Interembodiment: Relational living and interconnected thinking.

ABSTRACT The Committee (later Council) on Nutritional Anthropology was organized in the mid‐1970s to bring together the anthropology of food and nutrition that spanned archeology, evolutionary biological and physical, sociocultural, and also theoretical, applied, and policy‐engaged interests. This essay, drawing on my personal and professional experiences and prior American Anthropological Association contributions, outlines the history of the Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) with reflections on its 1970s origins, 1980s institutionalization, and 1990s through 2010s transitions. As touchstones, with reference to my research, writings, and advocacy, it emphasizes changing conceptualizations and approaches to hunger and human rights, with special attention to the challenges of breaking the links between hunger and conflict.

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, a growing number of activists, scholars, writers, and visual artists have engaged with futurism as a framework for representing the lives of Indigenous peoples. Inspired by this hopeful reframing of the past‐present‐future, contributions to this special section of American Anthropologist address the question: How can anthropologists use our unique disciplinary tool kit to craft empowering narratives grounded in Indigenous worldviews and futures? In this introduction to the section, we provide an overview of the concepts of “futurism” and “futurity.” Like their Afrofuturist interlocutors, scholars engaging with Indigenous futurisms challenge a taken‐for‐granted white settler future. Replacing colonial narratives with thriving Indigenous cultures replete with emergent technologies, geographies, and ontologies. Drawing particularly on the work of Grace Dillon, we then outline how the themes of contact, science, slipstream, and apocalypse have been used by contributors to this edited series to re‐narrate the past and project new visions of Native personhood. In drawing together case studies across temporal registers and geographies, this compilation of essays affirms the dynamic pasts, present, and future of Indigenous peoples and contributes to dismantling disciplinary practices grounded in colonial power structures and narratives.

The dissertation chapter aims to understand the experiences of Syrian women in Brazil based on three axes: identity, gender, and labor market insertion. Using qualitative methodology and the Collective Subject Discourse (CSD) of Fernando Lefèvre and Ana Maria Lefèvre, with an ethnographic approach, which, according to American anthropologist and professor Lila Abu-Lughod, in her book “Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories” (2020, p. 13-47), requires, above all, a break with the generalizations characteristic of classical ethnographies. That is, “describing the other” implies avoiding simplistic attributions to the groups studied, recognizing the complexity and internal diversity in their narratives. Thus, the study highlights the difficulties faced by these women, especially with regard to balancing family care, the need to generate income, as well as challenges in recognizing their labor rights and diplomas. The analysis highlights the double displacement—geographical and subjective—experienced by refugees, contributing to a process of identity reconstruction marked by intergenerational experiences, as they transition between traditional roles and new forms of leadership, in many cases becoming heads of households. In this context, identity, as a cultural construct, is formed in a non-linear manner and is deeply related to social interactions and symbolic consumption present in culture. Thus, by giving visibility to the silenced voices of women in refugee situations, the article contributes to the debate on reception policies, social inclusion, and gender equality.

This essay explores the history and origins of African American Anthropology. It asks how we can think about an anthropology made for and by African Americans? It sheds light on early African American pioneers in anthropology, and the key ideas, main lines, debates and developments of African American anthropology.

Internet studies have predominantly focused on the most recent platforms, leaving out many different ways to use internet that become invisible for mainstream studies. At the same time, the majority of internet studies are centered on urban contexts, leaving out populations and their use of internet in rural territories. WhatsApp has emerged as one of the most widely used apps, particularly in the Global South. However, its integration into rural and Indigenous contexts in Latin America remains relatively unexplored. The Jujuy Puna, situated in NW Argentina and home to Quechua communities, recently gained internet connectivity through state initiatives. As a result, the internet has become part of these communities' daily lives, with WhatsApp, in particular, becoming a vital infrastructure integrated into various aspects of everyday activities, including communication, governance, economy, health, and spirituality. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two villages, Cusi Cusi and Lagunillas del Farallón, this paper examines the use of WhatsApp in these communities. The objective is to highlight the socio-technical adaptability processes through which the uses of WhatsApp in the Jujuy Puna expand communication practices and ways of being that are specific to the local modes of relating to others and to technology. The ethnographic approach enables us to trace continuities that shape the appropriation of WhatsApp in accordance with regional Andean ways of inhabiting and understanding the world. Our aim is to understand WhatsApp from the perspective of the territory, hoping to encourage more diverse dialogues between Latin American anthropology, communication, and internet studies.

