Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Ceramic trends on Unguja Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania provide insights into non-elite political strategies on the East African Swahili Coast. Synthesizing imported ceramic data from two seasons of systematic field survey across rural Unguja with historical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence from coastal East Africa, this paper argues that an integrative orientation toward power characterized

Neale, T. (2023), Interscalar maintenance: configuring an Indigenous ‘premium carbon product’ in northern Australia (and beyond). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 29: 306-325. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13861 This article has been corrected to remove figure 1 and mentions of figure 1 out of respect for a person photographed. The article has been republished without the accompanying

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This article explores hospitality as a key rhetorical framework for refugee management in Turkey by focusing on how host-guest relations are mobilized to represent, interpret, and problematize the current state of affairs regarding Syrian refugees, as well as to formulate policies. It analyses the transformation of hospitality rhetoric, the notion of ‘compulsory guesthood’, and the most recent social

Practising Orthodox Christians in central Serbia live their liturgical lives within the idiom of Serbian peoplehood. This article probes the ‘people’ (narod)?– perceived locally as an historically and geographically rooted ethno-moral collectivity?– as a core concept of belonging which is key for understanding post-Yugoslav Orthodox life. The ‘people’ functions as a this-worldly collective identity

This article investigates the styles of enquiry involved in Lowland South American Amerindian shamanic and narrative discourse genres. The article argues in favour of the existence of an Amazonian mode of thinking strictly related to formulaic composition, commonly found in different verbal poetic genres and its contemporary transformations into written texts published as books by Amerindian researchers

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, radical nationalist and quasi-fascist movements defining themselves in opposition to the Russian government dominated the country's paramilitary scene. This trend was almost completely reversed in the 2010s, with the relative decline of grassroots Slavic ethno-nationalism and the emergence of a statist military-patriotic culture centred on ‘traditional values’

Innovation is generally associated with the creation of something new and with economic growth, and is often understood in relation to modernity and its prime social site, ‘the city’. Accordingly, the coupling of innovation and rural areas may seem incongruent. Drawing on ethnographic research on Israel's high-tech scene, we analyse innovation centres located primarily in kibbutzim in the northern

Anthropologists often have to justify their research to ethics and funding committees composed mostly of mainstream social-behavioral scientists. In making their case, anthropologists face a dilemma in representing their discipline's distinctive research practices. For many anthropologists, the value of ethnographic work derives from its global comparativism and socially embedded realism; for students

The contemporary sharing economy comprises a variety of technology-mediated user-to-user transactions and reveals both the extremes of the late-capitalist regime of accumulation and possible paths to supersede it. To critically explore the idea of the sharing economy, this article examines how it has been mobilized by a non-profit startup in neoliberalized South Korea. Open Closet cheaply rents donated

The article offers an ethnographically embedded analysis of a UK-based Jewish-Muslim inter-community network to contribute to anthropological research into the ethical efforts that groups seen as polarized invest in negotiating boundaries of difference. The article makes two sets of arguments. First, it suggests that sometimes such groups have to negotiate not one but several ‘borders across difference’

The face of the government is the interface through which citizens come into contact with and perceive the government via representation and face-to-face encounters. This article focuses on Colombian government officials in charge of delivering ‘peace pedagogy’ to explain to society the peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas, before and after a polarizing referendum which narrowly rejected the

This article explores the latent potential in the anthropological concept of survival, especially through Tylor's usage of the term. Once a core concept of anthropological theory in the late nineteenth century, the idea was critiqued and abandoned in the wake of the structural and functional anthropology of the early twentieth century. However, the concept implies many different things, and in clearing

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 5, October 2023.

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 5, October 2023.

Anthropology is good for understanding the metaverse, the emerging domain of digital culture that includes virtual worlds, online games, and social media. In the wake of COVID, there has been heightened interest in the metaverse's potential, particularly after Facebook renamed itself Meta in October 2021. Yet current understandings of the metaverse are deeply muddled, warped by rhetorics of promotion

Recent decades have witnessed the proliferation of alternative food networks (AFNs) in the US and Europe. While social scientists classify heterogenous practices as AFNs, their participants share the desire to work against the existing food system, and efforts to access food from outside this system. Many analysts have captured these features of AFNs by using concepts from Karl Polanyi's The Great

Presented as the eyes, ears, and voice for the Canadian Armed Forces in the Canadian Arctic, Canadian Rangers within the first Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (1CRPG) are applauded as being positive and progressive examples of state-Indigenous relations. Located in almost 70 communities across the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, the Yukon and Atlin, British Columbia (BC), Canadian Rangers in 1CRPG are

Network analysis has become increasingly common within archaeological practice, yet little consensus exists as to what networks based on material culture actually reveal about ancient social life. One common approach to archaeological network inference relies on constructing similarity networks based on shared material types or stylistic categories between archaeological sites or contexts. Many studies

