#anthropology

#anthropology

In 1434, the high-tech medium of oil paint allowed the Flemish master Jan van Eyck to infuse his sumptuous double portrait of the Arnolfinis with astonishing depth.He couldn't resist showing off a little more: A convex mirror on the back wall contains a tiny self-portrait of the painter at work.Six centuries later, when the multimedia artist and writer Seth Price includes an illusionistic mirrored sphere in the upper left of Thought Comes from the Body II, a big, crackled black and Day-Glo painting on panel, it still signals virtuosity.

In a remote part of the Amazon, anthropologists and neuroscientists are learning about life and health without an "embarrassment of riches."Beside the schoolhouse turned medical station in the northern Bolivian village of Las Maras, everyone is waiting for breakfast.Today's meal is rice and eggs, generously salted and adorned with globs of mayo: hearty fuel for a workday of foraging and hunting animals.

Earlier this month, a group of Brooklyn College students helped guide me on a tour of the Flatbush African Burial Ground, a sacred site that is the resting place of enslaved Africans who were brought to Brooklyn and died there from the late 1600s until the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827.The students are participating in a paid internship program with the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition (FABGC), a Black-led, multiracial organization that is fighting to preserve the site and teach its history.

Museums are full of artifacts left by "the first and the famous," says curator Ariana Curtis.Museums can better represent diverse stories, she argues, if they also include stories of everyday life.About Ariana Curtis Ariana Curtis serves as the first curator for Latinx Studies at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.