American Anthropological Research Articles

Gender, race, and life writing in the ethnography of Ruth Landes in Bahia

American anthropologist Ruth Landes (1908-1991) conducted ethnographic fieldwork in candomblé centers, terreiros, in Salvador, Bahia, in 1938-1939. In her book City of Women (1947) and journal articles she recorded her observations on matrifocality and gender variance and portrayed Afro-Brazilian culture as dynamic and innovative. This article examines how Landes’s theory of culture, methods of fieldwork, and personal writing style went against the grain of the approaches taken by leading scholars at the time who treated Afro-Brazilian culture in terms of race-based psychological characteristics and “African survivals” and harshly critiqued her work.

An African American Anthropologist in Wales: St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic Ecologies of Race Relations

AbstractIn summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as brown babies. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.

Withdrawn: Fossil Futures in Europe

Withdrawal: “Fossil Futures in Europe” by Bilge Firat, Anthropology News 2023; 64(5): 25–27. The above article, published online on October 10, 2023 in Wiley Online Library (https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/AN.1608) has been withdrawn by agreement between the author and the magazine's owner (American Anthropological Association) due to privacy and consent concerns about the information contained in the article.

CHURU-KOHO POTTERY OF LAM DONG PROVINCE IN RELATION TO CHAM POTTERY

This article examines Churu-Koho pottery in relation to Cham pottery in Central Vietnam and the Central Highlands. Research shows that Churu-Koho pottery (Lam Dong Province) is related to Cham pottery in Bau Truc (Ninh Thuan Province) and Binh Duc (Binh Thuan Province) and to the pottery of the Sa Huynh culture (Quang Ngai Province), which dates back to 3,000 BP. They are similar in name, visual arts, type, and pottery firing method. These types of pottery have been common in Central Vietnam and the Central Highlands for a long time. However, they have moderately fallen in number, especially Churu-Koho pottery. Therefore, preserving and promoting this heritage in economic, cultural, social, and tourism development is critical. We use the research methods of ethnology and anthropology, including fieldwork, participant observation, interviews, and comparison, combined with the theories of historical particularism of Franz Boas, cultural ecology of Julian Steward, and cultural acculturation of American anthropologists to analyze and explain the similarities and differences among the types of pottery.

A view from another side, or, not just another quit‐lit essay

AbstractAcademic anthropology is a paradoxical realm. On the one hand, opportunities for creatively exploring the human condition are hemmed in by administrators and bureaucracy. On the other hand, scholars in the academy have the space to call for justice—in Palestine and elsewhere, as they did in 2023, when the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution to boycott Israeli institutions. This paradoxical quality suggests some parallels between anthropology and the human rights system, especially in their logics and activities. Drawing from my experiences as I step off the professional academic ladder, I reflect on how this complex academic environment can lead to cynicism and resentment, yet also produce launching pads to collective action.

Theoretical Foundations of Cultural Materialism and Understanding of Literary Text

Cultural Materialism theory is proposed by an American Anthropologist Marvin Harris. This theory has a scientific strategy to find the facts about human cultures. This theory suggests that in every sociocultural system, three major parts, infrastructure, structure, and superstructure, interact with each other. Infrastructure refers to material resources of the culture that man established to get energy and food from his physical environment. Structure refers to the laws and procedures of social institutions which regulate the distribution of food and power among the members of the society. Superstructure refers to the soft images of society like art, music, language, literature, and behaviors of individuals in a social setup. This theory provides a comprehensive analysis pattern of any literary text by finding the infrastructure in the base of structure and superstructure. In this article, it is tried to formulate theoretical bases and practical dimensions of cultural materialism۔

What is Psychological Research?

This interview is a slightly modified transcript from the first PSYCHE Talk, hosted at the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, October 6, 2023. PSYCHE – Psychology of Culture, Humanity and Education, is a newly established research section that gathers three different research groups: Qualitative Studies, Situated Psychology and Cultural Psychology. PSYCHE Talks are hosted as biannual events, where prominent psychological researchers are invited to discuss fundamental questions about the nature and subject matter of psychology through an interview-based format. The title of this interview is inspired by two interviews with the American anthropologist, Jean Lave, conducted by Steinar Kvale in 1991 (published in 1995) and 2004 under the heading: “What is Anthropological Research?”. In this interview, Professor of General Psychology and Qualitative Methods, Svend Brinkmann, is interviewed by Assistant Professor of Psychology, Alfred Sköld.

