Anthropology and Ethnohistory of the Maya

Anthropological, linguistic, historical, and archeological research on the Maya proceeds today amidst public contestation, for political and economic reasons, of the identity of Maya people and the nature of Maya culture. Neo-liberal multiculturalism, struggles over dwindling land and forest resources, the intensification of international tourism, and the growth of pan-Maya movements repeatedly raise the question of who and what is authentically Maya. Our scholarship, while motivated by quite different concerns and interests, unavoidably touches on similar issues in its exploration of the forms and meanings of Maya expression, belief, and ritual from ancient times to the present.     

Anthropology and the New Museology

Efforts are expanding to make museums responsive to broader audiences, and to incorporate a more multi-voiced approach to representation. Anthropologists and museum professionals point to initiatives in museums to broaden their research and outreach, but there is work still to be done. Whether we focus on theory or methodology, the new museology represents a particularly anthropological approach to museum work, emphasizing collaboration between museums and communities, and the recognition of the rights of peoples to be included in and consulted about the presentation and preservation of their heritage.     

Anthropology and blockchain

Blockchain and its related technologies break away from the contemporary dystopian imaginaries of control and exploitation endemic in IT. This editorial considers the relevance of blockchain for anthropologists, why they should care, and what the technology brings. After sketching the evolution of blockchain, we draw attention to its potential as a playground – a plethora of projects reimagining and remaking the basic stuff of political economy, including the meaning of money, collectivities, exchange and voting. Blockchain's utility for rethinking the basic rules of the game in academia also deserves attention.     

Anthropology and populism

This guest editorial probes the inflationary use of ‘populism’ and the contribution that anthropologists can make to this field. Although a highly variable phenomenon historically, contemporary populists in locations as diverse as rural Hungary and urban Wales have much in common in their disaffection with the politics of liberal democracy. While the deeper causes must be sought in political economy, emotion and identity are just as important as material interest in populist movements. In describing and explaining populism, anthropologists should heed the populist traditions of their discipline – even at the risk of political incorrectness.     

Anthropology in the Anthropocene

In the Anthropocene – an age troubled by global processes of material degradation – anthropology is constrained by its emphasis on local experience. Rather than confine itself, like mainstream economics, to the study of signs and subjectivities, it needs to develop its capacity to deal with the interaction of the symbolic and the material. This should include unravelling how economic ideas and the semiotics of consumption are entwined with the materiality of the biosphere and the physical metabolism of world society.     

Anthropology and the Artifacts of Medical Practice

Brown, Paula. Beyond a Mountain Valley: The Simbu of Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. xix + 296 pp. including notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $36.00 cloth.

Tuzin, Donald. The Cassowary's Revenge: The Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiii + 256 pp. including notes, maps, references, and index. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Biersack, Aletta, ed. Papuan Borderlands: Huli, Duna, and Ipili Perspectives on the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. xiv + 440 pp. including collected bibliography, other works cited, and index. $59.50 cloth.     

Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology

This paper explores the implications of Foucault's perspective of liberal government for approaches to the practical history of anthropology. It also draws on assemblage theory to consider the changing relations between field, museum and university in relation to a range of early twentieth-century anthropological practices. These focus mainly on the development of the Boasian paradigm in the USA during the inter-war years and on the anthropological practices clustered around the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s. Key steps in the argument focus on the role of what Foucault called “transactional realities” in mediating the practical applications of anthropology in colonial contexts and in “anthropology at home” projects. Special consideration is also given to the increasingly archival properties of anthropological collections in the early twentieth century and the consequences of this for anthropology's relations to practices of governing.     

Anthropology of childhood

Beatrice B. Whiting and John W. M. Whiting. Children of Six Cultures: A Psycho‐Cultural Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. xiv + 237 pp. Figures, tables, illustrations, appendices, bibliography and index. $10.00.     

Culture and Power in the Anthropology of Japan

Though Japan anthropology since the 1970s has been characterized as outside mainstream anthropological currents, recent work reflects broader disciplinary debates about the relation between culture and power. The four books under review, spanning the archaeology, history, ethnography, and political science of Japan, illustrate different ways of synthesizing cultural and political perspectives. Yet, to varying degrees, they all move beyond an undifferentiated, ahistorical, and depoliticized view of culture to embrace complexity, variability, conflict, and change. In so doing, they raise important questions about knowledge construction across the subfields of anthropology and its uneasy relationship with nationalist and essentialist discourses.     

Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid

This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a 'social good', that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.     

Anthropology at the End of the World

At this critical juncture in human history, when technological, political, demographic, and climatological forces promise to reshape the world in fundamental ways, anthropology stands in a uniquely privileged position to understand and perhaps cope with these forces and the resulting changes. By virtue of three key features—holism, scalability, and a tradition of political engagement—anthropology has an important role to play in the 21st century.     

Anthropology in the arctic and subarctic today

Gösta Berg, ed. Circumpolar Problems: Habitat, Economy and Social Relations in the Arctic. Wenner‐Gren International Symposium Series. Vol. 21. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1973. vi + 194 pp. Figures, tables, and references. $19.50.     

Anthropology of mutualism

What might anthropology offer to our understanding of mutualistic relations? In making sense of these interspecies interactions, which, despite some costs, are ultimately beneficial to each partner species, zoological approaches operate at the level of populations on an adaptive scale. Anthropologists bring focus on individual actors and their subjective experiences within far more condensed temporospatial ethnographic timescales. This guest editorial brings a multispecies anthropological approach into dialogue with zoological understandings of mutualism. It examines the practical and theoretical potential of mutuality to make sense of relations of domestication. Materialistic profit and market-oriented forms of engagement in the domestic sphere are often detrimental to more-than-human communities. The persistence of different kinds of mutual co-existences, as shown in different forms of care of orphaned animals in Mongolia, Pakistan and Australia, offers an alternative and perhaps more hopeful model of more-than-human engagement in the Anthropocene.     

人类学的技艺

今天我们看到的社会科学乃是舶来品,是从西方知识体系中生长出来的。直到启蒙哲学时期,社会科学并没有剥离出来,我们能见到的还只是一些虽然睿智但却是大而化之的论述。“到19世纪初,科学终于     

Anthropology in the financial crisis

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions. We draw on Ortiz's research among financial professionals to show how working practices informed by economic liberalism can have extremely unequal consequences for the global distribution of resources. The perspectives of Mauss and Polanyi on political economy can help us to make sense of the current situation and to recommend a path forward beyond market fundamentalism. Their general ideas lend power to the concrete findings of field research. The mask of neoliberal ideology has been ripped from the politics of world economy. Anthropology's highest mission is to start from where people are and go with them wherever they take you. What better time to follow this imperative than when the model the world has been compelled to live by for three decades is in such disarray?