Anthropology
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Anthropology
Anthropology is the broad, comparative study of humanity across time and space. It examines humans as biological organisms, members of societies, creators of cultures, speakers of languages, users of technologies, and participants in changing ecological and political systems. The field is commonly organized around cultural or social anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology, although contemporary research frequently crosses these boundaries.
A defining feature of anthropology is its holistic approach. Anthropologists investigate subjects ranging from human evolution and ancient migration to family organization, religion, food, cities, medicine, technology, environmental change, race, identity, communication, and political institutions. Researchers combine ethnography, archaeological excavation, skeletal analysis, genetics, linguistic analysis, archival research, environmental evidence, and other methods to understand both human diversity and the processes that connect human societies.
Cultural and Social Anthropology
Cultural and social anthropology examines how people organize communities, create meaning, form relationships, establish institutions, and understand their worlds. Ethnographic research often involves sustained engagement with communities and everyday life, allowing anthropologists to study social practices in their cultural and historical settings.
Major subjects include kinship, marriage, family organization, food, religion, ritual, migration, gender, race, inequality, disability, cities, politics, economic systems, and environmental change. Anthropological studies of kinship have shown that concepts such as family, marriage, parenthood, and relatedness vary substantially among societies and continue to change with migration, reproductive technologies, economic transformation, and changing social norms.
Food provides another window into cultural life. Anthropologists examine how eating connects with identity, memory, sensory experience, ritual, economics, globalization, gender, social distinction, nutrition, and political power. Similar approaches are used to study sport, consumption, labor, material culture, and the body.
Urban anthropology investigates cities as spaces shaped by migration, development, architecture, inequality, property, segregation, infrastructure, and belonging. Anthropology also studies international development, tourism, public policy, capitalism, and institutions to understand how large political and economic systems are experienced in everyday life.
Linguistic Anthropology and Communication
Linguistic anthropology studies language as a form of social action. Rather than treating language only as a system of grammar and vocabulary, linguistic anthropologists investigate how communication creates identities, establishes authority, expresses emotion, transmits cultural knowledge, and shapes relationships.
Research addresses language revitalization, endangered languages, education, migration, citizenship, media, sexuality, race, ethnicity, law, political authority, and standards of linguistic correctness. Language ideologies—beliefs about which forms of speech are appropriate, prestigious, correct, or legitimate—can influence education, institutions, social inequality, and political participation.
Anthropologists also examine communication that extends beyond ordinary speech. Silence, gossip, music, sound, writing, images, digital media, and other communicative forms can carry culturally specific meanings. The development of writing and graphic communication is therefore studied using evidence from archaeology, linguistics, cognition, and ethnography.
Digital communication has expanded this field further. Smartphones, social media, online communities, artificial intelligence, and other technologies reshape how people maintain relationships, construct identities, exchange information, and understand social presence.
Archaeology and the Human Past
Archaeology investigates past societies through material remains such as settlements, buildings, tools, pottery, food remains, human and animal bones, monuments, landscapes, and other evidence. Archaeologists reconstruct patterns of migration, subsistence, trade, political organization, ritual, family relationships, environmental adaptation, and cultural change.
Modern archaeological research increasingly integrates techniques from genetics, chemistry, geology, remote sensing, and biological anthropology. Ancient DNA can reveal population movements and biological relationships, while isotope analysis can provide evidence about diet and geographic mobility. Lidar and other remote-sensing technologies allow researchers to identify landscapes, settlements, and archaeological features that may be difficult to observe from the ground.
Archaeological evidence has transformed understanding of migration. Rather than viewing ancient societies as isolated or static, research increasingly demonstrates extensive movement, exchange, intermarriage, and interaction among populations.
Archaeology also examines religion and ritual through architecture, artifacts, repeated practices, symbolic objects, burial traditions, and spatial organization. These approaches help researchers investigate belief and ceremonial life even in societies without written records.
Biological Anthropology and Human Evolution
Biological anthropology examines humans and other primates from evolutionary, ecological, genetic, anatomical, and behavioral perspectives. Human evolution is one of its central subjects.
Fossil, archaeological, and genomic evidence demonstrates that human evolution involved complex populations distributed across changing environments. Modern Homo sapiens emerged through a long evolutionary history in Africa involving geographically dispersed populations, movement, interaction, and genetic exchange.
