In this first approximation, I discuss the current state of music archaeological knowledge about bamboo-made flutes on the pre-Hispanic Altiplano around Lake Titicaca, triangulating the very scarce archaeological evidence with ethnohistorical and botanical literature and my fieldwork among contemporary highland flute makers from Walata Grande (Omasuyos province, La Paz department). Departing from ethnographic

Archaeomusicological efforts to reconstruct tonal sequences, musical genres, and musical experiences of the pre-contact Andes face great challenges given a lack of written musical notation. We suggest that a sociomusicological approach focusing on the “social organization of resources, makers, and occasions of musical performance” (Feld 1984: 383) offers an alternative analytic more amenable to standard

Can stateless persons become legal-economic subjects without state ratification? Can they appropriate technologies not designed for them to create both new subjectivities and new forms of community? A Malaysia-based nonprofit social enterprise, composed of stateless Rohingya, has been attempting to circumvent state rejection by inscribing aspects of Rohingya (in)dividuals—biometric data, genealogy

Leveraging a suite of remote sensing technologies deployed over large areas, this paper presents results that challenge long-held ideas about the origin and development of the world’s oldest urban centers, in southern Iraq. The standard model of third millennium BCE Mesopotamian cities presents them as nuclear, compact settlements set within an irrigated agricultural hinterland, expanding continuously

The Somali people have suffered from a devastating civil war and large-scale forced displacement since the late 1980s. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with Northwest London Somalis during the khat (Catha edulis) control debates that led to the prohibition of the substance in June 2014. It argues that diaspora poetics can become an expression of a deeply divisive past offering ways to

The participation of fathers in parenting and care has become a topical issue in public discourse in Japan. The phenomenon is often epitomized in the popular neologism ikumen, defining fathers actively involved in childcare (ikuji) as “cool” men. On the basis of an extended ethnography, the article focuses on a group of men who reject the ostensibly carefree ikumen image and who explicitly and “proactively”

Since the 1990s, training programs for service-sector jobs have proliferated in India. Frequently referred to as “skills training,” these programs aim to overcome the perceived cultural and professional “deficiencies” of youth from the poorest sections of society. They focus on “soft skills” and “personality development,” teaching body etiquette, time discipline, and emotional control; introducing

Explanations of misfortune are the object of much cultural discourse in most human societies. Recurrent themes include the intervention of superhuman agents (gods, ancestors, etc.), witchcraft, karma, and the violation of specific rules or ‘taboos’. In modern large-scale societies, people often respond by blaming the victims of, for example, accidents and assault. These responses may seem both disparate

‘Insight’ or vipassanā meditation refers to meditative practices employed within Buddhist traditions. But following the secularization of vipassanā in recent decades – that is, its differentiation from Buddhism – orthodox Jewish Israeli meditators frame it as a religiously neutral, therapeutic technique centred on the mundane human body. They thus consider it as involving no forbidden ‘Eastern’ religious

This ethnography of a charismatic group in French Polynesia aims to shed light on the patterns of authority and commitment within such informal religious spaces connected to the global economy of charismatism. Through analysis of the personal itineraries of several members of ‘Jean's group’ and through the observation of a march organized by the group in question in January 2012, I question the apparent

Exotic goods belong to a class of valuable materials that have played an important role in ritual activities, political ceremonies, and economic agreements in different human contexts, both past and present. However, we have made little progress in understanding exchanges as relationships between donors and receivers, as forms of reciprocal interaction that forged a network of links between individuals

Certain culinary practices are often interpreted as evidence of ‘economizing’ (a frugal use of available resources) or of ‘excess’ (a celebratory expenditure of resources for symbolic purposes). This article uses these categories as a way to interrogate analytical assumptions about materialism more generally. Drawing on ethnographic research from both rural Tanzania, and the contemporary suburban United

This article examines claims of ownership and appropriation of Basotho blankets. Ingrained in the ritual and mundane reproduction of life among the Basotho people of Lesotho, the luminous blankets and their story have enticed many to deal in them. The blankets are manufactured and trademarked by Aranda Textile Mills, and in recent years they have been adapted by Basotho fashion designers, foreign private

