Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 2017"

The Datafication of Health

Abstract: Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of “datafication” or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastructures, clinical health care, and self-care practices. For the purposes of this review, we focus mainly on the latter two domains, examining how scholars in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies have begun to explore the datafication of clinical and self-care practices. We identify the dominant themes and questions, methodological approaches, and analytical resources of this emerging literature, parsing these under three headings: datafied power, living with data, and data–human mediations. We conclude by urgi...

Fluid Drugs: Revisiting the Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals

Abstract: This review discusses a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that examines how drugs are rendered efficacious in laboratories, therapeutic settings, and everyday lives. This literature foregrounds insights into how commercial interests and societal concerns shape the kinds of pharmaceutical effects that are actualized and how some efficacies are blocked in response to moral concerns. The work brought together here reveals how regulatory institutions and health policy makers seek to stabilize pharmaceutical actions while, on the front lines of care, pharmacists, health workers, and users tinker with dosages and indications to tailor pharmaceutical actions to specific circumstances. We show that there is no pure (pharmaceutical) object that precedes its socialization. Pharmaceuticals are not “discovered”; they are made and remade in relation to shifting contexts. This review outlines five key areas of ethnographic and STS research that exam...

Brain Plasticity and Human Evolution

Abstract: Human behavior is shaped by social learning to an extent that is unrivaled in the natural world. What neurobiological changes have occurred in human evolutionary history that have enabled this remarkable cultural capacity? Human brain anatomy and function have evolved to be highly responsive to experience from the environment, especially the milieu of social interactions. Numerous aspects of human brain development show evidence of specialization leading to increased plasticity. These include the timing of brain growth relative to birth, rates of synaptogenesis and myelination, and shifts in gene expression and epigenetic modifications. Some of these evolutionary changes in human brain plasticity are also evident in fossil hominins and from analyses of ancient DNA.

Collective Action Theory and the Dynamics of Complex Societies

Abstract: Collective action theory, as formulated in the social sciences, posits rational social actors who regularly assess the actions of others to inform their own decisions to cooperate. In anthropological archaeology, collective action theory is now being used to investigate the dynamics of large-scale polities of the past. Building on the work of Margaret Levi, collective action theorists argue that the more principals (rulers) depended on the populace for labor, tribute, or other revenues, the greater the agency (or “voice”) a population had in negotiating public benefits. In this review, we evaluate collective action theory, situating it in relation to existing theoretical approaches that address cooperation, consensus building, and nonelite agency in the past. We draw specific attention to the importance of analyzing agency at multiple scales as well as how institutions articulate shared interests and order sociopolitical and economic interaction. Finally, we argue for a new synthesis of political economy ...

Epidemics (Especially Ebola)

Abstract: Anthropology's response to the West African Ebola epidemic was one of the most rapid and expansive anthropological interventions to a global health emergency in the discipline's history. This article sets forth the size and scale of the anthropological response and describes the protagonists, interventions, and priorities for anthropological engagement. It takes an inclusive approach to anthropological praxis by engaging with the work of nonanthropologist “allies,” including qualitative researchers, social workers, and allied experts. The article narrates how the concept of “anthropology” came to serve as a semantic marker of solidarity with local populations, respect for customary practices and local sociopolitical realities, and an avowed belief in the capacities of local populations to lead localized epidemic prevention and response efforts. Of particular consideration is the range of complementary and conflicting epistemological, professional, and critical engagements held by anthropologists. The arti...

Social Network Analysis in Archaeology

Abstract: Social network analysis (SNA) in archaeology has become important for a range of theoretical and methodological approaches that can more generally be characterized as relational. They are relational in that it is the ties between actors (or nodes) that define social connections. Archaeologists are currently employing a diversity of theoretical approaches to networks, and the perspective taken in this review is that SNA can provide insights into a number of different social processes using different theories. Following a brief historical overview, I discuss two aspects of SNA: the structural position of the actor or node, and characterizations of whole networks. I then summarize several broad classes of archaeological networks: historical, spatial, and material. I conclude with a call for more bridging approaches to span alternative theoretical and methodological approaches in the archaeology of networks.

