American Anthropological Research Articles

From Culture to Cultures: Understanding Edward Sapir’s Prophecy through Herderian Lenses

In 1934, the American anthropologist, Edward Sapir made a scientific prophecy on the concept of culture which remained largely overlooked but have proved to be surprisingly accurate and relevant in the contemporary era. He was focused on conceptual pluralisation and fragmentation. By predicting the pluralisation of culture, Sapir captured a trend that we can witness nowadays in the continuously growing number of cultures, subcultures, counterculture, and new conceptual interpretations and ramifications. His use of the Herderian concept of culture(s) requires a close inspection facilitated by interdisciplinary methodologies such as historical epistemology. Widely credited as the creator of the term “culture” in its plural sense, Johann Gottfried von Herder played a crucial role for Sapir’s academic formation. In the ruptures and continuities that culture as a concept has experienced, one can find valuable epistemological insights. Sapir did not come up with a daring prediction out of an uninformed position. Putting Sapir’s prophetic statement in the context of his academic and professional journey and in the context of the general research trends of the twentieth century reveals a strong Herderian heritage intensified by the psychologisation of anthropology that has ultimately led to an increasingly powerful and progressively sophisticated pluralisation of culture.

Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg

AbstractThe articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diversity of geographic regions. In this particular issue, we bring together scholars of SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa, a term that more broadly encompasses what is often referred to as the Middle East) whose projects are deeply influenced by Ginsburg's scholarship on shared anthropology, collaborative media practices and cultural activism. This introduction includes excerpts from a conversation with Ginsburg.

La confección de la utopía comunitaria

The researchers who are part of this dossier are members of the Working Group on Anthropology of Communities, Futures and Utopias in Latin America, affiliated to the Latin American Anthropological Association (ALA), and of the Research Network on Communities, Utopias and Futures (RIOCOMUN). The studies and reflections contained in this dossier are nourished by the discussions provoked by meetings and dialogues that have been taking place in the network for more than three years. The texts strung together for this issue of Encartes show different historical and cultural contexts in different states of the country and abroad: Baja California, Jalisco, Michoacán, Veracruz, Chiapas; and in the north Patagonian region of Argentina. Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

The Current Role of Analytical Psychology in Maintaining Fictitious Boundaries that are Promoted through the Race Lie: A call to dismantle the virtual wall that exists through attitudes of white supremacy.

In 1928, the American Anthropological Association declared that "Anthropology provided no scientific basis for discrimination against any people on the ground of racial inferiority, religious affiliation, or linguistic heritage" (Guthrie, 1976/1998/2004, p. 30). In 1945, Jung denounced race theory as a pseudo-science. In 1950, UNESCO released its statement denouncing race. Long discredited as scientifically invalid, the race concept still holds uncanny value and significance for Americans and Europeans. In effect, the concept seems to be mysteriously linked to the limited accessibility and the limited economic support that is allotted to people of colour, internationally. This paper will explore the global implications of Jung's expressed attitude towards people of colour prior to 1945, which I identify as an attitude of white supremacy, an attitude that stands in direct contrast to the analytical ethos, as expressed by the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). This attitude may promote the continuance of racialized beliefs and behaviours within the planning and provision of care to individuals in need of medical and mental health services. It is requested that a written acknowledgment of harm be added to the works of C. G. Jung.

“Dialogue” between Russian and (Post/Anti)Boasian Anthropologies

The article touches on the problem of self-perception of domestic scholars in a long on-going dialogue with American anthropology. The focus is on the figure of the latter’s founding father, who, as is known, maintained intensive contacts with many prominent Russian scholars (L. Shternberg, W. Bogoras, J. Averkieva, etc.). Thanks to him, they received their positions and degrees, weight in the scientific world. But there is much that is paradoxical in the Boasian influence on Russian anthropology. Bogoras, who was most strongly associated with him personally and adopted Boas’s fieldworks methods, nevertheless made little reference to him in his works. On the other hand, Averkieva, who quoted “Papa Franz” many times, practically remained unaffected by his intellectual influence. In the modern Russian history of anthropology, there is a growing desire to participate in the “sharing” of Boas’s legacy, together with their recognized American colleagues (G. Stocking, R. Darnell, etc.). However, the genealogy of professional connections between Russian and American anthropologists is not easy to construct. Mutual relationship sometimes appears in the most unexpected points (anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology), while parallels are often explained by “similar ways of thinking”.

