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This article explores the history of bioarchaeology from the beginning of the twentieth century, proxied by representation in publications as reported annually by the editors-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical/Biological Anthropology. Embedded within this history is the career trajectory of Jane E. Buikstra, who coined the term in relationship to the study of archaeologically recovered human remains in 1976. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investigation of dynamic fully integrated cultural-environmental systems is one grand challenge facing archaeologists in this century. In the Midwest and Southeast United States, archaeologists recently increased their study of Mississippian social systems (ca. AD 1000–1600) in relationship to paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental data. Significant differences in chronological control between archaeological chronologies and paleoenvironmental records pose challenges to the study of cultural-environmental systems in this region and often result in equifinal results. Three major lines of paleoenvironmental records are reviewed: bald cypress tree-ring records, the Living Blended Drought Atlas (LBDA), and lake-bottom sediment cores. The strongest approaches include local and regional multiproxy environmental records from the same location as a well-investigated archaeological site(s) or region(s). In the rare case where the cores also encode a regional population history, it may be possible to develop stronger inferences that consider variation within and between communities and their vulnerability to climate change and environmental catastrophes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of research on sexuality discourses directs attention to the patterns of indexical disalignment that have facilitated the global rise of transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist discourses. Over the last two decades, scholarship in the area of language and sexuality has focused primarily on patterns of alignment in the community-based indexical production of social personae, a necessary move for establishing the discursive agency, and indeed humanity, of LGBTQ+ groups. The focus of this review, however, is not alignment but disalignment, for it is in the clash of indexical systems that sexual ideologies take root. Specifically, the article focuses on acts of misrecognition that arise at the boundaries of indexical meaning, identifying practices such as indexical inoculation, indexical presumption, and indexical denial. The review is designed to provoke future research on misrecognition as contextualized social practice, a turn we believe imperative for uncovering the power-laden infrastructure of sexuality discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation genetics is the use of genetics to understand and mitigate the threats caused by anthropogenic activities, including habitat loss and fragmentation, wildlife trafficking, and emerging diseases. In this review, we discuss the role of primate conservation genetics in the development of effective conservation strategies, emphasizing the importance of maintaining genetic diversity to enhance adaptive potential and prevent extinction. First, we discuss studies of various primate species that exemplify how genetic data have been instrumental in accurately assessing threat levels, identifying trafficked animals and tracing their geographic origin, and studying how habitat loss affects primate populations. Subsequently, we describe the various molecular tools and analytical approaches employed in these studies. Lastly, we provide a bibliographic review of research in conservation genetics over the last 20 years. We conclude with a brief discussion of the limitations and challenges in this field in developing countries and recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the HIV/AIDS epidemic gripping the world in the 1990s and the resurgence of the antitrafficking discourse in the 2000s, the sex work/abolitionist debate took center stage. Proponents of sex work uphold the labor and livelihood paradigm based on consent; the abolitionists, on the other hand, dismiss sex work as work to posit prostitution as the paradigmatic example of patriarchal violence toward women. The latter routinely conflate sex work with trafficking, and the former sharply demarcates them. Above all, this debate poses a stubborn ideological divide among feminists with serious policy implications for both the worker and the victim, nationally and globally. Therefore, to imagine a pathway beyond this divide, this review centers on mobility and migration vis-à-vis labor and livelihood. Sex work offers insights into migration broadly speaking because it highlights the intersecting issues of labor, agency, gender, sexual mores, and displacement, all embedded within the global flows of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the conceptualization of well-being as pertaining primarily to individuals. Such a conceptualization, though welcome, can have undesirable practical and political consequences. In this review, I show how well-being intersects with recent work in the anthropology of ethics, how it is embodied and emplaced, and how it is closely intertwined with (rather than simply opposed to) suffering. Furthermore, while experienced as embodied, well-being is deeply affected by the suffering of others—and not only human others. As such, it could fruitfully be understood as a form of affective common. In contexts of complex environmental challenges and changes, inequality, and conflict, I suggest that studies of well-being call for a focus on experience beyond the individual: an affective enlargement entwining forms of care, maintenance, and repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ocean has a key, though often unremarked, role in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean. It notes the ways that the ocean appears and disappears as metaphor or material space of encounter and engagement within the past, present, and possible futures of anthropology. It shows how absence and presence as well