This paper reviews two recent works on the modern-day American death ways American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-first Century by Shannon Dawdy and The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-first Century edited by Dawdy and Tamara Kneese. Dawdy’s book is commended for its thoughtful description and analysis of several of the major new trends in American death-related ideas and practices and for its lively style. The discussion of The New Death consists of a critical review of each of the book’s chapters, which emphasizes the strengths and critiques some of the shortcomings of each piece. The only major criticism of both of the works under review is the fact that they pay very limited attention to those Americans who reject the innovative ideas and practices documented here. The review also calls for additional detailed ethnographies of the contemporary American death ways.

The present review discusses two recent works dealing with Franz Boas: a biography by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt and a book on Boas and several members of his school by Charles King. The information presented in Zumwalt’s biography is compared with the one found in an earlier one by Douglas Cole as well as in various books and articles on the specific aspects of Boas’s life and career. King’s book is commended for its depiction of Zora Neil Hurston’s ethnographic work but criticized for paying too much attention to Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict at the expense of several other key Boasians, such as Alexander Goldenweiser

This article reviews three recent books, each of which help establish connections between the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The review highlights the ways the 9/11 attacks amplified latent nativist and xenophobic currents in U.S. society. It also shows how the prosecution of the Global War on Terror militarized new sectors of American society while simultaneously undermining trust in government as economic convulsions, protracted overseas wars, and the Covid-19 pandemic adversely affected ordinary Americans. In the course of developing these arguments the review helps explain Donald Trump’s popular appeal and it shows how and why America may now be on the brink of a new civil war.

This 526-page discourse is a reasoned argument for rejecting the notion of steady progress in the human past that challenges our assumptions about the origins of many aspects of modern human behavior, including farming, property, cities, democracy, and slavery. The authors take an anarchic position. They conclude that since we have organized ourselves in many ways in the past, so there are other ways of organizing ourselves beyond the current dominant model of hierarchical states. The authors draw from/reinterpret archaeological data to emphasize (politically anarchic) examples of freedom, play, and social equality. This bold, controversial book will provoke intense discussion.

In recent years, scholars working across a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in exploring the contours and machinations of digital capitalism. Celebrants extoll the way digital technologies are enhancing processes of capital accumulation, rendering employment more flexible, democractizing innovation, and making new forms of economic co-operation possible. By contrast, skeptics warn that digital technologies are being used to exacerbate inequality, further capitalist domination and extraction, and automate human beings into a future where there is no escape from the ubiquitous surveillance technologies that are used to forward the interests of a powerful techno-elite. The four books I review in this essay all offer critical perspectives on capitalism in the digital age. However, when read collectively, these books also demonstrate that if we are going to enhance our understanding of digital capitalism, then a single narrative will not do. By exploring the different ways digital capitalism is produced, lived, and even resisted by those who are differentially positioned within its ambit, these books make a powerful case for the role anthropology can play in illuminating the complexities, and the transformative possibilities, of our current economic moment.

The article deals with specific field within the history of science: the institutional as well as biographical history of anthropological and archaeological museums. Through several case studies, more general questions are explored, those that inquire into the role of museums in delineating the agenda of anthropology and archaeology; the role of leading personalities of this discipline in envisioning and operating the museum institutions; the relationships between museums and governing institutions in national and (post)colonial contexts, and the interaction of museum with the general public, and specifically with the indigenous groups – that is, the very groups archaeology and anthropology are aiming to study.

Four recent books—two edited volumes and two monographs—applying anthropological and ethnographic methods to contemporary right-wing populism and illiberalism, around the world but with a special interest in the United States, are reviewed. While the authors discover great diversity in conservative, populist, and ethnonationalist movements and agendas based on local circumstances (for instance, European Union membership) and national history and culture, all identify anger and identity (racial and/or ethnic) as central to the current global wave of populist mobilization. The review concludes with an analysis of cultural loss and the appeal of illiberal democracy as a winning strategy.

Denis Regnier has written an ethnography that combines a cognitive approach and ethnography among villagers in southern Betsileo in Madagascar. The major aim of his study was to investigate the treatment and conditions for slave descendants by the majority of the people within villages and hamlets in southern Betsileo. These slave descendants are perceived and classified as ‘unclean’ people by the free descent ‘clean’ peoples. He provides extensive ethnographic and historical details on the socioeconomic, social, political, and religious aspects regarding the prohibitions of marriages between clean and unclean peoples. Regnier uses cognitive field experiments to assess whether the unclean peoples are essentialized by the clean people.

The four books under review can be considered case studies about the different aspects of identity creation and maintenance among selected groups of people in various African areas. Every one of those books inspects a similar phenomenon, but each examines it from a different perspective. The books discuss complicated and everchanging relations among individuals and their own bodies, group identity, history, institutions, ecology, and their relations toward space. What unites those books is their interest in the recent history of selected populations, and especially in practices, which helped those groups to sustain their sense of identity throughout turbulent phases of their history.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of the structural revolution in anthropology, passed in October 2009. In the decade after his death, we are presented with a significant number of successive publications that celebrate both his work and life and the ever-lasting public engagement of his heroic anthropology with problems of the modern world. This extended review article is focused to deal with these works in relation to contemporary issues, which is not already so well known for Lévi-Strauss and which can make a point to restore him to a central position of importance not merely in the history of anthropology but also in the public engagement of current anthropology.