Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Depopulation has become a landmark transformation across different rural areas, one that is often accompanied by collective experiences of abandonment, crisis, and deprivation. On the Azores archipelago, Portugal, people encounter demographic decline as a disorienting loss of familiarity with their environment and especially their horticultural plots. Azorean depopulation, then, is best framed as a

What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics

Against a phenomenological orientation to ageing as path or course, a contrastive frame is offered around a figure termed the enemy. Four distinctive ethnographic fragments are utilized: (1) a Polish‐Jewish migrant to Canada in her late eighties who listens continually to the radio and worries over the malign forces in the world that the radio broadcasts; (2) a Dalit woman in her seventies in a north

Since the early 2000s, the proportion of older adults in Japanese penal institutions has risen dramatically, driven largely by high rates of recidivism. This trend has developed alongside growing social insecurity about crime, as well as anxiety about old age and care in a time of increasing neoliberal discourses of individualized risk and responsibility for maintaining health. This article examines

This article explores transformation as a way of being in the rural Andes. It traces how transformation connects, and produces value within, multiple different spheres of life, specifically agricultural labour, personhood, identity, and space and movement. As an analytical lens, transformation allows us to revise prevailing understandings of how value is attached to agricultural work in these highland

This article explores how diverse South Africans often struggle to keep their inalienable possessions, especially homes, and modern electronics. These items temporarily remain with their owners until being forced into circulation owing to repossession by banks and frequent property thefts. Homes and electronics have become aspirational items for South Africans with democracy that can build social bonds

The passage of generational time may be one of the most fundamental ways of experiencing ageing; we age in relation to others with whom our lives are intertwined – by becoming a grandmother or losing a father. Those of the oldest generation weaken and pass away, but in that process, they persist – for a while – with the younger generations. In rural eastern Uganda, old people are ‘still here’ for younger

The anthropology of possibility – and the phenomenological traditions it often draws on – has predominantly been oriented towards the future, the not‐yet. With an empirical point of departure in fieldwork among older Kyrgyz Muslims who become old in the absence of younger relatives and drawing on the critical phenomenology of Alia Al‐Saji, I explore the what‐might‐have‐been as a space of possibility

In the Ik mountains in Uganda, only few old people still have the skills to ‘see time’ with sundials. Common ways of knowing time and age now include phones and ID cards in digital registers. I follow the elder seer Komol to explore how changing the measures of time influences the experience of time and age. How do being a ‘time being’ and ideas about ‘the good life’ change with age, technology, and

The clock‐drawing test, a cognitive screening test widely used clinically, is here taken as a window onto forms of temporality present in clinical encounters involving dementia. Drawing on close reading of clinical notes from their medical records, I offer imagistic silhouettes of three older adults in the Seattle area who had no living spouse or children when they developed dementia. Attending to

Interments of Ancestors linked past peoples with the living. However, less attention has been given to secondary burials and their role in social memory and placemaking. Given these ties between Ancestors, the living, and the landscape, Ancestors may have been brought when descendants moved from place to place. I applied biogeochemical methods to address questions about movement, placemaking, and ancestry

This article applies the concept of enactive signification to the subject of Early Cycladic figurines, critiquing the use of prestige frameworks for the interpretation of these objects and contributing to the archaeological analysis of the semiotics of value. I examine social organisation during the emergence of the Aegean Early Bronze Age and the material sign relations of Grotta-Pelos mortuary practices

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

The traditional practice of reindeer castration is an integral component of all known past and present reindeer herding cultures. It has likely played an essential role in the reindeer domestication process, making it relevant for understanding initial and subsequent human-reindeer interactions beyond hunter-prey relationships. This paper presents data on the Traditional Knowledge of reindeer castration

This study examines intra-settlement social inequality across 73 Mumun settlements (ca. 1500–1 BCE) on the southern Korean Peninsula using the Gini index and Lorenz curve. House size and pottery density are employed as proxies for socioeconomic power and the capacity for food storage and sharing, respectively. The analysis reveals a nuanced understanding of Mumun social complexity. Variations in house

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Previous analysis of skeletal indicators of physical activity suggested that the population at Tombos, an Egyptian colonial town in Nubia, may have benefited from an imperial framework through occupations that were not physically demanding. With more than ten years of continued excavations, coupled with further biomolecular testing, we reanalyze entheseal changes at Tombos. We compare entheseal changes

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Volume 66, Issue 1, February 2025.

