Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 45, 2016

I am delighted to contribute this career piece, although there are many other aged physical anthropologists who are more distinguished! I have tried to avoid duplicating another retrospective rumination (Jolly 2009) while describing personal academic experiences over the past 60 years or so. This is not a CV; I have concentrated on my main research themes, omitting some academic byways, teaching, textbooks, and edited volumes. The account is punctuated with opinionated comments, mostly on physical anthropology, but sometimes, rashly, on other anthropological specialties. It begins early, because my professional interests have deep roots, and finishes with a speculation about the future of physical anthropology, and anthropology in general, in the coming genomic age.

This review argues that the elastic space between intellectual property (IP) and unauthorized use (including piracy and counterfeiting) is an increasingly important feature of contemporary textual production and circulation. Within the context of digital textuality, circulatory legitimacy becomes integral to both contextualization and entextualization. The dynamic relationship between IP and piracy/counterfeiting appears as a means of organizing sense-perception and subjectivity, parsing geopolitical space, handling the surfeits and deficits that emerge in contemporary text circulation, distinguishing formality from informality, and deciding levels and forms of acceptable participation in the production and consumption of commodities. This becomes particularly fraught in the face of anxieties about the potential limitlessness of circulation.

This review of research literature on the language practices associated with the production and circulation of scientific knowledge documents four discourse-ideological processes: data/theory enregisterment, objectification, visualization, and entextualization. I argue that these processes cause the stabilization of scientific reference by imposing a conventionalist language ideology that opposes language and the objective reality of the world that it references.

The much-vaunted growth of cities across Asia has been accompanied by new forms of urban exclusion. This article reviews recent research into urban space and exclusion in Asia, focusing on anthropology as well as on key works in cognate fields such as geography, political science, sociology, and urban studies. The review of the literature suggests that spatial exclusions in Asian cities are perpetuated by numerous different modes, some overt and intentional, others tacit and unintentional, and that inclusion and exclusion are often entangled with each other. Six representative modes of exclusion are outlined: paperwork, money, violence, environment, space, and civility. Essential scholarship about each mode of exclusion is introduced, and it is suggested that the best scholarly work on urban exclusion investigates the overlaps and intersections of modes such as these.

The recent Ebola epidemic provides a dramatic example of the devastation and fear generated by epidemics, particularly those caused by new emerging or reemerging diseases. A focus on the control and prevention of diseases in living populations dominates most epidemic disease research. However, research on epidemics in the past provides a temporal depth to our understanding of the context and consequences of diseases and is crucial for predicting how diseases might shape human biology and demography in the future. This article reviews recent research on historic epidemics of plague and tuberculosis, both of which have affected human populations for millennia. Research on these diseases demonstrates the range (and differential availability) of various lines of evidence (e.g., burial context, diagnostic skeletal lesions, molecular data) that inform about past disease in general. I highlight how research on past epidemics may be informative in ways that benefit living populations.

Historicity has emerged within anthropology to refer to cultural perceptions of the past. It calls attention to the techniques such as rituals that people use to learn about the past, the principles that guide them, and the performances and genres in which information about the past can be presented. The concept is in essential tension with the meaning of the term as “factuality” within the discipline of history and in wider society. Anthropologists also sometimes compose histories within this Western paradigm, but historicity in anthropology orientates a different objective, namely to discover the ways (beyond Western historicism) in which people, whether within or outside the West, construe and represent the past. Historicity, which is grounded on a notion of temporality, offers a framework for approaching time as nonlinear and may thus be suited to studying other histories without fundamentally measuring how well they conform to Western history.

Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a framework can be compared with ethnographic work on the silence of survivors. Experiences of inhumanity and extreme violence eventually find a discursive niche but nevertheless pose problems of translation. Through the lens of traditional anthropology another realm emerges—a world of vampires, zombies, and cannibals. “Crimes against humanity” can be added to the list, but overall translations seem oriented toward the maintenance of interpretative control, even in contexts of mass dehumanization. Anthropologists are well placed to pay attention to both the complex evidential systems of survivors and the construction of liberal voices. The image of trauma and its untranslatability, however, linger in the background of interventions and point to the vital but endangered bond between language and humanity.