as metaphor and materiality are the modes through which oceans are imagined and inhabited. While there is no distinct oceanic turn in anthropology in contrast with a number of other disciplines, the anthropology of and from the ocean holds the possibility to reenergize anthropology's interdisciplinary encounters, including with history and geography, as well as modes of engaging scale and specificity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archaeology of early urbanism is a growing and dynamic field of research, which has benefited in recent years from numerous advances at both a theoretical and a methodological level. Scholars are increasingly acknowledging that premodern urbanization was a much more diverse phenomenon than traditionally thought, with alternative forms of urbanism now identified in numerous parts of the world. In this article, we review recent developments, focusing on the following main themes: (a) what cities are (including questions of definitions); (b) what cities do (with an emphasis on the concentration of people, institutions, and activities in space); (c) methodological advances (from LiDAR to bioarchaeology); (d) the rise and fall of cities (through a focus on persistence); and (e) challenges and opportunities for urban archaeology moving forward. Our approach places people—with their activities and networks—at the center of analysis, as epitomized by the quotation from Shakespeare used as the subtitle of our article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archaeology of the island of New Guinea is ancient and surprising, yet it is highly fragmentary in space and time. Consequently, archaeology provides only local and fleeting glimpses of social life in the distant past. In this review, we consider several key themes, such as initial colonization at least 55,000 years ago, the emergence of agriculture by at least 7,000–6,400 years ago, and social diversification in the last few thousand years. We build our discussions around robust archaeological records that convey a coherent impression of what people were doing in the past. We also highlight the ways in which archaeology can be repurposed to address contemporary issues, including social and environmental problems, and flag how a distinctive New Guinean archaeology could be rooted in a vegecultural conception of social life and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East Africa boasts one of the longest histories of humankind. From hominid origins to the present, people have roamed, interacted with one another, and influenced the environment in innumerable ways. To teach about the archaeology of East Africa is to engage with the deepest history of humankind, from Hominin evolution to historical archaeology and the archaeology of listening. Each topic has developed its own peculiar and complex analytical methodologies that require varied resources and degrees of intensity and investment in training and mentoring. This review discusses advances made over the past two decades in the research and dissemination of archaeological knowledge about East Africa. Beyond the major issues that stimulate scientific research and debates, what debates have been settled? Which emerging threats must East African archaeologists overcome to ensure a sustained practice of archaeology in the future? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Derrida and Foucault provide key starting points to understanding archives. They see archives as hegemonic, characterizing ways of thought, modes of colonization, and the control of citizens. However, they also make clear that archives can be read subversively. With patience, counter-readings allow the excavation of the voices (sometimes names) of subaltern and otherwise suppressed others from the archive. By reading along and across the archival grain, researchers can follow the development of ideas and processes across historical periods. Archives can be seen as orphanages, containing surrogates of performances. Archives (paper and digital) also provide access to the results of anthropological research in ways mandated by ethics codes, but these are subject to controversy. What sorts of consent and what sorts of anonymization should be provided? Archives run by the groups traditionally studied by anthropologists provide models of radical archives that are very different from those conceived of by traditional archivists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical assessment of the field of common property. After discussing briefly the major findings and accomplishments of the scholarship on the commons, the paper pursues two strategies of critique. The first strategy of friendly critique accepts the basic assumptions of most writings on common property to show that scholars of commons have discovered far more variables that potentially affect resource management than is possible to analyze carefully. The paper identifies some potential means to address the problem of too many variables. The second line of critique proceeds differently. It asks how analyses of common property might change, and what they need to consider, if they loosen assumptions about sovereign selves and apolitical property rights institutions. My examination of these questions concludes this review with an emphasis on the need to (a) attend more carefully to processes of subject formation, and (b) investigate common property arrangements and associated subject positions with greater historical depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a brief review of cross-cultural human sexuality and the concerns anthropologists have highlighted in the study of sexual practices. The paper is divided into a discussion of the topics heterosexual behavior and homosexual behavior. Focus is given on cross-cultural studies of sexual practice that attempt to deal with human sexual arousal, attraction, and customary means of dealing with sexuality in non-Western cultures. The paper excluded discussions of human biology and evolution, reproductive health and hygiene, gender role and status, the psychodynamic approach to understanding human sexual behavior, and historical surveys of Western sexual practice.

