Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 1. February 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 1 Front Cover Anthropologists have long ignored or criticized mainstream popular culture, so we have not always realized that something as seemingly mundane as a Hollywood film could contain valuable insights for teaching and thinking about the issues that matter to an anthropological perspective on the contemporary world. Given science fiction's intersections with anthropology in using other ‘worlds’ to gain perspective on our own, science fiction films could be particularly good resources for engaging wider audiences with anthropological insights. While there have been occasional examples of such cross‐fertilizations, such as the writings of Ursula Le Guin, the potential of science fiction as a source for anthropological thinking has been by and large neglected. In this issue, David Sutton shows how the recent film Arrival provides one striking example of the overlap between science fiction, anthropology and popular culture. Films such as this, offer much food for thought and for engagement with anthropological understandings of topics ranging from linguistic relativity to culturally constructed temporalities. At a time when anthropology itself has gained increased visibility in popular culture, it behoves us to think through, rather than reject out of hand, the ways that we might highlight these increased opportunities to promote anthropological understandings. Back Cover: ‘WE ARE ALL POLICE’ A scene from the taxi station at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, December 2016, after several deadly attacks against police and military members. Turkish flag stickers read as: ‘We are all police; we are all soldiers’. Scholars across disciplines have recently expanded state‐centred understandings of security (i.e. national security) by looking at the human and non‐human elements of security, including everything from food and ecological systems, to political economy, poverty and even everyday life itself. What kind of critical tools do we need to develop in order to understand our increasingly ‘securitized’ world infused with a growing (and increasingly repurposed) police force that includes both human and non‐human agents of policing? In this issue, Hayal Akarsu focuses on the technicalization of police violence through reform and the expansion of police power into unconventional domains. She shows how the very practice of reforming expands the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what such reforms are supposed to restrain. While her research remains contextualized within the specific histories of the Turkish police, it has relevance beyond Turkey, as many practices once considered as ‘harsh policing’ have increasingly enjoyed the support of the public in different parts of the world. In such a milieu, an ethnographically nuanced analysis can provide us with a more subtly attuned vantage point, enabling us to understand how technologies of security and policing with seemingly liberal genealogies like community policing or broad democratic police reform can coexist or be aligned with ‘non‐liberal’ and even authoritarian modalities of government.     

Reimagining Alterities: The Formation of Identities through Memory,History, and Place

Anthropologists have firmly established the need to attend to the paradoxes of mobile cultural and symbolic forms—these portable imaginaries of belonging or exclusion—during periods of transnational crisis and restructuring. In this article, I examine how formations of selfhood and otherness have come to public visibility in the context of globalization. My review of recent anthropological publications scrutinizes the range of possible methodological approaches to social identity practices, both in the past and present. Although contemporary scholars seek to refine anthropological insights on the plausible linkages between identity and alterity, the reliance on select methodological frames produces corresponding limitations in research focus and interpretative acuity.     

Human occupation in South America by 20,000 BC: the Toca da Tira Peia site,Piauí, Brazil

When and how did the first human beings settle in the American continent? Numerous data, from archaeological researches as well as from palaeogenetics, anthropological and environmental studies, have led to partially contradictory interpretations in recent years, often because of the lack of a reliable chronological framework. The present study contributes to the establishment of such a framework using luminescence techniques to date a Brazilian archaeological site, the Toca da Tira Peia. It constitutes an exemplary case study: all our observations and measurements tend to prove the good integrity of the site and the anthropological nature of the artifacts and we are confident in the accuracy of the luminescence dating results. All these points underline the importance of the Toca da Tira Peia. The results bring new pieces of evidence of a human presence in the north-east of Brazil as early as 20,000 BC. The Toca da Tira Peia thus contributes to the rewriting of the history of the peopling of the American continent.     

Networked Spirits and Smart Séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the Era of the Internet of Things

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human.     

