Search

"What good is anthropology?" Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi‐Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such as the first generation of postcolonial anthropologists in India, as they confronted the question whether India may be seen as a settler colony. How was such a spirit born? As one possible beginning, I offer a creation myth for the birth of anthropological sensibility, located in a key moment of the Ramayana, when its tribal/lower‐caste poet‐author, Valmiki, begins to enunciate differently, after witnessing an act of human, settler violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic, structural, and enacted violence. Today, continued inequality at local and global levels is deeply complicated by corporate globalization and climate change. Ethnographic research and anthropological engagement is urgent and critical, requiring our persistence to redress social wrongs through supportive, generous partnerships, as advocates and as outspoken witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's "meta," or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to "map the margins" (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the life of Viktor von Weizsäcker (VvW, 1886–1957), a German medical doctor, philosopher and founder of the Heidelberg School of Anthropological Medicine, from a psychobiographical and salutogenic perspective. The authors use salutogenesis and sense of coherence (SOC), and take crucial cultural, historical, and socio-structural frameworks into account to explore the life during the 19th and 20th Centuries in Germany. They present the exploration of a strong SOC in the life of VvW and show how SOC is created within the tight family bonds of the family clan, which has produced many extraordinary theologists, philosophers, scientists and politicians over six generations. In a complex, interconnected and holistic way, SOC is evident in von VvW's individual life, and is also shown to be a family resource. This article contributes to psychobiography in three ways: it develops the salutogenetic perspective in psychobiography, explores the life of VvW within a specific sociocultural context, and investigates the life from a salutogenetic and socio-cultural perspective. Finally, conclusions are drawn, and recommendations for theory and practice are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationally redeeming fieldwork institute. This article parses how some modernist anthropologists distanced themselves from Blom's imperial legacy, while others pressed his ideas of cultural continuity into implicit, controversial claims for their centrality to ancient and modern Maya studies writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three case studies depict different attitudes of anthropologists toward the politics of nationalism promoted by the prewar Polish state. Ethnographer Stanisław Dworakowski, involved in a governmental Committee for the Issues of Petty Nobility in Eastern Poland, elaborated a study on this social stratum. Although based on reliable field research, it can hardly be considered scientific work, as it has many features of political propaganda. Quite opposite is the case of folklorist Joachim Chajes, secretary of the Ethnographical Commission of YIVO. Contemporary Soviet folklore was one of the fields of his research, which Polish anticommunist and antisemitic authorities found suspicious. Accused of communist activity, he was imprisoned. Social anthropologist Józef Obrębski can be situated between those two extremes. His field research among East Slavic peasants in Eastern Poland, concerning their developing national identity, although conducted within a national scientific program and financed by the state, is an example of intellectual independence. By revealing the negative attitude of the peasants toward Polish authorities, Obrębski achieved an outcome, which did not fulfill the official political expectations. These three trajectories show competitive coexistence of the meta-field of power and the scientific field, focused on their respective stakes: power and recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, we argue that gerontologists should increase their engagement with anthropologists to increase transdisciplinary collaboration, fulfill the interdisciplinary promise of gerontology as a field, and to ensure the work of anthropologists is formed by, and employed in, situations where meaningful engagement with practitioners and policymakers can lead to social change. Anthropology is the study of human societies in historical, biological, and sociocultural context, comprising a holistic field of study that can contribute unique methods, approaches, and theories to the field of gerontology. Although increasing amounts of anthropological scholarship have focused on older adulthood, this critical work of anthropologists still needs to be utilized by those in positions of power to enact change. Furthermore, the work conducted by anthropologists of aging has not consistently been recognized as anthropological scholarship. Therefore, a notable gap exists between the promise of the anthropology of aging and the utilization of the field, its findings, and engagement with the broader gerontological academy. As such, the contributions of anthropology to aging scholarship and the resulting reduction in inequities in the aging experience are not always adequately recognized. By examining the history of anthropology's engagement with aging and the lifecourse, we argue for a more applied anthropological gerontology. We conclude with a call to action to ensure that anthropological gerontology is seen as a fundamental branch of scholarship, both within anthropology and gerontology, which can be used to improve the lived experiences of older adults globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In 