Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 52, 2023

In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events between 1988 and 1993 disrupted (in a good way) the trajectory of my professional life and provided a convenient anchor around which my themes pivoted and regrouped with very different standpoints. But some trends in my way of working remained constant and contributed, I hope, to a career of cumulative knowledge. Along the way, I show the significance, in terms of my personal intellectual context as well as archaeological practice in general, of my published works as well as more obscure and some unpublished works that are cited here for the first time.

This article reviews the anthropological scholarship that engages with religious conversion as a political phenomenon, broadly defined. It develops the idea of making a difference as an overarching framework with a double meaning. First, this idiom captures how, by framing religious conversion in political terms, anthropologists have claimed to have substantially intervened—have made a difference, so to speak—in the discussion of conversion. Second, the article sets aside the prevalent problematization of conversion as a category of change, showing instead how anthropologists have sought to establish how religious change makes a difference—in the interweaved realities of individuals, collectives, and polities. I scrutinize and contextualize the belated consolidation of this area of inquiry, map its major strands, and identify the interrelated theoretical developments within anthropology. Seeing these strands as a generative domain of inquiry, I conclude with a number of suggestions for future research, such as paying closer attention to political conversions and to the links between religious conversion and political crises.

In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American ethnic cleansing projects, as well as scholars who bring abolitionist and decolonial stances to highlight how the university continues to perpetuate state interests, carceral and settler logics, empire, and antiblackness. We then bring the lens of CUS to bear on critical work by anthropologists on higher education and on the discipline more broadly. We explore the challenges of advocating for antiracist and anti-imperial anthropology without attending to the structures of Western/white superiority that have enabled its institutionalization. We conclude by considering interventions by the emerging field of abolitionist anthropology.

This review surveys studies of men and masculinities in anthropology and ethnography from other disciplines, as well as theoretical frameworks and debates among anthropologists and other relevant scholars in the field. It also aims to assess developments in these studies since an earlier Annual Review of Anthropology article was published on this subject. By considering the ethnographic boom in men and masculinities studies across the globe since 2000, increasingly authored by anthropologists from the Global South, this review considers anthropology's singular contributions topically and conceptually—for example, masculinity and militarism, men and public health, gender inequalities, and trans^* social movements—including through innovative research in biological and linguistic anthropology and archaeology. Throughout, this article reflects on the extent to which anthropologists have moved (and if they should have moved) beyond the study of women or men to instead explore gender, sex, and sexuality of humans and nonhuman animals in less binary frameworks.

This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists’ research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology on prototypic images to show how these advances (e.g., entextualization, performativity, perspective, and enregisterment) can be leveraged to theorize images more generally. In doing so, I argue against any hard distinction between language and image. I conclude by expanding out from a linguistic anthropology of images to what I call “a linguistic anthropology of…,” a field characterized by an open-ended horizon of objects and modes of inquiry, all linked together as linguistic anthropology.

Water links the environment, culture, and biology. An integrative approach is needed to attain a complete picture of how water affects human biology due to its inherent interdisciplinary nature. First, this review describes advances in human water needs, thirst, and hydration strategies from a biocultural perspective. Second, it provides a critical appraisal of the literatures on water insecurity (WI) experiences and coping strategies used to mitigate WI to illustrate how they intersect to affect human biology through the embodiment framework. Deviations from water needs and heightened WI can alter hydration and coping strategies, which have implications for a suite of psychological and physiological outcomes. These disruptions are embodied in cellular damage, dehydration, nutrition, stress, mental health, cognitive impairment, aging-related effects, cardiometabolic health, and kidney function. Disrupting forces such as lifestyle changes and climate change have important implications for water needs, WI, coping and hydration strategies, and the embodiment of each.

Scholarship on the ancient Indian Ocean, which stretches deep into the previous century, is available from an array of academic disciplines including but not limited to history, archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, art history, and materials science. It spans from prehistory to the present era and includes evidence ranging from the Mediterranean to East Asia. What binds together the world of Indian Ocean research is an enduring interest in the complex maritime-based links crosscutting this space and—for archaeologists—the movements of cultural elements (objects, ideas, people, etc.) that have left behind some material trace. Recent field projects and materials science studies have greatly expanded this material database, refining (and sometimes challenging) traditional interpretations about Indian Ocean maritime relations. This review presents a streamlined perspective, focusing on recent archaeological contributions about long-distance interregional connections across the Indian Ocean from 500 bce to 1000 ce.

