Anthropological Work Research Articles

Владислав Якимович Гросул — автор концепции этногенеза молдаван

Almost all researchers representing various humanitarian disciplines are distinguished by an integrated approach at the present stage of development of scientific knowledge on the study of the ethnogenesis of Moldavians. One of these scientists is the outstanding historian Vladislav Yakimovich Grosul. As a representative of historical and political Moldavism, in the late 1990s he gave impetus to the revival of interest in the migrationist concept in fundamental science. Vladislav Yakimovich repeatedly drew attention to the fact that not only Romanian, but also Soviet scientists for a long time, in essence, adhered to autochthonous and admigration theories. According to his own confessions, he shared this position, and he himself, however, later decided to reconsider it and actively urged his colleagues to do so. Relying mainly on the works of linguists, archaeologists and anthropologists, he believed that the Romanized population of the Balkan Peninsula were primarily Romanized Illyrians, and not Daco-Thracians, and that the proto-language of the Eastern Romance was also formed in the Balkans. V. Ya. Grosul, admitting the possibility (albeit insignificant) that a small part of the Romanized population could have survived in the Carpathians, has developed the Illyrian version of the migration theory most fully and convincingly so far. The concept of V. Ya. Grosul requires the closest possible attention, critical analysis, especially on the basis of an integrated historical and geographical approach.

Men to Villains: Competitive Masculinity in The Lighthouse

This paper investigates the competitive nature of masculinity as presented in Robert Egger’s film The Lighthouse. Applying gender theory, I examine three crucial scenes in the film that demonstrate the two protagonists’ pursuit of ascendance, which manifests as their lust to possess the lamp of the lighthouse. Borrowing from the works of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, I was able to understand the naturally recurring crises of masculinity that circulate around a hegemonic model of the masculine ideal, ultimately leading to competition between men to achieve said hegemony. The Lighthouse proves this enduring phenomenon through Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s volatile relationship and their brutal demise. While the film might not propose a direct solution, I argue it serves as a bleak reminder of how misogyny and toxic masculinity harm men and their relationships with one another.

«МАТЕРИАЛЬНАЯ РЕЛИГИЯ» КАК МЕТОД СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ АНТРОПОЛОГИИ И ПРОБЛЕМА ДОСТУПА ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЯ К «РЕАЛЬНОМУ» РЕЛИГИОЗНОМУ ОПЫТУ (ЗАКЛЮЧЕНИЕ)

The methods of “material religion” elaborated in social anthropology and the materialistic (Marxist) approach to the study of religious life are methodologically different ways of turning our accustomed understanding upside down: the spiritual activity of Homo religiosus, acting as generating source, produces something material—sacred images, houses of prayer, and objects of worship. The method of material religion involves determining how the culturally specific sensory experience of the individual generates that which is interpreted by this individual, their fellow believers, and external observers—who usually receive accounts of such states in narratives—as actual religious experience. But behind what is read as a replica of the spiritual, disembodied world there is always the work of man, which, however, can be difficult to recognize in this quality. The Marxist materialist perspective, inevitably sharpened critically against religion as a typical ideology, seeks to find a basis for spiritual life in the economic conditions of human existence and society, which in this tradition of understanding human nature, are inevitably linked to labour. These two research traditions, which have the potential to enrich each other, remain in different segments of the academic field. One possible common ground for a collaborative project for these two perspectives is the study of infrastructural aspects of religious life. Another collaborative project could be the very work of social anthropologists who, using their bodies and intellect as their most accessible and potentially inalienable research tool, produce experiences comparable to those of believers and translate them into the terms of social science.

Guattari \ Heidegger: On Quaternities, Deterritorialisation and Worlding

In his final writings Guattari designed a four-functor meta-model with which to map subjective resingularisation against the backdrop of what he saw as the late-modern admixture of ecological collapse, social deterioration and subjective decomposition. I examine here Guattari’s fourfold in neo-structuralist terms and then engage in a discussion on the difference between worlding and deterritorialisation, reassessing in this sense Guattari’s concept of machinic indices in conversation with the works of anthropologists. Further, I show that Guattari’s fourfold is reminiscent of Heidegger’s Geviert, which I place at the very core of Heidegger’s project of overcoming the modern Ge-stell. Lastly, from the fact that Guattari’s fourfold opens onto the question of worlding and that Heidegger points to our incapability to tune in and sing back to the earth’s song, I draw the conclusion that they put forward an eco-cosmo-poetics that points beyond the flat ontology of today’s new materialism and the subtractive logic of speculative realism.

