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The identification of socioculturally important "keywords" remains a distinctive feature of critical social theory. This article asks why this is so while offering a critique of "keyword projects" as they have been formulated and pursued across cultural studies and anthropology. Such projects often remain inattentive to wider patterns of sign relations, concealing from ethnographic view the very patterns within which key "words" emerge and are embedded. Overlooking these patterns precludes finer‐grained considerations of what makes certain words situationally "key" within sociocultural life. Engaging with migrant mobilities across the borderlands and borderwaters of Indonesia and Malaysia, the article examines keywords not simply as sociocultural formations or semiotic regularities, per se, but as captions for and construals of fashions of speaking and forms of life. Connecting hitherto unconnected accounts of "rapport," it illustrates how anthropologists might move beyond "keyword talk" to more fully consider how rapport configures anthropological assumptions about "keyness" itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Penelope Harvey, a professor of social anthropology, ethnographic researcher and author, is presented. Some of the issues she addressed are interested in how infrastructure projects are imagined, created and sustained, why she does not consider herself as an anthropologist of climate change, interest in nuclear power and ways in which her research on nuclear life intersect with climate issues or climate change.

The recent push for multidisciplinary collaboration confronts anthropologists with a long‐standing ethnographic problem. The terms we have to talk about what we do are very often the same as the terms used by those with whom we work, and yet we are often doing very different things with these terms. I draw on over a decade of "awkward collaboration" with scientists working in highland Guatemala to explore how challenges of equivocation play out in research focused on improving maternal/child nutrition. In the interactions I describe, epidemiologists undertake ethnography, anthropologists study scientists, and a Mam–Spanish translator works for projects organized around English‐language funding structures and aspirations. I detail situations in which methods, interests, and goals coalesce and diverge to argue for the importance of careful equivocation, a research technique attuned to unsettling binaries that does not result in sameness or unity. I offer suggestions for how this technique might productively reshape the emerging global health imperative to work together. [global health, controlled equivocation, co‐laboring, material‐semiotics, Guatemala] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Ulf Hannerz reflects on the relationship between the development of his career as an anthropologist and the elaboration of his theoretical positions. He recalls some of his fieldwork experiences and connects those experiences to his emerging conceptual apparatus in his own take on the culture concept, on cosmopolitanism, on creolization and cultural hybridity, on cultural flows and fluxes, on urban globalization and global futures, and on nationalism and transnationalism. He pauses to consider some of the controversies surrounding his earlier work in Washington, DC, and "ghetto culture" as well as his entry into the debates on the creolization concept. Given his interest in the history and politics of anthropology—and where anthropology is headed in the future—Hannerz also locates his own intellectual production and the influences on, and evolution of, his theoretical and ethnographic perspectives in the competing histories of national traditions, making critical comments on the hierarchization of anthropology and the advent of accountability regimes negatively affecting the discipline. [culture, cultural anthropology, creolization, globalization, Ulf Hannerz] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughout 2017. It asks: What makes an anthropological inquiry timely, what sorts of relationalities command anthropological attention, and to what end? Noting our ongoing methodological commitment to long-term ethnography alongside increasingly important online forums for reaching broader publics and responding quickly to emerging issues, it expands the range of work surveyed to include some online-only short essays alongside the larger collection of traditionally published research articles. Characterized by empathic inquiry, frequently drawing on years of ethnographic and personal experience with the places, people, and other entities that we write about, and often attentive to histories at multiple scales, cultural anthropology of this moment, however published, grapples with dark times while it also offers ways of imagining other, better futures and ways of being in relation to others. Two thematic clusters organize this essay: the first considers temporality alongside mobility and sovereignty, and the second considers relationality alongside subjectivity and mediation. Together, all of these concerns--that are both of the moment and long standing--build a varied body of work that grapples with the interrelationalities that constitute power, place, and possibility. I argue that what makes an anthropological inquiry timely is the extent to which it is relationally informed and attuned to care for worlds that we inhabit and imagine, together. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, temporality, mobility, sovereignty, relationality, subjectivity,mediation]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with André Singer, social anthropologist, president of Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and anthropology adjunct professor at the University of Southern California as of June 2016, is presented. Singer discusses his inspiration to move from traditional forms of anthropological circulation to film and television in the 1970s, the difference between film and documentary film, and his advice for students of film or anthropology.

The article focuses on the anthropological work in universities and research institutions in India. The authors discuss how Indian anthropologists have been impacted by the country's colonial past, examine the relationship between social anthropology and sociology within Indian intellectual traditions, and explore how democratic processes have impacted India's borderlands.

