Animal work before capitalism: Sheep's reproductive labor in the ancient South CaucasusChazin, Hannah
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13916
Recent anthropological interest in “animal work” has focused on contemporary human‐animal relations. This article explores the “provocation” of animal work in the deeper past through an analysis of human‐herd animal relations in the Late Bronze Age (1500–1100 BCE) in the South Caucasus. Zooarchaeological and isotopic data reveal unexpected traces of the complexity and diversity of human and animal labor, with implications for political life. Challenging the anthropocentrism of (zoo)archaeological practice, animal labor provides a starting point for repurposing standard tools to ask new questions. Engaging with critical ethnographic perspectives on (animal) work, I consider how the question of animal work in the deeper past raises important questions about labor prior to or outside of capitalism—and its relationship to hierarchy and inequality, and the implications for archaeology more broadly. This challenge to narratives, within and beyond archaeology, that treat production in the deeper past as the origin or a prototype of production and inequality under capitalism also undermines accounts that link contemporary human‐animal relations to an origin in the deep past.
At home in my enemy's house: Israeli activists negotiating ethical values through ritualized Palestinian hospitalityMautner, Ori
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13925
Engaged Dharma Israel (EDI) activists resist their state's occupation of West Bank Palestinians by offering them solidarity and support. Whereas most Israelis consider such Palestinians’ houses unsafe, EDI participants “feel at home” when acting as polite guests there, experiencing the hospitality of their politically subordinate counterparts as poignant. Such activists value intimacy—crossing boundaries between self and other on both personal and national levels—which they substantially realize during their visits. However, they also seek to promote Israelis’ and Palestinians’ mutual autonomy, or nonintervention in each other's personal and communal affairs, an often‐competing value that the visits likewise help effectuate. These capacities of hospitality result from its ritualized nature—namely, its tendency to follow conventional scripts that do not require certain inner states (e.g., sincerity). Hospitality can therefore be usefully approached as a ritualized arena that enables people to promote multiple values, or culturally valorized ideals, including ones frequently found in tension. This ability of hospitality to work out and negotiate participants’ plural ethical commitments is embedded in the power dynamics and political inequalities that normally characterize hospitality events.
Genocide‐time: Political violence reckoning in RwandaNsabimana, Natacha
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13927
This article looks at how political violence in Rwanda, that of the genocide against Tutsi in 1994 and beyond, is remembered, narrated, and embedded in everyday sociality. It makes two related arguments. Taking the aftermath of Rwanda's Gacaca courts (a transitional justice mechanism implemented between 2005 and 2012) as my point of entry, I argue first that violence, though narrated as past in these courts, is imagined as returning in the future, and the present is the space to prepare for this inevitable return. This structuring temporal logic, or genocide‐time, undergirds everyday social relations between the protagonists of Gacaca courts years after their official end. Second, both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide claim forms of racialized victimhood, a legacy of European imperial categorizations of Rwandans into Hutus and Tutsis. Genocide‐time signals a temporal moment in which ethnic categories, crucial for colonial management, become racialized and deeply entangled with political violence. Shared claims to racialized victimhood today, I argue, index this longer history.
Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidenceLacy, Sarah; Ocobock, Cara
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13914
The Paleo‐fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer,” continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence, which reflects a failure to question how modern gender roles color our reconstructions of the past. Here we present examples to support women's roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft‐cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials. By pulling together the current state of the archaeological evidence along with the modern human physiology presented in the accompanying paper (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue), we argue that not only are women well‐suited to endurance activities like hunting, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting in the Paleolithic. Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.
Fear the Native woman: Femininity, food, and power in the sixteenth‐century North Carolina PiedmontBriggs, Rachel V.; Rodning, Christopher B.; Beck, Robin A.; Moore, David G.
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13918
Native women in Indigenous‐Western colonial entanglements are often portrayed as passive agents with little transformative social power in an otherwise dynamic landscape. However, Native women throughout the European colonial world many times controlled the most important resource required by European colonists: the knowledge and materials necessary to transform raw materials into “food.” Their control over this invaluable resource provided Native women with avenues of power both within their own societies and in European colonies. Here, we explore constructions and perceptions of Native women's power during the period of sixteenth‐century Spanish expeditions into the Carolina Piedmont and mountains by reviewing documentary data from entradas led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, as well as archaeological data from the Indigenous town of Joara and the Spanish colonial outpost of Cuenca and Fort San Juan at the Berry site (31BK22), located near Morganton, North Carolina. Employing an Indigenous feminist framework, we argue that the power vested in Native women through their own societies, as well as by Spaniards through their dependence on them for survival, provided Native women with far greater agency and power in entanglements with Spanish colonists, and interactions with European colonists more broadly, than previously recognized.
