Humans, Volume 5, Issue 4 (December 2025) – 10 articles

Gold mining has played a central role in shaping Peruvian society from pre-Inca civilizations to the present. However, existing literature offers fragmented perspectives, often focusing on isolated themes such as metallurgy, colonial mercury use, or environmental degradation, without integrating these across time and territory. This review addresses that gap by offering a place-based synthesis that combines archaeological, historical, legal, environmental, and comparative insights. Drawing on both Spanish-language sources and international literature, the paper reconstructs Peru’s gold mining trajectory through five historical phases—pre-Inca, Inca, colonial, republican, and contemporary—highlighting continuities and ruptures in governance, labor systems, and environmental impacts. The analysis reveals persistent challenges in Peru’s gold sector, including informality, mercury pollution, and weak institutional capacity. Compared to other mining economies such as Chile, Ghana, and South Africa, Peru exhibits greater fragmentation and limited integration of mining into national development strategies. The review also explores the role of gold in the global energy transition, emphasizing its relevance in clean technologies and green finance, and identifies policy gaps that hinder Peru’s alignment with sustainability goals. By bridging linguistic and disciplinary divides, this synthesis contributes to a more inclusive historiography of extractive industries and underscores the need for interdisciplinary approaches to mining governance. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reimagining of Peru’s gold sector, one that prioritizes environmental justice, social equity, and long-term resilience. Full article

In this article I analyze the symbolic role of the hospital in its social context, from its creation in Rome in the 2nd century BCE to contemporary Montreal hospitals. I trace the change from its original role as a site to isolate the sick to limit the symbolic pollution of the allegedly perfect social body of the Roman state, a trope that became an important vector of unity as Rome expanded and incorporated greater numbers of foreigners and slaves. Today, however, western hospitals have become a semiotic engine where patients construct a new biography to counter the depersonalisation of contemporary medical practices. I propose that today patients use the hospital as raw material to construct a temporal framework that substitutes the rhythms of everyday life that illness and the institutional culture of the hospital have interrupted. These narratives adhere to the same basic structure: the entrance scenario is always admission to the hospital; the plot structure is built with the non-medical details of the daily hospital routine. Surrounded by a neoliberal ethos that insists on the autonomy of the self but silenced by the mechanisation of illness, contemporary patients transform hospitals into semiotic engines where patients use their immediate environment to re-engineer new voices of the self. Full article

Higher education inculcates in students an enduring curiosity about the world. Accomplishing this goal requires helping undergraduates recognize that learning is a social process occurring within multiple communities of practice. Each of these collectives provides different lenses through which aspects of reality are illuminated, none encompassing all there is to know about a subject. Students thus appreciate that learning is an open-ended processes driven by a curiosity that is never satisfied. Knowledge resulting from that process is forever being refined, a project to which undergraduates can contribute. Appreciating the many ways of knowing the world requires engaging meaningfully with these distinct communities. This is best achieved by participating directly in the work and lives of multiple such collectives. Field schools provide excellent opportunities in which students come to perceive, think about, and act in worlds constituted by the community of archeologists and that comprise people hosting and participating in the investigations. We use our experiences directing an archeological field school in northwest Honduras from 1983-2008 to illustrate how we used this learning environment to help undergraduates make original contributions to knowledge of the area’s past while rethinking who they are and what they are capable of achieving. Full article

This article examines how ethnographic methodology and literary theory can advance research engines and artificial intelligence systems beyond the reductive computational approaches that dominate contemporary AI development. Drawing on recent Stanford research revealing fundamental gaps in large language models’ ability to distinguish factual knowledge from belief, I argue that contemporary AI systems enact what I term “abducted semantics”—appropriating the inferential logic of human meaning-making while systematically attenuating the culturally embedded, phenomenologically grounded capacities that generate authentic understanding. Through close analysis of Clifford Geertz’s thick description, Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, and canonical literary works—Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—I demonstrate that human understanding operates through complex semiotic processes irreducible to pattern-matching and statistical prediction. The article proposes concrete interventions to transform research engines from tools of semantic extraction into technologies that preserve and enhance interpretive richness, arguing that ethnographic and literary methodologies offer essential correctives to the epistemological impoverishment inherent in current AI architectures. Full article

