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Response to “Can women hunt? Yes, did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not.” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Cara Ocobock, Sarah Lacy
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Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not. American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Melanie Martin, Alejandra Nuñez de la Mora, Claudia Valeggia, Amanda Veile
A recent article by Ocobock and Lacy (Ocobock & Lacy, 2023) argues that human females are “just as, if not more, capable as males at performing arduous physical tasks” and therefore likely to have “meaningfully engaged in hunting during our evolutionary past.” This is a direct challenge to the (generally accepted) canon that gendered subsistence activities are a key feature of the human ecological
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Disrupting the patrón: Indigenous land rights and the fight for environmental justice in Paraguay's Chaco By Joel E.Correia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023. 236 pp. American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Caroline E. Schuster
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Textures of Black sound and affect: Life and death in New Orleans American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-03-03 Matt Sakakeeny
In a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, the characteristic shift from mourning to joy is propelled by brass band musicians weaving melodies and rhythms together. This article is about how these thickly layered textures of sound elicit shared sentiments of lament and of joy. More than an accumulation of individual layers, the textures and emotions compose an atmosphere, in both the physical and metaphorical
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What is “heard” at a pipeline hearing?: The gerrymandering of aurality in British Columbia, Canada American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-03-02 Lee Veeraraghavan
This article explores how sound technologies are deployed by government agencies to produce legitimacy in the struggle over oil pipelines in British Columbia, Canada. Activists seeking to stop the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines have mobilized noise and silence as tactics of protest and refusal. For example, one thousand demonstrators make a cacophony outside a Vancouver hotel in protest
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Shxwelí li te shxwelítemelh xíts'etáwtxw: The museum's confinement of Indigenous kin American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Dylan Robinson
Across the globe, museums filled with glass and plexiglass vitrines display collections of Indigenous belongings. The typical display scenario for such belongings places them upon plinths, underneath plexiglass. These cases render the life they contain into objects of display, things to be seen but not touched. For Indigenous people, experiencing this objectifying system of display is often traumatic
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El disco es cultura: Sonic artifacts and Latinx Chicago American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Alex E. Chávez
In music production, a sonic artifact refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, typically the result of the manipulation of sound. This understanding connotes both physical and figurative meanings: artifact as material alteration and as subjectively defined auditory disturbance. Both meanings attune the act of listening to noise—the perception of which relies on normative conceptions
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Introduction American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Matt Sakakeeny, Alex E. Chávez
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Heritage companionship in the Andean high valleys: A situated experience from Argentina to engage with postcolonial/decolonial/social archaeology frameworks American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 M. Alejandra Korstanje
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Polyphonic readings of a Luso‐Brazilian sobrado American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Roberta Burchardt
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Pitch Black: How design entrepreneurs are rethinking race in post‐Katrina schools American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Christien Tompkins
Putting anthropologists of design in conversation with Black studies, this article demonstrates how a group of repentant education entrepreneurs in post‐Katrina New Orleans mobilized racialized affective and narrative surplus within an information economy based on design rituals and protocols. I examine how this splinter group of education reformers established design communities through ritualized
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Introduction ‐ The heritage and decoloniality nexus: Global exchanges and unresolved questions in sedimented landscapes of injustice American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Marisa Lazzari, Peter Bille Larsen, Francesco Orlandi
More than ever, heritage narratives, policies, and objects are being questioned because of the colonial legacies that still permeate public spaces (e.g., Knudsen et al., 2022). From the eruption of protests and claims to heritage objects, places, and monuments in former colonial powers, to the emergence of Indigenous peoples’ heritage curatorship of land, and resources activism, new efforts are challenging
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FandangObon: Amplification, counter‐publics, and fugitive spaces of belonging in Los Angeles American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 George Lipsitz
The festive celebration known as FandangObon is made possible by workshops and satellite performances that artivistas (art activists) stage throughout the year in a variety of community venues. The event transforms the annual Japanese American Buddhist Obon ceremony honoring ancestors into an antiracist polycultural performance. Through improvisation and invention, colorfully adorned participants blend
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Heritages of (de)colonialism: Reflections from the Pacific Northwest Coast, Canada American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Bryony Onciul
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Mockery amid shooting: Laughter as an expression of expertise at a public clinic in Greater Rio de Janeiro, Brazil American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Pedro Silva Rocha Lima
