Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 49, 2020

Nearly a decade ago, we published the first Annual Review of Anthropology article on tobacco (Kohrman & Benson 2011). Since then, much has happened, and much has persisted regarding human-tobacco relations. Here, we present a stocktaking of how scholars drawing on anthropological methods have responded.

This article summarizes my perspective on vital lessons that I have learned over my 45 years as a practicing anthropologist. To avoid repeating previously published biographical details of my life, I have only briefly described the facts and stages of my career here. Instead I have focused on a personal account of what I have learned from the events and experiences of my career and have attempted to distill them into underlying premises that have guided my academic vocation. I call them “nine truths I live by.”

Climate anthropology has broadened over the past decade from predominately locally focused studies on climate impacts to encompass new approaches to climate science, mitigation, sustainability transformations, risks, and resilience. We examine how theoretical positionings, including from actor–network theory, new materialisms, ontologies, and cosmopolitics, have helped expand anthropological climate research, particularly in three key interrelated areas. First, we investigate ethnographic approaches to climate science knowledge production, particularly around epistemic authority, visioning of futures, and engagements with the material world. Second, we consider climate adaptation studies that critically examine discourses and activities surrounding concepts of vulnerability, subjectivities, and resilience. Third, we analyze climate mitigation, including energy transitions, technological optimism, market-based solutions, and other ways of living in a carbon-constrained world. We conclude that anthropological approaches provide novel perspectives, made possible through engagements with our uniquely situated research partners, as well as opportunities for opening up diverse solutions and possible transformative futures.

Deaf anthropology is a field that exists in conversation with but is not reducible to the interdisciplinary field of deaf studies. Deaf anthropology is predicated upon a commitment to understanding deafnesses across time and space while holding on to “deaf” as a category that does something socially, politically, morally, and methodologically. In doing so, deaf anthropology moves beyond compartmentalizing the body, the senses, and disciplinary boundaries. We analyze the close relationship between anthropology writ large and deaf studies: Deaf studies scholars have found analytics and categories from anthropology, such as the concept of culture, to be productive in analyzing deaf peoples’ experiences and the sociocultural meanings of deafness. As we note, however, scholarship on deaf peoples’ experiences is increasingly variegated. This review is arranged into four overlapping sections titled Socialities and Similitudes; Mobilities, Spaces, and Networks; Modalities and the Sensorium; and Technologies and Futures.

Archaeological investigations of late prehistoric Iberia between the Neolithic and Bronze Age (6000–1500 BCE) have long been a battleground between indigenist and exogenous models, and understandings of mobility and alterity have played an important role in these debates. Prior to the development of radiocarbon dating, key cultural transformations, such as megaliths, copper metallurgy, fortified hilltop settlements, and Beakers, were generally associated with nonlocal peoples, migrants, or colonizers. With the incorporation of radiocarbon dating to Iberian archaeological contexts in the 1980s and the determination of the antiquity of many of these cultural changes, the pendulum swung in the other direction, with a marked shift toward viewing autochthonous origins for these watershed transitions. In recent years, developments in strontium isotope analyses, genetics, and raw material characterization studies have provided new evidence for the mobility of peoples and things, and diffusionist models, sometimes without critical theorization, have once again reemerged.

The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experimentation, and to develop new forms of collaboration. Critics are concerned that the term Anthropocene overemphasizes human mastery or erases differential human responsibilities, including imperialism, capitalism, and racism, and new forms of technocratic governance. Others find the term helpful in drawing attention to disastrous environmental change, inspiring a reinvigorated attention to the ontological unruliness of the world, to multiple temporal scales, and to intertwined social and natural histories. New forms of noticing can be linked to systems analytics, including capitalist world systems, structural comparisons of patchy landscapes, infrastructures and ecological models, emerging sociotechnical assemblages, and spirits. Rather than a historical epoch defined by geologists, the Anthropocene is a problem that is pulling anthropologists into new forms of noticing and analysis, and into experiments and collaborations beyond anthropology.

