Annual Review of Anthropology - Current Issue

This perspectives article presents autoethnographic highlights of my formative years and career trajectory. My undergraduate and graduate studies inspired me to accept, as a call to action, the goal of reinventing anthropology and aligning my intellectual pursuits to struggles for human dignity, social justice, and liberation. Over many years, my scholarship has addressed a variety of concerns, ranging from Jamaica's urban informal economy to the theory and practice of African diasporic feminisms that understand racism, which operates in gendered and class-differentiated contexts, to be a violation of human rights. The article sketches the evolution of my thinking as a socially situated intellectual committed to the ongoing collective work toward antiracism, depatriarchalization, and decolonization along epistemological, institutional, and more encompassing structural lines.

Isotopic analysis of human and animal remains has become an important method in both bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology, driven by the ongoing development of new and improved methods. This review examines the intersection between isotopic methods and the turn to social and posthumanist theoretical frameworks, drawing on a range of contemporary social theories. There are promising points of engagement between these theoretical approaches and isotopic methods and data in bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology, which emerge from their ability to address questions about food, health, mobility, seasonality, reproduction, identity, gender, labor, politics, etc. To take full advantage of the possibilities offered by new theoretical directions, isotope archaeology should engage more explicitly with isotopic data's status as proxy evidence for the lives of humans and animals in the past. Pursuing epistemic iteration, rather than epistemic security, can help address ongoing issues in the development of methods and in the interpretation of isotopic data.

The time period ∼1200–1000 BCE was pivotal in the Maya area, which witnessed the adoption of ceramics, changes in subsistence practices, a decrease in mobility, and the first monumental constructions. These first monumental building efforts were on a landscape scale and emphasized horizonal monumentality through the construction of massive artificial plateaus and platforms and standardized architectural complexes. Complex and multifaceted interregional interactions over a large area of southern Mesoamerica seemed to have been critical in the creation and adoption of this new monumental public-ritual architecture and indicate that different ethnic and linguistic groups shared fundamental cosmological concepts. In the Maya area, the building projects themselves may have led to more social cohesion and cooperation among social groups that were, at the beginning, probably still mostly mobile. These processes eventually led to increased social differentiation and the development of what we today call the ancient Maya.

Archaeoacoustics is a multidisciplinary subfield of archaeology that explores the sounds and music of the past, focusing on sound-producing devices and acoustical spaces. It encompasses music archaeology, which examines instruments and musical practices, and acoustical archaeology, which studies soundscapes of architectural and natural environments. The field integrates disciplines such as ethnomusicology, psychoacoustics, and neuroacoustics to understand the cultural, symbolic, and psychological dimensions of ancient sound. Highlights within this research include the discovery of early musical instruments, the acoustic properties of ancient spaces, and psychoacoustic experiments on artifacts. Advances in digital technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) simulations and sound mapping, have enhanced public engagement. Despite its potential, archaeoacoustics faces challenges, including limited institutional support and representation in archaeology departments. Future research aims to deepen interdisciplinary collaborations, investigate multisensory experiences, and integrate broader ontological perspectives into the study of sound and music in past cultures.

The Civil War (1936–1939) and Franco's dictatorship (1939–1977) in Spain were characterized by mass violence and human rights violations. Hiding and destroying criminal evidence were systematic and intentional. Documentary sources were purged or destroyed, concentration camps were dismantled, and mass graves were eliminated or hidden. In recent decades, archaeology has contributed to revealing the Franco regime's repressive strategies. The focus on materiality, or the materiality turn, has greatly advanced the production of historical knowledge. Mass graves, concentration camps, labor camps, and prisons have been archaeologically investigated, producing new narratives surrounding contemporary Spanish history. Forensic archaeology has unearthed the traces of those who sometimes left no documents but left material evidence of their existence. This review aims to contribute to the studies of mass violence that reveal the technologies of exclusion, disappearance, and erasure of specific political and gender-neglected groups of society under Franco's repressive system.

