-
Music, Language, Aurality: Latin American and Caribbean Resoundings Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Amanda Minks,Ana María Ochoa Gautier
Recent work in anthropology has attended to the imbrication of music, sound, listening, and language in research on, and from, Latin America and the Caribbean, as part of a broader movement across regions. In this article, we argue that these relations have their own intellectual genealogies in Latin America and the Caribbean, which have often been neglected in studies written about the region. We
-
Intersectional Ecologies: Reimagining Anthropology and Environment Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Sarah E. Vaughn,Bridget Guarasci,Amelia Moore
Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, this review suggests “intersectional ecologies” as a method for critically engaging anthropology's relationship with the environment across subfields, intellectual traditions, and authorial politics. Intersectional ecologies helps us trace how a broad coalition of scholars represents and accounts for the environment within shifting planetary arrangements
-
Sociality, Style, and Paying Attention Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Don Brenneis,Karen B. Strier
-
The Human Sleep Paradox: The Unexpected Sleeping Habits of Homo sapiens Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 David R. Samson
The human sleep pattern is paradoxical. Sleep is vital for optimal physical and cognitive performance, yet humans sleep the least of all primates. In addition, consolidated and continuous monophasic sleep is evidently advantageous, yet emerging comparative data sets from small-scale societies show that the phasing of the human pattern of sleep–wake activity is highly variable and characterized by significant
-
Food Insecurity, Nutritional Inequality, and Maternal–Child Health: A Role for Biocultural Scholarship in Filling Knowledge Gaps Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Barbara A. Piperata,Darna L. Dufour
Food insecurity, a significant contributor to nutritional inequality, disproportionately affects women and children in low- and middle-income countries. The magnitude of the problem has inspired research on its impacts on health, especially on nutritional status and, more recently, mental well-being. Current research is dominated by surveillance-type studies that emphasize access, one of food security's
-
Recent Research on the Archaeology of War and Violence Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Andrew K. Scherer
The mid-1990s through the first decade of the new millennium marked an increase in publications pertaining to war and violence in the ancient past. This review considers how scholars of the past decade have responded to that work. The emerging consensus is that war and violence were endemic to all societies studied by archaeologists, and yet the frequency, intensity, causes, and consequences of violence
-
Transgressing Time: Archaeological Evidence in/of the Anthropocene Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Matt Edgeworth
Archaeological evidence of human-influenced transformations of physical strata and the Earth system provides strong support to the broad concept of the Anthropocene, yet it also presents a powerful material challenge to some of its most entrenched assumptions. This substantial and growing body of time-transgressive evidence has the potential to radically alter the concept from the ground up and to
-
Language and the Military: Necropolitical Legitimation, Embodied Semiotics, and Ineffable Suffering Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Janet McIntosh
This article augments and complicates Nelson's claim that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” ( Dedaić & Nelson 2003 , p. 459). Military endeavors require verbal legitimation, but militarizing participants and wide swaths of the civilian population requires more than just a stated rationale. It requires the complex construction of acquiescent selves and societies through linguistic
-
The Evolution of Human Infancy: Why It Helps to Be Helpless Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Karen R. Rosenberg
Humans have a prolonged childhood, which begins with an immature developmental state at birth. We take care of these helpless infants through a variety of cultural adaptations, including material culture, provisioning of food, and shared child care. Our species has long been characterized as having secondary altriciality, but an examination of human life history shows that we are fundamentally precocial
-
Doing Fieldwork Without Knowing It Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Renato Rosaldo
This perspective article explores the ways in which I was doing fieldwork without being aware of it from the time I began to speak and spoke English to my mother and Spanish to my father. This life experience taught me central concepts in anthropology, such as cultural relativity, and made me fascinated with the field before I was formally able to study it.
