Cultural Sociology

This article explores the history of bioarchaeology from the beginning of the twentieth century, proxied by representation in publications as reported annually by the editors-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical/Biological Anthropology. Embedded within this history is the career trajectory of Jane E. Buikstra, who coined the term in relationship to the study of archaeologically recovered human remains in 1976.

Primates live in complex social systems, and social contact and disease interact to shape the evolution of animal (including human) sociality. Researchers use social network analysis (SNA), a method of mapping and measuring contact patterns within a network of individuals, to understand the role that social interactions play in disease transmission. Here, we review lessons learned from SNA of humans and nonhuman primates (NHPs) and explore how they can inform health and wildlife conservation. Utilizing the breadth of knowledge in human systems and outlining how we can integrate that knowledge into our understanding of NHP sociality will add to our comprehension of disease transmission in NHP social networks and, in turn, will reveal more about human disease and well-being.

The health of Indigenous populations suffers compared with that of non-Indigenous neighbors in every country. Although health deficits have long been recognized, remedies are confounded by multifactorial causes, stemming from persistent social and epidemiological circumstances, including inequality, racism, and marginalization. In light of the global morbidity and mortality burden from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, cardiometabolic health needs to be a target for building scientific understanding and designing health outreach and interventions among Indigenous populations. We first describe health disparities in cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors, focusing on Indigenous populations outside of high-income contexts that are experiencing rapid but heterogeneous lifestyle change. We then evaluate two evolutionary frameworks that can help improve our understanding of health disparities in these populations: (a) evolutionary mismatch, which emphasizes the role of recent lifestyle changes in light of past genetic adaptations, and (b) developmental mismatch, which emphasizes the long-term contribution of early-life environments to adult health and the role of within-lifetime environmental change.

Airborne lidar (light detection and ranging), which produces three-dimensional models of ground surfaces under the forest canopy, has become an important tool in archaeological research. On a microscale, lidar can lead to a new understanding of building shapes and orientations that were not recognized previously. On a medium scale, it can provide comprehensive views of settlements, cities, and polities and their relationships to the topography. It also facilitates studies of diverse land use practices, such as agricultural fields, roads, and canals. On a macroscale, lidar provides a means to comprehend broad spatial patterns beyond individual sites, including the implications of vacant spaces. A significant challenge for archaeologists is the integration of historical and temporal information in order to contextualize lidar data in the framework of landscape archaeology. In addition, a rapid increase in lidar data presents ethical issues, including the question of data ownership.

This article focuses on the concept of refusal, particularly as it has been developed within critical Black studies and critical Indigenous studies within anthropology and beyond. It argues that while both Foucauldian and Gramscian frames have generated often exquisite analyses of the animations and counter-animations of power, they have not, in a general sense, sufficiently attended to the foundational processes that charted the possibilities of modern personhood and political life not only in the West but globally. Nor did they tend to acknowledge the genealogies of Black and Indigenous radical thought that were informing approaches to political life within these communities, locally and transnationally. I contend that any significant reformulation of the discipline of anthropology must deliberate anew about the logics and mechanisms of political struggle in a way that recognizes and foregrounds—in nuanced and dynamic ways—the ongoing coloniality and racism that constitute the afterlives (and still lives) of conquest. Refusal provides inroads to this project.

This review illustrates how language ideologies about correctness, in speaking and writing, have been discussed in research on the role of language in education. Research illustrates a give-and-take between the interests of multilingual speakers and advocates of language diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the correctness ideologies embedded in institutional demands for correctness and standardization (in schools and language policies) and commodification (in the global educational marketplace). More subtle than ideologies of correctness, language ideologies about “appropriate” language emerge as related to race, ethnicity, gender, and other embodied biases, and the nuanced mechanisms of language socialization illuminate the persistent dynamics of these appropriateness ideologies. Finally, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial epistemologies, the collaborative participatory research methods that are reframing what counts as correct and appropriate for the study of language and education, and the emerging role of generative artificial intelligence for language in education.

This article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces the nascent threads across anthropological scholarship to reach an emic understanding of those narratives and their sociopolitical reverberations and proposes approaching conspiracy theories through their style, agentive implications, and political effects. Conspiratorial style, the article argues, pertains not to the content of the narrative but to its incessant seeking of covert operations beyond readily visible forms as well as a growing flexibility regarding the narrator's belief in the narrative's veracity. The agentivizing dynamic generated through conspiracism differentiates contemporary conspiracism from its predecessors and involves an empowering current. Finally, the article focuses on how contemporary conspiracism is intricately linked to political contestations.

