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- Volume 47, 2018
Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 47, 2018
Volume 47, 2018
- Preface
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Others’ Words, Others’ Voices: The Making of a Linguistic Anthropologist
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 1–16More LessStarting from a recent flash of reflexive illumination experienced as a member of a dissertation committee, this act of (re-)constructive retrospection recalls the principal forces, experiences, and individuals that shaped my career as a linguistic anthropologist and turned my interests toward poetics, performance, language ideology, and remediation. Retracing my steps—sometimes halting, sometimes headlong—along the winding path that I have followed makes clear the degree to which my career has depended on the generous and energizing influence of my mentors, teachers, and colleagues, but also on the frustrating roadblocks placed in my way by less generous and understanding figures that led me to turn toward what proved to be far more productive directions. This reflexive process has also made clearer to me than ever before how strongly my career has been affected by the shifting conditions imposed by the political economy of higher education as I made my way in academe.
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Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 17–32More LessWe interrogate the many ways that language and food intersect. Food and its uses provide setting and structure for language, just as language and its uses constrain and inform food activities. We illuminate where and how food and language co-occur and how they are dynamically co-constitutive, foregrounding the potential for food-and-language scholarship to contribute to understandings of political economic processes and structures. We organize our review around the mutual production, consumption, and circulation of food and language. We show that the richness of scholarship about consumption (especially around the family meal) has not been matched by research concerning the production of food and language, whereas the co-constituting circulation of food and language contributes to new meanings and values for both. More research is needed to clarify the surging attention to food, which may be motivated by the complex global food system and the speed and ease of mediatization and circulation of food images and ideologies.
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Literature and Reading
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 33–45More LessThis article examines anthropological approaches to fiction reading. It asks why the field of literary anthropology remains largely disinvested of ethnographic work on literary cultures and how that field might approach the study of literature and reading ethnographically. The issue of the creative agency of fiction readers is explored in the context of what it means to ask anthropological questions of literature, which includes the challenge of speaking back to dominant approaches grounded in forms of critical analysis. Finally, the article looks to recent work in the anthropology of Christianity on Bible reading and engagements with biblical characters to open up new questions about the relationship between fiction reading and temporal regimes.
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Language of Kin Relations and Relationlessness
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 47–60More LessLanguage has long been at the center of kinship studies, where there has been a tendency to see the role of language in terms of nomenclature for labeling preexisting relations. Linguistic anthropologists have turned to the constitutive role of language in the formation of kin relations. People enact kin relations through behaviors that include, but are not limited to, the linguistic. Rather than static grids of terminology, linguistic anthropology finds its empirical object in the reflexive practices of speakers as they construct, reformulate, transform, and sometimes undercut cultural norms for being kin. Taking kinship behaviors that include language to be in dialectical relation to kinship structures, I review recent work that exemplifies linguistic anthropology's pragmatic approach to kinship, from the richness and diversity of kin relations to the possibility of the lack of kin relations as such.
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The Anthropology of Mining: The Social and Environmental Impacts of Resource Extraction in the Mineral Age
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 61–77More LessThis article examines the social and environmental costs of living in the mineral age, wherein contemporary global livelihoods depend almost completely on the extraction of mineral resources. Owing to the logic of extractivism—the rapid and widespread removal of resources for exchange in global capitalist markets—both developed and developing countries are inextricably entangled in pursuing resource extraction as a means of sustaining current lifestyles as well as a key mechanism for promoting socioeconomic development. The past 15 years has seen a massive expansion of mineral resource extraction as many developing countries liberalized their mining sectors, allowing foreign capital and mining companies onto the lands of peasant farmers and indigenous people. This mining expansion has also facilitated the rise of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Transformations in livelihoods and corporate practices as well as the environmental impacts and social conflicts wrought by mining are the central foci of this article.
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The Ethics and Aesthetics of Care
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 79–95More LessThis article is positioned at the intersection of linguistic, medical, and psychological anthropology and reviews scholarship on the communicative processes that constitute moral/ethical care. Varying notions of care have become a leitmotif in efforts to include the analysis of agency and creativity in discussions of the lived experience of marginalization. Understandings of care have in common an emphasis on relationality and activity: Communicative activities of care both constitute and are made relevant by morally/ethically framed relationships with others and oneself. Embodied communication is central in both care activities and the constitution of moral/ethical care. From a phenomenological standpoint, communicative activities of care are simultaneously social action and embodied experience. This article reviews three key themes: (a) the embodied linguistic constitution of care, (b) the performance of care, and (c) exclusion from care. Together, these themes reveal common moral/ethical–aesthetic processes that are shared across diverse social and cultural contexts.
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Science/Art/Culture Through an Oceanic Lens
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 97–115More LessSince the year 2000, artists have increasingly employed tools, methods, and aesthetics associated with scientific practice to produce forms of art that assert themselves as kinds of experimental and empirical knowledge production parallel to and in critical dialogue with science. Anthropologists, intrigued by the work of art in the age of its technoscientific affiliation, have taken notice. This article discusses bio art, eco art, and surveillance art that have gathered, or might yet reward, anthropological attention, particularly as it might operate as an allied form of cultural critique. We focus on art that takes oceans as its concern, tuning to anthropological interests in translocal connection, climate change, and the politics of the extraterritorial. We end with a call for decolonizing art–science and for an anti-colonial aesthetics of oceanic worlds.