-
The Earliest South African Hominids Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Ronald J. Clarke,Travis Rayne Pickering,Jason L. Heaton,Kathleen Kuman
The earliest South African hominids (humans and their ancestral kin) belong to the genera Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo, with the oldest being a ca. 3.67 million-year-old nearly complete skeleton of Australopithecus (StW 573) from Sterkfontein Caves. This skeleton has provided, for the first time in almost a century of research, the full anatomy of an Australopithecus individual with indisputably
-
Feminism in the House of Anthropology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Lilith Mahmud
Although early feminist insights about reflexivity and fieldwork relations have become core tenets of anthropological theories, feminism itself has been marginalized in anthropology. This review examines feminist contributions to American cultural anthropology since the 1990s across four areas of scholarship: the anthropology of science and medicine, political anthropology, economic anthropology, and
-
Rethinking the Landscape: Emerging Approaches to Archaeological Remote Sensing Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Jesse Casana
An emerging arena of archaeological research is beginning to deploy remote sensing technologies—including aerial and satellite imagery, digital topographic data, and drone-acquired and terrestrial geophysical data—not only in support of conventional fieldwork but also as an independent means of exploring the archaeological landscape. This article provides a critical review of recent research that relies
-
Pidgins and Creoles: Debates and Issues Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Christine Jourdan
This article identifies and presents the main debates and issues that are generating interest in the field of creole studies. It is composed of two main sections. The first one presents the debates currently stimulating creolistics: the nature of pidgins and creoles and the relation between the two, the sociological and typological distinction between pidgins and creoles, the various theories explaining
-
Peirce and Archaeology: Recent Approaches Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Joanne P. Baron
The philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, and in particular his theory of signs (semiotic), has seen increasing interest within archaeological theory over the past 20 years. This article reviews Peirce's most influential ideas within archaeology, directs readers to where in Peirce's voluminous works they can find these ideas, and discusses how each of them has been applied by archaeologists to a variety
-
Human Evolution in Asia: Taking Stock and Looking Forward Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Sang-Hee Lee,Autumn Hudock
We review the state of paleoanthropology research in Asia. We survey the fossil record, articulate the current understanding, and delineate the points of contention. Although Asia received less attention than Europe and Africa did in the second half of the twentieth century, an increase in reliably dated fossil materials and the advances in genetics have fueled new research. The long and complex evolutionary
-
Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Bruce Grant
If our knowledge of shamanism has been so abidingly partial, so impressively uneven, so deeply varied by history, and so enduringly skeptical for so long, how has its study come to occupy such pride of place in the anthropological canon? One answer comes in a history of social relations where shamans both are cast as translators of the unseen and are themselves sites of anxiety in a very real world
-
Archaeoprimatology: The Longue Durée Interface Between Humans and Nonhuman Primates Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Bernardo Urbani
Archaeoprimatology explores how humans and nonhuman primates coexisted in the past. This discipline has profound roots in texts of early scholars. Archaeoprimatological research examines the liminality between humans, apes, monkeys, and prosimians deep in time before the rise of the Anthropocene. By exploring the beginning of the relationship between modern Homo sapiens and primates, which possibly
-
The Political Economy of Attention Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Morten Axel Pedersen,Kristoffer Albris,Nick Seaver
Attention has become an issue of intense political, economic, and moral concern over recent years: from the commodification of attention by digital platforms to the alleged loss of the attentional capacities of screen-addicted children (and their parents). While attention has rarely been an explicit focus of anthropological inquiry, it has still played an important if mostly tacit part in many anthropological
-
Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2021-10-21 Carlota McAllister,Valentina Napolitano
Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and
-
Madness: Recursive Ethnography and the Critical Uses of Psychopathology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Sarah Pinto
From the late 1990s, a wave of writing in anthropology took up the idiom of madness to orient a critical approach. However, anthropology's use of madness as critique reflects a longer conversation between psychiatry and anthropology. As madness is used to point to and connect other things—afflictions, therapeutics, medicine, politics, colonialism, religion, and, especially, trauma as a social condition—it
-
Tobacco Reconsidered: Ongoing Omissions, Original Outlooks in the Slipstreams of Experience, Global Health, and Critical Industry Studies Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Matthew Kohrman,Peter Benson
Nearly a decade ago, we published the first Annual Review of Anthropology article on tobacco ( Kohrman & Benson 2011 ). Since then, much has happened, and much has persisted regarding human-tobacco relations. Here, we present a stocktaking of how scholars drawing on anthropological methods have responded.
-
Beyond the Household: Caribbean Families and Biocultural Models of Alloparenting Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-21 Robin G. Nelson
Alloparental or extramaternal care is an integral aspect of human childrearing. This behavior has been explored both as an extension of the primary mother–infant dyad that evolved to meet the deman...
