Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 43, 2014

Over more than a century, a growing body of books, articles, and dissertations has emerged that can now be recognized as part of the archaeology of ethnogenesis. Regardless of whether this work concerns people in the far reaches of antiquity or the more recent past, archaeologists are grappling with a variety of social forces, historical processes, contexts, and dimensions of social identity making. As with much contemporary anthropological social theory, prevalent themes include politics and economics as well as specific topics such as colonialism, frontiers, ethnonymy, persistence, nativism, migration, instrumentalism, slavery, and religion. There are few major regions of the world where archaeologists have not applied ethnicity or ethnogenesis theories. Although many archaeologists' attitudes toward investigating these forms of social identity involve skepticism or ambivalence, there is growing support. For similar and different reasons, native and descendent communities share this range of opinions about ethnogenetic research.

Urban centers have inner and outer landscapes whose physical remains can be read as the materialization of social, political, economic, and ritual interactions. Inner landscapes are manifested in architecture and spatial organizations that configure relationships on the basis of economic status, ethnicity, occupation, age grade, and gender within the city. Outer landscapes are composed of the hinterlands on which urban centers depend for resources, including agricultural products and in-migrating laborers who seek economic and social opportunities. Urban-based elites reach deep into the countryside not only as a matter of political control, but also for investment of centralized resources into infrastructure such as canals, roads, and territorial borders. The monumental and household configurations of cities, expressed both at the heart of urban centers and in their countrysides, enable a distinct phenomenology of interaction mapped into daily experiences.

Mortuary archaeology has always been viewed as one of the most richly evocative sources of evidence for past social systems, particularly those without writing. However, the political context within which archaeology developed as a discipline, especially in countries with a colonial past, has made it difficult or impossible for the burial record to be utilized to its full potential. Ironically, this moratorium on the use of human remains for research purposes has been accompanied by the development of new analytical techniques, including ancient DNA (aDNA) and chemical analysis of skeletal material, which provide powerful tools for understanding complex social relationships and mobility within and between ancient populations. This review focuses on the United States and Europe because of the close relationship between their scholarly communities, as a result of which the limits placed on mortuary archaeology in the United States has had and continues to have a direct impact on the development of the discipline in numerous European countries. The inferential potential of bioarchaeology in particular is discussed against the backdrop of these sociohistorical developments, and the case studies presented highlight the powerful array of interdisciplinary approaches now being brought to bear on our understanding of ancient social systems.

Informed consent is a key feature of risk management in medical research. This review outlines the history of the consent requirement and describes its diverse forms through a review of anthropological studies of consent practices. We make a distinction between the politics of intent and the politics of practice to show how the consent requirement has become entrenched in practices through insistence on particular morally sanctioned intentions regardless of whether these intentions are ever realized. We draw attention to the importance of socioeconomic contexts, material practices, and the ethicopolitical dynamics that undergird the resilience of informed consent. We conclude that informed consent has become so ubiquitous thanks to an ability to conjure a stable image of a recognizable and manageable procedure with a particular moral appeal, while simultaneously serving as an empty signifier: an image onto which people can project very different hopes, concerns, and expectations.

Ethnographies of encounter are one response to calls to decolonize anthropology. These ethnographies explore how culture making occurs through unequal relationships involving two or more groups of people and things that appear to exist in culturally distinct worlds. The term encounter refers to everyday engagements across difference. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes. They consider how such engagements bring discrepant stakes and histories together in ways that produce new cultural meanings, categories, objects, and identities. This article examines a transection of the discipline that shares this methodology. We focus on encounter approaches to (a) transnational capitalism, (b) space and place, and (c) human-nonhuman relations. Rather than taking capitalism, space and place, and humanness as contextual frameworks, these ethnographies demonstrate how encounter is the means by which these categories emerge.

“Imitation” in contemporary anthropology comprises numerous topics whose relations have seldom been explored. In surveying mimetic phenomena that range from television parodies to postural mirroring, I offer reflections designed to stimulate exploration of “mimetic practice.” The review encourages work at the nexus of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, for without appreciating the communicative specificities of mimetic practice, one can neither narrate nor theorize adequately what mimesis does, and thus is. I chart directions in research by drawing out underappreciated findings from the ethnographic record, such as those that show that mimesis is not a matter of two-ness, as the original–copy binary suggests; that communicative dissonance often helps actors recognize when mimesis is in play and what action(s) it involves; that mimetic practice suffers (and sometimes benefits) from various instabilities (e.g., what is imitated, who imitates whom); and that reflexivity helps create, stabilize, and alter mimetic practices and projects.

