Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 42, 2013

This is an account of the life and work of a person who was trained as an anthropologist in the University of Calcutta and then made his career in a department of sociology in the University of Delhi, where he is now professor emeritus. The career, in both teaching and research, described here has been built on the presumption of the unity of sociology and social anthropology, whereas in the West, and particularly in the United States, the disciplines are organized on the presumption of their separation. In this article I have discussed my relations with colleagues and students from both India and overseas. The bias in favor of the unity of sociology and social anthropology present throughout my work comes naturally to someone who takes for granted the unity of India, which is a very large country encompassing the most diverse range of social formations.

Precolonial African polities have emerged in recent years as fertile ground for the comparative archaeological study of social complexity and the state. For much of the twentieth century, precolonial African states were misinterpreted as the product of outside stimuli. Recent archaeological research on such polities, however, has revealed the autochthonous origins of social complexity and the state in Africa, providing valuable new insights for the comparative study of state formation in the past. This review outlines how archaeologists have tackled the precolonial state in Africa, beginning with an outline of colonial-era discourse on the nature of the state and civilization in Africa, followed by a discussion of how archaeological perspectives on power provide insights into political processes across the continent. Key examples are examined within four broadly defined subregions. Throughout this review, I highlight (a) the agency of indigenous political entrepreneurs in driving state formation across the continent, and (b) how alternative modes of power shaped the political contours of these precolonial African states.

In the past 25 years, an interest in “informal economies” has grown across the social sciences, encompassing economic activities not (successfully) regulated by government. Archaeology has paralleled this interest primarily through studies of household and craft production; much of this work presumes rather than proves state control over quotidian exchanges. The smaller number of works on the riskier endeavors of piracy, smuggling, and prostitution, which we review here, underscores how weak the formal/informal duality is in application over the longue durée: Most markets are gray, not black or white. Instead of discussing the problematic category of the informal economy, we focus on illegal and illicit economies while demonstrating that the relationship between government and economy is highly variable, politically volatile, and socially embedded. We identify emerging trends in archaeology and address the hesitation to read archaeological deposits for clandestine activities by eliciting the distinct forensic patterns they leave in the material record.

Disability is a profoundly relational category, shaped by social conditions that exclude full participation in society. What counts as an impairment in different sociocultural settings is highly variable. Recently, new approaches by disability scholars and activists show that disability is not simply lodged in the body, but created by the social and material conditions that “dis-able” the full participation of those considered atypical. Historically, anthropological studies of disability were often intellectually segregated, considered the province of those in medical and applied anthropology. We show the growing incorporation of disability in the discipline on its own terms by bringing in the social, activist, reflexive, experiential, narrative, and phenomenological dimensions of living with particular impairments. We imagine a broad future for critical anthropological studies of disability and argue that as a universal aspect of human life this topic should be foundational to the field.

Indigenous circumpolar populations have experienced profound transitions in lifeways over the past half-century as a result of economic development. Although there have been positive aspects of this social transformation, most circumpolar groups today have a triple burden of disease, with a modestly elevated infectious disease level, an elevated and increasing burden of chronic conditions such as obesity and cardiovascular disease, and high rates of mental health–related challenges. The health of contemporary circumpolar populations is not easily characterized because of dramatic regional differences that stem from socioeconomic disparities among nonindigenous groups, individual population histories, lifestyle factors, environmental pollution, and underlying biological variation. Overall health and well-being range from excellent among the Sami of Sweden and Norway to extremely poor among marginalized native populations in northern Russia. Circumpolar groups today are not only threatened by continued regional economic development and pollution, but also uniquely vulnerable to global climate change.

Anthropology has been involved with the field of organ transplantation almost since its inception. As a rapidly growing subfield within biomedicine, transplantation has been analyzed as one more example of the technological imperative: the development and application of new procedures and techniques that bring, in their wake, major changes in how humans relate to their bodies. Anthropologists have been especially interested in the psychological adjustment of organ recipients as they come to terms with the sacrifices or deaths that were necessary to provide them with organs and as they respond to the presence of an outsider in their bodies. Critical medical anthropologists have focused more on donor issues, raising ethical questions about transplant tourism and the commodification of organs and challenging the universal validity of brain death as the death of a person.