Unsettling extractivism: Indigeneity, race, and disruptive emplacements

AbstractDrawing inspiration from new work across the fields of political ecology, plantation and abolition studies, critical Indigenous studies, and racial capitalism, this Introduction to a special issue of The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology locates extraction within an account of property as a system of racialized exploitation. Aware of the risks of a cosmopolitics that romanticizes non‐Western value systems as largely untouched by extractivism, in this Introduction and in the articles themselves, we center the question of how Indigenous communities and others navigate extractivism in places and landscapes that have been deeply impacted and partly transformed by resource mining, agrarian monoculture, and deforestation. In voicing demands not subordinated by a materialist and secular language of resource exploitation, these accounts invite a less deterministic account of “our” late capitalist present. We contend that just as extraction is not monolithic, neither are its refusals, resistances, and alternatives.

Ethnographic methods: Training norms and practices and the future of American anthropology

AbstractAmerican anthropology is engaged in significant self‐reckonings that call for big changes to how anthropology is practiced. These include (1) recognizing and taking seriously the demands to decolonize the ways research is done, (2) addressing precarious employment in academic anthropology, and (3) creating a discipline better positioned to respond to urgent societal needs. A central role for ethnographic methods training is a thread that runs through each of these three reckonings. This article, written by a team of cultural, biocultural, and linguistic anthropologists, outlines key connections between ethnographic methods training and the challenges facing anthropology. We draw on insights from a large‐scale survey of American Anthropological Association members to examine current ethnographic methods capabilities and training practices. Study findings are presented and explored to answer three guiding questions: To what extent do our current anthropological practices in ethnographic methods training serve to advance or undermine current calls for disciplinary change? To what extent do instructors themselves identify disconnects between their own practices and the need for innovation? And, finally, what can be done, and at what scale, to leverage ethnographic methods training to meet calls for disciplinary change?

Social science Eurocentrism in the land of universalism: An introduction to French blindness

AbstractFrom the late 18th century onwards, France has delivered a universalistic discourse about politics, society, rights and also science. The emergence of social science largely confirmed this trend. Nowadays the growing challenging of Eurocentrism that has become more and more visible since the early 1990s remains most often untranslated, untaught, uninvestigated and undebated. The disciplinary structure of the university as well as the lingering isolationism of French social science accounts for part of this situation, the latter requires some further explanations. If some opening has recently been visible in the field of gender, race and discriminations, it has usually meant a greater influence of some—White or Black—American anthropologists, sociologist or philosophers, but hardly ever of non‐Western thinkers. The very issue of a social science canon is not even raised. The main reason for this is the weight of French neo‐republicanism as it was born in the early 1990s at the very same time when anti‐Eurocentric alternatives discourses became more widely heard. It results in a persistent denial of these discourses as being scientific and a widespread ignorance of them in the academic field.

Colombian Anthropology

Colombian anthropology is part of what Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1999) has called "peripheral anthropologies". These southern anthropologies have, since their emergence, forged close - and often conflicting - links with the "central anthropologies" of the classical schools in Europe, England and the USA. The characteristics of this discipline in Colombia cannot be detached from these relationships, nor from the wider context of Latin American anthropology and the country's historical, social and cultural particularities. The great social and cultural diversity is at the heart of the discipline's questions and practices. It is in the form of a "committed anthropology" that the discipline will be practiced in Colombia as soon as it enters the university system.

Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology

Los "antiguos peruanos" de la antropología americana: la arqueología de los Andes del siglo XIX como nexo de investigación global

Between 1820 and 1920, American anthropologists acquired more human remains of Andean origin than those of any other individual population worldwide. This article explains why in 1965 in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, anthropologists represented the growth of all humanity using 160 Andean skulls. Using archival sources, it argues that the excavation and interpretation of Andean ancestors in Peru prior to 1900 was foundational to the development of Americanist anthropology as a whole, and should be understood as the necessary preface to the more famous development of archaeology in Peru under Uhle and Tello. Exploration of this history is necessary in light of recent efforts in the United States to return or repatriate ancestral remains to source communities.