What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene

Abstract: The modernist usage of the word crisis conveys the idea of an event that acts as a historical judgment, marks an epochal transition, and sometimes leads to a utopian era. Furthermore, current uses of crisis in the political sphere often figure catastrophic events as the result of errors and malfunctions, drawing attention away from the quotidian and normatively accepted practices and policies that produce them. Anthropological definitions of disaster, in contrast, understand catastrophes as the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Despite this fundamental difference between customary and scholarly definitions of crises and disasters, the former term is commonly used to refer to the latter by political elites and academics alike. This arti...

Archaeology and Human–Animal Relations: Thinking Through Anthropocentrism*

Abstract: Archaeology is a field of research that relies largely on the remains of past humans and nonhuman animals and the traces of their interactions within a range of material conditions. In archaeology, as in sociocultural anthropology, the dominant analytical perspective on human–animal relations is ontologically anthropocentric: the study of the human use of nonhuman animals for the benefit of human beings, and scholarly inquiry that is largely for the sake of elucidating what nonhuman animals can tell us about the human condition. This review outlines the historical trajectory of Anglo-American archaeology's encounters with animal remains, and human–animal interactions, within this framework and considers recent attempts to move beyond anthropocentrism.

Recovering the Body

Abstract: The Anthropocene has been officially declared as a new geological epoch owing to the lasting impact made by humans on environments, negatively affecting the health and even survival of human populations Furthermore, over the past decade, molecular science has shown that the human genome is reactive to environments that are external and internal to the body Hence, environments impact directly on individual bodies by bringing about epigenetic changes in the genome Following a discussion of human exceptionalism and its limitations, I argue that an anthropology of embodiment should be situated in time and space, and recognition given to local biologies as a subcategory of situated biologies evident globally Examples are then given of the intergenerational transmission of epigenetic effects due to environmental toxic exposures with a concluding call for anthropologists to engage with the worldwide challenge

Rock Art and Ontology

Abstract: This article reviews recent ontological debates in archaeology and examines how ontology has been discussed in rock art studies. It questions the prevailing symbolic analysis of rock art and critically questions the epistemological foundations of “informed” and “formal” approaches to rock art. The article evaluates ontological debates within rock art studies and argues for a committed approach to ontology that uses anthropological understandings of ontology as an analytical tool and a method for generating fresh concepts. The article then reviews the ontological dimensions of a series of aspects of rock art studies, including the production of rock art images, their placement on the rock surface, their position in the landscape, and their relationship to formation processes. The article concludes by arguing that ontological questions not only relate to the interpretation of rock art images, but touch on all aspects of rock art.

Human–Animal Communication*

Abstract: Since the demise in the 1980s of research by psychologists who attempted to teach human language to apes, a range of other perspectives has arisen that explore how humans can communicate with animals and what the possibility of such communication means. Sociologists interested in symbolic interactionism, anthropologists writing about ontology, equestrian and canine trainers, people with autism who say they understand animals because they think like animals, and a ragbag of sundry New Age women who claim to be able to converse with animals through telepathy have started discussing human–animal communication in ways that recast the whole point of thinking about it. This review charts how interest in human–animal communication has moved from a concern with cognition to a concern with ethics, and it discusses the similarities and differences that exist among the range of writing on this topic.

Archaeologies of the Contemporary World

Abstract: Archaeologists have long been interested in contemporary material culture, but only recently has a dedicated subfield of archaeology of the contemporary world begun to emerge. Although it is concerned mainly with the archaeology of the early to mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in its explicit acknowledgment of the contemporary archaeological record as multi-temporal, the subfield is not defined by a focus on a specific time period so much as a particular disposition toward time, material things, the archaeological process, and its politics. This article considers how the subfield might be characterized by its approaches to particular sources and its current and emerging thematic foci. A significant point of debate concerns the role of archaeology as a discipline through which to explore ongoing, contemporary sociomaterial practices—is archaeology purely concerned with the abandoned and the ruined, or can it also provide a means by which to engage with and illuminate ongoing, contemporary, and fut...