Neo-Darwinian evolution is widely acknowledged as the key framework for understanding the form and function of living systems, including myriad aspects of animal behavior. Yet extensions to human behavior and society are perennially challenged; debates are vociferous and seemingly irresolvable, and evolutionary approaches to human behavior are marginalized within much of anthropology and other social sciences. This review explores this contested terrain, arguing that although many critiques of evolutionary analyses of behavior are faulty, some valid concerns must be addressed. Human agency, behavioral plasticity, and the partial autonomy of cultural and historical change present real challenges to the standard evolutionary framework. However, several additions to the standard framework currently employed by evolutionary anthropologists and others address these concerns and provide a more comprehensive understanding of human behavioral evolution and adaptation. These additions include phenotypic adaptation, cultural transmission, gene-culture coevolution, and niche construction.

Evidence excavacated from mass graves and clandestine burials has played an important role in the international prosecution of human rights abuses as well as in individual criminal cases. The archaeological dimension of forensic anthropological work is focused on the grave site and its immediate surrounding environment, making the work very visible and sometimes contentious. This review traces the ways in which forensic archaeological evidence is composed and evaluated, exploring how anthropologists have negotiated the sometimes competing demands and claims of the courts, scientific practice, and relatives of the dead.

Ethnographers have approached the modern business corporation (construed as cultural formation) from two directions: (a) the effects of corporations—on workers, communities, consumers, and the broader environment; and (b) the inner workings of corporations as small-scale (or even large-scale) societies. Although academically based ethnographic research inside corporations has grown only modestly since the 1980s, the number of anthropologists working for corporations has mushroomed. Coupled with the expansion of research on various corporate effects over the past three decades, this development, we argue, positions the discipline to make intellectual advances in theorizing the corporation (synthesizing the internal social group view with the external effects-producing agentive view), as well as practical contributions not only in monitoring harmful impacts but also in suggesting directions to enhance societal benefits. At the same time, we note that questions of access to corporate inner workings pose both practical and ethical challenges.

Ancient biomolecules including DNA, proteins, and lipids are often preserved in archaeological skeletons or artifacts such as potsherds from cooking vessels. Techniques for analyzing these molecules have improved dramatically in recent years, though challenges remain in ensuring that results are authentic and not confused by the presence of contaminating modern biomolecules. Ancient DNA (aDNA) can be used to identify the sex, kinship relationships, and population affinities of human skeletons, and also to detect the presence of disease-causing organisms such as the plague and tuberculosis bacteria. Stable isotope ratios in collagen and other skeletal proteins enable past diets to be studied, and similar work with lipids from potsherds have revealed that dairying in Europe began 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. Biomolecular archaeology has therefore developed into a mature discipline that is making a significant contribution to different aspects of our understanding of the human past.

How language is conceptualized as labor is a function of the economy within which profits are made and businesses are structured. Under capitalist regimes, language practices have been conceptualized as apart from labor, as part of the means of production, and as the product. Under neoliberal regimes and conditions of globalization, and depending on the language worker's job description and status as managed or managing, ethnicity/race, gender, and affiliation with national or nonnational language practices are conceptualized as skills subject to Taylorization, as natural abilities for employers' occasional use, or as indexes of authenticity. What ties all this together is how language workers are imagined in relation to the organizations for which they work, a key element being the degree to which language labor represents an internalization of the organization. In this way, language labor is conceptualized in relation to agency as a technology of self.

Modern humans differ from wild great apes in gestation length, weaning age, interbirth interval, sexual maturity, and longevity, but evolutionary anthropologists do not know when these distinctive life-history conditions evolved. Dental tissues contain faithful records of birth and incremental growth, and scholars suggest that molar eruption age, tooth wear, growth disturbances, tooth chemistry, and/or tooth calcification may provide insight into the evolution of human life history. However, recent comparative approaches and empirical evidence demonstrate that caution is warranted when inferring hominin weaning ages or interbirth intervals from first molar eruption, tooth wear, or growth disturbances. Fine-scaled studies of tooth chemistry provide direct evidence of weaning. Early hominin tooth calcification is more ape-like than human-like, and fully modern patterns appear only after Neanderthals and Homo sapiens diverged, concurrent with changes in cranial and postcranial development. Additional studies are needed to relate these novel calcification patterns to specific changes in life-history variables.