Current Anthropology, Volume 66, Issue 1, February 2025.

Space activities in subarctic Sweden are predicated on older infrastructures of underground resource extraction. The ongoing expansion of the country's rocket launch site outside Kiruna relies on the Swedish state's historical construction of the region as a resource frontier. Yet fieldwork among space actors and reindeer pastoralists reveals that relations between mining and space are also invoked

This article offers ‘stages’, an original device, to sharpen the focus on a particular divinatory economic performance: the folding of imagined profitable futures into the present to create the impression that profitable futures are imminent or already realized. Drawing on ethnographic material from the startup and multi‐level marketing (MLM) cryptocurrency sectors, and utilizing ‘stages’ as a concept/pun

This article develops a more‐than‐human conception of charisma to explain the interrelated magnetism of palaeontologists and prehistoric megafauna in the United States since the nineteenth century. It extends anthropological analysis of charisma to non‐human bodies, and argues that charisma is created by more‐than‐human processes involving tactile interactions among people and matter within particular

This article presents the latest results of a collaborative project that seeks to develop recommendations for policymakers on migration by drawing upon the incomparable dataset accessible to archaeologists. While prior archaeological research on migration has provided important theoretical insights, our policy-oriented goals required us to adopt different terminology and analytical frameworks. How

Archaeological narratives of migrations in pre-Colonial North America rely on cultural materials, which often only convey relative temporalities and tempos of these dynamic events. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling to examine a pattern of immigration into a cultural frontier during the 14th through the 16th centuries AD in what is today southwest Virginia, USA. Incorporation of prior

Macroevolutionary analysis provides the opportunity to ask questions concerning the major patterns of long-term continuity and change in the cultural record. In this study, we address the evolution of lithic technological operational strategies spanning the last 20,000 years primarily in the northwestern and northern portions of North America. We measure systemic technological variation on a maximum

History does not unfold along a single trajectory, and yet the socioecological configuration of landscapes may narrow the directions history can take. This article develops a framework for assessing the directionality of history in a (pre)historic heath landscape in Denmark. To make a living from the heaths, people concentrated the heath's limited fertility through pastoralism, swidden agriculture

In Eastern Indonesia, young male Islamic activists articulate a notion of religious authority that reorients community life toward neighborhood mosques. By providing local communities with Qur'anic classes and religious services, these activists—affiliated with Indonesia's largest Salafi organization—have created a network of spaces in which they promote new religious lifeworlds grounded in the substantive

The archaeology of diaspora has grown in many directions during the first two decades of the 21st century. It has become a key way of understanding the short-term and long-term connections between people and communities defined by movement and migration. However, archaeologists of diaspora still at times struggle with old models of interpretation which seek out ethnic markers in material culture or

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Architectural studies are of great interest in considering variations in social phenomena. This ethnoarchaeological program therefore focuses on the evolution of building techniques, both in relation to the recent prehistory of Western Asia, and the current context through field surveys carried out in Djibouti. The aim of this article is to present the results of our study conducted in the Gobaad basin

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

Current Anthropology, Ahead of Print.

This piece interrogates aporias of epistemic certainty by thinking through categories of medicine and uchawi (witchcraft) in Tanzania. I open with an account of how I misrecognized the meaning of a newspaper article about “head‐switching operations” posted on a hospital bulletin board. I then offer a close reading of the colonial/anthropological archive and its epistemic disavowal of uchawi nearly