In 2004, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology published Julie Field’s “Environmental and climatic considerations: a hypothesis for conflict and the emergence of social complexity in Fijian prehistory”, where she combined climate and environmental data to investigate the relationship between social patterns of change in the context of variability. Field tackled a complex issue: how societies respond

Human mobility is perpetuated at the intersection of opportunity and pressure. In this photographic essay, I explore reverberations of movement from the Arctic to East Africa, where I have done ethnographic fieldwork or passed through on my own anthropological and personal journey. The photos compare continuities of movement for transborder Skolt Sámi communities in Fennoscandia, sedentarized East

This article examines global agrifood chains from a perspective that links economic activity to sociocultural transformations in the social sphere—often categorized as private and independent of the economic domain. Specifically, the study examines the relations established between recruitment policies, work, and sexuality in the intensive cultivation of strawberries in Andalusia, Spain. Taking a feminist

Musical performance and audience participation are important activities in both group celebrations and funerary practices. This paper considers the intersection of music and ritual in shifting local mortuary traditions during state expansion in the southern Peruvian Andes. It addresses musical activities and burial rites during the Middle Horizon (MH) (600–1000 CE), a period defined by social change

In this article, I explore how different groups of the precariat endure and struggle with specific and hierarchical forms of precarity in Seoul. By paying attention to which precarity matters, and to whom it belongs, I examine the friction between the educated youth—the “deserving” precariat that can speak—and the urban poor, who endure abandonment. This collaborative project, in which university students

During the twenty-first century, in Recife, Brazil, musicians and promoters in the city’s alternative music scene benefited from an unprecedented amount of state sponsorship. However, because of an economic recession, since 2014 they have been contending with precarity: a lack of reliable employment and decreased state support. In order to “get by” (se virar), these professionals are becoming more

This article builds upon Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial Northwestern European skilled modes of engaging with wild fish. It explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be

Norway's welfare system is widely admired for its success in mitigating the worst effects of post-industrial capitalism. In the past decade, however, that system has undergone remarkable – and controversial – change, as commercial firms have been permitted to play a growing role in administering services for the unemployed. This article, based on fieldwork in Oslo during the 2015-16 oil crisis, examines

For Emmanuel Levinas, to study human nature is to ‘liberate human beings from the categories adapted uniquely for things’. This, paradoxically, is to occupy a standpoint where the human ‘no longer offers itself to our powers’: to go beyond the category-thinking of cultural construction and to put what one consciously supposes – Self, Society, Culture, Nature – into question. The ‘liberation’ of human

In archaeology, investigations into the social and cultural contexts of stone artefacts have largely focused on their typological styles, manufacturing technologies, functions, geographic distributions and the significance of the quarries they come from. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is the deeper contemporary understandings by Indigenous groups of the stone artefacts recovered from excavations

This paper explores the relationships between population change and human diet after the adoption of domesticated resources in northwest Mendoza, a subregion of central western Argentina (CWA). To estimate population, we used summed probability distributions of radiocarbon ages (RC-SPD). We used carbon and nitrogen stable isotope values (ẟ13Cco, ẟ13Cca, and ẟ15N) obtained on human bone (collagen and

This article examines practices of critique and ambivalence among participants in a controversial Latin American investment scheme called the telares de la abundancia (‘looms of abundance’). While the dominant discourses about the telares construe them as predatory, participants understand themselves as knowing subjects who reject a worldview based on economic rationality and utility in favour of one

Comparing, sharing, and shielding children's biological and biographical data in genetic databases and on Facebook are central moves when geneticists and families search for diagnoses for children with rare diseases. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, we show that the work of linking children carrying the same genetic mutations forges new sibling-like forms of relatedness between them. With

Research focusing on the emergence and collapse of ancient Maya polities is abundant, with many studies detailing these sociopolitical transformations from the perspective of apical elites at Classic period centers across the lowlands. It is, however, only relatively recently that studies have examined how the integrative strategies of commoner populations were both enabled and constrained by processes