1951, Mexico's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI) established a coordinating center for a pilot development project in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. INI administrators sought to draw Tzotzil‐ and Tzeltal‐speaking indigenous communities that radiated around San Cristóbal into identification with the Mexican state and its political mythology of racial‐cultural mixture, or mestizaje. To do so, the INI built roads. State investment in the transportation infrastructure of indigenous Chiapas enabled the geographical mobility of scores of U.S. anthropologists and students who used these roads to access "closed corporate communities" such as Zinacantán during the late‐1950s and 1960s. Working from archived correspondence and field notes, this essay examines Harvard Chiapas Project founder Evon Vogt's early project interviews conducted on these roads in a Land Rover. Reading the Land Rover as a space‐making technology of ethnographic rapport, I ask how such vehicles have structured ethnographic forms of intimacy and attachment and whether they render the interview space a site of capitalist capture. I ultimately refract a surfaced critique of the interview form's capitalist coloniality through a weak‐theoretical evocation of the Land Rover's social, technological, and symbolic indeterminacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that 'myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.' Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno's insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage of Horkheimer and Adorno's account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno's task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the 'theological dimensions of capitalism.' Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a focus on the activities of Native Americans and anthropologists involved in the Indian New Deal between the 1930s and the 1950s, I show that Native Americans have long attended to and contributed to a global conversation about decolonization and that North American anthropologists have long worked to decolonize Native American peoples. The Indian New Deal engaged the language of decolonization and instituted policy reforms in service of self-determination for Native Americans. But the Indian New Deal exhibited the characteristic ambivalences of the global decolonization movement, representing an impulse toward self-determination, on the one hand, and neocolonialism, on the other. Anthropologists' involvement in decolonization is thus complex, liberatory at times, paternalistic at others. To explore such important issues realistically, the history of anthropology needs to develop historiography to better situate practices of North American anthropologists within global history, including notably the global history of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon recent efforts to assess the history of anthropology in light of renewed calls for disciplinary decolonization, this paper turns to the role of US anthropologists in the infamous policy known as Indian termination, or the withdrawal of all federal aid, services, and protection from tribal members, as well as the end of reservations. Contextualizing the activism of the applied anthropologist John H. Provinse against the backdrop of broader shifts in post-WWII US liberalism, I argue that Provinse's support for termination in the late 1940s reflected an embattled social democratic and pluralistic conception of Indian–US relations. This perspective contrasted with and was ultimately overshadowed by the assimilatory sentiments that would become institutionalized in the termination policies of the 1950s. Thus, Provinse provides an analytical opening from which to explore the discipline's relationship with termination as well as the affordances and limitations of liberal anthropological activism. Moreover, such a case offers a generous rejoinder to more speculative assessments of the discipline's many pasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vine Deloria's account of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins (Macmillan, 1969) has become a touchstone of disciplinary self-critiques, used to dismiss past anthropologists and their vision of the discipline. Yet contemporary critical histories of anthropological practice in Native North America often ignore the specificities of Deloria's complaints and erase his engagement with contemporary activist anthropologists. My article focuses on one of Deloria's most important anthropological interlocutors, Nancy Oestreich Lurie. Building on her experience as an action anthropologist, Lurie championed Deloria's call for a mode of anthropology responsive to Indigenous struggles in a series of publications beginning in 1969 and extending through subsequent decades. Drawing on archival sources, I trace the development of Lurie's engagement with Deloria in writings calling anthropologists to join the ongoing struggle of Indigenous peoples and in her work with activists from the Menominee Nation in their efforts to protect their land and reclaim their sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthetic biology (synbio) scientists have identified islands as potential environments in which to trial the release of approved gene drives in the future for conservation and biosecurity purposes. However, islands, and their interconnected waterscapes, can connect as much as they contain. The Torres Strait Islands stretch between mainland Australia, of which they are a part, and Papua New Guinea. The Straits' water facilitates transport and fosters customary connection and trans/national notions of kin. In this watery world, how might Torres Strait Islanders' understandings complicate and/or contribute to (synbio) scientific concepts of islands as contained, 'watertight' field