Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 42, 2013

Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

The current financial and fiscal crisis within the Eurozone is the latest in a series of events to have occurred in recent decades that have been altering the meaning, purpose, and form of European borders. These events include the multiple border-altering experiments of the European Union (EU), the end of the Cold War, and the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. Cumulatively, the position of Europe, as a place and as an idea, has been undergoing considerable relocation as a result. This large-scale political reorganization of spatial location has led to a shift in focus within European border studies: The way the ground underneath people's feet can be shifted turns out to be as important as the way people themselves move from one place to another, or the way people form politically inflected identities in relation to territories.

This review surveys a resurgent ethnographic interest in radio media in order to identify the contours and potentials of an emergent anthropology of radio. We first locate such scholarship in relation to long-standing questions about the nature and power of technological mediation, as well as voice, sound, and aurality. This allows us to reveal how conceptualizations of a singular ontology of radio often implicitly underwrite most accounts of its social power. Finally, we draw attention to how recent but rarely consolidated anthropological efforts to engage ethnographically with radio technology and its sensorial affordances require critically rethinking the relationships among radio, ontology, and mediation. In doing so, this review advances a new working definition of radio: not as an old medium on the verge of obsolescence, but as a vibrant domain for acoustically resignifying the ontological that merits sustained ethnographic exploration.

This review unravels different facets of la Francophonie, both as an international institution dedicated to the defense of French and as a group of people who speak or are united by French. Having been highly ideological since its beginnings and its association with France's colonial history, the very idea of la Francophonie has aroused passionate debates both within and without. Although it was officially launched as a cultural community seeking to develop economic partnership, it has evolved into a political organization promoting human rights and democracy and defending cultural diversity against Anglo-American hegemony. From a linguistic point of view, la Francophonie is approached in light of the centuries-long ideology of French as a universal language whose vitality is threatened by other languages. This review also shows that the political discourse of the institutional Francophonie has not always been in tune with that of its main agents, the Francophones.

A mainstream narrative in the academy casts hidebound authority as the enemy of evidence and, in many cases, the truth. In this review, I argue for an ethnographic and linguistic approach to evidence and authority as communicative practices that are not inherently opposed but rather inseparably intertwined. For ethnographers, authority can usefully be viewed as authorizing acts (recognizing that the act includes the receiver), and evidence can be thus treated as a kind of authorization, an act of providing evidence. Viewed in this more dynamic framework, authority and evidence become observable practices in which actors deploy cultural forms—performances, experiments, verb tenses, quotes, narratives, pronouns—to persuade, argue, confirm, and mediate social and cultural relations.

Anthropological interest in Romany and Gypsy populations is now intense; but for the first seven or so decades of Anthropology, the field was left entirely to amateur folklorists. Roma and Gypsies may often “not want in” (Gmelch 1986), but they also seem not to fit into existing academic models. Examining various ways in which Romany sociality challenges existing anthropological models, this article assesses the contribution of three explanations of Romany persistence: historical, sociostructural and culturalist. Roma always live immersed within and dispersed among dominant majority populations, and yet their adaptation remains surprisingly successful in the long historical view. The enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well as Roma evasion of the trap of nation-state/ethnic figurations, continues to provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization.

DNA evidence is changing the field of paleoanthropology. Genomes have been recovered from Neandertals and from a previously unknown archaic human population represented at Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains. Both populations contributed to the ancestry of living human populations; Neandertals account for between 1% and 4% of the ancestry of people outside sub-Saharan Africa, and Denisovans contribute from 1% to 6% of the ancestry of people in island Southeast Asia and Oceania. These genomes lend new detail about the dynamics of Neandertal populations and help us to understand the diversity of the Middle Pleistocene ancestors of late archaic and modern humans worldwide. Further analyses have begun to uncover details about the phenotypes of archaic peoples and their contribution to the biology of recent humans. These insights have included new information about pigmentation, immunity, and the brain.