Nazism as modern magic: bronislaw malinowski's political anthropology

In the 1930s, the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski embarked on a lecture tour of the United States in an attempt to alert the American public to the threat posed by Nazism. This article considers how Malinowski's public campaigning built on his anthropological studies, and suggests how the insights contained therein can still be an impetus to further augment our understanding of Nazism as a phenomenon.     

Authorisation and the Process of Power: The View from African Archaeology

African prehistory has a unique contribution to make to our understandings of the ways that power and authority were constituted and enacted in the past; a combination of anthropological, historical and archaeological approaches to the issue provide a powerful heuristic for thinking through the ways that authority was legitimised. In this introductory paper we focus on the divide between power and authority, and argue that a process-based approach is necessary to understanding the ways that each was created in societies of the past. Such an approach, we argue, can offer a mediation between practice-based perspectives on social power, and those that focus on the operations of the state. We make a fundamental distinction between twin aspects of the exercise of power, imposition and composition, and demonstrate how the incorporation of the latter into our understandings of prehistory can allow archaeologists to consider the materials with which they work as residues of the performance of power. The African archaeological record has a key role to play in our understandings of the operation of power, the creation of legitimacy and the exercise of authority.     

Biblical anthropology and the idea of human prehistory in late antiquity

Late Antiquity is an important period in the history of anthropology because it marks a divide between the naturalistic and rationalistic anthropological ideas of Greco-Roman philosophers and the "biblical anthropology" that was formulated by Medieval Christian writers. The biblical anthropology that emerged in Late Antiquity addressed the question of the origin of the first humans, our relationship to the natural world, and the original state of mankind. While early Christian philosophers based much of this biblical anthropology on the Genesis account of early human history, they also utilized a great deal of Greco-Roman philosophy in order to expound a vision of human prehistory that profoundly influenced anthropological thought well into the modern era.     

Chaos,Complexity, and a Revitalization of Four-Field Anthropology?

Four-field anthropology has always struggled with the problem of how to holistically study human cultural systems that are the products of environment, process, and history. Complexity science offers a set of tools calibrated to the analysis of complex systems like those of human societies, and has the potential to allow us to scientifically understand how history and process affect the physical, cultural, and linguistic components that are entangled in the whole of human societies. Application of complexity science to anthropological problems thus far has favored engagement on a conceptual level rather than one that harnesses the full power of the approach.     

A new synthesis: Resituating approaches to the evolution of human behaviour

Most anthropologists would agree that humans are simultaneously historical, biological, behavioral, and social. However, many researchers retain a relatively dualistic paradigm dividing anthropological questions into biological and/or social aspects. Many practitioners of Neo-Darwinian perspectives prioritize natural selection in all explanations of human evolution. Many other anthropologists refuse to acknowledge a significant role for biological features and biological histories in human action, sensation, and engagement. Both perspectives are misplaced. Incorporating emerging perspectives in evolutionary theory into the broader anthropological discourse may help discard simplistic dualisms and resituate our assessments of the evolution of human behavior. In this essay I review three major emergent themes in evolutionary theory; Multi-Inheritance Systems Theory, Developmental Systems Theory, and Niche Construction. I suggest, with one brief example, that placing these elements in transaction with other perspectives in anthropology might enhance the possibilities of assessing human evolution and behavior.     

Thick Decisions: Expertise,Advocacy and Reasonableness in the Federal Court of Australia

Drawing from the litigation around the Hindmarsh Island Bridge (especially Chapman v Luminis Pty Ltd 2001) this article provides an analysis of judicial responses to anthropological expertise. Sensitive to the institutional responsibilities of judges, as well as rules of evidence, procedures and legal causes of action, it examines the strategic representation and appropriation of anthropological knowledge and practice. In exploring the relations between law and expertise the article illustrates how their combination shapes outcomes. In the process it explains how the judge could have produced a range of (in)consistent outcomes through the modulation of legal categories and their relations with prevalent images of anthropological expertise. This analysis positions the article to critically reflect on some of the implications for anthropologists working in and around legal or quasi‐legal settings as well as those commenting on that participation.     

