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

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

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 6, Page 743-744, December 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 6, December 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 6, December 2022.

While studying immigrant worlding in Brazil’s nineteenth-century southern settler frontier, I stumbled across multiple ways of archiving, from poor farmers’ viva voce prayers and reminiscences to the nurturing of herbal gardens and usage of forest medicinal products to communal vital registries and home burials (including my ancestors’)—all bridging the sensual and conceptual realms through specific

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

The term “Hyksos” commonly refers to the foreign dynasty that inhabited and held power in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, ca. 1650–1550 BCE. The later historian Manetho described the Hyksos as invading foreigners, and this view persisted until the modern period. Recent research has integrated archaeological, artistic, and textual evidence revealing the Hyksos origin and presence in Egypt

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Attempts to integrate human culture, history, or symbolic imagination into a comprehensive theory of evolution have, up to now, foundered on a bifurcation between mind and nature deeply embedded in the project of modern science. This article attempts to overcome the bifurcation by foregrounding the process of learning, understood neither as the lifetime expression of evolved attributes nor as a supplementary

Archaeology has recently been described as a means of “bearing witness” through the recuperation of pasts forgotten and dismissed. But archaeology is also a tool for unseeing, creating voids in the historical record easily filled by state-sponsored polemics. In few places is this as clear as the Armenian Highland of eastern Turkey. The year 2020 marked the 105th anniversary of the Armenian genocide

The archaeological record undergoes a dramatic shift in appearance whenever indigenous peoples encounter incoming populations—whether in the form of economy, politics, or identity. Rock art in southern Africa testifies to successive interactions among hunter-gatherers, incoming African herders, African farmers, and, later, European settlers. New subject matter, however, is not simply incorporated into

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Within 24 months (2015–2017), Houston was struck by three “500-year flood” events, including Hurricane Harvey, the largest rainfall event in US history. In this article we explore how this wave of catastrophic flooding has impacted Houstonians’ emotional and epistemic attachments to their homes, neighborhoods, and city. In dialogue with the anthropology and science and technology studies literature

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 5, Page 612-614, October 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 5, October 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 5, October 2022.

This article discusses DNA tests used by the police and justice systems in France to predict a suspect’s appearance or origin. It focuses on the effects of different conceptions of privacy when genetic information enters the semipublic domain. I analyze how a contemporary process of racialization is fostered by the combination of a concept of privacy founded on visibility and DNA-based technologies

In Koryak languages, tymlat means “close.” This name was chosen by Koryak families for their new home when they were forcefully relocated by the Soviet government near a collective farm on the coast of the Bering Sea in the early 1950s. Several northern areas of the Kamchatkan peninsula, in the Russian Far East, can be reached only by helicopter; roads are rare, and relatives often do not see each

This article outlines a methodological posture that I consciously adopted during recent ethnographic fieldwork. I call this methodological posture “belief-inclusive research” (BIR), and I see it as a complementary contrast to existing methodological frameworks that suggest the bracketing out of a researcher’s own beliefs. I offer BIR as a distinctive methodological posture for ethnographers who work

This article puts the analytic of “indigenous cosmopolitics” (as used by Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena) in dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity through an ethnography of a dam construction and resettlement project in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in the area, I explore how both God and Christian ethnotheology became imbricated with a group of indigenous

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”

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

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

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.

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

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

This article mobilizes an analytic of racial responsibilization to interrogate the contentious logics of risk-taking and risk-making that shape “the urban entrepreneur,” an organizing figure of prisoner reentry workforce development programs in the American city of New Orleans. My ethnographic study explores the fraught relationships between entrepreneurialism and self-actualization by tracing the

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 3, June 2022.

Horses have had a singular impact on human societies. Beyond increasing interconnectivity and revolutionizing warfare, reconfigurations of human-horse relationships coincide with changes in sociopolitical formations. How this occurs is less well understood. This article proposes that relationships of equestrianism transform people and horses reciprocally, generating new possibilities for both species

The patio, referring to the space outside the roofed houses but inside the fence wrapping around a property and often holding a handful of homes, is loosely defined in rural Dominican daily life. In the borderlands of the Dominican Republic, the patio serves as both a space for cultivating care between family and friends and a safe haven from the state. Spaces of resistance, as this photo essay illustrates

In this photographic essay, I explore the aesthetics and experiences of displacement among peasants in rural northern Sudan who were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe Dam construction project. The radically changing environment shaped people’s perception of displacement as they attempted to stay and revive life in their homeland on the shores of the expanding reservoir

In this paper, I am concerned with the concept of voice and human expressivity, in particular in the case of someone living a life as a host for spirits. Drawing on fieldwork in Zanzibar’s disadvantaged neighborhoods, I describe a case of spirit possession in the domestic sphere in which one’s body becomes the “seat” from where other voices can be heard. My interest lies in the expressive texture of

This report extrapolates from prior research to propose a preliminary framework for approaching extreme groundwater depletion through anthropological analysis of what it terms aquifer aporias—the ecological manifestations of epistemic gaps about aquifer loss. Informed by two years of ethnographic research on aquifer depletion on the High Plains, the essay identifies how aporetic relationships among

González-Ruibal evocatively described a “time of agony” for contemporary ruins between their abandonment, destruction, or incorporation into some formalized heritage regime. Agonal time often escapes recognition as socially meaningful, when in reality it can be a time of deregulated social activity as well as degradation within and beyond the full control of human counterparts. This figuration of the

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 234-238, April 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 232-234, April 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 232-232, April 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 2, April 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 2, April 2022.

The study of divination remains of central relevance to anthropology for what it reveals about the relationship between intuitive and reflective cognition. What marks divination out is the reflective elaboration of the role granted to intuitive associations in arriving at verdicts, which produces two distinct forms of divinatory interpretation. Generative interpretation, exemplified by Cuban Ifá, relies

Militarized borders have increased rapidly in the twenty-first century and come to be a global phenomenon. The high border wall built by the United States at its border with Mexico and the electrified fencing at the Hungarian border with Serbia are examples of the infrastructurally advanced Euro-American borders that have become icons of this phenomenon. Yet this tells only one part of the story of

This paper investigates the ways in which the nationalist narrative of the statist archaeology in Iran has contributed to the dominant nationalist discourse in systematic attempts to erase any evidence of the existence of a “non-Aryan” past in the Iranian plateau. Sponsored by the state, ethnoracial archaeological studies in Iran have functioned as a powerful instrument for constructing a desired past

This article explores the shared histories of blood groups, racial conceptions, and linguistics in the late twentieth-century Portuguese colonial science of anthropobiology in Oceania. It follows the work of making “indigenous languages” that went along with the work of making “blood groups” in a late form of colonial anthropology. It focuses on the case of the Timor Anthropological Mission (Missão

For many years, scholars have sought to track and explain how objects come to have layered, contested, and evolving meanings over time. This article examines the potential contributions and limitations of a palimpsest theory of objects to help explain such meaning-making practices. A palimpsest is a tablet or parchment from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make space for another

This essay explores the everyday experience of time within the frame of captivity. Through a series of photographs jointly produced by the incarcerated men at Rapa Nui’s carceral facility—the so-called happiest prison in the world—and me, I describe how the quotidian constraints of a captured present are themselves eventful and how this can critically compromise one’s continuity in time. From the reflections

In Denmark, as with elsewhere in the world, Twitter has emerged as an important arena of public discussion on issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the handling of the crisis by state authorities and health institutions. On the basis of approximately 140,000 tweets from the period between February 24 and April 28, 2020, harvested from Danish Twitter, this report explores how tweeting

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 126-127, February 2022.

Current Anthropology, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 1-1, February 2022.