{"title":"‘The most extreme case’?","authors":"Gustaaf Houtman","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70098","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"3-4"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Why is anthropology so threatening to reactionaries?","authors":"Jonathan Marks","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70097","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"5-7"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Front and Back Covers, Volume 42, Number 4. August 2026","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Front and back cover caption, volume 42 issue 4</p><p>Front cover caption, volume 42 issue 4</p><p>THE PAPAL ENCYCLICAL ON AI</p><p>Front cover. The lead seal of a papal bull issued by Urban VIII in 1637. The disc is of soft metal, struck from an engraved die and hung from the parchment on a plaited cord of red and yellow silk. The heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul face out from it.</p><p>The same two heads appeared on every such seal, in the same attitude, wherever the document happened to travel. That was the point of the device. A single stamp, repeated without variation, meant that authority arriving in a distant place could be recognized as the authority that had issued from Rome. One impression was held to be true everywhere.</p><p>In this issue, Jennifer Cearns reads Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, the first papal encyclical on artificial intelligence (AI), and finds in it a version of the same gesture. She grants that Leo's diagnosis is sharp. He sees that these systems carry values while claiming to be neutral, that they extract labour, land and data, and that they work as a hidden infrastructure of assumptions built in by the few who design them. The remedy he proposes, however, rests on a fixed account of the human person, revealed and already settled, from which sound rules can be drawn and applied to all.</p><p>Cearns, writing as an anthropologist, doubts that any single account of the human can serve as the measure of the rest. Anthropology learned that lesson slowly and at some cost. The task she sets for AI, in place of a better universalism, is to build systems able to hold a world that has always been plural. A seal presses one form onto everything it touches. An anthropology worth the name begins from the many.</p><p>Back cover caption, volume 42 issue 4</p><p>PSYCHIATRIC RECORDS, AMRITSAR, INDIA</p><p>In this issue, Lisa Dikomitis, Vineet Chaudhary, Savinder Singh and Sukhwinder Singh Shergill introduce the Archive of Psychiatry and Partition (PARA), a collection of psychiatric records discovered at the Institute of Mental Health in Amritsar.</p><p>The files document the lives of patients caught in the administrative aftermath of 1947, among them 450 people transferred from Pakistan to India in December 1950, more than three years after Partition and long after land, property and personnel had been counted and exchanged.</p><p>The cover image, photographed by Dikomitis, shows a corner of one of the hospital's record rooms. Files dating back to 1900 lie bundled on steel shelves and spill across the floor, browned, brittle and tied with string. Each holds a life. Admission notes, letters from relatives, instructions for a guard travelling with a patient, sketches made in the ward – all survive between the covers.</p><p>The authors describe the curatorial labour of turning these scattered papers into an archive, and the ethics of preserving psychiatric records in a working hospital with limited means.</p><p>Read against ","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"i-ii"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8322.70000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lice, gossip and the origins of language: A multispecies rethinking of Dunbar's hypothesis","authors":"Paul H. Mason, Greg Downey","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70093","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"21-23"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Living with dust: Slow violence in the shadow of a cement factory in rural Ethiopia","authors":"Negash Abebe, Addisu Gedlu","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70092","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"24-27"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"AI's anthropology problem","authors":"Jennifer Cearns","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70095","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"1-3"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Barbados to Wales: Cold War anti-communism and British anthropology","authors":"W. John Morgan","doi":"10.1111/1467-8322.70084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.70084","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46293,"journal":{"name":"Anthropology Today","volume":"42 4","pages":"9-12"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148695977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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