Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Body

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25antiblackness

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

References

Allen, Jafari S., and Ryan C. Jobson. 2016. “The decolonizing generation: (Race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” Current Anthropology 104, no. 3: 783–90.

Alves, Jaime A. 2018. The anti-Black city: Police terror and Black urban life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, liberalism, and American anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Anjari, Simran. 2022. “From Black consciousness to Black Lives Matter: Confronting the colonial legacy of colourism in South Africa.” Agenda: Empowering Women in Gender Equity 36, no. 4: 158–69.

Bacelar da Silva, Antonio J. 2022. Between Brown and Black: Anti-racist activism in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bailey, Moya. 2021. Misogynoir transformed: Black women’s digital resistance. New York: NYU Press.

Bajwa, Marium, Imke von Maur, and Achim Stephan. 2023. “Colorism in the Indian Subcontinent: Insights through situated affectivity.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (online). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09901-6

Baker, Lee D. 1998. From savage to Negro: Anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

–––––––. 2020. “The racist anti-racism of American anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 290, no. 2: 127–42.

Baldwin, James, and Margaret Mead. 1971. A rap on race. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha. 2015. Electric santería: Racial and sexual assemblages of transnational religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha, Jemima Pierre, and Junaid Rana. 2025. The anthropology of white supremacy: A reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Benton, Adia. 2015. HIV exceptionalism: Development through disease in Sierra Leone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. 2010. The image of the Black in Western art, vol. 2: From the early Christian era to the "Age of Discovery." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. London: Icon Books.

Blakey, Michael L. 2010. “Man and nature, white and other.” In Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology of liberation. Third edition. Edited by Faye Harrison, 16–24. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.

–––––––. 2020. “Archaeology under the blinding light of race.” Current Anthropology 61, no. 22: S183–97.

Blumenbach, Johann F. 1865. The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Edited and translated by Thomas Bendyshe. London: The Anthropological Society.

Boaz, Danielle N. 2021. Banning the Black gods: Law and religions of the African diaspora. University Park: The Pennsylvania University State Press.

Bolles, Lynn A. 2001. “Theorizing a Black feminist self in anthropology: Toward an autobiographic approach.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bonilla, Yarimar. 2015. Non-sovereign futures: French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2015. “The structure of racism in color-blind, ‘post-racial’ America.” American Behavioral Scientist 59, no. 11: 1358–76.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brandt, Allan. 1978. “Racism and research: The case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” The Hastings Center Report 8, no. 6: 21–9.

Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as white public space?” American Anthropologist 113, no. 4: 545–56.

Brown, Jaqueline Nassy. 1998. “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the gendering of diasporic space.” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3: 291–325.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark matters: On the surveillance of Blackness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1993. “Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading urban uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 16–23. New York: Routledge.

Candelario, Ginetta E.B. 2007. Black behind the ears: Dominican racial identity from museums to beauty shops. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Cantave, Rachel. 2024. “Pursuing racial order and social progress: Violence, Afrophobia and ‘religious racism’ in Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 59, no. 4: 858–71.

Chamberlain, Alexander. 1907. “Thomas Jefferson’s ethnological opinions and activities.” American Anthropologist 9, no. 3: 499–509.

Cohen, William. 1969. “Thomas Jefferson and the problem of slavery.” Journal of American History 56, no. 1: 503–26.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

Combahee River Collective. (1977) 2017. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” In How we get free: In Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, 15–27. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Cox, Aimee M. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Cox, Aimee, Savannah Shange, Christen Smith, and Deborah Thomas. “An anthropology of abolition/liberation with Aimee M. Cox and panelists.” Yale University. April 6, 2022. YouTube video, 28:51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BTMpj9KYI&t=1731s.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2014. On intersectionality: Essential writings. New York: The New Press.

Davis, Allison, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner. (1941) 2022. Deep South: A social anthropological study of caste and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, race and class. New York: Random House.

Dennis, Rutledge. 1995. “Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and the metaphysics of race.” The Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 3: 243–52.

Drake, St. Clair, and Willie Baber. 1990. “Further reflections on anthropology and the Black experience.” Transforming Anthropology 1, no. 2: 1–14.

Douglass, Frederick. (1881) 2022. “The color line.” In Douglass: Speeches and writings. New York: Library of America.

–––––––. 1854. The claims of the Negro, ethnologically considered. Rochester, N.Y.: Lee, Mann & Co.

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. 1945. Black metropolis: A study of Negro life in a northern city. New York: Harper & Row.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) 1996. The souls of Black folk. New York: Penguin Books.

–––––––. (1935) 1998. Black reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press.

DuVernay, Ava. 2016. 13^th. Netflix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8.

Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. London: Sage Press.

Essed, Philomena, and David T. Goldberg, eds. 2002. Race critical theories: Text and context. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Eze, Emmanuel C. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fabian, Johannes. (1983) 2014. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its objects. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Farmer, Paul. 2004. "An anthropology of structural violence." Current Anthropology 45, no. 3: 305–25.

Finkelman, Paul. 2014. Slavery and the founders: Race and liberty in the age of Jefferson. Third edition. London: Routledge.

Firmin, Anténor. (1885) 2000. The equality of the human races (positivist anthropology). Translated by Asselin Charles. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

Fleur-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology.” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3: 449–66.

Franklin, John Hope. 1989. Race and history: Selected essays, 1938-1988. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Fraser, Gertrude J. 1998. African American midwifery in the South: Dialogues of birth, race, and memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Garraway, Doris. 2005. “Race, reproduction and family romance in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description […] de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2: 227–46.

Garrigus, John D. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Andrew Curran, eds. 2022. Who’s Black and why? A hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Gibson-Light, Michael. 2023. Orange-collar labour: Work and inequality in prison. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gillam, Reighan. 2022. Visualizing Black lives: Ownership and control in Afro-Brazilian media. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black bodies, white bodies: Toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine, and literature. Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1: 204–42.

Gilroy, Paul. 1987. ‘There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–––––––. 1993. The Black Atlantic modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, ed. 2009. Shades of difference: Why skin color matters. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gray, Herman. 1995. Watching race: Television and the struggle for "Blackness". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gupta, Akhil, and Jesie Stoolman. 2022. “Decolonizing US anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124: 778–99.

Hage, Ghassan. 2000. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. (1997) 2013. “The spectacle of the ‘other.’” In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Second edition. Edited by Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, 215–87. London: SAGE.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. “The Du Boisian legacy in anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 3: 239–60.

–––––––. ed. (1991) 2010. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. Third edition. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.

Harrison, Ira E., Deborah Johnson-Simon, and Erica Lorraine Williams, eds. 2018. The second generation of African American pioneers in anthropology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in the nineteenth-century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Heath, Elizabeth. 2010. “Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.” In Encyclopedia of Africa, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195337709.001.0001/acref-9780195337709-e-0467.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1837) 1894. Lectures on the history of philosophy. Translated by J. Sibree. London: George Bell & Sons.

Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hochschild, Jennifer L., and Brenna M. Powell. 2008. “Racial reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, half-breeds, mixed parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican race.” Studies in American Political Development 22: 59–96.

Holland, Lorelle, Claudia Lee, Maree Toombs, Andrew Smirnov, and Natasha Reid. 2024. First Nations Health and Wellbeing – The Lowitja Journal 2: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fnhli.2024.100023

Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth. 2015. The color of love: Racial features, stigma, and the socialization in Black Brazilian families. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hume, David. (1748) 1997. “Of national characters.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 30–3. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1928. “How it feels to be colored me.” The World Tomorrow 11, no. 5: 215–6.

–––––––. 2018. Barracoon: The story of the last “Black cargo.” New York: HarperCollins.

Jablonski, Nina. 2021. “Skin color and race.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175, no. 2: 437–47.

Jackson, John L., Jr. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in racial sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jackson, Sebastian. 2024. “Miscegenation madness: Interracial intimacy and the politics of ‘purity’ in twentieth century South Africa.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research in Race 21, no. 2: 223–49.

Jaffe, Rivke. 2013. “The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica.” American Ethnologist 40, no. 4: 734–48.

James, C.L.R. 1938. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg.

–––––––. (1781) 2022. Notes on the state of Virginia. Edited by Robert Pierce Forbes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jenkins, Destin. 2021. The bonds of inequality: Debt and the making of the American city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jha, Meeta. 2015. The global beauty industry: Colorism, racism, and the national body. First edition. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Marguerite, and Alistair Rolls. 2023. “Georges Cuvier’s autopsy report on Sara Baartman: A translation and commentary.” Terrae Incognitae 55, no. 2: 170–95.

Jones, Delmos. 1970. “Towards a Native anthropology.” Human Organization 29, no. 4: 251–9.

Jordan, Winthrop. 1968. White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

–––––––. 2014. “Historical origins of the one-drop racial rule in the United States.” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no.1: 98–132.

Joseph, Daniel, and Bertin M. Louis Jr. 2022. “Anti-Haitianism and statelessness in the Caribbean.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 27, no. 3: 386-407.

Jung, Moon-Kie ,and João H. Costa Vargas, eds. 2021. Antiblackness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. (1764) 1997. “On national characteristics, so far as they depend upon the distinct feeling of the beautiful and sublime.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 49–57. Oxford: Blackwell.

Keaton, Trica. 2023. #You know you’re Black in France when…: The fact of everyday antiblackness. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Keel, Terence. 2013. “From Africans to Negroes: Anthropology and the politics of racial science in the nineteenth century.” History of the Human Sciences 26, no. 1: 3–32

Larsen, Nella. 1929. Passing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Lewis, Diane. 1973. “Anthropology and colonialism.” Current Anthropology 14, no. 5: 581–602.

Lindfors, Bernth, ed. 1999. Africans on stage: Studies in ethnological show business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

von Linnaeus, Carl. (1735) 1997. “The God-given order of nature.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 10–14. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister outsider. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press.

Magubane, Zine. 2001. “Which bodies matter? Feminism, poststructuralism, race and the curious theoretical odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’.” Gender and Society 15, no. 6: 816–34.

–––––––. 2003. “Simians, savages, skulls, and sex: Science and colonial militarism in nineteenth-century South Africa.” In Race, nature and the politics of difference, edited by Donald Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, 99–121. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Matlon, Jordanna. 2016. “Racial capitalism and the crisis of Black masculinity.” American Sociological Review 81, no. 5: 1014–38.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

McClaurin, Irma, ed. 2001. Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2021. “The illumination of Blackness.” In Antiblackness, edited by Moon-Kie Jung and João Costa Vargas, 17–36. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mishra, N. 2015. “India and colorism: The finer nuances.” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 4, no. 14: 725–50.

Mondesire, Zachary. 2022. “A Black exit interview from anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124, no.3: 613–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13755

Monk, Ellis P., Jr. 2015. “The cost of color: Skin color, discrimination, and health among African Americans.” American Journal of Sociology 121, no.2: 396–444.

Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E. 1798. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de L'Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1 (Paris: Dupont). https://archive.org/details/descriptiontopog00more/page/n9/mode/2up

Morgan, Marcyliena. 2002. Language, discourse and power in African American culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morton, Samuel George. 1839. Crania Americana; or, a comparative view of the skulls of various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson.