Research on Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes has shown that these populations interbred with ancestors of some living humans. These discoveries have replaced simple models of isolated human lineages with more complex histories involving migration, population structure, and admixture.
Human evolution was influenced by environmental variability, diet, locomotion, cooperation, social organization, technology, culture, and changing habitats. Anthropologists increasingly emphasize habitat diversity rather than assuming that a single environment, such as open savanna, explains early hominin evolution.
Culture itself can affect biological evolution. Dietary practices, settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, disease environments, and other cultural behaviors can alter selective pressures, producing continuing interactions between cultural and genetic change.
Primatology and Human Behavior
Primatology contributes to anthropology by studying humans in relation to other primates. Comparative research examines parenting, social relationships, feeding behavior, locomotion, cognition, development, aging, disease transmission, and ecological adaptation.
Human-primate relationships are also studied through ethnoprimatology, which examines shared spaces where humans and other primates interact. These interactions may involve agriculture, conservation, tourism, religious beliefs, hunting, urban expansion, and environmental change.
Research on primate development emphasizes that cognition and behavior cannot always be understood independently of social environments, caregiving, learning, age, and life history. Studies of parental care and social relationships similarly provide comparative perspectives on the evolution of human family life and cooperation.
Anthropologists also examine the ethical responsibilities associated with primate research, including obligations toward animals, habitats, nearby communities, conservation programs, and long-term research sites.
Kinship, Family, and Migration
Kinship has long been central to anthropology. Researchers investigate how societies define relatives, inheritance, descent, marriage, residence, parenthood, and obligations among family members.
Archaeological, genetic, and isotopic evidence now allows scholars to examine prehistoric kinship as well. Burial patterns, ancient DNA, and patterns of mobility can reveal family relationships and marriage networks in populations that left no written records.
Migration frequently transforms kinship. Marriage may influence migration decisions, while migration can reshape households, gender roles, citizenship, language use, identity, and transnational family relationships.
Anthropologists study migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers not only through population statistics but also through experiences of borders, displacement, family separation, legal uncertainty, labor, language, and belonging.
Race, Identity, and Human Diversity
Anthropology has played an important role in examining both human biological variation and the historical development of racial classification.
Contemporary biological anthropology distinguishes population ancestry and genetic variation from socially constructed racial categories. Human biological diversity does not divide neatly into the broad racial categories historically used by governments and societies. At the same time, racial classifications have substantial social consequences because they affect institutions, identity, discrimination, access to resources, and lived experience.
Anthropologists also critically examine the discipline's own involvement in colonialism and historical racial classification. Research has documented how early anthropological institutions sometimes participated in systems that attempted to classify populations into supposedly fixed biological groups.
Modern scholarship increasingly emphasizes collaboration, community authority, ethical responsibility, and examination of the colonial structures that shaped earlier research.
Medical Anthropology and Human Health
Medical anthropology investigates how biological processes, cultural beliefs, social relationships, institutions, inequality, and history interact to shape health and illness.
Anthropologists study hospitals, physicians, public-health programs, disability, nutrition, epidemics, reproduction, aging, chronic illness, health disparities, and systems of care. Medical anthropology often works alongside epidemiology while emphasizing that disease patterns cannot always be understood without considering social and cultural contexts.
Evolutionary anthropology also contributes to health research. Human evolutionary history influences genetic variation, metabolism, immune responses, disease susceptibility, and interactions between bodies and modern environments.
Research among Indigenous populations demonstrates how rapid environmental and economic changes can interact with developmental histories, inequality, lifestyle, and biological processes to influence cardiometabolic health.
Environment, Climate, and Human Adaptation
Environmental anthropology studies relationships among people, landscapes, animals, climate, natural resources, knowledge systems, and political institutions.
Climate change has become an important area of anthropological research because communities experience environmental change through livelihoods, cultural traditions, local knowledge, institutions, technologies, and political systems. Anthropologists investigate adaptation, resilience, mitigation, energy transitions, displacement, environmental justice, and changing human-animal relationships.
Human evolutionary studies also demonstrate the importance of environmental variability. Changing climates and heterogeneous habitats influenced the environments in which early hominins lived and adapted.
Anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene examine not only environmental change itself but also how responsibility, inequality, knowledge, and power shape interpretations of planetary transformation.
Technology and Digital Anthropology
Anthropologists increasingly study computers, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, programming, cryptocurrencies, smartphones, and online communities as cultural phenomena.
