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Current Themes in the Archaeology of East Africa Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Chapurukha M. Kusimba
East Africa boasts one of the longest histories of humankind. From hominid origins to the present, people have roamed, interacted with one another, and influenced the environment in innumerable ways. To teach about the archaeology of East Africa is to engage with the deepest history of humankind, from Hominin evolution to historical archaeology and the archaeology of listening. Each topic has developed
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Concrete Times Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-29 Julie Soleil Archambault
Our existence has become so entangled with concrete that it would be difficult to imagine life without it, though we probably should. Anthropologists recognize the part that concrete plays in mediating social relations and in shaping political subjectivities. Thinking about concrete anthropologically involves moving across multiple scales—from large infrastructure projects to modest housebuilding projects
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Well-Being Within and Beyond the Body: Toward Careful Planetary Engagements Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Iza Kavedžija
Discourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the
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Anthropology of and from the Ocean Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Jatin Dua
The ocean has a key, though often unremarked role, in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean
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Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices: Toward a Theory of Conspiratorial Style, Agency, and Politics Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Erol Saglam
This article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces
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Toward an Anthropology of Self-Care Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Susanna Rosenbaum, Ruti Talmor
This article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care
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Locating the State: Between Region and History Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Andrew Brandel, István Adorján, Shalini Randeria
If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through
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Language and Education: Ideologies of Correctness Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Betsy Rymes, Eunsun Lee, Sydney Negus
This review illustrates how language ideologies about correctness, in speaking and writing, have been discussed in research on the role of language in education. Research illustrates a give-and-take between the interests of multilingual speakers and advocates of language diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the correctness ideologies embedded in institutional demands for correctness and standardization
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Sexuality Discourses: Indexical Misrecognition and the Politics of Sex Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-18 Rusty Barrett, Kira Hall
This review of research on sexuality discourses directs attention to the patterns of indexical disalignment that have facilitated the global rise of transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist discourses. Over the last two decades, scholarship in the area of language and sexuality has focused primarily on patterns of alignment in the community-based indexical production of social personae, a necessary
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Refusal (and Repair) Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-15 Deborah A. Thomas
This article focuses on the concept of refusal, particularly as it has been developed within critical Black studies and critical Indigenous studies within anthropology and beyond. It argues that while both Foucauldian and Gramscian frames have generated often exquisite analyses of the animations and counter-animations of power, they have not, in a general sense, sufficiently attended to the foundational
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Lidar, Space, and Time in Archaeology: Promises and Challenges Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-15 Takeshi Inomata
Airborne lidar (light detection and ranging), which produces three-dimensional models of ground surfaces under the forest canopy, has become an important tool in archaeological research. On a microscale, lidar can lead to a new understanding of building shapes and orientations that were not recognized previously. On a medium scale, it can provide comprehensive views of settlements, cities, and polities
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Health Disparities Among Indigenous Peoples: Exploring the Roles of Evolutionary and Developmental Mismatch on Cardiometabolic Health Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-04 Michael Gurven, Ayana Sarrieddine, Amanda Lea
The health of Indigenous populations suffers compared with that of non-Indigenous neighbors in every country. Although health deficits have long been recognized, remedies are confounded by multifactorial causes, stemming from persistent social and epidemiological circumstances, including inequality, racism, and marginalization. In light of the global morbidity and mortality burden from heart disease
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Bridging the Gap: Integrating Knowledge from the Study of Social Network Analysis and Infectious Disease Dynamics in Human and Nonhuman Primates Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-06-19 Jessica R. Deere, Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, Julie A. Clennon, Thomas R. Gillespie
Primates live in complex social systems, and social contact and disease interact to shape the evolution of animal (including human) sociality. Researchers use social network analysis (SNA), a method of mapping and measuring contact patterns within a network of individuals, to understand the role that social interactions play in disease transmission. Here, we review lessons learned from SNA of humans
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A Bioarchaeological Perspective: What's in a Name? Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-06-07 Jane E. Buikstra
This article explores the history of bioarchaeology from the beginning of the twentieth century, proxied by representation in publications as reported annually by the editors-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical/Biological Anthropology. Embedded within this history is the career trajectory of Jane E. Buikstra, who coined the term in relationship to the study of archaeologically recovered human
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Slaving and Slave Trading in Africa Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann
Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported into the continent. This article reviews scholarly
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Human Bodies in Extreme Environments Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Cara Ocobock
