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135337 results in Anthropology

Page 1 of 6767

How Data Need People
  • The Social and Epistemic Practice of a Data-Rich Science
  • Götz Hoeppe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    30 June 2026
  • From genome sequencing to large sky surveys, digital technologies produce massive datasets that promise unprecedented scientific insights. But data, for being good to use and reuse, need people – scientists, technicians, and administrators – as embodied, evaluative, social humans. In this book, anthropologist Götz Hoeppe draws on an ethnography of astronomical research to examine the media and practices that scientists and technicians use to instruct graduate students, make diagrams for data calibration and discovery, organize collaborative work, negotiate the ethics of open access, encode their knowledge in datasets – and do social inquiries along the way. This book offers a reflection on the sociality of data-rich research that will benefit attempts to integrate human and machine learning. It is essential reading for anyone interested in data science, science and technology studies, as well as the anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy of science. This book is also available Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Neandertal Skeletal Anatomy
  • Form, Function and Paleobiology
  • Edited by Libby W. Cowgill, Scott D. Maddux
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
  • The Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis) are an extinct human species closely related to modern humans. They have the most extensive and well-documented fossil record of any fossil human group, allowing for a detailed understanding of their skeletal anatomy. This book offers a comprehensive synthesis of current knowledge on Neandertals, presenting an in-depth exploration of their paleobiology through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Contributions from leading experts provide detailed examinations of specific anatomical regions, ensuring authoritative and meticulously researched content. Each chapter integrates cutting-edge findings, drawing from extensive research and publication histories. This volume serves as an essential resource for advanced students, scholars, and professionals in anthropology, paleontology, and related fields. Whether as a comprehensive reference or a teaching tool, it is indispensable for those interested in the intricate study of Neandertal anatomy, evolution, and their place in human history.

Fashioning Futures
  • Uncertainty and Young Women's Livelihoods in Urban Nigeria
  • Juliet Gilbert
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Through vibrant ethnographic storytelling, this study reveals how young women capitalise on uncertainty in Calabar, southeastern Nigeria, to realise respectable futures. Exploring young women's daily activities across different sites from the house to church, sewing shops and beauty salons, Fashioning Futures examines the complex ways in which various forms of uncertainty permeate life in a city shaped by Pentecostal fervour and patriarchal conservatism. Juliet Gilbert demonstrates how young women actively engage with forms of uncertainty such as illusion, dissimulation and fakery to present themselves as respectable urbanites and work towards marriage. Revealing young women's centrality in the construction of urban lifeworlds in contemporary Nigeria, Gilbert re-casts youthhood in Africa, both as an analytical category and as a time of experience.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Race and Ethnicity
  • Edited by Jemima Pierre, Jean Muteba Rahier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • What is race and how does it structure our contemporary world? This Handbook offers a groundbreaking exploration of these urgent questions, providing a critical, global perspective on the anthropology of race and ethnicity. Drawing together cutting-edge research across subdisciplines such as physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology and linguistics, it emphasizes the key roles of colonialism and the discipline of anthropology in shaping our understanding of race, and demonstrates the instrumentality of race/ethnicity in the reproduction of local and global inequality. The chapters show how a variety of issues are deeply rooted in global structures of race and power — from the rising popularity of genomics to police brutality and the rise of the far right in the West. Providing new theoretical frameworks and innovative methodologies reshaping the discipline of anthropology, this Handbook is a vital resource for anyone interested in the complexities of race in the 21st century.

Disability and Distribution
  • Becoming a Valuable Person in Kinshasa
  • Clara Devlieger
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Set in the postcolonial city of Kinshasa (DR Congo), this ethnography explores how people with disabilities navigate debates about the just distribution of resources where there is little state organised welfare, and public perception of disability swings between the 'deserving' and 'undeserving'. Tracing a historic increase of disability due to polio and its long-term effects, this book examines two controversial livelihood activities that serve as informal alternatives to state support: a specialized form of international border brokerage across the Congo River, and a unique practice of bureaucratized begging that imitates state tax collection and humanitarian fundraising. Clara Devlieger examines how such activities shape ways that disabled people conceive the idea of becoming 'valuable people' in local terms: by supporting loved ones, many achieve high esteem against expectations, while adapting exclusionary models of urban personhood to include disability. Devlieger offers a new understanding of the complex dynamic between the imagined role of the state, international discourses of rights, and local experiences of disability.