This Letter to the Editor critically engages with the “Borrowed Magic” roundtable held at the 2025 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting, reading it through the author’s research on the Goddess cult as a device for historiography and theology. The letter examines the unresolved tension and resulting theological aporia between the “woman-centered” symbolic continuity of Goddess traditions and emerging non-binary frameworks. It further analyzes the generational conflict between authority rooted in long-term embodied practice and performative, aesthetically driven ritual forms circulating in digital environments. Discussions on the anti-colonial ethics of “research refusal” in bio-archaeology and the reproduction of historical knowledge through multimodal methods, such as sonic alchemy, are integrated into the analysis. The letter argues that contemporary spiritual communities are not merely ethnographic objects but active “laboratories of epistemology” where authenticity, memory, and gendered power are continuously renegotiated.

Abstract This conversation began as a roundtable at the 2023 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto. The roundtable was part of the Executive Program and was intended as a follow-up to Kisha Supernant’s keynote presentation, which was entitled ‘Truth before transition. Reimagining anthropology as restorative justice.’ Considering the sensitive nature of the topic, we responded to a selection of written questions from the audience rather than taking open questions. The discussion was webcast, then transcribed and redacted. This article includes a portion of the question period as well as a contextual introduction that was not part of the initial conversation.

Introduction: In this study, we aimed to explore how Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) in post-disaster Palu, Indonesia, manage their sexual identities under religious conservatism, patriarchal norms, and heightened moral surveillance following the 2018 earthquake. Within this religiously conservative and disaster-affected context, our objective was to understand how MSM employ impression-management strategies to navigate visibility, stigma, and safety, and to analyze their implications for mental health, healthcare-seeking behavior, and overall well-being. This study addresses gaps in the literature by situating MSM experiences within Indonesia’s sociocultural and religious frameworks, thereby contributing to regional and cross-cultural analyses of LGBTQ+ identity negotiation in Southeast Asia. Methods: This qualitative phenomenological study employed in-depth interviews, photo-elicitation, and digital ethnographic observation over six months in Palu. A total of twenty-five MSM participants aged 18–40 were purposively recruited to ensure diversity of experience and social background. Sampling continued until thematic saturation was reached, meaning no new themes emerged during ongoing analysis. Data collection included semi-structured interviews and analysis of interactions on online platforms (e.g., Telegram, BlueD, and Instagram). Visual materials contributed to the coding framework by illustrating non-verbal expressions of impression management, later integrated into thematic synthesis. Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the Faculty of Public Health, Universitas Muhammadiyah Palu, following the British Psychological Society (BPS) and American Anthropological Association (AAA) ethical codes. Participants provided verbal and written informed consent, and all identifying details were anonymized. Results: The primary outcome of the study was an understanding of how MSM in Palu adaptively navigate identity, stigma, and safety through impression management. Key findings revealed that MSM maintain dual personas—performing heteronormativity in public (front-stage) while expressing their authentic identities within digital backstage spaces. Selective disclosure of sexual orientation was governed by contextual trust, relational safety, and fear of institutional stigma. Digital platforms functioned as crucial psychosocial and health-navigation spaces, enabling solidarity and access to information. However, overreliance on digital interactions sometimes intensified isolation and reproduced inequalities linked to digital literacy and class. While these adaptive strategies ensure survival under moral surveillance, they inadvertently reinforce structural stigma by normalizing concealment and restricting public visibility. Conclusion: In conclusion, this study contributes to understanding how Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM) in Palu construct survival and well-being through impression management under conditions of religious-patriarchal stigma and disaster-induced moral tightening. It illustrates that dual personas, selective disclosure, and digital backstage practices function both as protection and as mechanisms that perpetuate invisibility. These findings inform the design of culturally sensitive, confidentiality-centered health interventions, emphasizing peer navigation, digital outreach, and faith-inclusive stigma reduction. Future studies should investigate the long-term mental health impacts of sustained concealment and digital dependency, advancing inclusive policies and provider training across Indonesia’s public health systems and the broader Southeast Asian region.

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.

Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology. By Christopher Heaney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 358. $35.99 cloth.

