Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 51, 2022

A focus on institutions frames this examination of the archaeology of African America. While initially emphasizing the institution of slavery and theories of Black difference, the field today has a much wider scope. Researchers engaged in this work critically examine past and present-day institutions. As such, this review also considers the place of African American archaeology in engaged scholarship, critical theory, and self-reflexive practice. As in past reviews, the emphasis is on the United States, with occasional references to important work in the rest of the African diaspora. African American archaeology is shown to be inextricably interwoven with scholarly work in North American archaeology, African American studies, heritage studies, and social theory.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies, and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled settler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have contributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjuncture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.

As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics with an operation of legality that emphasizes how biology and its attendant technologies alter legal form, knowledge, practice, and experience. These empirical and theoretical developments affect how we understand sociality. While public discourse remains preoccupied with the call for more regulation—thereby underscoring law's lag in its dealings with technology—the social science scholarship describes instead how bioscience and biotechnology are fragmenting and rearranging legal knowledge about property, personhood, parenthood, and collective identity. As it opens broader anthropological debates around exchange, self, kinship, and community, the study of biolegality brings a novel currency to the discipline, addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing.

The original hygiene hypothesis proposed that certain diseases derive from low levels of early-life microbial exposure. Since then, the hypothesis has been applied to numerous inflammatory, autoimmune, and allergic conditions. The changes in hygiene linked to these diseases include numerous changes in biotic exposure and lifestyle. To this end, some scholars have called for abandonment of the term or have suggested alternate labels, e.g., the old friends hypothesis. However, neither of these terms encompasses the complexity of plasticity in immune response and host–parasite/commensal interactions that influence these conditions. Here, I review this complexity, with particular regard to the factors affecting immunological strategies, the development of tolerance, immune dysfunction, and ecological interactions among organisms. I discuss the biotic factors that affect immune plasticity and how these interact with abiotic factors such as nutrition, as well as how transgenerational exposures may affect immune plasticity. Finally, I review the general features of diseases linked to biotic exposures.

Although anthropology was the first academic discipline to investigate cultural change, many other disciplines have made noteworthy contributions to understanding what influences the adoption of new behaviors. Drawing on a broad, interdisciplinary literature covering both humans and nonhumans, we examine (a) which features of behavioral traits make them more transmissible, (b) which individual characteristics of inventors promote copying of their inventions, (c) which characteristics of individuals make them more prone to adopting new behaviors, (d) which characteristics of dyadic relationships promote cultural transmission, (e) which properties of groups (e.g., network structures) promote transmission of traits, and (f) which characteristics of groups promote retention, rather than extinction, of cultural traits. One of anthropology's strengths is its readiness to adopt and improve theories and methods from other disciplines, integrating them into a more holistic approach; hence, we identify approaches that might be particularly useful to biological and cultural anthropologists, and knowledge gaps that should be filled.

Since the appearance of Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International in 1994, there has been an outpouring of writing in cultural studies around the themes of hauntology and spectralities. This article asks broadly whether a form of hauntology has emerged within anthropology; if so, when and how it has appeared; and what constitutes such a field as distinctive. This article asks what comprises being haunted as a specific affective state within anthropological writing, what theory of the subject is assumed by such writings, and what distinguishes ethnographic analyses that do not dismiss the presence of ghosts as simply cultural beliefs or literary fictions, as is common in cultural studies. It reviews the literature on the haunting remains of traumatic violence, examines writing that juxtaposes hauntological and ontological theorizing, describes the appearance of an incipient hauntological voice within ethnographic writing, and concludes with a discussion of the emergence of a hauntological ethics.

Gesture is intimately entwined with human language and thought. It is a tool for communication as well as cognition: conveying information to interlocutors, orchestrating interaction, and supporting problem-solving and learning. Over the past 25 years, the community of scholars interested in gesture has grown from a specialized group to a multidisciplinary community incorporating gesture into a wide range of topics. This article aims to capture and continue that growth by introducing readers to some of the most intriguing findings and questions in gesture research. It adopts a four-field approach, integrating multiple literatures and introducing work from outside anthropology. It defines key terminology and reviews five areas that have undergone significant recent growth: the integration of gesture with speech, gesture as communication and cognition, gesture's role in learning and language development, cultural variation in gesture, and the role of gesture in language origins. Taken together, these areas demonstrate that gesture is entangled with language, thought, and identity, starting in early childhood. This tangle has deep evolutionary roots; indeed, gesture may have been part of the human story from its start.

Beginning in earnest in the 1990s, archaeologists have used the material record as an alternative window into the experiences and practices of Black and Indigenous peoples in North America from the sixteenth century onward. This now robust body of scholarship on settler colonialism has been shaped by postcolonial theories of power and broad-based calls to diversify Western history. While archaeologists have long recognized the political, cultural, biological, and economic entanglements produced by settler colonialism, the lives of Indigenous peoples have largely been studied in isolation from peoples of African descent. In addition to reinforcing static ethnic divisions, until recently, most archaeological studies of settler colonialism have focused on early periods of interethnic interaction, ending abruptly in the nineteenth century. These intellectual silos gloss over the intimate relationships that formed between diverse communities and hinder a deeper understanding of settler colonialism's continued impact on archaeological praxis.

Although ubiquitous today, the “state” did not always exist. Archaeological and historical assessments of state beginnings—and research on the characteristics of the state form in both past and present—help address how the state as a social, economic, and territorial construct became dominant. Utilizing the categories of politics, violence, literacy, and borders, this article examines how individuals and households are mutually implicated in negotiations of power and expressions of everyday life that have been present from before the inception of the state through to the modern day. The state is constituted and expressed through nested exploitative engagements predicated on actual and perceived benefits; the outcomes of the existence of the state range from collaborative platforms for integration to the realities of inequality, environmental degradation through future discounting, and institutionalized power dynamics. As a container for human interactions, the state may be situationally unwanted but also seems inescapable once initialized.

Discussions of boundaries have enjoyed a renaissance in anthropological archaeology of recent years, especially as conversations surrounding forced migration and border walls look toward the material record for clarification about what borders are and what they do. Since 1995, when the Annual Review of Anthropology last addressed a similar issue, numerous methodological and conceptual changes in the field have led to a large proliferation in the literature. By framing this review around the work of boundaries, I signal two trends in the field of archaeology with conceptual and methodological implications. The first trend is the increased centrality of materiality as a theoretical register as new questions relating to object agency, human/nonhuman boundaries, and new models of environmental archaeology have populated the literature. In such climates it is important to focus on boundaries as a kind of assemblage of actants that takes on agencies beyond notions of territory. Associated border, crossing, transnational, and refuge assemblages are discussed. The second trend is the increased attention to boundary work in archaeology. In this article I review one thread of that literature, critical cartographies, and how they have used the archaeological record to develop radical renditions of political space where boundaries are involved. I focus on scholarship surrounding the relatively recent past (ca. 1200 CE to the present).

The COVID-19 pandemic is extraordinary, but many ordinary events have contributed to its becoming and persistence. Here, we argue that the emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus, which has radically altered day-to-day life for people across the globe, was an inevitability of contemporary human ecology, presaged by spillovers past. We show the ways in which the emergence of this virus reiterates other infectious disease crises, from its origin via habitat encroachment and animal use by humans to its evolution of troublesome features, and we spotlight a long-running crisis of inequitable infectious disease incidence and death. We conclude by describing aspects of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic that present opportunities for disease control: spaces for intervention in infection and recovery that reduce transmission and impact. There are no more “before times”; therefore, we encourage embracing a future using old mitigation tactics and government support for ongoing disease control.