Human habitation and adaptation to extreme environments have a deep history in anthropological research. Anthropologists’ understanding of these ecological pressures and how humans respond to them has grown substantially over the last 100+ years. This review covers long-standing knowledge on adaptation to classic extreme conditions of heat, cold, and high altitude, while also updating the areas in
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Financialization and the Household Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Caitlin Zaloom, Deborah James
Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing
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Critical Geoarchaeology: From Depositional Processes to the Sociopolitics of Earthen Life Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Andrew M. Bauer
In the last several decades, geoarchaeological research and practice have moved well beyond their foundational concerns for site formation processes and the stratigraphic integrity of artifact associations, developing significant orientations toward archaeological and social theory. This review focuses on four overlapping research emphases that have explicitly extended the reach of geoarchaeological
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Publics, Polls, Protest: Public Representation as Sociopolitical Practice Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Amahl A. Bishara
This article seeks to illuminate connections across studies of publics, media, formal political processes, and protests. An examination of representation as sociopolitical practice allows us to consider the practices that occur around the edges of what has been considered the public sphere and to interrogate the work of its boundaries, which reify national publics, separate civil society from formal
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Making a Difference: The Political Life of Religious Conversion Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Michal Kravel-Tovi
This article reviews the anthropological scholarship that engages with religious conversion as a political phenomenon, broadly defined. It develops the idea of making a difference as an overarching framework with a double meaning. First, this idiom captures how, by framing religious conversion in political terms, anthropologists have claimed to have substantially intervened—have made a difference,
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White Supremacy and the Making of Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Jemima Pierre, Junaid Rana
This review presents a historical and contemporary view of white supremacy as an entrenched global system based on presumed biological and cultural difference, related practices of racism, the valorization of whiteness, and the denigration of nonwhiteness. We center the role of the discipline of anthropology, and contend that the discipline is shaped by, and shapes, structures of white supremacy. In
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Biocultural Lactation: Integrated Approaches to Studying Lactation Within and Beyond Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 E.A. Quinn, Aunchalee E.L. Palmquist, Cecília Tomori
This review examines anthropological contributions over the past decade to the biocultural processes and practices of lactation via the analytical pillars of colonialism, racial capitalism, and medicalization. The nexus of these three processes has been foundational to the profound disruption and decline of breastfeeding in the mid-twentieth century and is still impacting ongoing efforts to restore
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Biological Normalcy Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Andrea S. Wiley
Contesting ideas about what is “normal” human behavior or biology is a core contribution of anthropology. In efforts to provide more inclusive views of what it means to be human, anthropologists challenge judgments about diverse ways of being, which include assumptions about what it means to be normal. Meanings of the term normal encompass the descriptive (statistical) and the evaluative (normative)
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Security Regimes: Transnational and Imperial Entanglements Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, Inderpal Grewal
This article reviews key theoretical and methodological contributions that anthropologists have made to the study of what we call security regimes. While anthropologists have been instrumental in denaturalizing discourses of security, much of the existing literature on who security actors are or where their work and force are to be found remains focused on the masculinist frontlines and visibly spectacular
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Is a Psychotic Anthropology Possible? Or How to Have Inclusive Anthropologies of Subjectivity and Personhood Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 John Marlovits, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as “normal,” which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology
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Decolonizing Museums: Toward a Paradigm Shift Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Alaka Wali, Robert Keith Collins
This review examines the discourses and practices that have produced a lively literature on museum decolonization created by scholars of museum practices and curators. We consider the trajectory of decolonization efforts in museums, focusing especially on the care of Native North American heritage, with comparison to similar trajectories internationally. We begin with a discussion of decolonizing moments
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Language and Race: Settler Colonial Consequences and Epistemic Disruptions Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Shalini Shankar
This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's “salvage anthropology,” which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language
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Environment, Epigenetics, and the Pace of Human Aging Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Elisabeth A. Goldman, Kirstin N. Sterner
The trajectory of human aging varies widely from one individual to the next due to complex interactions between the genome and the environment that influence the aging process. Such differences in age-specific mortality and disease risk among same-aged individuals reflect variation in the pace of biological aging. Certain mechanisms involved in the progression of biological aging originate in the epigenome
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Social Movements, Power, and Mediated Visibility Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Narges Bajoghli
This article focuses on how the anthropological study of media—through an examination of its production, circulation, and consumption—elucidates issues of social organization, political economy, and alternative visions for political futures. By bringing together the studies of visual media, social movements, and hegemonic power by anthropologists and ethnographers of media since the turn of the twenty-first
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Gut Microbial Intersections with Human Ecology and Evolution Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Katherine R. Amato, Rachel N. Carmody
