Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 43, 2014

Much of my career has involved the reshaping and transformation of knowledge of language and history shared with me by indigenous people who had made it a life's project to acquire, remember, and pass on this heritage. A consideration of the meaning of these encounters is interwoven with an autobiography of my scholarly formation and research career, the role of generationally shaped good luck in this career, and what it taught me about how speakers in diverse circumstances exploit the structural resources of their languages to protect and advance their interests.

Paul Friedrich has played a distinctive and multifaceted role within and well beyond anthropology over the past 50 years. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics and on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Friedrich's research sites have ranged from southwestern Mexico to south India, as well as with Russians. He has also written extensively in historical linguistics, classics, and anthropological theory. Much of Friedrich's writing has focused on the interplay of the practice of poetry and poetically focused analyses of language and interaction. He has published extensively, producing numerous volumes of poetry as well as path-breaking scholarship.

On May 13, 2013, at the University of Chicago, Professor Friedrich was interviewed by Dr. Dale Pesmen, an anthropologist, Russian scholar, artist, and translator who received her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked closely with Professor Friedrich. She is the author of Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Cornell University Press, 2000). Their conversation explored the remarkably heterogeneous and imaginative range of Friedrich's work and career, as well as highlighting ongoing core underlying concerns and themes. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

This article reviews changes in primate taxonomy, especially those pertaining to the meaning of the term species, since its inception two and a half centuries ago. Despite continuing discoveries and the involvement of competent practitioners, the adoption of the polytypic species concept, especially underpinned by the biological species concept, ensured that primate taxonomy was in a sorry state by the middle of the twentieth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a gradual rethinking of the nature of species took place, and many different species concepts were proposed. The phylogenetic species concept has been widely adopted over the past ∼20 years, sustained by a gradual realization that species are evolutionary lineages. This review provides examples of how the old way of thinking about species hampered our understanding of primate biodiversity and of how the phylogenetic species concept (or the diagnosability criterion under the general lineage concept) has clarified matters, opening them up for discussion. The adoption of this evolutionary view of species has implications for conservation, particularly because it increases recognition of biodiversity.

Voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category invoked in discourse about personal agency, communication and representation, and political power. This review focuses on scholarship produced since the 1990s in a variety of fields, addressing the status of the voice within Euro-Western modernity, voice as sound and embodied practice, technological mediation, and voicing. It then turns to the ways in which anthropology and related fields have framed the relationship between voice and identity, status, subjectivity, and publics. The review suggests that attending to voice in its multiple registers gives particular insight into the intimate, affective, and material/embodied dimensions of cultural life and sociopolitical identity. Questions of voice are implicated in many issues of concern to contemporary anthropology and can lend theoretical acuity to broader concepts of more general concern to social theory as well.

Although expansions of state secrecy and the countervailing leaks of classified documents imbue the anthropology of secrecy with urgent relevance, secrecy has a long-standing status as a paradigmatically anthropological topic. In the ethnographic record, initiatory secrets often stand for the quiddity of culture, and the revelation of concealed realities is an organizing trope in much ethnographic writing. While situating research on secrecy as a reflection of epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural anthropology more broadly, this review simultaneously explores parallels between different anthropological traditions by focusing on descriptions of the media through which social relations involving secrecy are transacted. Attending to ethnographic accounts of the way secrets travel across different media and coexist simultaneously in various mediated states provides both a novel intellectual framework for surveying recent research and a basis for conceptualizing the anthropology of secrecy itself as a practice that involves intermedial and transmedial knowledge flows.

Individuals learning to make pottery must master knowledge of materials and a complex production sequence. Intergenerational transmission of knowledge and diffusion of knowledge are basic processes in all human societies. How individuals learn, what they learn, and from whom they learn become aspects of their identity. Theoretical perspectives on learning and historical documents describing learning provide background for archaeologists interested in how crafts learning occurred in the past. New methods enable archaeologists to examine learning from skilled potters in childhood and learning from other skilled potters and objects later in life among the Ancestral Pueblos. Differences in learning and teaching frameworks have implications for the archaeological record.

Neoliberalism has been a popular concept within anthropological scholarship over the past decade; this very popularity has also elicited a fair share of criticism. This review examines current anthropological engagements with neoliberalism and explains why the concept has been so attractive for anthropologists since the millennium. It briefly outlines the history of neoliberal thought and explains how neoliberalism is different from late capitalism. Although neoliberalism is a polysemic concept with multiple referents, anthropologists have most commonly understood neoliberalism in two main ways: as a structural force that affects people's life-chances and as an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. Neoliberalism frequently functions as an index of the global political-economic order and allows for a vast array of ethnographic sites and topics to be contained within the same frame. However, as an analytical framework, neoliberalism can also obscure ethnographic particularities and foreclose certain avenues of inquiry.

This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists examine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post–Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity.

If the twenty-first century will be a Chinese one, what will its anthropology bring? The new realities of life in China have fundamentally reshaped the anthropology of modern China. With the disappearance of the planned economy, a whole range of structures, networks, organizations, and practices has emerged at the interface of state and society. Moreover, Chinese society is shaped by globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism to a degree never seen before. What happens under the impact of these changes is new and unique for the People's Republic of China, both recognizably Chinese and generically modern. Anthropological research on these changes will impact the discipline of anthropology as a whole, just as China's rise will change the world order.

