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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 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 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]

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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]

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]

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]