Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute最新文献_第6页

False kings and imagined protestants: why schismogenesis does not explain variation in inequality among Indigenous societies of the Pacific Coast 假国王和虚构的新教徒：为什么分裂不能解释太平洋沿岸土著社会不平等的变化

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-09-21 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70202

Eric Alden Smith, Brian F. Codding

{"title":"False kings and imagined protestants: why schismogenesis does not explain variation in inequality among Indigenous societies of the Pacific Coast","authors":"Eric Alden Smith, Brian F. Codding","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70202","url":null,"abstract":"Indigenous societies along the temperate Pacific coast of North America embody diverse cultural institutions. This variation is conventionally classified into two distinct cultural areas: the Northwest Coast (NWC) and California (CAL). Discussion of the environmental, material, social, and ideological variation in these societies has a long and continuing history in anthropology. In the last few years, two divergent accounts of this variation have appeared. One, proposed by Wengrow and Graeber, drawing on the concept of schismogenesis – ‘progressive differentiation’ at points of culture contact – posits a sharp contrast between Northwest Coast ‘Fisher‐kings’ and Californian ‘Protestant foragers’. The second views variation across the region as more continuous, focusing on how differential resource control and patron‐client dynamics can generate asymmetries in wealth and power. Our review of Wengrow and Graeber's proposal identifies several flaws: it portrays NWC culture in an over‐simplified and reductive manner, exaggerates the differences between CAL and NWC societies (particularly in the boundary region), and fails to provide convincing evidence that those differences result from oppositional differentiation (schismogenesis). We then explain why we believe opportunities for resource control offer a more empirically valid and theoretically coherent explanation for variation in political economy across these two culture areas.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"165 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149124466","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}

引用次数: 0

A closer look at the postcranial skeleton of Omo I from the Kibish Formation, Ethiopia: points of divergence from recent humans 近距离观察来自埃塞俄比亚基比什地层的奥莫I的颅骨后骨骼：与近代人类的分歧点

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-09-10 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70190

Osbjorn M. Pearson, John G. Fleagle

{"title":"A closer look at the postcranial skeleton of Omo I from the Kibish Formation, Ethiopia: points of divergence from recent humans","authors":"Osbjorn M. Pearson, John G. Fleagle","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70190","url":null,"abstract":"Previous studies have described the postcranial skeleton of Omo I as anatomically modern yet have often noted features in its anatomy that are unusual in comparison to recent humans. The present study presents an analysis of linear measurements of many portions of the skeleton in comparison to several samples of recent (Holocene) humans. Special attention is paid to contrasts with Zulu males, a sample that approximates Omo I in overall size. The results show that Omo I has a long humerus with a slender shaft, a proximally positioned ulnar tuberosity, a short olecranon process, large articular ends and flattened proximal articular surface of the first metacarpal, a large acetabulum, a narrow patellar notch, and a low talus with a long neck. These join the set of distinctive features identified in previous analyses and combine to push the skeleton away from recent humans in multivariate space. A few of the features appear to be plesiomorphic, others apomorphic and ‘modern’, and some possibly idiosyncratic. Close inspection of the unusual dimensions suggests that some are unreliable, including the original estimate for humeral length. This implies that Omo I had a stout rather than linear build.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148915448","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}

引用次数: 0

Gough's Cave and biomolecular archaeology: a story of evolving interpretation 高夫洞穴与生物分子考古学：一个不断演变的解释故事

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-09-07 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70201

William A. Marsh

引用次数: 0

‘Why didn't you bring us a pumpkin?’ Relational recognition of caste, class, and tribe in rural Andhra Pradesh, India “你为什么不给我们带个南瓜来？”印度安得拉邦农村种姓、阶级和部落的关系认同

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-09-03 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70192

Thomas Herzmark

引用次数: 0

Vital events, vital relations: the structure of relations in an identity database 重要事件，重要关系：身份数据库中的关系结构

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-09-02 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70197

