American Anthropologist

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13276

Thomas, Deborah A.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13377

Zee, Jerry C.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13360

This article explores Chinese environmental politics as a complex strategy for engineering weather and climate at national and then planetary scales. It argues that in times of meteorological insecurity, we can explore diverse sites in China's state environmental political apparatus as attempts at coordinating diverse physical, natural, and social processes into components of manipulable weather systems. Through considering two programs of state environmental intervention, the article explores “infrastructure” as a political practice and opportunity. First, in considering aerial seeding and ecological migration programs in the context of anti‐dust storm programs spearheaded by state forestry agencies, I show how environmental engineering involves the continual retooling of wind flows, local ecologies, and ex‐herder precarity into a variegated strategy of atmospheric control for downwind places in the path of dust storms. Then, I explore how the recent ascendance of the Chinese state in international climate accords builds on a decade‐long theorization of “socialist ecological civilization” by Party theorists. In aligning the longevity of state socialism with the sustaining of planetary climate systems, I argue that Chinese international politics increasingly rely on a vision of China as infrastructural to the political and climatic apparatus of the planet as such. [climate change, environment, infrastructure, dust storms, China]

Graeter, Stefanie

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13367

How much is a body with minerals worth? Through the lens of lead‐exposure politics, this article analyzes how people living near the mineral‐storage yards of Peru's seaport of El Callao enact a response to this question. El Callao's port serves as a transport and storage hub for metal particulates awaiting foreign markets. The infrastructure required for this undertaking—trucks, roads, and repositories—also generate conditions of metal leakage and human exposure. Over the decades, low‐income port residents have effectively acted as human infrastructures of toxic storage, a service for which they are selectively paid through ad hoc indemnification practices by multinational metal‐trading corporations. While arguing that such infrastructural incorporations materialize the racialized ethics of Peru's extractive economy, the article also shows how denouncing lead exposure has generated new political means for port residents to access previously unavailable infrastructure (water, electricity, building materials) for their formalizing or informal settlements as well as other basic necessities of life. Decades after the “discovery” of lead at the port, these isolated gift exchanges and infrastructural improvements provide corporations a palliative approach to lead remediation and indemnification, producing a state of ongoing ethical deferral of complete lead eradication, which keeps minerals moving swiftly through the port and inside the bodies of residents. [infrastructure, ports, toxicity, ethics, corporate social responsibility, racial extractive capitalism, Peru]

Stahl, Ann Brower

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13365

An urgency compels us to engage how archaeology relates to contemporary situations and future dilemmas as citizens anxiously contemplate their futures. We see “crowd‐sourced” efforts to define pressing questions. A welter of theoretical approaches promises new insight into our relationally configured worlds. We couple awareness of the situated character of knowledge with a commitment to its empirical grounding. In light of this contemporary frame, I explore principles of an “effective archaeology” that imagines its “impacts” beyond narrow “uses.” By attending to how we make facts, archives, and narratives; by placing Western knowledge in productive dialogue with knowledge grounded in other epistemologies; and by embracing a disciplinary responsibility to expand and enlarge imaginings of futures through evidentially robust and critically engaged practice, effective archaeologies hold promise to build toward more equitable futures. [archaeology, epistemology, ontology, knowledge production, collaboration]

James, Gary D.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13366

Allostasis (literally “stability through change”) is a key concept for understanding how human behavior and physiological adaptation are related. The continuous variation in arterial blood pressure is an exemplar of allostasis. The purpose of this article is to describe theoretical and methodological developments that have led to an improved biocultural understanding of arterial blood pressure responses to everyday life in humans using allostasis as a paradigm. Arterial pressure variation is directly related to lifestyle, or more specifically, the things that people do, think, and experience in their daily lives. Allostatic patterns of arterial pressure variation also change with life‐history events. Patterns are altered as people age and take on differing social roles, and patterns vary between men and women. The cumulative effects of allostasis is the development of allostatic load, or a “wearing out” of the system. Studies have linked allostatic load to the development of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). However, the rate and trajectory of allostatic load through adult life is effectively dictated by developmental and evolutionary processes that impact allostasis and will vary among populations as a consequence of developmental, heritable, environmental, and cultural differences. Allostasis is the paradigm for biocultural studies of arterial blood pressure. [allostasis, adaptation, blood pressure, life history, biocultural]