Housing as asset and payment: Construction, speculation, and financialization at the European peripheryMusaraj, Smoki
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13913
Construction booms have dominated Albania's economy and politics since the late 1990s. These booms continued even during times of illiquidity. One of the sources of financing construction in Albania is the practice of klering (in‐kind payments). In this practice, developers pay subcontractors in (future) apartments in exchange for materials and labor. I argue that, in klering transactions, housing serves as an asset and a means of payment. The practice of klering emerged at the interface of postcommunist transformations, neoliberal reforms, and the fetishization of housing as an asset of more durable and multifaceted economic and cultural value. While grounded in the local histories and values of housing, klering is made possible by a fuzzy property regime, systemic corruption, and widespread informality. At the same time, klering echoes other global patterns pertaining to housing, such as the rise of asset economy, financialization, and money laundering through real estate purchases. The klering economy echoes speculative logics and practices that are prevalent across and that link centers and peripheries, formal and informal markets. These economic logics generate uncertainty and ambiguity; they mobilize social networks and cultural imaginaries; and they thrive on and further reproduce deep social and economic inequalities.
Woman the hunter: The physiological evidenceOcobock, Cara; Lacy, Sarah
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13915
Myths of “Man the Hunter” and male biological superiority persist in interpretations and reconstructions of human evolution. Although there are uncontroversial average biological differences between females and males, the potential physiological advantages females may possess are less well‐known and less well‐studied. Here we review and present emerging physiological evidence that females may be metabolically better suited for endurance activities such as running, which could have profound implications for understanding subsistence capabilities and patterns in the past. We discuss the role of estrogen and adiponectin as respective key modulators of glucose and fat metabolism, both of which are critical fuels during long endurance activities. We also discuss how differences in overall body composition, muscle fiber composition, the metabolic cost of load carrying, and self‐pacing may provide females with increased endurance capacities. Highlighting these potential advantages provides a physiological framework that complements existing archaeological (Lacy and Ocobock, this issue) and cultural work reassessing female endurance and hunting capabilities as well as the sexual division of labor. Such a holistic approach is critical to amending our current understanding of hu(wo)man evolution.
Incommunicable: Decolonizing perspectives on language and healthBriggs, Charles L.
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13917
This article fosters a new relationship between linguistic and medical anthropology by decolonizing foundational conceptions of language and health. It reintroduces John Locke as a philosopher‐physician who used diagnosis of language disorders to impose a regime of communicability—reducing language to exchanging transparent, stable, purely referential signs. By deeming white, elite, able‐bodied European men alone capable of enacting this self‐help program, he connected communicability to whiteness and turned it into a means of evaluating and subordinating all others. Communicability also enabled him to shape how physicians produce knowledge in empiricist, atheoretical, observational fashion. I then trace physician‐philosopher Frantz Fanon's critique of how colonialism denies communicability to racialized subjects. Fanon's analysis of colonial medicine shows how clinical encounters can produce incommunicable subjects. Given that constructions of communicability have become highly visible features of medical education and practice and social‐scientific research on it, the article extends Fanon's analysis of physician‐patient communication more generally to ask if contemporary efforts to regiment clinical interactions and assess the communicable success of patients and doctors alike turn them into sites of incommunicability—assessments of communicable failure—for both parties. The article ends by imagining worlds beyond the oppressive weight of communicability and the stigma of incommunicability.
Evolving payoff currencies through the construction of causal theoriesHong, Ze; Henrich, Joseph
2023 American Anthropologist
doi: 10.1111/aman.13926
Payoff‐biased cultural learning has been extensively discussed in the literature on cultural evolution, but where do payoff currencies come from in the first place? Are they products of genetic or cultural evolution? Here we present a simulation model to explore the possibility of novel payoff currencies emerging through a process of theory construction, where agents come up with “channels” via which different cultural traits contribute to some ultimate payoff and use such “channels” as intermediate payoff currencies to make trait‐updating decisions. We show that theory‐building as a strategy is mostly favored when the noise associated with the ultimate‐level payoff is high, selective pressures are strong, and the probability of arriving at the right theory is high. This approach provides insights into both the emergence of payoff currencies and the role of cognition for causal model building. We close by discussing the implications of our model for the broader question of causal learning in social contexts.