Anthropology Today最新文献

In April 2026 a committee of ten senior scholars, chaired by the philosopher Paul Boghossian, delivered a report on the state of the humanities that reserved its bleakest verdict for anthropology, which it named ‘the most extreme case’. This editorial argues that the report is provisional by its own admission, unreviewed, drawn from evidence its authors read only where they could, and commissioned by administrators already on record as holding that the academy had grown too political. Its chair had argued the case in print for decades. Augury, the reading of omens by rules that prove nothing, is the fitting emblem: the report becomes the very thing it set out to find.

Jonathan Marks reads the committee's report on the humanities as an uncredited rehash of the 1990s science wars, a familiar quarrel with the academic left dressed as a defence of knowledge. Rather than rebut it point by point, he sets out ten propositions about human sameness and difference that anthropology has pressed on the comfortable since the 1870s. Much of what feels natural is a product of history rather than biology. Race marks politically relevant groups misrepresented as natural kinds. Human thought is symbolic and linguistic in a way ape thought is not. And one may be an ape and yet, in reading this, certainly human. Anthropology unsettles every generation, he argues, which is precisely why reactionaries find it threatening.

Some 30 years after the popularization of the ‘social brain hypothesis’, this commentary takes a multispecies lens to highlight the catalytic role that ectoparasites have played in the evolution of grooming and, by extension, potentially in humanly organized multimodal communication. Predators and foraging helped draw our ancestors into groups, but lice and other parasites applied a more intimate pressure, compelling tactile care. If grooming began as a response to parasites, became pleasurable before it became symbolic, and gossip later replaced grooming in larger groups, then the origins of language may be more relational and ecological than previously assumed. This speculative intervention suggests that even our most celebrated capacities may be rooted in interspecies entanglements. A multispecies perspective on human evolution reminds us that the story was never just human, and never just one story. What we know of the human is incomplete if we only know humans.

Industrial expansion in Ethiopia has positioned cement production as central to national development, yet its local environmental and bodily consequences remain under-explored. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2023-July 2024) in Kuyu district, this article examines how the Kuyu Cement Factory reshapes everyday life through dust, odours and environmental degradation. Residents describe coughing as part of daily existence, alongside impacts on health, livestock and crop production, while the surrounding landscape is frequently obscured by dust and smoke. Factory workers report prolonged exposure with limited protection. The article argues that industrial pollution is experienced not only as environmental harm but also as a transformation of sensory and embodied life. Crops lose colour, livestock show respiratory distress and visibility declines as emissions spread, while dust and odours reshape spatial orientation. These experiences reveal exposure as a shared atmospheric condition linking humans, animals and environments.

Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas (2026), the first papal encyclical dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), invokes ‘anthropological’ as a central term. This editorial argues that the term signals not common ground but a fundamental divergence: the encyclical draws on theological anthropology – committed to specific answers about the human person – rather than the comparative, ethnographic discipline. While Leo's diagnosis of AI as extractive, value-laden and data-colonial is acute, his proposed alternative replicates the universalist structure he critiques in Silicon Valley. Cearns identifies an underexamined consequence: large language models accelerate language death, reproducing colonial linguistic asymmetries at scale and embedding particular epistemological frameworks in clinical and social systems. Drawing on anthropology's reflexive and ontological turns, she argues that AI governance requires not a better universalism but a commitment to building without a centre.

This article examines the case of Ronald Frankenberg, a British anthropologist excluded from fieldwork in the British West Indies in 1952 owing to his Communist Party affiliations. The case is situated within the broader context of the Cultural Cold War and compared with American McCarthyism. While the United States conducted anti-communist campaigns through public hearings, Britain employed administrative measures through the Colonial Office. Frankenberg's exclusion, which redirected him to fieldwork in Wales and contributed to the development of British rural anthropology, was exceptional in receiving newspaper coverage and a House of Commons debate. The case raises questions about academic freedom during the Cold War and illuminates the intersection of anti-communism, colonial policy and the history of British anthropology.