Tension is a polysemic term used across South Asia to describe the strains and scrapes of life, like ‘worry’ or ‘stress’ in Euro-American discourse. Yet in the formerly agro-pastoralist and upwardly mobile Gaddi community of Himalayan India, it is used by women with the qualifying ghar ki – ‘household’ – to indicate a deeper disruption to bodily humours, intimate relations, and household materiality

A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as “guests” of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan-Arab

For many middle-income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever-increasing number of low-income families, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor-quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation—represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article

According to the cultural consensus model of business ownership in the United States, business entities seek to grow both in organization size and in revenues. To borrow the framing used by Patrick Bigger and Morgan Robertson (2017), business firms create value for their owners and/or shareholders through growth and maximization of profit, but the underlying societal value of business growth is the

The decline in the number of Native Hawaiian–owned kuleana properties is partly the result of legal frameworks surrounding heirs' property adjudication, which does not easily allow families with multiple owners to collectivize their interests. As a result, families are made vulnerable to land dispossession by developers' use of quiet title and partition actions through the courts. Based on fieldwork

Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I contribute novel ethnographic insights into how oil and gas experts understand notions of value. I show that prevailing notions of value are normatively defined in economic terms and closely tied to understandings of an American “way of life.” Questions of value, I suggest, reveal our idiosyncratic and shared ethical orientations toward what we

The significance of local spatial choices and memory and their impact on mobility networks is scarcely recognised in Mongolian archaeology. Here, we present a mapping strategy aimed at disentangling the landscapes of movement and investigating the materiality that accumulated in the palimpsest of the Ikh Bogd Uul Mountain (Bayankhongor, Mongolia). Based on an integrated and diachronic approach, our

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Visits from spirits are common among Latter-day Saints (Mormons) in northern Utah, and most involve positive interactions with the spirits of helpful kin: the spirits of the deceased and of children not yet born. The spirit visits show that the Mormon cosmological notion of the eternal family is not simply abstract or something to imagine and long for in the afterlife. Rather, spirit members of the

Anthropologists have spilt much ink deconstructing concepts inherited from the Enlightenment. Religion, possibly the most misleading such concept, has proved highly resistant to the acid of cross-cultural comparison. Debates about the nature of religion go back to sociocultural anthropology's beginnings as a discipline and beyond. Proposed definitions have been numerous, but none has come close to

Previous research has documented declines in the abundance of high-return resources including tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes) over the past three millennia in central California, suggesting the occurrence of resource depression. We test the hypothesis that hunting depressed tule elk in this setting by articulating stable isotope analyses from 88 directly dated tule elk specimens with data on

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 2, April 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 2, April 2023.

Weber, G. (2023), The cancer within: Reproduction, cultural transformation, and health care in Romania By Christina Pop. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 229 pp. American Ethnologist, 50: 331–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13160 The name of Cristina A. Pop was misspelled as Christina Pop in a review of her book The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health

The past is silent, or mostly so, yet sound can open a window to this same past. Early Spanish colonial ethnohistoric sources from the Andes are littered with references to indigenous dancing and music as an accompaniment to ritual and feasts. Recent archaeological research in the upper Ica Drainage on the late Prehispanic (CE 1000–1532) site of Viejo Sangayaico has revealed an open-air platform potentially

Cashmere provides an ideal material for examining how humans co-opt tangible and intangible qualities into their ascription of value. The fiber's relative worth lies at the intersection of its tangible qualities (e.g., softness, lightness, strength) and intangible qualities (e.g., rarity, history, authenticity, sustainability). Mediating the relationship between those qualities are actors with very

This article examines the valuation struggles around Argentina's Asignación Universal por Hijo para Protección Social (AUH), a large conditional cash transfer (CCT) program introduced in 2009. Thinking about value as a verb invites us to move away from reified notions and to consider the work differently positioned social actors do to value and devalue specific ideas, practices, people, and things

In designating its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the United Nations invoked the “water–energy–land (WEL) nexus” to emphasize the interconnections between different policy sectors and accentuate the importance of an integrated approach to human and environmental welfare. Identifying the WEL nexus draws attention to the interplay of technical and moral values, the intersections or overlaps between

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

We present analyses of post-fire engravings (PFEs), scratched markings made in the surface of ceramic vessels, from the sites of Atalla (800–500 BCE) and Huari (600–1000 CE), Peru. We compare engraved motifs, the vessel forms on which they appear, their placement on vessels, and the contexts in which they were found at Atalla and Huari to other examples mentioned in the Andean and international archaeological