The stories about how sexual violence comes to be constituted as an object of research offer complex commentaries about the operations of public secrecy in the realm of law, kinship, nation, and the state. Rape emerged as an anthropological object of research when anthropologists compared whole cultures to challenge the universalistic assumptions underlying a natural history of rape. Anthropological focus has now shifted to the situated nature of imagination, language, documents, and techniques that craft the silences and speech around rape. Recent anthropological research critiques the social, juridical, and political discourses complicit in the construction of rape as a public secret, offering an important route of engagement with ethnographies that recursively speak of rape as a situated category.

This review examines the emerging concept of “Native American DNA” utilized by genetic scientists and anthropologists to denote a connection via nucleotide bases between ancient and contemporary peoples of the Americas. This concept is problematic on conceptual and practical levels; this review highlights its use in various disciplines, focusing on ongoing disputes about its meaning and applicability and concluding with a call to attention for all who utilize such concepts. The ethical, legal, and social implications of Native American DNA have to be taken into account because the label itself is still under construction: Contemporary Native American peoples should not be confounded with the past or ancestral remains, but instead must actively be brought into research conversations at all stages.

Archaeologists and other social scientists have long argued that exercising power is a relational process. One way of modeling these relations is to see them as organized within social networks through which the resources needed to exert power in all its forms flow differentially. Two approaches to describing these interactions and understanding their political implications are particularly salient in the literature. One perspective draws from graph theory to describe how people's positions in established network structures affect their political aspirations and achievements. The other sees social nets as outcomes of strategies employed by actors seeking to define and achieve political goals within structural constraints. The advantages and limitations of these viewpoints are briefly reviewed, along with their implications for understanding past political processes.

It is a truism to say that primates develop, but it is also important to acknowledge that development occurs across many domains, including motor behavior, socioemotional behavior, communication, and cognition. In this review, we focus on those aspects of development that impact social cognition outcomes in infancy. Triadic engagements, such as those of joint attention, cooperation, and intentional communication, develop in the first year of life in chimpanzees and humans. Joint attention, for example, occurs when infants coordinate their attention to a social partner while also attending to an object or event. Hominoids are strongly influenced by experiences during early development, especially experiences that are foundational for these coordinated triadic engagements. Purported species differences in triadic engagements are highlighted in current evolutionary theories of primate social cognition, but conclusions about species differences are unfounded when development is ignored. Developmental experiences must be matched, controlled, or systematically varied in experimental designs that make cross-species comparisons. Considerations of development, across species and across rearing experiences, would contribute to more accurate evolutionary theories of primate social cognition.

From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: Rather than aiming to overcome infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology, such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality.

Centered on the ethnography of prisons and field research on penal confinement, this review maps out current developments and characterizes them in relation to key themes that shaped earlier approaches. Further internationalizing the ethnographic discussion on prisons by broadening the predominant focus on the United States and the English-speaking world, the review is organized around a main line of discussion: the prison–society relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds. More or less apparent in field research, this articulation is addressed from different perspectives—within and across different scales and analytic frames—whether centered more on the workings of the institution or on prisoners and their social worlds, both within and outside walls. The porosity of prison boundaries, increasingly acknowledged, has also been problematized and ethnographically documented in different ways: from prison-in-context to interface approaches, both more reflexive and attuned to broader theoretical debates.

Major advances in church and monastic archaeology are discussed in terms of two distinct waves, ca. 1970–1995 and 1995 to the time of writing (2014). The first wave was influenced by landscape history and processual archaeology; scholarship focused principally on historical, economic, and technological questions and targeted individual sites and monuments for study. The second wave has been informed by postprocessual approaches and considers change and complexity in religious landscapes and perspectives on religious space, embodiment, and agency. In conclusion, this article calls for a more holistic approach to the archaeology of medieval Christian belief, one which moves beyond the focus on institutions and monuments that has characterized monastic and church archaeology and extends archaeological study to include the performative rituals of Christian life and death in the Middle Ages.

Populations residing for millennia on the high-altitude plateaus of the world started natural experiments that we can evaluate to address questions about the processes of evolution and adaptation. A 2001 assessment in this journal summarized abundant evidence that Tibetan and Andean high-altitude natives had different phenotypes, and the article made a case for the hypothesis that different genetic bases underlie traits in the two populations. Since then, knowledge of the prehistory of high-altitude populations has grown, information about East African highlanders has become available, genomic science has grown exponentially, and the genetic and molecular bases of oxygen homeostasis have been clarified. Those scientific advances have transformed the study of high-altitude populations. The present review aims to summarize recent advances in understanding with an emphasis on the genetic bases of adaptive phenotypes, particularly hemoglobin concentration among Tibetan highlanders. EGLN1 and EPAS1 encode two crucial proteins contributing to oxygen homeostasis, the oxygen sensor PHD2 and the transcription factor subunit HIF-2α, respectively; they show signals of natural selection such as marked allele frequency differentiation between Tibetans and lowland populations. EPAS1 genotypes associated in several studies with the dampened hemoglobin phenotype that is characteristic of Tibetans at high altitude but did not associate with the dampened response among Amhara from Ethiopia or the vigorous elevation of hemoglobin concentration among Andean highlanders. Future work will likely develop understanding of the integrative biology leading from genotype to phenotype to population in all highland areas.

This review traces anthropological studies of humanitarianism starting in the late 1980s, when humanitarianism began to take shape as a particular moral and political project through the formation of transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It follows both the evolving relationship of anthropologists to humanitarianism—initially as allies, then as critics, alternately embracing and challenging their conjoined humanist legacy—and the growing field of the anthropology of humanitarianism.