Salt, Soil, and Story

It’s funny, but also not. It’s satire dressed as self-reflection, which, honestly, is half of modern anthropology. By now, most of us know the story:  earlier this month, thieves actually managed to pull off a heist at the Louvre. Disguised as maintenance workers, they strolled in under fluorescent lights and walked out with a velvet case of royal jewels reportedly worth hundreds of millions. Paris shut down the museum. The director resigned. Police used the word “priceless” so often it almost started to lose meaning.  But that’s the thing about the word “priceless.” It’s both a valuation and a confession: it means something is beyond worth, but also that no one can truly measure it. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how cultures decide what’s worth protecting. We encase diamonds in glass, ship mummies across continents, build climate-controlled rooms for oil paintings, and spend millions preserving artifacts once traded for salt, shells, or cows… But when it comes to people, ...

When Your Brain Feels Like an Exhibit I first saw this sculpture at the Eiteljorg Museum this past summer and thought: yep, that’s my brain midweek. A wiry little goblin with a flayed man thrown over his shoulder. One manic, the other lifeless. The goblin was clearly juggling deadlines, emails, and existential dread. The poor guy on his shoulder? Just trying to remember where he left his coffee...I laughed, took a picture, and moved on. But later, the image stuck. Not as a meme about burnout (though, let's be honest, it fits), but as something older...a story about balance, memory, and the tug-of-war between body and spirit. From the Arctic to the Inbox The sculpture came from Voices from the Arctic: Contemporary Inuit Art , an exhibition tracing Inuit creativity from the 1960s to today. These works span carvings of hunters and spirits to modern reflections on climate change and technology, a visual dialogue between past and present.  Suddenly, my “goblin-brain” didn’t feel like a ...

The Land Still Remembers Most people have never heard of Garcia Pasture, a stretch of wetland and marshland on the southern edge of Brownsville, Texas: where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf. I hadn’t either, until I began tracing my daughter’s ancestry. While I’m not Mexican, my daughter has Mexican roots, and her lineage reaches back to the Indigenous peoples who lived along the Rio Grande Valley long before it became Texas. In the ethnographic research I do (not my day job, but my deep curiosity), I’m drawn to the stories and beliefs that survive in fragments, folded into folktales, faith, and the land itself. Garcia Pasture is one of those places - and one where the land still remembers. A Place Beneath Our Feet Archaeologists date Garcia Pasture to around 1000–1750 CE, identifying it as a pre-Columbian village that once thrived with life, trade, and ceremony. Excavations have uncovered burials, shell tools, pottery fragments, and ritual sites connected to the Esto’k Gna (Carrizo/Come...