Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 51, 2022

Academic 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.

The 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.

This 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.

This 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.

Anthropology, 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.

In 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.

Speaker 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.

This 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.

As 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.

This 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.

Multimodality 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.

The 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.

Digital 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.

This 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.

This 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.

This 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.

Scholars 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.

In 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.

This 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.