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Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 51, 2022
Volume 51, 2022
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Thinking in Between Disciplines
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 1–15More LessAcademic disciplines are shape-shifting zones of inquiry yet notably bounded by regimes of training, truth, genre, and aesthetics. This article journeys into liminal zones in between disciplines as an existential space to ponder matters that beg for release from disciplinary syllabi. Can one thrive or even survive in the academy while dwelling in intervals between scholarly footprints? I lay bare a life of thinking in between anthropology, linguistics, and psychology for the reader to pursue and complicate this question. Try as I might to steer clear of folly, I have thrown caution to the winds to suggest affordances that nourish transgressive thinking in ways that expand and reassemble thinkable objects of inquiry.
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Bad Mouths: Taboo and Transgressive Language
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 17–30More LessThe academic literature on taboo language is flourishing not only in fields such as linguistic anthropology or sociolinguistics, but also in disciplines that usually target language itself as the object of study. Although there is more than a century of scholarly writing on taboo language, new and neglected areas and directions continue to provide valuable insights on a universal linguistic behavior. This review tracks four sometimes overlapping clusters: naming and linguistic avoidance behaviors, taboo language and transgression, taboo language in language contact situations, and taboo language in educational settings and other contexts. The discussion in this review includes examples of how taboo language is inextricably meshed with the relationships found among kinship circles, subcultural group members, generational cohorts, and other social groupings. New areas of research that are proving to be attractive to scholars include taboo language in global media translation, subtitling or scalation, language contact situations, and the teaching of taboo terms in second language instruction.
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The Necropolitics of Language Oppression
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 31–47More LessThis article explores how language oppression—coerced language loss—contributes to physical death. The context for this investigation is the ongoing crisis of global linguistic diversity, which sees approximately half the world's languages facing language oppression. It is also a crisis of bodies and lives. This article proposes the necropolitics of language oppression as a decolonial anthropological approach for theorizing and confronting this global problem. Drawing on the anthropology of violence, genocide, and the state, within the context of anthropology's colonial turn since the 1970s, this article describes how states within colonial modernity create and exploit population-differentiated death through practices of social death, slow violence, and slow death. This perspective enables a synthesis of literature from linguistics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, translation studies, and public health to reveal the links between language oppression and death. The conclusion discusses how the approach developed in this article can help sustain languages and lives.
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The Carceral State: An American Story
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 49–66More LessThis article reviews key works in the anthropology of mass incarceration, generated by anthropologists and their interlocutors whose research is directed outside physical sites of imprisonment. My geographical focus is on the United States during the last decade's political and economic Zeitgeist, shaped by the manifestations and consequences of the carceral state and the prison industrial complex. My discussion is also guided by research invigorated by anthropology's decolonizing drive and growing concern about racism within and outside the academy. Along the way, and emphasized in the final section, I make the case that anthropology's abiding interest in kinship is a productive approach for configuring our understanding of the American carceral state and the racial landscapes of carcerality. The research reviewed shows how deeply carcerality is embedded in race, illuminating its destructiveness in Black and brown communities, yet also revealing the creation of regenerative spaces of kinship.
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The Laboratory of Scientific Racism: India and the Origins of Anthropology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 67–83More LessAnthropology, especially biological anthropology, owes its origins to the scientific study of human racial differences. That dark history is well-acknowledged and, when it is taught, usually begins with the racism of early figures, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or, more recently, Earnest Hooton, and exonerates itself through a turn toward antiracist scholars such as Frank Livingstone and Franz Boas. Rarely, if ever, is this origin story critically appraised. This article aims to complicate the origin story of biological anthropology by examining how colonial subjects were involved in the development, testing, and refinement of racial theory, and thus of biological anthropology itself. Taking India as an example, I trace how Indians and the caste system were first the subjects and eventually the interlocutors of racial scientific theory and testing. This reorientation, I argue, is important for developing a more expansive and accurate version of the discipline's history and also for shining a light on its relevance to contemporary global racial conflict.
