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Religion, Theory
Emic and etic
The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been...
November 2020
by Till Mostowlansky, Andrea Rota
Health, Theory
Metrics
Numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life seem to govern our existence more and more. Particularly since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance...
October 2020
by Marlee Tichenor
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, Theory
Gifts
As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus...
July 2020
by Yunxiang Yan
Kinship, Theory
Childhood
Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a...
June 2020
by Catherine Allerton
Religion, Theory
Magic
Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘...
October 2019
by Matteo Benussi
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
Religion, Theory
Animism
Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants,...
June 2019
by Katherine Swancutt
Economics, Theory
Games
Though there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a ‘game’, games are typically defined as goal-oriented, rules-based activities closely associated with the...
May 2019
by Max Watson
Religion, Theory
Divination
Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s...
April 2019
by Diana Espírito Santo
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
Economics, Theory
Digital Anthropology
‘The digital’ is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to...
August 2018
by Daniel Miller
Kinship, Theory
Relations
To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry...
May 2018
by Marilyn Strathern
Religion, Theory
Animals
What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader...
May 2018
by Thomas White, Matei Candea
Kinship, Theory
Ethnography
Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such...
February 2018
by Signe Howell
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, Theory
Tourism
Tourism is a new phenomenon in world history, but today more people travel long distances for this purpose than for any other. This entry traces some main contributions...
November 2017
by Rupert Stasch
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
Religion, Theory
Ontological Turn, The
‘Culture’ is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline’s history,...
May 2017
by Paolo Heywood
Religion, Theory
Ethics / Morality
It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why...
May 2017
by James Laidlaw
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
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
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
Region, Theory
Mediterraneanist Anthropology
The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding...
September 2016
by Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Region, Theory
Landscape
When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and...
September 2016
by Paola Filippucci
Kinship, Theory
Matriliny
Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before...
September 2016
by Jessica Johnson
Religion, Theory
Values
The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review...
September 2016
by Joel Robbins, Julian Sommerschuh
Economics, Theory
Gambling
Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a...
September 2016
by Anthony Pickles
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