Digital technologies are not treated simply as technical tools. They are embedded in labor systems, institutions, political economies, identities, cultural assumptions, and social relationships.
Research on smartphones demonstrates that the same technologies can strengthen relationships while also creating new forms of anxiety, inequality, surveillance, and social expectation. Studies of artificial intelligence similarly explore ideas about agency, intelligence, automation, expertise, and human-machine relationships.
Programming itself can be studied as cultural practice, shaped by gender, race, nationality, professional identity, labor markets, globalization, and changing ideas about expertise.
Museums, Heritage, and Repatriation
Anthropology and archaeology have historically been closely connected with museums. Collections of cultural objects, archaeological materials, and human remains contributed significantly to the development of the disciplines, but many collections were assembled under colonial or unequal conditions.
Modern anthropology therefore examines provenance, repatriation, cultural patrimony, descendant-community authority, museum accountability, and ethical stewardship.
Repatriation involves returning ancestors or cultural belongings to originating communities. Research shows that repatriation does not necessarily end scientific inquiry. Instead, collaborative approaches can produce new relationships between museums, scholars, Indigenous communities, and descendant populations.
Museum decolonization extends beyond returning objects. It can involve changing how collections are interpreted, who has authority over exhibitions and research, how institutions acknowledge colonial histories, and how museums establish long-term partnerships with communities.
Digital documentation and three-dimensional recording are also creating new possibilities for heritage preservation, while raising questions about ownership, access, control, and representation.
Ethics and the Changing Discipline
Anthropology has undergone extensive debate about research ethics, colonial histories, representation, and relationships between researchers and the people they study.
Decolonizing anthropology involves reconsidering who conducts research, who determines research questions, whose knowledge is considered authoritative, how communities participate in interpretation, and who benefits from scholarly work.
Archaeological ethics similarly addresses looting, human remains, conflict, colonialism, cultural heritage, community participation, and professional responsibility.
Human-remains collections are receiving particular scrutiny. Anthropologists increasingly emphasize accountability, culturally appropriate treatment, consultation with descendant communities, repatriation, and careful evaluation of whether continued research is ethically justified.
These debates reflect a broader movement toward anthropology based on reciprocity, collaboration, transparency, and long-term relationships rather than treating communities primarily as objects of study.
Anthropology in a Changing World
Contemporary anthropology increasingly crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Researchers combine ethnography with genetics, archaeology with remote sensing, biological anthropology with social-network analysis, and linguistic anthropology with studies of law and digital media.
Emerging subjects include artificial intelligence, digital money, climate adaptation, infrastructure, loneliness, degrowth, human-animal relationships, visual politics, and changing forms of communication.
Anthropology's comparative perspective allows seemingly different subjects—such as hospitals, smartphones, migration, food, archaeological sites, museums, climate change, and human evolution—to be examined through a common question: how do humans create, experience, and transform their biological, social, cultural, technological, and environmental worlds?
Conclusion
Anthropology provides a broad framework for understanding humanity. It connects the deep evolutionary past with contemporary societies and combines biological, archaeological, linguistic, cultural, historical, and environmental evidence.
The discipline shows that human societies are neither biologically nor culturally static. Populations migrate and mix, languages change, technologies reshape relationships, institutions evolve, environments transform, and cultural meanings are continually negotiated.
At the same time, anthropology increasingly examines its own history and ethical responsibilities. Debates surrounding colonialism, race, repatriation, Indigenous authority, human remains, research ethics, and community participation have transformed how anthropological knowledge is produced.
By studying humans across cultures, environments, historical periods, and biological populations, anthropology offers an unusually wide perspective on both human diversity and the shared processes that have shaped the human experience.
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Foundations and Scope of Anthropology
Reviews the growing use of comics and graphic narratives as anthropological research methods, analytical tools, teaching devices, and ways of communicating ethnographic knowledge.
Examines how anthropologists have studied scientific knowledge, expertise, authority, and disputes over truth from the science wars to contemporary debates.
Surveys the extraordinary range of subjects anthropologists investigate, from human evolution and archaeology to religion, technology, language, identity, and everyday culture.
Reviews anthropological approaches to morality, ethical experience, virtue, ordinary ethics, political life, and culturally situated ideas of right conduct.
Examines development agencies, aid institutions, poverty programs, expert knowledge, neoliberalism, corporations, and the ethnography of international development.