Anthropology's good beyond the discipline

AbstractIn July 2023, the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) members voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions until they end their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The AAA's adoption of this resolution shows the potential good of anthropology, both within and beyond the academy. Anthropology's disciplinary scholarly processes, methods, and theoretical frameworks paved the way for this resolution, providing one answer to the question, What good is anthropology?

Four challenges from anthropology's current meta

AbstractAn examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's “meta,” or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges.

Music in the mind and primitive sounds: «only differences in kind»

Summary During his prolific career, the German Jewish scientist Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 - New York, 1942) recognized as the founding father of American Cultural Anthropology – maintained assiduous contacts with the European scientific community, in a privileged way with that of the German area. The contribution addresses the Boasian correspondence with the two directors of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, the philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, and the ethnomusicolo-gist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. All three were united by a common scientific experimental training and a solid musical education, typical of their Bildungsbu ü rgertum. With them, Boas consistently shared his fieldwork findings regarding music, sound, and language among the Indians of British Columbia: indeed, their epistolary exchanges intertwine epistemological reflections centered on the study of «exotische Musik» in context with technical problems, derived from the use of phonographic recordings and the relative shipments of wax cylinders by Boas to the Phonographic Archive. So far, the critical literature has not paid particular attention to their correspondence, that offer instead a privileged look in observing the birth of Ethnomusicology, at the time still defined as comparative Musicology (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft). Starting from a biographical contextualization and following the micro-history of the scientific and personal relationship of these scientists, the contribution aims to explore the hypothesis that the emerging Ethnomusicology significantly contributed to the definition of Cultural Anthropology as a discipline. In his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian sounds and languages, Boas observed indeed what happens if a mind is exposed to a new sound, musical or linguistic context; he had therefore to rigorously deal with the phenomena of mishearing, sound-blindness and biasing filter related to the perception of «new sounds». Thanks to his fieldwork, Boas would endorse a relativistic and “in context” approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about a broaden antiracist theory of human mental functions.

Complexities of gender and sex

This editorial reflects on the controversy at the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society's conference, where a session on the fixity of biological sex was cancelled. Retracing developments from Simone de Beauvoir's foundational ideas to the theories of second‐wave feminism it emphasizes how the gender concept was posed as a dynamic cultural construct. rather than a fixed biological fate, then shows that biological sex is also more complex than earlier characterizations of it as given, fixed, and immutable. Underscoring the complexities of academic debate and inclusivity, the piece highlights anthropologists’ work in revealing gender diversity and spotlights the role of young LGBTQI researchers in reshaping our concepts of sex and gender, which have moved from fixed binaries to a more fluid understanding in contemporary thought. The editorial concludes with a call for an integrated, non‐dichotomous approach to (cultural) gender and (biological) sex, a nuanced understanding that recognizes their interplay.

Collecting copper alloy portrait heads

Abstract Much has been written about the spectacular naturalistic copper and copper alloy heads of Wúnmọníjẹ̀ Compound, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, which stunned the art world after they were unearthed in 1938, on the cusp of the Second World War. However, little scholarly attention has been afforded to the controversial aftermath of their discovery, when multiple foreign parties endeavoured to collect and export many of them from Nigeria, while legislation to prohibit the export of antiquities was lacking. Drawing on archives from the USA and the UK, this article reveals important details of the collecting of several of the heads in the late colonial period. Coinciding with renewed calls for the restitution of Nigerian cultural patrimony from foreign institutions, it sheds light on the British Museum’s acquisition of one such head, the acquisition of two by the American anthropologist William R. Bascom, and the purported export by a German export company, of several heads which remain unaccounted for to this day.

Identifying Indigenous people: Visual appearance, filiation, and the experience of race in an “Indigenous” soccer championship and in everyday life in Otavalo, Ecuador

AbstractWhile Indigenous/mestizo distinction in Latin Americanist anthropology has been mainly thought of as a cultural and/or socioeconomic demarcation, I argue that a conceptualization in terms of race offers some valuable insights. Starting from a soccer championship in the Otavalo region of Ecuador, I show how otavaleño Indigenous people's historical and current experiences of racialization have shaped the criteria that they consider relevant to identification practices, and I illustrate how they build on these to act to some advantage. Building on the assemblage of what I call phenotypization—an extended notion of phenotype—and genealogy, otavaleños create spaces of identification control, striving to maintain the Indigenous/mestizo divide and a sense of belonging upon which they rely for economic activities. Favoring the notion of race, this study lays the groundwork for a Latin Americanist anthropology that considers Indigenous people as part of the same subaltern category as Afro‐descendants.