Archaeology in South Asia was a colonial import, superimposed on multiple existing forms of knowledge about and orientations toward the past. Substantive research on prehistory was initiated by colonial scholar-administrators, and the institutions, chronological frameworks, field methods, and dominant approaches to archaeological work all emerged out of British colonial rule. Here, I highlight three orientations toward the past that are especially important for understanding archaeological coloniality: (a) the priority of textual evidence; (b) the focus on continuity and singular narratives of change, especially progressive or civilizational change; and (c) a tendency to use essentialist identity formations such as community, caste, and culture as explanatory. These basic orientations interact with the systematics and practices of archaeology, shaping research questions, field practices, and analysis. Decolonial reorientation will require attention to these broad habits of thought as well as to more concrete issues such as resources and opportunities.

Forest fragmentation was highlighted as a conservation priority in primatology more than 20 years ago, yet this issue unfortunately remains a key challenge. In this article, I review the literature on primate responses to habitat fragmentation and propose priority areas for future studies. I first encourage scholars to take a landscape approach, which treats heterogeneous cover types, including agroecosystems and secondary forests, as viable spaces for primate movement and foraging. Next, I recommend further exploration of edge effects to understand how they interact with surrounding matrix and how different species use these habitats. Finally, I discuss linear disturbances, such as clearings for roads and power lines, and how they uniquely divide primate habitats. Further research in these priority areas, along with greater regional and taxonomic diversity of fragmentation studies, will improve our understanding of the impact of habitat fragmentation and inform management strategies to share space with our primate neighbors.

Social systems vary across the primate order, both within and between major lineages. Understanding how and why this variation arises and how social systems have changed over the radiation is a major focus of comparative primate evolutionary biology. For anthropologists in particular, the issue of social evolution resonates strongly because of interest in how certain aspects of human social systems—e.g., multilevel societies, divisions of labor—have come about. For primatologists, interest centers more around understanding the evolution of particular kinds of sociality (e.g., solitary versus various forms of group living); the variation observed in mating, breeding, and care systems; and the adaptive value of relationships. Attention has also been paid to the evolution of social “complexity,” although that concept is ill-defined and complicated by our human-centered perspective on the natural world. Here, I review 50 years of research on primate social evolution and how comparative phylogenetic approaches have informed that work, while offering some cautions and suggestions for the future.

During the course of human evolution, lithic technology became a critical element of hominin foraging ecology and a contributor to feedback loops selecting for increasingly sophisticated tool use, cognition, and language. Here we review the first million years of technology, from 3.3 million years ago (Ma) to 2.3 Ma. This time interval includes the two oldest archaeological industries (the Lomekwian and the early Oldowan) known exclusively from Africa, which collectively overlap with four genera of hominins (human relatives and ancestors). These Early Stone Age (ESA) industries focused on the production and use of sharp edges for cutting, as well as the use of larger, sometimes unworked stones for pounding. We review our current understanding of these technologies, where they were found, how they were made, what they were used for, and the hominins that could have produced them, and consider them in the context of nonhuman primate archaeology.

Humans and other primates communicate in multiple sensory modalities, and language itself is usually a multimodal form of communication. Discussion of the multimodal nature of primate communication goes back at least as far as the publications of Charles Darwin and has recently seen renewed interest. Here, I review key topics in the study of multimodal communication in nonhuman primates and humans, including issues of definitional complexity as well as classification systems and empirical approaches. I argue that multimodal communication is ubiquitous, ingrained, and advantageous. I discuss sensory aging and how multimodal communication can offer alternative routes to comprehension when sensory systems become impaired. To conclude, I consider future avenues of research that seem likely to prove productive.

In this article, I review the primate fossil record for some of the ways that it can inform us about the ongoing mass extinction. The broad patterns of past extinctions are discussed, as is how they are similar to those for mammals more generally, including the relationship to past climatic change, the size bias of Pleistocene extinctions, and the depleted nature of current communities. I also review some of the challenges with studying extinctions in the fossil record. These are illustrated using a few examples, including the extinction of plesiadapiforms, European hominoids, and a particularly well-studied species, Theropithecus oswaldi. I conclude by contextualizing the primate fossil record and extinction in a broader frame of Earth's history and an uncertain future.