Explores how ethnographers study computers, online communities, communication technologies, digital politics, identity, and everyday technological practices.
Reviews how anthropologists study tourists, destinations, cultural encounters, economic impacts, ecotourism, and relationships between visitors and host communities.
Reviews urban anthropology and the study of migration, segregation, globalization, architecture, inequality, space, and everyday life within cities.
Surveys anthropological research showing how emotions are interpreted, expressed, categorized, and experienced differently within cultural and social settings.
Introduces anthropology as the holistic study of humans through biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology.
Cultural and Social Anthropology
Examines how Himalayan communities draw on ancestral food knowledge and relationships with forests to respond to climate and supply-chain disruptions.
Explores how migrants maintain cultural identity, memory, family connections, and belonging through ingredients, cooking practices, and food traditions.
Examines sovereignty, settler colonialism, Indigenous studies, anthropology, representation, political authority, and changing relationships between scholars and Indigenous communities.
Examines anthropology's historical entanglement with colonial racial classification and the scientific study of human difference in British India.
Uses biological anthropology and evolutionary biology to examine common claims linking racial categories with athletic ability, intelligence, and health.
Reports ethnographic research across multiple countries showing how smartphones reshape home, aging, communication, migration, relationships, and everyday social life.
Describes ethnographic research with U.S. teenagers showing how phones simultaneously strengthen relationships, generate anxiety, and reproduce social inequalities.
Examines emotion as socially produced through language, interaction, institutions, ideology, vulnerability, political conditions, and relationships between people.
Uses anthropology to examine the cultural importance of older people, intergenerational knowledge, care, memory, and social responsibility.
Reviews anthropology's contributions to climate science, adaptation, resilience, mitigation, energy transitions, environmental politics, and possible alternative futures.
Explains the distinction between biological human variation and socially constructed racial classifications while examining the real consequences of racialization.
Reviews anthropological studies of rapidly changing Asian cities, concentrating on spatial exclusion, development, displacement, property, inequality, and belonging.
Explores disability as a relational and culturally variable category shaped by institutions, technologies, families, activism, communication, and social inclusion.
Examines how climate change alters relationships connecting humans, domesticated animals, wildlife, landscapes, livelihoods, and conservation systems.
Surveys anthropological research on relationships between cultural systems, environmental knowledge, livelihoods, adaptation, and contemporary climate change.
Uses food to explore culturally shaped experiences of taste, smell, memory, ritual, social distinction, identity, and everyday sensory life.
Examines changing understandings of kinship through same-sex families, assisted reproduction, marriage practices, and culturally diverse definitions of family.
Examines how gendered violence, reproduction, nationalism, domestic life, militarization, and political conflict become embedded within everyday experience.
Investigates how genomic science, ancestry research, identity, medicine, and population genetics can interact with socially constructed concepts of race.
Reviews anthropological approaches to food production, eating, identity, globalization, nutrition, inequality, ritual, gender, and political economy.
Reviews major changes in kinship theory involving gender, power, history, reproduction, marriage, family organization, and everyday relationships.
Linguistic Anthropology and Communication
Reviews silence as a culturally meaningful form of communication connected with morality, power, emotion, resistance, memory, and social relationships.
Synthesizes archaeological, linguistic, cognitive, and ethnographic research on the emergence and development of writing and other graphic communication systems.
Reviews gossip as a widespread communicative practice involved in morality, reputation, secrecy, group formation, socialization, ethnography, and information control.
Explores how speech, music, sound, aesthetics, and patterned communication contribute to constructing and transforming ideas about race and ethnicity.
Examines how communication channels are socially created, controlled, blocked, interpreted, and transformed rather than functioning as neutral conduits for information.
Examines how schools and societies create ideas about correct language and how these standards interact with identity, inequality, and linguistic diversity.
Reviews linguistic research on how sexuality, gender, identity, prejudice, political discourse, and social categories are created and contested through communication.
Introduces the study of language as social action connecting communication with culture, politics, identity, power, history, and social institutions.
Examines community-led efforts to revitalize endangered and dormant languages through education, media, technology, music, documentation, and intergenerational transmission.
Reviews research on Indigenous North American languages, language ideologies, identity, political economy, revitalization, and culturally situated communication.
Archaeology, Heritage, and the Human Past
Reviews new evidence concerning Paranthropus boisei and its place alongside other hominins within the complex evolutionary history of eastern Africa.