Moton, Fred. 2008. “The case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2: 177–218.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. 2010. The condemnation of Blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mullings, Leith. 2005a. “Interrogating racism: Toward an antiracist anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667–93.

–––––––. 2005b. “Resistance and resilience: The Sojourner syndrome and the legacy of Black women’s health issues in the United States.” In Health and social justice: Politics, ideology, and inequity in the distribution of disease, edited by Richard Hofrichter, 345–68. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mullings, Leith, Alaka Wali, Diane McLean, Janet Mitchell, Sabiyha Prince, Deborah Thomas, and Patricia Tovar. 2001. “Qualitative methodologies and community participation in examining reproductive experiences: The Harlem Birth Right Project.” Maternal and Child Health Journal 5, no. 1: 85–93.

Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of citizenship: Race and the census in modern politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nott, Josiah C. 1843. “The mulatto a hybrid – probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry.” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29, no. 2: 29–32.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Oshinsky, David M. 1996. “Worse than slavery”: Parchman Farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow justice. New York: Free Press.

Painter, Nell I. 2010. The history of white people. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Pascoe, Peggy. 2009. What comes naturally: Miscegenation law and the making of race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Perkins, Rachel, and Marcia Langton. 2008. First Australians: An illustrated history. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press.

Perry, Keisha-Khan Y. 2013. Black women against the land grab: The fight for racial justice in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. The predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–––––––. 2020. “Slavery, anthropological knowledge, and the racialization of Africans.” Current Anthropology 21, no.22: s220–31.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ralph, Laurence. 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ralph, Laurence, and Kerry Chance. 2014. “Legacies of fear: From Rodney King’s beating to Trayvon Martin’s death.” Transition 133: 137–43.

Ralph, Michael. 2012. “‘Life…in the midst of death: ‘Notes on the relationship between slave insurance, life insurance and disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v32i3.3267

Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. London: Zedd Press.

Rodney, Walter. (1972) 2018. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso.

Rodriguez, Cheryl. 2001. “A homegirl goes home: Black feminism and the lure of native anthropology.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin, 233–58. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Rouse, Carolyn. 2009. Uncertain suffering: Racial health care disparities and sickle cell disease. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of modernity: The tragedy of colonial Enlightenment. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

–––––––. 2014. “The theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the poetics of universal history. Small Axe 18, no. 3: 35–51.

Sexton, Jared. 2008. Amalgamation schemes: Antiblackness and the critique of multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shanklin, Eugenia. 1999. “The profession of the color blind: sociocultural anthropology and racism in the 21^st century.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 669–79.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the wake: On Blackness and being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shaw, Carolyn M. 2001. “Disciplining the Black female body: Learning feminism in Africa and the United States.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin, 102–25. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Sheriff, Robin, E. 2001. Dreaming equality: Color, race, and racism in urban Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Slocum, Karla. 2006. Free trade and freedom: Neoliberalism, place, and nation in the Caribbean. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Smedley, Audrey. 1998. “‘Race’ and the construction of human identity.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 690–702.

–––––––. (1993) 2007. Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview. Third edition. Boulder, Co: Westview Press.

Smith, Christen A. 2016. Afro-paradise: Blackness, violence, and performance in Brazil. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

–––––––. 2021. “An introduction to Cite Black Women.” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1: 6–9.

Snowden, Frank. 1970. Blacks in antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Spears, Arthur. 2020. “Racism, colorism, and language within their macro contexts.” In The Oxford handbook of language and race, edited by H.S. Alim, A. Reyes, and P. Kroskrity, 47–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––––––. 2021. “White supremacy and antiblackness: Theory and lived experience.” Linguistic Anthropology 31, no.2: 157–79.

Stewart, Dianne M. 2005. Three eyes for the journey: African dimensions of the Jamaican religious experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2006. Haunted by empire: Geographies of intimacy in North American history. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Strother, Z.S. 1999. “Display of the body Hottentot.” In Africans on stage: Studies in ethnological show business, edited by Bernth Lindfors, 1–61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sue, Christina A. 2013. Land of the cosmic race: Race mixture, racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, Paul M., and Cesare Marino. 2019. “Paolo Mantegazza’s vision: The science of man behind the world’s first museum of anthropology (Florence, Italy, 1869).” Museum Anthropology 42, no. 2: 109–24.

Telles, Edward, ed. 2014. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, race, and color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2019. Political life in the wake of the plantation: Sovereignty, witnessing, repair. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah, and M. Kamari Clarke. 2013. “Globalization and race: Structures of inequality, new sovereignties, and citizenship in a neoliberal era.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 305–25.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness.” In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press.

–––––––. 1995. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon Press.

Twine, France Winddance. 1998. Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Vargas, João H. Costa. 2018. The denial of antiblackness: Multiracial redemption and Black suffering. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wade, Peter. 2009. Race and sex in Latin America. New York: Pluto Press.

Walker, Alice. 1983. In search of our mother’s gardens: Womanist prose. San Diego: Harcourt.

Walker, David. 1830. David Walker’s appeal, in four articles; Together with a preamble, to the colored citizens of the world. Boston: D. Walker.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

West, Cornel. 2002. “A genealogy of modern racism.” In Race critical theories, edited by Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, ____. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Wilderson, Frank., III. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright.

Williams, Bianca C. 2015. “Introduction: #BlackLivesMatter.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, June 29. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-black-lives-matter.

Williams, Eric. (1944) 1994. Capitalism and slavery. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Williams, Erica L. 2021. “Black girl abroad: An autoethnography of travel and the need to cite Black women in anthropology.” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1: 143–54.

Willis, William S., Jr. 1972. “Skeletons in the anthropological closet.” In Reinventing anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 121–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London: Verso.

Woodson, Carter G. 1918. “The beginnings of the miscegenation of the whites and Blacks.” The Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4: 335–53.

Woodward, C. Vann. (1955) 2002. The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3: 257–337.

Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

[1] Rouse, Carolyn. 2021. “Capital crimes: ‘Language is a moving target.’” Princeton Alumni Weekly, November 20. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/capital-crimes.

[2] Charmantier, Isabelle. 2020. “Linneaus and race.” The Linnean Society of London, September 3. https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race

[3] Jefferson, Thomas. 1814. “Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 22 February 1814.” The National Archives Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0132.

[4] Scharff, Virginia. 2020. “Sally Hemings (1773 – 1835).” Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hemings-sally-1773-1835/#:~:text=Sally%20Hemings%20was%20an%20enslaved,was%20likely%20Hemings's%20half%2Dsister.

[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25dance

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

References

Allen, Jafari S. 2022. There’s a disco ball between us: A theory of Black gay life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ana, Ruxandra. 2017. “Rumba: Heritage, tourism and the ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban experience.” In Collaborative intimacies in music and dance: Anthropologies of sound and movement, edited by Evangelos Chrysagis & Panas Karampampas, 163–86. New York: Berghahn Books.

Bendix, Regina F. 1997. In search of authenticity: The formation of folklore studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

––––––– 2018. Culture and value: Tourism, heritage, and property. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Boas, Franz. 1927. Primitive art. Oslo: Aschehoug and Cambridge.

Bortolotto, Chiara. 2020. “Le patrimoine immatériel et le tabou de l’authenticité : de la pérennisation à la durabilité." In Le patrimoine culturel immatériel au seuil des sciences sociales, edited by Julia Csergo, Christian Hottin and Pierre Schmit, 218–35. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme.

Bovin, Mette. (1998) 2005. "Nomadic performance - pecuilar culture? 'Exotic' ethnic performances of WoDaaBe nomads of Niger." In Recasting ritual: Performance, media, identity, edited by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary M. Crain, 93-112. London: Routledge.

Buckland, Theresa J., ed. 1999. Dance in the field: Theory, methods and issues in dance ethnography. Palgrave Macmillan.

Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. 1997. "Sense, meaning, and perception in three dance cultures." In Meaning in motion: New cultural studies reader, edited by Jane Desmond, 269–88. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Calamoneri, Theresa. 2008. "Going native? Ethics and American cultural appropriation of Butoh dance." Dance Research Journal 40, no. 2: 36–49.

Chrysagis, Evangelos & Panas Karampampas 2017. "Introduction: Collaborative intimacies." In Collaborative intimacies in music and dance: Anthropologies of sound and movement, edited by Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas, 1–24. New York: Berghahn Books.

Cowan, Jane K. 1990. Dance and the body politic in Northern Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Delamont, Sara and Neil Stephens 2008. "Up on the roof: The embodied habitus of diasporic capoeira." Cultural Sociology 2: 57–74.

Desmond, Jane, ed. 1997a. Meaning in motion: New cultural studies reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

––––––– 1997b. "Embodying difference: Issues in dance and cultural studies." In Meaning in motion: New cultural studies reader, edited by Jane Desmond, 29-54. London: Routledge.

Duffy, Michelle. 2005. "Performing identity within a multicultural framework." Social & Cultural Geography 6: 677–92.

Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan. 1928. "The dance." Africa 1: 446–62.

Foster, Susan L., ed. 1996. Corporealities: Dancing knowledge, culture and power. London: Routledge.

Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1987. Dance and the lived body: A descriptive aesthetics. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

––––––– 2004. Dancing identity: Metaphysics in motion. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Garnica, Ximena. 2019. "LEIMAY, CAVE, and the New York Butoh Festival.” In The Routledge companion to Butoh performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 325–36. London: Routledge.

Giurchescu, Anca. 2001. “The power of dance and its social and political uses.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 33: 109–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/1519635.

Grau, Andrée. 1993. "John Blacking and the development of dance anthropology in the United Kingdom." Dance Research Journal 25: 21–31.

Hanna, Judith Lynne. 1979. "Movements towards understanding humans through the anthropological study of dance." Current Anthropology 20: 313–39.

––––––– 1987. To dance is human: A theory of nonverbal communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

van Hensbergen, Rosa. 2019. “German Butoh since the Late 1980s.” In The Routledge companion to Butoh performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 276–84. London: Routledge.

Kaeppler, Adrienne. L. 1991. "American approaches to the study of dance." Yearbook for Traditional Music 23: 11–21.

––––––– 2000. "Dance ethnology and the anthropology of dance." Dance Research Journal 32: 116–25.

––––––– 2006. "Dances and dancing in Tonga: Anthropological and historical discourses." In Dancing from past to present: Nation, culture, identities, edited by Theresa Jill Buckland, 25–51. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Karampampas, Panas. "Dancing into darkness: Cosmopolitanism and ‘peripherality’ in the Greek goth scene." PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016.

––––––– 2017. "Performing irony on the dance floor: The many faces of goth irony in the Athenian goth scene." In Collaborative intimacies in music and dance: Anthropologies of sound and movement, edited by Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas, 209–33. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2020. "Partying at times of crises and pandemics: Solidarity, resilience and coping with the measures against COVID-19." Social Anthropology 28: 292–3.

––––––– 2021. "(Re)inventing intangible cultural heritage through the market in Greece." International Journal of Heritage Studies 27: 654–67.