Claims made by linguist Daniel Everett, that the Pirahã language, spoken by a small group of native Amazonians, lacks features thought to be universally present in languages, captured the imaginations of scholars and prompted broader questions on the nature of language, the diversity in languages, and the universals shared by them. Everett claimed that, in Pirahã, he had found a language without numbers, colors, mythology, abstract thinking, or recursive embedding. These claims were challenged by proponents of a universal grammar and by other biological linguists concerned with identifying shared faculties that undergird human cognitive capacities and by linguistic anthropologists concerned with the products of those potentials as they are actualized in the interactivity of speaking. Situating the Pirahã in historical and sociological context, I question the novelty of a faculty of language and many of Everett's claims of Pirahã exceptionality, and I explore the renewed interest in the nature of language.

In this article, I first provide an overview of the Neandertals by recounting their initial discovery and subsequent interpretation by scientists and by discussing our current understanding of the temporal and geographic span of these hominins and their taxonomic affiliation. I then explore what progress we have made in our understanding of Neandertal lifeways and capabilities over the past decade in light of new technologies and changing perspectives. In the process, I consider whether these advances in knowledge qualify as so-called Black Swans, a term used in economics to describe events that are rare and unpredictable and have wide-ranging consequences, in this case for the field of paleoanthropology. Building on this discussion, I look at ongoing debates and focus on Neandertal extinction as a case study. By way of discussion and conclusion, I take a detailed look at why Neandertals continue to engender great interest, and indeed emotion, among scientists and the general public alike.

Anthropological expeditions seeking out algorithms frequently return empty-handed. They are confronted with the challenge of the object: what to study when studying algorithms? In this article, I draw together a number of literatures to outline one possible answer to the question of how to study algorithms in social science. I argue that what we should study are algorithmic ecologies. I sketch five modalities of algorithmic ecologies and review concomitant literatures: (a) imaginaries, (b) infrastructures, (c) interfaces, (d) identities, and (e) investments and interests. The speculative propositions offered here are that algorithms are immanent to ecologies and that they are enacted across all the modalities of algorithmic ecologies.

“Intervention” is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of “magic bullet” interventions arising from laboratory science, and studies of interventions based on deterministic modeling techniques. We then outline examples of “intervention otherwise,” in which people build relations of solidarity and care through global health programming, design interventions to be interactive and adaptable, and use data and modeling to support health justice. Whereas many global health interventions reproduce Western power hierarchies, intervention otherwise draws attention to alternative forms of knowledge, action, and expertise. Our analysis of lively and multivalent practices of intervention has implications for debates about the im/possibility of decolonizing global health.

This article reviews key theoretical and methodological contributions that anthropologists have made to the study of what we call security regimes. While anthropologists have been instrumental in denaturalizing discourses of security, much of the existing literature on who security actors are or where their work and force are to be found remains focused on the masculinist frontlines and visibly spectacular instances of security state power. We adopt a transnational feminist lens to rethink what we understand security regimes to be and where they are to be found by drawing attention to the multiscalar sites (e.g., home, family, kinship, intimacy) and technologies of rule (e.g., affect, aesthetics, discourse) through which security regimes are constituted, expanded, and challenged. The final section of the review examines methodological and ethical challenges, which are made more complex by the changing profile of the multiply racialized, gendered, nationalized, and classed researchers of security regimes.

Contesting ideas about what is “normal” human behavior or biology is a core contribution of anthropology. In efforts to provide more inclusive views of what it means to be human, anthropologists challenge judgments about diverse ways of being, which include assumptions about what it means to be normal. Meanings of the term normal encompass the descriptive (statistical) and the evaluative (normative), i.e., judgments about a given characteristic. In biomedicine, “healthy” is often the value ascribed to normal, but embedded in healthy are biases that derive from particular cultural and historical contexts. Here I review how the term normal is understood and used in anthropological and related studies of human biology and biological variation. I propose the biological normalcy framework for understanding how the statistical and normative meanings of normal mutually inform each other and their consequences for human population biology. Several examples provide illustrations of the framework.

