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40 results in Anthropology

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Traces of the Distant Human Past
  • Understanding the Archaeology of our Origins
  • Edited by Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, Enrique Baquedano
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • Traces of the Distant Human Past offers a critical examination of early human behavior by challenging traditional narratives and pushing for a more scientific, theoretically informed approach to archaeology. Emphasizing the importance of understanding early humans within their environmental context, the contributors to this volume propose a shift towards theoretical frameworks and ecological perspectives in archaeological research. They highlight the scarcity of well-preserved archaeological sites, making a strong case for high-resolution analyses and the need for new methodologies, including the use of artificial intelligence in taphonomy. By questioning the scientific rigor of current practices and advocating for hypothesis-driven research, this volume not only informs but also inspires a reevaluation of the approaches that can be applied to an interpretation of the evidence for human evolution in the archaeological record. It will be an essential resource for those interested in advancing the field and gaining a deeper understanding of human origins.

Marriage and the Moral Imagination
  • Janet Carsten
  • Published online:
    12 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • This fresh and engaging book opens up new terrain in the exploration of marriage and kinship. While anthropologists and sociologists have often interpreted marriage, and kinship more broadly, in conservative terms, Carsten highlights their transformative possibilities. The book argues that marriage is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale, carrying the seeds of social transformation alongside the trappings of conformity. Grounded in rich ethnography and the author's many decades of familiarity with Malaysia, it asks a central question: what does marriage do, and how? Exploring the implications of the everyday imaginative labour of marriage for kinship relations and wider politics, this work offers an important and highly original contribution to anthropology, family and kinship studies, sociology and Southeast Asian studies.
How Urbanism Changes Foodways

How Urbanism Changes Foodways
  • Monica L. Smith
  • Published online:
    26 November 2025
    Print publication:
    08 January 2026
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  • The advent of urbanism had profound impacts on landscape management, agricultural production, food preservation, and cuisine. This Element examines the 6,000-year history of urbanism through the archaeological perspective of food, using the analysis of cooking and eating vessels, botanical remains, and animal bones along with texts and iconographic evidence to understand the foodways that spurred and accompanied the growth of cities. Human-environmental changes took place as farmers became fewer in number but increasingly essential as providers of food for city-based consumers. The Element also examines the ways in which cities today share patterns of food production and consumption with the first urban settlements, and that we can address questions of sustainability, nutritional improvement, and other desired outcomes by recognizing how the growth of cities has resulted in distinct constraints and opportunities related to food.

Representing Relationships
  • Modes of Cognition and Connection
  • Alan Page Fiske
  • Published online:
    21 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • The four fundamental forms of sociality structure our relationships. By comparing hundreds of cultures across more than 5,000 years, this book builds on relational models theory to reveal how each of the four basic types of relationship is conceived in their own distinctive cognitive medium. The text demonstrates how people use their food and bodies to foster affiliation, spatial dimensions to form hierarchy, concrete operations of one-to-one matching to create equality, and employ arbitrary, conventional symbols for proportion-based relationships. Originating from the author's ethnographic fieldwork in a West African village, this innovative social theory integrates findings from social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, linguistics and semiotics, anthropology, archeology, art history, religious studies, and ancient texts. The chapters offer compelling insights into readers' everyday social relations by showing what humans think their social relationships actually are.

Homesick Nation
  • Development, Migration and Yearning in Rural China
  • Linda Qian
  • Published online:
    20 November 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025
  • This innovative study introduces the concept of xiangchou – homesickness and rural nostalgia – to English-language scholarship, using it as a lens through which to explore rural development in contemporary China. Using hometown ethnography, Linda Qian takes a village in Zhejiang province as her primary case study to demonstrate the emotional, social and political forces shaping rural return migration and development policies. Through personal narratives and state-led initiatives, she reveals how xiangchou functions as both a 'structure of feeling' and a tool of affective governance. By intertwining lived experiences with broader social and political contexts, this study highlights the overlapping desires projected onto the countryside and underscores the significance of the 'rural' in the traditional concept of the 'hometown'.