–––––––, n.d. "Intangible Cultural Heritage: 'First,' 'second,' or perhaps multiple 'existences' of tradition."

Kealiinohomoku, Joann. 1970. "An anthropologist looks at ballet as a form of ethnic dance." Impulse: Extensions of Dance 20: 24-33.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2014. "Intangible heritage as metacultural production." Museum International 6: 163–74.

Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth. 2004. For the love of women: Gender, identity and same-sex relations in a Greek provincial town. London: Routledge.

Kohn, Tamara. 2001. "Don’t talk – blend: ideas about body and communication in aikido practise." In An anthropology of indirect communication, edited by Joy Hendry and Conrad William Watson, 175–90. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203428573-17

Koutsougera, Natalia. 2023. "'Out in the streets': Hip-hop narratives in contemporary Greece." Meridians 22: 204–28.

Kringelbach, Hélène Neveu and Jonathan Skinner. 2012. "Introduction: The movement of dancing cultures." In Dancing cultures: Globalization, tourism and identity in the anthropology of dance, edited by Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Jonathan Skinner, 1–25. New York: Berghahn.

Kuutma, Kristin. 2012. "Between arbitration and engineering: Concepts and contingencies in the shaping of heritage regimes." In Heritage regimes and the state (eds) Regina F. Bendix, Aditya Eggert and Arnika Peselmann, 21–36. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen.

Manos, Ioannis. 2003. "‘To dance or not to dance’: Dancing dilemmas in a border region in northern Greece." Focaal - European Journal of Anthropology 41: 21–32.

Marsh, Charity and Mark V. Campbell (eds). 2020. We still here: Hip hop north of the 49th Parallel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Mead, Margaret. 1928. Coming of age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation. New York: William Morrow and Co.

Mead, Margaret and Gregory Bateson. 1952. Trance and dance in Bali. New York: New York University Film Library.

Nahachewsky, Andriy. 2001. "Once again: On the concept of ‘second existence folk dance.’" Yearbook for Traditional Music 33: 17–28.

–––––––. 2011. Ukrainian dance: A cross-cultural approach. Jefferson: McFarland.

O’Connor, Barbara. 2013. The Irish dancing: Cultural politics and identities, 1900-2000. Cork: Cork University Press.

Pateraki, Mimina. 2024. Επιλεκτικές εφαρμογές παγκοσμίων πολιτιστικών πολιτικών και ανθεκτικότητα. Αποσπασματικές ενέργειες στα χρόνια της λιτότητας στο Λεωνίδιο Τσακωνιάς (Πελοπόννησος, Ελλάδα). In Άυλη Πολιτιστική Κληρονομιά σε καιρούς οικονομικής κρίσης: Ένταξή στην αγορά και ανθεκτικότητα. ("Selective implementations of global cultural politics and resilience [fragmented act]." In Intangible cultural heritage in times of economic crisis: Marketisation and resilience, edited by Panas Karampampas, 92–104. Athens: The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports Press.)

Pateraki, Mimina and Panas Karampampas 2014. "Methodological insights in dance anthropology: Embodying identities in dance celebrations in the context of Metamorphosis of Sotiros in Sotira, South Albania." In Balkan border crossings: Third annual of the Konitsa Summer School, edited by Vassilis Nitsiakos, Ioannis Manos, Georgios Agelopoulos, Aliki Angelidou, and Vassilis Dalkavoukis, 149–74. Berlin: LIT.

Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2016. The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, violence, and minority politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Prichard, Robin. 2022. "Native American dance and engaged resistance." In Milestones in dance in the USA, edited by Elizabeth McPherson, 3–26. London: Routledge.

Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 1922. The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rakočević, Selena. 2020. "Political complexities of ethnochoreological research: The facets of scholarly work on dance in the countries of Former Yugoslavia. Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 65, no. 1: 13–26.

Reed, Susan A. 1998. "The politics and poetics of dance." Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 503–32.

––––––– 2010. Dance and the nation: Performance, ritual, and politics in Sri Lanka. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. 2012. Performing queer Latinidad : Dance, sexuality, politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Rowe, Nicholas. 2010. Raising dust: A cultural history of dance in Palestine. London: I.B. Tauris.

Savigliano, Marta E. 1995. Tango and the political economy of passion. New York: Routledge.

Scheelar, Catherine Mary. 2013. "The use of nostalgia in tribal fusion dance." In Belly dance around the world: New communities, performance and identity (eds) Caitlin McDonald & Barbara Sellers-Young, 121–37. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company.

Sellers-Young, Barbara. 2016. Belly dance, pilgrimage and identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Shay, Anthony. 2002. Choreographic politics: State folk dance companies, representation and power. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

––––––– 2016. "The spectacularization of Soviet/Russian folk dance: Igor Moiseyev and the invented tradition of staged folk dance." In Oxford handbook of dance and ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 236–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sklar, Deidre. 2001. Dancing with the virgin: Body and faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Laurajane. 2006. Uses of heritage. London: Routledge.

Spencer, Paul, ed. 1985. Society and the dance: The social anthropology of process and performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

St John, Graham, ed. 2004. Rave culture and religion. London: Routledge.

Stanford, Thomas. 1966. "A linguistic analysis of music and dance terms from three sixteenth-century dictionaries of Mexican Indian languages." Anuario 2: 101–59.

Stoller, Paul. 1994. “Embodying colonial memories.” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3: 634–48.

Tauschek, Markus. 2011. "Reflections on the metacultural nature of intangible cultural heritage." Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 5: 49–64.

Telban, Borut. 2017. "The intoxicating intimacy of drum strokes, sung verses and dancing steps in the all-night ceremonies of Ambonwari (Papua New Guinea)." In Collaborative intimacies in music and dance: Anthropologies of sound and movement, edited by Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas, 234–57. New York: Berghahn Books.

Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2013. "Laying claim to authenticity: Five anthropological dilemmas." Anthropological Quarterly 86: 337–60.

Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. 1993. The African aesthetic: Keeper of the traditions. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Wulff, Helena. 1998. Ballet across borders: Career and culture in the world of dancers. Oxford: Berg.

–––––––. 2007. Dancing at the crossroads: Memory and mobility in Ireland. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Zografou, Magda. 2003. Ο Χορός στην Ελληνική Παράδοση (Dance in Greek tradition). Athens: Art Work.

Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Outer space

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:54:32 +0000

Rocket launch at Playalinda Beach, Florida, 2017. Picture by Jill Bazeley

Anna Szolucha

Jagiellonian University

Initially published 26 Nov 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25outerspace

Abstract:

People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billionaire tourists, astronomers, or the military. However, ethnographic work shows how deeply outer space is intertwined with people’s lives on Earth, from the daily work of space scientists to the impacts of space infrastructure on local communities around the world.

Since outer space cannot often be known directly, what humans know about it and how they relate to it tends to be shaped by what they know about and how they relate to Earth. Consequently, earthly relations and political dynamics inevitably influence human activities in space. At the same time, an anthropological perspective on outer space can help defamiliarise the taken-for-granted contexts and factors specific to the earthly realm, revealing how deeply they shape human lives and people’s understanding of Earth within the cosmos. Thus, examining outer space can help us recontextualise fundamental questions about society and culture, compelling us to expand our analytical framework to encompass the cosmic realm but also encouraging us to explore alternative models for social life on Earth and beyond. This entry showcases anthropological research that has attempted to answer three fundamental questions at the human-cosmos interface: How do people interact with outer space? How does outer space impact human lives? How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Introduction

Outer space exerts a constant, albeit sometimes imperceptible or remote, influence on the daily lives of people worldwide. From treating the sky as the domain of ancestors and a guide for social and environmental understanding, to utilising space-based infrastructures and technologies for essential needs like communication and travel, outer space profoundly impacts human existence. Yet, what constitutes ‘outer space’? How have people interacted with this realm? And given its intimate connection to human life, is the term ‘outer’ space even appropriate?

The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space remains ambiguous, conventionally placed between 80 and 100 kilometres above sea level. Anthropological studies generally avoid rigid definitions of outer space as a purely physical entity, recognising it instead as a domain of human sociality beyond Earth’s atmosphere where diverse political, social, economic, and cultural relations are being played out.

At the same time, media and political discourses often frame outer space within an expansionist, competitive, and developmental narrative, employing terms like ‘space colonisation’, ‘frontier’, ‘race’, and ‘settlement’. Some of these are also used in academic literature. International and national legislation governing space activities, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, frequently reinforce the perception of space as an empty territory, available on a first-come, first-served basis. Some argue that the very descriptors ‘outer’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ perpetuate this sense of detachment, overlooking the long-standing Indigenous connections to the sky and the myriad ways in which it has shaped the lives of various communities and individuals throughout history, both before and after rockets soared through the atmosphere (see, for example, Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Certain critical scholars refer to outer space with the term ‘cosmos’, which usually carries a more philosophical or spiritual connotation than ‘outer space’. Within this entry, these terms are treated as synonymous. Doing so deliberately avoids reinforcing some of the dualisms—such as technology/culture or sacred/profane—that anthropological inquiry strives to critically examine and challenge.

Space anthropology is still an emerging field, despite its roots in early works by Ben Finney and Eric Jones (1986), among others. While it is already grappling with intricate terminological challenges and shifting research foci, its inquiries are fundamentally driven by a desire to ask better questions about humans and understand their place within the cosmos. Thus, ethnographic studies have investigated communities deeply immersed in outer space, such as space scientists discovering new planets by comparing their features to Earth and engineers working with Martian rovers that navigate an extraterrestrial terrain, for whom the cosmos is not merely an imagined realm but also a remote yet tangible and real place. These studies demonstrate that our understanding of the cosmos is not solely derived from an unmediated scientific perception, but rather shaped by a confluence of individual imaginations, organisational structures, and national cultural influences (Messeri 2016; Vertesi 2015).

As people’s familiarity with the vast cosmos deepens, it forces them to re-evaluate Earth’s position within it, broadening understandings of human environments and challenging anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. At the same time, anthropological and historical research consistently underscores the persistent terrestrial impacts of space exploration, the ecological and social footprint of which extends beyond the celestial sphere. Launch sites, research facilities, and other infrastructure are firmly rooted on Earth. These structures are not merely stepping stones to the cosmos; anthropological research argues that they are also intricately intertwined with earthly realities of colonialism, environmental impacts, and social displacement (e.g. Redfield 2000, 212–44). Outer space thus emerges as an arena of political power struggles, military competition, and capitalist expansion, where approaches deemed historically problematic on Earth are apparently readily adopted for exploring the unknown. Despite the powerful forces that frame the cosmos as a domain for profit-making and geopolitical expansion, anthropological perspectives both provide nuance for and problematise these narratives.

As space exploration continues, anthropological analysis has also addressed the more speculative possibilities of encountering extraterrestrial cultures or establishing human habitats beyond Earth. Ethnographic knowledge of intercultural dialogue, encounters, and migrations once served as anthropologists’ claim to a rightful role in space exploration endeavours (Finney and Jones 1986). Today, some continue to envisage outer space as a potential new home for humanity where the limitations and shortcomings of current societies could be transcended (Valentine 2012). This opens up discussions about human futures, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Consequently, outer space emerges as a space for not only critiquing existing politico-economic relations but also for projecting and contemplating alternative social formations.