Specters of excess: Passing and policing in the Malay‐speaking archipelago

AbstractPositioned at the island interface of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the east Malaysian state of Sabah bears witness to some of the largest clandestine cross‐border flows across the globe. This article examines what a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Illegal Immigrants in Sabah has called “an insidious problem which has turned out to be an all‐consuming nightmare.” It highlights the situated (meta)semiotic work involved in determining and enforcing the state's seemingly indeterminate and unenforceable borders between citizens and suspected non‐citizens, while also showing how inquiries into migrant illegality are ultimately inquiries into “excess.” It demonstrates how experiences of and orientations to excess take expressive shape in migrants and Malaysians' fashions of speaking and forms of life. It concludes by considering how these transnational dynamics across a sprawling archipelagic region lend a provincializing angle of vision on American(ist) anthropology's own hemispheric parochialism.

Radical Housing Justice Within and Beyond Caring

AntipodeEarly View Introduction Radical Housing Justice Within and Beyond Caring Michele Lancione, Corresponding Author Michele Lancione [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-3562 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic and University of Turin, Turin, Italy[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Michele Lancione, Corresponding Author Michele Lancione [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-3562 Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic and University of Turin, Turin, Italy[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 15 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12958Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL References Angel J (2017) Towards an energy politics in-against-and-beyond the state: Berlin's struggle for energy democracy. Antipode 49(3): 557– 576 Anzaldúa G E (1987) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books Byrd J A, Goldstein A, Melamed J and Reddy C (2018) Predatory value: Economies of dispossession and disturbed relationalities. Social Text 36(2): 1– 18 Cooper J (2019) “Care in Relief: Problematizing the Ubiquity of Care in California's Mental Health Courts and Anthropological Theory.” Paper presented at the 2019 American Anthropological Association / Canadian Anthropology Society annual meeting, Vancouver, BC, Canada Dadusc D and Mudu P (2022) Care without control: The humanitarian industrial complex and the criminalisation of solidarity. Geopolitics 27(4): 1205– 1230 Danewid I (2017) White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the erasure of history. Third World Quarterly 38(7): 1674– 1689 Foucault M (2016) Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (trans G Burchell). London: Verso García-Lamarca M (2022) Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People: Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain. Athens: University of Georgia Press Grosz E (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press Haraway D (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press Harney S and Moten F (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Composition Hartman S (2018) The anarchy of colored girls assembled in a riotous manner. South Atlantic Quarterly 117(3): 465– 490 Hawthorne C (2021) L'Italia meticcia? The Black Mediterranean and the racial cartographies of citizenship. In The Black Mediterranean Collective (eds) The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (pp 169– 198). Cham: Springer Hobart H J K and Kneese T (2020) Radical care: Survival strategies for uncertain times. Social Text 38(1): 1– 16 Lancione M (2019) Weird exoskeletons: Propositional politics and the making of home in underground Bucharest. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43(3): 535– 550 Lancione M (2020) Radical housing: On the politics of dwelling as difference. International Journal of Housing Policy 20(2): 1– 17 Lancione M (forthcoming) For a Liberatory Politics of Home. Durham: Duke University Press Lawson V (2007) Geographies of care and responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97(1): 1– 11 Lester R and Lauren C (eds) (forthcoming) Traces of Care. Durham: Duke University Press Massey D (2004) Geographies of responsibility. Geographiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 86 (1): 5– 18 Puig de la Bellacasa M (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Quizar J (2022) A logic of care and Black grassroots claims to home in Detroit. Antipode https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12842 RHJ Editorial Collective (2020) Covid-19 and housing struggles: The (re)makings of austerity, disaster capitalism, and the no return to normal. Radical Housing Journal 2(1): 9– 28 Rodriguez A D (2022) “What is our city doing for us?”: Placing collective care into Atlanta's post-public housing movements. Antipode https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12858 Roy A (2017) Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city's end. Geoforum 80: A1– A11 A Roy, R Rolnik, T Graziani and H Malson (eds) (2020) Methodologies for Housing Justice Guide. Los Angeles: Institute on Inequality and Democracy, UCLA Simone A M (2022) The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture. Durham: Duke University Press Stevenson L (2014) Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Los Angeles: University of California Press Summers B T and Fields D (2022) Speculative urban worldmaking: Meeting financial violence with a politics of collective care. Antipode https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12900 Thompson S (2022) Caring housing futures: A radical care framework for understanding rent control politics in Seattle, USA. Antipode https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12874 Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

What Is Light in Dark Times?

