American Anthropological Research Articles

Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Martial Anthropology

The article is devoted to the theoretical and applied aspects of the martial anthropology and its formation as a separate scientific branch at the late 20th – early 21st century. In Western European and American anthropological studies, scientists often complain that little attention is paid to military topics. The main reason for ignoring military problems by academic science in Western democracies is the fear of researchers that they will be suspected of cooperation with state security agencies, since this sometimes contradicts ethical norms, for example, the code of the American Anthropological Association (hereinafter – AAA). However, after the events of 2001 (terrorist act in New York), the issue of cooperation between anthropologists and state authorities have become more relevant. These events have made it clear that the existing AAA code of ethics is insufficient in a situation where anthropology is of a great importance to the national security of a state, and a significant community of «practicing anthropologists» may face ethical dilemmas. At the late 2000s, in the process of constant scientific discussions about the significance of anthropological methods in modern wars and about the specifics of cooperation between anthropologists and the military, the formation of martial anthropology as a separate discipline has taken place. Militarism today is an integral part of a global society, and it is especially typical for modern Ukraine, which for ten years has been forced to defend its territory from aggression by the Russian Federation. Military culture is inherent in constantly operating armies and paramilitary formations, as well as for the entire Ukrainian society, because military efficiency today is the key task for the state. One way or another, Ukrainians are constantly forced to think about war, even when they are in relative safety (in particular, abroad). Therefore, a thorough study of the military cultural and historical traditions of Ukrainians and their modern life is one of the priority areas for modern ethnological science. Analysis of various approaches to the study of military culture, theoretical and applied aspects developed in the world humanities is critically necessary for modern ethnological research.

‘Why did they hate us?’:

This paper historicises the concept of ‘bottomless academic pyramid’ (pirámides academicas sin base) from its origins in Latin American anthropology in the 1960s to its current use by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui to criticise the international system of power in higher education. Examining this theoretical legacy aims to foreground ongoing inequalities against the ‘predominated’, that is, people whose access to formal education is hindered by race, class, and gender. It touches on the epistemological injustice of being Othered by universities in reading the memories of Carolina Maria de Jesus. The discussion aspires to highlight the academic project’s tensions as problematised by contemporary decolonial feminisms from Latin America.

Paleoindian, East Asian and Siberian components of the Eskimo oral traditions

The possibility to use analytical units extracted from traditional narratives for the study of prehistoric migrations and contacts follows from the works of Franz Boas published bet­ween 1895 and 1915. In the 1920s, the priorities of American anthropology changed, so the folklore studies missed the opportunity to become a tool of historic research. Here we try to advance a project abandoned a hundred years ago. Our database consists of more than 80,000 abstracts of texts from all over the world and helps to determine the approximate time of spread of narrative episodes and mythological ideas. The study analyzes the parallels between the narrative motives of the Eskimo and motives collected outside of the Arctic. Since the Paleo-Eskimo are associated with the Denbigh flint complex, which appeared in Alaska about 3000 BC and, which is usually believed to descend from the Eas­tern Siberian Belkachi culture, it can be assumed that Siberian links must prevail in the narratives of the Eskimo. Instead, parallels for those episodes and images that typical for the Arctic are found mostly in South America. Apparently, these motives appeared in the New World during its initial peopling around 15,000 cal. BC. The narrative analogies between the Arctic and the East Asia are less numerous and some of them are also found in South American traditions. The American parallels in Siberia are widespread among the Indians but not among the Eskimo. To date, only one episode of Eskimo tales with definite Siberian roots, namely “The Blind Hunter”, has been identified. Though possibly related to the Belkachi tradition, this motif is also typical for the Indians of the North American Northwest, one case recorded in South America. The Eskimo version is slightly different from the main one. It probably split from it in Alaska and was brought to Canada and Greenland by the Paleo-Eskimo or by the Inuit. The Eskimo oral traditions emerged in Alaska and in major part go back not to the Siberian language ancestors of the Eskimo and Aleuts but to the local substratum.

Anthropology, Empire, and Resistance: French Colonial Ethnography, American Intervention, and the Moroccan Struggle in The Riffian

This article explores the complex relationship between anthropology, colonialism, and resistance in Morocco by analyzing the works of Edmond Doutté, Robert Montagne, and Carleton Coon. It investigates how French and American anthropologists approached Moroccan society, drawing comparisons between their methods and objectives. The analysis highlights how anthropology was used as both a tool for governance and a form of cultural critique. Particular attention is given to Carleton Coon’s novel The Riffian, which serves as a unique case study, blending ethnographic insight with fiction. The article argues that these anthropologists’ work reflects the tensions between colonial power, scholarly inquiry, and cultural identity. The findings illustrate that while anthropology often served imperial interests, it also provided spaces for anti-colonial narratives and deeper understandings of Moroccan life.

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.

Asian American Racialization: Tending Wounds and Making Medicine

ABSTRACT This article is an extended invitation to readers to cut back the stories of separation, hierarchy, and supremacy that dominate Western society, in order to make room for other stories of who we are and who we can be. The author weaves her own stories of healing during the COVID-19 pandemic with critical insights from Asian American studies, history, restorative justice, Indigenous knowledge, anthropology, and animist and Buddhist frameworks. In so doing, the article illuminates the vital role Asian American racialization plays in upholding oppressive systems and begins to articulate a path toward untethering from it in order to make space for all of our truer selves to emerge.

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.

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.