The Making of Brazilian Amazonian Societies
  • A Study in Ethnographic and Spatial History
  • Mark Harris
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Amazonia presents the contemporary scholar with myriad challenges. What does it consist of, and what are its limits? In this interdisciplinary book, Mark Harris examines the formation of Brazilian Amazonian societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing predominantly on the Eastern Amazon, what is today the states of Pará and Amapá in Brazil. His aim is to demonstrate how the region emerged through the activities and movements of Indigenous societies with diverse languages, cultures, individuals of mixed heritage, and impoverished European and African people from various nations. Rarely are these approaches and people examined together, but this comprehensive history insightfully illustrates that the Brazilian Amazon consists of all these communities and their struggles and highlights the ways the Amazon has been defended through partnership and alliance across ethnic identities.
Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities

Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities
  • A Western Immigrant Perspective
  • Phil Freestone
  • Published online:
    12 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • This Element analyses the sociolinguistic navigation of cultural and ideological influence among queer male-identified individuals in Chengdu and Taipei. By analysing how queer and ethnically Chinese-identified individuals navigate ideological influences, it investigates some of the complexities of culture and identity and their dependence on semiotics and situated communication. Thus, the social affordances and constraints relevant to specific individuals in these contexts are described not only in terms of influences like 'Chinese culture' or 'Western ideology', but also in terms of the ongoing communicative processes through which they orient themselves to diverse structural influences. As such, this Element engages with the diversity typically subsumed into common identity categories. In turn, through its qualified deconstructionist approach to identity, it sheds novel light on the ideological complexity that tends to underlie queer individuals' performance of 'who they are', in Sinophone contexts and elsewhere.

Shapes in Revolution
  • The Political Morphology of Cuban Life
  • Martin Holbraad
  • Published online:
    07 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Revolutions are cosmogonic. More than any other modern political form, their deliberate goal is to precipitate change as a total, all-embracing project: not just a radically new political order but one that reaches deep into the fabric of social relationships, seeking to transform people at their very core, recasting the horizons that give their lives shape and meaning. Combining ethnographic and historiographic research, Shapes in Revolution tells the story of this radical process of life-formation, with all of its rugged contradictions and ambiguities, as it has unfolded in Cuba. As well as a novel anthropological perspective on revolutions, the upshot is a fresh approach to the study of political forms and their power to format people and their relationships into particular shapes. Articulating politics through the shapes it gives to people and their lives, the work proposes relational morphology as a new departure for political anthropology.
Indigenous Rights to Land Versus Extractivism

Indigenous Rights to Land Versus Extractivism
  • The Promise and Limits of ILO Convention No. 169 in Mexico
  • Tamara A. Wattnem
  • Published online:
    04 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
  • Indigenous and tribal communities often make claims to territory citing their longstanding ties to the land. Since 1989, they increasingly reference ILO Convention No. 169, the only legally binding international agreement on Indigenous and tribal peoples rights. This Element proposes a three-pronged analytical framework to assess the promise and limits of indigenous rights to land as influenced by international law. The framework calls for the place-specific investigation of the interrelations between: (1) indigenous identity politics, (2) citizenship regimes, and (3) land tenure regimes. Drawing on the case of Mexico, it argues that the ILO Convention has generally been a weak tool for securing rights to ancestral land and for effectively challenging the expansion of extractivism. Still, it has had numerous other significant socio-political implications, such as shaping discourses of resistance and incentivizing the use of prior consultation mechanisms in the context of territorial disputes.

The Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology
  • Edited by Edward Lowe
  • Published online:
    22 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • Bringing together contributions from a global team of renowned scholars, this Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the dynamic field of psychological anthropology. It is divided into five parts and includes a critical updating of the theoretical foundations for psychological anthropology, covering cognitive, psychodynamic, linguistic, and phenomenological views. It provides the first-ever lifespan perspective on human development in culture from the perspective of anthropology and also contains sections that connect the biological dynamics involved in human experience through to social, cultural, and historical perspectives. It considers important political-economic concerns for psychocultural studies, including Indigenous perspectives and expert voices from the global south. By showing how researchers can break out of the disciplinary silos that separate important fields in the human sciences, like anthropology and psychology, it emphasizes the importance of working collaboratively together in order to enrich our understanding of the human condition.
Language, Gender and Pregnancy Loss

