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Many ethics review bureaucracies present signed, written forms administered at a single point in time as the default, best‐practice method for obtaining and documenting consent to participate in research. The demand is emblematic of ethics review committees' insistence on form over function, their failure to understand the cultural contexts of field research, and erroneous assumptions about research methods. Ethnographers responding to an international survey argued that written consent may not protect participants, may mask unethical research, and may often be inappropriate for legal, cultural, political or historical reasons. We suggest the dominance of written consent reflects culturally specific views of paper, writing, signatures, and contracts grounded in particular historical imaginations of the authenticity of the signature and the power of writing and forms. Construed by ethics review institutions as culturally universal, the signed consent form has come to take on the qualities of a fetish. [research ethics, informed consent, signatures, forms, research ethics committees, institutional review boards] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of this response article express gratitude for the comments made by Martin and colleagues on their previous paper. They argue that their review articles provide evidence supporting the idea that women were capable of hunting in the Paleolithic era. They disagree with Martin and colleagues' assertion that reproductive behavioral ecology work among modern foragers should preclude reconstructions of past gender roles. The authors also address criticisms regarding testable hypotheses, estrogen levels, the value of mothering and gathering activities, and the feasibility of a strict sexual division of labor in small forager groups. They invite Martin and colleagues to collaborate on further research to explore the reasons behind the absence of evidence for a sexual division of labor until relatively recently. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Paleo‐fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as "Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer," continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence, which reflects a failure to question how modern gender roles color our reconstructions of the past. Here we present examples to support women's roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft‐cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials. By pulling together the current state of the archaeological evidence along with the modern human physiology presented in the accompanying paper (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue), we argue that not only are women well‐suited to endurance activities like hunting, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting in the Paleolithic. Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on her experience of sketching notes during the 2017 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Washington, D.C. She expresses her fascination with the power of hand-drawn images to reveal and describe complex truths. She explains her views that drawing is an essential tool for thinking and the importance of holding back and waiting for the key messages to emerge before sketching.

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sally and her sister Patty attended school together, both graduating with honors in 1962 from the Westtown School, a private Quaker academy established in 1799, then attending Wellesley College together, Sally majoring in anthropology within an integrated department of sociology and anthropology. After returning to Stockholm, Hannerz sent Sally his unpublished 1970 conference paper titled "Management of Danger", which became the inspiration for Sally's doctoral project in "Dover Square", her pseudonym for the public housing project where she conducted research between March 1975 and September 1976. With a rich body of ethnographic data at hand, Sally returned to the concept of vernacularization in an article (Merry and Stern 2005) and book (Merry 2006), but her understanding of the process shifted significantly. Neither a strident critique of international human rights nor a righteous argument on its behalf, human rights vernacularization provided an empirically grounded framework for understanding the unavoidable complexities in "translating international law into local justice" (Merry 2006; see also Goodale and Merry 2007). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the author's comments as an anthropologist of tourism based in Japan on three papers addressing the anthropologies of tourism including a paper on the possibility of Ibero-American anthropologies of tourism, the Mexican way of studying tourism, and a paper on the anthropology of tourism in China.

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various papers published within the issue on topics including the persistence of white supremacy in response to capitalism, an exchange between anthropologist Margaret Mead and author James Baldwin and institutional racism in the U.S.

Reviewer critiques are, in part, a preview of the sorts of responses the work will get when it's out in the world. REVIEWER #2 MAY NOT, IN FACT, BE YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE This is likely the first time the work has been read by people outside your trusted circle, and this means that new - and perhaps unanticipated - questions and critiques are bound to arise. As you listen to the reviews, take note of your own inner responses, particularly if they are defensive or dismissive, and ask yourself: What questions or comments from reviewers can I reframe as moments where my writing did not reach my audience?. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An introduction to the papers featured in the current issue is presented, with topics including anthropologists working in museums, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea and obtaining consent from research participants as required by ethics review boards.

The author comments on anthropology professor Nahal Naficy's ethnographic account of the possibilities and institutional challenges to the disciplinary life of anthropology in Iran. He argues that Naficy's paper is a call on Iranian anthropologists to rethink pedagogy and address the important issue of disciplinary identity. He also discusses the link between the 1979 Revolution on the current preoccupation of Iranian social sciences with concepts of modernity and cultural identity.

The article presents the author's comments on papers in the special section of the journal that discuss the anthropologies of tourism. Topics discussed include tourism studies, the essays seeming primarily framed by political economic issues, and the larger discussion of tourism or research on tourism.

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An obituary for American anthropologist Harold C. Conklin is presented.

The article discusses papers published within the issue, including one by Chika Watanabe on the moral discourse surrounding loans to aid workers given by a Japanese environmental and development organization in Myanmar and another by Hadas Weiss on the attempt of middle-class workers in Israel to cope with pension practices.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various papers by linguistic anthropologists who work in indigenous- and endangered-language contexts published within the issue.

Critique, or "crit", comes from the world of fine arts and design and constitutes the dominant review model in many studio practice programs. The "best" type of review is usually considered to be double-anonymous review, where reviewers do not know the identity of the authors, and authors, similarly, do not know who has reviewed their work. Unlike double-anonymous review, crit takes the form of a conversation and may involve lively back-and-forth, and, of course, in crit nobody is anonymous. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the role of technologies in the consumption and circulation of digital music in Cuba. Topics discussed include the use of memory sticks to share digital music files, the construction of social imaginary based on common experiences, and the similarities between plastic bags and memory sticks which reflect resourcefulness and inventiveness in Cuban culture.

