Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 44, 2015

The turn to ontology, often associated with the recent works of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour, but evident in many other places as well, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli's formulation, “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” of something. It is, I here argue, a response to the sense that sociocultural anthropology, founded in the footsteps of a broad humanist “linguistic” turn, a field that takes social construction as the special kind of human reality that frames its inquiries, is not fully capable of grappling with the kinds of problems that are confronting us in the so-called Anthropocene—an epoch in which human and nonhuman kinds and futures have become so increasingly entangled that ethical and political problems can no longer be treated as exclusively human problems. Attending to these issues requires new conceptual tools, something that a nonreductionistic, ethnographically inspired, ontological anthropology may be in a privileged position to provide.

The main objective of this review is to consider what archaeology can contribute to general anthropological theories on “ritual in its own right” and to highlight the potential for advancing knowledge about ritual experience as a distinctive material process. An examination of the exceptional material frame marking ceremonial events demonstrates the value of ritual as a heuristic and challenges archaeologists who privilege the interpretation of religion, affect, ontology, or cultural rationalities as necessarily determinative of the ritualization process. Therefore, archaeologists should not interpret ritual places and residues as immediate proxies of other sociopolitical realities but instead should base their inferences on cross-contextual analyses of archaeological data sets. Ultimately, attention to the amplified materialization of the ritual process, often entailing the performative bundling of disparate material items in archaeological deposits, permits a re-evaluation of theories proposing that ritual is intimately connected to agency and power.

HDSM, high-density survey and measurement, is the collective term for a range of new technologies that give us the ability to measure, record, and analyze the spatial, locational, and morphological properties of objects, sites, structures, and landscapes with higher density and more precision than ever before. This article considers HDSM technologies, including airborne lidar, real-time kinematic global navigation satellite system (GNSS) survey, robotic total stations, terrestrial laser scanning, structured light scanning and close-range photogrammetry [CRP, also known as structure from motion (SfM)], and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based SfM/CRP and scanning, and we discuss the impact of these technologies on contemporary archaeological practice. This article reflects on how the democratization and proliferation of HDSM opens various applications and greatly broadens the set of problems being addressed explicitly and directly through shape and place.

In addition to its established interest in the relationships among states, corporations, and communities near extraction sites, recent anthropological and allied interdisciplinary interest in oil extends to encompass pipeline infrastructures, financial and commodity markets, reserve estimates and calculations, international legal battles, and the creation of geological, environmental, and petrochemical knowledge. This review suggests that, across these issues and around the world, two analytic issues have emerged as topics of special interest: temporality and materiality. The former includes the ways in which the oil complex shapes senses of cyclical boom and bust, of acceleration and deceleration, and of past, present, and future. The latter includes the ways in which humans encounter, transform, and represent various qualities and properties of oil as a substance.

This article reviews the recent and emerging post–Cold War sociocultural anthropology research on Central America, defined as the five countries that share a common colonial and postcolonial history: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Following a consideration of the foundational literature widely engaged by scholars to theorize regional processes, three sections reflect major themes of investigation in the area: political economy, including environmental concerns and migration; political, ethnic, and religious subjectivities; and violence, democracy, and in/security, including gangs. We conclude that the well-developed anthropology of Central America has made key contributions to disciplinary analyses and debates, especially in the fields of political and economic anthropology and in terms of furthering studies of violence, migration, neoliberalism, and postconflict democracy. Anthropologists working in the region have been at the forefront of public and “engaged” anthropology, recognizing the political contexts and power relations in which knowledge is produced.

This article probes the contradictions and unacknowledged risks inherent in the notion of citizenship today. We explore the possible fault lines that citizenship places on the notion of universality, namely the anthropology of contexts in which citizenship and biological self-preservation are being radically decoupled as well as the policies, techniques, and media (biological, health, juridical) through which such decoupling takes place. What concepts have anthropologists brought to the fore to address the emerging “fault lines of survival” embodied in the term citizenship? How have these concepts been taken up, becoming vehicles for resisting, or at least assessing, what has become of citizenship? Moving beyond narrowly conceptualized policy problems and calculations, this article also considers alternative pathways through which the “political” is being mobilized and through which a new politics of rescue appears.

This article defines the present moment in the anthropology of embodied human communication as a moment of possible fusion between (a) the new conception of the living human body emerging in biology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and sociology and anthropology and (b) the advanced methodology and research on social interaction in the “interactionist” tradition, which is reinterpreted here as a study of socialized practices for interacting in, and inhabiting, the world with others. A growing number of studies of interaction are now focused on “multimodal” communication in complex material settings. The convergence of research programs is illustrated here by sociological research on dance and sports, by a practice-based approach to gesture, and by a selective overview of recent studies of multimodality. Particular attention is given to two influential theoretical programs, one by E. Hutchins and the other by C. Goodwin.