M. Beliso‐De Jesús, Aisha; Pierre, Jemima

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13351

Speed, Shannon

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13359

Since the 2016 presidential election, there has been a resurgence of openly white supremacist discourse and action in the United States. The public debate following the election often suggested that Trump and his followers represented a backlash against the assumed progress of a multicultural and potentially even postracial society. However, the assumption inherent in this perspective, that white supremacy can be voted out or voted back in, is problematic. In this article, based on ten years of research with Indigenous women migrants from Mexico and Central America, I will apply an analytic of settler colonialism in order to explore how white supremacy is structured into our institutions and everyday social relations. In particular, I will consider the intersection of capitalism and the settler state, and how the changing needs of capitalism shape discourses of race differently over time yet remain fundamentally underwritten by white supremacist assumptions. Examining the shift from neoliberal multiculturalism to what I call neoliberal multicriminalism, I argue that neoliberal multiculturalism, with its accompanying discourses of tolerance and rights, may have reached its limits, and that the resurgence of open white supremacy is a response to the changing needs of white settler capitalist power. [white supremacy, patriarchy, settler colonialism, neoliberalism, migration]

Pierre, Jemima

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13352

This article argues that the vernacular of development, as deployed in and about African communities, is a racial vernacular. It is a racial vernacular of development because it is deployed within, in this case, the resource extraction industry (as well as within the broader development enterprise) in ways that sustain racial thought, index particular racial meanings, and prescribe social practices. How do we understand the processes through which racial codes are embedded and naturalized in practices ranging from the management and bureaucracy of resource extractions to the power structure of the world system that places African sovereignty below Western nongovernmental organizations and corporations? The development complex incorporates the unequal material relationships and processes that structure engagement between the Global South and the Global North, and its racial vernacular is the primary discursive scaffolding for these relationships. [development, race, resource extraction, Ghana]

Rana, Junaid

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13355

This article considers how anthropology can grapple with white supremacy by conceptualizing it as global and in relation to religion. Drawing on the exchange published as A Rap on Race between anthropologist Margaret Mead and the writer James Baldwin, I address the connection of religion and moral belief to racism, white supremacy, and the critique of racial liberalism. In their conversation, Mead and Baldwin discuss Christianity and white supremacy revealing a complex conjuring of Islam and Muslims that I describe as racecraft. The racialization of religion and the theological components of white supremacy have a particular relevance to the construction of anti‐Muslim racism. To describe how ethnography and anthropological theory can intervene, I offer an example of the study of white supremacy and discuss the implications. [racism, religion, white supremacy, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin]

Shankar, Shalini

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13354

In this article, I examine how white supremacy is reproduced and circulated through advertising. I explore the shift from the racial and ethnic specificities of “multiculturalism” to the more open‐ended concept of “diversity,” which indexes difference in unspecific and nonthreatening ways. How diversity is represented in general‐market advertising and how it differs from multicultural advertising offers a window into white supremacy and the role of advertising in furthering its agenda. Advertising has long acted as a vehicle for white supremacy, and by analyzing diversity, there is something to be learned about the current work done by this medium. [race/ethnicity, advertising, media, diversity, white supremacy]