In this review, we call for heightened attention to the labor of interpreters to think more reflexively about our own professional ethics and the paradoxes of global capitalism within which both interpreters and anthropologists work. Like other forms of communicative labor, interpretation is often devalued, unrecognized, and uncompensated—a form of invisible labor. Professional language ideologies, some paradoxically perpetuated by the profession itself, contribute to interpreters’ invisibility in their workplaces. Global and multilingual organizations depend on ideologies of transparency and the assumption that language transmission is easy; examining interpreters’ labor ethnographically troubles these assumptions. Interpreters also confront an ethical tension in their position that mirrors a tension in anthropology: namely, between ideals of professional neutrality and analytic distance versus intentional advocacy. The study of interpreters offers ways to critically assess anthropologists’ own professional practices and dig deeply into the contradictions of global capitalism.

Human habitation and adaptation to extreme environments have a deep history in anthropological research. Anthropologists’ understanding of these ecological pressures and how humans respond to them has grown substantially over the last 100+ years. This review covers long-standing knowledge on adaptation to classic extreme conditions of heat, cold, and high altitude, while also updating the areas in which recent research has broadened our understanding of human adaptation, acclimatization, and resilience. Unfortunately, the intersecting stresses of structural inequality and climate change have made these extremes more extreme, with drastic negative impacts on health and well-being. Future research will need to explore how extreme environments, structural inequality, and climate change are embodied as well as mitigated so that humans are better prepared to face a rapidly changing world.

The trajectory of human aging varies widely from one individual to the next due to complex interactions between the genome and the environment that influence the aging process. Such differences in age-specific mortality and disease risk among same-aged individuals reflect variation in the pace of biological aging. Certain mechanisms involved in the progression of biological aging originate in the epigenome, where chemical modifications to the genome are able to alter gene expression without modifying the underlying DNA sequence. The epigenome serves as an interface for environmental signals, which are able to “get under the skin” to influence health and aging. A number of the molecular mechanisms involved in the aging process have been identified, although few aging phenotypes have been definitively traced to their underlying molecular causes thus far. In this review, we discuss variation in human biological aging and the epigenome's role in promoting heterogeneity in human longevity and healthspan.

Although microbiome science is relatively young, our knowledge of human-microbiome interactions is growing rapidly and has already begun to transform our understanding of human ecology and evolution. Here we summarize our current understanding of three-way interactions between the gut microbiota, human ecology, and human evolution. We review the factors driving microbiome variation within and between individuals and populations, as well as comparative data from nonhuman primates that allow a more direct examination of microbial relationships with host ecology and evolution. Collectively, these data sets can help illuminate generalizable principles governing host-microbiome-environment interactions, the processes contributing to bidirectional influences between the human gut microbiota and the human ecological niche, and past changes in the human microbiome that may have harbored consequences for human adaptation. Developing richer insight into host-microbiome-environment interactions will ultimately broaden our view of human biology and its response to changing environments.

This article focuses on how the anthropological study of media—through an examination of its production, circulation, and consumption—elucidates issues of social organization, political economy, and alternative visions for political futures. By bringing together the studies of visual media, social movements, and hegemonic power by anthropologists and ethnographers of media since the turn of the twenty-first century, this review article provides a critical understanding of research about our current media environment, where scholarship within anthropology is heading in these domains, and what looking at these three fields together can mean for a more robust understanding of our political, social, and cultural futures.

This review examines the discourses and practices that have produced a lively literature on museum decolonization created by scholars of museum practices and curators. We consider the trajectory of decolonization efforts in museums, focusing especially on the care of Native North American heritage, with comparison to similar trajectories internationally. We begin with a discussion of decolonizing moments in theory and practice, with particular attention to 1990s critique of ethnographic museums and developments after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Following this discussion is a review of works on concerns regarding Native American representation and public displays, involvement in collections care, and the varied collaborations that are changing museum practices. The final section foregrounds the fluorescence of tribal museums and their contributions to the decolonization and indigenization of museums, as well as emerging paradigm shifts in both the anthropology of museums and anthropology in museums.