Search

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]

Shell valuable exchange in the New Guinea Highlands has been a key interest in anthropology, providing insight into economics, aesthetics, and social stratification among banded communities. This article describes how shell exchange at ethnographic present reflects deeper historical processes. We trace the origins and subsequent changes in shell use from the terminal Pleistocene to the Late Holocene at the site of Kiowa in Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. Zooarchaeological and technological analyses of Kiowa's shell artifacts indicates riverine mussel was procured locally from the terminal Pleistocene (9,500–10,000 years ago) and featured as a minor component in the diet into the recent precolonial period. In contrast, evidence for marine shell valuables only appears in the Late Holocene in the form of Trochus armbands and Tegillarca granosa and Polymesoda cf. erosa multifunctional tools. This challenges ideas that associate the gradual dispersal of marine shell into the highlands with the spread of agriculture around the Wahgi Valley at the start of the Holocene and supports punctuated pulses of coastal contact. In doing so, we formulate a testable model for the development of shell exchange into the highlands, with implications for the emergence of stratification and the conduits between the interior and coast. [shell valuables, trade and exchange, coastal contact, stratification, New Guinea Highlands] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

An essay which documents a film project highlighting the iterative and creative process involved in the anthropological study of "tajen," or the Balinese cockfight, is presented. Topics covered include the nonfiction narrative storytelling approach similar to sensory ethnography used in the film, techniques used in shooting for the film, immersion in the world of cockfighting and using the process of ethnographic observation and interviewing and the process of making "Tajen: Interactive."

This ethnographic article complicates the common wisdom that the American Jewish elite cares "obsessively" about its constituents' numbers. The article shows the ways in which population numbers matter to American Jewish leaders but also how they matter differently to various sectors of the community. Alongside those who are eager speakers of the language of quantification, there are those who feel unease with what, they feel, creates a reductive and irrelevant conversation about Jewish life in the United States. The article argues that by using the language of numbers and debating affectively over its value, American Jews debate who they are as a collective and struggle to define what counts for the future of the community as a highly diverse, shifting, and assimilating minority group. Building on the metaphor of "accounting of the soul"—one prevalent in religious and public discourses calling to Jews to look at their inner‐soul workings—the article suggests that numbers serve as an effective and affective proxy for divergent communal calculations and reflections. American Jewry presents a compelling case study with which to think through the affective attitudes toward quantification, the cultural value of numbers, and the polyvalent work that they do for collectives. [quantification, numbers, statistics, demography, affect, American Jewry] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In turn, Díaz reveals how these relations are impacted and constructed by the social relationships of celebrity media producers, who are primarily Latino male paparazzi and white female reporters. Yet, consumers, reporters, and even celebrities themselves denigrate the significant role of the paparazzi and look down on their integral function in celebrity media production (chapter 1). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the case for ethnographic data sharing by describing how to outline data management plans for stronger privacy and anonymity protection while facilitating as much sharing as needed for the purposes of collaborative anthropology. Topics discussed include the benefits of distributed curation of ethnographic datasets based on the description of key components of an open data management and implications of data sharing.

The article focuses on the major benefit of the Affordable Care Act of expanding Medicaid to low-income adults in the U.S. Topics discussed include the importance of taking a public stand in favor of preserving the positive aspects of the law, the role and limitations of a public anthropology in larger health-care debates through unsuccessful attempts to publicize ethnographic research in health-policy and clinical journals and arguments about the importance of Medicaid expansion.

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 introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including undocumented migrants from Oaxaca, Mexico, Spring Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, New York and ethnographic scholarship by Brazilian anthropologists in Africa.

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the development of professional anthropological discourses about audio-video recording technologies in ethnographic research. Synthesizing scholarship on ethnographic partiality, doing ethnography in sound, and multimedia technologies, the article reflexively applies the concepts of transduction and affordance to analyze how recorders may be theorized as part of fieldwork encounters. This is based on fieldwork with a Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa. Here, I discuss how research participants guided my use of recorders amid inequality and HIV stigma. I analyze the ethical-communicative affordances of recording technologies, examining how the design of audio-video technologies intersects with cultural and communicative conventions for use and evaluation of use of these technologies. This analysis suggests that the ethical-communicative affordances of transducers yield both an extension of an ethnographer's social self and a disconnect from that self in ways that can be productively navigated during fieldwork. [ ethnographic methods, technology, stigma, ethics] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Douglas C. Comer, the president of nonprofit International Council on Monuments and Sites' International Scientific Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management, is presented. When asked about how communities can he recognized as cultural heritage sites' stakeholders, he refers to ethnography which requires engagement of local communities. Other topics include ways for site management to deal with residents of ancient places and promotion of World Heritage Sites.