Zehra Hashmi

{"title":"Vital events, vital relations: the structure of relations in an identity database","authors":"Zehra Hashmi","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70197","url":null,"abstract":"The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) manages Pakistan's biometric‐based national identity database, one of the largest identification systems of its kind in the world. This article examines bureaucratic practices used during identity registration to record ‘vital events’ in the lives of citizens: birth, marriage, divorce, and death. Through an ethnographic study of NADRA's Identity Registration Centre in Islamabad, it illustrates how Pakistan's identification system uses vital events to create ‘vital relations’ by linking individuals to their next of kin. It argues that the way citizens negotiate vital event registration reveals the dynamic nature of kinship, both lived and datafied, as kin relations are continually reconstructed within the identity database. The system does so by drawing lines of descent from both parents according to a cognatic logic in order to establish individual identity. This cognatic logic represents a shift in longstanding modes of recording kinship by both the Pakistani state and the colonial state that preceded it. This article illuminates the multi‐faceted implications of such a shift, delineating how ordinary citizens navigate their datafied kin networks alongside their lived relations at the Registration Centre.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148877294","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}

引用次数: 0

Torture and scepticism in Papua New Guinea witch hunts 巴布亚新几内亚政治迫害中的酷刑和怀疑

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-08-31 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70193

Chloe Nahum‐Claudel

{"title":"Torture and scepticism in Papua New Guinea witch hunts","authors":"Chloe Nahum‐Claudel","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.70193","url":null,"abstract":"For over a century, anthropologists have documented the many institutions that exist to respond to witchcraft and the uncanny that it names: oracles that attempt to produce certainty by naming the witch; moots in which grievances are aired; trials in magistrates’ courts that attempt to satisfy the community while preserving the life of the accused; Christian purification crusades that cleanse blackened souls to unify riven communities. But can the uncanny be contained by any of these institutions? Extending existing anthropological work on doubt and scepticism, I argue that the effort to know and contain witchcraft through ritual means is always premised on scepticism. It is a restless quest for conviction rather than a violent response to certainty. In the central highlands of Papua New Guinea today, self‐consciously modern witch trials involving torture have become the ultimate oracular authority for revealing and countering kumo witchcraft. Confessions made under torture seem to be uniquely satisfying, offering surer ‘proofs’ and ‘evidence’ in the place of indeterminate signs. However, alongside progressivist discourses, people denounce torture as abuse and point out the futility and hubris of seeking to know and contain witchcraft. Bringing together scholarship on witchcraft and scepticism from the anthropology of witchcraft (which has undertheorized torture) and work on torture and scepticism from history (which has extensively theorized torture), I argue that scepticism often redoubles violence in the pursuit of its resolution.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"40 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2026-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148858815","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}

引用次数: 0

‘Collected photographs of naked women; left the RAI in mysterious circumstances, disowned by RAI’ “收集裸体女性的照片；让RAI陷入了神秘的境地，与RAI断绝了关系。

IF 1.2 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-08-31 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70191

Lisa Z. Sigel

引用次数: 0

From talking tools to metahumans: social interaction, semiotic skill, and the authority of AI chatbots Des outils parlants aux métahumains : interactions sociales, compétences sémiotiques et autorité des robots conversationnels 从聊天工具到超人类：社交互动、符号学技能和AI聊天机器人的权威

IF 1.5 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-08-27 Epub Date: 2026-04-10 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70133