Front and back cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 Front cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 WHEN EMPATHY BECOMES REVOLUTIONARY In December 2014, at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, hundreds of anthropologists transformed the lobby of Washington's Marriott Wardman Park Hotel into a site of collective mourning and protest. Bodies sprawled across the marble floor, participants held signs declaring ‘Black lives matter’. One invoked anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's searing words: ‘If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.’ This die‐in, organized in response to the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and countless others, marked a moment when the discipline, built on crossing cultural boundaries to understand different ways of being, refused to remain silent about state‐sanctioned violence against Black communities. A decade later, Chip Colwell's guest editorial in this issue reminds us why this moment of professional witness has acquired a new urgency. In an era when empathy itself has become politically contested, dismissed as weakness by authoritarian movements, stripped from government vocabulary as ‘woke’, anthropology's methodological commitment to suspending judgment and entering other worldviews becomes a revolutionary act. As Hurston knew, and as Colwell affirms, silence equals complicity. The die‐in embodied the first act of empathy: identifying with humanity's suffering. Yet Colwell challenges anthropologists to undertake a second act: using ethnographic methods to understand injustice ‘in all its dimensions’, examining not only victims but also the systems and worldviews that perpetuate harm, including those of perpetrators. A third act demands empathy toward ourselves, recognizing the limits of what any single individual can achieve, and the risks associated with immersing oneself in others’ pain. This deeper empathy transforms protest into sustained ethnographic engagement. The bodies on that lobby floor embody anthropology's distinctive tradition of bearing witness across difference, from Cushing's defence of Zuni land rights to contemporary struggles for racial justice. In times when authorities deride understanding ‘the other’, ethnography becomes essential revolutionary work towards a new future. Back cover caption, volume 41 issue 5 GLOBAL FRAGILITY In this photograph from Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Melissa Demian consults with a local community group on violence prevention work that, until recently, was supported by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Local practitioners methodically planned for sustainable peace‐building while their distant institutional partner was being dismantled overnight. In her article in this issue, Demian reveals how USIP's sudden collapse exposes the fiction that fragility is confined to certain geographical regions. USIP partners in Papua New Guinea spent months developing violence prevention strategies, building community networks, and translating abstract policy into concrete local actions, believing they were part of a 10‐year American commitment to addressing conflict drivers in Papua New Guinea, a partnership framed through contemporary security concerns and historical obligations dating to the Second World War. Yet in March 2025, these partners suddenly lost their access to USIP resources, the project suspended in administrative limbo. Ironically, those designated as requiring ‘stabilization’ continued their work while the stabilizers proved unstable. The community members gathered here, deemed vulnerable to state fragility by international policy, have demonstrated more resilience than the Washington‐based organization meant to assist them. Who truly occupies positions of precarity in the global development landscape? Local peace‐builders in Morobe Province, despite operating in a so‐called ‘fragile state’, maintained their networks and secured alternative funding. Meanwhile, USIP, with its half‐billion‐dollar headquarters and congressional mandate, was shut down at executive whim. Perhaps the real fragility lies not in the grassroots organizing of Papua New Guineans, but in the fickleness of distant powers whose commitments evaporate as quickly as their geopolitical anxieties shift.

Turning the Power: Indian Boarding Schools, Native American Anthropologists, and the Race to Preserve Indigenous Cultures by Nathan Sowry (review)

ABSTRACT This article investigates the poet Euripides’ work and its effect on theatregoers. It explores the ways contrasting metres and choral dance elements in his Cyclops and Alcestis contributed to a sense of divine presence at the Athenian Dionysia and perhaps in reperformance elsewhere. Gods are ‘supernatural’, inherently invisible and untouchable in normal circumstances, but as the American anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann puts it, worshippers need ‘to shift from knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real to feeling that gods and spirits are present in the moment’. In ancient Greece there were many ways to achieve this, ranging from prayer and sacrifice to larger ritual activities like choral dancing or processions and indeed impersonation. Combining evidence from the ceramic record (from Magna Graecia and elsewhere) and modern research into neurology, including brain/body interconnections, with close concentration on the metres involved in the choruses themselves makes it possible to gauge the emotional and psychological tone of the productions and suggest how through choral dance Euripides made gods, and particularly Dionysos, ‘real’ to fifth-century Greeks.