Examines monumental Neolithic cemeteries in northern France and what burial patterns reveal about kinship, status, gender, ritual, and social change.
Reflects on returning an ancestor's remains to Vanuatu and the possibilities for Indigenous solidarity, institutional accountability, relationship-building, and repair.
Describes genetic reconstruction of a multigenerational Bronze Age pastoral family and evidence for marriage networks and female mobility.
Surveys current archaeological research on East Africa's long human history, trade networks, communities, political systems, mobility, and changing interpretations of the past.
Reviews how lidar is transforming archaeological landscape research while discussing interpretation, chronology, spatial scale, field verification, and methodological limitations.
Reflects on the development of bioarchaeology and its integration of skeletal evidence with social, archaeological, historical, and ethical questions.
Uses reported British Museum thefts to examine collection management, provenance, museum accountability, legal restrictions, and debates surrounding restitution.
Proposes archaeological reclamation as a way for communities to recover meaningful places, ancestors, material heritage, and historical narratives affected by colonialism.
Discusses archaeological and ancient-DNA evidence showing substantial migration and biological diversity in early medieval British communities.
Combines ancient DNA and isotope evidence to connect migration into the Maya region with the spread and increased importance of maize agriculture.
Describes how collaborative repatriation can reshape archaeological research while increasing community authority over ancestors, heritage, and research questions.
Explores “propatriation,” in which museums develop continuing collaborative relationships with communities after cultural belongings have been returned.
Brings Indigenous and Black perspectives together to examine repatriation, ancestral remains, sovereignty, museums, human rights, and colonial legacies.
Follows efforts to return sacred Mijikenda vigango statues to Kenya and examines the practical and ethical challenges surrounding museum repatriation.
Examines how material evidence can illuminate ritual performance, experience, power, symbolism, social relationships, and culturally distinctive forms of action.
Reviews archaeological research on the formation of ethnic identities through migration, colonialism, slavery, politics, religion, persistence, and economic change.
Uses strontium isotope evidence from burials to investigate migration, marriage, and the spread of farming into southeastern Europe.
Examines ancient Mediterranean migration and colonial settlement while reconsidering older archaeological models shaped by modern nationalism and colonial assumptions.
Reviews how archaeologists identify and interpret ritual practices through architecture, artifacts, symbolism, social organization, material culture, and repeated action.
Biological Anthropology and Human Evolution
Reviews evidence linking aging, health, and social relationships across nonhuman primates and considers implications for understanding human social aging.
Reviews how skeletal form can illuminate activity, locomotion, labor, growth, and physical behavior while emphasizing methodological and interpretive limitations.
Examines biological variation, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, sex estimation, gender theory, and efforts to move beyond overly rigid binary frameworks.
Reflects on the century since the description of Australopithecus africanus and Africa's central place in scientific research on human origins.
Examines why broad racial categories are poor substitutes for ancestry and individual biological variation in medicine and health research.
Reviews how social-network structure affects disease transmission in humans and other primates and how comparative approaches can improve both fields.
Reviews environmental evidence associated with early hominins and challenges simple models linking human evolution exclusively to expanding open savannas.
Reviews fossil and genomic evidence showing that modern human ancestry emerged through complex population histories extending deep into the African past.
Examines human aging through evolutionary life-history theory, including reproduction, energetic investment, environment, genetics, physiology, and longevity.
Connects field observations of orangutan mothers with broader questions about primate development, parenting, learning, and human family experience.
Explores changing interpretations of Neanderthal-human relationships following archaeological and genetic evidence for repeated interbreeding.
Reviews population genetics and biological anthropology research on ancestry, demographic history, human variation, and the limitations of biological race classifications.
Discusses evidence that early hominins may have scavenged animal bones for calorie-rich marrow before developing more sophisticated hunting technologies.
Summarizes research proposing that Homo sapiens emerged from interconnected but geographically and ecologically diverse populations distributed across Africa.
Examines how population structure, environmental pressures, social behavior, and genetic variation can sometimes produce relatively rapid evolutionary change.
Clarifies evolutionary relationships among humans, monkeys, apes, and their shared ancestors while explaining common misunderstandings about evolutionary ancestry.
Reviews archaeological and evolutionary evidence concerning the emergence of modern human behavior, ecology, cognition, and population expansion.
Shows how carbon and strontium isotopes preserved in teeth can reveal ancient hominin diet, geographic movement, social behavior, and habitat use.