Laughter is one of the “weapons of the weak,” a means of degrading those in a position of power. Seeing laughter as such, however, only offers a view into what the performance does to its target, by belittling it, without saying much about what it does to the performer within a given power relation. This article investigates the potential of mockery and laughter to become expressions of expertise when
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“Heritage is about today, it's not about what happened in the past”: A conversation with Webber Ndoro, Director General of the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-18 Webber Ndoro, Peter Bille Larsen
Webber Ndoro was the director general of International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), an international organization based in Rome, from 2017 to 2023. Before joining ICCROM in January 2018, Webber Ndoro was the director of the African World Heritage Fund, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also associate professor at the University of
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“It comes down to dealing with people”: A conversation with Brennen Ferguson, Haudenosaunee Confederacy American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-18 Brennen Ferguson, Peter Bille Larsen
Brennen Ferguson is a citizen of the Tuscarora Nation—one of the six nations comprising the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. He sits on the Council of Chiefs and Clan Mothers in Tuscarora on behalf of the Turtle Clan family. He is also a member of the Haudenosaunee External Relations Committee (HERC). The HERC is mandated by the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee. Part of the mandate is to maintain and develop
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Decolonializing a museum of ethnography? A conversation with Carine Ayélé Durand, director of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2024-02-18 Carine Ayélé Durand, Peter Bille Larsen
Carine Ayélé Durand holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, UK (2010). Over the past 20 years, she has worked in various capacities as a curator and researcher in the field of cultural heritage in France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Spain. She has curated several public exhibitions on contemporary indigenous arts and political movements. Carine was chief curator at
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“Our blood is becoming white”: Race, religion, and Siddi becoming in Hyderabad, India American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-12-23 Gayatri Reddy
“Our blood is becoming white.” This was a constant lament I heard from siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India—third- and fourth-generation descendants of East African slaves and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The article explores this siddi lament and the multivalent symbols—of color, blood, affect, belonging—latent in it
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Weathered remains: Bioarchaeology, identity, and the landscape American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Meredith A. B. Ellis
This article explores the making of identity for two sets of human skeletal remains, labeled 1928 Hurricane Victims 1 and 2 Belle Glade. The remains are so poorly preserved that traditional bioarchaeological analysis to explore their perimortem identity is not possible. However, an exploration of their postmortem identity allows us to examine the relationship between landscape, soil, memory, and bodies
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More-than-human supremacy: Himalayan lessons on cosmopolitics American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-12-03 Mona Bhan, Radhika Govindrajan
How might our analysis of fascism be enriched if we turn our attention to how contemporary supremacist movements self-fashion themselves as more-than-human formations? How is fascist politics naturalized through claims that it is fueled by the agency and vitality of not just humans but also other-than-humans? How do right-wing supremacists’ assertions that theirs is an indigenous more-than-human politics
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Archaeology in 2022: Counter-myths for hopeful futures American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Marian Berihuete-Azorín, Chelsea Blackmore, Lewis Borck, James L. Flexner, Catherine J. Frieman, Corey A. Herrmann, Rachael Kiddey
Archaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat
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Blood for bread: Necro-labor, nonsovereign bodies, and the state of exception in Rojhelat American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-10-29 Ahmad Mohammadpour
As members of a stateless nation that is geopolitically divided across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds are known mainly in the West as excellent fighters and political revolutionaries. Amid the devastation of war and political unrest, most Kurds struggle for economic survival. This is especially true for Eastern Kurds living under Iranian rule. They have seen their lands confiscated, their resources
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Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Muhammad A. Kavesh
What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India-Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more-than-human
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Leaving traces: Fairy houses, kindness stones, and constructed heritage American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Michelle I. Turner, Derek D. Turner
The National Park Service and many other federal, state, and local land managers in the US enjoin visitors to “leave no trace” when visiting parks and wilderness areas. At the same time, practices that involve leaving traces—painted rocks, rock cairns, and fairy houses—have become well established on some public lands. Public discussions reveal deep divides in how people view these traces in a time
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Supporting the use of genetic genealogy in restoring family narratives following the transatlantic slave trade American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 LaKisha T. David
The inferred genetic family tree can be used as a reparative tool to contribute to a more cohesive family narrative after the mass trauma of the transatlantic slave trade (TST). There are weighty social implications to finding such relatedness. Genetic genealogy reconstruction and social interactions with newly discovered relatives may influence identities such as roles (e.g., distant cousin), family