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The Semiotics of Cooperation
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 85–101More LessIn this article, we suggest that in starting from dialogical, interactive studies of human discourse, we can uncover properties of cooperation that have otherwise been missed or have remained underappreciated by scholars trying to account for cooperation from an evolutionary point of view or from the point of view of its mental representation (i.e., by means of collective intentions or goals). Before uncovering these properties, we argue that a distinction must be drawn between intersubjectivity, understood as an ever-present empathic sensitivity to others, and intersubjective attunement, the process of adjusting one's actions to the ever-changing contextual conditions of interaction. It is by attending to intersubjective attunement that cooperative activities are shown to be inherently vulnerable to breach, failure, and all kinds of interactional glitches, while also being open to modifications, e.g., repairs, that allow for their successful completion. Unpacking these conditions for cooperation allows us to reveal five general properties that guide its semiotic constitution, namely, sensorial access, distributed intentionality, fluctuation of attention, improvisation, and negotiable role ascription. Attention to the semiotics of cooperation across communities and within particular activities can add a sixth general property, namely, variability in how and the extent to which cooperation is acknowledged. We introduce the term cryptocooperation to describe joint activities where the cooperative role by certain participants is underrecognized and thereby remains hidden.
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Aesthetics in Styles and Variation: A Fresh Flavor
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 103–120More LessSpeaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics (rasa and “everyday aesthetics”) that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.
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Wound Culture
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 121–135More LessThis review offers new perspectives on the anthropology of injuries and wounds. It maps how theories, methods, and ethnographic sensibilities converge on wounds, on the act of wounding, and on the wounded as instructive objects. The review assesses how anthropologists understand social forces to cause wounds and how they accord wounds the power to generate meaning about sociality. Organized across two themes, “breach” and “repair,” the review tests concepts of embodiment across clinical boundaries, manifestations of harm, and formations of justice. It examines how anthropological thought connects to wound culture and assesses links between embodiment and politics that develop in the domains of critical theory and medical anthropology. Ultimately, it aims to shed light on the connections between body politics and ethnography and to ask what wounds might generate as an anthropological concern.
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Prehistory of Kinship
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 137–154More LessAs observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia of human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key developments in prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to the Neolithic transition to agriculture and the heterogeneous resilience of matriliny. Starting with our hominin ancestors, kinship evolved among a cooperative breeding species to multilevel group structure among human hunter-gatherers, to substantial kinship changes brought on by the origins of intensified farming, to permanent settlements and unequal resource access. This review takes the approach that new forms of subsistence facilitated new equations of reproductive success, which changed cultural norms of kinship systems and heritable wealth. Subsequently, the formation of complex societies diminished kinship as the primary organizing principle of society. The article describes new methodologies and theoretical developments, along with critiques of bioarchaeological interpretations of prehistoric kinship.
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Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 155–171More LessThis article reviews work in anthropology over the last 30 years that has been informed by psychoanalysis, much of it drawing on contemporary schools of psychoanalytic thought that further develop or even directly challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the original Freudian corpus. It assumes that what happens at the margins or horizons of human consciousness, as a body of work, should be closely examined and included in anthropological theorizing rather than ignored or downplayed, and it examines how such states of consciousness both affect and are affected by entanglements with the world. Focal topics of the review include work on dreams, fantasies, and imaginal thought; loss and melancholia; aspects of emotional suffering, distress, and alienation; the effects of transference and countertransference on fieldwork; the sense of being haunted by personal and social injustices; and how the contingencies of self-awareness affect the development of ethics and morality.
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Multimodality: Reshaping Anthropology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 173–194More LessMultimodality offers anthropologists an inflection on the way we do research, produce scholarship, teach students, and relate to diverse publics. Advancing an expanding array of tools, practices, and concepts, multimodality signals a change in the way we pay attention and attend to the diverse possibilities for understanding the human experience. Multimodality recognizes the way smartphones, social media, and digital software transform research dynamics in unprecedented ways, while also drawing upon long-standing practices of recording and presenting research through images, sounds, objects, and text. Rather than flatten out ethnographic participant observation into logocentric practices of people-writing, multimodal ethnographies diversify their modes of inquiry to produce more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experiences. By emphasizing kaleidoscopic qualities that give shape to an emergent, multidimensional, and diversifying anthropology, multimodality proposes alternatives to enduring and delimiting dichotomies, particularly text/image. These new configurations invite unrealized disciplinary constellations and research collaborations to emerge, but also require overhauling the infrastructures that support training, dissemination, and assessment.