-
Archaeology of Everyday Life Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-21 Cynthia Robin
Everyday life is critical in the constitution of selves and societies alike. Archaeology, with its attention to material and spatial remains, is in a unique position to further studies of everyday ...
-
Socio-Ecological Challenges as Modulators of Women's Reproductive Trajectories Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-21 Pablo A. Nepomnaschy, Amanda Rowlands, Ana Paula Prescivalli Costa, Katrina G. Salvante
Amenorrhea, anovulatory cycles, miscarriages, and other reproductive outcomes are often seen as pathological. Life history theory, in contrast, treats those outcomes as adaptations that helped wome...
-
Archaeology of Cuisine and Cooking Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-21 Sarah R. Graff
This review demonstrates that recent contributions by archaeologists to the study of cuisine and cooking present a new addition to the field of anthropology. Archaeologists situate their work histo...
-
The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-17 Omer Gokcumen, Michael Frachetti
Abstract The study of ancient genomes has burgeoned at an incredible rate in the last decade. The result is a shift in archaeological narratives, bringing with it a fierce debate on the place of ge...
-
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-17 Stephen E. Nash, Chip Colwell
On November 16, 1990, US President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This federal legislation marked the culmination of decades o...
-
Liminal Light and Primate Evolution Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-17 Nathaniel J. Dominy, Amanda D. Melin
The adaptive origins of primates and anthropoid primates are topics of enduring interest to biological anthropologists. A convention in these discussions is to treat the light environment as binary...
-
Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-15 Sonya E. Pritzker
Previous research on language and emotion in anthropology has demonstrated that rather than being a private, subjective, and prediscursive experience belonging to individuals, emotion is an intersu...
-
The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Yael Navaro
Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated a negative methodology. New work has addressed the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production...
-
The Neolithic of Southeast Europe: Recent Trends Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 John Chapman, Stella Souvatzi
The prehistory of the Aegean, Balkans, and Carpathian Basin has changed dramatically in the last two decades. This review covers five aspects of these changes: (a) the development of theoretical ap...
-
Typologies, Typifications, and Types Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Stephanie Sadre-Orafai
This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomen...
-
Living in a Toxic World Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Alex M. Nading
While the proliferation of industrial toxic substances over the past century has had drastic environmental and bodily effects, conventional methods of measuring and mitigating those effects continu...
-
Broadening Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Paternal Care and Fathers’ Effects on Children Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Lee T. Gettler, Adam H. Boyette, Stacy Rosenbaum
Unlike most mammals, human fathers cooperate with mothers to care for young to an extraordinary degree. Human paternal care likely evolved alongside our unique life history strategy of raising slow...
-
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Randall H. McGuire
Fleeing violence, poverty, abuse, war, and climatic change, tens of millions of people have fled their homes in the Global South seeking refuge in adjacent nations and in the Global North. This mod...
-
Aging, Life History, and Human Evolution Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Richard G. Bribiescas
Aging occurs in all sexually reproducing organisms. That is, physical degradation over time occurs from conception until death. While the life span of a species is often viewed as a benchmark of ag...
-
Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-07-07 Winifred Tate
As complex institutions extend into and govern greater spheres of social life, ethnographers contend with policy in an ever-widening range of fieldsites. This review examines anthropology of policy...
-
Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and Collaborations Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-05-29 Andrew S. Mathews
The Anthropocene, a proposed name for a geological epoch marked by human impacts on global ecosystems, has inspired anthropologists to critique, to engage in theoretical and methodological experime...
-
Mobility and Alterity in Iberian Late Prehistoric Archaeology: Current Research on the Neolithic–Early Bronze Age (6000–1500 BCE) Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-05-18 Katina T. Lillios
Archaeological investigations of late prehistoric Iberia between the Neolithic and Bronze Age (6000–1500 BCE) have long been a battleground between indigenist and exogenous models, and understandin...
-
Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-04-14 Jessica O'Reilly, Cindy Isenhour, Pamela McElwee, Ben Orlove
Climate anthropology has broadened over the past decade from predominately locally focused studies on climate impacts to encompass new approaches to climate science, mitigation, sustainability tran...
-
Reflections of an Imperfect Anthropologist Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2020-02-21 Linda Marie Fedigan
This article summarizes my perspective on vital lessons that I have learned over my 45 years as a practicing anthropologist. To avoid repeating previously published biographical details of my life,...