Reviews evidence that cultural practices alter environments and selective pressures, creating continuing interactions between genetic and cultural evolution.
- Introduction to Human Evolution | Smithsonian Human Origins Program | Smithsonian Institution | n.d.
Provides an accessible overview of human evolution, bipedalism, brain expansion, tool use, language, culture, fossils, genetics, and paleoanthropology.
Medical, Applied, Technological, and Emerging Anthropology
Examines cryptocurrencies and other digital money through linguistic anthropology, semiotics, regulation, technology, political economy, social meaning, and everyday exchange.
Reviews anthropological research on images, visual politics, circulation, aesthetics, historical memory, repair, representation, and the social power of seeing.
Treats coding as a cultural and economic practice shaped by labor, race, gender, nationality, expertise, inequality, globalization, and artificial intelligence.
Explores how roads, railways, cities, and large infrastructure projects become material expressions of geopolitical power, development narratives, and international influence.
Examines how anthropologists interpret people's motives and proposes clearer distinctions between accepting, bracketing, and analytically reconstructing explanations for action.
Examines how concepts of economic and social growth shape institutions and aspirations while considering anthropological perspectives on degrowth and alternative futures.
Reviews hospitals as medical institutions, infrastructures, workplaces, ethnographic sites, and places where inequalities and alternative forms of care intersect.
Examines the colonial histories of human-remains collections and emerging approaches to research ethics, accountability, cultural variation, care, and institutional responsibility.
Reviews anthropological work on nuclear technology, radiation, risk, expertise, affected communities, colonial geographies, environmental legacies, and everyday coexistence.
Explores how archaeological concepts and methods might reconstruct the material histories of nonhuman animals such as birds, elephants, beavers, and termites.
Reviews how biological anthropologists use censuses, vital records, church registers, institutional archives, and digital technologies to study population health and demography.
Reframes loneliness as an issue involving individual experience, community relationships, social institutions, political economy, structural conditions, empathy, and belonging.
Examines how artificial intelligence, digital platforms, capitalism, misinformation, and changing information environments create new challenges for ethnographic research.
Explores coastal and amphibious environments through anthropology, examining water, land, mapping, infrastructure, environmental transformation, and changing ways of dwelling.
Reviews anthropological debates about sex work, trafficking, labor, consent, migration, mobility, gender, displacement, livelihoods, and global political economy.
Examines cardiometabolic health through interactions among evolutionary history, development, rapid environmental change, inequality, lifestyle, and Indigenous experiences.
Reviews physicians who also practice anthropology and how clinical experience, ethnography, and medical institutions contribute to understanding health and illness.
Reviews sensory ethnography and culturally variable relationships among vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, material culture, film, and social experience.
Examines hearing, vision, disability, communication, technology, identity, cultural competence, and ways societies shape the experience of sensory difference.
Examines growing collaboration between anthropology and epidemiology in understanding disease patterns, health behavior, populations, culture, and public-health interventions.
Anthropology as a Discipline
Examines anthropology's colonial history and debates over how research institutions, methods, knowledge production, and professional relationships might be transformed.
Discusses efforts to build more ethical anthropology through long-term relationships, community partnerships, reciprocity, and changes in research practice.
Explains cultural anthropology as the study of the diverse ways people organize societies, create meaning, establish relationships, and understand their worlds.
Explores how anthropological perspectives can illuminate institutions, business practices, hidden assumptions, social relationships, and rapidly changing technological environments.
Reviews feminist contributions to anthropology in ethnography, medicine, science, economics, politics, race, gender, decolonization, and disciplinary theory.
Explores inequalities within anthropology concerning who conducts research, who receives professional opportunities, and whose interpretations become authoritative knowledge.
Discusses globalization, cultural flows, cosmopolitanism, cities, transnational connections, and the idea of cultures as open and continually changing processes.
Reconsiders cultural boundaries through the intellectual legacy of Franz Boas and examines how cultural distinctions can remain meaningful without being fixed or absolute.
Examines debates within American anthropology about science, disciplinary identity, professional institutions, public responsibility, and approaches to studying humanity.
Explores changing definitions of culture and relationships between archaeology, cultural anthropology, theory, and interpretations of human behavior.
Kinship, Marriage, Family, and Migration
Reviews archaeological, genetic, isotopic, and comparative evidence concerning prehistoric kinship systems from hunter-gatherer societies through agricultural and complex societies.