The article focuses on issues and topics related to the concept of slavery in the different cultural perspectives. The author decided to write this paper in response to a study of the Western notion of slavery. Anthropologists have contributed some 6 percent of the total bibliographical entries. The rest comes overwhelmingly from history, with economic history a distant second. Overall, the anthropological contribution is narrowly focused on Africa and the Caribbean. Two African collections of papers of the middle nineteen-seventies account for fully a third of the some 75 anthropological entries on African slavery. Anthropology almost completely forgot slavery in the 1920 to 1960 period, when so much of its modem world view was being forged. However, slavery was noted in local contexts through ethnographic monographs rather than in articles which are the main vehicle for theory in American anthropology.

The article offers information about a study done to examine the trend in the use of the meaning-text theory (MTT) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. MTT operates on the principle that language consists in a mapping from the content or meaning of an utterance to its form or text. It was developed by Alexander K. Zholkovsky with the aim of formulating formal lexicons according to the principles of explanatory-combinatorial lexicology. However, the technology gained the refusal of professional journals to accept papers on MTT for publication. The papers had supposedly reflected the level on the representation of utterance in the meaning-text model (MTM), a proposal of a semantic transcription within the framework of MTT as well as the basic components of MTM.

The living great apes and, in particular, the chimpanzee have served as models of the behavior and ecology of earliest hominins for many decades. The reconstructions of Ardipithecus ramidus have, however, called into question the relevance of great-ape models. This paper reviews the ways in which human evolutionary scholars have used field data on the great apes to build models of human origins. I consider the likely behavioral ecology of A. ramidus and the relevance of the great apes for understanding the earliest stages of hominin evolution. I argue that the Ardipithecus fossils strongly support a chimpanzee model for early hominin behavioral ecology. They indicate a chimpanzee-like hominoid that appears to be an early biped or semibiped, adapted to both terrestrial and arboreal substrates. I suggest how paleoanthropologists may more realistically extrapolate from living apes to extinct hominoid behavior and ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 25 years the practice of archaeology has been transformed by a broader and deeper engagement with indigenous peoples around the world. Although there are real differences in the nature and consequences of such engagements in different national and local contexts, it is now more widely understood that archaeologists should recognize the significant role of archaeological heritage in the formation and maintenance of indigenous identities. This new understanding is expressed in the concept of 'indigenous archaeologies,' and the bulk of the paper reviews the concerns and approaches that are encompassed by it. The concerns of indigenous archaeologies overlap with other disciplinary movements that have come into being over the same period, especially postcolonial and 'engaged' archaeologies that stress the political significance of archaeological knowledge and seek to enhance its social significance. Some of the more important consequences of such engaged archaeologies are discussed, especially new developments in historical archaeology, and the potential for these next contexts of significance and meaning to transform the theory and practice of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Markets are key contemporary institutions, yet there is little agreement concerning their history or diversity. To complicate matters, markets have been considered by different academic disciplines that approach the nature of such exchange systems from diametrically opposed perspectives that impede cross-disciplinary dialogue. This paper reviews the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the detection, development, and significance of markets in the preindustrial past. We challenge both the view that marketing is natural and the perspective that market exchange is unique to modern capitalist contexts. Both of these frameworks fail to recognize that past and present market activities are embedded in their larger societal contexts, albeit in different ways that can be understood only if examined through a broadly shared theoretical lens. We examine the origins, change, and diversity of preindustrial markets, calling for multiscalar, cross-disciplinary approaches to investigate the long-term history of this economic institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minor controversies notwithstanding, the evolution of the human brain has been an intermingled composite of allometric and nonallometric increases of brain volume and reorganizational events such as the reduction of primary visual cortex and a relative increase in both posterior association and (most probably) prefrontal cortex, as well as increased cerebral asymmetries, including Broca's and Wernicke's regions, with some of these changes already occurring in australopithecine times. As outlined in Holloway (1967), positive feedback (amplification-deviation) has been a major mechanism in size increases. Exactly how this melange of organs evolved will require many more paleontological discoveries with relatively intact crania, an unraveling of the genetic bases for both brain structures and their relationship to behaviors, and a far more complete picture of how the brain varies between male and female and among different populations throughout the world. After all, the human brain is still evolving, but for how long is quite uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everywhere