Письмо из темноты: Рец. на кн.: Сергей Кан. Лев Штернберг: этнолог, народник, борец за права евреев / Пер. с англ. А. Глебовской. СПб.; Бостон: Библиороссика; Academic Studies Press, 2023. 694 с. (Современная иудаика)

The present review of the Russian translation of Sergei Kan’s book Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist constitutes a literary experiment. It endeavors to engage in a dialogue, presented in the form of a letter, with the central figure of the book, Lev Shternberg, the co-founder of Soviet and Russian anthropology, regarding the significant transformations it has undergone throughout the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. The author pays close attention to the social and political contexts of these changes and how they affected the interpretations of Shternberg’s persona and ideas in Soviet times and today. This experiment extends the author’s reflections on the necessity of revisiting the history of anthropology and reintegrating it into the field itself. As American anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell suggested in the 1960s, we should conceptualize “the history of anthropology as an anthropological problem.” By this, the author intends to reconstruct a dialogue between the history of anthropology and the communities with whom anthropologists have engaged, as well as to foster connections between the history of anthropological ideas and ongoing discussions both within and beyond the discipline. These changes, as the author argues, have the potential to significantly expand the styles of anthropological writing and reveal new genealogies of anthropological knowledge.

Introduction ‐ Anthropology and the security encounter: Toward an abolitionist anthropology in the age of permanent war

AbstractAnthropologists need to grapple politically with the ways in which security, war and militarization shape our fields of study. This special section of American Anthropologist, “Forever War: Anthropology and the Global War on Terror,” brings together scholars studying, writing and enacting their politics amidst the immense socio‐political impacts of the Global War on Terror. In this introductory article, I offer the concept of “the security encounter” to describe the complex and inherently political conditions of doing anthropology within the current conjuncture, as well as a provocation for anthropologists to adopt an abolitionist approach to security, militarization, and permanent war which increasingly structure our lives and work.

Honoring Valene Smith, our prescient foremother

Written by the Convenor of the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group (ATIG) at the American Anthropological Association on behalf of the Board and membership, this memorial article celebrates the life and multifaceted work of Dr. Valene Smith, the pioneering founder of the subdiscipline of the anthropology of tourism. It examines her prescience throughout her life that made her the pathbreaking scholar, teacher, traveler, and tourism practitioner that she was. Such foresight led to her convening the first anthropology of tourism panel at the AAAs in Mexico City in 1974, the product of which became the classic volume, Hosts and Guests. his and her subsequent publications are put into broader context of other classic tourism-focused social scientific works at the time, revealing her role in the development of tourism studies more broadly. As anthropologists are particularly keen on tracing kinship and lineage, the article argues that she rightly is considered anthropologists’ and tourism scholars’ “foremother”, or ancestral mother, who paved the way for generations of anthropologists to begin taking tourism seriously, recognizing its nature as a “total social fact” that can shed light on the holistic human experience.

Deep hanging out, mixed methods toolkit, or something else? Current ethnographic practices in US anthropology

AbstractWe use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open‐ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community‐based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant‐observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever‐changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students.

“Creative Anthropology” as a Unit for Knowing: Epistemic Object and Experimental System in Research-Creation “in” Clay

This essay takes advantage of the current context of superdiversity to define a form of hybrid heuristics between North American anthropology and research-creation “in” the arts. In an attempt to alleviate the epistemological disaster described by Gregory Bateson as the loss of the unity of the biosphere and humanity, I position myself within a nomothetic perspective of Boasian anthropology and a postqualitative approach to research-creation. My research-creation proposes clay as an epistemic object and develops a creative methodology in the form of an experimental system that borrows from the following two types of change observable in living organisms: static and schismatic changes. The artistic activities, presented as two heuristic cycles, seek to broaden the self-reflexivity inherent in the use of clay by human groups. They provoke decentring leading to a loss of control where a new identity has to be defined. This reveals itself in terms of system thinking as the reconstruction of a new reality that is defined neither entirely by my artistic practice nor entirely by my theoretical framework derived from anthropology. It is a “place of passage” between both. It is a new identity that can be defined by the “change of change” that I call “creative anthropology”. This transdisciplinary approach introduces a “second glance” into anthropological research and opens up breaches through research-creation. It works to develop new narratives and test posthumanism in the field of my artistic practice.

Lest we forget: Dr Paul Farmer (1959-2022) 'A Global Health Leader at Harvard'.