Webb Keane

{"title":"From talking tools to metahumans: social interaction, semiotic skill, and the authority of AI chatbots\u0000 Des outils parlants aux métahumains : interactions sociales, compétences sémiotiques et autorité des robots conversationnels","authors":"Webb Keane","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70133","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.70133","url":null,"abstract":"What does it take to turn a tool into a talking tool and that into an ultimate authority? Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in its diverse forms, such as large language models (LLMs), is celebrated as a useful tool. But LLM-based conversational agents, or chatbots, the software applications through which ordinary users are likely to engage with LLMs on a regular basis, can seem, for many, to harbour uncanny insights or transcendental knowledge whose sources are inexplicable – resembling what Marshall Sahlins called ‘metahumans’. The temptation to treat chatbots as metahuman is just an extreme case of a more general process. The inferences that chatbot users draw about GenAI's human or superhuman properties arise in part from the apps' role as an interlocutor in social interaction. Their authority draws on the pragmatics and semiotics of speech. Much as a prophet embodies and legitimates the authority of divinity, so chatbots can endow the profit-seeking strategies of their corporate owners with a supernatural aura. That such effects can seem intuitively real is, in part, because humans and metahumans address one another on semiotically unequal grounds.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"32 3","pages":"1022-1039"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.70133","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147648928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Animal translations: AI and the intelligibility of non-human worlds Traduire l'animal : l'IA et l'intelligibilité des mondes non humains 动物翻译：人工智能和非人类世界的可理解性

IF 1.5 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-08-27 Epub Date: 2026-04-14 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70132

Courtney Handman

{"title":"Animal translations: AI and the intelligibility of non-human worlds\u0000 Traduire l'animal : l'IA et l'intelligibilité des mondes non humains","authors":"Courtney Handman","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70132","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.70132","url":null,"abstract":"Amid the general sense of worry that large language models will soon drown out human voices, some researchers are optimistic that machine learning will allow humans to listen to and understand animal voices to an unprecedented extent. As part of a broader project aimed at interspecies communication, a loosely connected set of animal behaviourists, AI engineers, and public-facing animal advocates are working to comprehend ‘animal languages’ and thus to improve the lives of domesticated and wild species. Work in this field not only assumes a novel set of speakers (which can include, for some, plant as well as animal species), but it also contributes to a redefinition of what language is. This article examines how the expansion of language to non-human animals is helping to produce posthuman worlds in which linguistic expertise is partially transferred from humans to machines. These new ways of defining language are especially visible in the forms of translation that people in the world of interspecies communication engage in that link animals, humans, and artificial intelligence. Repeating earlier moments in translation history, a new kind of linguistic expertise makes a new kind of translation possible.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"32 3","pages":"1003-1021"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.70132","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147667099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Boredom, despondency, and the scourge that lays waste at noon: an anthropology of acedia Ennui, abattement et le fléau qui frappe à midi : une anthropologie de l'acédie 无聊，沮丧，以及在中午浪费时间的祸患：一个绝望的人类学

IF 1.5 2区社会学

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Pub Date : 2026-08-27 Epub Date: 2026-03-24 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.70088

Richard D.G. Irvine

{"title":"Boredom, despondency, and the scourge that lays waste at noon: an anthropology of acedia\u0000 Ennui, abattement et le fléau qui frappe à midi : une anthropologie de l'acédie","authors":"Richard D.G. Irvine","doi":"10.1111/1467-9655.70088","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9655.70088","url":null,"abstract":"Attentive to the ways that inertia can take hold of life, Catholic monks recognize despondency as a potential not only within the monastery, but in contemporary society more widely. Such experiences are regularly mapped onto an understanding of what early Christian monks termed ‘acedia’ (a Greek term that can be translated as ‘lack of care’). Taking as my ethnographic starting point the ways in which monks of an English Benedictine monastery understood and narrated the struggle with acedia, I note how this insight has been shared as a matter of public significance: most proximately during the boredom and constraint of the lockdown in response to COVID, but also more generally as something embedded, unrecognized, in modern life. What, then, does it mean to consider acedia as an analytical category? I argue that identifying acedia not only centres despondency as an active presence in life, but refuses to privatize it and strip it of its social dimensions. This fundamental sociality is both in the interaction with the demon of acedia, moving across the boundaries of a porous mind; and also in the means to resist acedia through the stability of shared time and space.","PeriodicalId":47904,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute","volume":"32 3","pages":"946-964"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2026-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-9655.70088","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147506653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0