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Consumerism
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 117–132More LessThe article investigates how consumerism is perceived as an unremarkable part of quotidian existence, as a patriotic duty at various moments, as an indicator of social class, and as a means of semiotic self-fashioning. In consumerism, the tension between the sumptuary restraint on conspicuous consumption, which characterized the early Protestant ethic, and the dependence of capitalism itself on boundless commodity circulation, emerges again and again. I investigate how certain forms of consumerism, relating to excess and improper storage, are reclassified in medical terms. I also investigate modes of strategic consumerism, which try to bridge the gap between producer and consumer, and how certain forms of performative labor are themselves consumed. I close with a few reflections on sites for future study: shopping as a form of underrecognized labor, and an auto-ethnographic turn for academics, inspecting the reach of consumerism into academic practices and universities themselves.
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Police and Policing
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 133–148More LessThe anthropology of policing draws from a range of intellectual traditions to generate new understandings of the police as an institution and policing as a social practice. This article reviews recent anthropological work on police, situating it in longer-term disciplinary concerns. I begin with the connection between policing and personhood, exploring how the subject–object dynamics of police domination are related to anthropological conceptions of kinship, law, and social control. I then turn to the contribution that anthropological ethnography makes to a critical theory of the relationship between sovereignty, violence, and police power. I conclude by reflecting on the situation of scholarship in our current political environment, suggesting that the anthropological turn to policing is animated, in part, by hope for a better understanding of the nature of moral agency under difficult conditions.
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The Language of Evangelism: Christian Cultures of Circulation Beyond the Missionary Prologue
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 149–165More LessThis article provides an overview of recent scholarship on the language of evangelism and missionization within the anthropology of Christianity. Attention to Christian evangelism and forms of circulation was minimized as scholars worked to distinguish the study of Christianity from the study of colonialism, often treating missionaries and missionization as a prologue to a more central analysis of transformation organized through local people and local cultural change. However, issues of circulation are at the heart of many Christian experiences, especially for those within evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic worlds. This research is discussed here in terms of Christian cultures of circulation specifically and of models of communicative circulation more generally. Framing the language of evangelism in terms of circulation allows for the integrated discussion of a wide range of related issues, including work on translation, missionary training practices, and material formations of evangelism.
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Children as Interactional Brokers of Care
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 167–184More LessBringing together ethnographic approaches to childhood, linguistic anthropology, and relational–feminist perspectives on care, this review focuses on the role of children as interactional brokers of care, a role that has been underappreciated. Building from the premise that, through language, children perform a fundamental form of other-oriented care—that of mediating another person's ability to express themselves—this review explores the material, political, moral, and affective dimensions of children's interactional care work. Attention to the interactional–relational aspects of children's caregiving shows the extent to which children are involved in facilitating the circulation of care and enabling community care networks, and it opens up new possibilities for how we conceptualize care: It illuminates the processes through which care practices are organized, negotiated, and enacted at the intersection of the local and the global; it reveals care as a reciprocal, distributed interactional achievement; and it helps us transcend dichotomies that have characterized scholarly thinking about care.
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Industrial Meat Production
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 185–199More LessThis review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words of the article's title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses. In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of industrialisms both old and emerging, at once violent and caring, far-reaching yet incomplete. The review further examines the numerous and distinct ways that scholars have suggested that industrial meat production is an exceptional kind of industrialism: one that requires analytics, ethics, forms of critique, and modes of attention that differ from those developed by studies of other sites of manufacturing.
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Political Parody and the Politics of Ambivalence
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 201–216More LessThis article offers insight into the meanings of the unprecedented political potential of humor in the early twenty-first century by discussing three parodic forms of contemporary political humor: carnivalesque politics, parodic reworkings of political discourses, and political protests and satirical activism. Revealing how political parody both produces ambiguity and hinges on it, the article proposes a shift in attention from its effects and capacity to promote or hinder a political change, and from the domination versus resistance binary, toward ambivalent political subjectivities that unfold in the production and consumption of political parody. The ambiguity of political parody, its reflexivity, and its capacity to build or reconfigure affective communities are workings of political humor that enable individuals to embrace their own involvement and vulnerability and the ambiguous and unpredictable moral consequences of their complex positioning as an authentic and potentially productive form of engaging with political reality.
