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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]

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 article presents a list of volumes that have been published through the American Anthropological Association's publication "Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association" including "Alternative Approaches to Lithic Analysis," "Powers of Observation: Alternative Views in Archeology," and "Lords of the Southeast: Social Inequality and the Native Elites of Southeastern North America."

The increasing visibility of sexualities beyond heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual is often associated with progressive politics and the questioning of heteronormativity. Yet non‐majoritarian sexualities can also include self‐identifications premised upon an opposition to LGBTQ+ equality and inclusion, including those who identify as "ex‐gay." Drawing on fieldwork with evangelical Christian activists in London, UK, this paper uses a court case in which the "legality" of ex‐gay sexuality was contested to discuss the law's simultaneous desire and inability to render contested identities legally legible. In seeking recognition as a sexual minority, self‐described ex‐gay evangelicals reveal the inadequacy of modern law's efforts to regulate difference as either "innate" or "chosen," thus upsetting the terms of the hetero‐secular legal gaze even as they embrace heterosexual supremacy. As such, this activism, which is typically analyzed in terms of evangelicalism's commitment to heteronormativity, works to denaturalize the concept of sexual orientation(s)—including, I argue, the heterosexuality ex‐gay Christians pursue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is well discussed in the literature, paid domestic workers become like kin through living with and caring for their employers. Exploring two disparate cases, aging Asian domestic workers in Singapore and African eldercare workers in the United States, the article focuses on two critical junctures when these kin relations are disavowed: the care worker's retirement and the death of a patient. We argue that the flexible registers of kinship that characterize care workers' relationships with their employers revert, at the end of employment, to fixed notions of kinship based on blood and marriage. These essentialist understandings of kinship arise around inheritance and the worker's care in older age and in illness, enabling employers, states, and private care agencies to avoid post‐employment obligations to domestic workers. The fluctuation between kinship‐as‐doing and kinship‐as‐essence marginalizes domestic workers in a globalized economy as disposable kin, denying their belonging as citizens or social equals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT The year 2016 in biological anthropology represented a return to the methodical study of classic questions and increased integrative team-based research that utilizes multiple methodological approaches. This review is not comprehensive, but rather highlights several papers that reflect trends in four areas of research within biological anthropology: paleoanthropology, primatology, human biology, and anthropological genetics. Methodological innovation enabled scholars in paleoanthropology to tackle questions once hampered by small sample size. Primatologists approached studies of behavior and reproduction with the rigor characteristic of the subdiscipline, while paying increasing attention to anthropogenic influences on primate habitats. Like their colleagues in paleoanthropology, human biologists also returned to enduring questions regarding reproduction, human adaptation, and behavior, including, notably, a focus on variability in cultural practice and meaning, as well as resource inequity. The publications representing anthropological genetics signify a movement toward an incorporation of multiple lines of evidence in our understanding of human and nonhuman primate ancestry. In total, these papers reveal shifts in biological anthropology toward research that is increasingly aware of the limits of siloed science and attuned to addressing issues salient to the populations and communities in which we work. [ comparative morphology, Anthropocene, anthropological genetics, human biology] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microsoft PowerPoint is both the bane and banality of contemporary South Korean office work. Corporate workers spend countless hours refining and crafting plans, proposals, and reports in PowerPoint that often lead to conflicts with coworkers and overtime work. This article theorizes the excessive attention to documents in modern office contexts. Where scholars have been under the impression that institutional documents align with institutional purposes, I describe a context in which making documents for individual purposes and making them for work exist under a basic tension. Based on fieldwork in corporate Korea between 2013 and 2015, I describe how Korean office workers calibrate documents to the tastes of superiors who populate the managerial chain. These practices leave little trace of real "work" on paper, but they are productive for navigating complex internal labor markets and demonstrating a higher order value of attention toward others. These findings suggest that institutional and individual authorities are not competing projects inside organizations but become entangled in increasingly complex participatory encounters, even as they are channeled through a seemingly simple software like PowerPoint. [documents, expertise, authority, technology, South Korea] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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.