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Retranslating Resilience Theory in Archaeology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 195–211More LessThe environmental crisis is rendering increasingly large areas of the planet inhospitable. As it reaches a tipping point, global warming is initiating cascades of ecological transformation, mass extinction, and irreversible damage—all of them increasingly beyond human control. To mitigate this situation, we need intellectual tools that can call on both the sciences and the humanities and spark integrated approaches that address deep-time scales. Archaeology can make a substantial contribution here. This article reviews the merits and limitations of the resilience concept in archaeology. Despite its ever-increasing relevance, resilience is still frequently understood within the framework of positivist approaches and branches of systems thinking that cannot capture our unfolding predicament and pay too little attention to the embodied historical asymmetries between more-than-human social worlds. This review identifies the potential for reformulations of resilience theory and its attendant concepts within a less positivistic and human-centered conceptual register. New translations of resilience in archaeology pave the way for more nuanced approaches to concepts of history and their sociopolitical use, as well as alternative time dynamics of historical change.
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Current Digital Archaeology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 213–231More LessDigital archaeology is both a pervasive practice and a unique subdiscipline within archaeology. The diverse digital methods and tools employed by archaeologists have led to a proliferation of innovative practice that has fundamentally reconfigured the discipline. Rather than reviewing specific technologies, this review situates digital archaeology within broader theoretical debates regarding craft and embodiment; materiality; the uncanny; and ethics, politics, and accessibility. A future digital archaeology must move beyond skeuomorphic submission and replication of previous structural inequalities to foment new archaeological imaginaries.
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Race and Racism in Archaeologies of Chinese American Communities
(方少芳), (伍穎華), (李紫瑄), (孫美華), and Barbara L. VossVol. 51 (2022), pp. 233–250More LessThis article provides a critical review of archaeological research that addresses race and racism in Chinese American communities. Future directions for Chinese diaspora archaeologies include employing an Asian American studies praxis that centers community-engaged research, using diasporic frameworks, and applying emic language to naming material culture and identities. Other innovative archaeological scholarship on the racialization of Chinese Americans reframes Chinese American communities as part of larger multiethnic neighborhoods, highlights gender and sexuality, and traces the transpacific connections of Chinese transmigrants. The interventions outlined provide archaeologists who are engaged in the study of the Chinese American past with the pathways needed to begin practicing antiracist Chinese diaspora archaeologies.
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Traveling Concepts: Anthropological Engagements with Histories of Social Science
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 251–269More LessThis article discusses historical and anthropological approaches to the life of social science. After presenting the thematic of social science concepts that figure as found object in cultural anthropology, this review briefly introduces the domain of history of social science (HSS). It then examines HSS studies that could enrich anthropological encounters with social science concepts, both methodologically and through the vivid social histories of relevant concepts, categories, and methods. I complement my review of these approaches in HSS with a discussion of anthropological studies of social science concepts. I review both the historical and the anthropological literature with the same key questions, focused on the analytical tools that each approach brings to the study of social science: what conditions of emergence of these social imaginaries are incorporated in the analyses, what contexts and processes relevant to their appropriation and travel are presented, and how these enquiries examine the effects on the worlds in which they circulate. In my conclusion, I point out how cultural anthropology can uniquely contribute to the domain of HSS.
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Intimacy and the Politics of Love
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 271–288More LessThis review provides an overview of the anthropology of love and some of the main bodies of ethnographic work and theoretical debates around studies of love. It surveys specific studies that make the politics of intimacy and love central to their analysis and that seek to make theoretical sense of its meaning and broader significance. This discussion is followed by work that draws together an example of the politicization of love in the shape of a claim around “love jihad,” which has dominated recent discussions of love in India and has begun to receive anthropological attention. In conclusion, the review argues that the politics of love will need to account for the meanings, constraints, and everyday vulnerabilities through which intimate lives become entangled with and illuminate political projects of every scale.
