Anthropological studies of gossip have been preoccupied with its content; as important as the que... more Anthropological studies of gossip have been preoccupied with its content; as important as the question of what gossip is about may be, such a focus has prevented a close examination of gossip itself as both text and activity. This paper is concerned with talanoa, a gossip genre among Hindi‐speaking Fiji Indians. It demonstrates the close relationships among gossip topic, performance style, and social process in a rural community.
Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the 'Anthropology of Policy' and its gr... more Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the 'Anthropology of Policy' and its growth as a new sub-field of political anthropology since the 1990s. They show how her focus on policy brought together her earlier concerns with organisations, power and processes of social transformation with critical and reflexive perspectives on language, higher education reform and regimes of audit and accountability. anthropology of policy and practice, audit culture, class, gender and power, institutional power of language, local government, methodology, political reflexivity, universities
Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking diff... more Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes-from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.
Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their... more Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern 'university of excellence' applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia.
Early in his engaging and thought-provoking perspectives article, Renato Rosaldo points to "learn... more Early in his engaging and thought-provoking perspectives article, Renato Rosaldo points to "learning el trato, how to treat other guys and girls," as central to his adolescent-and subsequent-friendships. The term can more broadly mean an agreement or treaty, but in Rosaldo's account it really captures a kind of social contract, enacted interactionally, rarely overtly discussed but learned through attentive participation in social life. One group's trato may, further, be quite different from the interactional practices of another. Rosaldo illustrates this variation through contrasting the Anglo style of leaving a party (slipping away quietly) with that characteristic of Mexican American partygoers in his youth (saying farewell to each individual person), unspoken but socially resonant practices. Rosaldo foregrounds his developing understanding of el trato as an example of how he did "fieldwork without knowing it" from early on, tellingly from "the time [he] began to speak." In his article, language, culture, history, and a core sense of identity are deeply entangled-and required his always active attention and reflection, in short his ongoing engagement as an ethnographer. His remarkable skills and insights as an anthropologist were built, he suggests, on the quotidian manner in which he learned his way into social life and into his own identity as Mexican American. Rosaldo's perspectives article illuminates the interplay of language with his growing sense of self and identity and points to a broader social semiotic, one in which form and style play key roles. His commitment to taking linguistic form seriously is evident in the poems and prose poems he has published in recent years, works that at the same time afford him greater freedom of expression and demand "the standards of accuracy and accountability that ethnography demanded of the social world depicted in the poems." Rosaldo's article both charts his personal, ethnographically illuminated Bildungsroman and explores the transformation of social anthropology across his career. He foregrounds especially the necessary and generative engagement of anthropological work with historical and literary analyses, the ongoing negotiation of and struggle over cultural citizenship, and the value of experimenting with styles of ethnographic representation. Many of the reviews in this volume, ranging from the political economy of attention to linguistic anthropological explorations of conversational analysis, touch and interaction, and pidgins and creoles, resonate strongly with themes running through Rosaldo's reflections. Semiotic analysis figures centrally in several articles, including those on Peirce and archaeology, language and the military, and postcolonial semiotics. Questions of style and sensory practice are focal in such reviews as "Music, Language, and Aurality," while those of ethnographic relevance feature in historical representations of primates.