Although microbiome science is relatively young, our knowledge of human-microbiome interactions is growing rapidly and has already begun to transform our understanding of human ecology and evolution. Here we summarize our current understanding of three-way interactions between the gut microbiota, human ecology, and human evolution. We review the factors driving microbiome variation within and between
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The Invisible Labor and Ethics of Interpreting Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Laura Kunreuther, Sonya Rao
In this review, we call for heightened attention to the labor of interpreters to think more reflexively about our own professional ethics and the paradoxes of global capitalism within which both interpreters and anthropologists work. Like other forms of communicative labor, interpretation is often devalued, unrecognized, and uncompensated—a form of invisible labor. Professional language ideologies
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Reconceptualizing Archaeological Perspectives on Long-Term Political Change Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Gary M. Feinman
In archaeology, along with a large sector of other social sciences, comparative approaches to long-term political change over the last two centuries have been underpinned by two big ideas, classification and evolution, which often have been manifest as cultural history and progress. Despite comparative archaeology's agenda to explain change, the conceptual core of these frames was grounded in the building
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Global Health Interventions: The Military, the Magic Bullet, the Deterministic Model—and Intervention Otherwise Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Emily Yates-Doerr, Lauren Carruth, Gideon Lasco, Rosario García-Meza
“Intervention” is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of “magic bullet”
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Steps to an Ecology of Algorithms Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Willem Schinkel
Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five
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Rethinking Neandertals Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 April Nowell
In this article, I first provide an overview of the Neandertals by recounting their initial discovery and subsequent interpretation by scientists and by discussing our current understanding of the temporal and geographic span of these hominins and their taxonomic affiliation. I then explore what progress we have made in our understanding of Neandertal lifeways and capabilities over the past decade
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Recent Developments in the Archaeology of Long-Distance Connections Across the Ancient Indian Ocean Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Shinu Anna Abraham
Scholarship on the ancient Indian Ocean, which stretches deep into the previous century, is available from an array of academic disciplines including but not limited to history, archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, art history, and materials science. It spans from prehistory to the present era and includes evidence ranging from the Mediterranean to East Asia. What binds together the world of Indian
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The Great Pirahã Brouhaha: Linguistic Diversity and Cognitive Universality Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Janet Chernela
Claims made by linguist Daniel Everett, that the Pirahã language, spoken by a small group of native Amazonians, lacks features thought to be universally present in languages, captured the imaginations of scholars and prompted broader questions on the nature of language, the diversity in languages, and the universals shared by them. Everett claimed that, in Pirahã, he had found a language without numbers
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Water Needs, Water Insecurity, and Human Biology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Asher Y. Rosinger
Water links the environment, culture, and biology. An integrative approach is needed to attain a complete picture of how water affects human biology due to its inherent interdisciplinary nature. First, this review describes advances in human water needs, thirst, and hydration strategies from a biocultural perspective. Second, it provides a critical appraisal of the literatures on water insecurity (WI)
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A Linguistic Anthropology of Images Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Constantine V. Nakassis
This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists’ research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image
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Remarking the Unmarked: An Anthropology of Masculinity Redux Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Matthew Gutmann
This review surveys studies of men and masculinities in anthropology and ethnography from other disciplines, as well as theoretical frameworks and debates among anthropologists and other relevant scholars in the field. It also aims to assess developments in these studies since an earlier Annual Review of Anthropology article was published on this subject. By considering the ethnographic boom in men
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Acknowledging Inspirations in a Lifetime of Shifting and Pivoting Standpoints to Construct the Past Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Ruth Tringham
In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events
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Critical University Studies Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Vineeta Singh, Neha Vora
In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American
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Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Douglas W. Hollan
This article reviews work in anthropology over the last 30 years that has been informed by psychoanalysis, much of it drawing on contemporary schools of psychoanalytic thought that further develop or even directly challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the original Freudian corpus. It assumes that what happens at the margins or horizons of human consciousness, as a body of work, should be
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What Makes Inventions Become Traditions? Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Susan E. Perry, Alecia Carter, Jacob G. Foster, Sabine Nöbel, Marco Smolla
Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions to understanding what influences the adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine ( a) which features of behavioral traits make them more transmissible, ( b) which individual characteristics
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Biolegality: How Biology and Law Redefine Sociality Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Sonja van Wichelen, Marc de Leeuw
As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept
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The Archaeology of Settler Colonialism in North America Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Lindsay Martel Montgomery