So I was curious when Betty took me there one sticky-hot September day. 15 I am borrowing Sharpe's ([15], 117) method of redaction to black out Betty's ethnic slur. Betty makes an introduction: "Shirley's an old head like me." All this kept me free from Betty's temper by making me her charge and, at times, an alibi for insolence that called itself defense - this I gathered when she vowed to "bitch-slap" any "thugs" who bothered me, to which I'd said, "No thanks.". [Extracted from the article]

The following day, Señor Aurelio and Benito left the township together and parted ways on the road: My younger brother was more adventurous, more decisive, we can say. On a Sunday four years after Señor Aurelio talked about his brother at Don Melesio's restaurant, he called out of the blue to tell me about the night he and Benito said goodbye. Señor Aurelio, who was in his early 70s, had been part of Peru's grassroots movements for more than five decades. On a Friday morning in the middle of fall 2019, I stood outside a colonial building not too far from Arequipa's main cathedral, waiting for Señor Aurelio,[1] a member of a civic association dedicated to monitoring corruption. [Extracted from the article]

We have white sage, rosemary, lavender, laurel, oak, elderberry, marigolds, celosia, hibiscus, and more. En el jardín del espíritu, we have huge nopal plants. En el jardín del espíritu - with my helper, Chámis My Niimiipuu ancestors always had close relations with the Phyto Ones. [Extracted from the article]

But after a few days, I began tuning into sex as an ambient potentiality outside of the space of screens, a sensitivity I had first cultivated in graduate school while researching public sex on the University of Texas at Austin campus. I've said "yes", but it's a laden "yes" - hemmed and hawed - because the struggle has been really real: health stuff, family stuff, addiction stuff, institutional stuff, plus the dystopian ordinary of a racial uprising and a global pandemic. While I conducted the research into the online spaces where porn refuseniks share resources and stories, I simultaneously undertook my own fast with some male-identified members of my Tantrik spiritual community, as well as a former student and then-nascent yogi. It looked to "fapstainers" - those who'd given up pornography and even masturbation in an attempt to reset their brains to a porn-free default and get it up again, or just to learn some new relating skills. [Extracted from the article]

I'm asking how Kodak changed the world, not whether it was 'worth it.'" "Well", Ted asked, "was it?" The chemicals that Kodak poured into the river and air and soil are still there, in the landscape and the bodies of workers, factory neighbors, and their children. Courtesy of Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY., scowling on the right side of the image, worked at Kodak, in the Camera Works factory. Founded in Rochester, New York, in 1880, Eastman Kodak went on to become the second-largest chemical company in the United States, and they are said to have made 80 percent of all the filmstock in existence. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

[Lichens are a] highly successful yet confounding entity. " Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus." http://www.waysofenlichenment.net. - Honegger ([4]) To me the real conceptual challenge posed by the lichen thallus derives from its unsettling capacity for transmutation even at the slightest shift in perspective.... Lichens ... exist at a kind of conceptual doorway, a portal. [Extracted from the article]

Clearly, the issue is that business entities in Acirema are immune from the rule of law.[6] I reckon that the social institutions underpinning Nacirema society require reimaginings, but the atmosphere here is allergic to critical thinking. Comments on a found text: "Return to Acirema: Fragments regarding twenty-first-century Nacirema culture" There is a distinct and palpable rot at the core of Nacirema society, and it is most evident in the steady rise of a collective resentment among its peasants (rural folk),[3] who seek to, quite dangerously, marry religion with politics and elect a "divine-king" as ruler. To the north, Adanac, another stolen territory, condemns the Nacirema way of life, and to the south, yet a third stolen territory, Ocixem waits nervously for the looming military invasion.[4] After all, the driving factor behind all of these crumbling institutions, systems, and structures is an unchecked neoliberal system - capitalism - which places things before people. [Extracted from the article]

Plant ones eat human ones (and many things besides) and human ones eat plant ones (and many things besides, all of which eat plant ones). B I Phyto i b - derived from the Greek I phyein i , meaning "to bring forth, produce, to grow, spring up"[1] and forming words with the sense "of relating to, or resembling (that of) a plant."[2] B I Future i b - that is to be, relating to, or constituting a tense expressive of time yet to come. We intend them to free up the plants and plant metaphors from plantation thinking through loving, careful searing, scorching, and decomposing. The rise of Man2 i [3] ( I Wynter i , [54], [55] I ) rendered (some) humans incapable of continued intimacy with plants, even mystified about the respectful intimacies that Indigenous peoples around the world maintained with plants. [Extracted from the article]

Doing I Dieta i in the way he envisages, in dedicated and resourced facilities, is an emergent practice, it enables an actualization of Shipibo roots, in new conditions, integrating selected elements from foreign culture and protecting what needs to be transmitted to future generations. For José Lopez Sanchez, a Shipibo Onaya (One Who Knows) who runs a Shipibo healing center (Shipibo Rao) in the Ucayali region of Peru, the future is something that you plant now. Dev ([3], ix) defines I samati i (to do I Dieta i in Shipibo) as follows: "Healers use dieting practices, consisting of periods of fasting and deprivation, to learn from teacher plants (or other material or spiritual entities).". [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author reflects on her experience of sketching notes during the 2017 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Washington, D.C. She expresses her fascination with the power of hand-drawn images to reveal and describe complex truths. She explains her views that drawing is an essential tool for thinking and the importance of holding back and waiting for the key messages to emerge before sketching.