Several people in contemporary postindustrial societies experience difficulties retaining intimate partners. This paper investigates the proximate reasons (the immediate causes of reduced capacity) and the ultimate reasons (the evolutionary causes behind those proximate mechanisms) that lead to such difficulties. I argue that the mechanisms or adaptations involved in partner retention evolved in ancestral preindustrial contexts and may not be effective in contemporary postindustrial settings. Relevant mismatches include the protection of human rights, dependence on intimate partners, freedom in mate choice, and access to parenting resources. I further argue that these mismatches have affected adaptations involved in partner retention, including the expression of undesirable traits, such as aggression and jealousy, insufficient mating effort, poor initial mate choice, and an impaired ability to meet the demands of parenting. As a consequence, many individuals today experience reduced mate-retention capacity, with implications that I explore. Full article

This article highlights the phenomenon of marginalized populations and minorities who espouse white supremacist ideology despite their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds within the USA. This study focusses on how non-Caucasian individuals are attracted to this ideology, its organizations, and how this contradiction is reconciled. Of particular interest is the rise in gun violence or the advocacy of gun violence by non-white individuals in the United States harboring white supremacist ideals and identifying with those principles. Statistical data for national violence is limited to general categories by state and federal law enforcement. This article examines public comments made by high-profile individuals as examples reflecting current attitudes under examination as well as violent acts resulting in deaths perpetrated by minorities motivated by supremacist ideals. Findings suggest that non-Caucasian or minority individuals from multivariant ethnic groups who espouse Nazi ideals are not following a singular objective or unified under one rubric but have mixed motivations rooted in establishing legitimacy and “white proximity”. White supremacist ideology is redefined to suit personal grievances unique to an individuals’ cultural group and/or needs. Full article

With an emphasis on the adaptation and mediation of Buddhist meditation within Western societies, this study explores the transformative interaction of traditional contemplative practices and modern technologies. By means of an extensive ethnographic investigation carried out in multiple European locations, this study sheds light on the significant influence that digital devices—specifically, smartphone applications—have on the accessibility, practice, and conception of meditation. These digital tools become guides that not only democratize access to meditation but also fundamentally change its nature, making it more individualized, commodified, and integrated into the field of self-care and therapeutic modalities from a deeply philosophical and communal practice. This inquiry critically looks at the two outcomes of this shift: the good that meditation is now more widely available and the bad that it is losing its conventional discipline and philosophical profundity. This paper raises concerns about the integrity of spiritual practices in the digital age and their evolution under the influence of Western epistemologies by arguing that the digital facilitation of meditation practices parallels broader societal tendencies towards personalization and digitization. Full article

In recent decades, the concept of a so-called Dark Age in ancient Sudan at the beginning of the first millennium BCE has been called into question within the field of Nubian archaeology. This is primarily due to new archaeological findings at urban sites such as Tombos and Amara West, as well as new theoretical approaches developed during the postcolonial turn. This study aims to show that new remote sensing, surveys and excavations in the Attab to Ferka region of Sudan have also revealed important evidence of continued occupation after the end of Egypt’s colonial rule over Nubia. In particular, studies of settlement patterns and ceramics enrich our understanding of people’s lives during the period between 1070 and 750 BCE and allow us to expand on dynamic processes, local forms of resilience and innovation. This new understanding of the persistence of communities after the fall of colonial Nubia under Egyptian rule facilitates a more nuanced interpretation of the evolution of the Napatan Empire, thereby challenging the conventional concept of secondary states. The Attab to Ferka case study demonstrates that previously marginalised regions and communities are significant contributors to cultural dynamics and achievements during the first millennium BCE in Sudan. Full article

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slavery was a central element of life in colonial and early national New York. The places where the enslaved buried their dead, referred to today as African Burial Grounds, remain important sites of reflection and remembrance for many New Yorkers. However, little literature exists discussing New York’s African Burial Ground sites from a broad, comparative perspective. This study examines seven African Burial Grounds in New York City and the Hudson Valley, two historically significant regions of New York State. GIS data from all seven sites, considered alongside GIS data from nearby coeval white Christian cemeteries, reveal that while the individuals interred in New York’s African Burial Grounds represent a variety of lived experiences, certain unifying patterns nonetheless emerge in the spatial dialectics of their final resting places. The findings have implications for the preservation of Black cultural heritage throughout southeastern New York State. Full article