Loneliness is increasingly recognized as a public health crisis. In contrast to approaches that medicalize loneliness as an individual pathology, this review offers a multiscalar anthropological reframing of loneliness not as an individual psychological state, but as a social breakdown involving a deficit of the practices that establish empathy, belonging, and solidarity in collective life. Drawing from ethnography and theory, we trace the pathways of this deficit across three interconnected scales. At the micro level, we analyze loneliness as an embodied, temporal, and existential affliction of subjectivity—a felt sense of empathetic disconnection. At the meso level, we examine the contestation and breakdown of Kleinman's “local moral worlds” and the shared practices that sustain community belonging. At the macro level, we diagnose how political-economic forces such as colonialism, neoliberalism, and structural violence create empathy deserts and perpetuate the lonely society. We conclude with how interdisciplinary research might bridge these levels to illuminate the causes of systemic breakdown and inform interventions for culturally attuned and structurally aware cultures of collective action and care.
This article considers anarchist archaeologies and how an approach to inequality shaped by anarchist values and modes of analysis can help us narrate more complex pasts and build more equal futures. The nature and impact of inequality are central concerns across humanities and social science disciplines. Archaeologists have long studied social differentiation, focusing primarily on the origins and cross-cultural articulation of inequality. An anarchist approach to the archaeology of inequality pushes us to eschew origins in favor of the mechanisms of and resistance to past inequality, informing struggles for a more equal present and future. It also forces us to examine the inequalities that persist in our discipline, restricting who can be an archaeologist and, consequently, contribute to archaeological knowledge production. We argue that a more equal archaeology is as necessary as a more complex view of past inequalities if we are to mobilize the past against structures of domination.
Channels are often treated as basic conditions affording communication. The anthropological research reviewed here, however, collectively demonstrates that channels are themselves subject to other forces—social, material, and political—and that channels can be deployed to limit or prevent communication. Channels are experienced as specific—as relating specific sentiences under specific conditions, often demanding specific choices. Because channels are vitalized by the specific and multiple sentiences that are connected to or cut out by them, channels both afford and depend on multiple, diverging perspectives. Attending to channels thus brings questions of social relation into relief: We check channels not only for fidelity but also for how they map shifting social locations. When we attend ethnographically not only to how people make, imagine, use, distort, check, block, and rechannel channels but also to who does so, and to what purposes, we discover many points of agency for upholding or changing social orders and infrastructures.
This review explores how and why we weaponize the past, underscoring how all parties to a conflict might manipulate antiquity, its materialities, and its meanings. The decision to destroy or preserve sites—whether to rewrite, challenge, or reify historical narratives—increasingly matters in an era of global disinformation, amid conflicts among states or within them. The past is both a tool and a target in modern warfare, prompting us to rethink how heritage is increasingly exploited as an instrument of power, coercion, and security. The review also discusses how damage and destruction of heritage have become a generative force within ruin warfare. Consequently, historic sites and disputes over them have prompted stricter legal accountability in the past two decades, raising issues of injustice, erasure, and genocide. Tracking these developments, I also ask how heritage assets, once seen as global goods in the twentieth century, have shifted to weapons of war in the twenty-first century.
Despite advancing discussions to move beyond sex and gender binaries in human skeletal biology, including in forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology, such binaries largely persist in praxis and pedagogy. This article explores the perspectives and practices that have hindered feminist and queer approaches to advance sex-/gender-expansive research in human skeletal biology with an emphasis on forensic anthropology. These hindrances include a history dominated by cishet white males; overt sexism, intersexphobia, transphobia, and homophobia; typological and essentialist renderings of skeletal sex differences; a lack of feminism; and oversimplifications of human biocultural variation to comport with the field's law enforcement alliances. In addition, we discuss ethical considerations necessary for sex-/gender-expansive research and offer areas of opportunity to advance the field's knowledge and perspectives regarding sex and gender. Critically, sex-expansive practices better reflect the science of human biocultural variation while importantly affirming LGBTQIA+ livelihoods, which the field needs to embrace and prioritize.
Archival materials are an important resource for biological anthropologists, providing high-quality data to address a variety of research questions. Archives often contain both quantitative and qualitative data, offering a multidimensional view of population structure, disease dynamics, and evolutionary processes. Major types of archival data include vital statistics, census data, church records, and government or institutional data. This review discusses primary methods that biological anthropologists use with archival materials and provides a critique of research in this area over the past five decades. Advances in digital technologies promise improved accessibility and analytical capabilities. These new technologies, including artificial intelligence, raise ethical concerns, however, as many archives were assembled under conditions that did not require the consent or autonomy of those represented. The article concludes by discussing ethical concerns and how emerging tools may reshape anthropological inquiry.