Altered Minds
  • The Interface of Substances, Virtual Simulations and AI Consciousness
  • Sheldon Lee Gosline
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of humanity's quest for altered states, from ancient psychoactive rituals to immersive AI and virtual reality, and examines their continued impact on cognition, culture, governance, and identity. Drawing on decades of global fieldwork and interdisciplinary research, Dr Sheldon Lee Gosline traces compelling connections between the regulation of controlled substances and the addictive dynamics of emerging technologies. Readers are challenged to move beyond binaries of legality and pathology and discover how symbols, rituals, and imagination have long mediated our understanding of self and reality. Bridging anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the history of medicine, chapters introduce innovative concepts such as symbolic entropy and recursive regulation to interpret present crises and anticipate future transformations. A must-read for scholars, policymakers, and curious readers alike, the volume offers a powerful lens through which to understand the evolving future of consciousness in the digital age.

Iran's Minorities
  • Social Diversity and State Power
  • Lois Beck
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • In the wake of Iran's revolution in 1978–79, a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy took control of the country. These dramatic changes impacted all sectors of society including a vast array of diverse peoples and cultures. In this book, Lois Beck provides an anthropological and historical account of Iran's many minorities. She focuses on the aftermath of the revolution, declaration of an Islamic republic, and Iraq-Iran war. Drawing on six decades of anthropological research, Beck provides frameworks for understanding how each of Iran's linguistic, religious, ethnic, ethno-national, and tribal minorities fashioned unique identities. These identities stem from factors relating to history, location, socioeconomic patterns, and sociocultural traits. They reflect the people's interactions with Iran's rulers and governments as they changed over time. A modern nation-state cannot be fully understood without knowing the extent of its reach in the peripheries and border regions and among its diverse peoples. This landmark study challenges existing scholarly accounts by offering broad and detailed perspectives on Iran's many distinct languages, religions, ethnicities, ethno-nations, and tribes.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death
  • Edited by Sarah L. Richardson, Sarah E. Wagner, Ruth E. Toulson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Shaped by important shifts in the field and a global pandemic, this Handbook provides a fresh look at the anthropology of death. It is split into five parts, with chapters examining how deathcare happens and the kinds of relationships that arise between the living, the dying, and the dead; how rituals change and also endure; and how societies make sense of and live with death – both everyday and catastrophic. It draws on theories of social death and necropolitics, as well as death's materiality and more-than-human experiences of death and grief, inviting a broader understanding of the subject itself. With contributors from within and beyond the fields of anthropology and death studies, it bridges gaps in scholarly dialogues around life from death and death's afterlife of mourning and memory. The ethnographically grounded individual studies combine to underscore why death matters in new and urgent ways beyond concerns of just human life.

Critical Friendship in the Modern World
  • Edited by Laura Eramian, Peter Mallory
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, Laura Eramian and Peter Mallory offer a comprehensive conceptualization of 'critical friendship' across its diverse meanings. Drawing on contemporary insights and cross-cultural examples from interdisciplinary contributors, the chapters examine the ambivalence of friendship, its entanglements with other relations or institutions, the quest for selfhood and recognition, and how friendship finds meaning across private and public life. Through an empirically rich evaluation of the multiple ways that friendship is practiced, valued, or interpreted, this volume advances critical debates on friendship across social psychology, anthropology, sociology and beyond.

Nuer Messianic Judaism
  • Truth and Mediation in the Ethiopia-South Sudan Borderlands
  • Yotam Gidron
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • The Messianic Jews of Ethiopia's Gambella region are Evangelical Christian Zionists who adhere to various Jewish practices and understand their faith as authentically emulating the faith of the first followers of Jesus Christ. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in this region, Yotam Gidron traces here the rise and evolution of Christian Zionist and Messianic Jewish faiths amongst Nuer communities in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands. This study approaches processes of religious change from the perspective of believers, examining their pursuits of knowledge and transnational connectivity. In doing so, Gidron considers everyday dilemmas concerning spiritual mediation and truth, as they emerged in relation to church genealogies, Christian literacy, modes of prayer and praise, bloodlines, cattle, and the constitution of various human and divine relationships. As a result, he offers timely insights on spiritual and political life at the global margins, and on contemporary African attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East.
Food Taboos in Archaeology

