Anthropology Today最新文献

The UK's October 2024 agreement to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius marks a turning point in Indian Ocean decolonization, though Mauritius must delegate control of Diego Garcia back to the UK for 99 years to maintain the US military base. This article traces the forced displacement of Chagossians from 1968-1973 and their current responses as their future hangs in the balance. Despite promises of resettlement in parts of the archipelago, many Chagossians remain wary of their continued exclusion from decisions about their ancestral homeland. Their experiences reveal the human costs when military strategy outweighs indigenous rights.

This article examines how modern anti-natalist movements have emerged in Japan, India, China and the United States. Drawing on interviews, online discussions and public protests, it explores these movements' distinctive secular understanding of human procreation. While traditional societies interpreted birth using religious or spiritual frameworks, anti-natalists consider procreation an ethical decision shaped by legal reasoning, scientific knowledge and existential philosophy. They portray birth as a random event subject to calculation, raise questions about consent to life and position parents as ethically responsible ‘small gods’. These movements, which have found resonance among urban youth, point to deep changes in how people think about family ties and social obligations. Questions about having children have become more complex as reproductive technologies multiply and environmental pressures mount. What was once taken for granted now prompts serious ethical reflection.

Drawing on fresh ethnographic research, this article examines how President Japarov and Security Chief Tashiev built their political alliance in post-2020 Kyrgyzstan. Their ‘tandem’ rule rests on a mix of friendship ties, family bonds and economic control through kusturizatsia – legalized extortion of criminal networks and corrupt officials. Using Sahlins’ concept of reciprocity, I show how money flows form the heart of their power, binding allies through gifts while crushing opponents through force. The tandem's fusion of state authority with criminal enterprise reveals new patterns of authoritarian rule in post-Soviet space.

This article introduces ‘temporalized sociotechnical imaginaries’ to analyse how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) deploys technology-focused visions across timeframes to construct national identity. We examine how Dubai's Museum of the Future and the UAE Vision Pavilion at Expo 2020 project futuristic technological narratives linked to the nation's centennial in 2071. Unlike traditional museums presenting history, these exhibitions offer carefully crafted visions of the future, serving as deliberate performances of state-led nation-building. These imaginaries reinforce national cohesion and legitimize current governance by integrating technological progress with national identity across past, present and future. This study contributes to our understanding of contemporary nationalism in rapidly developing states and the role of temporal imaginations of technology in nation-building.

This guest editorial examines Israel's deployment of the AI program Lavender in Gaza as a significant shift in counterinsurgency warfare, moving from traditional hearts-and-minds campaigns to algorithmic targeting. Drawing on investigative reporting and anthropological perspectives on algorithms, it analyses how Lavender transforms warfare through four critical stages: problematic initial parameters, systematic matching errors, declining human oversight, and erosion of moral responsibility. While the system presents a veneer of precision targeting, its flexible thresholds and high acceptable civilian casualty ratios enable mass civilian casualties while providing bureaucratic legitimacy. The analysis suggests this fusion of AI and killing represents a concerning precedent that could proliferate to other conflicts unless decisively addressed.

Sites of plantation slavery that are now interpreted as heritage frequently spatialize their narratives by emphasizing White elites in monumental spaces and associating the Black enslaved with smaller, less-imposing and frequently worse-preserved elements. In the contemporary present, as heritage spaces increasingly push to focus on the enslaved instead of the elite, the preservation of elite monumentality can be viewed as honouring enslavers. This article explores the position of heritage professionals on St Croix, US Virgin Islands, who advocate instead for a respatialization of slavery's heritage: a resignification of these ‘elite’ monuments as monuments to – and created by – the enslaved themselves. Their emphasis on the resilience and ingenuity of the enslaved challenges the spatial foregrounding of White supremacy in monumental heritage and allows the persistent materiality of plantations to be reclaimed in order to elevate Black history and identity.

Ongoing attempts to develop a ‘transformative’ relationship between anthropology and theology have exhorted anthropologists to look to theology to ‘unsettle’ existing understandings of the discipline's goals and potential. This article explores the ‘transformative’ relationship between anthropology and theology by examining E.E. Evans-Pritchard's perspective on fieldwork, influenced by his Catholic faith and mysticism. Evans-Pritchard saw both fieldwork and mysticism as rooted in shared experiential knowledge, challenging the discipline's secular foundation and reframing the relationship between anthropology and theology as grounded in a shared concern for experiential knowledge. Refiguring participant observation fieldwork in this way – as sharing a fundamental aspect with something as profoundly religious as mysticism – not only disrupts anthropology's understanding of its secular constitution but also reframes the relationship between anthropology and theology. This shift moves the relationship from one barred by a lack of shared beliefs to one potentially grounded in joint attention to and care for experiential knowledge.