From an anthropological perspective, outer space can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of terrestrial realities. According to this approach, earthly relationships and dynamics play out and expand within a cosmic context, intricately connected to events on Earth. On the other hand, outer space can also be seen as an overarching realm that encompasses our planet. This perspective recontextualises Earth’s position and significance within the cosmos. It offers potential avenues for imagining alternative social and economic relations both on Earth and beyond. This entry delves into anthropological investigations exploring the profound relationship between humans and outer space. It examines three core questions that have shaped space anthropology so far. These are: How do humans engage with the cosmos? What is the impact of outer space on our lives? And what is its influence on people’s understanding of social reality?

How do people interact with outer space?

Ethnographic research has demonstrated a diverse range of ways in which people around the world engage with the cosmos. Their interactions shape their understanding of its significance within their communities and for humanity as a whole. While these understandings may sometimes differ, their analytical value lies in their capacity to offer alternative perspectives that can enrich, nuance, problematise, or challenge established narratives of space and space exploration. For example, Indigenous connections with the sky often problematise the assumption that outer space is empty and inanimate and no people or beings other than a limited number of astronauts have travelled or lived in space. Reportedly, Inuit peoples in Alaska laughed when an anthropologist informed them about the first Moon landing, as they claimed to have been travelling there for years (Young 1987).

In fact, several Indigenous knowledges express a profound interconnectedness between the earthly and cosmic realms, recognising their mutual dependence. The sky is often considered to be inhabited by ancestors and other beings. Indigenous cosmologies such as those of the Yolŋu in northern Australia are deeply embedded within the stories told about outer space and the sky (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Moreover, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge of the skies not only aid in understanding natural patterns related to weather, seasons, animal behaviour, and plant life but also sometimes pre-date Western scientific knowledge of historical celestial phenomena (Hamacher 2023). Given their close and kin relationships with the cosmos, Indigenous communities worldwide such as the Diné (the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States) often caution against exploitative approaches to space exploration, which they believe disrupt the cosmic order (Bartels 2024).

Non-Indigenous interactions with the cosmos can appear to lack the Indigenous sense of kinship with the sky. Space scientists and engineers within major Western space agencies and laboratories, recently the focus of ethnographic attention, often rely on technological devices and terrestrial landscapes to mediate their interactions with and conceptions of the cosmos. However, even they strive to reaffirm the reality of the cosmic objects they study and operate upon, seeking to establish more intimate and multi-layered relationships with outer space.

For instance, scientists who study planets that circle stars outside our solar system (exoplanets) strive to measure the dimming of a star while the exoplanet transits across its face—a technique known as ‘the transit method’. Subsequently, they visualise and interpret data obtained through such methods to turn the measurements into something that would seem more tangible and relatable. As part of this process, the scientists imagine exoplanets as potential places that they might inhabit, as worlds (Messeri 2016). They draw, for example, upon the more familiar language of the Earth’s solar system to describe the properties of newly discovered planets. Even though their precise parameters remain uncertain, astronomers employ familiar comparisons, calling the exoplanets ‘super-Earths’ or ‘hot Neptunes’, etc. They also utilise a variety of visualisation techniques, from producing curves and graphs to generating statistics, to represent these places that elude visual observation. Similarly, scientists can now translate cosmic phenomena, such as gravitational waves, into audible sounds. While this process relies on established scientific theories, models, and instrumental captures, the resulting sounds are also shaped by a multitude of social and cultural metaphors. For example, an astronomical observatory is compared to ‘a hearing aid’ and sounds of cosmic phenomena to ‘chirps’ or ‘whines’. These visual and acoustic ‘informalisms’ (Helmreich 2016) not only reflect upon the original theories and instrumental data but also foster a more intimate connection between the astronomer and the celestial objects they study.

This connection mirrors the direct experience of observing the night sky at an optical observatory. Although astronomical work increasingly relies on digital data, some astronomers still deeply value the opportunity to conduct research at an observatory, where the distant universe becomes more tangible (Hoeppe 2012). Ethnographic work within science and engineering teams responsible for operating Mars rovers has also underscored the importance of such embodied practices (Vertesi 2015). Various team members identified with the bodies of the rovers, incorporating their physical gestures and movements into their understanding of the rovers and their objects of analysis. This shows how important representational techniques are in establishing and cultivating relationships with the extraterrestrial. Simultaneously, team members aligned their work structures with local and workplace-based norms, meetings, and forms of talk, thereby forging a specific community. Put differently, the intimate engagements with the Mars rovers represented the extraterrestrial as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of a particular social order. People’s representations of and engagements with outer space not only facilitate the scientific exploration of the cosmos and render extraterrestrial scientific objects more legible, but also generate new social relations on Earth, aligning individuals’ aims and values in their collective endeavour to familiarise the unknown.

Many of the techniques that bring the cosmos closer and render it more familiar are inherently social and cultural. Consequently, our representations of outer space are profoundly shaped by cultural tropes and socio-political narratives. The spectacular images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, are not merely unfiltered photographs of the universe; they are products of scientific and aesthetic negotiation. Astronomers had to make deliberate choices about how to translate raw data into meaningful colours and contrasts. In the process, they drew upon familiar geological and meteorological formations, as well as the iconography of nineteenth century American Western landscapes (Kessler 2012). These images were carefully composed for both American domestic and international audiences, serving as a form of scientific outreach and public service. However, by drawing parallels to earthly landscapes and aligning with narratives of outer space as a frontier, these images also encouraged a specific perception of the cosmos: a place simultaneously distant yet inviting exploration. Similar dynamics are evident in other public-facing initiatives, even those designed to be more ‘democratic’, i.e. open to independent public interpretation. For instance, a group of computer scientists at NASA aimed to create an interactive map of Mars that the public could explore independently. Yet, even this initiative promoted a specific way of seeing Mars: as a dynamic, vital place that merits continued research and financial commitment from NASA's exploration project—ultimately reflecting NASA’s overarching mission of extraterrestrial conquest (Messeri 2017). Our highly mediated engagements with outer space offer valuable insights into the socio-cultural nature of how humans represent the cosmos. They also demonstrate how we connect to the cosmic realm while simultaneously shaping our realities on Earth.

Analogue sites (and various forms of simulation training, more generally) offer another example of an important medium for human interaction with outer space, particularly for experimenting with aspects of human spaceflight missions. These sites allow space scientists and future astronauts to familiarise themselves with the unfamiliar environment of outer space while remaining on Earth. Analogue research typically involves travelling to locations with environmental, geological, or other conditions resembling those found on Mars or other celestial bodies, enabling the testing of equipment and mission designs. For example, ethnographic work with scientists at NASA demonstrates how Mars was brought into being as a group of scientists descended upon an analogue site in the Utah desert (Messeri 2016). These ‘mission’ members treated earthly geological formations as if they were Martian, weaving planet-specific narratives about their past and present. This experience provided the closest possible approximation of being on Mars, and it helped maintain the possibility of future human habitation on the planet. The physical and imaginary elements of the analogue mission, including the strict protocols governing ventures outside the ‘space habitat’, induced a cognitive shift among its participants, redefining the experience of living on Earth. However, these missions also possessed more practical elements. At the time of this research, NASA had stalled plans for human missions to Mars. Consequently, the activities observed by the anthropologist present also represented an attempt by NASA employees to cultivate a utopian narrative within the agency, one that preserved the possibility of Martian missions in the future (Messeri 2016).

In another ethnographic study of analogue sites, anthropologist Valentina Marcheselli worked with astrobiologists in Italian caves and mines, simulating potential microbial habitats or shelters on Mars (2022). Their embodied experiences of the caves and mines were crucial not only for transforming these earthly settings into otherworldly analogues but also for establishing astrobiology as a novel scientific discipline. The analogue astrobiological work challenged traditional scientific practices, as its observations and results were no longer solely derived from hypothesis testing but emerged through a more open-ended approach. Such embodied and open-ended research was deemed particularly suitable for a discipline dedicated to encountering and explaining the extraterrestrial unknown. Studying analogue sites, then, reveals something about the inherently dual nature of analogue space missions. In trying to keep Martian exploration viable in times of institutional contraction, or reinforcing the case for a new scientific research method, they aim to make mission participants more intimately familiar with another world, while also utilising this work to influence human engagement with this one.

In a similar vein, astronautics, or the science of space travel, is thought of by US scientists, physicians, and engineers involved in human spaceflight as relying on various ‘systems’ in order to work (Olson 2018). Such systems are defined as technologies that relate diverse concepts and materialities to one another. Thinking of human-technology constellations as systems serves a technocratic function. It contributes to perceiving outer space as governable, thereby perpetuating expansionist narratives of space exploration. The work conducted in extreme terrestrial environments, such as analogue lunar bases on the seafloor, and the allure of radically different extraterrestrial conditions, resonates with a culture in which the extreme has positive connotations as a catalyst for improvement and progress. Consequently, analogue missions participate in a cultural dynamic that frames the extreme as an imperative for overcoming challenges, fostering social innovation, and achieving distinctiveness (Olson 2018).

Earlier research on the European Space Agency (ESA) examined the entanglement of space with a different cultural dynamic, specifically the metaphor of European cooperation (Zabusky 1995). Studied during the 1990s, European cooperation in space science turned out to, paradoxically, rely on both conflict and diversity. The inherent internal diversity of European institutions, in which staff comes from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, helps ESA employees avoid feelings of alienation and stagnation. Through regular, contested interactions and performances of difference, cooperation emerges through space technology as a form of rational solidarity. However, this process is not merely instrumental; it also constitutes a journey through which individuals experience a sacred and intense sense of community (i.e. communitas).

Even though science often claims to be largely impartial and independent of cultural influences, the social nature of the human-space interface is evident not only within the structures and practices of scientific communities, but also in the scientific outcomes of major research organisations such as NASA. Their varied internal hierarchies and interactional norms produce different kinds of scientific knowledge. Sometimes NASA's collective work modes relied on collectivist decision-making structures such as consensus, and emphasised the importance of arriving at a common ground. On other occasions, integrative work modes were favoured, stemming from a position that respected the autonomy of separate units and tried to unite the particular interests of different units in some form of a workable whole. These differing organisational structures were reflected, for example, in the authorship structure of scientific articles and in the influence that different scientific disciplines had in NASA's research (Vertesi 2020).

While the socio-cultural connections between Earth and outer space turn out to be robust, as is evident in human representations and engagements with the cosmos, it is also crucial to avoid an overly deterministic view of this relationship. While human perceptions and interactions with the universe are undoubtedly shaped by cultural narratives and social structures, these influences are multifaceted and nuanced rather than one-dimensional or all-powerful. For example, NASA employees working with Mars rovers encountered significant challenges in aligning their work schedules with the Martian day-night cycle, which is around 40 minutes longer than that of Earth. Despite the use of visual displays and other representational techniques to track Martian time, the inherent mismatch between Earth and Mars time led to confusion and—with ever-changing work schedules meant to allow staff to keep up with Mars—bodily fatigue (Mirmalek 2020). This highlights the limitations of simply imposing external (and extraterrestrial) frameworks on human experience.

