{"title":"Hominin dispersals: causes, conditions, and outcomes","authors":"Robert A. Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70215","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Out of Africa’ model that has dominated palaeoanthropology for nearly three decades was originally based on five elements: a recent ancestry to human populations; an African origin for the ancestral population; limited or no gene flow among archaic hominins and no admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals; a marked difference between the behaviour of modern humans and archaic populations; and a major role for dispersals. The first four of these have been significantly modified by accumulating fossil, genomic, and archaeological data. Dispersals, however, have remained central to the model, and have been extended to earlier phases of the evolution of <jats:italic>Homo</jats:italic> . Here we consider the evidence for dispersals in Pleistocene hominin evolution, and place these into the broader context of comparative evolutionary biology. We distinguish between dispersals that are essentially habitat tracking as climate or environment changes, and those conditioned by adaptive changes. Finally, we consider the consequences of dispersals for the structure of hominin populations, emphasizing the multiple potential outcomes of dispersals, the role of density dependence in structuring rates of divergence, and the role of centre‐edge models in understanding hominin diversity.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149093422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment by Bill Angelbeck","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70212","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor's Preface: Friendship","authors":"Dimitrios Theodossopoulos","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70211","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"58 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment by Anna Marie Prentiss","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70214","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Robert A. Foley, Louise T. Humphrey, Marta Mirazón Lahr
{"title":"Mostly Out of Africa: Chris Stringer and the palaeoanthropology of the last million years","authors":"Robert A. Foley, Louise T. Humphrey, Marta Mirazón Lahr","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70203","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Staging friendship: towards an anthropology of everyday geopolitics in South Asia","authors":"Sahana Ghosh","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70208","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies Indian‐Bangladeshi friendship ethnographically, as a contested political imaginary, claim, and relation, from the vantage of its shared borderlands. Staging friendship, I show, is a geopolitical project that engages equally the highest echelons of the Indian and Bangladeshi states and ordinary residents of its marginalized borderlands. In conversation with the anthropological and interdisciplinary scholarship on friendship and the political aesthetics of nationalism, I develop an ethnographic frame to study friendship in and as geopolitics. Zooming in on friendship as political aesthetic and ethical practice allows us to grapple with the hegemonies and hierarchies, the elasticity and the power of such histories, and the everyday practices that constitute the geopolitical as a lively horizon. Moving beyond a traditional conception of geopolitics, this article is an invitation to imagine instead a geopolitics of friendship that centres and takes seriously the difficult work of living solidarity through differences, that many communities are not only engaged in, not as occasional, but as everyday acts of making a liveable world.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mandala logic: mytho‐praxis as vernacular political theory in Myanmar","authors":"Michael R. Dunford","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70205","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that myth‐making is a form of vernacular social theory, a way of producing conceptual arguments about how social formations work and what is at stake in them. I focus on a myth from Myanmar, the Myth of the Tea Seeds, and its attendant ritual complex, which culminates in an annual religious festival in the highland town of Namhsan. Drawing on the so‐called ‘mandala model’, a classic historiographic approach for the study of Southeast Asia, I show how Ta'ang and Burmese people navigate sedimented trans‐regional power relations, and how highlanders and lowlanders alike engage in acts of retelling, exegesis, and critique that test the limits of the myth as a theoretical tool. What emerges is a picture of core‐periphery politics that looks less like a dialectic of coercion and evasion, and more like a system of antagonistic mutual dependence. Here, mythology is contested ground, a site for interrogating the relationship between abstract social theorization and lived social relations amidst long local histories of accommodation and struggle.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knots in the weave: female friendship, ritual tension, and the religious other","authors":"Ghazal Asif Farrukhi","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70209","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the possibility of inter‐religious friendship in a context where the norms of secular citizenship are not necessarily available to form the grounds of community. Hindu and Muslim girls met every day to learn to sew together in a sewing class located inside a Hindu temple compound in a small town in Pakistan. Ritual tensions arose in this space from the shared effort to maintain conviviality across social and theological differences, which were managed through the embodied labour of sewing. Knowledge of the religious other as friend necessitates continually retracing the fuzzy line between intimate familiarity and potential danger. The article argues that the careful management of ritual rivalries and boundaries engendered tenuous forms of friendship grounded in norms of feminine domestic discipline.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: On the fickleness of friendship","authors":"Simon Coleman","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70210","url":null,"abstract":"In this Introduction to the special section, I provide a brief overview of the anthropology of friendship, particularly from the 1960s to the present, before focusing on the four articles that form the main body of the section. I argue that anthropologists who do not regard themselves as specialists in friendship will still find much to gain from reflecting on the topic. In addition, I highlight the significance of friendship in pointing to the significance of the fickle in human relations.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149123978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The reckoning: ethnographic explorations of the ending of a friendship","authors":"Katherine Smith","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70207","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ending of a friendship in ethnographic fieldwork. I argue that friendship is a necessarily ambiguous concept and relation, made most distinctive as a ‘friendship’ at its end. Reflecting on a friendship that was ended between this author and an old friend in fieldwork in Halleigh, North Manchester, England, I discuss the friendship's end as a reckoning, a performative act that exposes the structural underbelly of the friendship, as a relation of reciprocity, of obligation, of interdependence, as the history of unspoken material and immaterial exchanges of things, of favours, of time and trust are made explicit and listed, reckoned up, in anger, and, in the present case, when the friendship is being ended. Ethnographically, I address what is exposed about friendship at its ending, the methodological‐cum‐ethical predicaments that the ending of friendships in and after fieldwork may introduce for the ethnographer, and the importance of engaging with and interpreting the breaks and disconnects of the friendship as an ethnographic experience. Examining the reckoning and my own positioning as an anthropologist‐in‐the‐field and friend, I consider more than one form of reckoning at play when re‐engaging with, and writing about, the ending of a friendship.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149009888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}