-
Soylent Is People, and WEIRD Is White: Biological Anthropology, Whiteness, and the Limits of the WEIRD Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Kathryn B.H. Clancy, Jenny L. Davis
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative human subjects research. Although this oversampling i...
-
The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 William Mazzarella
This article suggests that although there is not much of an explicitly defined anthropology of populism, anthropologists have nevertheless been working for many years on the things we talk about wh...
-
Environmental Politics of Reproduction Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Martine Lappé, Robbin Jeffries Hein, Hannah Landecker
What constitutes "human reproduction" is under negotiation as its biology, social nature, and cultural valences are increasingly perceived as bound up in environmental issues. This review maps the growing overlap between formerly rather separate domains of reproductive politics and environmental politics, examining three interrelated areas. The first is the emergence of an intersectional environmental
-
The Anthropology of Art, After the End of Art: Contesting the Art-Culture System Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Eugenia Kisin, Fred R. Myers
We focus on the anthropology of art from the mid-1980s to the present, a period of disturbance and significant transformation in the field of anthropology. The field can be understood to be respond...
-
The Call of the Wild: Rethinking Food Production in Ancient Amazonia Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Eduardo G. Neves, Michael J. Heckenberger
The Amazon basin is accepted as an independent center of plant domestication in the world. A variety of important plants were domesticated in the Amazon and its surroundings; however, the majority ...
-
Language Endangerment in Childhood Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Barbra A. Meek
Language endangerment by definition excludes children and childhood, as the most endangered languages are those which are no longer being used, spoken, or acquired by the youngest generations. By a...
-
Archaeology and Social Memory Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Ruth M. Van Dyke
This review provides a road map through current trends and issues in archaeological studies of memory. Many scholars continue to draw on Halbwachs for collective memory studies, emphasizing how the...
-
Governmentality and Language Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Jacqueline Urla
This article reviews how the analytics of governmentality have been taken up by scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics. It explores the distinctive logics of...
-
How Maya Archaeologists Discovered the 99% Through the Study of Settlement Patterns Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Jeremy A. Sabloff
This article presents an autobiographical perspective on the changing nature of Maya archaeology, focusing on the role of settlement pattern studies in illuminating the lives of commoners as well a...
-
Population Demography, Ancestry, and the Biological Concept of Race Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Adam P. Van Arsdale
For more than 50 years, biological anthropology has argued against the use of the biological race concept. Despite such efforts, aspects of the concept remain in circulation within society and with...
-
Poverty and Children's Language in Anthropolitical Perspective Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Amy L. Paugh, Kathleen C. Riley
From the “verbal deprivation” and “restricted codes” of the 1960s to contemporary “language gap” discourses, deficit models of children's language have been posited to explain social ills ranging f...
-
The Embodiment of War: Growth, Development, and Armed Conflict Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Patrick F. Clarkin
Armed conflict regularly presents extremely adverse circumstances not only for combatants, but also for civilians. In fact, estimates from various wars over the past 70 years suggest that noncombat...
-
The Anthropology of Water Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Andrea Ballestero
The anthropology of water is a self-declared relational field that attempts to transcend nature/culture distinctions by attending to the fact that the social and ecological aspects of water are sep...
-
Arctic Archaeology and Climate Change Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Sean P.A. Desjardins, Peter D. Jordan
An enduring debate in the field of Arctic archaeology has been the extent to which climate change impacted cultural developments in the past. Long-term culture change across the circumpolar Arctic ...
-
Adolescence as a Biocultural Life History Transition Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Meredith W. Reiches
While the categories of adolescence and puberty are often treated as one, the existence of two distinct terms points to different kinds of maturation in humans. Puberty refers to a period of coordi...
-
The Anthropology of Islam in Europe: A Double Epistemological Impasse Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Nadia Fadil
This article reviews the main trends in the anthropological scholarship of Islam in Europe by examining this body of work through the lens of what I call a double epistemological impasse. The first...
-
The Anthropology of Death Revisited Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 Matthew Engelke
This article brings together classic work in the anthropology of death, much of which focused on funerary rites, with more recent studies, some of which continue with the classic focus and some of ...
-
Food: Location, Location, Location Annual Review of Anthropology (IF 4.064) Pub Date : 2019-10-21 David Beriss
This article examines the question of why local food has become, for many activists and scholars, a core concept for understanding food systems and globalization and for challenging systems of inju...