This article traces democracy from a time of universal optimism to today's moment of democratic decline to show how anthropology is particularly well positioned to understand the relationship between democracy and authoritarianism, not only as opposing forces, but also as interconnected political processes. Anthropological approaches to democracy rest on two key analytical distinctions: first, treating politics as a process and, second, separating democratic structures from democratic values to examine how people bridge the inevitable divide they encounter between democratic structures and values. The article highlights three bodies of literature—transitions to democracy, citizenship, and social movements—to show how the marketization and technicalization of politics, the centralization of power, and systems for the allocation of rights lay bare the ways that democratic structures can impede democratic values, as well as how people continue to pursue democratic values, even in the absence or decline of democratic structures.
The anthropology of science emerged in the 1980s as a critique of science and technocracy, exposing the social construction of scientific facts and their role in reinforcing ideologies such as capitalism, racism, and gender inequality. This project positioned anthropologists as challengers of scientific authority, culminating in the science wars of the 1990s. By the 2000s, the political landscape shifted as climate skeptics appropriated social constructionist arguments. In response, some anthropologists adopted neorealist epistemologies that view scientific facts as constructed but real, enabling collaborations with scientists but also generating new conflicts. This review argues that in the post-truth era, the anthropology of science has struggled to reconcile its critical origins with a defense of scientific authority. These normative agendas aside, we need close-up ethnographic observation of scientific practice more than ever to understand what comes after the “knowledge societies” from which the anthropology of science had been born some 40 years ago.
This review examines listening as both an aspect of everyday sensory experience and a specialized mode of attention, analyzing how different cultural frameworks and social practices shape the ways people attend to, interpret, and respond to speech and sound. Drawing on recent ethnographic studies, it demonstrates how different “genres of listening” emerge through processes of professional training, political engagement, and technological mediation. The article analyzes how experts—from psychoanalysts to forensic specialists—cultivate specialized modes of listening, while also examining how listening shapes political contexts. Particular attention is paid to the methodological challenges of studying listening ethnographically and to the role of listening in anthropological research itself. By highlighting how listening practices are implicated in processes of social differentiation, professional authority, and political participation, this review advances our understanding of reception as a critical domain of anthropological inquiry, one that complements the field's traditional focus on speech and speaking.
Humans and other primates communicate in multiple sensory modalities, and language itself is usually a multimodal form of communication. Discussion of the multimodal nature of primate communication goes back at least as far as the publications of Charles Darwin and has recently seen renewed interest. Here, I review key topics in the study of multimodal communication in nonhuman primates and humans, including issues of definitional complexity as well as classification systems and empirical approaches. I argue that multimodal communication is ubiquitous, ingrained, and advantageous. I discuss sensory aging and how multimodal communication can offer alternative routes to comprehension when sensory systems become impaired. To conclude, I consider future avenues of research that seem likely to prove productive.
Anthropology has long engaged in explorations of pain as part of the human condition. Sociocultural values and norms shape expressions and understandings of pain, as well as pain management practices globally. Here, we focus on physical pain to highlight the intersections of race, gender, class, and position in the global neoliberal economy as major themes in shaping attitudes toward pain and accessibility of pain management. Pain is always intersubjective, producing social relations and invoking (sometimes-tenuous) bonds of care, while also revealing power dynamics, inequalities, and struggles for recognition on interpersonal and global scales. We present ethnographic approaches to studying pain, gender and pain, pain and birth, opioids and pain, cancer and end-of-life care, and chronic pain and aging to critically consider the role of social and material life, language, agency, and structural inequalities in the quest to express, recognize, and care for pain.
In this article, I review the primate fossil record for some of the ways that it can inform us about the ongoing mass extinction. The broad patterns of past extinctions are discussed, as is how they are similar to those for mammals more generally, including the relationship to past climatic change, the size bias of Pleistocene extinctions, and the depleted nature of current communities. I also review some of the challenges with studying extinctions in the fossil record. These are illustrated using a few examples, including the extinction of plesiadapiforms, European hominoids, and a particularly well-studied species, Theropithecus oswaldi . I conclude by contextualizing the primate fossil record and extinction in a broader frame of Earth's history and an uncertain future.
The organization of gender-based violence by the urgent need for intervention results in an emphasis on binaries, namely a distinction between domestic violence and sexual assault. It also produces an ethnographic landscape that focuses on the institutions associated with intervention, primarily the courts and clinics whose policies are framed by these binaries. The anthropology of gender-based violence trades in the binary categories of intervention while exceeding and critiquing them. Within these studies are queries about gendered vulnerabilities and structural conditions that generate harm. Resisting the normative ways in which gender-based violence is discussed gives rise to critical theories of masculinity and lays bare queer vulnerabilities. It also allows anthropology to think about the role of gender-based violence in the production of anthropological knowledge. By moving beyond domestic violence and sexual assault as mutually exclusive formations, anthropology has increasingly deployed the rich specificities of time and space to think with and through capacious avenues for preventing, addressing, and producing gender-based violence in a broader array of ethnographic sites and institutions.