Biocultural perspectives on bioarchaeological and paleopathological evidence of past pandemics

AbstractObjectivesPandemics have profoundly impacted human societies, but until relatively recently were a minor research focus within biological anthropology, especially within biocultural analyses. Here, we explore research in these fields, including molecular anthropology, that employs biocultural approaches, sometimes integrated with intersectionality and ecosocial and syndemic theory, to unpack relationships between social inequality and pandemics. A case study assesses the 1918 influenza pandemic's impacts on the patient population of the Mississippi State Asylum (MSA).Materials and MethodsWe survey bioarchaeological and paleopathological literature on pandemics and analyze respiratory disease mortality relative to sex, age, and social race amongst patient deaths (N = 2258) between 1912 and 1925. Logistic regression models were used to assess relationships between cause of death and odds of death during the pandemic (1918–1919).ResultsFindings include substantial respiratory mortality during the pandemic, including from influenza and influenza syndemic with pneumonia. Older patients (40–59 years, 60+ years) had lower odds (p < 0.01) of dying from respiratory disease than younger patients, as did female patients compared to males (p < 0.05). Age patterns are broadly consistent with national and state trends, while elevated mortality amongst Black and/or African American patients may reflect intersections between gender roles and race‐based structural violence in the Jim Crow South.DiscussionFuture work in biological anthropology on past pandemics may benefit from explicit incorporation of biocultural frameworks, intersectionality, and ecosocial and syndemic theory. Doing so enables holistic analyses of interactions between social context, social inequality and pandemic outcomes, generating data informative for public health responses and pandemic preparedness.

Review: Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname, by Stuart Earle Strange

Review: <i>Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname</i>, by Stuart Earle Strange

Resisting Resilience: An Anthropologist's Paradox

Resilience can be a tremendous asset to any individual's ability to carry on despite difficulties. At the same time, revering resilience without a healthy amount of respect for emotional vulnerability—by which I mean the intentional choice to tap into our emotional beings and allow ourselves to deeply experience the emotions that arise in us doing our fieldwork and analysis phases of ethnographic research—can be a hindering block to doing good anthropological work. Drawing upon three examples from my personal work as an anthropologist—one from academic research in interreligious relations, one from a healthtech start up context, and one from doing ethnographic work in corporate settings—I call out for anthropologists to not neglect our emotional experiences. I point back to the often‐referenced “empathy” within anthropological spheres and, looking at empathy as both a cognitive and an emotional phenomenon, I join the conversation of others who are arguing for the intentional inclusion of affective empathy.

Building Resilient Futures in the Virtual Everyday: Virtual Worlds and the Social Resilience of Teens During COVID‐19

Virtual worlds have been central to an imagined future in which advances in technology propel new social practices. The recent focus within the technology industry on the “metaverse” is the latest iteration of imagined, utopian virtual worlds which have continually surfaced in literature, film, product development, and more since the 1960s. One might say that the concept of virtual worlds is resilient—but do these proposed virtual worlds actually make society more resilient? We argue that despite their endurance, these concepts present a deterministic vision of a singular future towards which humanity is inevitably progressing, revoking the agency, desires and resilience expressed by people today in their everyday realities. Building on original ethnographic research conducted with 31 teenagers in China, Germany and the US as well as past anthropological work on using ethnography to anticipate the future and teenage online practices, this paper conceptualizes resilience as present‐day creative adaptations which propel people into more desirable futures. Virtual worlds emerge as multilayered and equiprimordial spaces for the building of social worlds, giving teenagers novel tools to build and augment their social resilience.

Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: The Looping Effects of Persons and Social Worlds

This article reviews work in anthropology over the last 30 years that has been informed by psychoanalysis, much of it drawing on contemporary schools of psychoanalytic thought that further develop or even directly challenge some of the fundamental assumptions of the original Freudian corpus. It assumes that what happens at the margins or horizons of human consciousness, as a body of work, should be closely examined and included in anthropological theorizing rather than ignored or downplayed, and it examines how such states of consciousness both affect and are affected by entanglements with the world. Focal topics of the review include work on dreams, fantasies, and imaginal thought; loss and melancholia; aspects of emotional suffering, distress, and alienation; the effects of transference and countertransference on fieldwork; the sense of being haunted by personal and social injustices; and how the contingencies of self-awareness affect the development of ethics and morality.

On being Chinese and being complexified: Chinese IR as a transcultural project

AbstractWhile proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.

Precarious Democracy

This book review examines Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair, and Resistance in Brazil (2021), edited by Benjamin Junge, Sean T. Mitchell, Alvaro Jarrín, and Lucia Cantero. The edited volume contains ethnographies addressing the Brazilian social landscape after Workers Party administrations. These chapters discuss the mechanisms of Bolsonarismo and the contradictory ways through which people show support to President Jair Bolsonaro. The book has sixteen chapters, authored by scholars hailing from different parts of the globe, who examine this topic in different parts of Brazil. As a rigorous yet accessible anthropological work, I argue that the book is an important addition to current discussions on Brazil’s sociopolitical and economic situation.

Toward a Narrow Cosmopolitanism: Kant’s Anthropology, Racialized Character and the Construction of Europe

AbstractThis article explores the distinctions among European peoples’ character established in Kant’s anthropology and their connection with his politics. These aspects are neglected relative to the analysis of race between Europeans and non-Europeans, but Kant’s anthropological works portray the people of Mediterranean Europe as not capable of civilization because of the dominance of passion in their faculty of desire, which he ties to ‘Oriental’ influences in blood or government. Kant then superimposes this racialized anthropology over the historical geopolitics of Europe, obscuring the indebtedness of Northern European trade dominance to Mediterranean historical tactics and financial wealth. By relegating the Mediterranean to the margins and dismissing contentious commercial exchange in the region as mere violence spearheaded by North African corsairs, Kant gives us an elitist cosmopolitanism unable to cope with hierarchy and inequality, diminishing its potential for egalitarian global projects today.

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Apologetics and Antiquity: Book of Mormon Reception, 1830–1844

Sticking with the Fat: Excess and Insignificance of Fat Tissue in Cadaver Dissection

Fat, in the context of dissection, is a nuisance, an obstruction to anatomical order and orientation. Yet it makes up a large part of the human body, and in the practice of dissection becomes one of the most prominent materials in the room, as it sticks to gloves and spreads through the dissection hall, making chairs greasy and instruments slippery. In this article I explore the role and significance of fat tissue in anatomical dissection for medical students. In anatomy, fat remains largely an excess material; something superfluous, insignificant, left-over when the body is turned into an anatomical body consisting of muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and bones, cleaned and displayable. But fat is also something which appears in experience as excessive, omnipresent, proliferating, and resistant to attempts to keep it in order. Much anthropological work within dissection practices has described the process of ‘cleaning’ the bodies, but often—mirroring medicine—these accounts follow the becoming of the anatomical body and leave the fat behind. In this article, I try to ‘stick with’ the fat and suggest that fat tissue, as an embodiment or material manifestation of the more-than-anatomical-body, may tell us something about bodies, subjectivity, scientific order, and dissection.

A Generalised Neural Network Model to Estimate Sex from Cranial Metric Traits: A Robust Training and Testing Approach

The morphology of the human cranium allows for reconstructing important information about the identity of an individual, such as age, ancestry, sex, and health status. The estimation of sex from morphology is a key component of the work of physical anthropologists, and in the last decade, the field has witnessed an increase in the use of novel algorithm-based methodologies to tackle the aforementioned task. Nevertheless, several limitations (e.g., small training/testing sample size, training-test data relatedness, limited population inclusiveness, overfitting) have hampered the application of such methods as a standardised procedure in the field. Here, we propose a population-inclusive protocol for estimating sex from a small set of cranial metric traits (10 measurements) based on a neural network architecture trained to maximise the probability of sex attribution and prevent overfitting. The cross-validation returned an accuracy of 86.7% ± 0.02% and log loss of 0.34 ± 0.03. The protocol developed was tested on data unrelated to that of the training and validation phase and returned an estimated accuracy of 84.3% and log loss of 0.348. The model and the related code to use it are made publicly available.

