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Member in the
Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. He is the author of The Dread Heights: Tribulation and
Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press: 2025) and editor of collaborative journal issues on
tribulation (2022), the destruction of loss (2023), the incapacitation of tradition (2026), and the unmooring of the
present (forthcoming by @calanthro

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Spring enrollment is coming up, and there are so many amazing anthropology classes to choose from!

Which ones will you be adding to your cart? by @calanthro

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Constance Chiang Pan Reading Room October hours! 🦇

Irregular Hours:
Tuesday, October 13- Open 12 pm- 5 pm
Monday, October 26- Closed
Tuesday, October 27- Closed
Thursday, October 29- Open 10 am- 5 pm by @calanthro

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4 days ago

Thank you to everyone who came to the undergraduates brunch! It was lovely to see you all! by @calanthro

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8 days ago

We are excited to announce that John Borneman (Princeton University), will be speaking in our department on Thursday, Oct 8, 5:00 - 7:00 pm, in the Anthropology Reading Room.

The talk is entitled “Ethnography and Autobiography”, the poster and abstract are here below and in attachment. John Borneman is a prominent political anthropologist and an ethnographer of queer kinship. His extensive fieldwork has been in Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as Syria, and his work on the two Berlins and the fall of the Berlin wall is a classic. He is the author of many books, among them, After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin (1991), Settling Accounts (1997), Syrian Episodes (2007), Cruel Attachments (2015), and, his autobiography I Was Married to a Horse (2025). by @calanthro

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11 days ago

Introducing the first event “Historically Situating Mayan Scientific Knowledge,” with the debut talk conducted by historian of Mayan astronomy Gerardo Aldana. Aldana’s talk is titled, “Sak, Tahn Waax, Astronomy and Psychedelics in the history of Mayan Oracular Science,” taking place on Friday October 16th at noon hosted at the Latinx Research Center. Aldana is the author of Calculating Brilliance, which re-examines the historiography of the Mayan Dresden Codex. This speaker series has been made possible by CLACS. Sponsorship for this talk includes an array of departments and centers; the History department, CLACS, CSTMS, the Latinx Research Department, Chicanx Latinx Studies, the Anthropology department and the Astronomy department. Mark your calendars! by @calanthro

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17 days ago

This Monday (9/28)! Remote option available!

Constance Chiang Pan Reading Room (AAPB 230), reception to follow!
Join on Zoom: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/95521304108 The UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology Presents

Bureaucratic Coyotaje, Narrative Fugitivity, and the Liminality of Belonging MONDAY 9/28 2:30-4:30 PM

Anthropology and Arts Practice Building,

Constance Chiang Pan Anthropology Reading Room (Room 230)

Join on Zoom: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/95521304108 A reception and refreshments will follow.

Since the mid-2000s, the US Department of State has systematically denied US passports to tens of thousands of Mexican Americans on the grounds that their births may have been fraudulently registered by midwives or home birth attendants. In the past two decades, this bureaucratic suspicion has focused especially on the Southeast region of Texas. Using a "suspected birth attendant" list first created in the mid-1990s by the Nationality and Immigration Service (INS), federal and state officials have "flagged" a growing number of US birth certificates registered between the mid-20th century and the early 2000s, producing a new category of precarious citizen, the native-born "citizen-in-question." The legal and procedural shifts that have made these acts of securitization possible presage the more recent efforts to reconfigure birthright citizenship through executive action.

In this talk, Dr. Orlando Lara places the practices that federal and state officials have criminalized in the context of rapidly shifting biometric regimes within a larger trajectory of "bureaucratic coyotaje," processes that marginalized and often colonized communities use to carve channels of mobility and belonging through unequal bureaucratic regimes. Focusing on the challenges of self-narration that people encounter when they must navigate complex or dual birth registration histories, Dr. Lara's presentation challenges the often taken-for-granted binaries of citizenship/non-citizenship, legality/illegality, and speech/silence that often animate discussions of "legal status" and political subject formation.

Questions? More info: Anthropology@berkeley.edu

Dr. Orlando Lara Chancellor's Postodoctoral Fellow, UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology olara@berkeley.edu

Orlando Lara is a 2025-2026 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. As a scholar, Orlando melds legal and political anthropology, medical anthropology, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC Irvine (2025) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell (2011). Grounded in the Rio Grande Valley and Houston, Orlando Lara's current work focuses on the growth of new forms of identity precarity through the interrogation and denial of core state identity documents such as US birth certificates and passports.

A long-time practitioner of multimodal anthropology, Orlando has worked with the artist Delilah Montoya to co-produce the photo and object-based installation, "Sed: A Trail of Thirst" and with the Sin Huellas Artist Collective developed the multimedia installation, "Detention Nation." Through his longtime collaboration with the Ethnic Studies Network of Texas, an organization he co-founded, Orlando also examines and participates in the inter-generational struggle for K-20 Ethnic Studies and truthful Social Studies curriculum in Texas and other Southern states. by @calanthro

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21 days ago

Congrats and welcome, ISSI Fellows! 💙👏💛 Seven @ucberkeleygraduate students have joined the ISSI Graduate Fellows Program: Alexa Kurmanov (@lost_in_the_field1988), Edward Martin (@afroachilles), Jesús Nazario, Coryna Ogunseitan (@cocogunseitan), Natasha Shannon, Deibi Sibrian (@day_bee), and Derek Wu!

The Fellows come from a range of fields, including @calanthro, @ucbgeography, and @natureatcal.

Learn more ➡ link in bio by @calanthro

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a month ago

Interested in purchasing some Anthropology Department merch? Shirts (adult and child), tote bags, mugs, and hoodies are available in the front office (Anthropology and Art Practice Building 232) during open hours! Free stickers with every purchase! by @calanthro

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2 months ago

Welcome back students! This semester the Constance Chiang Pan Anthropology Reading Room will be open Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm. Feel Free to drop by, study, read, or hang out! We look forward to seeing you! by @calanthro

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2 months ago

We will be closing the Reading Room as summer classes are coming to an end, but we'll reopen when the fall semester begins!📖🍂 by @calanthro

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