Language, Gender and Pregnancy Loss
  • Beth Malory
  • Published online:
    21 October 2025
    Print publication:
    13 November 2025
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  • This Element explores the gendered dimensions of the ways language used to describe, define, and diagnose pregnancy loss impacts experiences of receiving and delivering healthcare in a UK context. It situates experiences of pregnancy loss language against the backdrop of gender role expectations, ideological tensions around reproductive choice, and medical misogyny; asking how language both reflects and influences contemporary gender norms and understandings of maternal responsibility. To do this, the Element analyses 10 focus group transcripts from metalinguistic discussions with 42 lived experience and healthcare professional participants, and 202 written metalinguistic contributions from the same cohorts. It demonstrates the gendered social and symbolic meanings of diagnostic terminology such as miscarriage, incompetent cervix, and termination or abortion in the context of a wanted pregnancy, as well as clinical discourses, on the experience of pregnancy loss and subsequent recovery and wellbeing. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Nightwatchman
  • Representing Black Men in Colonial South Africa
  • Hlonipha Mokoena
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    13 September 2025
    Print publication:
    01 August 2025
  • The Nightwatchman extends the literature on colonial photography and dress by exploring the representation of black men in South African portraiture. The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial South Africa brings into focus African men in colonial uniforms as a subject of portraiture. While colonial governments co-opted and conscripted Africans into military and policing services, it was after the Zulu defeat of the English in the battle of Isandlwana that a genre of photography developed around images of the 'Zulu warrior' and 'Zulu policeman'.

    In this illustrated collection of essays, Hlonipha Mokoena extends the literature on colonial ethnographic photography by creating a narrative of nightwatchman portraiture from the rich archive of images. Although the origins of this genre lay in the representation of 'Fingoes' (amaMfengu) during the frontier wars, she argues that the spectacle of the Zulu male body was inaugurated after the last Zulu king, Cetshwayo, was photographed as a posing subject.

    While much research has focused on the African man employed in emasculating labour or as a functionary of settler power, this book shifts debates about how the body moves in history. Placed in uniform, the male subject becomes aestheticised and admired. Mokoena focuses on the sartorial selection processes and co-optation of colonial aesthetic culture that constructed the idea of the Nonqgqayi or nightwatchman as a fully formed photographic presence. The beauty captured in these images upends conceptions of colonial photography as a tool of oppression.

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure
  • Paolo Novak
  • Published by:
    Bristol University Press
    Published online:
    06 September 2025
    Print publication:
    18 June 2025
  • This book examines the buildings used as reception centres for asylum seekers in central Italy to reveal how they reflect the European migration crisis and EU border management. It highlights key debates on the EU border, including their logistical management, the profit-driven industry they create and their colonial implications.
‘Alaska’ is Not a Blank Space

‘Alaska’ is Not a Blank Space
  • Unsettling Aldo Leopold's Odyssey
  • Julianne Warren
  • Published online:
    28 August 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • This Element supports Gwich'in, Iñupiat, and all Alaska Natives' collective continuance and reparative justice from the perspective of a settler in the traditional territories of lower Tanana Dene Peoples. It stands with Alaska Natives' recovering and safe-keeping: kinships obstructed by settler-colonialism; ontologies and languages inseparable from land-relations and incommensurable with English-language perspectives; and epistemologies not beholden to any colonialist standard. These rights and responsibilities clash with Leopoldian conservation narratives still shaping mind-sets and institutions that eliminate Indigenous Peoples by telling bad history and by presuming entitlements to lands and norm-making authority. It models an interlocking method and methodology – surfacing white supremacist settler-colonialist assumptions and structures of Leopoldian conservation narratives – that may be adapted to critique other problematic legacies. It offers a pra xis of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, liberatory environmental-narrative critical-assessment centering Indigenous experts and values, including consent, diplomacy, and intergenerational respect needed for stable coalitions-making for climate and environmental justice.

No Last Place to Rest
  • Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa
  • Dineo Skosana
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    09 August 2025
    Print publication:
    01 March 2025
  • This book examines the impact of coal mining on the lives of former-labour tenant and rural communities in post-apartheid South Africa. No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa is an exploration of the ongoing struggles faced by families whose lives have been upended by the relentless expansion of coal mining operations in the Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. These regions, burdened with the task of fulfilling the nation's energy needs and boosting the country's economy, witness daily the harsh realities of land dispossession that extend far beyond the mere loss of property.