In this article, we seek to outline some of the key impulses, both substantive and methodological, in cultural anthropology in 2010 as represented in the four main peer-reviewed journals: American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Current Anthropology. We identify four main themes of particular significance in terms of theoretical intervention and methodological innovation: Gilles Deleuze, indigeneity, natureculture (multispecies ethnography), and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have tended to portray their discipline as in crisis and ask whether 'the end of anthropology' is near. I offer indicators to suggest that the discipline is alive and well as far as its internal activities are concerned. I then turn to the more worrying question of its external image, understandings and stereotypes more or less common among a wider public: the anthropologist as antiquarian and insensitive, slightly lost in real life. Anthropologists have been ineffective in offering a simple, coherent view of what the discipline is and what holds it together. I propose that a consistent emphasis on 'diversity' as what anthropology is about best matches our combined interests and practices. To have a strong 'brand' is essential under present-day cultural and political conditions, in and out of academic life. The foregrounding of 'diversity' goes with the anthropological concern with ethnography, comparison, and cultural critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The breadth and reach of practicing anthropologists in 2009 suggests that anthropology has entered a new phase of advanced engagement at local, national, and international levels. In this article, I review thematic areas in which practicing anthropologists made significant contributions in 2009, including fiscal crisis and business anthropology; U.S. race relations, civil rights, and policy reforms; human rights, environmental change, and displacement; global health and human rights; and war and peace. New areas of expansion are also discussed in the arenas of public archaeology, museums and heritage, and engaged scholarship. Innovations in anthropological research and communicating ethnographic findings with the broader public are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long been interested in the survival of Indian cultural traits in the New World. In this article, we present results of an ongoing project with a Costa Rican community that descends from East Indian indentured servants. We focus on the group's marriage patterns and how these patterns might have helped keep the community as a cohesive ethnic group. We investigate the group's level of inbreeding by computing the inbreeding coefficient using two different methods. We show that the community has been successful at keeping its inbreeding low, despite its small size, by allowing marriage with nonmembers of the community. We propose that unless consanguineous marriages are allowed virtually all of the community's marriages will be with noncommunity members. Absorption into tourism, as well as the community's staunch avoidance of consanguineous marriages and virtually universal marriage with noncommunity members, will likely contribute to their disappearance as a viable ethnic group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the intellectual; pedagogical, professional, and public life of anthropology and related disciplines research funding, human subjects review, scholarly publishing, program and personnel assessment, and intellectual property among them The talk points to current practices of knowledge production and circulation in the United States and to the increasingly complex intersections among scholarly knowledge, managerialist language and practice, and private capital, intellectual and otherwise. It is meant to encourage serious ethnographic examination of the contexts within which anthropologists work, consideration of the potential consequences of these contemporary changes, and creative thought about the kinds of collegial and collective action that might be pursued to help sustain what we find to be of real value in the discipline and in our professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970's, anthropologists have been centrally concerned with the relationship of ethnographic representation to political and historical context. Interestingly, the work of Pierre Bourdieu has largely escaped such contextualization, despite the significance of Bourdieu's ideas to anthropological theorizing. Today, many of Bourdieu's central concepts float free from the context out of which they arose-the Kabyle region of Algeria. This article addresses this omission by reading Bourdieu's early works against each other to reconstitute aspects of his methodology and fieldwork. Focusing on his choice to represent the Kabyles of his early work in prose, and those in his later work via proverbs, I suggest that key premises of Bourdieu's theory may not be supported by historical and ethnographic evidence. I consider how Bourdieu's position as a young social scientist grappling with ethnographic responsibilities in colonial wartime led him to privilege his interlocutors' accounts in some studies while expunging them from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international human rights regime established following the end of World War II and the Holocaust was intended to protect persons against abuse and oppression. Despite this noble goal, U.S. anthropologists were initially skeptical about the metaphysical foundation of human rights asserted by founders of the movement. Much of the ethnographic research on human rights conducted by anthropologists focuses on the assertion of cultural difference by indigenous groups as well as on the role of rights in accomplishing sociopolitical transitions in postconflict settings. Significantly less attention has been paid to the relationship between human rights politics and media.

This article presents an interview with Margery Wolf, professor emeritus of the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, and currently secretary of the American Anthropological Association. This interview takes the occasion of Professor Wolf's recent retirement to offer a retrospective on the importance of her work for cultural anthropology. Throughout her career, Wolf maintained a unique approach to writing ethnography. She began as a writer and brought that sensibility into her anthropological work.

The article comments on the result of the research conducted on the sexual behavior of the people living in Samoan. The author said that the question raised by the researcher to the respondents could have been ridiculously answered since it is a taboo among the group to discuss on sexual matter. Their revelation that the Samoan women are mostly promiscuous needed further inquiry since it was beyond their knowledge that they were investigated by an anthropologist.