Examines transracial adoption through kinship, race, identity, family experience, inequality, and the historical institutions surrounding adoption.
Uses migrants' experiences to illuminate global migration systems, family separation, labor, inequality, borders, mobility, and the human consequences of migration policies.
Describes research linking matrilineal household organization among the Mosuo with women's social relationships, autonomy, family structure, and health.
Examines the experiences of African asylum seekers through migration routes, displacement, border systems, legal uncertainty, and everyday survival.
Reviews how marriage shapes migration and how migration transforms family formation, gender roles, citizenship, household organization, and transnational relationships.
Explores relationships between intimacy, marriage, colonial encounters, Indigenous peoples, racial classification, and nation-building.
Reviews how migration and language interact through identity, institutions, assimilation, racialization, citizenship, education, and transnational social life.
Examines cousin marriage and other forms of consanguinity in relation to demography, genetics, reproductive behavior, cultural practices, and human evolutionary history.
Reassesses archaeological approaches to migration and argues for careful methods for identifying ancient population movement through material evidence.
Religion, Ritual, Race, and Identity
Explores contemporary anthropological approaches to animism and culturally diverse understandings of personhood, spirits, landscapes, animals, and material environments.
Examines evolutionary approaches to religion and considers how imagination, cooperation, social learning, symbolism, and culture contributed to human belief systems.
Uses anthropological research on religious belief to examine how people establish trust, truth, authority, evidence, and social belonging.
Explores why ritual remains widespread across human societies and how collective practices can influence identity, cooperation, emotion, memory, and group solidarity.
Examines race as a social classification with powerful historical and material consequences despite poor correspondence with discrete biological human populations.
Discusses anthropology's contributions to understanding the historical construction of racial categories and their relationships with institutions, inequality, and identity.
Examines how mass media, digital communication, sound, images, migration, and public institutions transform religious authority and religious diversity.
Reviews relationships among religion, schooling, missionary histories, states, development, knowledge, morality, and social transformation across African societies.
Reviews evolutionary, cognitive, psychological, and cultural explanations for religious beliefs, rituals, supernatural concepts, cooperation, and social organization.
Uses archaeology to examine changing social identities, colonial encounters, racial classifications, households, and cultural interaction in Spanish colonial California.
Language, Law, Media, and Institutions
Examines intersections between legal anthropology and linguistic anthropology, emphasizing how language structures authority, interpretation, institutions, and legal knowledge.
Reviews ethnographic approaches to policymaking, bureaucracies, institutions, experts, implementation, political processes, and the gap between formal rules and lived experience.
Uses anthropology to examine cultural assumptions surrounding artificial intelligence and how societies imagine agency, intelligence, technology, and machine autonomy.
Examines how citizenship and belonging are produced through language, public discourse, migration, media, nationalism, bureaucracies, and everyday communication.
Compares machine learning with human childhood learning and emphasizes the importance of social relationships, culture, embodiment, interaction, and shared environments.
Reviews how language and food interact in constructing identity, value, authenticity, ethnicity, class, social relationships, and economic exchange.
Reviews linguistic anthropology of new media and examines how communication technologies reshape language practices, relationships, social expectations, and ideas about mediation.
Explores jurisdiction as both a legal and linguistic practice through which institutions establish authority over people, places, disputes, and forms of knowledge.
Reviews how societies establish credible evidence and authoritative knowledge through language, performance, institutions, expertise, and culturally specific communicative practices.
Examines roads, electricity, media systems, water networks, and other infrastructures as technological systems with cultural meanings and social consequences.
Labor, Consumption, Bodies, and Material Culture
Examines the evolution of division of labor and how cooperation, specialization, food sharing, ecology, and social organization contributed to human adaptability.
Reviews archaeological, physiological, and ethnographic evidence relevant to assumptions about rigid gender divisions in hunting and subsistence.
Examines consumption as a cultural and economic process shaped by capitalism, identity, morality, class, commodities, globalization, and social distinction.
Reviews anthropological approaches to embodiment and explores interactions among biology, environment, culture, inequality, epigenetics, and lived bodily experience.
Reviews archaeological investigation of recent and contemporary phenomena including conflict, industry, waste, migration, material culture, heritage, and globalization.
Reviews anthropological studies of sport through nationalism, gender, race, globalization, embodiment, performance, commercialization, and social identity.