This article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care. In this moment, the work of scholars who have long theorized systemic abandonment and the unequal distribution of care is crucial not just to understanding the present but to imagining a new way forward. Proposing what an anthropology of self-care might look like, we start with the term's emergence in Black feminist thought and Foucault's late writing. We then explore how it moves through anthropology and how it has been defined by Indigenous, disability, queer, and Black feminist epistemologies. We end with sections on what we term literatures of refusal and self-care's relation to these. We thus argue that self-care provides a unique angle through which to grapple with the discipline's legacy and to imagine a new anthropology.

If anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.

The ocean has a key, though often unremarked, role in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean. It notes the ways that the ocean appears and disappears as metaphor or material space of encounter and engagement within the past, present, and possible futures of anthropology. It shows how absence and presence as well as metaphor and materiality are the modes through which oceans are imagined and inhabited. While there is no distinct oceanic turn in anthropology in contrast with a number of other disciplines, the anthropology of and from the ocean holds the possibility to reenergize anthropology's interdisciplinary encounters, including with history and geography, as well as modes of engaging scale and specificity.

Discourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the conceptualization of well-being as pertaining primarily to individuals. Such a conceptualization, though welcome, can have undesirable practical and political consequences. In this review, I show how well-being intersects with recent work in the anthropology of ethics, how it is embodied and emplaced, and how it is closely intertwined with (rather than simply opposed to) suffering. Furthermore, while experienced as embodied, well-being is deeply affected by the suffering of others—and not only human others. As such, it could fruitfully be understood as a form of affective common. In contexts of complex environmental challenges and changes, inequality, and conflict, I suggest that studies of well-being call for a focus on experience beyond the individual: an affective enlargement entwining forms of care, maintenance, and repair.

Our existence has become so entangled with concrete that it would be difficult to imagine life without it, though we probably should. Anthropologists recognize the part that concrete plays in mediating social relations and in shaping political subjectivities. Thinking about concrete anthropologically involves moving across multiple scales—from large infrastructure projects to modest housebuilding projects. This review asks what we might gain from a focus on this ubiquitous material. I propose that attending ethnographically to how concrete mediates social experiences across scales brings to the fore building as an activity of political, economic, social, and ecological significance. Concrete offers a lens through which to apprehend social formations and transformations as well as to examine how built forms mediate and leverage power, how space is used and claimed, and how futures are imagined and pasts remembered. I conclude with a critical reflection on the ecological implications of these concrete times.

East Africa boasts one of the longest histories of humankind. From hominid origins to the present, people have roamed, interacted with one another, and influenced the environment in innumerable ways. To teach about the archaeology of East Africa is to engage with the deepest history of humankind, from Hominin evolution to historical archaeology and the archaeology of listening. Each topic has developed its own peculiar and complex analytical methodologies that require varied resources and degrees of intensity and investment in training and mentoring. This review discusses advances made over the past two decades in the research and dissemination of archaeological knowledge about East Africa. Beyond the major issues that stimulate scientific research and debates, what debates have been settled? Which emerging threats must East African archaeologists overcome to ensure a sustained practice of archaeology in the future?

Conservation genetics is the use of genetics to understand and mitigate the threats caused by anthropogenic activities, including habitat loss and fragmentation, wildlife trafficking, and emerging diseases. In this review, we discuss the role of primate conservation genetics in the development of effective conservation strategies, emphasizing the importance of maintaining genetic diversity to enhance adaptive potential and prevent extinction. First, we discuss studies of various primate species that exemplify how genetic data have been instrumental in accurately assessing threat levels, identifying trafficked animals and tracing their geographic origin, and studying how habitat loss affects primate populations. Subsequently, we describe the various molecular tools and analytical approaches employed in these studies. Lastly, we provide a bibliographic review of research in conservation genetics over the last 20 years. We conclude with a brief discussion of the limitations and challenges in this field in developing countries and recommendations for future research.

The archaeology of the island of New Guinea is ancient and surprising, yet it is highly fragmentary in space and time. Consequently, archaeology provides only local and fleeting glimpses of social life in the distant past. In this review, we consider several key themes, such as initial colonization at least 55,000 years ago, the emergence of agriculture by at least 7,000–6,400 years ago, and social diversification in the last few thousand years. We build our discussions around robust archaeological records that convey a coherent impression of what people were doing in the past. We also highlight the ways in which archaeology can be repurposed to address contemporary issues, including social and environmental problems, and flag how a distinctive New Guinean archaeology could be rooted in a vegecultural conception of social life and time.