sites? And how is a changing climate and rising sea levels impacting identities in the Torres Strait and relationships in the region? As intra‐ and inter‐national island anthropology, this article considers how synbio approaches to water may engage with the hydro‐history and fluid future of Torres Strait Islander identities and cross‐cultural socio‐environmental responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a reading of Mantas Kvedaravičius’ research findings from the perspective of visual anthropology. The paper describes the continuities between Kvedaravičius’ theoretical concerns on the anthropology of war and his filmmaking approach. These continuities imply an epistemological position that approaches research cinematically and proceeds to write from that position. Kvedaravičius’ work is illustrative of research that takes audio-visual ethnography seriously and works through the possibilities and limitations of different media to produce new stories on the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates a particular orientation to combining professional legal training and anthropological scholarship that I call ethnographic lawyering. Ethnographic lawyering takes legal form as an object of anthropological analysis, loosely inspired by the Marxist jurist Evgeny Pashukanis's theorization of law as a social relation. If ethnographic method in anthropology entails theorizing from the concepts and experiences of interlocutors, then ethnographic lawyering analytically centers the subjectivities, logics, and relationalities that legal form both presupposes and animates. Ethnographic lawyering brings to light the contingent lives of legal form. To demonstrate this method, the article uses the example of conspiracy in early US court cases involving Al Qaeda, informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and anthropologist in litigation arising from the war on terror. An ethnographic lawyering approach illuminates how conspiracy's distinct forms in criminal law, the law of evidence, and tort law each bring far‐flung subjects, events, and actions together into reified entities even as they atomize and recombine social relations. This dynamic tension resembles the vertiginous nature of conspiracy theorizing in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interdisciplinary perspective, between history and anthropology, of our contribution has as its subject the pilgrimage at Kisha e Shna Ndout (Sanctuary of St. Anthony of Padua) in Laç, northern Albania, which is one of the most visited religious sites in southeastern Europe. The church, built there and ministered by Franciscans, is now an impressive place of worship frequented throughout the year by thousands of pilgrims. On the 12th and 13th of June of each year, an official pilgrimage is held, which reaches its climax on the night of the 12th, when thousands of Albanians sleep in the shrine seeking blessings and healing. The pilgrimage practices show how materiality is a privileged means of reaching out to a religious place. This materiality is grounded in the multilayered built environment, which has been built and rebuilt and especially reconstructed after the collapse of the socialist regime—a process that reveals the pivotal function of secular infrastructures in the case of religious places. Virtuality is also an important aspect of the pilgrimage, and so materiality and virtuality form a single milieu that reshapes perceptions. Through participation in this pilgrimage, virtuality is sacralized and promotes sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "decolonizing generation" is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today's moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo‐Marxism, and anti‐racist movements? And what is meant by "decolonizing anthropology" when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists' gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1939, Melville Herskovits arrived in Trinidad. Already committed to his eponymous thesis of African cultural survivals, he identified the rural municipality of Toco as a site to observe "African ways of life ... in greatest purity." The oil field strikes that gripped the island just two years earlier received only a passing mention in his monograph, Trinidad Village. This essay meditates on Herskovits's field notes to consider how a Boasian cultural paradigm compelled Herskovits to exclude the oil field labor from his study. Still, he is aggravated throughout by oil troubles of his own. Vexed by a faulty gasoline generator, Herskovits used his field diary to document his frustrated efforts to record audio of Shango songs in Toco. Engaging in a counterfactual thought experiment in which Herskovits pursued the aftermath of the oil field strikes as his object of study, this essay considers how Herskovits could have charted a distinct ontological ground for discipline of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of British anthropology and critiques a new book called "Participant Observers" by Freddy Foks. The author argues that Foks misrepresents the existing scholarship and fails to situate his findings within the larger historiographic narrative of British anthropology. However, the article also acknowledges that Foks' book provides valuable insights into the impact of social anthropology on British society in the twentieth century. The book covers topics such as expertise, race, economics, and kinship and community. Despite its flaws, the article suggests that the book is worth reading for those interested in modern British history, identity formation, empire, race studies, or anthropological legacies. [Extracted from the article]