In the trenchant, deeply informed, and compelling Perspective essay that opens this volume, Marga... more In the trenchant, deeply informed, and compelling Perspective essay that opens this volume, Margaret Lock explores a number of consequential and intertwined themes. These include the understanding of the Anthropocene as an era in which human activity has dramatically shaped environmental change, the concurrent rise of epigenetics and our knowledge of the environmentally reactive character of the human genome, and ongoing debates concerning human exceptionalism central to anthropology. Drawing on this framework, Lock then makes a powerful argument for the importance-both intellectually and in terms of people's lives, health, and well-being-of taking situated embodiment seriously through a focus on what she calls "local biologies." This argument is embedded in a thought-provoking account of striking transformations in our sense of ontological and agentive dimensions of being human, dimensions that are of clear and pressing significance for our field and to the contemporary world. Serendipitously, these debates concerning human exceptionalism salient in Lock's concise reading of our disciplinary history figure centrally in this volume's theme of human-animal interaction. The pieces in this volume range across the discipline in terms of methodology and topic. Brian Boyd's piece provides a reconsideration of the archaeology of human-animal relations, one that moves beyond taken-for-granted humancentered perspectives, whereas Glenn Schwartz focuses specifically on sacrifice as a particularly salient nexus of human-animal interaction. Michelle Bezanson considers recent advances in comparative studies of nonhuman primate positional behavior, including developmental features that remind us of both the continuities and discontinuities between other primates and ourselves. Jessica Lynch Alfaro elucidates human influence on the historical, contemporary, and future biogeography of New World primates. David Anderson draws on comparative cultural anthropology in considering human-animal relationships specifically in boreal regions, the locus of classic work concerning human exceptionalism and of major contemporary research wrestling with these issues. Finally, linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick provides a catalytically wide-ranging exploration of the contemporary literature, scholarly and more popular, concerning human-animal communication. Core questions of relatedness, difference, ethics, and interdependence, among others, resonate across these pieces-and with Lock's framing of the debate. Lock's themes also emerge at multiple junctures throughout this volume, whether in Roberto Barrios's exploration of catastrophes and the anthropocene or in Sandra Lee's essay on "good citizenship" and precision medicine, Rodney Harrison & Esther
In her Perspective article for this volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA), Linda Fedi... more In her Perspective article for this volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA), Linda Fedigan reflects on some of the experiences that shaped her professional life as a biological anthropologist and primatologist. As she explains, her path in primatology was decided early on when she was an undergraduate anthropology major and discovered that she preferred conducting observational research more than interviews. This self-revelation launched her initial investigations into the social behavior of female nonhuman primates and led to a succession of increasingly refined studies of how wild female primates navigate the complex social dynamics that arise from living in groups with one another and with males. From this brief autobiography, Fedigan deftly distills the lessons she learned as a researcher in academia into a set of what she describes as "nine truths to live by." The comparative perspectives that nonhuman primates provide about humans (truth 7) are among the cornerstones of anthropology's comparative, multifield approach (truth 6), and they provide the intellectual continuum along which Fedigan and other anthropologically trained primatologists work. The five truths leading up to these anthropologically focused insights pertain to the scientific process and how to navigate it. These begin with the messiness of science, as Fedigan illustrates through the lens of her first thwarted initiatives before she was able to establish a highly productive, long-term primate fieldsite in Costa Rica. She also expands on the importance of persistence (in the face of setbacks), communication skills (for publishing), flexibility in identifying interesting questions (which are often not the questions with which we start), and the purposefulness and commitment that are necessary to succeed in research in primatology and other fields. But it is in her final two truths about the importance of being willing to change our minds (truth 8) and of defining a legacy and then working toward it (truth 9) that Fedigan's article takes on a prescient timeliness, for these particular truths apply equally well to the challenges of academia and research as they do to the challenges of our times. Fedigan wrote and submitted her article before the COVID-19 pandemic had been declared and before so many lives were lost or irrevocably altered. Her contribution also preceded the global protests about persistent racial and social injustices and the rallying cries for positive change. Yet her wise words about the uncertainties that ebb and flow throughout one's life, and about the necessity to adapt and change, resonate and speak to our capacity to meet these unanticipated contemporary challenges in actively thoughtful and effective ways.
