A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the “ordinary

Archaeological interpretations for the seemingly sudden introduction of new types of material culture or cultural practice often include attribution to the arrival of a migrant population as part the construction of a periphery or frontier zone. In the International Four Corners area of the American Southwest/Mexican Northwest, archaeologists often correlate the ascendancy of Paquimé in the late thirteenth

We examine Late and Terminal Classic (c. 600–950 CE) Maya ceramic figurine whistles from Ceibal, Guatemala, as materials of socialization. The figurines are mold-made and represent repeating characters, including humans, animals, and supernaturals. Based on mortuary and other contextual evidence, we argue that they were used for household performances among adults and children. Figurines were everyday

Cultural-evolutionary modeling of archaeological data faces numerous challenges, perhaps the most significant being the mismatch between models of microscale activities and the macroevolutionary scale of the archaeological record. This is especially the case with identifying different kinds of social learning reflected in the record. Here we present a computational approach to social learning using

In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived at Mound Key, the capital of the Calusa polity. What he saw there was unlike anything else he would encounter in La Florida, a capital teaming with people and complex architecture that was essentially a terraformed anthropogenic island constructed mostly of mollusk shells situated in the middle of Estero Bay. The Calusa literally raised this landscape—51 ha

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Bird language is an emerging practice among nature-connection enthusiasts in which practitioners strive to comprehend the signals emitted by birds and other nonhuman beings. This practice shares much with contemporary academic interests in more-than-human sociality and foregrounds relational ways of knowing. Beyond merely classifying birds as communicative and social beings, the practice of bird language

The state of exception is classically understood as a situation devoid of laws and marked by the sovereign's absolute powers. This picture is unsettled by offering a more tenuous account of the state of siege, showing that normal laws and processes can be a constitutive dimension of modern exceptional regimes. Through an ethnography of a permanent space of exception in India, I argue that emergency

Inspired by the case of a jaguar raised as a pet by some paramilitary warlords, this article discusses how armed conflict encompasses more-than-human realities, becoming a hybrid experience capable of dislocating the borders between environmental and social processes, predation and warfare, human and nonhuman agency, and subjects and objects. It draws attention to a pervasive form of damage—afterlives—that

Clay figurines represent one of the ideal object categories for tracing the profile of their makers since they preserve traces of the maker’s gestures. The scope of the article is to reconstruct the different manufacturing steps of clay figurines, assess the complexity of the shaping sequences and study fingerprints to trace the profile of people who produced such artefacts in the ancient village of

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 470-471, August 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 466-467, August 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 4, August 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 4, August 2023.

Since 2006, albinism has emerged as both a subject and an object of contestation in Tanzania and beyond. An abiding global narrative purports that, as a recessively inherited condition, albinism is fetishized by Africans who falsely attribute otherworldly potentials to albino body parts and commodify them in a grisly market run by “traditional” healers and their patrons. In response, translocal albinism

This article examines the employment of kinship relations in sustaining the plantation economy and in perpetuating the precariousness of child labourers who later became temporary workers in the tea plantations of Kerala, South India. Kinship ties locked diverse workers into a moral obligation of care that could easily be manipulated by plantation management as a form of labour control. Plantation

The area of the Etosha National Park in Namibia has been inhabited for many centuries by Haiǁom, a group of (now former) hunter-gatherers. In 1907, Etosha was proclaimed as a game reserve, although Haiǁom were still allowed to live in the area until they were expelled in the 1950s due to then-dominant ideas of fortress conservation. In recent years, Haiǁom have been provided with several resettlement

Abstract not available

With the reflexive turn in the social sciences, emotional engagement is an inevitable and crucial part of data-gathering and analysis. However, there is a glaring gap in methodological discussions to this end. Presenting ethnographic research into end of life with people living at home in England with heart failure, we argue for a methodological blend of engagement and detachment that shifts throughout

Guided by social justice and sexual health concerns, scholars of same-sex sexualities in Africa have mainly examined related conflicts and inequities, generating an unbalanced emphasis on homophobia. Following Stella Nyanzi's plea for a broader exploration of queer sexuality in Africa, we move beyond the strictly sexual sphere to study the kinship arrangements of same-sex couples in Kenya. These couples

This article is focused on problematic distinctions of difference among animals in the lineage of great apes. It combines several theoretical perspectives on evolutionary relationships, technological innovation, the development of body parts as tools, and a semiotic interpretation of what André Leroi-Gourhan called technicity. Foundational questions in social theory are developed using biosemiotics

This article studies ways in which art education is mobilized to modify subjective and aesthetic performances of Palestinian students, considering debates surrounding depoliticization and development funding in Palestine. It explores the subject matter and critical stance deemed appropriate for self-directed art projects within a Ramallah art school. Moving beyond arguments put forward within existing

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We discuss the differences in conceptualizations in relation