Just as the human body cannot simply adapt to Martian time while remaining firmly rooted on Earth, human imaginations are not solely shaped by dominant narratives of space exploration. Ethnographic work with 'New Space' advocates, who invest in commercial space ventures (Valentine 2012), as well as space creators and enthusiasts, who popularise space exploration (Szolucha 2024), reveals a more nuanced picture. While these individuals may operate within the constraints of capitalist relations or navigate the uncertainties of a social spectacle, they also challenge conventional investment strategies, foster community, and actively produce shared visions of the future, thereby creating new social relations. The work of space creators, for example, not only popularises space exploration and makes it comprehensible to a global audience of enthusiasts, but also has the power to mould the public’s collective space myths. The collective imagination of outer space may, therefore, contain possibilities for new narratives of space exploration.

How does outer space impact human lives?

Space exploration leaves a visible mark on Earth, requiring diverse infrastructure for the manufacture and operation of space technologies. These facilities are often situated in locations perceived as remote or uninhabited. However, anthropological research foregrounds the stories of communities impacted by these developments, emphasising their needs, perspectives, and the structural biases that limit their agency. For example, several engaged anthropologists worked during the 1970s with the Yanadi, an Indigenous tribe in India with a nomadic lifestyle historically centred around hunting and gathering (Agrawal, Rao and Reddy 1985). This engagement occurred shortly after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had acquired the Yanadi’s traditional lands to establish a new space centre on an island off India’s eastern coast. The anthropologists documented the profound changes ISRO brought to the region, displacing the Yanadi from their traditional hunting grounds, offering employment opportunities, and creating new community facilities. By collaborating with the Yanadi and ISRO, the anthropologists helped negotiate extended land access rights for the tribe members and educated the ISRO about the social impacts of its activities on the Yanadi community.

The Yanadi case is not an isolated historical incident. Displacement or various degrees of neglect of Indigenous or disadvantaged populations during state or commercial encroachment on their territories has been a recurring theme in the construction and siting of space-related infrastructure, persisting to the present. In the 1980s, the space base in northeastern Brazil displaced Afro-Brazilian villagers, reflecting a history of class and racial inequality within the country (Mitchell 2017). In French Guiana, the construction and operation of ESA’s spaceport in Kourou continues to be entangled with the colonial history of the region (Redfield 2000) and its peculiar status as a European periphery (Korpershoek 2024). Currently, the Native American Esto’k Gna oppose the operations of a private space company for restricting the access to their traditional lands on the southern tip of Texas in the United States (Szolucha 2023). The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred mountain of Maunakea in Hawai'i, despite sustained local protest and predicted environmental impacts, is another example (Hobart 2019; Maile 2019). Anthropologists have helped to amplify the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and disadvantaged groups, documenting the historical legacies of inequality and injustice, while exploring potential avenues for change.

Such examples have led some social scientists to formulate more sweeping critiques of space exploration efforts, characterising them as inherently colonial and exploitative (for example, Rubenstein 2022; Treviño 2023). Against such views, critical scholars propose alternative approaches to engaging with the cosmos, such as celestial wayfinding. Aiming to mirror the way Polynesians navigated the ocean and to avoid the perpetuation of colonial dynamics in space exploration, celestial wayfinding is meant to be guided by principles of sustainable settlement, informed by an animate view of the cosmos and based on a belief in the inherent value and necessary co-existence of all beings (Lempert 2021). The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa have been suggested as a positive and egalitarian model for social organisation of space communities (Lee 1985). Their adaptations were based on the practice of sharing, living in a small group, and being self-sufficient for a very long time. Anthropologists have also considered the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with their emphasis on mutual learning and reciprocal interaction, as a potential model for interstellar migration (Tanner 1985). Furthermore, alternative modes of travelling and living together that have been explored in science fiction movies also hold the potential to inspire and improve space exploration (Lempert 2014; Salazar 2023).

Queer and feminist perspectives on space exploration equally offer frameworks for reimagining it. ‘Queering the cosmos’ would involve liberating it from the constraints of established, often limited, visions of the future and opening it up to multiple possibilities (Oman-Reagan 2015). Similarly, feminist approaches to space travel challenge the presumption of heterosexuality—pervasive within the imaginaries and designs of human spaceflight—and critically examine the ideological and structural biases that lead to exclusionary and oppressive practices and imaginaries (Gál and Armstrong 2023).

While various critical approaches are being proposed to ‘reclaim outer space’ (Schwartz, Billings and Nesvold 2023) a growing body of anthropological work is emerging in parallel that challenges the seemingly monolithic character of modern space projects. On the one hand, space infrastructure developments are typically justified in the name of scientific and economic advancement for a specific community, region, or even nation. While the examples above illustrate some significant challenges and pitfalls of these justifications, space projects may mobilise a sense of hope, agency, and visions of alternative futures that extend beyond serving as an escape plan for a select few (Denning 2023). They can provide alternative visions of international cooperation and even increased ecological care.

At the same time, outer space has always held the potential for increased militarisation, neocolonialism, and extractivism. Anthropologists demonstrate that these two facets, of care and extractivism, are inextricably linked and that space exploration, while perpetuating harmful legacies, also automatically elicits alternative practices and visions of the future (see, for example, Ojani 2024). Many Mexicans, for example, reveal complex imaginaries surrounding space. They see space exploration as a pathway to economic development through technological innovation while simultaneously emphasising the need to critically reflect on the conditions that shape its achievement (Johnson 2020). Similarly, astronomers in Madagascar demonstrate that a problematic and culturally specific notion of the ‘universality of science’ can nevertheless serve as a tool for navigating inequalities on Earth (Nieber 2024). Assuming that science is to some extent universal is not just an epistemic requirement for gaining entry into an international scientific network. It is also a horizon of possibility, one that offers both hope and direction.

How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Outer space not only affects people’s lives but also recalibrates their structures of understanding. Being outside Earth and thinking about the cosmos involves encountering extraterrestrial materialities and contexts that are unfamiliar or behave in unexpected ways. Living in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS), for example, removes the people involved from the familiar bounds of Earth and from usual ways of being and feeling human. The physical experience of weightlessness affects emotions and their social expression, demonstrating how gravity—a condition we typically take for granted—influences not only the human body but also emotions and social relations. This is because the effective communication of emotions and human relations depends on certain material conditions. When those are dramatically altered in such environments as outer space, a simple hug, for example, becomes a challenge because bodies behave and react differently than they would on Earth. The hug becomes a somewhat awkward experience, because bodies of astronauts struggle to align and exchange the same sense of touch they would under the conditions of gravity (Parkhurst and Jeevendrampillai 2020). Similarly, venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere allows us to reconsider its role as a primary context, one that provides the reference points for our fundamental understandings and distinctions, such as the one between nature and culture, for example (Battaglia 2012; Valentine 2016). An anthropological engagement with outer space turns out to broaden the notions of what constitutes an ‘environment’ and to decentre our geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives (Battaglia, Valentine and Olson 2015; Helmreich 2012; Olson and Messeri 2015).

This recalibrating nature of outer space has also prompted a rethinking of anthropological methodologies (see, for example, Gorbanenko, Jeevendrampillai and Kozel 2025). Specifically, it has been suggested that anthropological research be recontextualised in ‘more-than-terran’ spaces (Olson 2023), to think about fieldwork as having significance and being localised beyond Earth, and as being entangled with entities, dynamics, and phenomena beyond Earth-based contexts. While humans’ earthly embeddedness is undeniable, an expanded methodological toolkit would acknowledge that societies already exist on a boundary between terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms. However, how radically methodologies need to be adjusted is currently somewhat under dispute. Given that people constantly negotiate their social existence through a dialogue with their social and material worlds, life on Earth may be quite mediated already and therefore not that different to study than life in space (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2023).

Ethnographic research in locations like the ISS is unlikely to occur anytime soon, given how expensive and hard it is to access. Studying Earth-based space infrastructures related to it, such as its Mission Controls, is much more feasible and can still be highly elucidating. Ethnographers can more easily enter a meeting in ground-based buildings by government agencies and companies designing space experiments or observe livestreamed conversations with ISS crews. Seemingly remote locations can thus be studied via the multiple, interconnected sites, media, and groups of people that constitute a field both up in space and here on Earth (Buchli 2020). These include the constant online presence of the ISS, multimedia archives, and communities tracking the ISS from Earth.

Space activities, both on Earth and in outer space, are dispersed across vast distances and dynamically evolving networks. Therefore, field sites are never stable entities but are better understood as sometimes-atomised and relational spaces connected through shared meanings and materialities (Timko 2024). The distributed nature of space-related sites and globally dispersed communities has led to the idea of a ‘planetary ethnography’ (Szolucha et al. 2022; 2023). This approach to research seeks to push the boundaries of representation to uncover new perspectives both by engaging with diverse social groups across different cultures and by bringing them into a comparative analysis that can reveal unexpected alliances or effect a change in perspective. These under- or unrepresented experiences and viewpoints, much like the extraterrestrial itself, should have the potential to revisit and reorient entire fields of understanding, rather than simply adding another perspective, one that remains on the periphery.

Conclusion

Although outer space remains a physically distant horizon, unreachable for most, it is closer than one may think. It plays a significant role in the everyday lives of diverse groups, from Indigenous communities to the global network of space professionals. Through their engagement with outer space and its many representations, they make communal histories, social norms, as well as distant celestial objects and phenomena more readily comprehensible. In doing so, they reshape social relations and realities here on Earth. Regardless of how they connect with the sky, people worldwide seem to actively strive to forge more intimate relationships with the cosmos, underscoring its inextricable link to human life.

But why is this connection with the universe so important? Perhaps the answer lies in viewing outer space as a social and cultural canvas, one on which individuals and communities can project their understanding of the present social order and their aspirations for the future. For example, Russian cosmonautic amateurs who build and test satellites and other space technologies hold the idea that anyone can participate in space exploration, even without government backing (Sivkov 2019). Their activities highlight the importance of merit and technological know-how in driving space exploration. Therefore, engaging with the cosmos allows them to critique the social and political realities of their country. Outer space can thus be understood as a field for critiquing current social conditions and experimenting with potential alternatives.

Popular representations of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects (‘UFOs’) have also been interpreted as expressions of broader socio-political concerns. These include feelings of alienation and mistrust towards political representatives. Alien abduction narratives equally reflect anxieties, including concerns about racial and ethnic difference. In other depictions, extraterrestrial beings are viewed as divine, expanding the scope of human understanding beyond purely scientific explanations. Historically, ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs—emerged from anxieties surrounding military tensions and technological advancements (Battaglia 2006), a dynamic that continues to resonate today.

Public interest in the cosmos waxes and wanes, driven by the vagaries of politics and cultural trends while popular sentiment toward even the most successful space programmes is often ambiguous (Launius 2003). However, anthropological research has definitively demonstrated that people worldwide actively seek deeper and more complex connections with the cosmos. It is an inextricable part of daily life, shaping their past, co-creating their present, and prefiguring their future.

