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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.

In this paper I address one site of technological development and cultural production, the permanent or persistent comatose condition and the institutions and practices that enable this life form to exist. As with other medical sites of ambiguity and change under recent scrutiny by anthropologists, the locations in which comatose bodies thrive are those in which the routinization of technology use in the clinic and a legitimating social and economic context come together to permit and create a further remapping of the notions of "life" and "person." I explore the new forms of knowledge, practice, and the body that are created at this site and how they are negotiated, and I discuss how the shifting understanding of "culture" and "nature" both have an impact on and are informed by American quandaries about approaching death. I argue that beings who are neither fully alive, biologically dead, nor "naturally" self-regulating, yet who are sustained by modern medical practice, destabilize the existing social order in ways that are different from other hybrid forms.

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 comments on articles which reflect the popular representations about Cuba. Topics discussed include the development of Cuban socio-material ecology, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz's life in two cultural-linguistic worlds in Cuba and Spain, and the politics of travel, arrival and departure in Cuba.

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.)

Beginning with Edward Tylor's (1889) definition of culture as socially “acquired,” I focus in this article on motion as social acquisition and transmission through “artifacts”—both durable (like ceramic pots) and fleeting (like sounds). Motion can be detected by comparison of the artifacts to which people are exposed with those they in turn produce. I examine rates of interaction with artifacts and changes in rates as evidence of the operation of “forces” such as interest and metaculture. I develop a set of axioms or laws of motion, growing out of fine-grained research on naturally occurring discourse, and endeavor to demonstrate their utility through application to three empirical cases. Although I deal with relatively small-scale artifacts, I conclude this article with the suggestion that its methods may prove useful in the broader study of cultural phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this “In Focus,” authors address how culture is figured in institutional contexts that are putatively arenas of no culture. Participants in these institutions pay ever more attention to questions of “culture” but often deploy the term in ways that presume that only select outsiders are culture bearers. Contributors to this volume seek to highlight the intricate ways in which the “cultural” and “acultural” are mutually constituted in such institutional settings and the consequences that flow from this. To address this issue ethnographically, the authors explore how culture—framed as traditional and locatable—is presumed and performed in institutional contexts constructed as modern, universal, and acultural. By comparing how different institutions account for the cultural and the acultural, this special issue questions what is the price of having culture as a classificatory category? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing entirely on public, open sources, in this article I trace the recent development of U.S. military understandings and uses of cultural knowledge. Military education, training, and operations reveal complexity and diversity that demands empirical study. In particular, I locate in Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–present) an internal, critical theoretical disagreement between a model of culture as a static, or slow-moving, property of a constructed “other,” embraced by mainstream thought in the U.S. Army, and a competing sense of cultural process as dynamic, interactive, and emergent, emphasized by Special Forces and the Marine Corps. This disagreement feeds off of and into longer-running debates within U.S. military circles, demonstrating that the U.S. military's engagement with the concept of “culture” is far from monolithic: different services’ approaches are shaped by their own histories, driving rival emphases on weaponizing culture and culturalizing warriors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archaeology of empire is permeated by sexual narratives. This has been especially true of archaeological research on the Spanish Americas, where the material remains of colonial settlements have often been interpreted as products of a literal and figurative marriage between two cultures. However, investigating colonization as a consensual domestic arrangement has masked the ways in which imperial projects relied on the exercise of power, including sexual regulations and sexual coercion. Recent archaeological and ethnohistoric research at the Spanish-colonial military settlement of El Presidio de San Francisco affords a different perspective, one in which the public and institutional exercise of sexual control was central to the imperial project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]