In the Perspective article for this Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) volume, Jeremy Sabloff ch... more In the Perspective article for this Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) volume, Jeremy Sabloff charts the trajectory of Maya archaeology over the past five decades, a path that has led scholars from an almost singular focus on elite sites and materials to a much more comprehensive consideration of the "99%" of lowland Maya societies-and of their interactions with elites and with each other. Sabloff makes a compelling argument that the shift to explorations of the whole constellation of remains in relation to their specific landscapes catalyzed and facilitated a pivotal transformation in the field. This transformation in settlement pattern studies moved the research focus from monuments to the everyday contexts of social life, from a preoccupation with elite history and agency to nonelite lives, both on their own and in interaction with elites. Moving from a singular focus on structures to an exploration of the activities and social relations they entail and make possible has dramatically illuminated the complexity and heterogeneity of Maya societies. Sabloff's account highlights the often taken-for-granted elite/nonelite distinction. It also makes clear that multiple variables and dimensions of difference were in play. The research he considers suggests the likelihood of a far from dichotomous class system that might well include, at the very least, a middle class. Beyond sharpening our understanding of class, settlement pattern approaches also foreground other crucial and consequential dimensions of social difference, especially gender. One hallmark of these approaches in Maya archaeology has been the recognition of variation within and across communities. A further key dimension has been the centrality of both broad and deep contextualization. New technologies for analyzing less durable material figure crucially in making such detailed work possible. As Sabloff notes, a further transformation has been a shift from focusing on relatively isolated sites to approaches that pursue the interconnectedness of communities and classes. His contribution provides a rich account of 50 years of Maya archaeology and, more broadly, demonstrates the signal value of mapping both settlements and the social terrain they entail with acuity, imagination, and a sense, literally and metaphorically, of the centrality of landscape. The task of determining how one might most effectively map a complex social, cultural, and intellectual terrain is clearly not limited to Mayanists or archaeologists. It is, rather, a distinctive dimension of much scholarship and science. It is certainly also a key theme underlying the work of the ARA Editorial Committee: How can we capture the ongoing generative heterogeneity of anthropology? In what ways might we most effectively convey the wide range of methodological, interpretive, and analytical perspectives characteristic of the field? How can we help demonstrate the distinctiveness of specific
Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social th... more Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research. [sound, epistemology, ethnography, documentation, media representation] S ound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade.
The work of science and scholarship is often characterized as an ongoing conversation, one that r... more The work of science and scholarship is often characterized as an ongoing conversation, one that relies on exchange among researchers and on a much longer-term engagement with earlier data, discussion, and debate. We generally regard "conversation" as a convenient metaphor and, at the same time, as one whose specific contours and implications for the ongoing shaping of our field rarely draw our sustained attention. Dick Bauman's Perspective article in this volume, "Others' Words, Others' Voices," provides a welcome and illuminating exception in this regard. Here, conversations-friendly, hostile, tentative, creative-lie at the core of both his scholarly focus and his account of his own intellectual trajectory. Bauman's work has focused on the complex and consequential intersections of face-to-face and mediated communication and the broader-gauge political economic dimensions of the communities he has studied as well as those institutional frameworks within which he has shaped his scholarly life. He traces a series of resonant research and theoretical projects, ones that are fascinating in themselves and central in shaping the development of linguistic and cultural anthropology over recent decades. His work has demonstrated and argued explicitly for the inextricable entanglements of the subdisciplines. His article also explores the specific kinds of conversations with colleagues that helped shape his work, whether through generous and fascinated support or through hostility and disciplinary policing. As the article's title indicates, Bauman has long acted from a Bakhtinian perspective, engaged as he has been with voices in interaction and with the social worlds such conversations both reflect and shape. Each volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology is characterized by intense and multiperspectival conversations, both at the annual Editorial Committee meetings and through ongoing engagements among authors and the Editors. A key goal is to recruit and publish articles that capture the wide range of scholarship and of scholarly perspectives within our complex field. We aim to put each volume's articles into potential conversation with each other-and hope that readers will find the invitation to such intellectual interactions productive. This volume's themes, "Ethics" and "Food," both have strong interactional dimensions. Martha Sif Karrebaek, Kathleen C. Riley, and Jillian Cavanaugh's article, "Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value," is exemplary in this regard. It draws together materiality, communicative practice, and questions of both meaning and value. Other articles on food are free range, moving from consumerism to interspecies relations and from industrial meat processing to biological anthropological research on foraging, crop losses, and crop raiding. All, however, see food as deeply embedded in social relations. The articles addressing ethics are even more explicitly concerned with interpersonal engagement and the web of often quite disparate expectations, obligations, and value v
This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the ... more This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the intellectual, pedagogical, professional, and public life of anthropology and related disciplines: research funding, human subjects review, scholarly publishing, program and personnel assessment, and intellectual property among them. The talk points to current practices of knowledge production and circulation in the United States and to the increasingly complex intersections among scholarly knowledge, managerialist language and practice, and private capital, intellectual and otherwise. It is meant to encourage serious ethnographic examination of the contexts within which anthropologists work, consideration of the potential consequences of these contemporary changes, and creative thought about the kinds of collegial and collective action that might be pursued to help sustain what we find to be of real value in the discipline and in our professional practice.