In 2014, Islamist jihadist groups overran a Lebanese border town and besieged it for four days, spreading terror across the town and the country as a whole. In response, the Lebanese army launched a violent counterattack on these groups with the aid of Hizbullah in what became known as the Battle of Arsal. Declaring the area a security zone, the army restricted mobility and placed Lebanese citizens

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

This article explores the tensed sociality amongst precariously employed service economy workers in the retail outlets of a prominent eyewear company in New Delhi, India. The bickering staff label the ongoing interpersonal strife ‘dirty politics’. Linked to this are their confident assertions that, in fact, all politics is dirty, and dirty politics is the only type of politics possible – rejecting

Childhood, though it is understood cross-culturally in very different ways, always has a distinctive temporal framework, since children's growth and development cannot be undone. Yet, in many contexts, the times of childhood have become discordant with the rhythms, timescales, and temporal controls of migration. Focusing on the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants in Sabah, Malaysia, this article

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

We review archaeological research from the Late Maritime Woodland period (1300–550 cal BP) on the Maritime Peninsula and argue that there is substantial evidence for sociocultural and economic hunter-fisher-gatherer complexity prior to the arrival of Europeans. This is relevant because the region was the stage for some of the earliest contacts between Indigenous and European peoples in the Americas

Māori students in Aotearoa New Zealand have recently challenged anthropology to better support them to thrive on their own Indigenous terms. This commentary responds to their call and critically reflects on one fruitful avenue for deepening decolonizing work, namely engaging with historical trauma and trauma-informed frameworks. Such frameworks address the legacies of colonial violence and the present

In this study cranial injuries in human skeletal remains from the site of Cerro Oreja in the Moche Valley of north coastal Peru provide a proxy measure of violence during the Gallinazo Phase preceding the rise of the Southern Moche State and are used to assess the role that violent conflict may have played in state formation. Both healed and perimortem cranial vault fractures are present in the sample

Much study of ritual has focused on demarcated spaces and times of performance, and the often spectacular features of such collective behaviour provide rich resources for analysis of formal, symbolically dense action. This article shifts attention to dimensions of ritual events that entail zones of ambiguous, diffuse, or limited engagement where the boundaries between participant and non-participant

Techno-stylistic studies in ceramic analysis have largely focused on characterising production groups, based on the similarity of various objects and how they were made. The demographics of potters and the division of labour often remain enigmatic in current chaîne opératoire research. A growing number of biometric studies have demonstrated the potential of fingerprints preserved on ceramic surfaces

In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of

Using anatomical feature comparison to consider potential matches from hand images to identify or eliminate suspects in an investigation, commonly relating to those involved in the production of images of child sexual abuse, is an emerging forensic methodology that has become increasingly utilized by police forces within the United Kingdom. This article gives an overview of the development of a process

The neoliberal turn has had significant impacts across Australian universities and First Nations communities, especially since the emergence of the global pandemic. These developments have highlighted the inherent flaws of the consultation process in developing programs and policies. Here, the weaknesses of the consultation process are analyzed using an anti-politics framework together with two comparative

Remote-sensing techniques play an important role in the resumption of archaeological research in southern Iraq. These tools are especially powerful when ground-truthed through excavation and survey, and when informed by local environmental histories. This response engages with propositions put forward by Hammer (2022): “Multi-centric, Marsh-based urbanism at the early Mesopotamian city of Lagash (Tell

Thirty-two years after the publication of Faye V. Harrison's edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation, I take stock of the book's origins and its impact on the discipline. Despite intellectual barriers and postmodernist critiques, Decolonizing Anthropology has influenced a generation of anthropologists who carry forward the book's original spirit

Anthropologists have extensively examined the material politics of bureaucratic rule and technical expertise. But ethnographic analysis must also attend to the politics of mathematical abstractions that cannot be reduced to any specific kind of materiality. A key site to appreciate such politics is the georeferentiation of Indigenous property polygons in Peru's Amazonian region of Loreto. In the context

The aim of this research project is to explore the differential impacts of soft tissues on skeletal ageing and apply these findings to skeletal age estimation methods. Computed tomography (CT) scans of 412 size-selected individuals from Ontario, Canada, were assessed using an adapted pubic symphysis age estimation method. Individuals ranged from 20 to 79 years of age (mean = 49.46 years), with 208

Archaeologists have long relied on material proxies of labor organization to identify different social formations. Conventional wisdom holds that specialization is particularly integral in developing hierarchical states, and that hunter-gatherers are typically “generalists” provisioning their immediate household and community. However, archaeological evidence from eastern North America challenges these

This supplement has been a stimulating project which has allowed us not only to examine the areas of work that forensic anthropologists are involved in on a daily basis, but also to explore the cross-fertilization that continues to occur between forensic anthropology, biological anthropology, and social anthropology. We are at an exciting point in our profession, having established a certification

In Norway, there was considerable overlap between the poor house, the workhouse, and correctional facilities. An assemblage of human skeletal remains from Oslo's House of Correction cemetery, largely comprised of individuals disturbed during municipal development in 1989, consists of c. 314 individuals who died as inmates or residents; many were disabled or elderly. Although names were recorded at