The concept of ethnicity has advanced and retreated as an object of anthropological interest. A central concern of studies of nationalism and modernity, it faded from view, only to reappear more recently tied to questions around the commodification of identity. This article traces the relational concept of ethnicity, understood to be part of a semiotic constellation with nation and race, as linked to the legitimization of social inequality in the rise of liberal democracy and industrial capitalism. Ethnicity was initially mobilized in the making of the modern nation-state as tied to criteria of access to political rights (through which access to economic resources was distributed). However, the most recent crisis of capitalism, often understood as “globalization,” has rendered the semiotic attributes of ethnicity as an identity category tied to political rights available to be mobilized as economic resources in and of themselves. This shift has destabilized the workings of this category, leading to difficulties in boundary production and reproduction, as well as sapping its ability to serve as a basis for mobilizing resistance to inequality.

While debates over freedom of speech have been a focus of renewed public and media attention over the past decade, anthropological literature focusing self-consciously and explicitly on the topic remained, until very recently, relatively thin on the ground. And yet questions of freedom of expression are treated tangentially in a range of anthropological literatures, including studies of publics, media and mediation, expertise, political subjectivity, or humor. We draw these contributions together to build a synthetic account of what anthropology has had to say—directly or indirectly—about freedom of speech. Building on this literature, the article argues that rather than imagine freedom of speech as the illusory opposite of our preferential understanding of communication as necessarily constrained, a more ethnographic and less parochial approach would seek to interrogate the different modalities in which freedoms of speech are evoked, invoked, imagined, and practiced.

This review argues for renewed attention to interdiscursivity—processes through which linguistic or other semiotic elements taken from one context are integrated into another, forging links among texts, contexts, and people. We examine historical and institutional structures that guide processes of interdiscursivity to focus on three interconnected interdiscursive processes. First, conventional interdiscursivity (re)produces power structures, such that people deem certain interdiscursive connections as appropriate, proper, or otherwise normalized. Next, attention to interdiscursive gaps—socially structured spaces of silence and elision—reveals complex, power-laden logics of selection and erasure underpinning the (re)production of authoritative interdiscursive configurations. Finally, renegade interdiscursivity is how people refuse conventional links and forge novel connections with the marginalized, silenced, and left out. Throughout, we conceptualize material linguistic forms as evidence and manifestations of power and authority to show that attending to and remaking interdiscursive patterns can be a way to contest and remake structures of power and authority.

This review examines listening as both an aspect of everyday sensory experience and a specialized mode of attention, analyzing how different cultural frameworks and social practices shape the ways people attend to, interpret, and respond to speech and sound. Drawing on recent ethnographic studies, it demonstrates how different “genres of listening” emerge through processes of professional training, political engagement, and technological mediation. The article analyzes how experts—from psychoanalysts to forensic specialists—cultivate specialized modes of listening, while also examining how listening shapes political contexts. Particular attention is paid to the methodological challenges of studying listening ethnographically and to the role of listening in anthropological research itself. By highlighting how listening practices are implicated in processes of social differentiation, professional authority, and political participation, this review advances our understanding of reception as a critical domain of anthropological inquiry, one that complements the field's traditional focus on speech and speaking.

In describing how naming is a universal and critical space in which to understand the nature of recognition, this review argues that the inherent tension between the fixity and flow of the name allows us to better think about the underlying concerns in the study of language, the politics of designation, and anthropology's own reliance on naming practices. By looking to a number of different genealogies in anthropology, the article describes how scholars are increasingly highlighting practices of naming as sites of contestation, revealing naming as an often unsettled and fraught space rather than merely a useful port of entry into the social, as perhaps has too often been the case in the history of the discipline.

This article combines perspectives from linguistic anthropology and outsider scholarship to examine the academic discourses of law and anthropology. Inclusion of outsider scholarship is not only an issue of politics and ethics within the academy, but also a crucial corrective to limited epistemologies, ontologies, and methods within standard Eurocentric forms of analysis. We begin in Sections 1 and 2 with an overview of relevant scholarly foundations, and then consider in Section 3 the persistent conceptual division between formal law and law in action, long questioned in legal and anthropological thinking. To move the discussion further, Section 4 excavates underlying legal metapragmatic assumptions using the example of the “depublication” of legal precedents. Section 5 examines the New Legal Realist movement as another case of attention to metalinguistic norms undergirding translation between law and social sciences. We conclude in Section 6 that the most promising places for conversations between law and anthropology are at marginalized but cutting-edge spaces.