Triangulating to human nature generally is accomplished by finding analogies with nonhuman primates, by searching for overt behaviors that are universal, by identification of emotions that can be correlated with physiological responses or brain rewards, or by use of appropriate selection scenarios. An additional method is proposed, which focuses on universally occurring psychological ambivalences as manifestations of competing tendencies in human nature. Ethnographic exemplification concentrates on subsistence crises relevant to reproductive success, and dilemmas associated with feuding assassinations. It is argued that universal psychological ambivalences and the universal decision dilemmas these produce may be a better key to human nature than are universal patterns of observed behavior. It is suggested also that an ambivalence approach can assist us in arriving at a more specific treatment of human behavioral lability, one that can be usefully tied to the decision approaches employed by anthropologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Traditional culture’ is increasingly recognized to be more an invention constructed for contemporary purposes than a stable heritage handed on from the past. Anthropologists often participate in the creative process. Two distinct inventions of New Zealand Maori culture are analyzed, together with the role of anthropologists in each of them. The conclusion explores the logic of culture invention and some of its implications for the practice of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the author's response to the commentary on anthropology and Navajo-Hopi land dispute. The author addressed the three ethical issues raised by the activities of certain anthropologists in the land dispute controversy. In this context , it has been agreed that issue of anthropological intervention includes government parties.

The article comments on the use of Maring ethnography to evaluate equilibrium and nonequilibrium model. The author emphasizes that the two authors who consider the Maring ethnography, are not aware of any Maring research done previously, and unaware that the other ethnographers worked with the more peripheral Maring clusters in the Simbai Valley.

A review of the article “The Institutionalization of Social Anthropology in Western Andalucía: A Struggle for a Decolonized Discipline" by Beltrán Roca and Emma Martín-Diaz, which appeared in the periodical “AmericanAnthropologist" in September 2016, is presented.

The article offers the author's comments on the essay "World Anthropology with an Accent: The Discipline in Germany since the 1970s" by Thomas Bierschenk, Matthias Krings, and Carola Lentz. The author says that the essay offers a detailed and thorough review of anthropological developments and the epistemic practices and institutions of the anthropological research community in Germany. He also reflects on his own experiences as a short participant observer in the country in 2008-2010.

Anthropologists' interest in literature and novelists' interest in cultural criticism converge in J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003) and in these four ‘In Focus’ responses to the book. Recent discussions of ethnographic writing seem to have prepared anthropologists for the generic innovations of the novel, leaving us free to take up the pressing moral problems that Coetzee rehearses. To speak to a broad public about such issues remains a challenge for anthropologists, who would do well to study the ways novelists have found to make their political voices heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's tribute to anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. The anthropology he preached was a borderless one-one that could bend genres, excite participation, rupture expectations, create surprises, and explore every point of conjuncture between ethnography and fiction, between meticulously close observation and the capacity to dream. Cinema was Rouch's personality: from his technical skill and pride to his filmic mannerisms, innuendoes, nuances, and attitude present in all his work. He always made his own voice and image part of the filmic voice and image of his stories. The legacy of this authorship is clear: Rouch's cinema exhibits an endlessly restless sense of experimental play, mixed with an uncommon mastery of film's realist and nonrealist history and genres.

The article presents information on the French explorer and anthropologist Jean Rouch. The death of Jean Rouch left a void in visual anthropology that is unlikely to be easily filled. He was at once a respected cultural anthropologist contributing to our knowledge of African ritual life and an important filmmaker who influenced the development of the French New Wave and fundamentally altered the history of documentary and ethnographic film. Out of the making of this film came Rouch's ideas about film and anthropology. Borrowing from Vertov, he suggested that the "ciné-eye" of the camera was a trans- forming agent that causes people to go into a "cin&eacut;- trance"--an altered state of consciousness in which they self-consciously revealed their culture in ways unavailable to the researcher when the camera was turned off, creating "cine-people." Although some of the best cinematographers of the time were involved in the shooting of Chronicle, Rouch shot the majority of his other films. Never one to be overly concerned with the technical aspects of filmmaking, some of Rouch's films appear to be rough looking and even poorly edited. Rouch left us with a lot of unfinished business. Most of his films are unavailable in the United States. His archive is not well organized. Most importantly, the essential scholar- ship about his work is only just beginning.

The article presents the reply of Bernhard Streck to Gretchen Schafft's commentary of his review of her book "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich." He argued that the margins between a physical and cultural anthropology should have been investigated more deeply before the scientific assistance to genocide is named anthropological, which automatically includes German ethnology.

Fabricated quotations are one of the more disturbing features of researcher Brian Thom's September 2002 book review. Thom states, for example, that in an effort to critique interpretive anthropology and descriptive ethnography seeks to let the facts speak for themselves. Twice, in fact, he quotes that the facts speak for themselves. Nowhere within the Atlas, however, will readers find any such text or sentiment. Thom also attributes another quote that anthropologists mainly pursue their own interests not those of the natives. Once again, readers will find no such quotation or opinion anywhere within the "Atlas."