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At home in my enemy's house: Israeli activists negotiating ethical values through ritualized Palestinian hospitality American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Ori Mautner
Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI) activists resist their state's occupation of West Bank Palestinians by offering them solidarity and support. Whereas most Israelis consider such Palestinians’ houses unsafe, EDI participants “feel at home” when acting as polite guests there, experiencing the hospitality of their politically subordinate counterparts as poignant. Such activists value intimacy—crossing boundaries
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Genocide-time: Political violence reckoning in Rwanda American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Natacha Nsabimana
This article looks at how political violence in Rwanda, that of the genocide against Tutsi in 1994 and beyond, is remembered, narrated, and embedded in everyday sociality. It makes two related arguments. Taking the aftermath of Rwanda's Gacaca courts (a transitional justice mechanism implemented between 2005 and 2012) as my point of entry, I argue first that violence, though narrated as past in these
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Evolving payoff currencies through the construction of causal theories American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Ze Hong, Joseph Henrich
Payoff-biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory construction, where agents come up with “channels” via which
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Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank By Kareem Rabie. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 272 pp. American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Timothy Seidel
What of the state in Palestine? What does state power look like, and to what end? How do public and private sectors interact? These are some of the big questions Kareem Rabie is exploring in his book Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank. He does this through a meticulous study of Rawabi—a city-building project in the occupied West
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Silence at the end of life: Multivocality at the edges of narrative possibility American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Annemarie Samuels
“If God wants her to get better, she will get better,” Nila said in a comforting way.1 We were in a major public hospital in the city of Banda Aceh, standing at the bedside of a young woman suffering from AIDS-related toxoplasmosis, and talking to the mother who nodded acquiescingly while gently rubbing her unconscious daughter's cold legs. Back in the hospital corridor, Nila whispered that it was
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The sounds of silence: Thai meditative practice for personal and political change American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Julia Cassaniti
In the middle of Benjamin Tausig's (2019) Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, amid the clamor of crowds protesting military suppression and the voices of those who would not be silenced, the narrative suddenly becomes quiet. Tausig focuses in on a man named Kittisak Janpeng (Diew) sitting silently among the protestors. He was protesting without words, a nonverbal reaction to political
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Incommunicable: Decolonizing perspectives on language and health American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Charles L. Briggs
This article fosters a new relationship between linguistic and medical anthropology by decolonizing foundational conceptions of language and health. It reintroduces John Locke as a philosopher-physician who used diagnosis of language disorders to impose a regime of communicability—reducing language to exchanging transparent, stable, purely referential signs. By deeming white, elite, able-bodied European
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Fear the Native woman: Femininity, food, and power in the sixteenth-century North Carolina Piedmont American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Rachel V. Briggs, Christopher B. Rodning, Robin A. Beck, David G. Moore
Native women in Indigenous-Western colonial entanglements are often portrayed as passive agents with little transformative social power in an otherwise dynamic landscape. However, Native women throughout the European colonial world many times controlled the most important resource required by European colonists: the knowledge and materials necessary to transform raw materials into “food.” Their control
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Animal work before capitalism: Sheep's reproductive labor in the ancient South Caucasus American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Hannah Chazin
Recent anthropological interest in “animal work” has focused on contemporary human-animal relations. This article explores the “provocation” of animal work in the deeper past through an analysis of human-herd animal relations in the Late Bronze Age (1500–1100 BCE) in the South Caucasus. Zooarchaeological and isotopic data reveal unexpected traces of the complexity and diversity of human and animal
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Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Cara Ocobock, Sarah Lacy
Myths of “Man the Hunter” and male biological superiority persist in interpretations and reconstructions of human evolution. Although there are uncontroversial average biological differences between females and males, the potential physiological advantages females may possess are less well-known and less well-studied. Here we review and present emerging physiological evidence that females may be metabolically
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Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Sarah Lacy, Cara Ocobock
The Paleo-fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer,” continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic
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Reciprocity and intimate capital in household work: Exchanging love and care for labor rights in contemporary Buenos Aires American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 María Lis Baiocchi
In 2013, Argentina promulgated Law 26844, transforming household workers’ juridical status from “servants,” with almost nonexistent labor rights, to “workers,” with rights virtually equal to all other workers under the law. This article examines how household workers in Buenos Aires who share amicable or kin-like relationships with their employers and the people they care for experience the transition
