When Sapiens closes…
I found out recently that Sapiens.org, one of my favourite Anthropology magazines, is shutting down. This was where I went to educate myself about the world through the lens of culture, history and lived experience in very accessible ways (for everyday people like me without formal anthropology training). The editing is high quality and has one of the best reading and browsing experience among most online publications I’ve encountered.
I was sad, of course, but then I became curious. Isn’t this happening to other public science media as well? Is there a broader pattern here? I looked it up and found that, indeed, funding constraints, shifting institutional priorities, and the difficulty of sustaining public-facing scholarship, has caused several shutdowns of publications in recent times.
Following the money
Across academia, media, and tech, I noticed that funding increasingly flows toward things that scale cleanly: platforms, tools, outputs with measurable returns. What struggles to survive are the in-between forms of work like translation, interpretation, and sensemaking, especially when their impact is slow and hard to quantify. Public anthropology, like Sapiens, is neither "pure research" nor a product, yet requires time and editorial care in systems that prefer speed and demonstrable ROI. (In fact, I sometimes secretly questioned how the magazine managed to stay financially sustainable all these years, providing such amazing work for freeloaders like me to enjoy.)
Perhaps anthropology is not disappearing, but being repackaged under different names like “human context”, “systems thinking”, or “org culture”. We actually encounter anthropological thinking all the time, just not labelled as such.
Sounds like deja vu?
Likewise in the design industry, I’ve noticed that disciplines like information architecture, content strategy, human factors, and service design, get folded under the broad umbrella term of “User Experience”. The pragmatic upside of this consolidation is that it helped the field gain legitimacy (i.e. everyone in tech now knows what “UX” is, broadly speaking). But the downside is it flattened important distinctions.
Over time, some practices became invisible, expected, yet under-resourced. Newer generations of UX practitioners gained only surface level understanding of their field and we gradually lose fidelity in the tools and frameworks that help us solve problems effectively.
I cringe when “UX” becomes shorthand for everything (especially these days when the field is increasingly getting “democratised”). Teams now can confidently run “user research” without understanding research methods, do “information architecture” by putting out sitemaps without grasping structural principles, do “design thinking” by hosting a workshop that masquerades as alignment. The work gets done, but something crucial gets lost in translation.
What we risk losing
If anthropology is to follow the same trajectory of being absorbed into a broader and more generalist field with clearer, more urgent impact, I wonder if it would be easier to get funded and resourced. Applied anthropology/social sciences under the umbrella terms I mentioned above would probably be the closest thing to that. If the world can’t be changed simply by public awareness, then perhaps anthropologists could use their skills and unique ways of seeing with the world to actually go out and make the impact they want to see.
However, I can’t help worrying about what the world will lose. Is being absorbed into broader fields a loss or an evolution? Maybe both. What I do know is that I want to keep learning from anthropologists directly, understanding their methods and perspectives before they get translated into something else. That's partly selfish (I think it makes me better at my own work), but it's also because I suspect we need people who can both specialise in the discipline AND apply it to various situations; who can both go deep into the rabbit hole AND make things accessible for others.
Perhaps that is why I have been trying to learn directly from the anthropology community — participating in anthropology conferences, volunteering my time mentoring young anthropology graduates, attending part time university courses to dip my toes in the practice.
I noticed how my learnings in anthropological methods have given me different ways of seeing patterns and understanding context that purely design-focused training doesn't, and this shows up in how I approach my work. When working with teams on process improvement or organisational structures, I find myself drawing on ethnographic observation, paying attention to informal systems and cultural practices that standard design frameworks often miss. (But yes, I do still dream of being able go to grad school study to Anthropology one day.)