This article's subject is the theory and practice of 'regional survey', the method of social and environmental study associated with Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Despite being overlooked or dismissed in most accounts of early 20th-century social science, regional survey had a wide influence on the development of the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and human geography. Emerging from late 19th-century field biology, the regional survey came to typify a methodological moment in the natural and social sciences that favoured the holistic analysis of geographically delimited areas. By the interwar period, the kinds of projects that went under its name can clearly be seen as forerunners of the post-Second World War tradition of community studies. Additionally, in its self-presentation as a civic, participatory exercise, the regional survey can be read as a form of popular autoethnography that contrasts with other, more familiar social-scientific ventures in the first half of the 20th century, and defies the dichotomy between 'gentlemanly' and 'technical' modes of social science. As a result, this article argues, the regional survey provides an alternative point of departure for thinking about the origins and development of the modern social sciences in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the 'Chinese' school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of die 19th century, in a context in which Eastern Europe drew most of die media's attention, the means of communication provided die public opinion with images and news from this region. The Russian-Romanian-Turkish War (1877-1878), also known as Romania's Independence War, sparked a lot of interest abroad, due to the considerable number of military observers and artists sent as war correspondents and accredited by die belligerent parties. We will make extensive reference to a work comprising a set of informative articles whose documentary value is enhanced by engravings which cover a wide array of topics. It is a collective volume widi contributions from war correspondents and artists-illustrators, some attracted by die landscape and the urban environment (Ladislaus Eugen Petrovits, Themistoclcs von Eckenbrecher), others by the combatants' faces and appearance (Auguste Lançon), odiers by die uniforms, military equipment and war scenes (Dick de Lonlay, Johann Nepomuk Schönberg), or by the inhabitants' way of life and activity (José Luis Pcllicer). We can also mention the following illustrators who depicted scenes from the Russian-Romanian-Turkish war: Mathes Koenen, Emil Volkers and Friedrich Kaiser. There are also superb images capturing crucial moments of the conflict, whose author is the engraver Carol Popp de Szathmári (Károly Szathmári Pap). Our approach is an interdisciplinary one, given tiiat it contains elements of geography, history', anthropology, sociology, geopolitics, economy and art, which turns it into an analysis of cordial geography, calligeography or beautiful geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologically informed plaster face casts were created and collected in the 19th and 20th centuries as part of an effort to develop human typologies, and to acquire data on what were perceived to be the morphological attributes of race. Their subsequent affective, politically sensitive, promiscuously mobile, and precarious qualities have resulted in them occupying highly charged territories within collections, as well as between museums and descendant communities. They are objects with inherent ambiguities due to how they exist at the intersections of art and science, merging individual, cultural, political, and colonialized bodies. Casts also provide tangible traces of unwanted physical intimacy resulting from how colonized peoples often had no choice in being cast or handled by strangers. In recent years, however, they have also been used by descendent communities as memorials of family members. This article explores this potent intersection of ambiguity and intimacy that these casts occupy, arguing for ethical protocol for their treatment that acknowledges their history, colonial contexts, and the processes behind their creation, as well as their current re-socialization through renewed relationships with descendant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores, through a close reading of newspapers and publications connected to the Portuguese libertarian movement, anarchist discourses and practices around understandings of "race" in Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A contribution is made both to studies of Lusophone anarchism as well as broader labour movement history where analyses of the interconnections between race and colonialism have been sparse. Portuguese anarchist understandings of race are placed within the context of broader ideas on internationalism within the anarchist movement, contemporary theories of the inheritance of racial characteristics and contestations against notions of nationhood and nationalism. The specific context of Portuguese colonialism and the development of anthropology in the country form the backdrop against which anarchist ideas are analysed. The article argues that while anarchism disrupted certain tropes within racial and colonialist discourse, it also reinforced some cultural categories and rigidified understandings of race, culture and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American Anthropologist 43 (1): 83 - 88. 10 Davis, Allison, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner. Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman's "Decolonizing US Anthropology" is motivated by the painful observation that the world is a hot mess of racism, genocide, dispossession, neoimperialism, inequality, and environmental destruction. Under Jim Crow, white mobs brutally regulated and "normalized... the all-black black family", so that by 1907, Booker T. Washington was trying to "pacify white America" and fend off more lynchings by "assur[ing] white audiences that black families should contain only black members" (147-48). [Extracted from the article]