This understanding challenges the detached view of the cosmos as an outside domain, a perspective some argue was reinforced by the first images of Earth taken by astronauts of Apollo missions from the void of space (Arendt 1968; Cosgrove 1994). This seemingly detached ‘view from nowhere’ may perpetuate the notion that the cosmos is simply there for the taking, whether by technologically advanced nations or an oligarchy-controlled private sector. If technological engagement with outer space expands in the coming decades, largely fuelled by commercial and military-led space ventures, what convergences and tensions will emerge with the fundamental human drive for cosmic intimacy? One thing is certain: humanity will discover ever-new ways to imbue outer space with meaning, both on Earth and beyond.

References

Agrawal, Binod C., N. Sudhakar Rao, and P. C. Gurivi Reddy. 1985. Yanadi response to change: An attempt in action anthropology. New Delhi: Concept.

Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between past and future: Eight exercises in political thought. New York: Viking Press.

Bartels, Meghan. 2024. "Human remains are headed to the moon despite objections." Scientific American, 5 January. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-remains-are-headed-to-t....

Battaglia, Debbora, ed. 2006. E.T. culture: Anthropology in outerspaces. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———. 2012. "Coming in at an unusual angle: Exo-surprise and the fieldworking cosmonaut." Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4: 1089–106. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0058.

Battaglia, Debbora, David Valentine, and Valerie Olson. 2015. "Relational space: An earthly installation." Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 2: 245–56. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.2.07.

Bawaka Country, A. Mitchell, S. Wright, S. Suchet-Pearson et al. 2020. ‘Dukarr lakarama: Listening to Guwak, talking back to space colonization." Political Geography 81: 102218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102218.

Buchli, Victor. 2020. "Extraterrestrial methods: Towards an ethnography of the ISS." In Lineages and advancements in material culture studies, edited by Timothy Carroll, Antonia Walford, and Shireen Walton, 17–32. London: Routledge.

Cosgrove, Denis. 1994. "Contested global visions: One-world, Whole-earth, and the Apollo space photographs." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2: 270–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1994.tb01738.x.

Denning, Kathryn. 2023. "Reclaiming space: On hope in a jar, a Bear in the Sky, and the Running Red Queen." In Reclaiming space: Progressive and multicultural visions of space exploration, edited by James S.J. Schwartz, Linda Billings, and Erika Nesvold, 196–212. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Finney, Ben R., and Eric M. Jones, eds. 1986. Interstellar migration and the human experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gál, Réka Patrícia, and Eleanor Armstrong. 2023. "Feminist approaches to outer space: Engagements with technology, labour, and environment’. In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 158–71. London: Routledge.

Gorbanenko, Jenia, David Jeevendrampillai, and Adryon Kozel, eds. 2025. Exploring ethnography of outer space: Methods and perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Hamacher, Duane. 2023. The first astronomers: How Indigenous elders read the stars. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2012. "Extraterrestrial relativism." Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4: 1125–39.

———. 2016. "Gravity’s reverb: Listening to space-time, or articulating the sounds of gravitational-wave detection’. Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 4: 464–92. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.02.

Hobart, Hi’ilei Julia. 2019. "At home on the Mauna: Ecological violence and fantasies of terra nullius on Maunakea’s summit." Native American and Indigenous Studies 6, no. 2: 30–50.

Hoeppe, Götz. 2012. "Astronomers at the observatory: Place, visual practice, traces." Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4: 1141–60.

Jeevendrampillai, David, Victor Buchli, Aaron Parkhurst, Adryon Kozel, Giles Bunch, Jenia Gorbanenko, and Makar Tereshin. 2023. "An ethnography of an extra-terrestrial society: The International Space Station." In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 413–26. London: Routledge.

Johnson, Anne Warren. 2020. "A Mexican conquest of space? Cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, and cosmopoetics in the Mexican space industry." Review of International American Studies 13, no. 2: 123–44. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.9808.

Kessler, Elizabeth A. 2012. Picturing the cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope images and the astronomical sublime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Korpershoek, Karlijn. "A tale of two outers: Studying up, down and around Europe’s Ville Spatiale in South America." PhD dissertation, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 2024.

Launius, Roger D. 2003. "Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight." Space Policy 19, no. 3: 163–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0265-9646(03)00039-0.

Lee, Richard B. 1985. "Models of human colonization: !Kung San, Greeks, and Vikings." In Interstellar migration and the human experience, edited by Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, 180–94. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lempert, William. 2014. "Decolonizing encounters of the third kind: Alternative futuring in Native science fiction film." Visual Anthropology Review 30, no. 2: 164–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12046.

———. 2021. "From interstellar imperialism to celestial wayfinding: Prime directives and colonial time-knots in SETI." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 45, no. 1: 45–70. https://doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.45.1.lempert.

Maile, Uahikea. 2019. "Resurgent refusals: Protecting Mauna a Wākea and Kanaka Maoli decolonization." Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 11, no. 1: 57-69. https://www.academia.edu/40930104/Resurgent_Refusals_Protecting_Mauna_a_....

Marcheselli, Valentina. 2022. "The exploration of the Earth subsurface as a Martian analogue’."TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 13, no. 1: 25–46.

Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing outer space: An earthly ethnography of other worlds. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press.

———. 2017. "Extra-terra incognita: Martian maps in the digital age." Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1: 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312716656820.

Mirmalek, Zara. 2020. Making time on Mars. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Mitchell, Sean T. 2017. Constellations of inequality: Space, race, and utopia in Brazil. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Nieber, Hanna. 2024. "Universality as horizon: Aspirations and geometries of astrophysics in Africa." Zeitschrift Für Ethnologie/Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 149, no. 1: 53–70. https://doi.org/10.60827/zfe/jsca.v149i1.1877.

Ojani, Chakad. 2024. "Reindeer, rockets and space infrastructures: Enacting oligoptic-satellitarian environments in Northern Sweden." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 7, no. 6: 1957–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241262621.

Olson, Valerie. 2018. Into the extreme: U.S. environmental systems and politics beyond Earth. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

———. 2023. "Refielding in more-than-terran spaces." In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 31–43. London: Routledge.

Olson, Valerie, and Lisa Messeri. 2015. "Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-earthing an epoch." Environment and Society 6, no. 1: 28–47. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2015.060103.

Oman-Reagan, Michael. 2015. "Queering outer space." Space + Anthropology, September 11. https://medium.com/space-anthropology/queering-outer-space-f6f5b5cecda0.

Parkhurst, Aaron, and David Jeevendrampillai. 2020. "Towards an anthropology of gravity: Emotion and embodiment in microgravity environments." Emotion, Space and Society 35(2): 100680. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2020.100680.

Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2022. Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. The University of Chicago Press.

Salazar, Juan Francisco. 2023. "A chronopolitics of outer space: A poetics of tomorrowing." In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 142–57. London: Routledge.

Schwartz, James SJ, Linda Billings, and Erika Nesvold, eds. 2023. Reclaiming space: Progressive and multicultural visions of space exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sivkov, Denis Yu. 2019. "Space exploration at home: Amateur cosmonautics in contemporary Russia [Osvoenie Kosmosa v Domashnikh Usloviiakh: Liubitel’skaia Kosmonavtika v Sovremennoi Rossii]." Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, no. 6: 67–79. https://doi.org/10.31857/S086954150007769-5.

Szolucha, Anna. 2023. "Planetary ethnography in a 'SpaceX village': History, borders, and the work of 'beyond'." In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 71–83. London: Routledge.

———. 2024. "A disappearing frontier?: An ethnographic study of the labour of imagination of SpaceX fans and space creators in south Texas." Acta Astronautica 222: 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2024.06.001.

Szolucha, Anna, Karlijn Korpershoek, Chakad Ojani, and Peter Timko. 2022. "Planetary ethnography: A primer." SocArXiv, March 24. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/sy2gh.

Szolucha, Anna, Peter Timko, Chakad Ojani, and Karlijn Korpershoek. 2023. "Ethnographic research of outer space: Challenges and opportunities." Ethnography (online): https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231220273.

Tanner, Nancy Makepeace. 1985. "Interstellar migrations: The beginnings of familiar process in a new context." In Interstellar migration and the human experience, edited by Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, 220–33. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Timko, Peter. "Plural presents and imagined futures of the new space economy." PhD dissertation, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 2024.

Treviño, Natalie B. 2023. ‘Coloniality and the cosmos’. In The Routledge handbook of social studies of outer space, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar and Alice Gorman, 226–37. London: Routledge.

Valentine, David. 2012. "Exit strategy: Profit, cosmology, and the future of humans in space." Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 4: 1045–67.

———. 2016. "Atmosphere: Context, detachment, and the view from above Earth." American Ethnologist 43, no. 3: 511–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12343.

Vertesi, Janet. 2015. Seeing like a Rover: How robots, teams, and images craft knowledge of Mars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2020. Shaping science: Organizations, decisions, and culture on Nasa’s teams. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Young, M. Jane. 1987. "'Pity the Indians of outer space': Native American views of the space program." Western Folklore 46, no. 4: 269. https://doi.org/10.2307/1499889.

Zabusky, Stacia E. 1995. Launching Europe: An ethnography of European cooperation in space science. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Note on contributor

Anna Szolucha is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of new technologies, natural resources, and society.

Research for this article received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

Anna Szolucha, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, ul. Golebia 9, 31-007 Krakow, Poland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8938-6066

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Populism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:35:17 +0000

Donald Trump supporters at a political rally in Mesa, Arizona in October, 2018. Picture by Gage Skidmore.

Julia Fierman

Harvard University

Initially published 21 Mar 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25populism

Abstract:

Populism is a conception of political representation that views ‘the people’ as the primary political actor and the basis of political sovereignty. As populism does not refer to a specific ideology, ideologically diverse movements can fall under it. Thus, populism is not intrinsically conservative or progressive, left-wing or right-wing. However, populists’ insistence that their movement, leader, and party should represent ‘the people’ puts populist politics at odds with liberal democracy’s insistence on a public sphere characterised by rational deliberation—the model of deliberative democracy and liberal constitutionalism that has been celebrated throughout Western Europe and gained hegemony in the majority of the Northern Hemisphere since the French Revolution. Populism tends to reject consensus politics, even if it believes in democratic elections—as shown by most populist political parties. While the first populist party came about in the United States, populist parties and movements are prominent across all continents.

Anthropologists have studied populism within highly distinct cultural contexts, often foregrounding the very overt role of emotion and feelings of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in populist rhetoric. They have also investigated the relationship between populism and democracy, and the seemingly unique role of the leader in populist movements, which seem to equate a political movement with a singular figure. Ethnographic methods, which allow us to come closer to understanding the lives of others, have challenged hegemonic narratives about populism, questioning its assumed ties to specific ideologies and pushing back against the notion that populism disqualifies itself just because it relies on emotions. Thereby, anthropology provides us with a critical lens on populism that still helps us grasp its seemingly global appeal in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: What is populism?