The centenary of the Great Union can be a "semiotic resource" (van Leeuwen) for the national identity of the Romanians, but this challenges (requires) us to answer several questions: what kind of identity will the commemorative ceremonies have to reinforce or restart? Or would it be more profitable to reset the national identity, to adapt it to the new historical conditions, genetically called "globalization"? To answer these questions, we should answer others: Is national identity immutable, a historical, or is it re-defined from one historical era to another? The centenary should encourage Romanians to remain as they are, or should urge them to change, encourage them to accept change and show them the things to change, with which they cannot be successful in 21st century? In specialized literature there is no single definition of national identity, but some authors propose a classification of the main dimensions of the concept: the subjective conviction of a person regarding the nation to which he formally belongs, or would like to belong; the importance of national self-identification in relation to other elements of identity (ethnicity, language, religion, etc.); emotions and feelings about the nation. After the American anthropologists B. L. Whorf and E. Sapir launched the theory of linguistic determination of worldviews (1921), more and more researchers came to the conclusion that the fate of people is strongly influenced by their mother tongue; this gives them the mental categories that allow them to think about the world and understand their place in it. The language in which we think and dream defines us, in the sense that it gives us an identity; moreover, it opens up and, at the same time, limits our possibilities of knowledge and self-knowledge. This is why the Romanian language can be used as a semiotic resource in the reconstruction of the national identity of the Romanians. In the present paper, we try to show what we should do so that the Centennial anniversary takes place on a decent, responsible and instructive note, to sanction ethnocentric excesses, ethno-religious speculations, to encourage self-knowledge of the Romanian nation, to promote civic patriotism, responsible and documented, a "nationalism at the edges of the truth", as Mihai Eminescu demanded in his time.

Abstract This article forwards an alternative perspective on how authenticity can be constructed through popular music tribute show performances. It adopts Edward Bruner’s (1994, American Anthropologist, 96, 397–415) categorisation of authenticity in relation to the replication of ‘historical sites’ in museum exhibitions. It argues that rather than focusing on sonic and historical ‘accuracy’, tribute musicians strive to curate their history and personal experiences with the music they play to prove their ‘authority’ as cultural ambassadors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Perth, Western Australia, and a case study of a UK-based international touring tribute to The Smiths, this article highlights how some tribute musicians may purposely ‘put themselves in the music’ to conjure a sense of legitimacy and connect with audiences.

ABSTRACTThis article is a slightly revised version of the 2021 Past President's address delivered virtually at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. I reflect on refusing the terms of dominant sensemaking in education and suggest that one of the most productive parts of our work is when it calls us into relationships and to engage deeply with the diverse desires for life and justice that children, families, and communities hold.

ABSTRACTThe papers presented in this special section were originally prepared for the American Anthropological Association's fourth annual symposium on anthropology and entrepreneurship, held in Toronto in November 2023 and sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. This special section follows two compilations from earlier Foundation‐sponsored symposia. The Foundation has provided support to the Association to recognize innovative ways of thinking about entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on (1) entrepreneurial behavior and the social, cultural, and economic institutions that facilitate the emergence and ongoing support of such behavior; (2) innovative approaches to entrepreneurship training and development; (3) partnerships and financial instruments that support new enterprises; and (4) innovative approaches to enterprises that explicitly aim to serve public interests and/or urgent social needs.

ABSTRACT Helen Mears, a figure recognized among Japanese historians and American anthropologists, has often been relegated to the sidelines in political science discourse. Despite her significant contribution as a Japanologist and critic of U.S. policies, her extensive commentaries in general magazines and popular newspapers, along with her discourse studies, remained understudied. This neglect persists even though Mears offers a unique vantage point—a firsthand experience of Japan in the 1930s –distinct from conventional narratives on paternalism and militarism. What if I reconsider Mears as a political ethnographer, possessing both systemic insights and cultural sensitivity? This article advocates for such a perspective shift, viewing Mears as a valuable source of lessons for research design in the field of social science. Through an analysis of her seminal work, ‘Year of the Wild Boar: An American Woman in Japan’, this paper explores Mears’ methodological approach and its implications for comparative political ethnography, interpretivism, positionality, and the exploration of local knowledge and intersubjectivity.

ABSTRACT At the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle, WA, we organized a session called “Landscapes of Surveillance Care in Reproductive Health.” This introduction to our special issue represents a sustained conversation among panelists and other scholars regarding the complicated ways that surveillance and care play upon each other in our own ethnographic research and what we might learn from them.