the issue has been examined, people make discriminations about others' physical attractiveness. Can human standards of physical attractiveness be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology? In the past decade, this question has guided much theoretical and empirical work. In this paper, we (a) outline the basic adaptationist approach that has guided the bulk of this work, (b) describe evolutionary models of signaling that have been applied to understand human physical attractiveness, and (c) discuss and evaluate specific lines of empirical research attempting to address the selective history of human standards of physical attractiveness. We also discuss ways evolutionary scientists have attempted to understand variability in standards of attractiveness across cultures as well as the ways current literature speaks to body modification in modern Western cultures. Though much work has been done, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology has been linked to colonialist attitudes and scientific imperialism. But what are the perspectives of Indigenous groups concerning the practice of archaeology? Numerous organizations recognize the distinctive needs of Indigenous communities throughout the world and have adopted agreements and definitions that govern their relationships with those populations. The specific name by which Indigenous groups are known varies from country to country, as local governments are involved in determining the appropriateness of particular definitions to populations within their borders. This paper begins with an examination of the various aspects that have been used to determine whether or not a group of people might be considered "indigenous" under various definitions, and then uses the history of the relationships between North American archaeologists and Indigenous populations as a background for the examination of some of the political aspects of archaeology that have impacted Indigenous populations. It then proceeds to discuss perspectives on archaeology offered by members of various Indigenous populations throughout the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genus Homo as represented by Homo ergaster (= early African Homo erectus) is characterized by a pattern of features that is more similar to modern humans than to the earlier and contemporaneous australopithecines and paranthropines. These features include larger relative brain sizes, larger bodies, slower rates of growth and maturation, dedicated bipedal locomotion, and smaller teeth and jaws. These features are phenotypic expressions of a very different lifestyle for the earliest members of the genus Homo. This paper considers the energetic correlates of the emergence of the genus Homo and suggests that there were three major changes in maintenance energy requirements. First, there was an absolute increase in energy requirements due to greater body size. Second, there was a shift in the relative requirements of the different organs, with increased energy diverted to brain metabolism at the expense of gut tissue, possibly mediated by changes in the proportion of weight comprised of fat. And third, there was a slower rate of childhood growth, offset by higher growth costs during infancy and adolescence. These changes, as well as energetic requirements of reproduction and bipedal locomotion, are considered in a discussion of one of the major transitions in adaptation in human evolution, the appearance of our own genus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is enunciated through the discourses of nationalism, sociopolitics, postcolonialism, diaspora, and globalism. Both trends have been tacitly shaped by anthropological and social theory, but they are fundamentally driven by the powerful voices of once marginalized groups and their newfound place in the circles of academic legitimacy. I argue that our disciplinary reticence to embrace the politics of identity, both in our investigations of the past and our imbrications in the present, has much to do with archaeology's lack of reflexivity, both personal and disciplinary, concurrent with its antitheoretical tendencies. The residual force of the latter should not be underestimated, specifically in regard to field practices and the tenacity of academic boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. Explanations of the observable archaeological phenomena in Eurasia, or the lack of such evidence in other regions, include biological arguments (the role of Cro-Magnons and the demise of the Neanderthals), as well as cultural-technological, and environmental arguments. The paper discusses issues of terminological ambiguities, chronological and geographical aspects of change, the emergence of what is viewed as the arch-types of modern forager societies, and the hotly debated and loaded issue of modern behavior. Finally, the various causes for the Upper Paleolithic revolution are enumerated, from the biological through the technocultural that relies on the analogy with the Neolithic revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power an inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, an situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Perspective article, I am able to draw the various strands of my intellectual thinking and practice in archaeology and European prehistory into a complex narrative of changing themes. In this narrative, I draw attention to the inspirational triggers of these transformations to be found in works and words of colleagues and events within and outside my immediate discipline. A group of events between 1988 and 1993 disrupted (in a good way) the trajectory of my professional life and provided a convenient anchor around which my themes pivoted and regrouped with very different standpoints. But some trends in my way of working remained constant and contributed, I hope, to a career of cumulative knowledge. Along the way, I show the significance, in terms of my personal intellectual context as well as