In the chronicles of medical advancement, Dr Paul Farmer stands out as a transformative figure whose unwavering commitment to healthcare equity has reshaped treatments for the disenfranchised. An American anthropologist and physician, Farmer has had a profound impact on global health which encapsulates a legacy driven by the steadfast belief that healthcare is an inalienable human right. This article explores Farmer's monumental contributions, showcasing how his dedication has revolutionized the landscape of healthcare, particularly for those marginalized and underserved. As the architect of Partners In Health and a guiding force at Harvard Medical School, he fostered a novel paradigm of enduring, community-focused medical care. His unyielding advocacy from Haiti to Rwanda confronted entrenched health disparities and galvanized support for increased access to primary and secondary care. His poignant critiques and policy recommendations during the COVID-19 crisis highlighted his relentless pursuit of health justice - advocating for equitable vaccine distribution and tackling racial health disparities. His scholarly works on overlooked health dilemmas and the urgency of global healthcare reflect a legacy that transcends his lifetime. While his passing is deeply felt, Farmer's visionary ethos continues to inspire, beckoning us toward a more equitable healthcare horizon.

Mussolini and the Jewish Question in the Diaries of Claretta Petacci

The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the attitude of the leader of Italian fascism, Benito Mussolini, to representatives of Jewish nationality. The diaries of Mussolini's mistress Claretta Petacci, which she kept from 1932 to 1937, are mainly used as a source. The work also explores the drastic change in B. Mussolini's attitude towards Jews, which occurred after an alliance was concluded with the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, in 1937. There is a connection between these events, since until 1937 Petacci's diaries said nothing about the Jewish question. The article also examines the attitude of Italian society towards the racial laws of 1938 against Jews, which was not at all unambiguous. As an analytical method, the interpretive approach of the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz will be used, who believed that the analysis of culture is not an experimental matter, but a hermeneutic one, engaged in the search for meanings, symbols and ideas. The scientific novelty of this study lies in a specific consideration of the Jewish question of Mussolini and his study based on the memoirs of his mistress Claretta Petacci. There are not many studies devoted specifically to this issue and specifically to this historical source. The main conclusions of the above study are that it was the alliance concluded in 1937 with Adolf Hitler that radically influenced Benito Mussolini's decision to introduce racial laws in Italy, since the Duce was not much concerned about the Jewish question until 1937. The author of the work also drew conclusions regarding the negative attitude towards anti-Semitic laws by the majority of Italian society: Italians did not accept them due to the lack of anti-Semitism and hostility towards Jews in Italy.

“Bullshit Job”: The Critic of Capitalism in D. Graeber’s Theory

The article is on the theme of the emergence of nonsensical job as a result of the Neoliberal Capitalism development. American anthropologist D. Graeber, the author of the conception of ‘bullshit jobs’, decided to solve the scholarly problem: why the fast-moving technical development run to the situation, when people start to work more instead to work less. It happens because the new nonsensical posts and jobs are built. Graeber proposes the ‘bullshit job’s’ classification showing that the contemporary capitalism creates the useless working place and pays people for doing nothing contrary to the economical law (minimization of costs and maximization of profit). The term ‘bullshit’ resulted from the word ‘bull’ which is rooted in French ‘bole’ (illusion, swindle). This fact shows that ‘bullshit jobs’ consist of an illusion and fraud: the person, doing some ‘bullshit job’, knows that his/her work is nonsensical and useless but he/she have to make a show (for himself and other people) that this is not the case. Graeber comes to the light that moral and psychical violence are rooted in contemporary labour relationships and it is shown the negative essence of the Neoliberal society. Graeber offers the initiative of the Universal Basic Income as the ‘medicine’ from ‘bullshit jobs’. Article shows that the governmental protection of the basic human needs operates as the Universal Basic Income in Socialist society. There were no ‘bullshit jobs’ in the U.S.S.R.

СОВРЕМЕННОЕ БРЕНДИРОВАНИЕ КАК ПЕРЕОСМЫСЛЕНИЕ ТЕОРИИ РОСКОШИ В. ЗОМБАРТА

The views of the classic German sociologist W. Sombart regarding the social practices of luxury consumption are of undoubted scientific interest. The article, in relation to modern realities, examines the psychological types identified by Sombart that are predisposed to promoting the bourgeois way of life. Sombart's ideas regarding the ideological component of Western European capitalist entrepreneurship, revealed as a unity in the entrepreneur of the images of a conqueror, organizer and merchant, which has a mythological nature in Anglo-Saxon culture, are also being developed by modern researchers (the American anthropologist D. Graeber, for example). Comparison of Sombart's ideas with the views of M. Weber, L.N. Gumileva reveals aspect of inequality of behavioral inclinations within a nation and the inequality of expression of such inclinations between nations, which in no way contradicts modern science and ethics, since it can relate to the parameters of the distribution of types of temperament, and could also turn a material for the development of ethological studies of behavioral stereotypes, which are not enough in modern stage of science development