Hawai'i and Fiji share strikingly similar histories of colonialism and plantation sugar produ... more Hawai'i and Fiji share strikingly similar histories of colonialism and plantation sugar production but display different legacies of ethnic conflict today. Pacific Island chiefdoms colonized by the United States and England respectively, the islands' indigenous populations were forced to share resources with a small colonizing elite and growing numbers of workers imported from South Asia. Both societies had long traditions of chiefly power exercised through reciprocity and descent; both were integrated into the plantation complex in the nineteenth century. Colonial authorities, however, constructed vastly different legal relationships with the indigenous peoples in each setting, and policy toward imported workers also differed in arrangements around land tenure and political participation. The legacies of these colonial arrangements are at the roots of the current crisis in both places. Focusing on the intimate relationship between law, culture, and the production of social ...
Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their... more Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern 'university of excellence' applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia.
Anthropological studies of gossip have been preoccupied with its content; as important as the que... more Anthropological studies of gossip have been preoccupied with its content; as important as the question of what gossip is about may be, such a focus has prevented a close examination of gossip itself as both text and activity. This paper is concerned with talanoa, a gossip genre among Hindi‐speaking Fiji Indians. It demonstrates the close relationships among gossip topic, performance style, and social process in a rural community.
Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the 'Anthropology of Policy' and its gr... more Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the 'Anthropology of Policy' and its growth as a new sub-field of political anthropology since the 1990s. They show how her focus on policy brought together her earlier concerns with organisations, power and processes of social transformation with critical and reflexive perspectives on language, higher education reform and regimes of audit and accountability. anthropology of policy and practice, audit culture, class, gender and power, institutional power of language, local government, methodology, political reflexivity, universities
Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking diff... more Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes-from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.
Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their... more Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern 'university of excellence' applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia.