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South Asian Language Practices: Mother Tongue, Medium, and Media
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 289–305More LessScholars such as Murray Emeneau and John Gumperz made India prominent in the development of sociolinguistics as a field of study through their simultaneous attention to difference and cohesiveness. Later, scholars stressed the ideological mediation of practice, especially the importance of colonial constructions that continue to be relevant in the postcolonial period. Work on specific notions such as mother tongue and medium of instruction, and the salience of English, led scholars to provide insights into multilingual practices in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Finally, a vast scholarship on an array of older and newer media forms ranging from early print publications to social media has posed questions about the possibilities of representation and participation. Ethnographic approaches to digital media that focus on the complex dynamics between ideologies and practices have put South Asia at the forefront of studies of communication.
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Disappointment
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 307–323More LessIn recent years, disappointment has emerged as a prominent topic of anthropological inquiry and theorization. We explore this disciplinary interest in order to probe the conditions that have made it possible, the lines of inquiry it opens up, and the self-reflexive critiques it underscores. Running throughout the anthropological literature on disappointment is a pressing concern with the messy, unpredictable, and friction-laden dimensions of social life, dimensions that eschew easy categorization in terms of the heroic/abject, agentive/passive, macro/micro, righteous/wrong-headed, or progressive/reactionary. After exploring the conditions that underlie disappointment, we discuss comparison, poetics, and slog as three domains of its anthropological analysis, highlighting key methodological innovations, ethnographic genres, and research questions within each area. We close with reflections on disappointment within the discipline, focusing on the experience of field research, the moral optimism of the discipline, and the institutional conditions that shape knowledge production and professional life.
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Religious Orthodoxies: Provocations from the Jewish and Christian Margins
Ayala Fader, and Vlad NaumescuVol. 51 (2022), pp. 325–343More LessThis review represents a dialogic experiment developing the comparative analytical category of religious orthodoxies. To explore the category, we profile scholarship on Jewish and Christian orthodoxies, neither of which fits into the Protestant ideas of religion, secularism, and modernity that still implicitly undergird the anthropology of religion. For religious orthodoxies, the heart of religious experience is correctness and continuity, rather than personal transformation and reform. Furthermore, the imbrication of the political with the theological that is definitive of religious orthodoxies holds promise for new understandings of politics and religion's potential for social action. By including different relationships of scale in a range of social formations and institutional dynamics, religious orthodoxies provide insight into the mutually constitutive relationship between practice and belief; the taken-for-grantedness of material mediation of presence in orthodox traditions; the ethical dimension of practice; and the entanglements of orthodoxies, heterodoxies, and heresies.
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African American Archaeology, for Now
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 345–363More LessA 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.
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Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 365–381More LessThe 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.
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Biolegality: How Biology and Law Redefine Sociality
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 383–399More LessAs 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.
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The Ecoimmunology of Health and Disease: The Hygiene Hypothesis and Plasticity in Human Immune Function
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 401–418More LessThe 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.
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What Makes Inventions Become Traditions?
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 419–436More LessAlthough 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.
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The Anthropology of Being Haunted: On the Emergence of an Anthropological Hauntology
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 437–453More LessSince 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.
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Gesture
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 455–473More LessGesture 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.
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The Archaeology of Settler Colonialism in North America
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 475–491More LessBeginning 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.
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The Fundamentals of the State
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 493–508More LessAlthough 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.
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The Work of Boundaries: Critical Cartographies and the Archaeological Record of the Relatively Recent Past
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 509–526More LessDiscussions 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).
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SARS-CoV-2 Is Not Special, but the Pandemic Is: The Ecology, Evolution, Policy, and Future of the Deadliest Pandemic in Living Memory
Vol. 51 (2022), pp. 527–548More LessThe 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.
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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)