Times of debt: heterochrony and bank loans in rural Mongolia

Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor-creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.     

"Mrs. Landes Meet Mrs. Benedict": Culture Pattern and Individual Agency in the 1930s

This article presents Ruth Landes as a transitional figure in 20th-century anthropology between the culture and personality studies of the interwar years and the study of power and structural dynamics so important in the discipline by the end of the century. Expanding on Benedict's theory of culture pattern and employing the life history method, Landes highlights in her work relations of power in the structural dynamics of culture as she explores: the experience of social marginality; the making of the public symbolic order; the plurality of local knowledge systems; the role of the individual; what she called "the moot problem of women and men"; and the relationship of researcher and researched. [Keywords: Ruth Landes, Ruth Benedict, culture, gender, power]     

Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race]     

The Law of the Land: A Review Article

This is a review article of the book Native Title Corporations: A Legal and Anthropological Analysis from the point of view of anthropology. I begin by highlighting the development of Anglo‐Australian social anthropology from such figures as Radcliffe‐Brown and Fortes, who were heavily influenced by regulatory and normative models from the domain of legal and judicial scholarship and speculate on the contemporary conditions by which this original social anthropological metaphor has apparently achieved a new literalisation. I criticise the legalistic appropriation of anthropological and ethnographic methodology that this book makes explicit, and finally, I express scepticism for the future success of the prescribed body corporate, as described in the Native Title Act (1993), as a model for the possession, transmission and elaboration of indigenous rights to country.     

Beyond the Post-Structural Impasse in the Anthropology of Development

In recent years anthropologists have produced innovative and critical scholarship that refuses to simplify or essentialise the development process. However, for the most part the anthropology of development remains closely tied to the post-structuralist paradigm. Why, after more than two decades, does the post-structuralist critique continue to hold its dominant grip on the anthropology of development? Why haven’t anthropologists been able to move the anthropology of development, or development itself, further ahead? These are the main questions addressed in this article. More specifically, it is argued that the anthropology of development has reached an impasse; it remains bound to an overly structural interpretation of the development process, a construction that privileges not only structure over agency, but also hegemony over dialectics. Using the ethnography of a high-profile case of development in northwest Namibia, the article suggests a possible path forward by outlining a proposal for a simultaneous theoretical re-orientation and methodological reclamation in the anthropology of development.     

The Difference that Diaspora Makes: Thinking through the Anthropology of Immigrant Education in the United States

In this article, I examine the possibility of a productive dialogue between diaspora studies and the anthropology of immigrant education in the United States. Arguing that their respective views on the nation-state is a key source for their different orientations toward migrant social and cultural worlds, I nevertheless argue that an engagement between these two fields of study will yield more critical understandings of nationalism, the category of the "immigrant," and multiculturalism within both these areas of scholarship.     

Yam is King! But Cassava is the Mother of all Crops: Farming, Culture, and Identity in Igbo Agrarian Economy

The history of Igbo scholarship has benefits from pioneer scholars such as Victor Uchendu, Ikenna Nzimiro, Don Ohadike, Michael Mbabuike, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, and Angela Uwalaka, among many others. Collectively, their scholarship defined the contours of Igbo political economy, anthropology, and sociology, and linguistic. As an agricultural people, the history of the Igbo people was defined by their relationship to the land and their ecology. These scholars, to whom I humbly devote this piece, have touched upon the changing nature of Igbo political economy as much as the link between Igbo agriculture and their identity.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

On Neoliberalism and Other Social Diseases: The 2008 Sociocultural Anthropology Year in Review

ABSTRACT   In this article, I consider a selection of the 129 articles of new research published in five of the leading Anglo-American peer-reviewed outlets for sociocultural anthropology in 2008, discerning two general, but related, trends. The first suggests an ongoing interest among sociocultural anthropologists in new forms and contexts of market capitalism and a deepening concern for the multiple, complex, and even contradictory orientations to those forms by social actors caught up in them. The second reveals a concern with the imbrications of political and scientific epistemologies, particularly as they emerge in state policies and actions around issues of public health, the environment, and agriculture. Where they come together is in the number of studies whose objects of inquiry reside at the nexus where science, politics, and markets meet in what they see as the creeping expansion of neoliberal logics and their implications for the state as a political formation. [Keywords: sociocultural anthropology, neoliberalism, science studies, public health, capitalism]     

Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory

This article tracks the growth of medical anthropology in the United States in the decades since the 1970s, as it has intersected the expansion of feminist activism and scholarship. I argue that feminist attention to embodied inequalities quickly focused on reproduction as a site of investigation and intervention. Medical anthropology has benefited from feminist concern with stratified reproduction, especially its interrogation of nonnormative and stigmatized fertility and childbearing. When reproduction becomes problematic, it provides a lens through which cultural norms, struggles, and transformations can be viewed. Examples drawn from prenatal diagnosis are particularly revelatory of the diverse interests and stakes we all hold in reproduction.     

