Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 40, 2011

This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology's future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design's limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.

This article examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship. Analytically important in linking kinship with understandings of the body and person, substance has highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship. Studies of organ donation and reproductive technologies in the West considered here challenge any simple dichotomy between idioms of a bounded individual body/person and immutable kinship relations in Euro-American contexts and more fluid, mutable bodies and relations elsewhere. Focusing on blood as a bodily substance of everyday significance with a peculiarly extensive symbolic repertoire, this article connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart. The analogies of money and ghosts illuminate blood's capacity to participate in, and move between, multiple symbolic and practical spheres—capacities that carry important implications for ideas and practices of relationality.

This review surveys the literature on publics: political subjects that know themselves and act by means of mass-mediated communication. It examines classic accounts of how publics form through interlocking modes of social interaction, as well as the forms of social interaction that publics have been defined against. It also addresses recent work that has sought to account for contradictions within theories of the public sphere and to develop alternative understandings of public culture. Historical and ethnographic research on this topic reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably enmeshed in the very technological, linguistic, and conceptual means of its own self-production. Research on publics is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life.

Each menopausal body is the product of decades of physiological responses to an environment composed of cultural and biological factors. Anthropologists have documented population differences in reproductive endocrinology and developmental trajectories, and ethnic differences in hormones and symptoms at menopause demonstrate that this stage of life history is not exempt from this pattern. Antagonistic pleiotropy, in the form of constraints on the reproductive system, may explain the phenomenon of menopause in humans, optimizing the hormonal environment for reproduction earlier in the life course. Some menopausal symptoms may be side effects of modernizing lifestyle changes, representing discordance between our current lifestyles and genetic heritage. Further exploration of women's experience of menopause, as opposed to researcher-imposed definitions; macro- and microenvironmental factors, including diet and intestinal ecology; and folk etiologies involving the autonomic nervous system may lead to a deeper understanding of the complex biocultural mechanisms of menopause.

Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint. The anthropological evidence suggests that there are three patterns of hallucinations: experiences in which hallucinations are rare, brief, and not distressing; hallucinations that are frequent, extended, and distressing; and hallucinations that are frequent but not distressing. The ethnographic evidence also suggests that hallucinations are shaped by learning in at least two ways. People acquire specific representations about mind from their local social world, and people (particularly in spiritual pursuits) are encouraged to train their minds (or focus their attention) in specific ways. These two kinds of learning can affect even perception, this most basic domain of mental experience. This learning-centered approach may eventually have something to teach us about the pathways and trajectories of psychotic illness.

This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressing and generative avenues of research and thought in phenomenologically oriented anthropology.

In this review, I examine the meaning, place, and role of remittances for migrants (movers) and for their sending households and communities. I define remittances as more than economic and explore the cultural and social value of remittances as well as the ways in which transnational space is created as movers and nonmovers interact. Although remittances are often critical to the well-being and survival of migrant sending households, this review also defines the costs that movers face as they remit and the positive as well as negative impacts remittances can hold for sending households.

The anthropology of Central Asia provides socially situated, ethnographically grounded analyses that complicate grand narratives of post-Soviet transformations in this understudied and undertheorized region. Coalescing as a field with the sudden outsider access since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, western anthropological research in Central Asia is only beginning to contribute to current conceptual debates in anthropology. This review surveys the English-language literature, focused on the ex-Soviet republics Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, with comparative references to Xinjiang, China. Themes revolve around economic survival strategies amid upheaval, traditionalist revivals in nationalizing states, Soviet rule's peculiar productivity of culture and imaginaries, post-9/11 Islamic modalities, the nature of state power, and the importance of Cold War epistemologies in critiquing this literature. It considers fruitful future directions of research within a post–Cold War frame.

A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods' dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.

Most members of minority ethnic/racial groups in affluent western societies are recent immigrants or immediate descendants thereof. The health implications of ethnic groups also being migrant groups are important but often not fully explored. Research demonstrating developmental influences on the risk of type 2 diabetes and associated conditions suggests that migrants will differ in disease risk compared with the general population. It also leads us to expect intergenerational differences in disease risk within many minority ethnic/racial groups. Differences in health behaviors between ethnic/racial groups are also expected to change over time following migration, including across generations, but do not necessarily follow a simple model of acculturation. Understanding the ways in which the biosocial heritage of migrant groups interacts over the long term with migrants' new environments is central to understanding differences in disease risk that are identified as ethnic or racial and also highlights heterogeneity in risk within ethnic groups.