In the 1970s, public archaeology, a major theme in anthropology, sought to articulate the field's new orientation toward engaging the nonprofessional, general public, particularly in the realm of cultural resource management (CRM). Over the decades that followed, this approach evolved to focus increasingly on ways to connect archaeological heritage to different kinds of publics. Through this work, among the most important publics that emerged were groups who claimed descent from the ancient peoples archaeologists studied. By the end of the 1990s, a significant branch of archaeological practice had shifted toward new theories and methods for directly and meaningfully engaging descendant communities. This article focuses on how in the United States, and beyond, research with Native peoples in particular has created a rich dialogue about such wide-ranging themes as ethics, collaboration, indigeneity, and multivocality. Although critiques have emerged, the increasingly active role of descendant communities has fundamentally shifted the way museums present culture and contributed to community development, tribal heritage management programs, social justice, and the advancement of the CRM industry. Descendant communities have helped to fundamentally transform archaeology into a science that is driven by an ethical engagement with key publics invested in the interpretation and management of the material past.

Archaeologists generally agree that high-power computer technology constitutes the most efficient venue for addressing many issues in archaeological research. Digital techniques have become indispensable components of archaeological surveys, fieldwork, lab work, and communication between researchers. One of the greatest advantages of the digital approach is its ability to examine large assemblages of items using advanced statistical methods. Digital documentation has reached the point of no return in archaeological research, and reverting to traditional methods is highly improbable. However, digital data may also contain additional information that has yet to be extracted by computer analysis. In this arena, new computer algorithms can be triggered by research questions that cannot be addressed without digital models.

Sociolinguists are deeply politically committed to (dis)fluency. They have generally seen it as their task to revise popular wisdom on the presumed disfluency of nonstandard, accented, or multilingual speakers and to demonstrate regularity and competence where deficit is presumed. I argue that this revision has its merits but is not immune to reconsideration for its naturalization of cultural ideas that value fluency and its promise of modernization through sociolinguistic knowledge. After addressing the limitations of this literature, I review works that explore alternative conceptualizations of (dis)fluency. I build on these to argue that rather than being an inherent characteristic of particular linguistic forms, (dis)fluency depends on relationships between these forms and their evaluation by speakers with competing perspectives and different positions in the social arrangements they so help to reproduce.

Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provided the initial impetus for explicitly ontological research in archaeology. Their impact on archaeologists, however, has been quite different. What I call the “metaphysical archaeologists” trace their genealogy from Latour, though they are now equally influenced by “new materialism” and the “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2015). They have introduced an alternative metaphysical orthodoxy to archaeology. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro and colleagues have authorized the return of the grand ethnographic analogy to archaeology, particularly in the case of animism. A second, quite different tendency inspired by these same anthropologists is to engage with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice. I suggest that a point of convergence between the metaphysical and the latter anthropological approaches exists in their focus on the concept of alterity.

Anthropological STS, distinct from its nearest neighbors social studies of science (SSK), social studies of technology (SCOT), and actor–network theory (ANT), is (a) more holistic and culturally embedded than those neighbors and (b) in conversation with comparative literature, film, and media studies, including imaginaries of networks beyond national boundaries. Asian STS, or theory from the Global East, rearranges theory from the Global North (traditional STS), the Global South (South Africa), India (postcolonial or subaltern studies), or white settler postcolonial theory from the antipodes. New key journals and networks are centers for STS in Asia. With consciousness of anthropocene changes and biological sensibilities of how systems interact, regenerate, stabilize, or collapse and morph, transform, and become otherwise, this article argues that we need more perspectives, located in different parts of the earth, on our bios and our polis, including revisionist histories of inter-Asian circulations and global circuitries, both as sentinels and as sources for robustness, consent, and legitimacy of flexible and responsive governance of emergent and interacting, if culturally variegated, technoscientific societies.

Anthropoid primates other than humans show a conspicuously disjunct geographic distribution today, inhabiting mostly tropical and subtropical parts of Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. During the latter part of the Eocene, early anthropoids showed a similarly disjunct distribution, although South America and Africa were both island continents then. Attempts to explain the historical biogeography of anthropoids as resulting from vicariance caused by tectonic rifting between South America and Africa conflict with both the chronology and the topology of anthropoid evolution. The only viable hypotheses that remain entail sweepstakes dispersal across marine barriers by early monkeys on natural rafts. Early anthropoids and certain Asian rodent clades seem to have been especially adept at accomplishing sweepstakes dispersal, particularly during the Eocene, although this process has classically been envisioned as highly random and extremely rare. This article identifies and discusses biological and geological factors that make sweepstakes dispersal by certain taxa at given times far less random than previously conceived.