Food Taboos in Archaeology
  • Max Price
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • Anthropologists have struggled with the concept of the food taboo for over a century; and archaeologists struggle with detecting them in the material signatures of the past. Yet by recognizing that ancient peoples must have followed taboos, some of which may have persisted for thousands of years, we gain insight into how cultural traditions shaped the ways in which people ate and interacted with their environments. This Element concerns food and the cultural structures that surround it. It provides an overview of the history and anthropological understandings of food taboos, and offers critical engagement with the current archaeological method and theory investigating these. Archaeological case studies, including the pig taboo in Judaism and ethnoarchaeological analysis of various mammalian taboos among the Nukak of Amazonia, shed light on the difficulties and prospects of studying food taboos in the material record.
Language, Gender and Biopolitics

Language, Gender and Biopolitics
  • Meaning-Making and Intersex Variations in Healthcare
  • Brian W. King
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • This Element examines language, power and intersex variations within clinician accounts in Hong Kong, examining how they communicate about intersex traits to patients and their families. Employing interactional sociolinguistics, the research analyses clinician interviews as dynamic social interactions, focusing on how communicative stances are negotiated and social practices are enacted. The Element probes the influence of biopower on clinicians' stances (encompassing gender, sexual difference, racialization and ableism) and explores the possibilities of emancipation from these biopolitical constraints. Findings highlight the tension between medical structuring forces and the formation of intersex subjects and bodies, impacting their autonomy and livability. Gender is relevant as both a power system and a lived reality, critical for understanding the bioregulation of innate sex characteristics and advancing broader implications for gender and language studies and healthcare communication. This research challenges gender-sceptical discourses and highlights the transformative potential of gender frameworks in medical and social contexts.
Constrained Multilingualism

Constrained Multilingualism
  • Marco Santello
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • This Element highlights the role of constraints in shaping multilingualism. It discusses their conceptualisation, starting from Michel de Certeau's view of action in everyday life, and operationalisation for the study of migrants. The results of the research conducted among Gambian migrants in Italy show not only constraints but also the tactics to inhabit them, as well as non-language related aspects, for example suffering, which are grouped into five clusters. These are (1) lack of support; (2) limited interaction in the 'local' language; (3) immigration status in conjunction with life events; (4) others' behaviour; and (5) other concerns and suffering. The conclusion presents a discussion on the wider significance of what incorporating constraints means for our understanding of multilingualism and migration, including policy implications, and for intercultural communication research.

An Unholy Pedagogy
  • Visions of Learning from Mesoamerica, 1300-1650
  • Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • The traumatic Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, and the Ibero-Catholic colonialism that followed, truly transformed Indigenous political, economic, and socio-cultural practices. Confronted by dogmatic European literary regimes, strident indoctrination, and acts of structural violence, how could 'Aztec' education have survived in colonial times? An Unholy Pedagogy rethinks education studies by centering discussions on Indigenous visions of learning that shaped schooling throughout the sixteenth century. Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald tracks education systems before the Spanish-Catholic invasion, examining the writings, art, and architecture of Nahua communities. He analyses Nahuatl primary sources and historical art and archaeological sources, focusing especially on materials produced by Indigenous and Indigenous-Christian artists and scribes. This fascinating interdisciplinary study reveals the ways that Nahua students transformed pedagogy, shaped learning, and preserved local knowledge.

The Life of Form
  • Anthropology, Wittgenstein, and the Problem of Context
  • Paolo Heywood
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • What if anthropology's fundamental assumptions about cultural and social context were shaped by a philosopher many anthropologists have never engaged with? This book explores how, from the early twentieth century to the present day, anthropological ideas about context have been shaped by Ludwig Wittgenstein's evolving philosophy, often without anthropologists fully realizing it. It shows how Wittgenstein's philosophical journey mirrors anthropology's own theoretical transformations. Through careful analysis of key figures from Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to Geertz and contemporary theorists, Paolo Heywood reveals unexpected connections between philosophical developments and anthropological practice. The result is a surprising genealogy of how we came to think about culture, society, and everyday life the way we do. This intellectual history illuminates the hidden philosophical assumptions that continue to shape anthropological work today. It reveals how disciplines are shaped by ideas they've forgotten they borrowed, and the surprising ways such ideas evolve in new contexts.
Gender and Uptalk in Hong Kong English