As complex institutions extend into and govern greater spheres of social life, ethnographers contend with policy in an ever-widening range of fieldsites. This review examines anthropology of policy as an emerging subfield of political anthropology, focusing on policy making as central to contemporary governance in English-language ethnographies. Broadening the analytical field in the study of policy to include the targets of policy and their allies is one of the central contributions of an anthropological approach to policy making. Anthropological studies of policy production, implementation, and effects face significant methodological and ethical challenges. Scholarly debates in the United States and Europe continue to erupt over the production of scholarship intended to inform policy making, including the co-option of ethnography. While turning the anthropological gaze on powerful political actors could contribute to decolonization efforts within the discipline, ethically adopting ethnographic research into policy making requires complex alliances with communities targeted by policy.

Aging occurs in all sexually reproducing organisms. That is, physical degradation over time occurs from conception until death. While the life span of a species is often viewed as a benchmark of aging, the pace and intensity of physical degradation over time varies owing to environmental influences, genetics, allocation of energetic investment, and phylogenetic history. Significant variation in aging within mammals, primates, and great apes, including humans, is therefore common across species. The evolution of aging in the hominin lineage is poorly known; however, clues can be derived from the fossil record. Ongoing advances continue to shed light on the interactions between life-history variables such as reproductive effort and aging. This review presents our current understanding of the evolution of aging in humans, drawing on population variation, comparative research, trade-offs, and sex differences, as well as tissue-specific patterns of physical degradation. Implications for contemporary health challenges and the future of human evolutionary anthropology research are also discussed.

The prehistory of the Aegean, Balkans, and Carpathian Basin has changed dramatically in the last two decades. This review covers five aspects of these changes: (a) the development of theoretical approaches, in which diversification from cultural archaeology has seen the spread of processual, postprocessual and later approaches; (b) the acquisition of data, with the key major development being the proliferation of large-scale infrastructure projects; (c) the synthesis of data, the most significant challenge being to make sense of the massive increase in paleo-environmental research, materials science, regional surveys, and site monographs; (d) thematic questions, whose very diversity underscores the discipline's growth in these regions; and (e) emergent trends, such as the creation of new forms of synthesis at the local, regional, and interregional scales, the theorizing and differentiation of new ways of relating people, places, plants, and animals and objects, and continuing diversification in the application of scientific techniques.

Unlike most mammals, human fathers cooperate with mothers to care for young to an extraordinary degree. Human paternal care likely evolved alongside our unique life history strategy of raising slow-developing, energetically costly children, often in rapid succession. Adaptive frameworks generally assume that paternal provisioning played a critical role in this pattern's emergence. We draw on nonhuman primate data to propose that nonprovisioning forms of low-cost hominin male care were potentially foundational and ratcheted up through evolutionary time, helping facilitate social contexts for later subsistence specialization and sharing. We then argue for expanding the breadth of anthropological research on paternal effects in families, particularly in three domains: direct care and teaching;social capital cultivation; and reduction of family conflict. Anthropologists can greatly contribute to conversations about the determinants of children's development across contexts, but we need to ask more expansive questions about the pathways through which caregivers (including fathers) affect child outcomes.

Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated a negative methodology. New work has addressed the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production in and about sites of mass atrocity and is developing novel research practices within these schisms. While considering the (im)possibility of research as the condition of possibility (as well as the question) for anthropological (and historical) work on the long durée of mass violence, this review highlights some adverse ethnographic methods that have emerged (and have been conceptualized) in the interstices. A critical positionality vis-à-vis anthropology's positive outlook for evidentiary presences in the field has moved scholars of mass atrocity and its aftermath toward methods that would tarry in and through the negative.

Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This modern migration entails a material, sensual experience in time. The craft of archaeology has traditionally engaged with the material, the sensual, and the temporal. Archaeologists who study the materiality of modern undocumented migration embrace activist-engaged research that applies the craft of archaeology to the contemporary world. They study the materiality of migration to reveal and comprehend the lived experience of displaced persons. They seek to understand the barriers erected to that journey, the things migrants acquire and leave on the trail, migrant placemaking, their stranded lives, how they build new lives, what the migrants have left behind in their home countries, and the heritage of forced migration. They approach this work in critical solidarity with displaced peoples.