Early in his engaging and thought-provoking perspectives article, Renato Rosaldo points to "learn... more Early in his engaging and thought-provoking perspectives article, Renato Rosaldo points to "learning el trato, how to treat other guys and girls," as central to his adolescent-and subsequent-friendships. The term can more broadly mean an agreement or treaty, but in Rosaldo's account it really captures a kind of social contract, enacted interactionally, rarely overtly discussed but learned through attentive participation in social life. One group's trato may, further, be quite different from the interactional practices of another. Rosaldo illustrates this variation through contrasting the Anglo style of leaving a party (slipping away quietly) with that characteristic of Mexican American partygoers in his youth (saying farewell to each individual person), unspoken but socially resonant practices. Rosaldo foregrounds his developing understanding of el trato as an example of how he did "fieldwork without knowing it" from early on, tellingly from "the time [he] began to speak." In his article, language, culture, history, and a core sense of identity are deeply entangled-and required his always active attention and reflection, in short his ongoing engagement as an ethnographer. His remarkable skills and insights as an anthropologist were built, he suggests, on the quotidian manner in which he learned his way into social life and into his own identity as Mexican American. Rosaldo's perspectives article illuminates the interplay of language with his growing sense of self and identity and points to a broader social semiotic, one in which form and style play key roles. His commitment to taking linguistic form seriously is evident in the poems and prose poems he has published in recent years, works that at the same time afford him greater freedom of expression and demand "the standards of accuracy and accountability that ethnography demanded of the social world depicted in the poems." Rosaldo's article both charts his personal, ethnographically illuminated Bildungsroman and explores the transformation of social anthropology across his career. He foregrounds especially the necessary and generative engagement of anthropological work with historical and literary analyses, the ongoing negotiation of and struggle over cultural citizenship, and the value of experimenting with styles of ethnographic representation. Many of the reviews in this volume, ranging from the political economy of attention to linguistic anthropological explorations of conversational analysis, touch and interaction, and pidgins and creoles, resonate strongly with themes running through Rosaldo's reflections. Semiotic analysis figures centrally in several articles, including those on Peirce and archaeology, language and the military, and postcolonial semiotics. Questions of style and sensory practice are focal in such reviews as "Music, Language, and Aurality," while those of ethnographic relevance feature in historical representations of primates.
In the trenchant, deeply informed, and compelling Perspective essay that opens this volume, Marga... more In the trenchant, deeply informed, and compelling Perspective essay that opens this volume, Margaret Lock explores a number of consequential and intertwined themes. These include the understanding of the Anthropocene as an era in which human activity has dramatically shaped environmental change, the concurrent rise of epigenetics and our knowledge of the environmentally reactive character of the human genome, and ongoing debates concerning human exceptionalism central to anthropology. Drawing on this framework, Lock then makes a powerful argument for the importance-both intellectually and in terms of people's lives, health, and well-being-of taking situated embodiment seriously through a focus on what she calls "local biologies." This argument is embedded in a thought-provoking account of striking transformations in our sense of ontological and agentive dimensions of being human, dimensions that are of clear and pressing significance for our field and to the contemporary world. Serendipitously, these debates concerning human exceptionalism salient in Lock's concise reading of our disciplinary history figure centrally in this volume's theme of human-animal interaction. The pieces in this volume range across the discipline in terms of methodology and topic. Brian Boyd's piece provides a reconsideration of the archaeology of human-animal relations, one that moves beyond taken-for-granted humancentered perspectives, whereas Glenn Schwartz focuses specifically on sacrifice as a particularly salient nexus of human-animal interaction. Michelle Bezanson considers recent advances in comparative studies of nonhuman primate positional behavior, including developmental features that remind us of both the continuities and discontinuities between other primates and ourselves. Jessica Lynch Alfaro elucidates human influence on the historical, contemporary, and future biogeography of New World primates. David Anderson draws on comparative cultural anthropology in considering human-animal relationships specifically in boreal regions, the locus of classic work concerning human exceptionalism and of major contemporary research wrestling with these issues. Finally, linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick provides a catalytically wide-ranging exploration of the contemporary literature, scholarly and more popular, concerning human-animal communication. Core questions of relatedness, difference, ethics, and interdependence, among others, resonate across these pieces-and with Lock's framing of the debate. Lock's themes also emerge at multiple junctures throughout this volume, whether in Roberto Barrios's exploration of catastrophes and the anthropocene or in Sandra Lee's essay on "good citizenship" and precision medicine, Rodney Harrison & Esther