Gender and Uptalk in Hong Kong English
  • Wilkinson Daniel Wong Gonzales, Chan Pui Yu Ivy, Zhang Xiaohan Harry, Ng Chui Yin Judy, Chung Yan Ching Karina
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • This Element interrogates the complex role of gender in shaping the sociolinguistic variable of UPTALK within Hong Kong English, highlighting its interaction with other sociodemographic factors. Foregrounding gender as a central factor, the Element employs a robust array of methodologies to dissect how gender interacts with social factors, identities, and social types across a sample of sixteen participants. Findings unveil new perspectives on gender-dependent meanings of UPTALK, demonstrating that while gendered stylistic accommodation plays a notable role, UPTALK is not merely a gender marker. Instead, it embodies complex social meanings shaped by a broad spectrum of individual, cognitive (awareness), and contextual factors. By integrating both production and perception/attitudinal data from a relatively unexplored context, the Element provides a holistic, nuanced understanding of how UPTALK can function as a multifunctional sociolinguistic resource, offering insights into the theorization of language variation and social meaning, with particular focus on the role of gender.

The Rediscovery of Huaca Pintada
  • Why Traditional Ecological Knowledge Matters Within Archaeological Environments in Peru
  • Sâm Ghavami, Christian Cancho Ruiz
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • This Element presents a case study of the authors' partnership with the Pintada community in their excavation of a pre-Columbian site known as 'Huaca Pintada', a pyramidal mound located in the Lambayeque region on the north coast of Peru. The site, which gained recognition after the fortuitous discovery by looters in 1916 of an exceptional polychrome mural, was somehow 'forgotten' by the scientific community after irreversible damage. However, this was not the case for the local inhabitants, families like the Inoñán or the Chapoñán descendants of ancient muchic traditions, who founded a village named after their illustrious elder. The authors will describe how local actors like shamans or workers were indispensable in finding solutions that led not only to the rediscovery of the treasures of the Huaca Pintada but also to the reconnection of the community with its past.
The Behavioral Ecology of Food

The Behavioral Ecology of Food
  • Bridging the Archaeological and the Contemporary
  • Elic M. Weitzel, Natalie D. Munro
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • Due to the multi-faceted nature of food – as sustenance, symbol, and commodity – diverse theoretical perspectives have been used to study it in archaeology. One of the more influential and versatile of these approaches is behavioral ecology: the study of behavioral adaptation to local environments. Behavioral ecology provides a powerful body of theory for understanding human decision-making in both the past and present. This Element reviews what behavioral ecology is, how it has been used by archaeologists to study decision-making concerning food and subsistence, how it articulates with other ecological approaches, and how it can help us to better understand sustainability in our contemporary world. The use of behavioral ecology to bridge the archaeological and the contemporary can not only explain the roots of important behavioral processes, but provide potential policy solutions to promote a more sustainable society today.

Linguistic Representations of Women in Old English Prose
  • A Corpus-Based Phraseological Study
  • Anna Cichosz, Tomasz Dobrogoszcz
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • This Element traces the origins and earliest manifestations of gender bias in the English language. The analysis is based on a corpus of Old English prose texts, written between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. The results are interpreted in the historical, cultural and literary context of Anglo-Saxon England and early medieval Europe. The investigation shows a significant difference in the way women and men are presented in Old English texts, with the former clearly associated with family life, portrayed in the context of their physical appearance, marriage and childbearing, rarely involved in meaningful activities and presented as possessions of their male relatives. Situating the linguistic representations of women in the context of Christianity, the Element demonstrates that late Old English can be seen as a vehicle of language bias that will establish male domination for centuries to come. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Religion, Dissonance, and Systems Theory
  • Comparing Spiritual Traditions
  • Ariel Glucklich
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • Religious belief systems are often marked by internal dissonance. Mitigating this dissonance can lead to surprising religious phenomena, including blood libels, scapegoating, religious violence, the worship of saints and martyrs, asceticism, austerities, as well as processions, fasting, and clowning. In this study, Ariel Glucklich provides a new approach to understanding how religious actions emerge in the context of belief systems. Providing an innovative psychological and social understanding of the causes that stimulate believers to action, he examines a range of religious phenomena in India, Israel, Austria, Italy, and the United States. Glucklich's new theory enables recognition of the patterns that account for the full complexity of actions inspired by religious beliefs and systems.  His systematic comparison of actions across traditional boundaries offers a novel approach to cause and effect in comparative religion and religious studies more broadly. Glucklich's book also generates new questions regarding a universal phenomenon that has escaped notice up to now.

Page 1 of 6767