The twenty-first century has been characterised by an upsurge in the popularity of populist movements across the globe. If it is possible to identify the first formal populist movement in history, we could arguably start with the United States, which, in the 1890s, saw the establishment of the People’s Party, or Populist Party. The American People’s Party never enjoyed significant electoral success, but its platform, which generally sought to improve the lives of labourers and regulate the concentration of capital, remains relevant in American politics. Historian Federico Finchelstein has claimed that Peronism, which came to power in Argentina in 1946, is the first populist regime in global history. Peronism emerged as a workers’ movement in 1945 but has evolved to take on many ideological iterations since then. Beyond Peronism, which within a single populist movement has taken on varying policy positions, in other places, such as the United States, different parties of opposing views may be labelled as ‘populist’, such as the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States. As a result, ‘populism’ is difficult to define; it is a very broad concept—or an ‘overdetermined signifier’ (Stavrakakis et al. 2017, 425)—that stands for a plethora of political movements, which seem quite different from each other.

Because so many different political moments representing diverse and even conflicting views have been called ‘populist’, a question of great scholarly importance, including for anthropologists, is what exactly the term stands for. Many scholars of populism have argued that the term does not refer to a specific political platform, but rather, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, one of the most influential theorists of populism, to a ‘political logic’ or form of political discourse that can be adapted to any ideological program or political platform (2005). Populist movements, parties, and regimes can thus be on the left or right or anywhere in between. For example, the New Left leaders of Latin America that emerged in the 2000s, which included Evo Morales in Bolivia, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula Ignacio da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, represented a populist turn to progressive politics in South America. In contrast, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States (as well as several other leaders in the Global North) are right-wing populists related to fascism, as they overtly celebrate xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies.

Further inspired by the work of Laclau (2005), anthropologists tend to think of populism as a style of political discourse that employs a polarising logic. This logic positions ‘the people’—the protagonist of populist politics—against an ‘enemy’, often internal to the nation-state or wider populace. In populism, ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’, as political theorist Jan Werner-Müller has stated (2014). This means that popular sovereignty does not extend to everyone, but only to ‘the people’ that populism celebrates, as opposed to others. Thus, for populist parties, which are often nationalist, not all citizens can be said to truly belong to the nation-state. The frontier that populism creates between ‘the people’ and their others is an antagonistic one. Thus, ‘the people’ are said to have ‘enemies’—often fellow citizens who are viewed as betraying a sense of national authenticity (Laclau 2005, 84-5). ‘Enemies’ or ‘anti-people’ may be defined along status, class, ethnic, party, or sectoral lines, and are often viewed as undermining national well-being (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). Thus, a key aspect of populist politics is its divisive rhetoric, which, when repeated often enough, turns into a discourse, i.e. a way of perceiving and thinking about the world.

Another structural continuity of populism is that it frames its central political actor—‘the people’—as a victimised group within broader national or global populations (Samet 2019). Their ‘enemies’ are somehow a source of ‘the people’s’ suffering or exploitation. This may seem surprising, as ‘the people’ and their assumed ‘enemy’, are single names for heterogeneous groups and social sectors, each representing highly disparate sets of social demands. Moreover ‘the people’ can even include powerful groups, such as dominant racial groups within a society. Yet, this sentiment of victimhood or of being a morally upright ‘underdog’ is particularly important, as it unites vague sectors and otherwise heterogeneous factions of a given society (Chatterjee 2011, 15). By relying on antagonistic victimisation, populism is a necessarily polarising political force. As such, it engenders an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy—even if most populist regimes have been democratic. As some scholars have underscored, liberal regimes that present emotional politics as ‘irrational’ may further marginalise the social demands of the most vulnerable populations within society (Ahmed 2004). Populism, on the other hand, allows for the expression of political voices that might otherwise go unarticulated.

A final structural continuity between different forms of populism that draw on ‘the people’ as an underdog, even a downtrodden group, is that its discourse does not rely on traditional notions of class warfare. This can be explored through Trumpism in the United States. In this case, ‘the people’ stands for a highly racialised concept of American identity but is not defined, in membership, by being white. ‘The people’ consists of a broad coalition that feels that their different demands could be satisfied by the same leader and movement. ‘The people’ is also an identity that is inherently exclusive towards many Americans who are considered to be sympathetic to migrants, protesters associated with amorphous leftist forces, as well as various ‘elites’, be they academics and universities, part of a general intelligentsia (including non-aligned media), and even corporate managers who do not adhere to Trumpist politics. Trumpist discourse is thus not restricted to ideas of class warfare but has, instead, allied various sectors of American society against common and often vaguely defined enemies, such as ‘the media’, ‘the Washington elite’, or ‘the Left’.

In sum, populism refers to a discursive logic or manner of constructing the political rather than a specific ideology, and it thinks of politics in polarising, often self-victimising terms. Populism is also usually characterised by charismatic leadership, overtly emotional rhetoric, and positions ‘the people’ as the central actor in politics. While this definition of populism is broad, its structural continuities differentiate its various ideological stripes from the liberal forms of democracy most celebrated in Europe and North America after the French Revolution. As this entry will explore further, the relationship between populism and democracy is not one of diametric opposition, but populist notions of political representation certainly disturb liberal norms of deliberative democracy. More specifically, populism is a political logic that encourages an overtly emotional brand of politics.

The anthropology of populism

While much social science literature has been dedicated to populism, the term does not yet occupy a large amount of literature within anthropology (see Mazzarella 2019). This is surprising, as the discipline is uniquely suited to study the appeal of populist movements. Its ethnographic research methods reveal the emotional, economic, social, and cultural factors that lead to populism’s appeal. Additionally, because anthropologists conduct their research in diverse geographic contexts, their inquiries into populism clarify the historical and social contingencies that give rise to and shape populist movements in specific field sites, while also considering what these sites reveal about the appeal of populism more broadly.

Anthropological investigations of populism have focused on recent and current populist regimes, such as Erdoğan’s Turkey (Tambar 2014), Maduro’s Venezuela (Samet 2019), Modi’s India (Hota 2020), Trump in the United States (Kalb 2023), and Orbán in Hungary (Laszlo 2020), adding distinctively ethnographic insight into what has been described as an illiberal rejection of liberal democratic norms prevalent in the post-WWII era. They have often sought to explain the appeal of the respective populist movements upon which they focus, frequently asking how populist communities are created and sustained. Anthropology links this question to its interest in the structure and reproduction of community as well as to its long-standing interest in the creation of social solidarity. It turns out that rhetoric, ritual, and state fetishism are central to populism’s appeal. For example, in Lauren Derby’s history of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, she understands fetishism to be key to the dictator’s appeal, or ‘seduction’, in her words, diminishing the population’s capacity to resist authoritarianism (2009). Similarly, Fernando Coronil, Michael Taussig, and Rafael Sánchez have all underscored how reifying and even deifying political figures is central to populist politics.

Similarly, work on scapegoating in times of uncertainty has shown that ambiguous social conditions lead to blaming individuals or groups for social ills, often resulting in violence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976; Geschiere 2013; Siegel 2006). In recent ethnographic work on ethnonationalism in Turkey, for example, we have seen how wounded masculinity among disabled Turkish veterans of the Kurdish conflict contributes to their hatred for their Kurdish foes. Coming home from war disabled, these veterans feel betrayed by the Turkish state, which they criticise for taking too soft of an approach against the Kurds (Aciksoz 2019). Ethnographic work on racialised nationalism elucidates how the demonisation of racialised others becomes the basis for racist political movements. For example, ethnographic work on white nationalists in de-industrialised parts of the United States has reflected this logic of demonisation. Instead of drawing on theories of scapegoating explicitly, some anthropologists have traced this othering logic through a psychoanalytic framework, meditating on the dialectical relationship between self and other to understand how whiteness is constituted through xenophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in deindustrialised North America (Song 2011).

Scholars working on ultranationalist politics have also drawn on the notion of sacrifice to better understand the rhetoric of ethnonationalist populist discourse. In Turkey, disabled military veterans (gazi) are lionised as modern-day martyrs (şehitler). Their sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of their bodies in war, is deeply implicated in notions of citizenship. Disabled veterans are held to be owed debts of honour and gratitude by the state, which entitles them to various privileges, such as high-quality prostheses, jobs, interest-free housing credit and medical care (Aciksoz 2019, 56-7). They do not embody the horrors of war as much as they serve state purposes for further militarisation. The celebration of their sacrifice exists alongside a scapegoating of the Kurdish movement as a threat to Turkish sovereignty (Aciksoz 2019).

Further broadening ethnography’s insights into populism, anthropologists of the post-Soviet Visegrád nations (i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) have looked at how populism can emerge in opposition to liberal discourses of multiculturalism. Here, people attracted to populism consider national culture to be under attack by an urban intelligentsia. In Poland and Slovakia, populist politics underscore local valorisations of cultural authenticity (both fascist and progressive), which appeal to local identities associated with rural origins and agricultural labour (Buzalka 2021). Post-Soviet populism is also marked by a nostalgia for a sense of collectivism and community, which seem at risk in an increasingly globalised world. In Hungary, the interplay of economic transformation and an attachment to national culture and solidarity are equally at play (Kurti 2020). Here, populism is closely tied to racist ethnonationalism and xenophobic political sentiments that translate into anti-immigrant discourse, as is evident elsewhere in the region (Buzalka 2022; Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Malewska-Szalygin 2009). The ethnographic study of Visegrád politics thus helps understand the logics of populism in other regions, notably Brexit and Trump (Kurti 2020).

The following sections will foreground three main tensions in the anthropological study of populism, namely the emotional drivers of populism, its relationship to democracy, and the nature of populist leadership.

Emotion and political economy

Anthropologists have been interested in the emotional and affective drivers of social life since at least the 1990s. They neither condemn nor celebrate emotion as irrational or rational, but consider feelings, sensations, and emotional and affective dispositions as revelatory of political dynamics. This is true for work on the emotions and affect of political memory (Yashin-Navarro 2002, 2012), volunteer work (Muehlebach 2011), or citizenship (Cox 2016; Savell 2015), for example.

Anthropologies of populism share this overarching concern with affect and emotion and have often aimed at understanding the ritualisation and routinisation of emotion in illiberal politics (Sánchez 2016, de Abreu 2021). Take Peronist rallies in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s. These rallies, in which thousands of Peronists gathered to express loyalty to the leaders of the movement, were highly emotionally charged ritualised theatre in which the masses played a mostly passive role. Many women active in Peronist politics have imitated the matriarch of Peronism, Eva ‘Evita’ Perón, in their speech patterns and hairstyles (Auyero 2001). In contrast to spontaneity, these practices ‘modulate affect’ through ritual, inculcating the followers of such movements with a series of habits that some critics qualify as authoritarian (Sanchez 2015) or at least at odds with the freeing affects of revolutionary politics (Beasley-Murray 2010, 25).

The emotional and affective underpinnings of populist mobilisation can be libidinal, even erotic. The election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in India in 2014, for example, catalysed a populist Hindu nationalism that was not just racialised and caste-oriented, but also highly gendered (Hota 2019). Here, Hindu ethnonationalists shored up popular anxieties linked to sex by presenting the ‘national body’ as ascetic, masculine, and pure, whilst conceiving of vilified others (e.g. protesting students, Christians, Muslims) as feminised and polluting. Doing so helped Modi supporters add a sexualised edge to the emotions involved in political othering.