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Can there be a Godly ethnography? Islamic anthropology, epistemic decolonization, and the ethnographic stance American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Yasmin Moll
Can there be a Godly ethnography? This article explores how the epistemic entailments of this question trouble our taken-for-granted notions about what decolonizing anthropology demands. Disciplinary decolonization aims at more-just futures through interrogating Eurocentric ways of knowing and approaching marginalized histories and perspectives as good to think with, not merely about. I argue that
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Caring labor and the affective economy in the making of the Caribbean American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Alice V. M. Samson, Jago Cooper, María de las Mercedes Martínez Milantchi, Victor Serrano Puigdoller, Miguel A. Nieves
This article is a reflection on early colonial industries as caring labor rather than just commodity production or resistance. We draw on Indigenous philosophies of relations and Amazonian ontologies to foreground care and frame the Caribbean material record. We investigate how traditional things such as hammocks and cassava bread produced by a sixteenth-century encomienda population on Mona Island
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Tracing a genealogy of ideas, seeing, and not seeing bias: Legacies in science and society of Charles Seligman's biocultural theory of Africa (Hamitic hypothesis) and Ashley Montagu's on race American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Shomarka Keita
Some ideas about populations in Africa that were called “races” are addressed in the works of two influential scholars of the twentieth century: Charles Seligman and Ashley Montagu. Seligman is remembered for his notable students and a discredited theory called the Hamitic hypothesis. Montagu is primarily known for his early public interrogation of the term race. There are inconsistencies in aspects
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Biocarceral citizenship: Criminalizing through care in postapartheid South Africa American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-07-21 Sonia Rupcic
The story often told about HIV in South Africa is a celebratory one that foregrounds the relationship between seropositive citizens and health-care institutions. In the last 20 years, the government has invested heavily in rolling out life-sustaining antiretroviral medicines to all who need them, making HIV a firm ground upon which many residents claim protections from the state. This article explores
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Sisterly intimacies: Islam, gift-giving, and women's relations of care in Russia American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Tatiana Rabinovich
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Saint Petersburg (Russia) between 2015 and 2016, this article weaves together gift exchange and affect theory to analyze how low-income Muslim women cultivated sisterly intimacies, a materially mediated and affect-laden form of attachment. Sustained through the practices of giving clothing, food, and other spiritually significant items to one another, sisterly intimacies
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“I'm telling you this because I love you” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-07-01 Amy Leia McLachlan
This essay follows the parenthetical opening of the fieldwork confessional into the parenthetical spaces within our fieldwork archives, in order to consider the nature of those parentheses and of their complex claims on our writing and relating. Noticing an echo of address across several fieldsites and their material traces, this essay follows a thread I find winding through an archive of narratives
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“Is your investigation from a professional perspective, or as a woman?” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-29 Amy Krauss
By the time Dr. Z called me into the operating room, I had been shadowing different areas of the clinic for months. I'd sat with the secretaries at the front desk, drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups and helping to organize paperwork. I'd been in the ultrasound room with Dra. A, filling in the number of weeks people were pregnant on patient charts. I'd walked around with the social workers, who dictated
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“I've never told anyone that before …” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Erin K. McFee
I met Juan in the summer of 2019 at the Clínica de Comunidad Sinaí, a men's drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Sinaloa, Mexico. His ongoing struggle with methamphetamine addiction formed the prelude to his time at Sinaí, and he had, his mother informed me, gotten carried away with the malos recursos offered by the cartels. Juan's story was certainly one about the kinds of spectacular violence
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Pocodisco: The sonic performativity of grief, grievance, and joy in diaspora American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Roshanak Kheshti
This article examines the intersection between diasporic melancholia, dance, and world music. These phenomena coalesce at postcolonial discos, or public gatherings where political movement takes the form of dance, sound, and eros. I explore the network that connects various times and places to this fantastical dreamland of a sonic postcolonial future and the DJs and producers who keep those records
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In lieu of “keywords”: Toward an anthropology of rapport American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Andrew M. Carruthers
The identification of socioculturally important “keywords” remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of “keyword projects” as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns
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Theorizing with incorrect data: A new look at the historical inaccuracies of the bioarchaeology of corsets American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Rebecca Gibson
This essay strives to correct the bioarchaeological record of skeletal changes due to corseting, a currently understudied but impactful subject in biological anthropology. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ([1892] 1994, 7) tells us, via his famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, that “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of
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En el jardín del espíritu—with my helper, Chámis American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-18 Inés Hernández-Ávila