In the contemporary world, archaeology has become drawn, sometimes in dramatic fashion, into the violence of war. Archaeologists have taken part in monitoring and attempting to protect sites, museums, and monuments. However, they have engaged to a lesser extent with the underlying connections between damage to and destruction of archaeological remains and the reasons why archaeology has become increasingly both a target and a weapon of war. To highlight the complex intertwining of archaeology and war, this review examines the relationships among archaeologists' conceptions of their profession, the spiraling commodification of remains of the past, understandings and practices of cultural heritage, and the willful destruction of archaeological sites and objects, with a focus on Western Asia.

The field of social and behavioral epigenetics examines the role of epigenetic modifications to mediate the effect of psychosocial stressors on an individual's health and well-being. Epigenetic modifications influence gene expression, which can lead to changes in an individual's phenotype. DNA methylation is an important epigenetic modification that varies throughout the lifespan and appears to respond to a wide range of psychosocial and biological stressors. The effects of early-life adversity impact future health and may be passed on to future generations. The underlying model proposes that stress influences health via an epigenetic mechanism involving altered DNA methylation and gene expression. This review summarizes a range of studies that have identified DNA methylation at specific genes and throughout the genome in association with multiple psychosocial stressors, including psychiatric disorders, sexual and physical abuse, and war trauma. Future studies should test a comprehensive list of epigenetic modifications in association with psychosocial stressors and multiple health outcomes.

Previous work in the anthropology of cancer often examined causes, risks, and medical, familial, and embodied relationships created by the disease. Recent writing has expanded that focus, attending to cancer as a “total social fact” (Jain 2013) and dissecting the landscape of “carcinogenic relationships” (Livingston 2012). Cancer-driven relationships become subjectively real through individual suffering, stigma, and inequality. This article traces concepts developed from a primarily US-centered discourse to a global cancer discourse, including cancer-related issues continuing to raise concern such as stigma, narrative moments of critical reflection on the dominance of biomedicine, and processes by which individuals and communities manage inadequate access to biomedical technologies. Beyond the medical relations and politics of cancer, this article considers the ways in which ethnography addresses local moral worlds and differences that come to matter in attending to the disease, the person, and consequent social and material relations.

Although the languages of Native North America and the linguistic communities that spoke these languages once provided the key data for American anthropology's early agenda under Boas, linguistic anthropologists continue their study in a manner inflected to contemporary political economic realities and theoretical concerns. One area of scholarship that displays some continuity with earlier research is the study of Native American place-names, but even here contemporary researchers have explored the ethnographic surround of naming practices, including the multilingualism and multiculturalism of today's indigenous communities. Other research topics that have had less precedent include verbal art, language ideologies, and linguistic racism. Recent research in Native North American verbal art has advanced the appreciation of indigenous poetics but also developed a “critical” ethnopoetics that attends to a larger political economic context. Recent research on language ideologies has explored such topics as new patterns of language and identity and the role of ideologies in language revitalization.

This review article approaches the turn to affect theory as diagnostic of broader currents in cultural anthropology. This is a time of increased curiosity within the subfield. It is also a time of increased anxiety, as researchers feel mounting pressure to make a case for the empirical value of what they do. Affect theory seems to offer cultural anthropologists a way of getting to the bottom of things: to the forces that compel, attract, and provoke. And yet what affect theory is offering cultural anthropologists may be less an account of how the world works than a new awareness of the premises that guide their research. I base these observations on a discussion of recent ethnographies that deploy affect theory in the study of labor, governance, and animal–human relations. I conclude with an assessment of the risks and opportunities associated with the adoption of theoretical models from other fields.

By revisiting earlier debates around the definition of peasantries and new issues around farming in present-day agricultural regimes, this review underlines the uneven forms of capitalist surplus extraction. After revisiting the classic debate, I explore present-day issues such as market-led agrarian reforms, land grabs, and transnational peasant movements that recenter the peasant debate. The following sections address two expressions of small-scale agricultural production: contract farming and agroecological short-circuit food provisioning. These two varieties of contemporary peasantries express different forms of dependent autonomy and are integrated in value accumulation circuits in different ways. A final section of the article attempts to compare aspects present in agriculture with similar ones present in other sectors of production to show the theoretical value of these discussions.