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Rondels are the oldest monumental ceremonial objects in Europe. They appeared some 200?years after the demise of the Linear Pottery culture (c. 4800?BCE). They have given a new shape to the resurgent 'Danubian Neolithic World'. However, despite intensive research, it is still unclear (1) how the transition process took place after the fall of the LBK; (2) how long rondels were function; and (3) under

This article analyses senses of belonging and belonging disrupted via the lens of Brexit with a little ‘b’: namely at the level of ordinary experiences in the flow of daily lives. Our interlocutors recount these as deeply emotionally charged experiences. Their accounts supplement and help nuance more widespread popular explanatory models of the referendum vote and its outcomes. Examining brexit through

To practice music archaeology is to enter into a dialogue between the humanities and the sciences, social and otherwise. Music archaeology is part of the humanistic study of past sounded behaviour, ritual practice, and soundscapes, as well as a global history of discursive representations about humans' capacity for music. It is also the scientific inquiry of sound technology through time, of materials

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

What is the work of time on a marriage, and how does it transform people as they struggle to change and leave traces on others? Through reflections of middle-class women in Pakistan who married men who did not share their religious aspirations, I focus on how difference is negotiated and conceived in these marriages, and on the unexpected outcomes in the religious outlook of both spouses. The work

Since 2001, beetles have killed two-thirds of the pine trees in British Columbia, Canada, decimating the predominant commercial tree species in one of the world's largest timber economies. Attempts to construct and circulate computer models of the infestation and its aftermaths, however, have obscured destabilizing changes across state institutions for environmental research. Juxtaposing literary conceptualizations

What makes revolutionary media ‘moderate’, and why would a revolutionary state produce moderation? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with pro-regime media producers in Iran, this article examines the attempted creation of a new revolutionary hero, an ‘Islamic Che’, who appeals to younger audiences by creating a moderate style. Iran's regime media makers seek to attract not just youth who protest against

Since the 1979 Revolution, Iranian pilgrims have engaged in saint visitation (ziyarat) to sites in Syria. By travelling via Turkey on buses, and venerating Sayyida Zainab at their destination, these pilgrims disrupt conventional conceptions of not only Islamic ritual, but also Iranian mobility under sanctions. Their experiences venerating Sayyida Zainab?– emerging out of a self-described ‘poverty of

In this Henry Myers Lecture, I summarize several decades of collaborative research on the role of ritual in group bonding and co-operation, ranging from psychology experiments in university laboratories to field research among indigenous groups, and from surveys with armed revolutionaries to extended interviews with religious adherents. This body of work is helping to clarify the mechanisms by which

This article delves into the life stories of Indonesian Muslims who struggle with same-sex attraction (henceforth SSA) and believe that their SSA is divinely foreordained as a test from Allah. I draw on seventeen months of ethnographic research in an online community called Yayasan Peduli Sahabat (henceforth YPS) which prescribes ways to live heterosexually to its members and clients with SSA. In this

This article examines the constitutive role of blame in kinship as a practice in a low-income neighbourhood in India's capital city, Delhi. Using ethnographic data, I show how women with serious or chronic illness express blame towards kin for their failures in critical moments: for not providing care during illness, not fulfilling kinship obligations, and even for causing or exacerbating illness.

This article provides an ethnographic account of understandings of ‘ethnic’ difference in Khovd province, Mongolia. It attempts to use said material to challenge the terms of debate within the current concern with ‘essentialism’ in social theory. It is in agreement with constructivist-inspired observations by anthropologists that so-called ethnic groups in Mongolia exist partly as ideological ascriptions

Polanyi, Mauss, and others describe reasons for the growing differentiation of economy from other spheres of life. This article proposes a further reason: the increasing invisibility of economic transactions in everyday life. It traces the declining visibility of economic transactions in England and North America from around 1700 to the present, as public marketplaces were displaced by growing longer-distance

The article uncovers a forgotten chapter in the history of anthropology by revealing the experiences of American ethnographers in Turkey between 1967 and 1969. Using original archival documents and oral history interviews, it focuses on the trials of Professor Lloyd A. Fallers as well as doctoral students Michael Meeker, Peter Benedict, and June Starr in navigating Turkish bureaucracy and global politics

The emergence and expansion of inequality have been topics of household archaeology for decades. Traditionally, this question has been informed by ethnographic, ethnohistoric and/or comparative studies. Within sites and regions, comparative physical, spatial, and architectural studies of households offer an important baseline of information about status, wealth, and well-being, especially in the Maya

