Degrees prior to starting this degree program:

BA, Georgetown University, 2014

Areas of Interest:

Healing, herbalists, social movements, Black Diaspora, indigenous medicine, psychoanalysis.

Field Research Plans/History:

Anakwa’s research focuses on the Tallensi earth priests of north-eastern Ghana, and Candomble herbalists and healers in Quilombo communities around São Luís, Maranhão, in Brazil.

In particular he is interested in tracing the cultural, political and social structures and semiotic forms of these Black religious communities. In doing so, he seeks to explore how they have held onto sacred beliefs as guardians of the land, in the face of normalized economic incentives that devalue the earth. In putting these communities in dialogue, he seeks to investigate the core of their practices of kinship making through rituals; the intergenerational transference of knowledge; their sacred bonds with the environment, and other resilient communal values that withstood the violence of the slave trade.

His broader research interests include storytelling, mythmaking, art, and visual anthropology.

Anakwa is also a journalist with a decade of experience working in newsrooms like The New Yorker, New Republic and The Nation magazines. Prior to Princeton he worked as a freelance journalist in West Africa (including researching and reporting from Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria). Before that, he was a Fulbright-National Geographic fellow, researching the intersection of climate change and traditional cultural practice in Ghana.

Membership/activities in graduate student events or organizations:

PLAS Lassen Fellow, 2024-2025