Urban-to-rural migration is a rising trend across industrialized countries, the significance of which is not interpreted unanimously. The explanations tend to fall into two competing groups: (a) an alternative to capitalism or (b) perpetuation of the status quo, where, on one hand, the richer participants effect a green lifestyle choice, while the poorer participants follow a coping strategy, on the

NGOs often portray commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, transgender people (hijrae), and homosexual men as quasi-legal persons who are locked in a policing-criminality relationship with the state, and who therefore need them to mediate this relationship. By advancing such portrayals, NGOs in Pakistan's HIV prevention sector capitalize upon the presumed cultural difference of the so-called

Abstract not available

This article examines the mysterious side of ‘company’, a fundamental aspect of human existence, exemplifying it with an ethnographic vignette about a dugout canoe in the mangroves of southern Bahia (Northeast Brazil). Inspired by Kant's proposal concerning aspects of world, the article distinguishes company both from empathy and from community, as distinct registers of human sociality. Being in company

The Hungarian Bronze Age witnessed rapid sociopolitical transformation during the 16th century BCE as large communities scattered across the landscape, most long inhabited tell-settlements were reorganized, and centuries-old cemeteries were abandoned. Historical change on this scale is often perceived as a single, momentous episode elusive in the process, but visceral and consequential in its effect

Bitcoin, regarded as a decentralized currency of the future as well as a digital gold, faces various challenges, such as scalability, the geographical concentration of mining, its politically informed design and history, its high market volatility, and inequalities in the proportion of accumulation. However, the number of Bitcoin owners has risen exponentially, and relevant socioeconomic and political

This paper addresses the cosmological foundations of political authority in the Rapayán-Tantamayo region of the highlands of Peru during the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1450 CE). The people of this region organized their residential settlements around large and elaborate multi-storied tombs where mummified founding ancestors dwelled. The evidence presented reveals that selected families at each

Although the chaîne opératoire approach was introduced more than half a century ago, it has seldom been employed to reconstruct the techniques and tools involved in the production of Iron Age pottery (c. 1200–600 BC) from Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the reasons why this method is so seldomly applied is that only rarely can archaeologists rely on enough contextual information to allow the reconstruction

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 456-457, August 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 454-455, August 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 4, August 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 4, August 2022.

In central Eurasian archaeology, Soviet- and post-Soviet investigations and more recent biologically-focused analyses are often subtly presented as two extremes of archaeological synthesis, although both bodies of research complement one another and wrestle with similar questions about the human past. Through three case studies that marry 20th and 21st century research, we examine the archaeological

This study investigates diet heterogeneity among Chinchorro and Inca adults and subadults living on the northern Chilean coast of the Atacama Desert before and after the introduction of maize cultivation. This is achieved by amino acid carbon isotope analysis and bulk carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur isotope analysis of 1-cm sequential segments of scalp hair from human remains deposited at the funerary

Patterns of superposition in rock art are often used to systematically construct style sequences. However, once on the rock, images can affect subsequent engagements with the art, the rock surface, the site, and its surrounding landscape, and this recursiveness can be studied through the superimpositions (significantly overlaid markings) on a rock face. This is an opportunity for archaeologists to

Most hunter-gatherer lifeways revolve around periodic large gatherings – aggregations – that serve as social, ritual, and economic anchors for their annual cycles. However, in archaeological contexts they are often difficult to recognize. This paper describes and interprets a particularly large and well-preserved example of a warm season aggregation site dating to the Late Dorset period in the eastern

As part of a surge in technologies with so-called ‘artificial emotional intelligence’, robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors’ feelings. For this reason, it can be called a ‘technology of affect’. In order to communicate how new affective

The origins and histories of mounds are perennial topics of investigation in the American Southeast, underscoring the centrality of these monuments to the social lives and cosmologies of Indigenous southeastern peoples. Drawing upon theories of persistent place and path dependence, we argue that a focus on the pre-mound histories of mound sites can elucidate emplacement at these monumental locales

