Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 52, 2023

In archaeology, along with a large sector of other social sciences, comparative approaches to long-term political change over the last two centuries have been underpinned by two big ideas, classification and evolution, which often have been manifest as cultural history and progress. Despite comparative archaeology's agenda to explain change, the conceptual core of these frames was grounded in the building of stepped sequences of transformation with expectations drawn from synchronic empirical snapshots in time. Nevertheless, especially over the last 70 years, archaeology has seen the generation and analysis of unprecedented volumes of data collected along multiple dimensions and a range of spatial scales. Compilation and comparison of these data reveal significant diversity along various dimensions, which have begun to create dissonance with key tenets, assumptions, and even the aims of extant, long-held approaches. Expanded conceptual framing with a shift toward a focus on explaining variation and change is necessary.

Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as “normal,” which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropology, we argue for the need to attend to interactions and behavior as the necessary basis for anthropological studies of personhood and subjectivity. These foci, which build on a foundation provided by affect theory and disability studies, stand to open up anthropological conceptions of personhood and subjectivity and resituate the process of attribution in making persons and subjects. We articulate a psychotic anthropology that centers atypical forms of consciousness and seeks to unsettle anthropological assumptions about mind, cognition, and consciousness.

This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's “salvage anthropology,” which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropology. Contemporary studies frame linguistic racialization through markedness theory and use paradigms of language ideology, language materiality, and semiotics to forward discursive and ontological analyses that span communities and institutional spaces. I offer “disruption” as a way to consider the impact of epistemologies that inform academic research agendas as well as institutional power dynamics between BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) scholars and White practitioners in linguistic anthropology and discuss how these disruptions could form the basis from which to decolonize aspects of linguistic anthropology.

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

This review presents a historical and contemporary view of white supremacy as an entrenched global system based on presumed biological and cultural difference, related practices of racism, the valorization of whiteness, and the denigration of nonwhiteness. We center the role of the discipline of anthropology, and contend that the discipline is shaped by, and shapes, structures of white supremacy. In this article, we detail anthropology's role in the development of racial science and the subsequent placement of whiteness at the top of the world's global political and cultural systems of power. We examine the early critiques of anthropology's racializing practices by Black and Indigenous anthropologists, which set the stage for an anti-imperial analysis that addressed how white power was entrenched within the discipline and broader society. Last, we discuss emerging scholarship on the anthropology of white supremacy and the methodological and theoretical shifts that push the discipline and refine the concept.

This article seeks to illuminate connections across studies of publics, media, formal political processes, and protests. An examination of representation as sociopolitical practice allows us to consider the practices that occur around the edges of what has been considered the public sphere and to interrogate the work of its boundaries, which reify national publics, separate civil society from formal political work, and separate representational work from collective action. Thinking about environments for expression and practices of representation invites a consideration of the multiple interrelated geographies of expressive spaces—ranging from publics that legitimize a state to those corresponding to or creating communities, political movements, immigrant groups, or diasporic networks. A focus on representational practices trains attention on the body, place, and social relations and encourages attention to the multiplicity of ways in which violence shapes environments for expression, as well as how social and political actors respond to violence.

In the last several decades, geoarchaeological research and practice have moved well beyond their foundational concerns for site formation processes and the stratigraphic integrity of artifact associations, developing significant orientations toward archaeological and social theory. This review focuses on four overlapping research emphases that have explicitly extended the reach of geoarchaeological research within the broader social sciences and humanities, including (a) interpretive, symbolic, and social approaches in geoarchaeological research; (b) articulations with recent developments in posthumanist and new materialist scholarship; (c) the application of geoarchaeological investigations to historical ecology and political ecology research programs; and (d), building on the latter, critical engagements with ongoing transdisciplinary scholarship on the Anthropocene. Taken together, these different orientations offer new possibilities for geoarchaeological research to inform anthropological concerns for social and environmental production and the ways that archaeological and geological fields of practice and discourse contribute to shaping social, political, and environmental conditions today.

This review examines anthropological contributions over the past decade to the biocultural processes and practices of lactation via the analytical pillars of colonialism, racial capitalism, and medicalization. The nexus of these three processes has been foundational to the profound disruption and decline of breastfeeding in the mid-twentieth century and is still impacting ongoing efforts to restore and facilitate breastfeeding. Anthropologists have helped expose and challenge biocapitalist, medicalized conceptualizations of lactation that undermine breastfeeding often even when they claim to support it. Moreover, they have highlighted how ethnocentric cultural ideologies shape biomedical categories of “normal” infant feeding and lactation and have demonstrated the variability of these processes and practices. While these efforts have yielded important interventions into anthropology and a range of other disciplines, significant work remains to integrate efforts across the subfields and to challenge racist, oppressive systems that continue to shape both the study and the practice of lactation.

Slavery in Africa dates to antiquity. Slave trading networks in Africa transported people across the Sahara and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with significant numbers of people sent to the Middle East, India, central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. Africa, however, was not only a source of export of people; enslaved persons were also imported into the continent. This article reviews scholarly research into the capture, trade, and use of enslaved men, women, and children in Africa, with a focus on Ghana. It suggests that the history and legacies of slavery and slave trading cannot be understood without reference to African historiography, the politics of knowledge production, and present-day heritage tourism. In reviewing the historical and anthropological research, it also introduces some of the possibilities, problems, and challenges of archaeological approaches to studying slavery and slave trading to demonstrate that archaeology is in conversation with—and of value to—those outside the discipline.