    Dineo Skosana presents a compelling argument that dispossession remains a present-day reality and crisis, contradicting the notion that it is merely a relic of the past in the post-apartheid landscape. She challenges the narrow perspective that measures land loss in material and economic terms only. By considering the impact of grave relocations - a common occurrence in these mining-dominated locales - she demonstrates the profound spiritual anguish and dehumanisation communities endure as their lands are excavated and families lose their sacred connections with their ancestors. Skosana argues that the act of dispossession of both the living and the dead from their land wounds the collective soul of a people, eroding their cultural heritage, collective identity and sense of belonging.
Defending Community, Territory, and Indigenous Environmental Relations

Defending Community, Territory, and Indigenous Environmental Relations
  • Levi Gahman, Filiberto Penados, Cristina Coc, Shelda-Jane Smith
  • Published online:
    08 August 2025
    Print publication:
    11 September 2025
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  • This Element addresses a range of pressing challenges and crises by introducing readers to the Maya struggle for land and self-determination in Belize, a former British colony situated in the Caribbean and Central America. In addition to foregrounding environmental relations, the text provides deeper understandings of Qʼeqchiʼ and Mopan Maya people's dynamic conceptions and collective defence of community and territory. To do so, the authors centre the voices, worldviews, and experiences of Maya leaders, youth, and organisers who are engaged in frontline resistance and mobilisations against institutionalised racism and contemporary forms of dispossession. Broadly, the content offers an example of how Indigenous communities are reckoning with the legacies of empire whilst confronting the structural violence and threats to land and life posed by the driving forces of capital accumulation, neoliberal development, and coloniality of the state. Ultimately, this Element illustrates the realities, repercussions, and transformative potential of grassroots movement-building 'from below.' This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Healing and the Invention of Metaphor
  • Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience
  • Laurence J. Kirmayer
  • Published online:
    17 July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. This book, written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.

Beings and Beasts
  • Human-Animal Relations at the Margins
  • Edited by Ambika Aiyadurai, Prashant Ingole
  • Published online:
    16 July 2025
    Print publication:
    17 July 2025
  • While, a lot has been written about the need to 'decolonize' animal studies and wildlife conservation, there is no discussion or attempt to 'de-brahminize' animal studies and conservation science in India. Similarly, some animals and birds are positioned as superior in the Brahmanical social order, others seem to be subordinated and are associated with certain 'inferior' caste groups. Beings and Beasts discusses the relations between humans and animals of marginalized societies, especially of Dalits and Tribals. It analyses the various ways of perceiving the 'conjoint' living and examines it from multiple perspectives and disciplinary lenses.

Visceral Politics
  • Imaginaries of Power in South India
  • Indira Arumugam
  • Published online:
    04 July 2025
    Print publication:
    10 July 2025
  • How can a brutal murder influence a person's duty to their god? What do the bold actions of crows entering homes say about family relationships? How does meat reflect political beliefs? And what does the disappearance of gods, once roaming the earth and meeting their followers, tell us about the political changes happening in the world? This book studies the body of politics, revealing the deep connections and unseen forces that hold it together. It illustrates how power, political dynamics, and beliefs come to life through the actions of families, the land they inhabit, and the animals they sacrifice. The book pulls apart the messy, vital, and often mysterious aspects of human existence, examining the politics that shapes people. Along the way, it reveals how ordinary people, in their daily lives, also come to understand and challenge the systems of power around them.

Making a Life
  • Young Men on Johannesburg's Urban Margins
  • Hannah J. Dawson
  • Published by:
    Wits University Press
    Published online:
    03 July 2025
    Print publication:
    01 May 2025
  • Examines young men's livelihoods, identities, and political practices in a Johannesburg informal settlement revealing the dynamics of urban work, citizenship and inequality.

    Making a Life: Young Men on Johannesburg's Urban Margins explores the dynamic everyday life-making strategies of young men in Zandspruit, a sprawling informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In many ways, Zandspruit typifies the precariousness of life in South Africa, where two-thirds of young people lack waged employment. However, rather than seeing Zandspruit as dumping ground, Hannah J. Dawson calls for an integrated understanding of the complex linkages between people's lives and livelihoods, and the multifaceted sociopolitical landscape of urban settlements.

    Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research, Dawson investigates how social belonging, identity and economic realities intertwine in informal settlements like Zandspruit. This approach not only challenges conventional approaches to studying work; it also questions the increasingly prevalent perspective that romanticises the adaptive survival strategies of the urban poor. By exploring the intricate connections between those with and without waged employment, the author shows how young men manage complex social, political and economic conditions.

    Making a Life offers insights into issues such as urban work, citizenship, un(der)employment and inequality in South Africa. At the same time, it contributes to a global understanding of how young people - men especially - manage economic uncertainty.

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