In 2010, scholars of language and culture developed broader and more dynamic ways to understand traditional approaches in the anthropological study of language, reframed our analyses of communicative events, created new ways to understand the co-construction of languages and social organizations from the family to the nation-state, and forged activist partnerships with the communities we worked with on issues including social justice, language revitalization, and education. In this review article, I reflect on 2010 work in journals, books, and conference papers within the field of linguistic anthropology and in associated disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometime in the early 17th century, at Magdalena de Cao, a community of resettled native peoples in the Chicama Valley on the North Coast of Peru, a Spaniard used the back of a letter to jot down the terms for numbers in a local language. Four hundred years later, the authors of this article were able to recover and study this piece of paper. We present information on this otherwise unknown language, on numeracy, and on cultural relations of ethnolinguistic groups in pre- and early-post-Conquest northern Peru. Our investigations have determined that, while several of the Magadalena number terms were likely borrowed from a Quechuan language, the remainder record a decimal number system in an otherwise unknown language. Historical sources of the region mention at least two potential candidate languages, Pescadora and Quingnam; however, because neither is documented beyond its name, a definite connection remains impossible to establish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a range of issues presented initially in The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, and debated subsequently in reviews and various papers, this article ranges widely in time to address traditional environmental knowledge, oral history, conservation and sustainability, and environmentalism in indian Country. I also offer thoughts on the involvement of Native people in large-scale development as well as comanagement schemes today and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks into a scientific controversy involving a manuscript entitled 'Lizard Stowaways on the Express Train to Polynesia,' which appeared in the British science weekly 'Nature,' to show the difficulty involved in interdisciplinary collaboration. Background on evolutionary biologist Christopher Austin's paper; Culture of science at the turn of the 21st century; Trope of scientific experiments and research.

The article deals with the intellectual, ethical and career path problems of anthropologists in China, in response to a paper by Gordon Matthews about East Asian anthropology. Topics discussed the influence of Western model of anthropology on Chinese anthropology, the role of technological and economic factors in decolonizing anthropology in East Asia, and the use of the English language. The initiative of Chinese anthropologists to create an identity is mentioned.

Responds to Steve Fuller's comments on am article in the June 1998 issue of the `American Anthropologist,' on the authorization of science studies. Questions discussed in the original paper; Use of `anti-science' as a political weapon against work; Undisciplined science studies; Heterodox anthropologies; Anthropology and science studies.

Presents a commentary on the paper written by anthropologist Paul Shankman published in the periodical `American Anthropologist' defending anthropologist Margaret Mead's claims regarding Samoan sexual customs. Background on the original report written by Mead; Mead's interpretation of the sexual mores of the Samoans; Errors in Mead's research; Confirmation of Mead's account by Lowell D. Holmes.

Refutes the claims of Carmella C. Moore and A. Kimball Romney in their paper `Material Culture, Geographic Propinquity, and Linguistic Affiliation on the North Coast of New Guinea: A Reanalysis of Welsch, Terrell, and Nadolski'. Correlation between material culture and language-group affiliation in New Guinea's North Coast; Factors behind the linguistic diversity.

Investigates the factors behind the variation in assemblages of material culture in the North Coast of New Guinea. Reanalysis of the results of the paper `Language and Culture on the North Coast of New Guinea,' by Robert Welsch, John Terrell and John Nadolski; Relationships among material culture, distance and language; Distribution of material artifacts.

Discusses the life and work of Lewis H. Morgan, one of the most influential 19th-century anthropologists, and explores his papers bequeathed to the University of Rochester, which provide insights into how he went about doing research, and suggest the relevance of his work to issues still being discussed. Ethnography; From ethnography to philology; New instrumentality; Philology to conjectural history; Conjectural to universal history; The contemporary Morgan.

Presents a paper by Bruce C. Trigger, Anthropology Professor at McGill University, considering what a synthesis of current ideas about archeological explanation might look like. Thesis and antithesis; External and internal constraints; Feelings concerning a holistic archeology; Conclusions.