The concept of ethnicity has advanced and retreated as an object of anthropological interest. A central concern of studies of nationalism and modernity, it faded from view, only to reappear more recently tied to questions around the commodification of identity. This article traces the relational concept of ethnicity, understood to be part of a semiotic constellation with nation and race, as linked to the legitimization of social inequality in the rise of liberal democracy and industrial capitalism. Ethnicity was initially mobilized in the making of the modern nation-state as tied to criteria of access to political rights (through which access to economic resources was distributed). However, the most recent crisis of capitalism, often understood as “globalization,” has rendered the semiotic attributes of ethnicity as an identity category tied to political rights available to be mobilized as economic resources in and of themselves. This shift has destabilized the workings of this category, leading to difficulties in boundary production and reproduction, as well as sapping its ability to serve as a basis for mobilizing resistance to inequality.
Archaeoacoustics is a multidisciplinary subfield of archaeology that explores the sounds and music of the past, focusing on sound-producing devices and acoustical spaces. It encompasses music archaeology, which examines instruments and musical practices, and acoustical archaeology, which studies soundscapes of architectural and natural environments. The field integrates disciplines such as ethnomusicology, psychoacoustics, and neuroacoustics to understand the cultural, symbolic, and psychological dimensions of ancient sound. Highlights within this research include the discovery of early musical instruments, the acoustic properties of ancient spaces, and psychoacoustic experiments on artifacts. Advances in digital technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) simulations and sound mapping, have enhanced public engagement. Despite its potential, archaeoacoustics faces challenges, including limited institutional support and representation in archaeology departments. Future research aims to deepen interdisciplinary collaborations, investigate multisensory experiences, and integrate broader ontological perspectives into the study of sound and music in past cultures.
What is the relationship between experiential knowledge and the categories, etiologies, and treatment modalities of medical science? When do patients form social movements and demand participation in medical research? This article reviews trends in how medical anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and the history of medicine approach the coproduction of medical knowledge. Coproduction is used as a wide-ranging idiom to capture how knowledge building happens across social-material domains and as an aspirational vision for the ways that collaborative knowledge making can be intentional, improved on, and reimagined. I begin with an intellectual and social history of voluntary self-help organizations, patient advocacy movements, citizen science, lay expertise, and the era of intentionally patient-led research. I then offer thoughts about how abolition medicine and Indigenous science offer a radical vision for the coproduction of medical knowledge, especially in an era of antiscience, when strong political forces threaten public well-being.
Rooted in the freedom dreams of Black political movements across diasporas, abolition has emerged as a framework for the study and practice of building a world without captivity. Anthropologists of social movements have attended to the dreamers and destroyers doing this work, turning an analytic eye to the practice of abolition among community organizers, high school students, immigrant rights advocates, and queer activists. As the discipline flails for relevance, anthropologists writing from some of the most prestigious enclaves have called for its destruction. Both abolitionist anthropology and the abolition of anthropology itself have surfaced as rejoinders to the deraced humanism that dominated the last century of American anthropology. In this review, we engage abolition as a political horizon, a targeted decarceration movement, an ecological struggle, a mode of healing, and a pedagogical framework. Ultimately, we conceptualize abolition as an ecumenical imperative that both exceeds and inspires anthropological practice.
This perspectives article presents autoethnographic highlights of my formative years and career trajectory. My undergraduate and graduate studies inspired me to accept, as a call to action, the goal of reinventing anthropology and aligning my intellectual pursuits to struggles for human dignity, social justice, and liberation. Over many years, my scholarship has addressed a variety of concerns, ranging from Jamaica's urban informal economy to the theory and practice of African diasporic feminisms that understand racism, which operates in gendered and class-differentiated contexts, to be a violation of human rights. The article sketches the evolution of my thinking as a socially situated intellectual committed to the ongoing collective work toward antiracism, depatriarchalization, and decolonization along epistemological, institutional, and more encompassing structural lines.
Anthropological studies of LGBTQ activism around the world in recent decades offer insights into what political scientist Cathy Cohen called the “radical potential” of coalitions rooted less in LGBTQ identity than in countering interlocking oppressions. Accordingly, this article focuses on ways that anthropological scholarship has ethnographically studied LGBTQ activism not as sites of identity, but rather as scenes of unending nonsublimation of differences in embodied navigations of race, gender, sex, caste, and class. This work features scenes of transnational interlinkages in restructurations of sexual and erotic subjectivities, decolonial strivings to upend exploitative extractions of value from marginalized people and landscapes, and spiritual activism that seeks their material survival and flourishing through more just redistributions of pleasure and care.