Anthropology and the Third Information Revolution

This journal, Visual Anthropology, has now been in existence for a third of a century, and so it is an appropriate moment to look back at where we and our scholarship have come from, and what changes we have seen during our own lifetimes. This article first gives a rapid overview of the four major forms of information technology in human history. These were the age of oral transfer of messages, writing, printing, and lastly the age of mechanical reproduction, including the development of digital technologies. The rest of the article recalls the author’s own experience of the most recent period of computer and multi-media work. The first phase of this was the computer revolution from the 1960s to around the Millennium, the second is the spread of the high-speed internet with the accompanying tools on the web. The article ends by considering some of the implications for anthropology of the accumulated developments, in terms of on-line databases, digital repositories and personal publishing. Anthropology has been transformed during the author’s lifetime by the rapid growth of more powerful tools of communication, and it is likely that this will increase exponentially into the future. As anthropologists we need to see the big picture of how this has happened and what its implications are.     

Continuities in Insight and Innovation: Toward a Biography of Margaret Mead

A biographical study of Margaret Mead presents a special opportunity for anthropologists to look at the relationship between the personality of a researcher, the researcher's own culture, and the scientific product, because of Mead's own awareness of disciplined subjectivity and the richness of the available scientific and personal record. Concurrently, it will be possible to consider her innovations and conservatisms in family life and organizational structure as expressions of anthropological insight. [ researcher bias, field methods, history of anthropology, innovation, life history ]     

From Documentation to Representation: Recovering the Films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

Although the seven films made by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, based on footage shot in Bali and New Guinea during 1936–39, are identified as a landmark in various histories of ethnographic film, these films have been the subject of remarkably little analysis in the anthropological literature. In contrast, their photographic work has received much more extended commentary. Making a close reading of the films in their final edited form, this article aims to recover this aspect of Mead and Bateson's work from its relative neglect. We consider the circumstances under which the films were made, the theoretical ideas that informed them, and the methods employed in shooting and editing. Notwithstanding recent skepticism about both the theoretical ideas and the quality of the research on which Mead and Bateson's work in Bali was based, as well as the naiveté of some of the filmmaking ideas found in the films themselves, when considered as a group, they continue to be interesting examples of a particular transitional phase in the history of ethnographic film.     

The evolutionary history of childbirth

Consideration of the evolutionary and cross-cultural history of childbirth reveals many differences between the ways in which most human females have experienced childbirth and the ways in which most women in contemporary industrialized obstetric settings experience the event. In this paper I review two of these differences: the pain and anxiety of labor and delivery and the discontinuity of care provided for the mother and infant. I argue that much of the dissatisfaction with birth practices in the United States results from the failure of modern obstetric practice to meet the evolved needs of mothers and infants. Wenda Trevathan is an associate professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University. Her research interests focus on evolutionary and biosocial aspects of human female reproductive behavior, including childbirth, sexuality, and menopause. She is the recipient of the 1990 Margaret Mead Award and has received midwifery training.     

Anthropology: The Empire on which the Sun Never Sets

Questions and debates about the end of anthropology are highlighted here for their potential value in revealing what the ‘crisis talk’ in the discipline really means, and what it may be masking. In this article the reader is invited to reflect on several questions: about anthropology as a discipline or as a praxis; about how anthropology can be not just revitalised, but revolutionised; about the place of ethnography in anthropology; and about the quest for distinction and the accumulation of disciplinary capital. More broadly, this article deals with the restructuring of anthropology within a context of continued imperialism.     

‘This is a gathering of lovers’: Islamic self-help and affective pedagogies in contemporary Singapore

In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the Qur'an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated, minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated young women's anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter's negotiations of their newly acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology's foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.     

The New Ecological Anthropology

Older ecologies have been remiss in the narrowness of their spatial and temporal horizons, their functionalist assumptions, and their apolitical character. Suspending functionalist assumptions and an emphasis upon (homeo)stasis, "the new ecological anthropology" is located at the intersection of global, national, regional, and local systems, studying the outcome of the interaction of multiple levels and multiple factors. It blends theoretical and empirical research with applied, policy-directed, and critical work in what Rappaport called an "engaged" anthropology; and it is otherwise attuned to the political aspects and implications of ecological processes. Carefully laying out a critique of previous ecologies by way of announcing newer approaches, the article insists on the need to recognize the importance of culture mediations in ecological processes rather than treating culture as epiphenomenal and as a mere adaptive tool. It closes with a discussion of the methodologies appropriate to the new ecological anthropology. ["the new ecology," political ecology, applied or engaged anthropology, linkages methodology]     

The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers

A survey of articles published in the American Anthropologist over a 100-year period indicates that substantive collaboration across anthropological subfields is largely a myth—amounting toonly 311 of 3,264 articles surveyed (or 9.5 percent of the total). Working with the anthropological insights of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Tylor, and Claude Levi-Strauss, this article considers why a myth of subf ield collaboration nonetheless exists within anthropology. This article concludes by calling for new forms of holism. [Keywords: American Anthropologist, subf ield collaboration, holism, public anthropology]