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Politics, Region
Latin America
‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’...
January 2021
by John Gledhill
Economics, Politics
Tax
Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a...
December 2020
by Miranda Sheild Johansson
Politics, Religion
Sharia
Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and...
November 2020
by Morgan Clarke
Economics, Politics
Neoliberalism
‘Neoliberalism’ is a widely used term that travelled from economic philosophy into policymaking, and from policymaking into critical social scientific discourse in the late twentieth...
October 2020
by Natalie Morningstar
Health, Politics
Addiction
What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive...
October 2020
by Joshua Burraway
Politics, Theory
Political Ecology
Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology and related disciplines that examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental...
September 2020
by Jason Roberts
Economics, Politics
Cooperatives
Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of...
August 2020
by Theodoros Rakopoulos
Economics, Politics
Hunting and gathering
Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present....
May 2020
by Thomas Widlok
Economics, Politics
Money
Money is a formidable subject — an intimate object in our everyday lives, a claim over resources, and a topic of academic inquiry. Textbooks define money by its various functions, e....
March 2020
by Allison Truitt
Economics, Politics
Farming
Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of...
January 2020
by Andrew Ofstehage
Economics, Politics
Water
Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its...
December 2019
by Veronica Strang
Politics, Theory
Revolution
Revolutions encompass political mobilizations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures....
October 2019
by Alice Wilson
Economics, Politics
Mining
Mining has occurred for thousands of years, and social anthropologists have studied it for almost a century. This entry explains anthropology's principle findings about mining,...
October 2019
by Alex Golub
Health, Politics
Autism
The concept of autism is historically contingent. It did not exist, in any proper sense, before it was invoked by medical and mental health professionals in the twentieth century....
September 2019
by Ben Belek
Economics, Politics
Waste
From plastics in the oceans, to the export of toxic materials, waste is an issue that increasingly attracts public attention as well as demands for political and environmental action...
August 2019
by Patrick O'Hare
Kinship, Politics
Queer Anthropology
Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in...
July 2019
by Ara Wilson
Health, Politics
Global Health
Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures....
June 2019
by Emily Yates-Doerr, Kenneth Maes
Health, Politics
Sport
Activities that one can retrospectively label as ‘sport’ have probably been part of human beings’ repertoire for millennia, but sports as we know them today are the product of a...
May 2019
by Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell
Politics, Theory
Anthropocene
‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition...
January 2019
by Liana Chua, Hannah Fair
Politics, Religion
Islam
Islam is not an anthropological concept in the way, for example, culture, or even religion, are. People have thought about and discussed Islam long before anthropologists started...
October 2018
by Samuli Schielke
Health, Politics
Disability
Disability is a form of difference that is created when the social participation of someone with an impairment is ‘dis-abled’ by normative expectations and material conditions...
June 2018
by Clara Devlieger
Politics, Religion
Cargo Cults
Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their...
March 2018
by Lamont Lindstrom
Economics, Politics
Precarity
Precarity emerged as a central concern in scholarly research and writing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to political mobilizations against unemployment and social...
March 2018
by Sharryn Kasmir
Politics, Theory
Deleuze
This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the...
January 2018
by Jon Bialecki
Economics, Politics
Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office (‘bureau’). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an...
November 2017
by Nayanika Mathur
Politics, Theory
Voice
Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen...
October 2017
by Marlene Schäfers
Economics, Politics
Feasting
Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating...
October 2016
by Chloe Nahum-Claudel
Politics, Theory
Science
'Science' features twice in anthropology. On the one hand, science is an object of anthropological enquiry, in much the same way as ‘kinship’, ‘religion’, or ‘nationalism’....
October 2016
by Matei Candea
Economics, Politics
Resistance
With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected...
October 2016
by Fiona Wright
Economics, Politics
Anthropology Museums and Museum Anthropology
This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the...
October 2016
by Anita Herle
Politics, Theory
Citizenship
What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public...
September 2016
by Sian Lazar
Economics, Politics
Colonialism / Postcolonialism
The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its...
September 2016
by Susan Bayly
Politics, Theory
Human Rights
Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of...
September 2016
by Harri Englund
Kinship, Politics
Tribe
The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been...
September 2016
by David Sneath
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