In anthropology's spatial turn, cultural anthropologists directed portions of their attention to the spaces in which human habitation takes shape. This article concerns the large planned spaces configured in the Modernist era of the twentieth century. Utilizing a fieldwork-based methodology that draws on the ethnographic toolkit, analysis compares and contrasts three large planned spaces located in Washington State: the former site of the Northern State Mental Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, the location in central Spokane at which Expo 74 was hosted, and the rural location of the never-completed Satsop Nuclear Facility near Elma, Washington. Our analysis suggests the singular use for which these sites were once constructed poses challenges for reconfiguring them to contemporary use. Notably, those sites with interconnections to nearby communities, and those that conjure or draw upon a broader social memory of place, have fared better in their path to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on theory within anthropology and associated fields, I develop feralness as a lens for understanding the complexity of technological afterlives. Conceptual development proceeds through a case study of the relationship between Do-it-Yourself Biology (DIYbio), nonprofessional scientists experimenting with the established technology of recombinant DNA in new contexts such as garages and kitchens, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Absent the institutional controls of academia or industry, DIYbio has been perceived by the FBI as a potential threat to national security and is policed by the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. Though the FBI has tried to contain the spread and reach of DIYbio, it has, ironically, came to be one of the main instruments of DIYbio's global spread. In closing, I argue that feral technologies, those technologies with unexpected and potentially dangerous afterlives, are emblematic of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief review article aims to recapitulate the history of osteoporosis from the most ancient observations to the current clinical definition, by offering a perspective on trabecular bone health and degeneration, which has become of paramount important both in clinical, radiological and biological anthropological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clay has a long history in the global south and has been extensively studied by 'Western' social scientists particularly anthropologists and archeologists in relation to histories of earlier civilisations and cultural practices. Clay in relation to contemporary 'science' has received less attention in social science despite the emergence of the sub-discipline of 'clay science' and its increasing focus on clay to transform wide ranging aspects of social life. In this paper we work towards an exploration of clay in science. We begin with the question of 'what is clay?' from the perspective of a multidisciplinary group of scientists, whilst being alert to culturally located and past knowledges of clay that shape current scientific knowledges and practices. Drawing on interviews with six clay scientists we explore the ontological and epistemological process for scientists in 'reading' clay to reveal how clay is 'classified', 'worked upon' and 'partnered'. Our findings suggest that clay comes into being for scientists by being read as an informational and temporal medium and agentic matter with transformative promise to remedy specific threats to human and environmental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The encounter of professors with cultural diversity has become a common experience in higher education institutions based on the policies of democratization of access to universities in Brazil in the first decades of the 21st century. This article presents "points of contact" with diversity in the context of an institution created under the guidelines of international South-South academic cooperation. Through the description of situations experienced in teaching activities, a reflection is sought on the processes of identity construction promoted by agencies associated with the formation of ethnic and national boundaries. Anthropology emerges as a mediator to this encounter in the record of the experience that articulates theory to the post-colonial situations found in teaching relationships, locating interdisciplinary problem-spaces, common values in the context of the administrative structures and a sensitive approach to the history shared by the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews Patrick L. Schmidt's book chronicling the rise and fall of Harvard's Department of Social Relations (Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science) and contrasts Schmidt's history with work of other scholars focusing on the impacts of the Cold War on Harvard's social sciences during this period. While Schmidt provides important new historical details about the Department of Social Relations, with significant new information on some of Harvard's internal politics, this review considers some of the department's failures in relation to the chilling effects of McCarthyism and some department members covert arrangements with intelligence agencies, and limits to free inquiry during the early Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies. We propose that a reassessment of US anthropology might fruitfully begin with some counterfactual history. How would US anthropology been different had the founding generations conceptualized the discipline as a decolonizing project? What topics or themes might have become central to US anthropology? How might our methods have been different? To make anthropology departments more diverse, inclusive, and equitable, we need to do more than add faculty and students of color. Despite being a field whose central concept is "culture," we have paid far too little attention to the culture of anthropology departments. Do unexamined practices of "white‐norming" that shape the everyday lives of faculty and students in anthropology departments persistently "Other"—marginalize and alienate—people of color? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction I try to bring together the commonalities of articles which are about many different topics, including food, nationalism, rituals, the creation of icons, the importance of tourism, language, and celebrations that give meaning to the lives of very diverse people. Perhaps the Middle East as the crescent of civilisation can be comprehended in a nutshell in this collection of articles, which are written mostly by anthropologists but also by a political scientist and sociologists, to show the viability of methodology of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro's anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging, sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of 'gossip'. However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as investigator and subject understood in different ways the meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they co-produced. Ultimately, Shapiro's ambivalent approach to the status of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with Pitcairn's local hospitable forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Benedict (1938–2006) is an underrecognized figure in the history of anthropology in Turkey even though his Ula research, published in 1974, has been one of the most meticulous studies on the Anatolian countryside. This article unveils a biographical portrait of Benedict by utilizing the archival resources that consist of personal correspondences from the 1960s and 70s as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author. In addition, by analyzing his publications, it demonstrates Benedict’s authentic contributions to the literature and emphasizes the originality of his approach to the post-World War II transformations through the point of view of the townsmen. Designed in life history format, thanks to the help of details about his personal life, this article aims to present Benedict as a human being with his successes and anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines humor as geopolitical performance in the context of Russia–US political communication. Humor has featured prominently in the mass‐mediated performances of Russian state actors since 2012. Public officials such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have engaged in ambiguous play and satirical borrowings via the circulation of memes and other political theatrics. "Russiagate"—the scandal about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election—proved to be a particular flashpoint. I draw on recent scholarship in anthropology and media studies as well as prior ethnographic work to account for these humorous performances and consider the work that they do. Dominant analyses view this humor in militarized terms, regarding it as part of a deliberate "hybrid war" strategy. I contend that deadpanning diplomats like Lavrov are produced when a transformed Soviet‐era humorous form, stiob, intersects with a hybridized and transnationally dialogic global media context, resulting in a volatile form of geopolitical communication. In taking this state propagated humor and the confusion it generates as ethnographic objects, I contribute to anthropological interrogations of the politics of post‐truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology, especially biological anthropology, owes its origins to the scientific study of human racial differences. That dark history is well-acknowledged and, when it is taught, usually begins with the racism of early figures, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or, more recently, Earnest Hooton, and exonerates itself through a turn toward antiracist scholars such as Frank Livingstone and Franz Boas. Rarely, if ever, is this origin story critically appraised. This article aims to complicate the origin story of biological anthropology by examining how colonial subjects were involved in the development, testing, and refinement of racial theory, and thus of biological anthropology itself. Taking India as an example, I trace how Indians and the caste system were first the subjects and eventually the interlocutors of racial scientific theory and testing. This reorientation, I argue, is important for developing a more expansive and accurate version of the discipline's history and also for shining a light on its relevance to contemporary global racial conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the concurrent development of Edward Spicer's theory of 'enduring peoples' and his political support for the federal recognition of the Pascua Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona. This case illustrates how dynamic conceptions of acculturation and indigeneity dissipate in the face of recognition and more politically expedient narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the integration of anthropology in Slovenian history over the last decade. It is based on an analysis of 1,707 papers published between 2009 and 2021 in four representative history journals, Studia Historica Slovenica, Zgodovinski časopis, Acta Histriae and Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia. A content analysis of papers reveals the integration of the field of history and analyzes the embedding of anthropological content in Slovenian history. The results show (1) that there are 18 distinctive thematic areas in Slovenian history research in the sample under consideration, (2) that