archaeological practice in general, of my published works as well as more obscure and some unpublished works that are cited here for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In archaeology, along with a large sector of other social sciences, comparative approaches to long-term political change over the last two centuries have been underpinned by two big ideas, classification and evolution, which often have been manifest as cultural history and progress. Despite comparative archaeology's agenda to explain change, the conceptual core of these frames was grounded in the building of stepped sequences of transformation with expectations drawn from synchronic empirical snapshots in time. Nevertheless, especially over the last 70 years, archaeology has seen the generation and analysis of unprecedented volumes of data collected along multiple dimensions and a range of spatial scales. Compilation and comparison of these data reveal significant diversity along various dimensions, which have begun to create dissonance with key tenets, assumptions, and even the aims of extant, long-held approaches. Expanded conceptual framing with a shift toward a focus on explaining variation and change is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review sketches a linguistic anthropology of images. While linguistic anthropology has not historically focalized images as a central theoretical object of concern, linguistic anthropologists' research has increasingly concerned images of various sorts. Furthermore, in its critique of structuralist reductions of language, the field has advanced an analytic vocabulary for thinking about the image in discourse. In this article, I review scholarship in linguistic anthropology on prototypic images to show how these advances (e.g., entextualization, performativity, perspective, and enregisterment) can be leveraged to theorize images more generally. In doing so, I argue against any hard distinction between language and image. I conclude by expanding out from a linguistic anthropology of images to what I call "a linguistic anthropology of...," a field characterized by an open-ended horizon of objects and modes of inquiry, all linked together as linguistic anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims made by linguist Daniel Everett, that the Pirahã language, spoken by a small group of native Amazonians, lacks features thought to be universally present in languages, captured the imaginations of scholars and prompted broader questions on the nature of language, the diversity in languages, and the universals shared by them. Everett claimed that, in Pirahã, he had found a language without numbers, colors, mythology, abstract thinking, or recursive embedding. These claims were challenged by proponents of a universal grammar and by other biological linguists concerned with identifying shared faculties that undergird human cognitive capacities and by linguistic anthropologists concerned with the products of those potentials as they are actualized in the interactivity of speaking. Situating the Pirahã in historical and sociological context, I question the novelty of a faculty of language and many of Everett's claims of Pirahã exceptionality, and I explore the renewed interest in the nature of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contesting ideas about what is "normal" human behavior or biology is a core contribution of anthropology. In efforts to provide more inclusive views of what it means to be human, anthropologists challenge judgments about diverse ways of being, which include assumptions about what it means to be normal. Meanings of the term normal encompass the descriptive (statistical) and the evaluative (normative), i.e., judgments about a given characteristic. In biomedicine, "healthy" is often the value ascribed to normal, but embedded in healthy are biases that derive from particular cultural and historical contexts. Here I review how the term normal is understood and used in anthropological and related studies of human biology and biological variation. I propose the biological normalcy framework for understanding how the statistical and normative meanings of normal mutually inform each other and their consequences for human population biology. Several examples provide illustrations of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trajectory of human aging varies widely from one individual to the next due to complex interactions between the genome and the environment that influence the aging process. Such differences in age-specific mortality and disease risk among same-aged individuals reflect variation in the pace of biological aging. Certain mechanisms involved in the progression of biological aging originate in the epigenome, where chemical modifications to the genome are able to alter gene expression without modifying the underlying DNA sequence. The epigenome serves as an interface for environmental signals, which are able to "get under the skin" to influence health and aging. A number of the molecular mechanisms involved in the aging process have been identified, although few aging phenotypes have been definitively traced to their underlying molecular causes thus far. In this review, we discuss variation in human biological aging and the epigenome's role in promoting heterogeneity in human longevity and healthspan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review surveys studies of men and masculinities in anthropology and ethnography from other disciplines, as well as theoretical frameworks and debates among anthropologists and other relevant scholars in the field. It also aims to assess developments in these studies since an earlier Annual Review of Anthropology article was published on this subject. By considering the ethnographic boom in men and masculinities studies across the globe since 2000, increasingly authored by anthropologists from the Global South, this review considers anthropology's singular contributions topically and conceptually—for example, masculinity