Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 39, 2010

This review considers research on language and affect, with particular attention to gender, that has appeared in the past two decades in ways informed by the recent effloresence of work on affect in feminist, queer, (post)colonial, and critical race studies. The review is selective: It focuses on a few key ways that recent research is responding to gaps identified in earlier research and opening up promising areas for future research. This review thus attempts to connect linguistic anthropological and discourse analytic studies more fully with contemporary debates in feminist, queer, antiracist, and postcolonial studies. In general, I look at the rise of more fully historical approaches; in particular, I look at (a) affect in imperial and other global encounters; (b) language, neoliberalism, and affective labor; and (c) terror and hate, compassion, and conviviality in public speech. It also considers why we are, at this particular moment, witnessing such interest in affect.

A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropological approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive interweavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ideology, we question sound's supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline's inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded discipline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully.

The past few decades have witnessed an eruption of property claims worldwide. The new form of cultural property has emerged. There has also been a marked growth in claims of intellectual property that are now applied to an expanded array of things and contexts. Older property forms, such as landownership, are deployed in new contexts, generating novel contests about the capacity of land to be exclusively owned. The ideology of neoliberalism and new technologies of biology, information, and communication are central to these transformations in property relations. In their distinctive ways, each has contributed to the expansion of property claims while continually disrupting the division of persons and things central to property. The article considers how contests about new and old property forms are simultaneously generative of new forms of persons, such as indigenous persons, whose outlook and conduct potentially undermine the legitimacy of conventional property claims.

Taking as its starting point classic accounts of native education and culture contact, this article reviews key trends and orientations that have shaped the anthropological study of education and religion in Africa. It identifies three frames that capture the development of research chronologically from the 1930s onward: (a) a functionalist focus on Christian-inflected adaptive education; (b) applied and sociohistorical emphases on education as, respectively, an engine for driving secular change and a medium through which to shape new ritualized practices and religious beliefs; and (c) a more recent concentration on youth education as a key site for analyzing politicized religious identity and youths' radicalization. I argue that this trajectory of research foregrounds two phenomena that anthropology also underanalyzes: first, the close association of religious missions with the development of today's highly secularized yet religiously inflected regional and global institutions that support educational programming in Africa; and second, a marginalization of the study of Islam in Africa, which reflects a Christianized cultural legacy in anthropological studies of religion and education.

By late in the twentieth century, scientists had succeeded in manipulating organisms at the genetic level, mainly by gene transfer. The major impact of this technology has been seen in the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, which has occurred with little controversy in some areas and with fierce controversy elsewhere. GM crops raise a very wide range of questions, and I address three areas of particular interest for anthropology and its allied fields. First are the political-economic aspects of GM, which include patenting of life forms and new relationships among agriculture, industry, and the academy. Second is the wide diversity in response and resistance to the technology. Third is the much-debated question of GM crops for the developing world. This analysis is approached first by determining what controls research agendas and then by evaluating actual impacts of crops to date.

Water has become an urgent theme in anthropology as the worldwide need to provide adequate supplies of clean water to all people becomes more challenging. Anthropologists contribute by seeing water not only as a resource, but also as a substance that connects many realms of social life. They trace the different forms of valuing water, examine the often unequal distribution of water, explore the rules and institutions that govern water use and shape water politics, and study the multiple, often conflicting knowledge systems through which actors understand water. They offer ethnographic insights into key water sites—watersheds, water regimes, and waterscapes—found in all settings, though with widely varying characteristics. Anthropologists provide a critical examination of a concept called integrated water resource management (IWRM), which has become hegemonic in the global discourse of sustainable development.

The demographic success of humans compared with other closely related species can be attributed to the relatively rapid pace of reproduction and improved chances of survival. The assistance that mothers receive from others to help raise children is a common theme in explaining this gain in surviving fertility. Cooperative breeding in its broad definition describes such a social system in which nonmaternal helpers support offspring who are not their own. In traditional societies, kin and nonkin of different ages and sex contribute both to child care and to provisioning older children. This review discusses empirical evidence for human cooperative breeding and its demographic significance and highlights the ways in which humans are similar to and different from other cooperative breeders. An emphasis is placed on cross-cultural comparison and variability in allocare strategies. Because helping in humans occurs within a subsistence pattern of food sharing and labor cooperation, both kin selection and mutualism may explain why children are often raised with nonmaternal help. Cooperative breeding is relevant to debates in anthropology concerning the evolution of human life history, sociality, and psychology and has implications for demographic patterns in today's world as well as in the past.

This review summarizes current thinking about the concept of modern behavior in the context of Neandertals and anatomically modern humans. The decoupling of modern anatomy and modern behavior has prompted researchers to reframe studies of the emergence of modern humans as a debate that explicitly focuses on the origins of behavioral modernity making its intersection with modern anatomy a point of discussion rather than a given. Four questions arise from this debate: (a) What is modern behavior? (b) Is the emergence of modern behavior sudden or more gradual? (c) Is modern behavior unique to modern humans or more widely shared with other species, most notably the Neandertals? (d) Is the emergence of modern behavior primarily the result of new cognitive abilities or social, cultural, demographic, and historic factors? This review briefly addresses each of these questions and in the process offers some thoughts on the current state of the debate.

A distinctive school of landscape archaeology is emerging in the American Southwest. The Southwest School, as here defined, has its roots in a unique set of historical relationships among archaeologists, ethnographers, indigenous people, and an intoxicating physical setting that has long provided scholarly inspiration. The most significant contribution of this school, however, is the manner in which it has begun to engage Native American intellectuals, not as data to be studied, but as interlocutors with distinct epistemological stances who have their own contributions to make toward the theorization of cultural landscapes generally. As such, the Southwest School stands poised to offer an important alternative to the more widely read landscape approaches currently popular in British archaeology.

International interest in the prehistory and archaeology of the Eurasian steppes and Mongolia has increased dramatically since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This article surveys important new evidence and interpretations that have emerged from several collaborative projects in the past two decades. A particular emphasis is placed on issues that are crucial to regional studies in the steppe ecological zone; however, it also is suggested that steppe prehistory must come to play a more significant role in developing more comprehensive understandings of world prehistory. Key developments connected with the steppe include the diffusion of anatomically modern humans, horse domestication, spoke-wheeled chariot and cavalry warfare, early metal production and trade, Indo-European languages, and the rise of nomadic states and empires. In addition to these important issues, thoughts are offered on some of the current challenges that face archaeological scholarship in this region of the world.

This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.