An essay on the author's performance ethnography for the poem "Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life." is presented. The author discusses the rules and routes of hip hop from Chicago, Illinois; Marrakech, Morocco; and Puerto Rico. Topics include performance in anthropology, Muslim women framed as victims of culture, and terrorism in Muslim cultures.

A personal narrative is presented in which the author talks about his workshop-focused program titled La Grande Life in Oregon, where he taught the participants about ethnography and mobile digital video production skills using iPads.

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that 'imagination' and 'imaginaries' (arguably quite different but often conflated) have acquired too many meanings, which are in turn too imprecisely applied and combined, to usefully illuminate mechanisms of social belonging. I begin by reviewing others' critiques of the concepts and the ways scholars have sought to organize and manage its meaning(s) and offering a synthesis of these. I argue for the arbitrariness of such lineages before demonstrating the ways in which various combinations of imagination-imaginaries have been assembled and deployed in current literature. I contend that ongoing efforts to use and extrapolate the term, or to decipher or cull its meaning, merely recuperate its value as a catchall device for asserting social collectivity and claiming broad relevance of often limited ethnographic data. After arguing, through example, that other theories and concepts often better do the analytical work that anthropologists intend imagination and imaginaries to perform, I conclude with a metatheoretical reflection on the relationship between imagination and contradiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the nine points of the term multisensorial anthropology. These include the expansion of anthropological knowledge production in relation to the four different types of challenges and opportunities, anthropological engagement with theories, realms of being and orders of data concerning sensory, sensation and qualia, and the time to move multisensorial anthropology in from the margins due to the economics of publishing.

A table of contents for the issue is presented.

ABSTRACT In this review essay, I explore the implications of renewed anthropological interest in materiality and the cultures that emerge from interaction among humans, nonhuman agents, and the material environment. Drawing upon sociocultural anthropology published primarily in 2015, I focus on five themes: cultures as emergent; bureaucracies in contemporary life; science, measurement, and state policy; affect and emotion in daily life; and multispecies and interspecies studies. Overall, the works I review illustrate the strength of anthropology in rendering visible the contradictions, trade-offs, and unlikely connections of lived experience in a material world. The works also show how cultures become real through people's actions and interactions with others. Nevertheless, sociocultural anthropology continues to face two enduring contradictions: first, attention to inequalities and disadvantages caused by existing structures versus an emphasis on the emergence and consequent unpredictability of social forms, and second, a view of humans as significant causal agents who can harm the natural world versus a perspective that sees humans as influenced by complex environments that include nature, nonhuman living beings, and inanimate objects. [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 discusses the importance of anthropology in contemporary health research and practice as of 2016. It looks at the sophisticated and rigorous ethnographic approach by anthropologists, the lack of standards in most qualitative work in public health and medicine, and the strength of ethnographic work such as the power to illuminate political, cultural and historical context.

The article explores the developments in German-language anthropology since the 1970s. The authors argue that the history of German-language social and cultural anthropology is a slow catch-up process. It looks at the institutional development of German anthropology and discusses the role of the Internet in the transmission of anthropological knowledge. Also discussed is the important contribution of the German language Völkerkund to the international history of anthropology.

ABSTRACT Skeuomorphs are copies of prototype artifacts replicated in different physical materials in the derivative objects. The skeuomorph copy may or may not have a utilitarian function, and the original function of the prototype attribute may change or become less functional with successive copying. Because skeuomorphs are an imitation of the prototype model, they are iconic representations. Archaeological examples of pottery vessel skeuomorphs are presented and interpreted with evidence from ethnography, psychology, and modern material culture. This review lends support to the proposal that skeuomorphism is a causal factor in technological change. Skeuomorphs facilitate acceptance of innovations in artifacts by (1) materializing the pre-existing familiar value of prototypes as attributes transferred to unfamiliar derivative objects; (2) evoking positive social memories associated with the prototype; and (3) creating broader scales of value by creating novel variants of similar objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the evolution and development of South African cultural and social anthropology. Topics include the ideological and political positions on anthropology's South African trajectories, the departments of anthropology at South African universities and the history of sociocultural anthropology in South Africa including during the apartheid era.