As a Wiradjuri person living on stolen Kabi Kabi Land, I begin this article by framing Yindyamarra Winhanganha as an ethos of my life, and therefore of the research I conduct. Yindyamarra Winhanganha is a complex Wiradjuri philosophy of designing a world that is made better through our actions. It forms the starting point of my relationality and centers my aspirations as a researcher. Wiradjuri is

To open new disciplinary imaginings, we must reinvigorate the relationship between utopian and anthropological thought. This is already underway in efforts to decolonize knowledge. Though such efforts have different emphases, they are located within a field of ideological and utopian struggles that must be understood in the context of imperialism-colonialism, of subalternized subject positions, and

The imperial underpinning of the early anthropology of Pakistan constituted “the other” as a subject of comprehension, categorization, and containment. Later, with the post-9/11 geopolitical backdrop, anthropologists focused on selected themes such as religious and ethnic disparity and political nationalism, eliding some topics or groups. What would it mean for the anthropology of Pakistan to consider

This essay explains why debates about the decolonization of anthropology tend to become reactive and confrontational, and outlines a model for why productive critique is central to intellectual progress. In a small, young discipline that values subjectivity and the questioning of ethnocentrism, the decolonial critique of tradition is more likely to be felt as a personalized war on one's professional

India-based anthropologists must contend with the legacies of colonial epistemologies and postcolonial imperatives in an increasingly neoliberal academy and Hindu-supremacist nation-state. For these scholars, anthropology's values of critical humanism are more vital than ever. The challenge is to uphold them in ways that both include and reach beyond the academy. Over the decades, Indian anthropologists’

For many today, extraction is a damning feature of all ethnography. Yet anthropologically minded ethnographers should not think of themselves as multinational mining corporations. The self-estimation of any ethnographer, especially an anthropologically minded ethnographer, should be much lower and smaller, as low and small as tiny moles that make new connections by digging channels in the dark. Moles

In contemporary Indian cities, sewage infrastructures hold out the promise of liberal modernity. But they have also become sites for the reinvention of “manual scavenging,” a legally abolished caste practice that degrades and kills ostracized communities by exposing them to human excreta. Amid official underreporting, activists estimate that hundreds of workers, overwhelmingly Dalit (ex-untouchable)

In June 1939, Melville Herskovits arrived in Trinidad. Already committed to his eponymous thesis of African cultural survivals, he identified the rural municipality of Toco as a site to observe “African ways of life … in greatest purity.” The oil field strikes that gripped the island just two years earlier received only a passing mention in his monograph, Trinidad Village. This essay meditates on Herskovits's

This study investigates the trends within the published research up to 2019 in relation to skeletal and dental age estimation in living individuals by using a novel bibliometric analysis which utilizes a specialist, open-source R script. The analysis was performed on a total of 644 papers (627 articles, fifteen conference papers, and two reviews) retrieved using the online database Scopus. The analysis

This is an account of ethnographic research examining the specialist scientific processes known as ‘Disaster Victim Identification’ (DVI) in three settings: Québec, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In cases of multiple deaths, a series of actions accompanied by a plethora of tools are often invoked, housed at a disaster scene, forensic laboratories, a family assistance centre, and a mortuary

If forensic physical anthropology is the science of biological processes and related medico-legal investigations, then forensic social anthropology is the science of cultural processes and related socio-legal investigations. This article lays out the terms, definitions, and application of forensic specialization in social anthropology as it is practised in Australia. The objective of this exercise

Early villages are often assumed to be economically and politically autonomous and equivalent to an archaeological socio-spatial unit that represents a maximum scale of cohesive residential communities. But the boundaries of some communities extended far beyond such sites of early population aggregation. In the coastal plain of the American Southeast, early village communities of the Middle and Late

Textilization processes envisioned as technological transformation of animal fibres and the incorporation of textiles into human bodies, is analyzed among Chinchorro hunter gatherers, along the hyperarid Pacific coast of the Atacama Desert throughout the Holocene (ca. 7800–3500 cal BP). The Chinchorro, as producers and consumers of South American camelid fibres and textiles, created a range of textilized

In the Andes, successive waves of Inka and Spanish imperialism reshaped local ecologies and transformed agricultural practices between the 14th and 17th centuries. As the Inka (ca. 1450–1532CE) consolidated control over the region they co-opted existing resources, directed the development of new farmland, and imposed new labor obligations on Andean people. In turn, Spanish colonizers (1533-1824CE)

Abstract not available

In Colombia, I once heard a farmer reject a humanitarian demining project operating in her community. “Land mines are our smallest problem,” she said. Creating a moment of ethical disconcertment, she sought to slow down humanitarian imperatives. I place her in conversation with local pleas for “demining with development,” illustrating how they challenge the logic and temporality of humanitarian mine