The anthropology of science emerged in the 1980s as a critique of science and technocracy, exposing the social construction of scientific facts and their role in reinforcing ideologies such as capitalism, racism, and gender inequality. This project positioned anthropologists as challengers of scientific authority, culminating in the science wars of the 1990s. By the 2000s, the political landscape shifted as climate skeptics appropriated social constructionist arguments. In response, some anthropologists adopted neorealist epistemologies that view scientific facts as constructed but real, enabling collaborations with scientists but also generating new conflicts. This review argues that in the post-truth era, the anthropology of science has struggled to reconcile its critical origins with a defense of scientific authority. These normative agendas aside, we need close-up ethnographic observation of scientific practice more than ever to understand what comes after the “knowledge societies” from which the anthropology of science had been born some 40 years ago.

Anthropology has long engaged in explorations of pain as part of the human condition. Sociocultural values and norms shape expressions and understandings of pain, as well as pain management practices globally. Here, we focus on physical pain to highlight the intersections of race, gender, class, and position in the global neoliberal economy as major themes in shaping attitudes toward pain and accessibility of pain management. Pain is always intersubjective, producing social relations and invoking (sometimes-tenuous) bonds of care, while also revealing power dynamics, inequalities, and struggles for recognition on interpersonal and global scales. We present ethnographic approaches to studying pain, gender and pain, pain and birth, opioids and pain, cancer and end-of-life care, and chronic pain and aging to critically consider the role of social and material life, language, agency, and structural inequalities in the quest to express, recognize, and care for pain.

The organization of gender-based violence by the urgent need for intervention results in an emphasis on binaries, namely a distinction between domestic violence and sexual assault. It also produces an ethnographic landscape that focuses on the institutions associated with intervention, primarily the courts and clinics whose policies are framed by these binaries. The anthropology of gender-based violence trades in the binary categories of intervention while exceeding and critiquing them. Within these studies are queries about gendered vulnerabilities and structural conditions that generate harm. Resisting the normative ways in which gender-based violence is discussed gives rise to critical theories of masculinity and lays bare queer vulnerabilities. It also allows anthropology to think about the role of gender-based violence in the production of anthropological knowledge. By moving beyond domestic violence and sexual assault as mutually exclusive formations, anthropology has increasingly deployed the rich specificities of time and space to think with and through capacious avenues for preventing, addressing, and producing gender-based violence in a broader array of ethnographic sites and institutions.

Few concerns are as important in contemporary politics as energy, that vital force. Janus-faced, energy animates modern life while seeming simultaneously to ensure its undoing. It is a notion haunted in equal measure by promise and doom. In anthropology, the potential for energetic relations to alter worlds was of intense disciplinary importance well before the current interest in energy production as technoscientific endeavor. More specifically, an expanded history of the subdiscipline shows how contemporary understandings of energy as an extractable and (unevenly) deployed resource link to a more immaterial, indeed magical, theorizing of influence and power. Energy thus conceptualized stands in excess of thermodynamics, and it continues to provide anthropologists with a fruitful means of moving between things, scales, materials, communities, ideas, and even disciplines. As such, anthropologists rarely, if ever, study energy itself; instead, they use it to provide a new angle into classic concerns and, equally, as a sharp-toothed vehicle for the analysis of contemporary political and economic systems as much as energetic ones.

This article reviews developments within urban anthropology and adjacent fields to argue for a more-than-human approach to urban inequalities, centered on the relations among humans, sociotechnical systems, and nonhuman life. A first section reviews an established tradition within urban anthropology that focuses on sociospatial relations to understand how resources, risks, and political influence are distributed unequally across urban populations and spaces. A next section highlights the more recent infrastructural turn, which has directed attention toward how such uneven distributions are mediated by sociotechnical systems and a range of urban things. A third section introduces an emergent literature that extends multispecies ethnography to understand how urban nature—specifically animals and plants, but also microbes—coproduces inequalities, while the concluding section notes the need to connect these latter two approaches more explicitly.