The author comments on the article "The Question of Cultural Incommensurability: An Intercultural Interpretation Arising Out of Southeast Asia," by Beng-Lan Goh. Topics include the distinction between hybridity and syncretism, semantic confusions in the paper such as the concept of cultural relativism and Goh's reading of two Asian scholars, Kuan-Hsing Chen of Taiwan's cultural studies circle and Hindu-American historian Prasenjit Duara.

Presents a critique on the paper `Race and the Culture of Anthropology,' by Kamala Visweswaran. Visweawaran's interpretation of the text `Race: Science and Politics,' by Ruth Benedict; Benedict's arguments for science in the form of anthropology; Erroneous presentation of Benedict's notion of cultural studies; Misuse of the history of relativism to reinvent theoretical orientations and topics.

Presents a critique on the essay `Race and the Culture of Anthropology,' by Kamala Visweswaran. Failure to address the issue of equal evaluation of all cultures; Visweswaran's arguments; Visewaswaran's criticisms for the efforts of anthropologist Franz Boas to demonstrate the fallaciousness of racial discrimination and the ignorance of racism; Summary of Visweswaran's paper.

Khipus are knotted-cord devices once used in the Andes for communication and recording information. Although numbers can be read on many khipus, it is unknown how other forms of data may have been recorded on the strings. Scholars currently debate whether elements of cord construction, such as the direction of ply, signified meaning on khipus and, if so, how. Testimony from an Aymara-speaking khipu maker, collected in 1895 by Max Uhle and recovered from Uhle's unpublished field notes, combined with the analysis of his actual khipu provides the first direct evidence that ply was a signifying element in khipus. Moreover, the evidence suggests that ply signified through a principle of markedness in which S ply corresponded to the unmarked (more valued) category while Z ply corresponded to the marked (less valued) category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolution of anthropology as a scholarly discipline in East Asia, in response to a paper by Gordon Matthews on the interconnection between global and East Asian anthropologies. It is argued that Matthews has failed to discern the academic training of the founders of East Asian anthropologies and the role of Chinese anthropologists in helping the growth of the discipline. The use of both university-ranking systems and scholarly performance evaluations is mentioned.

For 12 days in May 2005, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), as well as several other screening venues in Washington, D.C., hosted a group of renowned indigenous filmmakers from around the globe for the ground-breaking film showcase, ‘First Nations\First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media.’ This film showcase highlighted the innovative ways in which indigenous filmmakers draw on indigenous storytelling practices to create cinematic visions that honor their long-standing indigenous cultural worlds while reaching local and world audiences. In this essay, I highlight the onscreen impact through an analysis of several films featured in First Nations\First Features, as well as the offscreen impact emphasizing how the indigenous directors used this opportunity to strengthen social networks and share experience in this industry, which may develop into future collaborative film projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the paper "Restaging the Will to Believe," by Thomas G. Kirsch published in the journal "American Anthropologist." Kirsch's paper exposes the difficulties of studying religious belief, but the reforms he suggests need to go even further. Kirsch emphasizes on the dynamic nature of religious behavior in the paper but his new terminology does not address the fundamental problem touched on -- but not solved -- in his paper. He is assumes that people do or do not possess a certain kind of talk, what he refers to as "my informants' assertions."

Information is presented about several papers delivered at the "New Dialogue on Race" Conference held January 12-13, 2010 sponsored by the American Anthropological Association to discuss aspects of race, racism, and racial attitudes in the U.S. Topics include the intersectionality of race, issues with Islamophobia or discrimination against Muslims, and racial aspects of international human rights violations. The symposium featured several anthropologists including Leith Mullings, John Jackson, and Maria Vesperi.

This article focuses on the various papers published in the December 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Anthropological Association. Articles in this issue explore the ideologies underlying the discourse of language rights on which contemporary claims for linguistic survival are largely based. Anthropological interest in and concern for threatened languages is not new. These publications reflect growing awareness in the public media of language loss and considerable anxiety felt by speakers toward consequences of this loss.