Rosa, Jonathan; Díaz, Vanessa

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13353

This article presents a theory of raciontologies—the fundamentally racialized grounding of various states of being—that sheds light on complex forms of institutional racism and white supremacy. We are interested in exploring not only how institutional contexts and processes function as sites or vehicles for the reproduction of white supremacy but more specifically how institutions become endowed with the capacity to act in their own right. This approach represents a raciontological perspective that attends to the central role that race plays in constituting modern subjects and objects in relation to particular states of being. Raciolontologies powerfully shape how entities become endowed with the capacity to engage in particular acts, while also conditioning perceptions, experiences, and material groundings of reality. Our theorization of raciontologies combines anthropological analyses of institutional racism and ontologies beyond the human. These analyses point to the role of institutions in the reproduction of white supremacy and reimagine the range of entities capable of action, respectively. The broader goal is to suggest how new ways of understanding the raciontological nature of institutional enactments of white supremacy can inform antiracist theories of change. [race, ontology, institutional racism, white supremacy]

Ralph, Laurence

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13356

This article examines the life and career of Richard Zuley, a Chicago police detective turned military interrogator who tortured criminal suspects in both the United States and Guantánamo Bay. Among the police officers and military personnel who have commented publicly on Zuley's career, there exists a consensus that his actions have undermined the integrity of the US criminal justice system and the international security state. The problem is that while acknowledging that Zuley's actions were unconscionable, they also implicitly characterize torturers like Zuley as exceptional. This poses the question: How do we understand the figure of Richard Zuley in a way that does not see the torture he enacted as an anomaly? The literature on white supremacy gives us a way forward. Building on this work, I argue that the ideology of white supremacy is a major component of the schema of racism that informs state‐sanctioned violence. By now, the schema of racism is so ingrained that it is subconsciously enacted in rationales for fighting terrorism and cannot be simply “unthought.” The irony is because schemas of racism cannot be unthought, they are naturalized and go unexamined in prevailing scholarship on governance and security. [policing, race, security, terrorism]

Beliso‐De Jesús, Aisha M.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13357

This article examines how white supremacy is embedded and also made invisible in the molding, crafting, and training of police‐recruit bodies. I use the term molding to describe the process of manufactured sculpting through the manipulable material of police recruits. Through ethnography of a composite police academy made up of academies from several US cities, this article demonstrates how white supremacy is ordered, maintained, infused, and embodied. I argue that the jungle academy produces a form of active reshaping of everyday young citizens into police through the recruit process: a physical, emotional, and mental re‐forming. This work is situated in scholarship on embodiment, race, and the state, and demonstrates how to methodologically examine the corporeal and ontological aspects of racialized state violence. It also demonstrates how an anthropology of white supremacy provides insight into how white governance is intimately tied to the embodiment of the state through the institution of the police. [white supremacy, police, race, gender, United States]

Perry, Keisha‐Khan Y.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13358

Black activists in Brazil have consistently reminded us that the violence of the military dictatorship (1964–1980) represented only one historical moment in the long history of white supremacist colonial violence and the legacy of slavery in the country. The resurgence of far‐right violence and politics in Brazil—specifically, the concerted attempt to repeal social gains for Blacks, women, and poor people—must be understood through this broad historical context of the ongoing enactment of white supremacy and must be read through an intersectional approach that reveals the vulnerabilities and exclusions that have further marginalized racialized and gendered populations, particularly Black women, from equal protection under laws and policies. [intersectionality, white supremacy, Black feminism, Brazil]

Dominguez, Virginia R.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13371

Roche, Gerald

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13372

Davis, Jenny L.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13373

Friedman, P. Kerim

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13374

Singer, Ruth

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13375

Shange, Savannah

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13369

Prazak, Miroslava

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13370

Meyers, Richard

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13349

Boris, Eileen

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13362

Babidge, Sally

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13363

Yarris, Kristin Elizabeth

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13361

Lambek, Michael

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13346

Perley, Bernard C.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13364

Wilson, Thomas M.

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13350

Abdelmonem, Angie

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13347

Dooren, Thom

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13376

2020 American Anthropologist

doi: 10.1111/aman.13368