Alisse Waterston and Charlotte Corden's Light in Dark Times (2020) began as an address by the president of the American Anthropological Association and was transformed into "a work of art and anthropology" by a member of the audience. The result was a coauthored book-length graphic essay that is expansive in subject matter, and in the representation of ideas, scholars, and questions about what it means to be human and how we will pass the time that is given us on earth. Light and dark are central to the visual representations that serve as the background to a story about what is necessary to become a person who is honest. This critical assessment reflects on the content and form of that story, which predated the COVID pandemic, widespread political unrest, and assaults on truth, evidence, language, categories, education, and "others" in the US and elsewhere. The format is both challenging to read and interesting to think with. As teaching and learning increasingly become animated and visualized, Light in Dark Times is a worthy introduction to these ways of apprehending the vexing questions and conundrums presently in such abundant supply.

WHEN JAZZ BROKE OPERA: SOUND AND MYTH IN …(IPHIGENIA)

As an anthropologist, I am no stranger to the importance of myth to both meaning-making and as connective tissue with ancestral forms of knowledge. Claude Levi-Strauss is synonymous with the study of myth in twentieth-century anthropology. Zora Neale Hurston, however, has only recently been reclaimed by the discipline of anthropology, even though she was both a student of Franz Boas—the so-called ‘father’ of American anthropology—and she conducted tireless ethnographic research in the US South and Caribbean for over forty years, focused on what she preferred to call folklore, or lies. Hurston is an important lens through which to interpret …(Iphigenia) because Hurston's corpus catalogues the mythocentrism of African American and African diasporic culture. She created a mind-bendingly prolific body of both fiction and non-fiction work centered on myth and provides an important context for the connections being drawn in this opera between jazz and Greek tragedy: that of sound.

The Vigilant Citizen: Everyday Policing and Insecurity in MiamiBy ThijsJeursen, New York: NYU Press, 2023, pp. 208.

Journal for the Anthropology of North AmericaEarly View BOOK REVIEW The Vigilant Citizen: Everyday Policing and Insecurity in MiamiBy Thijs Jeursen, New York: NYU Press, 2023, pp. 208. Megan Raschig, Corresponding Author Megan Raschig [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-5198 Correspondence Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Megan Raschig, Corresponding Author Megan Raschig [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-5198 Correspondence Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12175Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Beliso-de Jesús, Aisha. 2019. “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 143– 56. Burton, Orisanmi. 2015. “To Protect and Serve Whiteness.” North American Dialogue 18 (2): 38– 50. Feliciano-Santos, Sherina. 2021. “Of Cops and ‘Karens’: Language and the Bureaucratic Arm of Policing.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31 (2): 261– 66. Rios, Jodi. 2020. Black Lives and Spatial Matter: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy. Edited by Ruth M. Van Dyke and Carrie C. Heitman

Chaco Culture National Historical Park has long captured the attention of both the public and researchers. Despite strong disagreements over Chaco society, archaeologists had rarely spoken with descendent community members or included their voices directly in our broader understandings of this place and society. While this has been changing in recent years, we were missing a comprehensive volume that brought voices of descendent communities into conversation with Chaco researchers until the publication of The Greater Chaco Landscape: Ancestors, Scholarship, and Advocacy. As attested through the receipt of both the American Anthropological Association’s 2021 Engaged Anthropology Award and the Society for American Archaeology’s 2022 Popular Book Award, Van Dyke and Heitman compiled a compelling and wide-reaching volume bringing together an impressive breadth of scholarship and advocacy in The Greater Chaco Landscape. The book consists of seventeen chapters authored by individuals representing a range of perspectives, including academics, Indigenous community members, and National Park Service (NPS) and nonprofit employees. Stemming initially from an NPS initiative to better communicate the significance of the broader landscape and help protect the area from oil and gas development, Van Dyke and Heitman embraced a multimedia approach for the book with links to videos filmed either in Chaco Canyon or at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center during a seminar held in 2017 for all but the final chapter. Six of the chapters exist only as videos available on the University Press of Colorado’s website (http://read.upcolorado.com/projects/the-greater-chaco-landscape/) with helpful abstracts and links available within the hard copy of the book; this style of presenting information embraced the communication styles and strengths of the variety of contributors. Within the volume, chapters are divided into seven sections that highlight Understudied Landscape Dimensions; Indigenous Perspectives; Experiencing the Landscape; Geospatial Investigations and Big Data; and Management, in addition to introductory and concluding sections. The range of chapters strikes an important cord of multivocality, allowing many groups with stakes in Chaco Canyon and the surrounding region to contribute and be heard.