As cities and nation-states design massive coastal development projects, I show in this review how these projects require and produce emptied and flattened surfaces necessary for the workings of coloniality, racial capitalism, and enslavement, dispossessing amphibious modes of life and livelihood in their wake. Nevertheless, despite their accreted force (and also perhaps because of it), colonial and postcolonial projects to stabilize and concretize coasts are always falling apart. Their disrepair manifests how projects, and the lives and landscapes they make, continue to be situated in amphibious worlds. Building on the work of scholars in anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, and Black studies, I first draw attention to the spatial and temporal rhythms in which social groups dwell in amphibious terrain. Second, thinking with Kamu Brathwaite's formulation of tidalectics and Tiffany Lethabo King's formulation of shoals, I show how concepts of an amphibious anthropology lend themselves to reading the compromised yet consequent forces with which sedimented and sodden social and natural histories matter. Finally, I return to Peters & Steinberg's provocation of more-than-wet ontologies to unpack how an amphibious anthropology might register and theorize the permeability of the body and, in so doing, address the long-standing separations between environmental science and the health sciences.

This article reviews recent debates on the contemporary crisis of truth and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platforms and constructions, including social media, deepfakes, and new algorithmic governance settings. The latter are often seen as essential in producing the former, though the wider implications of both on ethnography have been scarcely explored. Anthropologists have criticized technosolutionist AI assumptions of control but also creatively combined AI and ethnographic forms of knowledge production. Neither, however, has led to a renewed appreciation of truth, among other reasons due to the dominance of new materialist, ontological, and related theoretical strands. In contrast, the article makes the case for a planetary ethnography centered around the relations among ethnography, (post-)truth, and AI-enabled platform capitalist power. This argument may help not only to productively understand the contemporary crisis of truth, but also to renew an anthropological politics around speaking truth to power in the context of escalating planetary crises.

What is the relationship between experiential knowledge and the categories, etiologies, and treatment modalities of medical science? When do patients form social movements and demand participation in medical research? This article reviews trends in how medical anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and the history of medicine approach the coproduction of medical knowledge. Coproduction is used as a wide-ranging idiom to capture how knowledge building happens across social-material domains and as an aspirational vision for the ways that collaborative knowledge making can be intentional, improved on, and reimagined. I begin with an intellectual and social history of voluntary self-help organizations, patient advocacy movements, citizen science, lay expertise, and the era of intentionally patient-led research. I then offer thoughts about how abolition medicine and Indigenous science offer a radical vision for the coproduction of medical knowledge, especially in an era of antiscience, when strong political forces threaten public well-being.

Anthropological studies of LGBTQ activism around the world in recent decades offer insights into what political scientist Cathy Cohen called the “radical potential” of coalitions rooted less in LGBTQ identity than in countering interlocking oppressions. Accordingly, this article focuses on ways that anthropological scholarship has ethnographically studied LGBTQ activism not as sites of identity, but rather as scenes of unending nonsublimation of differences in embodied navigations of race, gender, sex, caste, and class. This work features scenes of transnational interlinkages in restructurations of sexual and erotic subjectivities, decolonial strivings to upend exploitative extractions of value from marginalized people and landscapes, and spiritual activism that seeks their material survival and flourishing through more just redistributions of pleasure and care.

Rooted in the freedom dreams of Black political movements across diasporas, abolition has emerged as a framework for the study and practice of building a world without captivity. Anthropologists of social movements have attended to the dreamers and destroyers doing this work, turning an analytic eye to the practice of abolition among community organizers, high school students, immigrant rights advocates, and queer activists. As the discipline flails for relevance, anthropologists writing from some of the most prestigious enclaves have called for its destruction. Both abolitionist anthropology and the abolition of anthropology itself have surfaced as rejoinders to the deraced humanism that dominated the last century of American anthropology. In this review, we engage abolition as a political horizon, a targeted decarceration movement, an ecological struggle, a mode of healing, and a pedagogical framework. Ultimately, we conceptualize abolition as an ecumenical imperative that both exceeds and inspires anthropological practice.