Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 41, 2012

Most would agree that anthropology needs a degree of consensus and structure and, arguably, of “identity” as well. But as a discipline, its boundaries are blurred, with ongoing negotiations along its changing peripheries. Frontiers with history and the humanities are examples. Other examples are in the biological sciences, other social sciences, and public and academic policy. This article follows the form of a 65-year contextualized semiautobiography juxtaposing difficulties and ambiguities that have long characterized archaeological preoccupation with building models out of recoverable, material evidence alongside philological fidelity to the testimony of early literate records. My substantive field is ancient southern Mesopotamia, where the earliest beginnings of both urbanism and literacy can be traced. The challenge is to move beyond little more than mere coexistence toward better articulating “text” and “context” to form a more truly interdisciplinary dialogue. This approach touches on other individualized choice and behavioral boundaries as well.

This review assesses the contribution that a holistic, multisited, and multiscalar anthropology can make to the investigation of climate change and its impact on various human-animal assemblages. Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in animal management under changing environmental conditions. I focus on recent material that investigates the impact of anthropogenic climate change on human-animal relations using ethnography from Africa, Amazonia, and the circumpolar rim. I argue that the value of juxtaposing work in diverse settings and across various scales is to highlight the asymmetry of encounters between different perceptions of climate change and the responses they require. Anthropology's critical, holistic approach is especially valuable in places where people, animals, landscapes, the weather, and indeed climate change itself are aspects of an undifferentiated, spiritually lively, animate environment.

This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious diversity and difference, the second strand of research looks at the interaction of religious difference and the public circulation of discourse and images. The third approach takes built-in links between media and religious practices as a starting point to investigate the diversity of modes of interaction between religious practitioners and religious otherworlds and the consequences these modes have for sociocultural life. This article argues that a perspective mindful of the intrinsic relationships of religion and media is best positioned to do justice to the questions provoked by the intersection of media practices and religious difference.

The term anthropogenic takes its meaning from an implied contrast to an idealist notion of nature as separate from humans and endowed with a timeless or cyclical equilibrium. In recent decades, however, scientists have concluded that human influences now dominate nature at global and geological scales, reflected in the contention that Earth has entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene. Anthropogenic global warming is central to these developments, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change obligates the international community of nations to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Scientific debates surrounding anthropogenic impacts on the environment have a much longer history, however, revealing chronic empirical difficulties with the human-nature dualism combined with an inability to overcome it conceptually. Anthropologists have a key role to play in emerging transdisciplinary efforts to understand the anthropogenic across scales from the molecular to the global.

In our reconstructions of human evolution, a few key questions consistently rise to the surface. These questions tend to revolve around how the morphology of previous hominin species would have allowed them to gain access to resources during key life-history events, particularly gestation and lactation. Here the data surrounding the interactions between these key issues are assessed, making particular notes of recent advances in the fields of energetics and biomechanics as they relate to locomotion during reproduction. Reconstructions of body mass, lower limb length, and pelvic breadth suggest diverse mobility strategies for different hominin species and may offer some clues about the demographic shifts occurring in the late Pleistocene.

The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This article sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that (a) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, potentially expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; (b) the meanings of variables are underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles, and (c) variation does not simply reflect, but also constructs, social meaning and hence is a force in social change.

Humans are literal and figurative kin to other primates, with whom many of us coexist in diverse social, ecological, symbolic, conflictual, and even hopeful contexts. Anthropogenic action is changing global and local ecologies as fast as, or faster than, we can study them. Ethnoprimatology, the combining of primatological and anthropological practice and the viewing of humans and other primates as living in integrated and shared ecological and social spaces, is becoming an increasingly popular approach to primate studies in the twenty-first century. This approach plays a core linking role between anthropology and primate studies and may enable us to more effectively assess, and better understand, the complex ecologies and potential for sustainability in human–other primate communities. Here I review the basic theoretical underpinnings, historical contexts, and a selection of current research outcomes for the ethnoprimatological endeavor and indicate what this approach can tell us about human–other primate relations in the Anthropocene.

Chimpanzees are our closest living genomic relatives, but they lack the bipedal locomotion, markedly enlarged brains, and advanced communication skills of humans. This has led many to view them as “primitive” and to presume that their behavior and anatomy are also primitive. If true, they could serve as models of our last common ancestor (LCA), i.e., a territorially aggressive knuckle walker, reliant on vertical climbing and below-branch suspension to access the high canopy as a ripe-fruit frugivore. Ardipithecus now provides abundant information that the LCA differed substantially from chimpanzees (as well as bonobos and gorillas), both anatomically and behaviorally, and exhibited many characters that are more similar to those of modern humans than to any living ape. This major extension of the hominoid fossil record contravenes strict referential modeling based on the extant chimpanzee and greatly improves our ability to reconstruct the LCA more accurately, but only when viewed within the broader context of evolutionary ecology.

The living great apes and, in particular, the chimpanzee have served as models of the behavior and ecology of earliest hominins for many decades. The reconstructions of Ardipithecus ramidus have, however, called into question the relevance of great-ape models. This paper reviews the ways in which human evolutionary scholars have used field data on the great apes to build models of human origins. I consider the likely behavioral ecology of A. ramidus and the relevance of the great apes for understanding the earliest stages of hominin evolution. I argue that the Ardipithecus fossils strongly support a chimpanzee model for early hominin behavioral ecology. They indicate a chimpanzee-like hominoid that appears to be an early biped or semibiped, adapted to both terrestrial and arboreal substrates. I suggest how paleoanthropologists may more realistically extrapolate from living apes to extinct hominoid behavior and ecology.