Dear reader, This piece was written from Patwin lands. The Patwin peoples have always had a relationship with the Phyto Ones that belong to this land: ‘‘acorns … buckeyes, pine nuts from both sugar and gray pines, blackberries, juniper berries, elderberries, wild grape, and manzanita berries; Indian potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions.’’1 Today, this historic Patwin land is saturated with agriculture
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Surviving in an age of transparency: Emancipatory transparency-making in food governance in Italy American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-17 Alexander Koensler
The concept of transparency is now an unescapable reference in public, professional, and private life. As transparency-making has recently transmuted from a progressive instrument to counter corruption into a new universal ideological formation, it is time to problematize the concept of transparency and its uses. In this article, I consider transparency not as a moral principle or static ideology but
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The end of bamboo houses in northern Laos American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Rosalie Stolz
While we know much about the beginnings of houses, we rarely know about their endings. Yet, to understand the temporality of houses and the entanglement of the biographies of houses and their residents, the analysis of their endings is particularly relevant. The case of Khmu houses is especially suggestive here, for it shows that the end of a house is not an exceptional phenomenon, nor a symptom of
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Dilemmas of anthropological activism, solidarity, and human rights: Lessons from Haiti American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Mark Schuller
Building on a growing anthropological engagement with and interrogation of the multiple forms and meanings of activism, this article—based on over 20 years of activist engagement and ethnographic interviews spanning 11 years—offers ethnographically grounded understandings of solidarity activism. The rich and at times messy (auto)ethnographic data suggest that contradictions inherent to liberal humanism
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What makes a “good” forensic anthropologist? American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Meredith G. Marten, Allysha P. Winburn, Benjamin R. Burgen, Spencer K. Seymour, Taylor Walkup
Forensic anthropology has recently and publicly grappled with fundamental disciplinary issues—including estimating population affinity, the pursuit of objectivity, and the role of bias in medicolegal contexts—all of which has left the subdiscipline in a state of seeming fracture, with many practitioners worried about its future. Given these concerns, we wondered to what degree polarization exists,
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Strategic generosity among local patrons: Place belonging and ethnic exclusion in a transforming lower-income neighborhood of Tel Aviv American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Tal Shamur
Working at the intersection of exchange theory, urban anthropology, and ethnic and racial studies, this article offers an original perspective on the role of local patrons’ exchange networks in constructing place belonging during racial urban change. Inspired by a middle-ground approach to reciprocity, embodying both solidarity and distrust within the same ethnic community, and manifested in an interracial
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Pearls before swine flu: Crisis and the politics of resilience in Cabo Pulmo, BCS, Mexico American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Ryan B. Anderson
This article employs a long-term historical and anthropological perspective to examine questions of resilience through a case study of Cabo Pulmo, BCS, Mexico. Using the recent COVID-19 crisis as a starting point, this article discusses the crises, shocks, booms, and busts that have affected and shaped the people, landscapes, and ecologies of the coastline that now includes Cabo Pulmo. While the community
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Comments on a found text: “Return to Acirema: Fragments regarding twenty-first-century Nacirema culture” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-05-31 Hilary Morgan V. Leathem
18 July 2101 Dr. Thomas Takagawa Department of History University of Tokyo 7-chome 3-1 Hongo Tokyo 113–8654 Japan Dear Dr. Takagawa, I hope this finds you very well. After the complete elimination of anthropology from universities across the globe, followed by the utter collapse of academic institutions in the former United States of America, I'm endlessly anxious about even the future of our own discipline—the
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Out of the ordinary: Everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini” American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Paolo Heywood
Ordinary life is in many ways the quintessential object of anthropological analysis. Yet little attention has been paid to contexts in which it is important to people themselves that they and their actions are seen to be ordinary and to the work that goes into making something or someone appear ordinary. An exploration of ordinary life in Predappio, Italy, birthplace and grave of Benito Mussolini and
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Decentering death: The war on terror and the less-than-lethal paradigm American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Kali Rubaii
How does violent military coercion work alongside liberal democratic values in contemporary iterations of imperialism? This article shows how the less-than-lethal paradigm occludes death and perpetuates extreme forms of both deadly and not-deadly military coercion in Iraq. Key to the 2003 invasion and subsequent counterinsurgency in Iraq, the less-than-lethal paradigm extends across military doctrine
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Sounding eeeeeee: Stretching phyto vibrancy beyond anthropology American Anthropologist (IF 3.139) Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Julie Laplante, Daniel Alberto Restrepo Hernández
“Go ahead, take your shoes off and walk toward the beach. This way your head won't heat up along the path.” Kai begins to walk. Sol had been wandering for months in a speculative postnatural expedition when she met him on the littoral of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. They could see the mountains on the horizon from the accidented landscape. As they walk toward what had been Palomino village, planty