Present theory suggests that neighborhoods form through frequent, repeated face-to-face interactions among people in groups of spatially co-located residences. Over time, layered interactions create relational identities (through face-to-face contact) and categorical identities (through perceived similarities). Neighborhood identity, when present, indicates a union of both relational and categorical

A precisely dated, high-resolution palynological profile shows that around 5680 BCE a community that grew crops and raised livestock settled on the northern periphery of the area later covered by the LBK colonisations. This indicates that pioneer farmers reached this region around 300 years earlier than estimated by recognised models of the Neolithisation process. These findings point to the need for

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Archaeologists have long recognized that spatial relationships are an important influence on and driver of all manner of social processes at scales from the local to the continental. Recent research in the realm of complex networks focused on community detection in human and animal networks suggests that there may be certain critical scales at which spatial interactions can be partitioned, allowing

Socially defined neighborhoods develop through frequent face to face interactions among residents and their self-identification as neighbors. While archaeological evidence of neighborhoods is usually dependent on artifact frequencies, boundaries, or shared features, this paper explores how effectively communal features act as proxies for social interactions. Network data drawn from historic newspapers

Abstract not available

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Amid economic and sociopolitical turmoil in Zimbabwe, police roadblocks proliferated throughout the country, creating sites not only of extraction but also of citizen engagement. These sites show that sociality mediates policing, as police and policed together negotiate the precarities of living in the wake of crisis. Roadblocks are key to the performance of the state as such. Yet this occasions the

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

A decade ago, the French press was full of references to “stock market layoffs.” The term, popularized by the French Left, was an attempt to name and contest layoffs undertaken not because a company had run into trouble, but because the layoffs would boost the company's value and thus deliver more robust profits to its shareholders. The term thus targeted a specific form of financialization that “externalizes”

Fieldwork on violence needs to take into consideration its knowledge practices and the ways in which violence is contained, produced and made sense of as normalized or traumatic. This I argue is a way to incorporate knowledge production of violence with the experiential that anthropology has privileged as a source of understanding suffering. Moghnieh (2017, p. 35) The work of Munira Khayyat and that

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

We have considered a range of commensality in Neolithic Çatalhöyük using ceramics, animal bones, and architecture. Integrating the data allowed us to capture the change in commensal practices over the Final occupational phase (ca. 6300–5950 cal BC). The shift from community commensality to family commensality is marked by a decrease in the size of jars, accompanied by slight changes in the size of

Social hierarchy is the most prominent framework scholars use to examine settlement structure and development in Southeast Asia's pre- and post-state eras. The concept of social heterarchy, an unfixed ranked and diversified form of social structure, is an alternative approach to examining the sociopolitical organization of early settlements in the region. However, applications of heterarchy are limited

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

This paper discusses the maize consumption record among hunter-gatherers outside assumed production areas in northeastern Patagonia. We evaluated if this anomalous record is the result of occasional events of local production/consumption; the transport of the microremains in the teeth of individuals after consuming maize in non-local production areas; or the local consumption of maize after its transport/exchange

When ethnography is used in fields outside anthropology, vignettes often take a central role. Yet methodological discussions of the vignette are not as central to anthropology as their cross-disciplinary use might warrant. By dwelling on, but perhaps less stringently guarding, disciplinary boundaries, anthropology can gain a clearer view of its own central tools—in this case, vignettes. Reconsidering

Together with the development of ancestral Huron-Wendat village life in what is now southern Ontario, Canada, unusual deposits consisting of animal parts, small stones, and manufactured items such as smoking pipes were occasionally sequestered in sweat lodges, longhouse post holes, and other features. In instances where such deposits have received comment, most turn on notions of ritual behavior that

Ethnographically known weapon systems are crucial for the functional interpretation of pertinent archaeological materials. The tip cross-sectional geometries of North American ethnographic projectiles are particularly widely used as standards against which the probable functions of archaeological stone points are assessed. While their known weapon-delivery mechanisms make these North American samples

Is life “priceless,” or can life be bought and sold like a commodity? Anthropological theory has not yet been able to integrate incommensurable value with commensurable value. But such an integrated theory of value exists—not explicitly in theory but implicitly in everyday ethics and fictional narratives. I analyze how the movie Titanic, one of the most commercially valuable artefacts of all time,

In eastern Uganda “being educated” is an identity that people work on throughout their lives. They develop an educated identity through participating on committees, educating their children, and subscribing to a recognizable set of behaviors. Education is a “scaffold” that can be built up or knocked down, one that is related to, but broader than, experiences of going to school or being young. Moreover