Understanding the interaction between past environmental and evolutionary change informs scientific and public awareness about natural environmental dynamics. Evidence of dramatic climate variability, cooling, and aridity over the past six million years has stimulated research about whether environmental change has been a major causal factor in the development of our species' defining characteristics. Examples pertaining to the evolution of bipedality, earliest known toolmaking, dispersal of Homo erectus, extinction of Neanderthals, and the global spread H. sapiens all point to the emergence of adaptability in response to environmental uncertainty as a recurrent theme in human evolution. A synthesis of African paleoclimate data suggests that significant events in human origins tended to occur during lengthy eras of strong climate fluctuation. Human adaptability will continue to be tested as societies face the challenges of adjusting to unprecedented change in Earth's environmental dynamics.

The literature on the archaeology of emotion and affect is mostly quite recent and is not extensive. This review considers the main lines of approach taken so far and explores how different understandings of what constitutes an emotion underlie the work of archaeologists in this area. A distinction is made between past emotion as a subject of study and examination of the emotional subjectivity of the archaeologist as a method. The potential contribution of archaeology to emotion studies in the future includes bringing a sense of contextual historicity to the discussion and developing our knowledge of how material things and places are involved in shaping and expressing emotion. Inspired by some historians of emotion, a focus on shared emotional meanings, values, and codes seems a more productive direction than the exploration of idiosyncratic personal emotional experience.

This review covers sociocultural ethnographies of indigenous Australia from the 1970s to the present. It explores three trends: ethnographic reckonings with indigenous encapsulation within a liberal-settler state; the influence of international theoretical emphases; and movements toward an anthropology of the otherwise. The advent of land repossession, and the ethnographic and employment opportunities this created, indelibly shaped the discipline. With their immersion in land rights and native title, anthropologists were also embroiled in the state adjudication of indigeneity. Beyond the courts, the discipline struggled to shake the strictures of area studies and its ongoing, if unrecognized, imbrication in statist cultural logics. Consequently, indigenist anthropologies have not shifted, but perhaps helped affirm, the West's sense of being the apex of modernity. Emergent approaches, which refuse the ossifications of statist logics using forms of immersion and multimedia ethnography, show signs of ways forward.

Given that something as fundamental as food acquisition is subject to selection pressure, it follows that morphological and behavioral diversity among primates is reflective of a range of adaptations to diet, feeding, and foraging. The recognition of these adaptations, however, is operationally difficult because it is the interaction between morphological and ecological variables that serves to define the particular adaptation. Researchers have addressed this problem of recognition of adaptation by integrating functional and biomechanical measures of morphological performance with observations of foraging and feeding behavior of primates in natural habitats. These disparate approaches traditionally resided in separate laboratory and field domains, but technological and analytical advances have blurred the distinction between them. The success with which this integration of approaches has elucidated the nature of primate foraging adaptations is reviewed with respect to (a) ingestive strategies, (b) locomotor diversity, (c) hard-object feeding in papionin primates, and (d) the influence of “fallback foods” on behavior and morphology.

This review considers the impact and efficacy of material thinking in anthropological studies of photographs and photographic practices. Such analytical strategies have moved the analysis of photographs beyond that of the visual alone and illuminated the cultural work required of photographs. After reviewing key analytical positions of social biography, visual economy, and photography complex, I explore the material work of photographs through two registers: the idea of “placing”, in which photographs become active in assemblages of objects, and the processes of material repurposing and remediation of the humble ID photography. These strands are drawn together in the idea of a sensory photograph, entangled with orality, tactility, and haptic engagement. The article argues that photographs cannot be understood through visual content alone but through an embodied engagement with an affective object world, which is both constitutive of and constituted through social relations.

Money is one of the most timeless, all-pervading, and arbitrary inventions in human history. Its ubiquity in time and space offers great scope for comparative archaeological research into its varying material manifestations. This article takes a broad approach, ranging from Old World prehistory to twentieth-century ethnography. First, the development of archaeological approaches to coinage and money is outlined. Subsequent sections explore research into the use of objects as currencies in prehistory; the origins of coined money; archaeological sites illustrating the adoption and functions of coinage in and around the classical Mediterranean; and the study of coins as archaeological artifacts in the more recent past and in non-European contexts. Finally, we suggest some potential ways forward, employing comparative archaeological study to enhance our understanding of the complexity of functions performed by monetary objects, both in the past and in the present.

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.

This review explores why phenomenology has been such a popular theme in landscape archaeology in the last two decades—and why it has also provoked anger and controversy. The article concentrates less on the philosophical essence of phenomenological traditions than on their practical applications and context, particularly within British landscape archaeology. Criticisms of phenomenological approaches are reviewed and suggestions for future research made. The review concludes that research into landscape and human subjectivity will continue to be a strong research theme, whether or not such work explicitly derives its theoretical approach from phenomenology.

Island communities stand to be among the first and most adversely affected by the impacts of global climate change. Rising sea levels, changing precipitation and storm patterns, and increasing air and sea-surface temperatures stress already limited island resources while climate change policies circumscribe local decision making. Anthropologists make important contributions to understanding island-based knowledge, global causes of vulnerability, local perceptions of risk, and islander agency channeled into adaptive capacity and resilience. A conceptual framework that recognizes both the complexity of the causes of island vulnerability and the constraints and opportunities available to islanders offers an analytical approach to understanding islander responses to climate change, including migration. The framework is used to show that island communities are not merely isolated, small, and impoverished but that they are often deeply globally connected in ways that reject such simple descriptions and will be essential to just and equitable climate solutions.