Scholars have converged on a theory that ritual involves poetically dense figuration of macrocosmic order in microcosmic action. I illustrate this by surveying work on how ritual and oratory involve coordination of action across multiple semiotic media. I review at greater length the “poetic density” theory's interest in how ritual and oratory causally shape people's worlds, and the theory's interest in the edginess of ritual as a site of articulation between actors with disparate political positionalities. Much scholarship now examines norms of the pragmatics of sign use (not just signification's semantics, so to speak) as being of a piece with the poetic, figurational organization of ritual and oratorical processes. This turn of attention is important for understanding what it means that ritual seems to be action about the organization of action itself. A final element in ritual and oratory's poetic density surveyed here is their nesting in culturally variable ideologies of ritual and oratorical genres themselves.

This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology's roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering both the unprecedented urgency and the new level of reflexivity that climate change ushers in, anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice. I argue for one mode that anthropologists should pursue—the development of critical collaborative, multisited ethnography, which I term “climate ethnography.”

Theories of migration hold a pervasive position in prehistoric archaeology of Central Eurasia. International research on Eurasia today reflects the juxtaposition of archaeological theory and practice from distinct epistemological traditions, and migration is at the crux of current debates. Migration was employed paradigmatically during the Soviet era to explain the geography and materiality of prehistoric ethnogenesis, whereas in the west it was harshly criticized in prehistoric applications, especially in the 1970s. Since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), migration has resurfaced as an important, yet polemical, explanation in both academic arenas. Short- and long-distance population movements are seen as fundamental mechanisms for the formation and distribution of regional archaeological cultures from the Paleolithic to historical periods and as a primary social response to environmental, demographic, and political pressures. Critics view the archaeological record of Eurasia as a product of complex local and regional interaction, exchange, and innovation, reinvigorating essential debates around migration, diffusion, and autochthonous change in Eurasian prehistory.

The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.

The ethnographic study of migration into the United States has shown that the culturally specific ways people are made into distinct and hierarchically ranked kinds are a key force organizing human movement. Among migrants, such people-making is transnational, unfolding across nation-state borders and involving encounters with regimes of social difference produced at multiple scales of interaction. This article explores the influential role language ideologies and practices play in transnational people-making, concentrating on orders of indexicality: the ways language creates and stratifies personae (images of people associated with patterned ways of using language). Orders of indexicality offer a useful way to conceptualize how regimes of social difference are generated and challenged. I examine, first, the indexical orders that erect nation-state borders, focusing on U.S. linguistic nationalism and covert racializing discourses. I then consider the scholarship on the indexical orders generated by migrants, emphasizing how they complicate those of the nation-state.

Immigrant cultures are routinely posed as threats to national culture. Particular understandings of immigrant and national cultures underlie cultural politics. Culturalism—conceiving cultures as reified, static, and homogeneous across bounded groups—imbues these understandings. Representations of immigrant and national culture are mutually constituted in policies, state institutions, the media, and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law. Furthermore, coupled with a popular or commonsense structural-functionalism that sees all cultural values and practices as inherently interlinked, many modes of cultural politics are contextually stimulated by anxieties about cultural loss. At critical junctures, certain representations gain powerful roles in cultural politics through synecdoche, when specific symbols stand for an integrated set of cultural attributes. Examples include Muslim head scarves in France and the “ground zero mosque” in the United States. Anthropologists can usefully mitigate culturalism and contribute to public debates by promoting more processual and distributive understandings of culture.

The mirror system hypothesis suggests that evolution expanded a basic mirror system for grasping, in concert with other brain regions first to support simple imitation (shared with the common ancestor of humans and great apes) and thence to complex imitation (unique to the hominin line), which includes overimitation, the apparent drawbacks of which are in fact essential to human skill transmission. These advances in praxis supported the emergence of pantomime and thence protosign and protospeech. This capacity, we claim, was adequate for cultural evolution to then yield language. We argue that Oldowan tool making corresponds to simple imitation and ape gestural communication and Acheulean tool making corresponds to complex imitation and protolanguage, whereas the explosion of innovations in tool making and social organization of the past 100,000 years correlates with the emergence of language. Care is taken, however, to distinguish brain mechanisms for praxis from those supporting language.

The Balkans were the first linguistic area (sprachbund) to be identified as such. The concept was originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity. The fact that the sprachbund cannot be as neatly bounded as the traditional language family has led to some calls for abandoning the concept, but it remains a useful heuristic referring to the results of historical and social processes of language contact. Recent conflations of areal linguistics and typology miss these processes, which are themselves grounded in speaker interaction. Issues of causation in the emergence of sprachbunds involve both language shift and language maintenance, influenced by various social factors playing roles. This review examines both the history and the current state of Balkan linguistics as a part of the study of language.