Tap water's availability, accessibility, and biological safety do not automatically translate into social acceptance. Most Americans no longer drink water directly from the tap but rely on either filters or bottled water. As demonstrated by fieldwork among New York City water-filter users, filters have the power to restore tap water's acceptability, making this an interesting site to examine the imagined

Abstract not available

This paper presents the first systematic study of pre-Columbian imported stone celts recovered from the limestone islands of the Lucayan archipelago, comprising The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands of the northern Caribbean/West Atlantic. The majority derive from antiquarian collections and early archaeological investigations, prior to the destruction of many sites due to guano mining and development;

As demonstrated in an ethnographic description of displaced Syrians living in Gaziantep, Turkey, hospitality fails when it is captured by a state that transforms ethical-religious duties into legal obligations. Indeed, Syrian “guests” cannot reciprocate state hospitality because they do not belong to the same scale; moreover, they refuse their guest status, claiming to be refugees and thus subjects

The requirement for schools in England to implement equality education has led religious conservative minorities to voice a conflict between legally protected characteristics of religion and sexual orientation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic engagement with Jewish orthodoxies in England, the article critiques these apparent aporetic differences by tracing the grammars of protection that are fielded

Red chert attributed to a small number of outcrops within the Munsungun Lake formation, northern Maine is nearly ubiquitous in late Pleistocene Fluted-Point-Period (FPP) archaeological sites throughout northeastern North America, including at sites hundreds of kilometers from this source. Red Munsungun chert also appears more frequently in FPP sites than any other material type in the region. The frequency

In a poor neighborhood of Delhi, women try to cope with unemployment among male breadwinners, and in so doing they often frame their practices as a way of passing time. From the long wait at service points to contentious involvements in work and politics, they depict a host of different and seemingly contradictory activities as meaningless idleness. My analysis of these discourses uncovers a wider

This ethnography contributes to the field of Holocaust heritage studies by exploring the paradoxical tendencies of memorial proliferation and oblivion. The topic of investigation is the genesis and multiplications of the so-called ‘Anne Frank Tree’, the horse chestnut tree behind the Secret Annex that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary. Fungus-infected, the tree fell in 2010. The Anne Frank Tree testifies

As heterogeneous forms of commodification threaten the survival of urban commons worldwide, in Beirut a group of residents and professionals has resorted to civic advocacy to keep the beach of Dalieh of Raouche accessible, including calling on public authorities to intervene. Combining Polanyian analysis and recent developments in the anthropology of the state, civic advocacy is recast here as a case

This article explores the efforts of the Venezuelan government to improve food security and rural livelihoods with an experimental cattle-breeding project. It investigates the activities of a state enterprise in the western plains and how the selective-breeding practices of veterinary experts intersect with the logic of capital and biopolitics. Contributing to debates on the interaction between society

Studying atrocities poses many challenges for ethnographers, not least of which is how to represent violent experiences, which often exceed articulation. The atrocities perpetrated during the military dictatorship in Argentina are no exception. Yet, during my fieldwork in Buenos Aires, I found that the violence forcefully surfaced in many ethnographic encounters, as a result of my having accidentally

Africanist anthropology has tended to paint social relations on the continent in a positive light, giving the impression that a pro-social relationality will provide the poor with economic assistance in moments of need. This article troubles these accounts by turning to Kenya, where a history of socioeconomic stratification has created a landscape of class closure. Rather than generously give, upwardly

I consider the influence of the language used in anthropological analysis (the metalanguage). If in principle there are at least as many anthropologies as there are languages, then we must allow the possibility of seven thousand or so more or less incommensurable anthropologies. However, incommensurability need not follow: not only can sparse theory aid comparison but it can also help establish partial

The idea of ‘equity’, largely grounded in Western legal tradition, has come to permeate evaluations of what is fair and just within environmental governance programmes. But what constitutes equity in climate change and conservation projects? And does everyone affected by such projects see equity as desirable? Local encounters with global environmental governance interventions in Suau, Milne Bay Province

Studies that employ probability distributions of radiocarbon dates to study past population size often use exponential increase in radiocarbon dates with time as a standard of comparison for detecting population fluctuations. We show that in the case of early postglacial interior Scandinavia, however, the summed probability distribution of radiocarbon dates has best fit with a S-shaped logistic growth

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 1, Page 124-125, February 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 1, Page 123-124, February 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 1, February 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 1, February 2023.