American Anthropologist最新文献

Affordable Chinese copies of Western brands are ubiquitous in African markets. Despite democratizing consumer access, these goods appear to cement hegemonic value hierarchies that rank Chinese or local products as inferior to Western goods. To unsettle this implicit geography of fakes and dominant politics of authentication, scholars have proposed a continuum of hybrid identities—from genuine fakes to copied originals—seeking to collapse a simplistic dichotomy between originals and counterfeits. This article argues the opposite: Upholding this dichotomy is crucial for Nigerian entrepreneurs operating in counterfeit economies to stake original claims by means other than being “first” or “from the West,” often impossible production conditions to satisfy. Following a well-known Spanish brand of soaps and lotions, Idole, and other Western cosmetics brands in Nigerian markets and on e-commerce platforms, this ethnographic study shows how improving quality, concentrating quantity, and expanding the variety of fakes offer new epistemological possibilities for what makes an original original. Counterfeits become originals when performance distorts primacy and where popularity inverts provenance. Informed by Chinese philosophies on copying, the “mutable original” captures sellers’ and buyers’ paradoxical indifference to copying and investment in originals, along with the commercial and cultural contexts that nurture these seemingly counterintuitive interests.

This article explores entanglements between water cosmologies and capitalist transformation in the Sundarbans delta of West Bengal, India. It traces how “awakened” tidal creeks have been iteratively enclosed as private fisheries from the colonial period to the present, with particular focus on the expansion of commercial aquaculture over the past 30 years. I show that the consolidation of capitalist relations has produced striking cosmological divergences. Today, private fishery owners often engage water beings through ritual worship and sacrificial offerings, recruiting them into profit-oriented production. In contrast, their dispossessed neighbors claim that water beings have abandoned local waterways. Considering such divergences, I argue that capitalist transformation has proceeded through the delta's water cosmologies. Rather than displacing or erasing emplaced cosmologies, these processes have reorganized relationships with water beings and produced new and uneven geographies of enchantment.

This article argues that hunting is not a bounded event but a materially redistributed atmosphere that extends beyond the kill and across field, truck, clothing, and home. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with wild boar hunters in Uruguay, I show how mud, odors, blood, and bodily residues carry the sensory, affective, and material force of tracking, waiting, and pursuit into domestic space. Rather than treating this continuity as merely phenomenological or symbolic, I explain how it is materially reproduced through adhesive, persistent, and indexical substances that bind bodies, vehicles, dogs, and households into the hunt's ongoing life. I develop the concept of atmospheric modulation to describe how these substances reorganize relations across spaces and times. In doing so, the article reframes hunting as a pervasive more-than-human practice and contributes to anthropological debates on materiality, residues, traces, and the social life of substances.

This article draws on understandings of whiteness and the misconstrual of South Central Los Angeles to analyze the power dynamics between “outsider” activists and residents of South Central as they worked toward a more equitable food system. As concerns over the “obesity epidemic” and the push for “real food” in the 2000s coincided with a surge in GIS data on “food deserts,” a new cadre of activists, often white and middle-class, began intervening in South Central Los Angeles as part of the food justice movement. Residents had already been organizing around broader social justice issues and food retail equality. Though food justice brought these groups together in multiracial organizing, there were divergent visions about the problem and the goals of food justice work. In some cases of conflict, in a process I call “principled withdrawal,” residents withdrew from project situations that they did not align with ideologically, morally, or practically.

The Huntington Anatomical Collection (1893–1921) includes the skeletal remains of immigrants, migrants, and lifelong New York City residents. The collection's formation was coeval with the formalization of physical anthropology, and the collection was made to serve research aims centered on race and origin. This early focus on race has materially shaped the collection, and, in turn, researchers’ ongoing engagements with it. When delineating research questions and forming samples, researchers (even those critical of race science and the collection's history) tend to do so along race- and place-based categories prioritized by early curators and physical anthropologists. Treating these categories as the primary axis of difference flattens the complex life histories, movements, and social relations of the people in the collection, thus occluding a view of life courses as lived. Drawing upon archival evidence, I argue that such separation practices have profound implications for how we view belonging, social relations, and kinship in the past. These concerns extend into present questions regarding descendant engagement, as practitioners and institutions define communities of care and navigate future consultation and return.