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Word for Word: Verbatim as Political Technologies
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 217–232More LessVerbatim—word for word—is assumed to be a text that faithfully captures and represents a discursive event that took place in time and space, which would otherwise be ephemeral and unrepeatable. In modern societies, verbatim stands in for durable indexicality and materializes the social epistemology of evidence, accountability, and authenticity. Today's ubiquitous presence of recording technologies amplifies the conviction that the production of verbatim as in the conversion, for example, from speech to writing is unmediated and transparently mechanical. Far from being unremarkable, however, the seemingly unmotivated commensurability between original and copy is an ideological function of social reproduction and institutional power. Building on both classic and contemporary linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic studies of verbatim texts, this review suggests how ethnographically situated studies of verbatim in its production and process open up cogent historical and political analysis of social institutions and relations and of subject formation through the labor of inscription.
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Interspecies Relations and Agrarian Worlds
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 233–249More LessRecent years have witnessed burgeoning interest in interspecies relations and multispecies ethnography. This review explores what such perspectives bring to long-standing anthropological attention to agrarian worlds. Considering why so much recent scholarship only minimally engages with longer disciplinary traditions found within ecological and environmental anthropology and ethnobotany, the review examines continuities and discontinuities across these different modes of attending to interspecies relationships. From here, it explores how contemporary scholarship renews anthropological attention to questions of domestication, relatedness, agency, and personhood and how it charts new ground by engaging theories of biopolitics, biocapital, biosemiotics, and plant ontologies. While noting that recent work has distinctive theoretical preoccupations, the review concludes by suggesting that fruitful possibilities lie in working with, and across, established and emergent anthropologies of the agrarian.
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Hybrid Peace: Ethnographies of War
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 251–262More LessThis article reviews recent ethnographies of war that shed light on interconnected states of security at home, international military interventions, and hybrid or rhizomic warfare doctrines. I suggest the notion of hybrid peace to explore global implications of these ethnographic perspectives and to ask what it means to inhabit spaces that are constituted by such hybrid warfare. I argue for the usefulness of Schmitt's “nomos of the earth” and his theory of the partisan to conceptualize this condition and bring together different approaches to warfare.
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Ethics in Human Biology: A Historical Perspective on Present Challenges
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 263–278More LessThe practice of human biology requires the negotiation of a range of ethical issues, including the politics of race and indigeneity, the appropriate use of research materials, and the relationship between researchers and those people from whose bodies they seek to gain knowledge. Grounding my discussion in a history of the field, I discuss key ethical turning points that have shaped the present. These include the field's complex historical relationship to race and colonialism and the implications this relationship has for research, including the needs and desires of Indigenous peoples. This review demonstrates that human biology has been a crucible for many of the most complex ethical issues facing anthropology and allied practices of biomedicine and life science. Its future success as a field is inextricable from its practitioners’ ability to adapt in ways that foster the trust and engagement of those humans whose bodies constitute the basis for their knowledge making.
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Development and Disciplinary Complicity: Contract Archaeology in South America Under the Critical Gaze
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 279–293More LessIn South America, as elsewhere, development projects have to go through environmental permitting, a component of which is the archaeological assessment of the areas to be impacted. Because such an assessment is paid for by the development companies seeking such a permit, it has come to be known as contract archaeology. Given the accelerated pace of development projects in the region, it is not surprising that contract archaeology has grown exponentially. The academic literature dealing with it and related fields has also witnessed a rapid growth, which this article seeks to review. In doing so, it discusses the literature that accepts and promotes contract archaeology (a) as a part of environmental permitting; (b) as the primary stimulus responsible for widening the job market, whose structure has transformed disciplinary practice to a large extent; and (c) in terms of its relationship with the archaeological record and with heritage education. This article also reviews a growing literature, both supportive and critical, that assesses contract archaeology.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 53 (2024)
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Volume 52 (2023)
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Volume 51 (2022)
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Volume 50 (2021)
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Volume 49 (2020)
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Volume 48 (2019)
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Volume 47 (2018)
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Volume 46 (2017)
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Volume 45 (2016)
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Volume 44 (2015)
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Volume 43 (2014)
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Volume 42 (2013)
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Volume 41 (2012)
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Volume 40 (2011)
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Volume 39 (2010)
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Volume 38 (2009)
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Volume 37 (2008)
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Volume 36 (2007)
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Volume 35 (2006)
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Volume 34 (2005)
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Volume 33 (2004)
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Volume 32 (2003)
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Volume 31 (2002)
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Volume 30 (2001)
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Volume 29 (2000)
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Volume 28 (1999)
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Volume 27 (1998)
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Volume 26 (1997)
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Volume 25 (1996)
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Volume 24 (1995)
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Volume 23 (1994)
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Volume 22 (1993)
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Volume 21 (1992)
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Volume 20 (1991)
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Volume 19 (1990)
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Volume 18 (1989)
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Volume 17 (1988)
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Volume 16 (1987)
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Volume 15 (1986)
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Volume 14 (1985)
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Volume 13 (1984)
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Volume 12 (1983)
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Volume 11 (1982)
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Volume 10 (1981)
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Volume 9 (1980)
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Volume 8 (1979)
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Volume 7 (1978)
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Volume 6 (1977)
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Volume 5 (1976)
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Volume 4 (1975)
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Volume 3 (1974)
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Volume 2 (1973)
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Volume 1 (1972)
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Volume 0 (1932)