Reinforcing Diversity: From the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’

This paper focuses on Jan Monk's contribution to reinforcing diversity and collaboration in the field of human geography. It illustrates how gendered diversity and feminism is promoted in her academic work both inside the Anglo-American academic world and outside, by exposing the feminist voices from around the world and mainstreaming them in her collaborative work. Fostering and reinforcing diversity has become a body of knowledge in her extensive publications in which she assesses the varying extent and nature of feminist geography in the Anglophone world and across countries, attempting to interpret differences in terms of geographical and cultural contexts and disciplinary trends. The paper emphasizes how fostering diversity and collaboration in Jan's academic work is not only about writing articles, editing books and producing a film, but also engages the formulation of organizational structures such as the Routledge book series and the initiation and establishment of the Commission of Gender and Geography of the International Geographical Union which have contributed to the production of collaborative feminist geographical knowledge across spaces and places.     

BONES, BODIES, and DIS-EASE

Summary: This paper considers the present state of cemetery studies in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire. Different aspects of the study are identified and a combination of these is put forward as the requirement for a perfect cemetery report, against which some recent publications are judged. the greatest failure is found to be the provision and assimilation of a bone report, whether anthropological or palaeo-pathological. the potential of complete cemetery reports is stressed.     

Into the Great Beyond: Ontology and the Non-Human

In the following essay I review three recent additions to the burgeoning ontology literature: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, and Istvan Praet's Animism and the Question of Life. United by their shared goal of making anthropological inquiry less ethnocentric by avoiding the imposition of Western ontologies on non-Western societies, these works simultaneously exhibit considerable variation in theory and method, ranging from traditional structuralism to ethnographically-informed Peircean semiotics. I emerged from my engagement with these ambitious books unclear about how anthropologists should conduct ethnographic research that goes “beyond the human” and convinced that units of analysis that might seem anachronistic to certain people (such as language, culture, and collectives) remain key constituents of the foundation of anthropological inquiry.     

Demographic growth and the “cultural factor” in ireland: rethinking the relationship between structure and event

The structure/event dichotomy has been a bone of contention in anthropology for many decades. The so‐called “synchronic paradigms” such as functionalism and structuralism saw “structure” (defined in various ways) as the object of anthropological analysis, whereas “events” were left to historians. Recent trends in anthropological thought are eager to dismiss the ahistoricity of traditional approaches as they attempt to include the diachronic perspective within anthropological research. Very often, this re‐historization of anthropology has entailed the criticism of the structure/event dichotomy. By using data from Irish demographic history, in this article I postulate the need to recover this dichotomy as a fundamental component of the anthropological approach to human affairs.     

THE CHALLENGE OF ‘TECHNOLOGICAL CHOICES’FOR MATERIALS SCIENCE APPROACHES IN ARCHAEOLOGY*

Recently several anthropological and sociological studies have interpreted technologies as cultural choices that are determined as much by local perceptions and the social context fly any material constraints or purely functional criteria. Using the example of ceramic technology we consider how materials science studies can contribute to and benefit from this understanding of technology as a social construct. Although we acknowledge some potential difficulties, it is our contention that both materials scientists and archaeologists have gained much and have much to gain by cooperating together to study ancient technologies, and that the concept of ‘technological choices’can facilitate a wider consideration of the factors shaping technological developments.     

Environmentalism,Culture, Ethnography

Such is the ubiquity of environmentalism as a significant community experience throughout the world that most anthropologists will nowadays find themselves attending to the concerns their respondents have for the environments which surround and sustain them. In this article, we take stock of some of the issues addressed, and the achievements realized, by environmental anthropology to date. First, we emphasize that there is already a literature which stands as testament to the variety of environmental issues ‐ water, whales and the weather, for instance ‐ on which anthropologists have original insights to offer. Second, we argue that an important anthropological focus is on how ordinary people think and talk about their environments, especially when faced with external forces that have to be responded to in innovative and creative ways in order to be effective. It is not the view from above or below, but the view from within environments that matters most in local settings, which anthropologists have been concerned to unravel. Third, we emphasize that the Asia Pacific region constitutes an exceptionally rich field for anthropological research. Studies already carried out in places as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile and the Torres Strait make categorically clear that local and regional environmental concerns and conflicts are influenced by history, religion, Indigeneity, ethnicity, gender and other considerations that deserve critical anthropological enquiry. It is a crucial message that is endorsed and amplified by our fellow contributors in this special issue.     