Humans and Animals in Northern Regions

Abstract: This review weighs the importance of human–animal sociality in Northern ethnographies through an examination of key concepts such as totemism, ideas of the entitlement, and domestication. It shows how classic narratives of cultural evolution are linked to conservation discourse, whereas current theoretical conversations such as the “ontological turn” are rooted in older idioms of liberal egalitarianism. Using a broad comparative approach with literature from all parts of the circumpolar North, this review weighs the effect of older metaphors on the discipline and suggests that a focus on landscape sociality—or sentient ecology—would best represent Northern situations and stories.

Language and the Newness of Media

Abstract: How is the newness of new media constructed? Rejecting technological determinism, linguistic anthropologists understand that newness emerges when previous strategies for coordinating social interactions are challenged by a communicative channel. People experience a communicative channel as new when it enables people to circulate knowledge in new ways, to call forth new publics, to occupy new communicative roles, to engage in new forms of politics and control—in short, new social practices. Anthropologists studying media have been modifying the analytical tools that linguistic anthropologists have developed for language to uncover when and how media are understood to provide the possibilities for social change and when they are not. Taking coordination to be a vulnerable achievement, I address recent work that elaborates on the ways that linguistic anthropology segments communication to explore how a particular medium offers its own distinctive forms of authorship, circulation, storage, and audiences.

A Bundle of Relations: Collections, Collecting, and Communities*

Abstract: Anthropology has always involved collections and collecting Collections helped give rise to the discipline's formation and were integral to theoretical perspectives rooted in hierarchies of race and technology in the nineteenth century With the disavowal of these perspectives, collecting, and its resulting collections, remained an ongoing but unacknowledged activity The material (re)turn in the 1980s brought anthropology's material legacies under renewed scrutiny by repositioning objects as having histories and agency Ethnographies of collecting have helped reveal the often obscured collaborations that were, and are, critical to anthropological knowledge Collaborations with indigenous communities involving collections are helping to address the discipline's asymmetry by challenging anthropological categories and authority In the process, experimental ethnographies through digital and nondigital means are demonstrating that collections are profoundly relational This relational perspective is helping

Marriage and Migration

Abstract: Despite immigration policies that are often built around family reunification, contemporary research on migration often prioritizes labor mobility over mobility associated with marriage and family formation Drawing on scholarship across a range of disciplines and across the globe, this article focuses attention on the substantive dimensions and theoretical debates located at the intersections of research on marriage and migration Among the topics covered are rural bride shortages and mail-order marriages, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience and the state policies introduced to regulate them, and crimes of honor The article also addresses the impact of migration on spousal relationships and on parenting in a transnational context Of particular consideration are dimensions of insecurity that arise in mixed-status families, which may result in domestic violence

Personal Narratives and Self-Transformation in Postindustrial Societies

Abstract: This article surveys literature on personal narratives as situated practices in a variety of contexts in primarily Western, postindustrial societies. It begins with an overview of theories that articulate the relationships among narrative, self, and narrating context. I then consider how narratives of the self are shaped in institutional contexts, including those in which narratives are used to evaluate selves or used as a technology for changing selves. The section that follows examines how narrative analysis can be used to examine people's positioning in relation to larger social discourses such as neoliberalism. The final section returns to the relationship between narrative forms and contexts by examining how people narrate themselves across the variety of digital media and online contexts provided by the Internet.

China–Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities

Abstract: This review uses multilingual sources to illuminate China–Africa encounters in historical, socialist, and postsocialist contexts. It emphasizes interregional connections over time and uses nuanced ethnographic accounts to complement macrogeopolitical analyses. The article focuses on mutual stereotypes as well as on the negotiation of social and cultural barriers in everyday life. It challenges static, bounded conceptual categories in social science and policy research. The ethnographic studies cited highlight the complexities of human agency and historical legacies on the ground and show the contested democratization of space and opportunities that ensue both when Africans enter Chinese social fields and vice versa. In the process, these examples force us to rethink analytical assumptions about mobility, hierarchy, and political economy in ways that complicate Cold War–derived understandings of both China and Africa.