Recurrent, most recently Romantic, ideologies conceptualize creativity as the solitary, ex nihilo creation of products of self-evident and universal value—most emblematically in the field of art—by highly exceptional individuals. Such ideologies obscure the social dimensions of creativity that come into view via anthropological analysis: (a) the nature and ubiquity of creative processes as communicative and improvisational events, with real-time emergent properties, involving human and nonhuman agents in the context of pre-existing yet malleable genres and constraints; (b) the role of socialization in the making of creative individuals, implicating processes of social reproduction; and (c) the processes by which certain objects and individuals are recognized and constructed as exemplars of creativity and thus acquire their value. This review discusses these dimensions by synthesizing cultural and linguistic/semiotic anthropological research. It concludes by addressing the recent transformation of creativity into the neoliberal philosopher's stone and the potential contribution of anthropology to the demystification of this transformation.

Stable isotope analysis of carbon and nitrogen has revolutionized anthropology's approach and understanding of the evolution of human diet. A baseline comparison across extant nonhuman primates reveals that they all depend on C3 plants in forests, forest patches, and woodlands except during rare seasonal intake, in marginal regions, or where maize fields exist. Even large-bodied hominoids that could theoretically rely on hard-to-digest C4 plants do not do so. Some Plio-Pleistocene hominins, however, apparently relied heavily on C4 and/or CAM plants, which suggests that they relied extensively on cecal-colon microbial fermentation. Neanderthals seem less carnivorous than is often assumed when we compare their δ¹⁵Nbone collagen values with those of recent human populations, including recent human foragers who also fall at or near the top of their local trophic system. Finally, the introduction of maize into North America is shown to have been more sporadic and temporally variable than previously assumed.

Risk and resilience research articulates major explanatory frameworks regarding the persistence of health disparities. Specifically, scholars have advocated a sophisticated knowledge of risk, a more grounded understanding of resilience, and comprehensive and meaningful measurements of risk and resilience pathways across cultures. The goal is to operationalize research issues into sustainable health practice and equity-focused policy. This article synthesizes current understandings on risk and resilience from the lens of medical anthropology: It reviews key insights gained from the standpoint of cultural narratives, political economy, and life history theory, as well as current shortcomings. The emergent literature on health-related risk and resilience is breathing new life into collaboration and dialogue across diverse fields of research and policy.

Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how this linkage operates via production formats, participant structures, genre conventions, and ideologies of personhood. We then consider approaches to citation in the domain of legal discourse, an arena that relies on specific, patterned forms of citation that are historically rooted, institutionally perpetuated, and subjectively reenacted.

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. The anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance, in particular, have been the focus of much research since the 1980s. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and attempts to reform it.

To present the world anthropologies project (WA), this article explores the existence of three kinds of anthropological cosmopolitanisms and cosmopolitics: imperial, liberal, and radical. Imperial cosmopolitics reproduces the hegemony of the Anglo-American core in the world system of anthropological production. Liberal cosmopolitics is a step ahead but naturalizes the West's prominent place in the global production of knowledge. Radical cosmopolitics is currently epitomized by the WA. It problematizes Anglo-American centrality and criticizes Eurocentrism. The WA is a hybrid of diverse theoretical and political debates. It has important singularities: It is not located in the discipline's center, and it is a political critique of and action against the existing global anthropological hierarchy. Critical transnationalism and cosmopolitanism are sources of inspiration for the WA. The WA believes that anthropologists can take advantage of globalization's heterodox opportunities to go beyond metropolitan provincialism, to improve the conditions of conversability, and to benefit from the diversity of anthropologies and from the resulting heteroglossic cross-fertilizations.

This review applies a critical linguistic anthropological perspective to classic and current scholarly literature on interviewing, understood as a cluster of communicative practices used to produce and circulate various types of authoritative and consequential knowledge about groups and individuals. I begin by treating interviews as multifunctional, ideologically mediated communicative events. I then discuss the multiplicity, indeterminacy, and intertextuality in people's practices and understandings of interviewing as a communicative genre. Interviews are fundamentally intertextual, as they resemble, co-occur with, precede, and follow other communicative events.