Since the 1980s, anthropologists have criticized a US-centric view of bioethics that presents individual autonomy as a universal principle without acknowledging its embeddedness in time and place. A recent turn in this critique points out how this view has gained dominance across the world, traveling alongside clinical trials and global health interventions. Here, centering a competing bioethical vision

In the Guyanese Amazon, Waiwai memory is made through the substances and associated sentiments that accrue in the body. Remembering and forgetting are morally weighted actions that transform the dispositions of others, enabling desired feelings of contentment or anger and ill will. Waiwai perspectives on the stakes of being or not being in the thoughts of others matter for their relations with the

The King of Bangkok (Sopranzetti, Fabbri & Natalucci 2021) is a non-fictional graphic novel, based on more than a decade of anthropological research and an attempt to think graphically through ethnography and think ethnographically through comics. The book, which was first published in Italian, then in Thai, and finally in English, tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets

Abstract not available

Anthropological studies of the internet have traced the emergence of new forms of intimacy in various arenas of life, including friendship. Drawing upon an ethnography of Facebook and its use among young lower-middle-class men in Pune, Maharashtra, western India, the article investigates the discourse of friendship young men deploy on the platform. Although moulded in the image of their intimate friendships

Rice was historically a “total social phenomenon” in Sierra Leone, molding rural identities through farming. Crop yields are rapidly declining, forcing change among people who once claimed to be “wealthy” from rice and now face severe food insecurity. In response to change, they can take out loans—offered by “strangers”—to continue farming rice, or they can “diversify” and farm alternative crops. Low

The theory and practice of decolonization present an awkward paradox: How can social change occur in everyday life to disrupt state structures while entangled with the mundane, social, and institutional practices and representations that perpetuate state power? In Sápmi, the transborder Indigenous Sámi homeland, decolonization has been intertwined with the institutionalization of Sámi governance and

Since the 1990s, Thamel—a dense neighborhood in Kathmandu, Nepal—has become the primary hub of transgressive, experimental cultural practice among young urban Nepalis. The multivalent assemblage of Thamel reflects emergent lifeworlds that challenge “traditional” conceptions of Nepali identity, and the place produces those emergent lifeworlds as well. Such transformations contest normative social roles

To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. But it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory but an acknowledgment of

In Mozambique, class and gender have long produced sweating bodies entangled in hierarchies of care and labor. Today, the growing popularity of fitness is complicating the cultural politics of bodily substances, especially sweat. Challenging ideals of feminine propriety, new ways of sweating are fostering health-conscious subjectivities and encouraging alternative ways of becoming and relating. As

In April 2018 four drums of depleted uranium sludge burst open at a US Department of Energy facility at Idaho National Laboratory. This echoed a previous incident in 2014, when a drum erupted with fire and spewed radionuclides at a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico. Such “drum breach” accidents have been characterized in official reports as “isolated events,” and as “self-initiated” and “spontaneous

This paper is oriented around moments of crises and kinship ambivalence within the home of a merchant family on the outskirts of a small town in central Sri Lanka. The problems explored play out in two registers. The first outlines relations between men that become problematic and result in disharmony at home and at work, while the second deals with a situation in which the house itself becomes the

This article offers a theoretical excavation of the brown savior, a figure that has taken on a critical role in the newly reconstructed help industries in India. Brown saviors help us to think more critically about the global help industries, an area in which racializing processes have been relatively understudied despite the fact that, historically, nearly all help interventions have focused on previously

Dogs were commonly buried individually upon death but sometimes jointly interred with people. The oldest known example of the latter, from Bonn-Oberkassel in Germany, serves as a window for viewing this phenomenon. The common practice of regarding dogs as much like people underlies these occurrences. Joint dog-human interment took place in many regions over thousands of years. This widespread practice

In Indonesian Islamic boarding schools (pesantren), access to digital media is strictly regulated, if allowed at all. Young women students are viewed as particularly susceptible to the perceived moral dangers of uncensored internet content and the unmonitored communication of social media and cell phones. At the same time, digital literacy is seen as integral to social advancement and higher education