In her Perspective article for this volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA), Linda Fedi... more In her Perspective article for this volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA), Linda Fedigan reflects on some of the experiences that shaped her professional life as a biological anthropologist and primatologist. As she explains, her path in primatology was decided early on when she was an undergraduate anthropology major and discovered that she preferred conducting observational research more than interviews. This self-revelation launched her initial investigations into the social behavior of female nonhuman primates and led to a succession of increasingly refined studies of how wild female primates navigate the complex social dynamics that arise from living in groups with one another and with males. From this brief autobiography, Fedigan deftly distills the lessons she learned as a researcher in academia into a set of what she describes as "nine truths to live by." The comparative perspectives that nonhuman primates provide about humans (truth 7) are among the cornerstones of anthropology's comparative, multifield approach (truth 6), and they provide the intellectual continuum along which Fedigan and other anthropologically trained primatologists work. The five truths leading up to these anthropologically focused insights pertain to the scientific process and how to navigate it. These begin with the messiness of science, as Fedigan illustrates through the lens of her first thwarted initiatives before she was able to establish a highly productive, long-term primate fieldsite in Costa Rica. She also expands on the importance of persistence (in the face of setbacks), communication skills (for publishing), flexibility in identifying interesting questions (which are often not the questions with which we start), and the purposefulness and commitment that are necessary to succeed in research in primatology and other fields. But it is in her final two truths about the importance of being willing to change our minds (truth 8) and of defining a legacy and then working toward it (truth 9) that Fedigan's article takes on a prescient timeliness, for these particular truths apply equally well to the challenges of academia and research as they do to the challenges of our times. Fedigan wrote and submitted her article before the COVID-19 pandemic had been declared and before so many lives were lost or irrevocably altered. Her contribution also preceded the global protests about persistent racial and social injustices and the rallying cries for positive change. Yet her wise words about the uncertainties that ebb and flow throughout one's life, and about the necessity to adapt and change, resonate and speak to our capacity to meet these unanticipated contemporary challenges in actively thoughtful and effective ways.
In the Perspective article for this Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) volume, Jeremy Sabloff ch... more In the Perspective article for this Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) volume, Jeremy Sabloff charts the trajectory of Maya archaeology over the past five decades, a path that has led scholars from an almost singular focus on elite sites and materials to a much more comprehensive consideration of the "99%" of lowland Maya societies-and of their interactions with elites and with each other. Sabloff makes a compelling argument that the shift to explorations of the whole constellation of remains in relation to their specific landscapes catalyzed and facilitated a pivotal transformation in the field. This transformation in settlement pattern studies moved the research focus from monuments to the everyday contexts of social life, from a preoccupation with elite history and agency to nonelite lives, both on their own and in interaction with elites. Moving from a singular focus on structures to an exploration of the activities and social relations they entail and make possible has dramatically illuminated the complexity and heterogeneity of Maya societies. Sabloff's account highlights the often taken-for-granted elite/nonelite distinction. It also makes clear that multiple variables and dimensions of difference were in play. The research he considers suggests the likelihood of a far from dichotomous class system that might well include, at the very least, a middle class. Beyond sharpening our understanding of class, settlement pattern approaches also foreground other crucial and consequential dimensions of social difference, especially gender. One hallmark of these approaches in Maya archaeology has been the recognition of variation within and across communities. A further key dimension has been the centrality of both broad and deep contextualization. New technologies for analyzing less durable material figure crucially in making such detailed work possible. As Sabloff notes, a further transformation has been a shift from focusing on relatively isolated sites to approaches that pursue the interconnectedness of communities and classes. His contribution provides a rich account of 50 years of Maya archaeology and, more broadly, demonstrates the signal value of mapping both settlements and the social terrain they entail with acuity, imagination, and a sense, literally and metaphorically, of the centrality of landscape. The task of determining how one might most effectively map a complex social, cultural, and intellectual terrain is clearly not limited to Mayanists or archaeologists. It is, rather, a distinctive dimension of much scholarship and science. It is certainly also a key theme underlying the work of the ARA Editorial Committee: How can we capture the ongoing generative heterogeneity of anthropology? In what ways might we most effectively convey the wide range of methodological, interpretive, and analytical perspectives characteristic of the field? How can we help demonstrate the distinctiveness of specific
Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social th... more Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research. [sound, epistemology, ethnography, documentation, media representation] S ound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade.