This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,” broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.

While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continue to produce uncertainty. The project of living in a toxic world entails ethical, technical, and aesthetic efforts to understand toxicity as a contingent encounter among beings, systems, and things, rather than as a fundamental characteristic of particular substances. Anthropologists do not just observe such encounters; they live and work within them. This review examines recent anthropological research on toxicity, proposing that responses to toxic disaster and occupational exposure, as well as acts of familial, state, or corporate care, are all modes of “toxic worlding.” The review concludes with a summary of recent research in collaborative and engaged anthropology, suggesting that such approaches are essential not so much for purifying or detoxifying the world as for making it otherwise.

On November 16, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This federal legislation marked the culmination of decades of debate among scientists, curators, and Native American leaders and activists over the control of ancestral human remains and sacred, funerary, and communally owned objects. Anthropologists have now investigated myriad aspects of NAGPRA, from its underlying philosophical arguments; to its legislative history, its legal ramifications and political effects, and the methods of its implementation; to how it has remade American museums, archaeologists, tribes, and federally funded repositories; and to how it has ushered in a new (even if imperfect) period of collaboration and partnership. This article reviews the last 50 years of scholarship on repatriation, with a particular focus on NAGPRA's last 30 years.

Previous research on language and emotion in anthropology has demonstrated that rather than being a private, subjective, and prediscursive experience belonging to individuals, emotion is an intersubjective, emergent process that is not only everywhere in language but also everywhere language is. In this review, I discuss how recent research in linguistic anthropology and related fields has continued to build on such insights in investigations of the flow of affect across bodies, the ways in which politically situated ideologies of language and emotion function at various institutional scales, and the role of language and emotion in the enactment of agency. Overall, my discussion is framed in a consideration of how this body of work contributes both theoretically and methodologically to understanding the role that language and emotion play in mediating the dynamic relationship between vulnerability and political agency.

The adaptive origins of primates and anthropoid primates are topics of enduring interest to biological anthropologists. A convention in these discussions is to treat the light environment as binary—night is dark, day is light—and to impute corresponding selective pressure on the visual systems and behaviors of primates. In consequence, debate has tended to focus on whether a given trait can be interpreted as evidence of nocturnal or diurnal behavior in the primate fossil record. Such classification elides the variability in light, or the ways that primates internalize light in their environments. Here, we explore the liminality of light by focusing on what it is, its many sources, and its flux under natural conditions. We conclude by focusing on the intensity and spectral properties of twilight, and we review the mounting evidence of its importance as a cue that determines the onset or offset of primate activities as well as the entrainment of circadian rhythms.

The study of ancient genomes has burgeoned at an incredible rate in the last decade. The result is a shift in archaeological narratives, bringing with it a fierce debate on the place of genetics in anthropological research. Archaeogenomics has challenged and scrutinized fundamental themes of anthropological research, including human origins, movement of ancient and modern populations, the role of social organization in shaping material culture, and the relationship between culture, language, and ancestry. Moreover, the discussion has inevitably invoked new debates on indigenous rights, ownership of ancient materials, inclusion in the scientific process, and even the meaning of what it is to be a human. We argue that the broad and seemingly daunting ethical, methodological, and theoretical challenges posed by archaeogenomics, in fact, represent the very cutting edge of social science research. Here, we provide a general review of the field by introducing the contemporary discussion points and summarizing methodological and ethical concerns, while highlighting the exciting possibilities of ancient genome studies in archaeology from an anthropological perspective.

From the late 1990s, a wave of writing in anthropology took up the idiom of madness to orient a critical approach. However, anthropology's use of madness as critique reflects a longer conversation between psychiatry and anthropology. As madness is used to point to and connect other things—afflictions, therapeutics, medicine, politics, colonialism, religion, and, especially, trauma as a social condition—it is noteworthy not only for its breadth, but also because it is often applied to contexts in which it already has purchase as critique. Thus, madness in anthropology is a mirror onto the discipline's recursive engagements with psychiatry and the worlds to which both turn their attention.