and militarism, men and public health, gender inequalities, and trans* social movements—including through innovative research in biological and linguistic anthropology and archaeology. Throughout, this article reflects on the extent to which anthropologists have moved (and if they should have moved) beyond the study of women or men to instead explore gender, sex, and sexuality of humans and nonhuman animals in less binary frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore critical university studies (CUS), an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates structures of higher education and their entanglements with national and global institutions and political movements. Favoring an expansive definition of CUS, we draw from scholars who trace the origins of the American university to the slave trade, racial science, and Native American ethnic cleansing projects, as well as scholars who bring abolitionist and decolonial stances to highlight how the university continues to perpetuate state interests, carceral and settler logics, empire, and antiblackness. We then bring the lens of CUS to bear on critical work by anthropologists on higher education and on the discipline more broadly. We explore the challenges of advocating for antiracist and anti-imperial anthropology without attending to the structures of Western/white superiority that have enabled its institutionalization. We conclude by considering interventions by the emerging field of abolitionist anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Intervention" is central to global health, but the significance and effects of how intervention is practiced are often taken for granted. This review takes interventions into health and medicine as subjects for ethnographic inquiry. We highlight three lines of anthropological contributions: studies of global health interventions that serve imperial and military objectives, studies of "magic bullet" interventions arising from laboratory science, and studies of interventions based on deterministic modeling techniques. We then outline examples of "intervention otherwise," in which people build relations of solidarity and care through global health programming, design interventions to be interactive and adaptable, and use data and modeling to support health justice. Whereas many global health interventions reproduce Western power hierarchies, intervention otherwise draws attention to alternative forms of knowledge, action, and expertise. Our analysis of lively and multivalent practices of intervention has implications for debates about the im/possibility of decolonizing global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I first provide an overview of the Neandertals by recounting their initial discovery and subsequent interpretation by scientists and by discussing our current understanding of the temporal and geographic span of these hominins and their taxonomic affiliation. I then explore what progress we have made in our understanding of Neandertal lifeways and capabilities over the past decade in light of new technologies and changing perspectives. In the process, I consider whether these advances in knowledge qualify as so-called Black Swans, a term used in economics to describe events that are rare and unpredictable and have wide-ranging consequences, in this case for the field of paleoanthropology. Building on this discussion, I look at ongoing debates and focus on Neandertal extinction as a case study. By way of discussion and conclusion, I take a detailed look at why Neandertals continue to engender great interest, and indeed emotion, among scientists and the general public alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews anthropological paradigms that link language and race with a focus on the United States and other settler colonial nations that continue to use language as a tool of racialization to bolster White supremacy. Enduring colonial ideologies, along with Boas's "salvage anthropology," which separated race and language, have enshrined White racism in anthropological studies of language as well as in the field of linguistic anthropology. Contemporary studies frame linguistic racialization through markedness theory and use paradigms of language ideology, language materiality, and semiotics to forward discursive and ontological analyses that span communities and institutional spaces. I offer "disruption" as a way to consider the impact of epistemologies that inform academic research agendas as well as institutional power dynamics between BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) scholars and White practitioners in linguistic anthropology and discuss how these disruptions could form the basis from which to decolonize aspects of linguistic anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the main approaches to the discursive analysis of racist utterances. Moreover, we discuss the notions of racism and race historically and from the point of view of different cultures and languages. We restrict ourselves to the discourse analytical concepts and methodologies, which vary greatly, both in theory and in analysis. We present one example and analyze it in detail as an illustration of the linguistic tools that help make hidden and latent meanings transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the idea of social networks, which have been becoming increasingly popular among both social anthropologists and sociologists as one way of understanding behavior, particularly in larger scale complex or less structured societies. It reviews several literature related to the topic including those that were regarded as the most effective treatment for the subject. Furthermore, it concentrates on the developments that have taken place after the discoveries made by these related literature. It discusses a range of topics that include the question of the network theory, structural and transactional perspectives, network concepts, data collection, and finally, it presents an analysis of the social networks.

