American Anthropologist最新文献

Archaeology in 2022 features more calls than ever for a socially and politically engaged, progressive discipline. Archaeologists increasingly respect and integrate decolonizing and Indigenous knowledge in theory and practice. They acknowledge and embrace the fluidity and diversity of sexes and genders, past and present. They document patterns of migration, ancient as well as contemporary, to combat retrograde and racist narratives that remain pervasive in the public sphere. At the same time, the field has a deep-seated conservative bastion toward which many scholars retreat, arguing for an “objective” past that is free of political implications or interpretive ambiguity. As anarchist archaeologists, we see the myth of the objective past as one of many interconnected myths that have provided the basis for an archaeology that reifies and proliferates the current social order. We deconstruct myths relating to capitalist and colonialist ideologies of “human nature,” the assumed inevitability of the current order, and fatalistic commitment to dystopian or utopian futures. As alternatives, we present counter-myths that emphasize the contingent and political nature of archaeological praxis, the creative and collaborative foundation of communities, the alternative orders that archaeology uncovers, and the role of a hopeful past for constructing the possibilities of different futures.

As members of a stateless nation that is geopolitically divided across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, Kurds are known mainly in the West as excellent fighters and political revolutionaries. Amid the devastation of war and political unrest, most Kurds struggle for economic survival. This is especially true for Eastern Kurds living under Iranian rule. They have seen their lands confiscated, their resources plundered, and their access to capital and educational mobility severely restricted. Moreover, under the rule of the Iranian Persian-Shi'i necropolitics, Kurds have been culturally and economically subjected to a regime of internal colonialism that has eroded their capacity for economic survival. Building on the literature on sovereignty and violence, this article investigates the nexus between precarity, spatiality, and necropolitics as embodied in the practice of Kurdish cross-border labor, or kolberi. I argue that the Iranian state deploys the discourse of a securitized borderland as a weapon to inflict a permanent state of exception on Rojhelat, condemning Kurds to the status of living dead through the imposition of precarious necro-labor practice. Furthermore, this study articulates the border as an archive where registers of state necropolitics are deposited, preserved, and revealed in the lives of kolbers.

The National Park Service and many other federal, state, and local land managers in the US enjoin visitors to “leave no trace” when visiting parks and wilderness areas. At the same time, practices that involve leaving traces—painted rocks, rock cairns, and fairy houses—have become well established on some public lands. Public discussions reveal deep divides in how people view these traces in a time of increased pressures on public lands. This article develops an anthropological analysis of the practice of leaving traces at Mesa Verde National Park, in Colorado, and Machimoodus State Park, in Connecticut. Taking an approach that aligns with recent work on archaeologies of the contemporary, we interrogate the meaning of these material traces and consider how these practices of constructing cultural heritage in spaces perceived as “natural” provide a quasi-archaeological experience and reenact colonialist processes.

What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India-Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more-than-human Other arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (2000) construction of hostpitality and Punjabi Sufi poet-philosopher Waris Shah's discussion of badal (reciprocity), this article contends that in South Asia, reciprocal exchanges produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds and propound an analytical avenue to critically rethink deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.