The work of science and scholarship is often characterized as an ongoing conversation, one that r... more The work of science and scholarship is often characterized as an ongoing conversation, one that relies on exchange among researchers and on a much longer-term engagement with earlier data, discussion, and debate. We generally regard "conversation" as a convenient metaphor and, at the same time, as one whose specific contours and implications for the ongoing shaping of our field rarely draw our sustained attention. Dick Bauman's Perspective article in this volume, "Others' Words, Others' Voices," provides a welcome and illuminating exception in this regard. Here, conversations-friendly, hostile, tentative, creative-lie at the core of both his scholarly focus and his account of his own intellectual trajectory. Bauman's work has focused on the complex and consequential intersections of face-to-face and mediated communication and the broader-gauge political economic dimensions of the communities he has studied as well as those institutional frameworks within which he has shaped his scholarly life. He traces a series of resonant research and theoretical projects, ones that are fascinating in themselves and central in shaping the development of linguistic and cultural anthropology over recent decades. His work has demonstrated and argued explicitly for the inextricable entanglements of the subdisciplines. His article also explores the specific kinds of conversations with colleagues that helped shape his work, whether through generous and fascinated support or through hostility and disciplinary policing. As the article's title indicates, Bauman has long acted from a Bakhtinian perspective, engaged as he has been with voices in interaction and with the social worlds such conversations both reflect and shape. Each volume of the Annual Review of Anthropology is characterized by intense and multiperspectival conversations, both at the annual Editorial Committee meetings and through ongoing engagements among authors and the Editors. A key goal is to recruit and publish articles that capture the wide range of scholarship and of scholarly perspectives within our complex field. We aim to put each volume's articles into potential conversation with each other-and hope that readers will find the invitation to such intellectual interactions productive. This volume's themes, "Ethics" and "Food," both have strong interactional dimensions. Martha Sif Karrebaek, Kathleen C. Riley, and Jillian Cavanaugh's article, "Food and Language: Production, Consumption, and Circulation of Meaning and Value," is exemplary in this regard. It draws together materiality, communicative practice, and questions of both meaning and value. Other articles on food are free range, moving from consumerism to interspecies relations and from industrial meat processing to biological anthropological research on foraging, crop losses, and crop raiding. All, however, see food as deeply embedded in social relations. The articles addressing ethics are even more explicitly concerned with interpersonal engagement and the web of often quite disparate expectations, obligations, and value v
This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the ... more This address considers ethnographically a range of sites and practices central to sustaining the intellectual, pedagogical, professional, and public life of anthropology and related disciplines: research funding, human subjects review, scholarly publishing, program and personnel assessment, and intellectual property among them. The talk points to current practices of knowledge production and circulation in the United States and to the increasingly complex intersections among scholarly knowledge, managerialist language and practice, and private capital, intellectual and otherwise. It is meant to encourage serious ethnographic examination of the contexts within which anthropologists work, consideration of the potential consequences of these contemporary changes, and creative thought about the kinds of collegial and collective action that might be pursued to help sustain what we find to be of real value in the discipline and in our professional practice.
Hawai'i and Fiji share strikingly similar histories of colonialism and plantation sugar produ... more Hawai'i and Fiji share strikingly similar histories of colonialism and plantation sugar production but display different legacies of ethnic conflict today. Pacific Island chiefdoms colonized by the United States and England respectively, the islands' indigenous populations were forced to share resources with a small colonizing elite and growing numbers of workers imported from South Asia. Both societies had long traditions of chiefly power exercised through reciprocity and descent; both were integrated into the plantation complex in the nineteenth century. Colonial authorities, however, constructed vastly different legal relationships with the indigenous peoples in each setting, and policy toward imported workers also differed in arrangements around land tenure and political participation. The legacies of these colonial arrangements are at the roots of the current crisis in both places. Focusing on the intimate relationship between law, culture, and the production of social ...
Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their... more Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern 'university of excellence' applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia.
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