The article looks at the current state and future prospects of quantitative archaeology. It explores the limitations of quantitative archaeology, as well as the mathematical or formal techniques that are applied by archaeologists who advocate the quantitative movement. It also examines the history, the working assumptions, the frustrations and the basic attitudes of the field. It comments on some of the main trends in the field of quantitative archaeology between 1950 and 1980, and reviews the collected papers in "Quantitative Research in Archaeology: Progress and Prospects," edited by M. S. Aldenderfer and "Mathematics and Information Science in Archaeology: A Flexible Framework," edited by A. Voorrips.

The article presents the linguistic typology and the three way language classification through morphological typology. Morphological typology states that world languages are isolating, agglutinating and fusional. Greenberg's paper on work order universals revealed the four word order types: subject-object-verb, possessor-noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition; like a but with noun-adjective; verb-subject-object, noun-possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun; like c but with subject-verb-object. Government and Binding Theory's versions of generative grammar are pro-drop and configurationality that manifested language as correlated and hierarchical.

The article focuses on anthropological writings on Chicano studies between 1970 to 1984. Anthropologist Octavio Romano, and a sociologist, published a series of papers on the characteristics of Chicano studies which appeared in "El Grito," the Chicano journal they founded. The stance that has become prevalent in anthropological works on Chicanos faces two directions: looking inward toward the academic discipline itself, and looking out outward toward Anglo American society. Researchers have developed broad sketches of the characteristics and boundaries of regions and subregions within the area inhabited by people of Mexican ancestry.

The article presents an anthropological review of the social processes and the themes of conflict and conflict resolutions taken by the Manchester School in South-Central Africa after the World War II. Anthropologist released different papers that tackled the different aspects of the school which included the social field, situational analysis, perpetual succession, intercalary roles, situational selection, cross-cutting ties, the dominant cleavage, redressive ritual, repetitive and changing social systems, processional form, processual change and much of the rhetoric studied has been concerned in disputes and court arguments.

The article investigates the concern of anthropologists with social and cultural changes in human development. Anthropologists have long made significant contributions to the understanding on these changes. In this paper, the researchers have focused on the involvement of anthropologists in the deliberately planned bilateral, multilateral, and private efforts to foster economic development and social change in low income countries that have flourished since the close of the Second World War. The review analyzes the renewed and expanded involvement of anthropologists in development in the last decade.

The article studies the history of anthropology in the historical perspective. The history of anthropology has a long-established history within the discipline. Virtually every major graduate program requires of its students a course in the history, sometimes combined with the theory, of anthropology. However, it is not obvious that this has caused history of anthropology to fill a significant or integral role in the teaching and practice of the discipline. Indeed, the opposite has traditionally been true. The required course is frequently taught by the eldest member of the department, who is presumably qualified to teach the history because he has lived through more of it than anyone else.

The article examines the themes that have dominated in prehistorical studies of eastern North America. Of the various areas of studies, experts noted three themes that have dominated Midwestern prehistorical studies. They include the gradual evolution from hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural societies over a period of 15,000 years, the achievement of two cultural climaxes, and the strong impact on cultural evolution of cultivated plant introductions from Mesoamerica. The purpose of this paper is to review the directions in major research approaches as well as current thought on the major factors underlying Midwestern cultural evolution.

The article focuses on the interplay between nutritional anthropology and biological adaptation. Adaptation has become a pervasive theme in biological anthropology. And the anthropological literature has produced several theoretical papers that discuss the concept of adaptation and its application in sociocultural and biological anthropology. A significant feature of these discussions is the treatment of population and even individual adaptation as neither solely biological nor social in origin or effect. The role of the nutritional environment in human adaptation may serve as an organizing framework for this broad area of multidisciplinary research.