Living in Culture

Some months are quieter than others for the field, but June 2026 had a little bit of everything: heritage being protected in an active war zone, artifacts finally heading home after decades in someone’s private collection, linguists gathering to save languages before they disappear, and a global day dedicated to the millions of people living without a home to call their own.

Ukraine’s Heritage, Protected Mid-War

On June 25, UNESCO handed over a full set of strategic tools to Ukraine for protecting and managing its World Heritage sites. The handover happened in Gdańsk during the Ukraine Recovery Conference, marking a milestone in UNESCO’s ongoing effort to safeguard cultural heritage in crisis contexts. It’s a reminder that anthropology and heritage work don’t pause during conflict. If anything, they become more urgent, since the loss of a historic site or archive can be as permanent as any other kind of loss the war causes.

Days earlier, on June 19, UNESCO also ran a youth-focused public forum in Bosnia and Herzegovina on sustainable heritage protection, bringing together government officials, academics, and young people to talk about what comes next for that country’s sites. Two very different countries, same underlying question: how do you hold onto a shared past when the present keeps threatening to erase it?

A Private Collector Tries to Give History Back

In Zurich, a Swiss collector named Vincent Escriba announced he wants to return roughly 3,500 Indigenous artifacts, a collection valued at up to $14 million, to Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. The pieces include beaded bandoliers, 19th-century moccasins, feathered headdresses, and items connected to the era of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The catch: advocates estimate it could take around $20 million to actually complete the repatriation, covering purchase, authentication, transport, conservation, and cataloguing.

It’s a good example of how repatriation isn’t just a legal or moral question. It’s also a logistical and financial one, especially when the “return” of an object has to go through an entire process of verifying where it came from and who it actually belongs to now.

Saving Languages Before They Go Silent

Starting June 22 and running through mid-July, linguists, Indigenous language activists, and students converged for CoLang, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research, three weeks of hands-on work on documenting and revitalizing endangered languages. It’s the kind of unglamorous, on-the-ground work that rarely makes headlines but is arguably one of the most direct forms of cultural anthropology in action: languages carry entire ways of seeing the world, and once the last fluent speaker is gone, that way of seeing goes with them.

World Refugee Day, and 75 Years of the Refugee Convention

June 20 was World Refugee Day, and this year carried extra weight; it marked the 75th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the founding document of international refugee protection. Events happened in over a hundred countries, many centered on cultural programming led by refugees themselves: storytelling, film screenings, dance performances, and food from displaced communities cooking for the people around them.

There’s something anthropologically rich in that pairing, a day about displacement that’s marked, almost everywhere, through the things people carry with them anyway: recipes, music, language, craft. Culture doesn’t stay behind when people are forced to leave; it moves with them, and often becomes one of the only things they get to keep.