the topics can be categorized into 4 groups: (a) National topics (b) Military topics, (c) Local topics and (d) Church-biographical themes, (3) that the presence and relationships between the central themes appears to be uniform from 2009, (4) that the field appears to be strongly masculinized, (5) that history has a strong basis in the humanities, (6) that the themes show a relatively limited range, and (7) that anthropology comprises an integral part of the study of Slovenian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers to the international community of students of the anatomical sciences a brief biographical and historical sketch of the Italian embalmer Francesco Spirito (1885-1962) and his preservative petrification technique. After describing the formula and method he used, the paper examines the educational role played by his preparations and the research potential they offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how African rituals and festivals have been kept alive in the Rosário dos Homens Pretos da Penha’s Brotherhood, in the east of São Paulo, since the 18th century. Based on participant observation, it uses Harry Pross’s concept of the body as primary media to discuss how customs, gestures and the environment itself supports the memory’s preservation and the resistance against the confrontations imposed to the brotherhood for your faith’s manifestation. The text also has the theoretical contribution of Peruzzo, Paiva, Baitello Jr. and Downing, as well as from authors in history and anthropology such as Cezerillo, Quintão, Toledo, Eliade and Bâ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of perfumes, incense, colognes, and plant and flower essences in Amazonian healing practices is a hallmark feature of vegetalismo, a form of healing in Peru's Amazonian regions. Sprayed, smoked, rubbed on bodies, and poured in medicinal baths, these odorous tools are vital allies to the curandero for cleansing bodies and spaces, for protection, or to add potency to medicinal plants. Certain perfumes are more common than others, particularly the citrusy Agua de Florida, an 18th Century eau de cologne from the United States. Focusing in on the history of Agua de Florida and its ubiquity in Western Amazonia, I suggest the necessity of a sensory anthropology for exploring the vast healing potential of vegetalismo. Going beyond the visual to consider other sensory experiences lends insight into the various healing mechanisms in Amazonian shamanism that are often overlooked by western epistemologies of health and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in con- text, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Al- though each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It does not follow, however, that the anthropology of half a century ago and more impedes the work of current anthropology. "Decolonizing US Anthropology", by Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman, is motivated by the "renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology" by members of a younger generation of anthropologists. I suggest, on the contrary, that today's anthropologists can stand on the basis of the newer discipline that has developed over the preceding several generations, and it is not necessary to expend so much labor on reinterpreting and rethinking US anthropology's past. [Extracted from the article]

Gupta and Stoolman enhance this tradition of historical critique by asking why the founding generations of US anthropology "[failed] to move from a liberal antiracism to a decolonizing project." While Gupta and Stoolman do not quite address this point in a direct manner, responses to present-day defenses of the founding generation that are premised on the utility of ethnographic conservation can be found in the reflexive writing of post-WWII action anthropologists mentioned above. My response will attend to two aspects of Gupta and Stoolman's piece: the historical factors that prevented the development of a decolonizing anthropology following WWII and the politics of contemporary departments of anthropology. Though situated within the current politics of racial reckoning, Akhil Gupta and Jessie Stoolman's "Decolonizing US Anthropology" addresses a multitude of issues that are equal parts past and present. [Extracted from the article]

This paper considers the ways in which the painter Pang Xunqin "translated" the bodies of non-Han people, by examining his visual representation of the Miao people of Guizhou during the 1940s. His work needs to be understood within the context of the history of anthropology in Republican China. Since he worked closely with Chinese anthropologists his work was largely informed by an anthropological understanding of human diversity and of ethnographic collecting and museum practice, a matter hardly explored among current studies on Pang Xunqin. Pang's representation of the Miao was influenced in equal measure by customary Chinese ethnographic illustration and Western anthropological photography. This paper highlights the many sources that can be found in Pang's works and reveals how he depicted the peripheral frontier. The biopolitics of the body, employed as a system of ethnic classification by Chinese anthropologists, affected Pang's visualization of Miao bodies. In order to build a politicized and unifying Zhonghua minzu, Chinese anthropologists, demonstrated bodily similarities between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in the southwest of China under categories of "Mongoloid" or "Yellow" racial types. Pang thus depicted Miao bodies by emphasizing their bodily similarities with the majority Han Chinese and adopting the physical features of "Mongoloid/Yellow." His work provides a fine example of the ways in which art can become politicized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]