Primate Positional Behavior Development and Evolution

Abstract: Positional behavior (posture and locomotion) studies are a category of primatological and anthropological field research that attempts to describe movement capabilities and expressed behavior within an evolutionary, ecological, and/or morphological context This area of research is appealing because it allows the integration of morphological data (capabilities) with expressed behaviors and provides a basis for understanding fossil reconstruction Because positional behavior acts as a mediator between the biology and the environment, it offers information about virtually all aspects of a primate's life We are currently undergoing an increase in the number of field projects focusing on the development of positional behaviors in immature primates, and results suggest that in many species positional competence develops relatively early In this review, I present information on recent positional behavior studies with a focus on how positional behavior develops in young primates Research on immature primates

The Archaeological Study of Sacrifice

Abstract: Sacrifice is one of the most common manifestations of human religious thought and behavior, yet archaeology has only recently begun to devote significant attention to the practice This article reviews the diverse ways in which archaeologists have studied sacrifice and how work might proceed in the future Both animal and human sacrifice are considered, along with the question of whether these two manifestations of ritual killing are significantly distinct After examining how sacrifice can be identified in the archaeological record, the review outlines important new developments in bioarchaeology and zooarchaeology that facilitate study of the geographical origin of victims, lifestyle, and health prior to sacrifice, preparations for sacrifice, methods of ritual killing, and postmortem treatment Proceeding beyond the mechanics of the practice, the article discusses how archaeologists can study sacrifice in its social context as well as its spatial and temporal dimensions

Late Australopiths and the Emergence of Homo

Abstract: New fossil discoveries and new analyses increasingly blur the lines between Australopithecus and Homo, changing scientific ideas about the transition between the two genera. The concept of the genus itself remains an unsettled issue, though recent fossil discoveries and theoretical advances, alongside developments in phylogenetic reconstruction and hypothesis testing, are helping us approach a resolution. A review of the latest discoveries and research reveals that (a) despite the recent recovery of key fossil specimens, the antiquity of the genus Homo remains uncertain; (b) although there exist several australopith candidate ancestors for the genus Homo, there is little consensus about which of these, if any, represents the actual ancestor; and (c) potential convergent evolution (homoplasy) in adaptively significant features in late australopiths and basal members of the Homo clade, combined with probable reticulate evolution, makes it currently impossible to identify the direct ancestor of Homo erectus.

The Monkeying of the Americas: Primate Biogeography in the Neotropics*

Abstract: Monkeys first arrived in the Neotropics about 36 Ma, and the ancestry of all living Neotropical primates (Platyrrhini) traces to a single common ancestral population from 24 to 19 Ma. The availability of lush Amazonian habitat, the rise of the Andes, the transition from the lacustrine to riverine system in the Amazon Basin, and the intermittent connection between the Amazon and the Atlantic tropical forests have all shaped how primates spread and diversified. Primates outcompeted native South American mammals but faced an influx of North American fauna with the closing of the Isthmus of Panama. Humans, extreme newcomers in the Neotropics, have influenced primate habitat and ecology over the last 13,000 years, with radical transformations in the last 500 years as a result of European colonization and land use change. Neotropical primate biogeography informs taxonomic work and conservation efforts, with a mind toward mitigating effects of direct human impact and human-mediated climate change.

Consuming DNA: The Good Citizen in the Age of Precision Medicine

Abstract: The convergence of increasingly efficient high-throughput genetic sequencing technology and ubiquitous Internet use has fueled the proliferation of companies that provide direct-to-consumer (DTC) personal genetic information The emergence of consumer genetics reflects several shifts in the governance of genetic testing and management of human genetic data This article discusses DTC genetics as a case study of neoliberalism and contemporary transformations in medicine that construe disease and its management through economic rationalities At stake are shifts in subjectivities from “patient” to “consumer” and the meaning of being a “good citizen” in the context of precision medicine Engaging concepts of biopower, biosociality, and biovalue in the public consumption of genetic information, this article analyzes DTC genetics and its effect on social connection, identity, and modes of participation in the production of biomedical knowledge and the management of health and risk