Beginning in earnest in the 1990s, archaeologists have used the material record as an alternative window into the experiences and practices of Black and Indigenous peoples in North America from the sixteenth century onward. This now robust body of scholarship on settler colonialism has been shaped by postcolonial theories of power and broad-based calls to diversify Western history. While archaeologists
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The Fundamentals of the State Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Monica L. Smith
Although ubiquitous today, the “state” did not always exist. Archaeological and historical assessments of state beginnings—and research on the characteristics of the state form in both past and present—help address how the state as a social, economic, and territorial construct became dominant. Utilizing the categories of politics, violence, literacy, and borders, this article examines how individuals
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Traveling Concepts: Anthropological Engagements with Histories of Social Science Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Bregje F. van Eekelen
This article discusses historical and anthropological approaches to the life of social science. After presenting the thematic of social science concepts that figure as found object in cultural anthropology, this review briefly introduces the domain of history of social science (HSS). It then examines HSS studies that could enrich anthropological encounters with social science concepts, both methodologically
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The Carceral State: An American Story Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Aisha Khan
This article reviews key works in the anthropology of mass incarceration, generated by anthropologists and their interlocutors whose research is directed outside physical sites of imprisonment. My geographical focus is on the United States during the last decade's political and economic Zeitgeist, shaped by the manifestations and consequences of the carceral state and the prison industrial complex
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Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Jessica R. Cattelino, Audra Simpson
The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies, and when the long-standing anthropological interest
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The Work of Boundaries: Critical Cartographies and the Archaeological Record of the Relatively Recent Past Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Mark W. Hauser
Discussions of boundaries have enjoyed a renaissance in anthropological archaeology of recent years, especially as conversations surrounding forced migration and border walls look toward the material record for clarification about what borders are and what they do. Since 1995, when the Annual Review of Anthropology last addressed a similar issue, numerous methodological and conceptual changes in the
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SARS-CoV-2 Is Not Special, but the Pandemic Is: The Ecology, Evolution, Policy, and Future of the Deadliest Pandemic in Living Memory Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Jessica F. Brinkworth, Rachel M. Rusen
The COVID-19 pandemic is extraordinary, but many ordinary events have contributed to its becoming and persistence. Here, we argue that the emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which has radically altered day-to-day life for people across the globe, was an inevitability of contemporary human ecology, presaged by spillovers past. We show the ways in which
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Disappointment Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Jessica Greenberg, Sarah Muir
In recent years, disappointment has emerged as a prominent topic of anthropological inquiry and theorization. We explore this disciplinary interest in order to probe the conditions that have made it possible, the lines of inquiry it opens up, and the self-reflexive critiques it underscores. Running throughout the anthropological literature on disappointment is a pressing concern with the messy, unpredictable
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Religious Orthodoxies: Provocations from the Jewish and Christian Margins Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Ayala Fader, Vlad Naumescu
This review represents a dialogic experiment developing the comparative analytical category of religious orthodoxies. To explore the category, we profile scholarship on Jewish and Christian orthodoxies, neither of which fits into the Protestant ideas of religion, secularism, and modernity that still implicitly undergird the anthropology of religion. For religious orthodoxies, the heart of religious
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The Ecoimmunology of Health and Disease: The Hygiene Hypothesis and Plasticity in Human Immune Function Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Aaron D. Blackwell
The original hygiene hypothesis proposed that certain diseases derive from low levels of early-life microbial exposure. Since then, the hypothesis has been applied to numerous inflammatory, autoimmune, and allergic conditions. The changes in hygiene linked to these diseases include numerous changes in biotic exposure and lifestyle. To this end, some scholars have called for abandonment of the term
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Intimacy and the Politics of Love Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Perveez Mody
This review provides an overview of the anthropology of love and some of the main bodies of ethnographic work and theoretical debates around studies of love. It surveys specific studies that make the politics of intimacy and love central to their analysis and that seek to make theoretical sense of its meaning and broader significance. This discussion is followed by work that draws together an example
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Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Mette Løvschal
The environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage—all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated
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Current Digital Archaeology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Colleen Morgan
Digital archaeology is both a pervasive practice and a unique subdiscipline within archaeology. The diverse digital methods and tools employed by archaeologists have led to a proliferation of innovative practice that has fundamentally reconfigured the discipline. Rather than reviewing specific technologies, this review situates digital archaeology within broader theoretical debates regarding craft
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South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Chaise LaDousa, Christina P. Davis
Scholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such
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Gesture Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Erica A. Cartmill
Gesture is intimately entwined with human language and thought. It is a tool for communication as well as cognition: conveying information to interlocutors, orchestrating interaction, and supporting problem-solving and learning. Over the past 25 years, the community of scholars interested in gesture has grown from a specialized group to a multidisciplinary community incorporating gesture into a wide