Now & the recent past
17 topicsVietnam — The Shape of the Country
Two deltas, a 1,650-kilometer coast, a mountain spine, and a climate that runs from temperate to tropical along its length. The geography decides almost everything.
Camellia Sinensis
Every cup of tea on earth comes from one species — one species with two varieties, a few thousand named cultivars, and a still-unsettled origin story.
Sea Silk
A fabric woven from the byssus filaments of a single Mediterranean clam, kept alive by one woman on the island of Sant'Antioco.
How Processing Makes Six Teas
One leaf, six categories. The differences between green, white, yellow, oolong, black, and pu-erh tea are entirely about what you do — and don't do — to the leaf in the hours after picking.
Japanese Tea Ceremony
A practice that calls itself "the way of tea" and is, on close inspection, almost entirely about everything except the tea.
Yixing Clay
An iron-rich purple clay from one Chinese township that became the only material serious tea drinkers will use for a teapot.
Mercator and the Politics of Projection
Every flat map is a lie. The interesting question is which kind of lie it is, who benefits from that particular lie, and what would be lost if we told a different one.
Oaxacan Mezcal
Smoke, agave, and a regional spirit whose definition is mostly an argument about how slowly things should be allowed to be made.
Gongfu Cha
A Chinese way of preparing tea where the goal is not the cup but the attention you bring to it.
Phở, Bánh Mì, and the Vietnamese Coffee Economy
Vietnamese cuisine is a colonial palimpsest layered onto a deeper indigenous tradition — and the coffee that came in with the French became, a century later, the country's largest agricultural export.
The Four-Fields Model
A peculiarly American structural decision — that anthropology is biology, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnography under one roof — and what it has cost and bought.
Participant Observation
The method that made anthropology a discipline rather than a literature — and the unresolved question of what it is, exactly, you are doing when you do it.
The Blue Marble
One photograph, taken by an unidentified Apollo 17 astronaut from 29,000 km out, became the first time the entire human species saw its home from outside.
Anthropology After 1980
The discipline turned reflexive, post-colonial, and politically explicit — and in doing so found itself unable to ignore the conditions that had once made it possible.
GPS and the End of Being Lost
A military system designed in the 1970s to guide nuclear submarines became, within a generation, an invisible utility on which the global economy and the human sense of place both quietly depend.
Đổi Mới and Reunification
The first decade after the war was a planned-economy disaster. The 1986 reforms reopened the country to markets, kept the political structure intact, and produced one of the fastest sustained economic transformations of the modern era.
Contemporary Vietnam
A hundred million people, an upper-middle-income economy, the world's primary alternative manufacturing base, and a one-party state navigating its largest geopolitical contest since 1979 — Vietnam in the 2020s.
The twentieth century
5 topicsKinship & Structuralism
For sixty years anthropology's central project was to understand how marriage rules and kinship terminologies organize societies. Then, almost suddenly, it stopped.
The Vietnam Wars
Two wars, thirty years, and a sequence of strategic miscalculations by two of the most powerful militaries in the world. The lessons are about politics, not weapons.
French Indochina
Eighty years of French colonial rule built rubber plantations, rail lines, opium monopolies, a Latin-script Vietnamese alphabet, and a generation of Vietnamese-educated revolutionaries who would eventually drive the French out.
The Origins of Anthropology
How a discipline built to justify empire became, over a century and a half, a discipline obsessed with critiquing the conditions of its own production.
Tea & Empire
How a Chinese beverage became a British addiction, the addiction became a trade deficit, the deficit became the opium trade, and the trade became a war that rewrote the political map of Asia.
The long nineteenth
1 topicEarly modern
2 topicsThe Longitude Problem
For three centuries, the most important scientific problem in Europe was a problem of timekeeping — and the solution came not from the astronomers it was supposed to come from, but from a self-taught carpenter.
The Silk Road's Forgotten Cities
Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv — once the wealthiest cities on earth, now half-buried, half-restored, half-still-there.