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Among my interlocutors in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city, were individuals who repeatedly claimed that some persons, philosophies, and ethical lives not only might be but actually were perfect (kāmel). The salavāt, a polyvalent blessing upon the Prophet and his descendants, evinces this. By evoking a unified, authoritative, egalitarian moment, reoriented in praise of perfect religious exemplars

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

In the western Indian city of Jodhpur, computer typists provide migration brokerage services to Pakistani Hindu refugee-migrants and Indian immigration officers. Such encounters and their interpretations contrast with the Indian state's emphasis on governmental proximity and immediate state-subject relations. Though computer typists—who I am calling brokers—are essential mediators, their acts of mediation

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Cultural loss has been neglected in the study of Aboriginal Australia. This neglect reflects the impact of changes in Australian society involving the recognition and celebration of Indigenous culture. Yet new jurisprudence relating to compensation under Australian land rights legislation has refocused attention on cultural loss. This article draws on ethnography from North West Queensland's Gulf Country

During an unprecedented crisis of bushfires, the staff of emergency management control centers in southeast Australia pause to perform rites with their political leaders. They reenact decisions that have already been made and generate divinations of fiery futures that are unlikely to occur. Their work, like that of others in large centralized technical infrastructures, is made possible by ritualized

In the past two decades, drug-treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and attended by the working poor, anexos’ therapeutic practices blend criminal violence and religious ritual, and they are widely condemned as abusive and unethical. Based on several years of ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article situates anexos within a larger historical frame

This article compares two East African unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs and how they have been interpreted by their target populations. While the US-American NGO GiveDirectly focuses on poor households in Western Kenya in an allegedly unbureaucratic and digital way, the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) distributes cash transfers in a bureaucratic and analogue manner in Tanzania. While

How are the historically fraught contexts of alterity that define postcolonial settings generated and negotiated in the context of medical uncertainty? What role does narrative play in the lived experience of such uncertainty and alterity? Focusing on a single “diagnostic odyssey” of childhood illness, this article examines the relationship between chronic uncertainty, alterity, and narrative sensemaking

Archaeological interpretations for the seemingly sudden introduction of new types of material culture or cultural practice often include attribution to the arrival of a migrant population as part the construction of a periphery or frontier zone. In the International Four Corners area of the American Southwest/Mexican Northwest, archaeologists often correlate the ascendancy of Paquimé in the late thirteenth

A novel terrain of health care is emerging in Kenya at the intersection of a cancer epidemic, expanding medical and health insurance markets, the continued evisceration of public health care, and a middle class that can raise funds from credit, loans, and social networks. As middle-class cancer patients and their families navigate these landscapes, they find themselves vulnerable both to the “ordinary

We examine Late and Terminal Classic (c. 600–950 CE) Maya ceramic figurine whistles from Ceibal, Guatemala, as materials of socialization. The figurines are mold-made and represent repeating characters, including humans, animals, and supernaturals. Based on mortuary and other contextual evidence, we argue that they were used for household performances among adults and children. Figurines were everyday

Cultural-evolutionary modeling of archaeological data faces numerous challenges, perhaps the most significant being the mismatch between models of microscale activities and the macroevolutionary scale of the archaeological record. This is especially the case with identifying different kinds of social learning reflected in the record. Here we present a computational approach to social learning using

In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived at Mound Key, the capital of the Calusa polity. What he saw there was unlike anything else he would encounter in La Florida, a capital teaming with people and complex architecture that was essentially a terraformed anthropogenic island constructed mostly of mollusk shells situated in the middle of Estero Bay. The Calusa literally raised this landscape—51?ha

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Clay figurines represent one of the ideal object categories for tracing the profile of their makers since they preserve traces of the maker’s gestures. The scope of the article is to reconstruct the different manufacturing steps of clay figurines, assess the complexity of the shaping sequences and study fingerprints to trace the profile of people who produced such artefacts in the ancient village of

Bird language is an emerging practice among nature-connection enthusiasts in which practitioners strive to comprehend the signals emitted by birds and other nonhuman beings. This practice shares much with contemporary academic interests in more-than-human sociality and foregrounds relational ways of knowing. Beyond merely classifying birds as communicative and social beings, the practice of bird language

The state of exception is classically understood as a situation devoid of laws and marked by the sovereign's absolute powers. This picture is unsettled by offering a more tenuous account of the state of siege, showing that normal laws and processes can be a constitutive dimension of modern exceptional regimes. Through an ethnography of a permanent space of exception in India, I argue that emergency

Inspired by the case of a jaguar raised as a pet by some paramilitary warlords, this article discusses how armed conflict encompasses more-than-human realities, becoming a hybrid experience capable of dislocating the borders between environmental and social processes, predation and warfare, human and nonhuman agency, and subjects and objects. It draws attention to a pervasive form of damage—afterlives—that

Current Anthropology, Volume 64, Issue 4, Page 472-473, August 2023.