Proposes understanding material culture through dynamic relationships among materials, environments, making, movement, perception, organisms, and human activity.
Explores approaches combining archaeology and ethnography to investigate relationships among material remains, memory, contemporary communities, landscapes, and multiple understandings of time.
Uses archaeological evidence to examine long-term changes in human social and political organization across societies in different parts of the world.
Reviews globalization and labor through gender, migration, manufacturing, household economies, flexible employment, inequality, and changing international production systems.
Environmental and Health Anthropology
Uses intersectional approaches to examine how environments are understood through materiality, knowledge, identity, inequality, bodies, politics, and social position.
Reviews how evolutionary history, natural selection, population change, genetic variation, and past environments influence contemporary patterns of human health and disease.
Reviews how anthropologists engage with the Anthropocene through ethnography, interdisciplinary collaboration, environmental history, multispecies research, and critiques of planetary narratives.
Examines how people perceive environmental change through local observations, scientific measurements, cultural knowledge, weather experience, and changing landscapes.
Examines food insecurity through migration, family life, social relationships, culture, economic constraints, health, and the emotional meanings attached to food.
Explores meat consumption as a cultural practice shaped by environment, economics, dietary traditions, symbolism, identity, and changing food systems.
Examines relationships among diet, cultural practices, nutrition, health, modernization, markets, and changing food systems.
Examines ways evolutionary anthropology can contribute to applied questions involving health, development, demography, conservation, inequality, and human behavior.
Examines anthropological approaches to environmental change, human influence on landscapes, political ecology, science, and distinctions between society and nature.
Reviews evidence concerning climatic variability, changing habitats, adaptation, behavioral flexibility, and environmental influences during human evolutionary history.
Museums, Heritage, and Archaeological Ethics
Examines return, mobility, memory, ancestry, heritage, and archaeological approaches to African diasporic communities and their relationships with places of origin.
Explores digital recording and three-dimensional documentation of archaeological and heritage sites in South Africa and questions surrounding access and preservation.
Examines controversies surrounding museum collections while considering provenance, research, preservation, ethical reform, public access, and institutional accountability.
Reviews museum decolonization, Indigenous participation, repatriation, representation, collections care, tribal museums, collaboration, and changing curatorial practices.
Describes research tracing timber used at Chaco Canyon and considers ancient transportation, resource procurement, labor, environmental change, and monumental construction.
Examines debates surrounding human remains from Paviland Cave in Wales through archaeology, museum stewardship, local identity, scientific research, and repatriation.
Uses heritage work in Rwanda to examine colonial legacies, archaeological practice, museums, local authority, historical narratives, and community participation.
Explores debates over cultural patrimony, African art, colonial collecting, restitution, museums, ownership, cultural identity, and international heritage.
Examines the history and ethics of museum collections of human remains and changing expectations concerning research, consent, descendants, and repatriation.
Reviews ethical issues in archaeology involving communities, human remains, looting, conflict, colonialism, professional responsibility, public engagement, and interpretations of the past.
Human Evolution and Primatology
Uses the fossil record of extinct primates to examine extinction risk, environmental change, geographic range, ecology, adaptation, and modern primate conservation.
Reviews Asian hominin fossils, genetic evidence, Homo erectus, population continuity, gene flow, paleoanthropological history, and unresolved questions about human evolution.
Reconsiders hunter-gatherer studies in debates about cooperation, competition, sharing, violence, social organization, and the evolution of human behavior.
Reviews ethical responsibilities in primate fieldwork toward study animals, ecosystems, local communities, conservation efforts, researchers, and long-term field sites.
Examines primate development and emphasizes how social environments, learning, caregiving, age, and life histories influence comparisons of cognition and behavior.
Reviews debates about how primate species are defined and classified and considers implications for evolution, biodiversity, systematics, and conservation.
Reviews genomic discoveries concerning Neanderthals and Denisovans and their implications for admixture, migration, ancestry, population structure, and modern human evolution.
Examines shared ecological and social spaces occupied by humans and other primates and integrates anthropology, primatology, conservation, behavior, and human-animal relationships.
Reviews connections among primate diet, feeding behavior, anatomy, biomechanics, ecology, locomotion, and evolutionary adaptation.
Compares paternal care across humans and other primates through evolutionary ecology, hormones, infant development, mating systems, family structure, and reproductive strategies.