Mobile Humanity: The Delocalization of Anthropological Research

Anthropological research in recent decades has become increasingly multi-sited, envisioning the local as an iteration of world-systemic processes, and following the movement of people, things and ideas across the typical boundaries of sites. This review essay examines four edited volumes concerned with such mobility and dislocation. The cultural anthropological volumes engage with the strengths and perceived weaknesses of multi-sited ethnography, the advantages of following people and themes across space, and the definition of sites by topic rather than by place. The archaeological collections move beyond typologies that have constrained archaeological investigations of movement through the study of the material practices that constituted social landscapes of mobile and settled peoples. Although the reviewed volumes offer important methodological distinctions and theoretical engagements, all four provide numerous ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological views of the delocalization of anthropological research, including claims for the utility of collaborative partnerships, the following of paths across space and time, and the reconsideration of the fixity and centrality of contemporary, historic and prehistoric places.     

The future of molecular medicine

Abstract

Humanities computing is an ‘interdiscipline’ concerned with the application of computing to the arts and letters. Although it has been practised since the late 1940s, it has only recently begun to gain institutional recognition and a measure of self-awareness. In this contribution to the vigorous debate among practitioners, I argue for a common methodological ground shared by computer using scholars and students across the disciplines of the humanities. In large part because of the commons, these individuals tend to come together physically in laboratory settings as well as virtually online, pursuing traditional research goals by the means they now share, or collaborating on numerous larger projects that computing has enabled. A useful model of their collaboration is Peter Galison's ‘trading zone’, an anthropological–linguistic metaphor he uses to describe interchange among researchers and technicians of the Manhattan Project. Humanities computing functions like a merchant trader in a Galisonian trading zone: it sees to a similar interchange of tools and techniques among the departmentalised cultures with which it deals, and for itself studies the effects and consequences. It thus exemplifies a true interdisciplinarity. Sufficient work has now been done for us to begin to map out a research agenda for humanitites computing as an interdiscipline, and this will help to identify the essential habits of mind and skills our colleagues and students must have to refurbish the humanities in the twenty-first century. Computing presents the humanities with the need and opportunity to reconceptualise and rebuild our inherited scholarly forms, which are as historically contingent as any human artefact. Rethinking how we do what we do in turn requires what Clifford Geertz has called ‘intellectual weed control’. A central project of humanities computing is to help in the construction of a worldwide digital library of resources and tools. Its role within this project is, I argue, primarily to articulate the powers of imagination that computing in the humanities demands of us.     

Tourism,leisure and work in an east African pastoral society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article investigates what happens with leisure experience between cultures when the Mursi of southwestern Ethiopia meet with international tourists. I propose that instead of regarding leisure as a fixed human condition within one society, it might fruitfully be approached as a process that evolves when different societies meet, i.e. as a constantly emerging (and disappearing) practice in cross‐cultural encounters. Tourism, studied broadly from an anthropological point of view, offers an excellent field for this investigation. The Western ideology of leisure, mobilized by tourists in non‐Western settings, is a good entry point to make tangible how societies understand leisure pursuits in intercultural encounters.     

Bioarchaeology and the Skeletons of the Pre-Columbian Maya

This review explores the past two decades of research on ancient Maya skeletons. The focus is on how this work has contributed to our understanding of health, diet, social change, inequality, migration and mobility, war, violence, and ritual practice, with special attention given to recent methodological developments and debates in the bioarchaeology of the Maya. This review essay highlights the most recent findings in the bioarchaeology of the Maya and how those results were achieved. The essay concludes with suggestions for future research and highlights areas of potential collaboration that have been underutilized to address broader anthropological questions.