Jurisdiction, a concept often demarcating law's territorial scope, and thus the bounds of state sovereignty, is offered here as a theory of legal language and its relation to law's social force. Reconsidered in light of its etymology as law's speech, new theories of jurisdiction suggest that law is simultaneously founded and enacted through language both spectacular (such as courtroom arguments or in the preambles of constitutions) and mundane (such as in legal aid intake exchanges, or in the forms of bureaucratic records). Jurisdiction points up how the force of law, and the sovereignty that law's force presupposes, can be seen as being made, and made seemingly unassailable, in the discursive and textual details of law's actual accomplishment. This review considers a segment of legal language scholarship produced in recent decades, while arguing for the ground that language, as juris-diction, always holds for law and sovereignty.

This review examines how international development has been studied by anthropologists, both as a particular form of institutional practice and as the terms of global economic and cultural integration. This review also explains a shift from an anthropological critique of the discursive power of development toward the ethnographic treatment of development as a category of practice. It reviews research into organizational and knowledge practices, and the life-worlds of “Aidland,” before turning to anthropological approaches to neoliberal development and the new aid architecture and, finally, to three significant current issues: the importance of business in development and corporate social responsibility; the donor focus on poverty as the result of the failure of government, conflict, and insecurity; and the growing importance of new donors such as China and India. This review concludes with comments about how engagement with international development has encouraged reflection on the practice of anthropology itself.

This review aims to explore the relationship between anthropology and genetics, an intellectual zone that has been occupied in different ways over the past century. One way to think about it is to contrast a classical “anthropological genetics” (Roberts 1965), that is to say, a genetics that presumably informs anthropological issues or questions, with a “genomic anthropology” (Pálsson 2008), that is to say, an anthropology that complements and relativizes modern genomics (on the model of, say, medical anthropology and legal anthropology).¹ This review argues that a principal contribution of anthropology to the study of human heredity lies in the ontology of genetic facts. For anthropology, genetic facts are not natural, with meanings inscribed on them, but are instead natural/cultural: The natural facts have cultural information (values, ideologies, meanings) integrated into them, not layered on them. To understand genetic facts involves confronting their production, which has classically been restricted to questions of methodology but which may be conceptualized more broadly. This review is not intended as a critique of the field of anthropological genetics, but as a reformulation of its central objects of study. I argue for reconceptualizing the ontology of scientific facts in anthropological genetics, not as (value-neutral) biological facts situated in a cultural context, but instead as inherently biocultural facts.

Afghanistan is a key region in and from which scholars can reflect on the potentials and challenges of anthropology. Structured chronologically and analytically, this review analyzes the persistence up to present day of the colonial image of an inward-looking society without, however, equating the current interplay of states and nonstate actors to the international context of the nineteenth century or the Cold War. The 1960s and 1970s were a productive period for research on the country focusing on pastoral nomadism, ethnicity, state, and tribe. When the opportunity for long-term fieldwork in Afghanistan was temporary interrupted in the 1980s with the Soviet occupation, anthropologists were forced to shift focus. Many worked among Afghan refugees in Pakistan as well as on the diaspora, including on the transnational networks of migrants. The international intervention in late 2001 incited an academic scramble for Afghanistan. The article reflects on the deontological challenges of research in an environment characterized by the demand for immediate policy-relevant knowledge while arguing that the study of the overlapping sovereignties linked to the interplay of international and nongovernmental organizations with the state and military forces in Afghanistan contribute to larger current debates in anthropology.

Primates as a group exhibit high reproductive costs, departing in numerous ways from expectations derived from other mammals. Yet, there is also substantial life-history variation within primates that affects the costs of producing offspring and how these costs are distributed over time. Whereas general phylogenetic and allometric trends are well established, issues regarding the mechanisms that regulate energy allocations remain unresolved. This review examines reproductive energetics across primates, placing them in context with other mammals and comparing how reproductive processes change as body and brain size increase. The three major stages of reproduction (conception, pregnancy, and lactation) are examined along with the reproductive adaptations that facilitate them: breeding seasonality, placental formation, breast milk production, body fat, and communal breeding. Throughout, this review examines how comparative primate energetics can help illuminate the unique adaptations that allow humans to produce extraordinarily costly offspring at an unexpectedly high rate.

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also have played out in relation to pre-existing social relations of inequality, poverty, and global exclusion. We are also interested in the ambiguities and challenges of racial meanings as they operate within multiple orders and different scales, especially in relation to contemporary intellectual silences.