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The Anthropology News Interview

In-depth conversations with the people who make anthropology tick.

Doing anthropology isn’t always fun, but some of the people doing it are absolute delights—and they have a lot to say about their research, the state of the discipline, and, naturally, their favorite foods. Welcome to The Anthropology News Interview , where we sit down with some of the field’s most compelling voices.

If you want to understand how race actually works across borders, Kimberly Eison Simmons is the scholar you need to read. In her foundational book Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic (University Press of Florida), Simmons untangles how state elites systematically buried the nation’s African past—pushing official categories like indio to champion racial mixture while sidelining Blackness. But as Dominicans moved back and forth between the island and the US, those tidy state narratives began to unravel.…