Siberia is a vast and varied region, linked horizontally to the circumpolar Arctic and vertically to Mongolia and Central Asia. Nineteenth-century anthropological fieldwork was important abroad, particularly in America. From the 1920 to 1980s, Siberia was almost totally isolated from outside research and from comparative anthropology. However, Soviet anthropologists conducted lengthy fieldwork, producing a huge corpus of valuable material in Russian. Their questions were specific to their ideological situation, for example placing indigenous peoples in a Marxist evolutionary framework, and during the 1930s, many suffered imprisonment and execution. Topics became more sociological in the 1960s, and when the region opened to foreigners around 1990, a new wave of young researchers conducted long-term fieldwork, producing a flourishing new literature in English and shifting the emphasis from historical reconstruction to current issues. Topics in this new literature include the state, agency, modernization, shamanism, animal spirits, resource development, and empowerment. Throughout all periods, indigenous people themselves have also been involved in research.

Taking my cue from two novels, Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangos and Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know, I posit that their respective senses of living in Pakistan or being from Bangladesh capture a shared intuition of not knowing enough to know oneself or one's place in the world. In this review, I ask, Can we speak of an inheritance of the colonial imperative to know when the need is not to know and rule others, but to know and rule oneself? Can we speak of an overturning or transfiguring of the colonial imperative to revise the central question for new nation-states to be, “Who are we, who have done all this”? Or, is that question too quickly dispossessed of agency and made to serve development goals and utilitarian ends? And if so, how are claims to self-knowledge asserted in the face of a constant arrogation of agency?

This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise showcases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.

Eating is a risky affair. All animals have to offset risks of feeding such as exposure to plant toxins, increased vulnerability to predation, or conspecific aggression with a food's energetic and nutritional return. What, when, and where an individual eats can impact fitness and, ultimately, species-level adaptations. Here, we explore the variables that influence primate feeding preference: food availability, chemical defense, and nutrient content. We present information demonstrating that consumers manipulate nutrient and energy intake, indicating that what may be a less-than-optimal food for one state of an animal's phenotype may not be for another. This evidence suggests that factors previously assumed to be constraints in Optimal Foraging Theory, Functional Response, and—recently—Fallback Food feeding models would be better categorized as variables. We conclude that “fallback” is not an intrinsic state of the food or the consumer and that this conclusion complicates the application of this concept to morphological features in the fossil record.

Formal models of life-history evolution have been used to illuminate both the peculiarities of the human life cycle and its commonalities with those of other taxa. Understanding reproductive decisions in both the contemporary market-based economies of wealthy nation-states and rapidly changing populations largely of the Global South presents particular challenges to evolutionary life-history theory for several reasons. These include (a) the rapidity with which reproductive patterns change, (b) the magnitude of fertility reduction from previous equilibria, and (c) the frequent absence or even reversal of expected wealth-fertility gradients. These empirical challenges have been met to an increasing extent by specifically incorporating durable wealth and resource transfers into more traditional life-history models. Such relatively new models build on classical life-history theory to generate novel predictions. Among these are quite robust predictions that the existence of heritable wealth will decrease optimal fertility and that, once the system of resource transfers is established, fertility and resource transfers will coevolve.

Modern humans are an anomaly in evolution, and the final key features occurred late in human evolution. Ultimate explanations for this evolutionary trajectory are best attained through synthetic studies that integrate genetics, biological anthropology, and archaeology, all resting firmly in the field of evolutionary anthropology. These fields of endeavor typically operate in relative isolation. This synthetic overview identifies the three pillars of human uniqueness: an evolved advanced cognition, hyperprosociality, and psychology for social learning. These properties are foundational for cumulative culture, the dominant adaptation of our species. Although the Homo line evolved in the direction of advancing cognition, the evidence shows that only modern humans evolved extreme levels of prosociality and social learning; this review offers an explanation. These three traits were in place ∼200–100 ka and produced a creature capable of extraordinary social and technological structures, but one that was also empowered to make war in large groups with advanced weapons. The advance out of Africa and the annihilation of other hominin taxa, and many unprepared megafauna, were assured.

Discard studies have demonstrated that waste is more than just a symptom of an all-too-human demand for meaning or a merely technical problem for sanitary engineers and public health officials. The afterlife of waste materials and processes of waste management reveal the centrality of transient and discarded things for questions of materiality and ontology and marginal and polluting labor and environmental justice movements, as well as for critiques of the exploitation and deferred promises of modernity and imperial formations. There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but become entangled with the lives of nonhuman creatures and the future of the planet we share.

This review addresses general anthropological understandings of practice and a technical semiotic approach to pragmatics through the concept of qualia. Qualia are pragmatic signals (indexes) that materialize phenomenally in human activity as sensuous qualities. The pragmatic role of qualia is observed through exemplary accounts of the “feeling of doing” from the ethnographic record of practice in four domains: linguistic practices, phatic practices organized explicitly around social relations, practices organized around external “things,” and body-focal practices. Attention to qualia enables anthropologists to consider ethnographically what is continuous semiotically across and within practices—from communication to embodiment. The article concludes with a discussion of praxis in relation to practice and pragmatics and offers suggestions for future research on qualia in the areas of awareness, language, and ritual.