To the extent that the culture-historical approach Kroeber advocated continues, today it is one vision, one realization of a shared project of anthropology implemented in different ways across the United States and globally. By that time, Kroeber was an emeritus faculty member, and the impetus for the new center of anthropology to bring together the department and museum in a single space came from a leading figure in a later generation, George Foster (Hammel 2000). On January 26, 2021, the chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, announced the result of a deliberative process that had lasted more than six months, resulting in a decision to remove the name of Alfred Kroeber from the building on campus that houses the main offices of the Department of Anthropology, with which Kroeber is indelibly connected. [Extracted from the article]

The author comments on social anthropology in Argentina. He discusses how labor relations of researchers are established, the integration of researchers from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Argentina, the association of graduates in anthropology in the country and the implications of the work of the CONICET for anthropological research.

The article discusses the contemporary anthropology of Ireland with special attention to the Irish culture, traditions, and society. Other topics mentioned in this article include the ethnology of Ireland, the cultural history of Ireland, and the overall history of Ireland with special focus on anthropological research.

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine producers' interpretations of economic downturn in an Alaskan commercial fishery to shed light on how workers endure ongoing capitalist vicissitudes and how capitalism itself endures. I focus on Alaska's salmon industry, which has weathered many ups and downs. In the early 2000s, despite strong wild salmon populations, the industry struggled as salmon prices sank to new lows. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bristol Bay, where most residents identify as Alaska Native, I show how salmon producers withstood volatile economic cycles by looking to ecological cycles, particularly the region's salmon returns, to interpret the fluctuations of capitalism and envision a future both within and beyond it. While fishers expressed senses of precariousness during the downturn through metaphors of extinction, they also undertook efforts to 'reinvent' the industry, identifying in salmon cycles their own capacity to continue. Highlighting how dramatic ecological fluxes tune Bristol Bay producers to recurring change, I argue that this case reveals a more general pattern by which workers become oriented to ongoing instability. As they draw on experiences forged beyond the terms of capitalism to engage within it, their responses help maintain its cycles but also bolster their ability to persist in its midst. [ crisis, capitalism, natural resources, fishing, Alaska] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on activist anthropology. The author explains that she has engaged in activist anthropology through her work at an immigrant rights organization in New Jersey, explores the relationship between ethnography and activist work, and discusses a human chain demonstration she took part in on December 10, 2013, International Human Rights Day, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at an undocumented immigrant deportation center.

The article discusses how method and knowledge production in anthropology can grow through multimodal anthropologies. Topics include the place of design and design thinking in multimodal anthropology, the role of the design studio in ethnographic research and pedagogy and various innovative ways of highlighting ethnographic research.

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]

ABSTRACT In this review essay, I explore the relationship between cultures of circulation and anthropological facts. Research published in 2013 advanced the field by attending to the coproduction of globally circulating things (commodities, race, brands, authenticity, blood) and specific cultural landscapes. Building on the field's renewed interest in materiality, scholars showed how anthropological facts are produced at the intersection of interlocking cultural classification systems and a world that is heterogeneous and dynamic. Moving beyond the notion that shared meanings and categories are attached to or layered on people and things, this approach conceptualized such relations recursively. Scholars suggested that race-as an anthropological fact-becomes biological through social practice and, similarly, that cultural assumptions and political biases become environmental because they are embedded in our infrastructures and built landscapes. This approach permeates many of the articles reviewed and links the clusters into which I have grouped them: 'Value and Incommensurability,' 'Brands and Authenticity,' 'Race and Blood,' and 'Infrastructure and Citizenship.' I conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities for a sociocultural anthropology that recognizes the transformative power of global connection while refusing to give up its long-running pursuit of cultural wisdom and more humane social configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT According to its 2008 Constitution, Ecuador is a 'plurinational' and 'intercultural' state. In this article, I examine the creative expounding of constitutional plurinationality-interculturality by indigenous Kichwa activists in the city of Tena in the Amazonian province of Napo. Through a popular annual native beauty pageant, members of a rising, elite sector of professional indigenous intellectuals draw on the rhetoric of constitutional interculturality in order to establish a space for local Kichwa cultural and linguistic practices in the dominant sociocultural order. Meanwhile, these visionaries are working to inscribe new models of public Amazonian Indian identity and institute a controversial new code of cultural expression. Their intercultural code blends standardized Kichwa language and its inherent political ideologies with symbols of an essentialized gendered Amazonian Kichwa identity. This intercultural code is then presented to multiethnic audiences as the urban speaking mode of the new intercultural Indian. The popularizing of the intercultural code represents a profound reconfiguration of long-held ethnolinguistic categories and identities, challenging old dichotomies of 'public' versus 'private,' 'power' versus 'purity,' 'dominant' versus 'indigenous,' and even 'Spanish' versus 'Kichwa' that have long characterized coding principles in popular ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.