New Anthropology in Works of Vasily Chekrygin

The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new ideas of matter. A paradoxical fusion of scientific and occult thought, coupled with ideas of Christian anthropology, formed a crucial component of Chekrygin’s works. The artist produced his anthropological project at the intersection of two cultural paradigms: that of Christianity, on the one hand, and science and the occult, on the other. This blend of such heterogeneous concepts was not an accidental fact of the artist’s biography. It makes it possible to see certain problems and antinomies that were fundamental to the Russian culture of the 1910s through the early 1920s.

Pakistani Literature Festivals and a Scopaesthesiac Consciousness

Abstract This paper seeks to understand and theorize Pakistani literature festivals. In order to do so, I study the programs and schedules of the Karachi Literature Festival from 2010–2020 and the Lahore Literary Festival from 2013–2020. Using Andrew Shryock’s idea of Other-consciousness and building on Ammara Maqsood’s anthropological work done in urban Pakistan, I argue that the conception, programming, and execution of festivals like the Karachi and the Lahore festivals are governed by a “scopaesthesiac consciousness” – a consciousness of being observed and judged by an imagined outsider. As a result, the organizers and producers of these festivals are less interested in showcasing an organic literary production and more interested in portraying a “soft image of Pakistan” to an imagined outsider.

The common sense of expert activists: practitioners, scholars, and the problem of statelessness in Europe

In this article, I follow a group of professionals in their efforts to address the problem of statelessness in Europe. My interlocutors divide the members of their group into “practitioners,” on the one hand, and “scholars” on the other. Relating this emic dichotomization to Antonio Gramsci’s dialectical take on common sense, I argue against a theoretical reductionism that regards expertise and activism as two essentially different and mostly separate endeavors, and put forward the concept of the “expert activist.” Unpacking what I call the “practitioner–scholar dilemma,” I show that in their effort to end statelessness, “practitioners” take a reformist route that aims at realizing citizenship for the stateless, while “scholars” are open to a more revolutionary path that contemplates the denaturalization and even the eradication of the state. By drawing on Gramsci, I suggest that the impasse the group encounters in their work might relate more to the structural constraints imposed by the state within or against which they operate than to the problem of statelessness they are trying to solve. This article contributes to a body of emergent work in anthropology that explores the intersection of scholarly expertise and activism.

Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper

This is a prodigious historical synthesis. Reaching back before the birth of Homo sapiens, it glides through pre-history to documentary history as late as our present struggles with COVID-19 and further pathogenic forces on the horizon. This history has not taken the usual path of concentrating on epidemics; rather, it integrates numerous endemic diseases with epidemics and spends more space on endemic killers, which have weighed more heavily on human populations, from hunters and gatherers to the present, than the more studied pandemics. I know of no wide-ranging historical work to have so meticulously integrated the epidemic with the endemic. To examine the long story of how humans acquired their ‘distinctive disease pool’, Kyle Harper focuses his book on four ‘transformative energy revolutions’. The first is fire and begins well before Homo sapiens’ rise with australopithecines in Africa around four million years ago. The second is the Neolithic Revolution of farming, c.10,000 years ago. The third begins with Christopher Columbus and ‘regular crossing of the Atlantic Ocean’ (p. 8), and the fourth concerns the harnessing of fossil fuels that extracted ‘eons of congealed sunlight’ from coal, oil and gas. One timely strand is Harper’s charting of new evidence on the interactions between humans and their parasites derived from the work of geneticists, bioarchaeologists, physical anthropologists and other scholars over the past three decades. These scientific endeavours have created two new archives: ancient DNA of pathogens, and phylogenetic trees constructed from genome sequencing of present-day humans, animals and plants.