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- Volume 49, 2020
Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 49, 2020
Volume 49, 2020
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Tobacco Reconsidered: Ongoing Omissions, Original Outlooks in the Slipstreams of Experience, Global Health, and Critical Industry Studies
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. A-1–A-5More LessNearly 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.
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Reflections of an Imperfect Anthropologist
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 1–12More LessThis 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.”
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Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 13–29More LessClimate 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.
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Deaf Anthropology
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 31–47More LessDeaf 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.
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Mobility and Alterity in Iberian Late Prehistoric Archaeology: Current Research on the Neolithic–Early Bronze Age (6000–1500 BCE)
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 49–65More LessArchaeological 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.
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Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 67–82More LessThe 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.
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Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 83–99More LessAs 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.
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Aging, Life History, and Human Evolution
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 101–121More LessAging 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.
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The Neolithic of Southeast Europe: Recent Trends
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 123–140More LessThe 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.
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Broadening Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Paternal Care and Fathers’ Effects on Children
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 141–160More LessUnlike 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.
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The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 161–173More LessRecent 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.
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The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 175–191More LessFleeing 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.
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Typologies, Typifications, and Types
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 193–208More LessThis 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.
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Living in a Toxic World
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 209–224More LessWhile 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.
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NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 225–239More LessOn 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.
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Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 241–256More LessPrevious 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.
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Liminal Light and Primate Evolution
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 257–276More LessThe 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.
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The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 277–298More LessThe 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.
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Madness: Recursive Ethnography and the Critical Uses of Psychopathology
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 299–316More LessFrom 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.
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Socio-Ecological Challenges as Modulators of Women's Reproductive Trajectories
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 317–336More LessAmenorrhea, anovulatory cycles, miscarriages, and other reproductive outcomes are often seen as pathological. Life history theory, in contrast, treats those outcomes as adaptations that helped women optimize the timing of reproductive ventures across our evolutionary history. Women's bodies adjust their reproductive strategies in response to socio-ecological conditions, a process mediated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPAA). Here, we review the links between socio-ecological conditions, HPAA activity, and the pace of women's reproductive transitions such as puberty, age at first birth, interbirth interval, and perimenopause. We also discuss the HPAA's role as a modulator of reproductive function: It not only suppresses it but may also prime women's bodies for future reproductive ventures. We conclude by reviewing challenges and opportunities within our subfield, including the need for transdisciplinary teams to develop longitudinal studies to improve our understanding of women's reproductive trajectories and outcomes from the moment they are conceived.
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Archaeology of Cuisine and Cooking
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 337–354More LessThis review demonstrates that recent contributions by archaeologists to the study of cuisine and cooking present a new addition to the field of anthropology. Archaeologists situate their work historically and contextually by examining cuisines that are culturally constructed. Studying cooking and food preparation helps elucidate relationships among material practices, understandings of taste, identity, power, and meaning in a society. Archaeologists can not only discover specific ingredients in food, but also reconstruct recipes, decipher regional cuisines, ascertain sensory experiences, recover the tools in spatial context, recreate techniques used to prepare food in the past, and overall learn more about the social and cultural contexts of the human experience. This type of investigation is possible because archaeological work uses complementary data to explain social practices and because advances in archaeological methods make accessible previously undetectable data. Experimental archaeology focused on cooking in the past has not only revealed important social information but also captured the imagination of the public. Archaeological research on cooking and cuisine reveals social, political, religious, and economic practices in the past, and it has a unique ability to engage the present with the past through public outreach and solutions to food-related problems.
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Beyond the Household: Caribbean Families and Biocultural Models of Alloparenting
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 355–372More LessAlloparental or extramaternal care is an integral aspect of human childrearing. This behavior has been explored both as an extension of the primary mother–infant dyad that evolved to meet the demands of altricial offspring and as an economic exchange of energy and resources. Much of this research centers on foraging or small-scale communities and positions the household as the central unit through which to explore negotiations of care. In this review, I use evidence from Black Caribbean communities living in industrialized countries to challenge the broad applicability of the analytical model of the bounded household and to question whether our current articulations of theory and empirical assessments of extramaternal care are well suited to investigations of these behaviors in the vast majority of contemporary human populations. Alloparental practices in the Caribbean reflect dynamic responses to maternal migration and the local influence of global labor markets. The children who remain at home experience variability in the care received from their surrogate parents. The dynamic aspect of the care practices enacted by these transnational families reveals the behavioral flexibility that has been integral to human survival.
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Archaeology of Everyday Life
Vol. 49 (2020), pp. 373–390More LessEveryday life is critical in the constitution of selves and societies alike. Archaeology, with its attention to material and spatial remains, is in a unique position to further studies of everyday life, as ordinary materials and spaces formalize how people learn about themselves and their world. This review defines an archaeology of everyday life, examines its historical roots, synthesizes new literature on the topic, and outlines future directions. Although there is no established subfield called “everyday archaeology,” a rich and ever-growing body of recent research illustrates the impact of everyday life studies on archaeological interpretations and practice. Research on everyday life peoples the past in a way that few other paradigms do.
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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)