American Anthropologist
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American Anthropologist
@amanthro.bsky.social
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American Anthropologist is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. The journal advances research on humankind in all its aspects.
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amanthro.bsky.social
New article alert! Check out "Tasting Red, Hearing Silk: Synesthesia, Sensory Labor, and the Social Aesthetics of Chefs" by Kelly Alexander. #Anthropology

doi.org/10.1111/aman...
December 3, 2025 at 5:28 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
New #OpenAccess article: "How to Fish With Respect: A Transformation of Human-Fish Relations in Riverside Amazonia" by Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie

doi.org/10.1111/aman...
December 1, 2025 at 5:55 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
New #OpenAccess article alert! Check out Eitan Wilf's "New Media Ecologies, Old Occupational Subjectivities and Practices: Tensions and Contradictions in Online Crowdfunding for the Arts in the Netherlands" #Anthropology

doi.org/10.1111/aman...
October 21, 2025 at 7:39 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
New Vital Topics Forum: "Archaeology, Politics, and Environmental Crisis." The fourteen contributions consider how the discipline might respond to our age of intertwined environmental crises. #Anthropology #Archaeology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1...
October 7, 2025 at 5:17 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Check out "'We Are All Implicated': An Interview With Korean Anthropologist Mun Young Cho" by Mun Young Cho, Yang Zhan, and Jing Xu. Out now! #Anthropology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
September 12, 2025 at 3:05 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Read Dela Kuma's new #OpenAccess article "Trade Networks and Consumer Practices in Amedeka, Ghana: Negotiating 'Nkudzedze' From the Late 19th to Mid-20th Centuries" #Anthropology #Archaeology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
September 10, 2025 at 10:35 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
New #OpenAccess article! Read "Learning to Love Rats: A Postwar Ecology in a Cambodian Minefield" by Darcie DeAngelo #Anthropology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
September 3, 2025 at 11:36 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
New issue alert! The September issue of American Anthropologist is out now. It features two special sections, a year-in-review article, a multimodal collection on vanishing fieldsites, and more! #Anthropology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15481433...
August 28, 2025 at 4:23 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
We're more than halfway through 2025, so we're revisiting some of the most-read AA articles so far this year! First up is Alpa Shah's "When decolonization is hijacked" #OpenAccess #Anthropology

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
August 20, 2025 at 4:23 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Jose Leonardo Santos's article, "'Eliminate Anthropology': Attitudes toward social science in the public discourse"

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Abstract: What do people think about anthropology and other disciplines in the social sciences and liberal arts? How do negative views of anthropology influence the discipline's future? A review of public discourse from news, commentaries, scholarly literature, monographs, and institutional reports reveals anthropology's current state and direction. The results point to great distress. Analysis demonstrates powerful disapproval of higher education, the liberal arts, and social sciences threatens the instruction, practice, and ethos of anthropology. Narrative domains in popular discourse reveal active attitudes demanding and executing audits, cuts, and closures of anthropology departments; legislation restricting teaching and research; and the dissolution of anthropology's legitimacy. This review demonstrates the existence and power of such popular narratives, analyzes how they reflect a common political-economic threat to the discipline, then asks difficult, critical questions before offering recommendations to confront one of the discipline's darkest moments.
July 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Mallory E. Matsumoto's article, "Friction in the field: Milpa, missionary, and scales of refusal in 1960s highland Guatemala"

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Abstract: This article takes a scalar view of “friction” (Tsing 2005) and “refusal” (Ortner 1995) between ethnography and the archive. The concept of friction was originally formulated in the context of a globalizing world, but friction's perception and experience are highly local. By recurrently destabilizing interactions, friction generates the constant possibility of contestation at the same time that it fosters ongoing renewal and reshuffling of social relations. Refusal, in turn, is shaped by a combination of individual agency and the contextual parameters delimiting any given social interaction. Based on a K'iche’ Maya narrative recorded by Catholic missionary James L. Mondloch in the area of Nahualá, Sololá, Guatemala, I illustrate how refusal not only informs interpretation of the oral history but shaped its 1968 telling. As debate continues over the ethics and logistics of working with legacy fieldwork data, I consider the frictions that anthropologists have to live with when working with archival data and those that we ourselves may generate.
July 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Carol Chan's article, "Hostile friendships: Dynamics of care and conflict between migrant women in Chile"

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Abstract: Friendships between low-wage migrant workers can provide mutual support and information, as well as generate suspicion, jealousy, and competition. Indonesian and Filipino migrant women in Chile maintain counter-intuitive social relations where, despite never fully resolving ongoing conflicts over money, men, or reputations, women continue to attend to new emergencies and provide significant economic, practical, or emotional support to one another. Such friendships take on a hostile quality, where women can be aggressive or antagonistic while caring for the other's needs. These friendships that endure despite open wounds raise questions about the nature of care and obligation in contemporary urban nonkin relations. They highlight how women affectively navigate the potential harm of friendship to survive structural and everyday violence from other social relations. In decentering the role of positive affect in analyses of friendship and caring relations, I propose that a focus on such “ambivalent relationality” can present us with more realistic, although perhaps unromantic, models of how to care for one another in an imperfect world.
July 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Emma Nelson Bunkley's article, "The weight of rumor"

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Abstract: In Senegal, Type II diabetes often causes rapid weight loss. Weight loss is usually the reason women will finally seek out a biomedical diagnosis for their ailment. Loss of weight has many negative connotations for Senegalese women—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, financial troubles, or an unhappy marriage. When women lose weight, they become the subject of rumors and gossip in their communities. This leads to isolation. Research has shown that isolation has deleterious mental health effects, especially in places as communal as Senegal. Worsening mental health can also exacerbate diabetes. This article explores Senegalese women's experiences with weight loss due to Type II diabetes and the effects their weight loss, in addition to their diabetes, has on their lived experience and their social networks.
July 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM
amanthro.bsky.social
Lorenzo Ferrarini's article, "Tools for relatedness: 'Fetishes' in Burkina Faso and the work of enacted metaphors"

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Abstract In West Africa, certain objects can act in the world and interact with people as subjects. Labeled “fetishes” by Europeans, these material things have generated centuries of debates on the nature of their agency. In this article, I rely on participant fieldwork as a student in a group of initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso, which involved using my own fetishes as operator and other people's as client. Starting from this ethnography, I suggest that the agency of fetishes is neither primary to their materiality nor ascribed by humans. Instead, it arises by mediating a three-way identification between the person who uses them and a spirit. Despite recent anthropological critiques of their use to explain away practices and beliefs, I propose using metaphors to make sense of the practical ways people enact such identification with powerful domains of being. Often found alongside metonymies, these enacted metaphors are at work in sacrifice, in embodiment, and in the sharing of substances, where a fetish acts as the body of a normally intangible spirit. While rejecting a symbolic reading of fetishes, I propose reevaluating metaphors as tools to practice relatedness and expand the limits of one's life-world.
July 21, 2025 at 1:38 PM