Some scholars have drawn on Western crowd theories to trace a genealogy between the libidinal urges evident in crowds and populist emotions. People in crowds experience a contagious collective effervescence, frequently described as producing sentiments and actions that transcend the individual (Canetti [1960] 1984, Freud 1921, Le Bon [1895] 1995, Tarde [1898] 1989). They may thus act differently than they would on their own. Thus, crowds are sometimes perceived as stripping people of their agency or as intrinsically sinister, as they may elicit irrational and base feelings. Perceived as such, crowds can be thought of as threats to the social order, bypassing institutions and sanctioned normative behaviours. While this can be true—taking the January 6^th, 2021 riots of Trump supporters in the US, who stormed the Capitol because they did not accept that Trump had lost the 2020 election, as an example—ethnographic work also shows that crowds can be a generative political force, capable of transforming social and political norms. The imprisonment of then-Secretary of Labor Juan Perón in 1945 by the Argentine government provoked mass protests that not only led to Perón’s release but solidified Peronism as a formidable political force that would drastically expand workers’ rights in Argentina.

Beyond focusing on affect and emotion, the popularity of nationalist populism, particularly in Europe, is often linked to a general disenchantment with neoliberalism (Gusterson 2017, 210). While populism predates neoliberalism, populism’s increased popularity can be read as a reaction to an economic system in which state intervention favours the market, rather than regulating the market to favour its citizens (Foucault 1979). In Guatemala, this disenchantment takes the form of pessimism in which citizens, even if they may sympathise with drastic political reforms, view social transformation through politics quite cynically. Ethnography has shown how a significant number of citizens from the Indigenous population, which faced genocide at the hands of the military dictatorship led by Ríos Montt in the 1980s, has, since the 1990s, supported his Guatemalan Republican Front in local and national elections. In a context of neoliberalism where revolutionary change seems impossible, this population is drawn to this political party’s local development projects and clientelistic practices, which bring capital to Indigenous communities. In this context, Indigenous Guatemalan subjects are resigned to understanding the limitations of politics and pragmatically engage with a political party that can contribute tangible material gains to their lives (Copeland 2019). Disaffection with neoliberalism and wariness of globalised cosmopolitanism was also evident in the UK’s 2016 withdrawal from the EU through the Brexit referendum (Gusterson 2017).

Notable ethnographies of populism have foregrounded the role of cynicism in the face of neoliberalism. For example, in post-Soviet contexts such as Slovakia (Buzalka 2022) and Poland (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgin 2001a, 2001b), citizens feel left behind by neoliberal policies that render them further marginalised. In these cases, cynicism towards neoliberalism is also accompanied by a celebration of national tradition that takes on, often, ethnonationalist flavours. As shown by work on post-Soviet populisms in anthropology, the reification of traditional and even rural ways of life are part of a rejection of neoliberalism and liberalism.

The study of populist emotions and affect raises the question of who exactly the subject of populist movements is. Ethnographic work on populism has confirmed that ‘the people’ are not explicitly related to socioeconomic class categories. ‘The people’, even when they are primarily thought of as ‘workers’, such as in the case in early Peronist rhetoric in Argentina, is a vague enough moniker to unite various social sectors that are not constricted by class identity. Instead, who ‘the people’ are is often intentionally left vague so as to absorb as many different social forces as possible. This coalitional nature of populist politics cuts across class alliances. In Brazil, for example, right-wing authoritarian politics include supporters that are not limited to one particular socioeconomic class (de Abreu 2021). Similar inter-class alliances have also been observed in right-wing populism in Guatemala (Copeland 2019), and Chavista and anti-Chavista mobilisation in Venezuela (Samet 2019).

At the same time, populist movements celebrate an underdog identity that appeals to notions of being part of a social sector excluded from the elite. Some scholars have been particularly attentive to the ‘double devaluations’ of space and class felt by those attracted to right-wing populism. The double devaluation refers to feelings of disenfranchisement that arise from those who feel both their socioeconomic class and place of origin to be devalued by liberal norms. Neoliberal global flows of capital, people, and ideas have produced a rise in the popularity of right-wing populist movements that imbue their supporters with a sense of dignity (Kalb 2023). In this work, like those working in post-Soviet contexts and in Latin America, we see how disenchantment with neoliberalism produces cynicism, resignation, and, in the case of Poland, resistance in the form of illiberal, right-wing politics (Kalb 2023).

Both populism’s critics and its supporters are attentive to its emotionally charged nature. Critics often find its overtly emotional dimensions to be proof of its irrationality, disqualifying it from being taken seriously or even condemning it as something that has no place in the political sphere (Ostiguy 2009, 2017). Supporters have argued that populism is radically democratic, and that its capacity to express the affective dimensions of political mobilisation is precisely part of its democratic potential (Samet 2019; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). From this point of view, liberal paradigms of democracy that focus on mediation through institutions are overly restrictive as they repress the emotional nature of political participation.

Ethnography has trodden a middle ground in this debate. While highlighting the importance of emotion and affect, anthropologists refuse to fetishise populism as inherently less rational than other kinds of politics (Hann 2019). Consider the discussion of Peronism mentioned above. While Peronism is marked by dominant emotional features, these do not thereby render it irrational. Instead, its emotional appeal exists in addition to a political field of highly limited practical options. Peronist supporters are motivated by a ‘structure of feeling’ that coexists alongside practicality (Auyero 2000). Rather than pointing at populism as a mostly rational reaction to neoliberalism or as simply a ritualised collective effervescence, ethnographic work shows that practical and emotional drivers co-exist and interact with one another.

Relationship to democracy

As stated above, discussions of populism tend to categorise it as radically democratic or counter to the spirit of democracy. Anthropologists have thus explored the relationship between populist movements and democratic politics. Both privilege the concept of popular sovereignty, which positions ‘the people’ as the foundation of political legitimacy. In populism, ‘the people’ is the political actor par excellence, viewed as having a rather unmediated relationship to power even beyond the sphere of electoral politics. In deliberative democracy, ‘the people’s’ power is mediated, mostly by elections and state bureaucracies, which is meant to protect minorities and temper populist decision-making via a rule of experts.

The classic image of popular sovereignty is the crowd—a group of people that has come together through a common cause or grievance. The Jacobins, who emerged in the late 1700s as part of the French Revolution, represent the crowd’s raw democratic potential and potentially sinister dimensions. Once in power, during the early 1790s, they carried out a wave of political violence known as The Reign of Terror (la terreur), which resulted in thousands of executions of political and ideological enemies. Yet, they also represented a plurality of social forces dedicated to anti-royalist republicanism. The Jacobinian phase of the French Revolution thus positions the crowd as both the embodiment of democratic spirit and the anarchic overturning of an existing order (Mazauric 2014). The mass of the revolution is violent, unpredictable, and destructive—yet it is this mass action that challenges the monarchic notion of the sovereign by demonstrating the bare power of popular sovereignty. And so, within the history of modern democracy and republicanism, we have a reification of ‘the people’ as the political actor par excellence and as the mercurial and temperamental mass that can tear down an existing order through organising around particular demands as well as through brute force. As follows, some political theorists have argued that the crowd embodies true democracy while others consider it true (i.e. deliberative) democracy’s ‘shadow’ or ‘mirror’ (Canovan 1999; Panizza 2005).

Crowds are arguably both celebrated and feared by deliberative democracies, who view popular sovereignty as fundamental yet often insist on its mediation through institutional mechanisms. Within liberal democracy resides a tension between the Jacobinian, evolutionary spirit of popular sovereignty and the requirement for institutionalism, the latter often being viewed as cumbersome to the former (Canovan 2005; Sánchez 2016). In populism, this tension comes to a head as the crowd may potently shirk institutions associated with the status quo. Obvious examples from recent history would include the January 6^th, 2021 riots that sought to overturn the results of the US 2020 presidential election, as well as the January 8^th, 2023 protests in Brazil, which also challenged the outcome of their presidential elections.

As some scholars have argued, the crowd is both necessary for democratic support in the context of republicanism, but also poses a threat to the stability of a republic. Thus, the state must transform the unruly crowd or masses into the disciplined ‘people’ of republicanism. Popular sovereignty makes republican politics possible and constantly challenges its perpetuity. The same is true for populism, which creates ‘the people’ out of a broad coalition of social sectors and political interests. As a result, even in its democratic iterations, populism is ultimately authoritarian because it is so focused on controlling the masses by containing them as ‘the people’. Some have argued that this tension exists in republican democracy as well (Sánchez 2016), but it is more obvious in populism due to its more brazen celebration of popular sovereignty as ‘the people’ (Canovan 1999, 2005; Panizza 2005).

Anthropologists have long been aware of this uneasy relationship between populism and democracy. While some have been critical of populism’s allegedly inherently authoritarian tendencies (Sánchez 2016), several ethnographies argue that populism is the most radically democratic form of political organisation, which is precisely why it seems so threatening to any status quo. Its capacity to unite diverse factions of society makes it a particularly efficacious brand of political mobilisation (Samet 2019).

A major question that these debates raise is what the relationship between populism and fascism may be, as many right-wing populist movements clearly resemble or have components of the latter. Populist movements, in the Global North in particular, represent democratic as well as fascist reactions to liberal paradigms of governance, which favour models of deliberative democracy. In these contexts, popular support for populist movements and parties is, in large part, due to their platforms’ espousal of anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Scholars studying these cases have shown how neoliberal economic policies, combined with liberal political discourse, have alienated rural and post-industrial contexts (Holmes 2010, 2019; Kalb 2023). These movements, such as the British National Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, Brexit, Trumpism, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, as with many Visegrád region nations, articulate national sovereignty and citizenship in ethnonationalist terms (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgyin 2021a, 2021b). This fascistically ethnonationalist and racist populist illiberalism unites those who feel devalued by liberal multiculturalism and the patterns of capital accumulation that have historically accompanied it in the post-WWII era.

The fascist discourse of many populist movements has led some scholars to argue that they are intrinsically interrelated—in other words, that populism is always related to fascism (Finchelstein 2019). While the abovementioned ethnographic work looks at populisms that are blatantly ethnonationalist, xenophobic, and racist, anthropologists have also argued that because populism is a political logic with drastically varying ideological content, it is important to evaluate different populist traditions based on the ideas they promote, rather than stigmatising all political forms that are labelled as ‘populist’ (Samet and Schiller 2017).

Charismatic leadership

One of the most important and controversial themes of inquiries into populism is the relationship between ‘the people’ and the leader. Because of its emphasis on popular sovereignty, some anthropologists have underscored the importance of people’s mobilisation in populism. They consciously move away from attributing the appeal of populist politics to personal charisma, arguing that depictions of charismatic leaders presiding over a passive mass reinforce stereotypes of socioeconomically precarious sectors as lacking in agency or as being intellectually incapacitated (Aciksoz 2019; Cody 2015; Lazar 2017; Samet 2019; Tambar 2014). These thinkers have sought to underscore the bottom-up dimensions of populism, demanding that we not simply credit the charismatic leader for creating the basis of populist organisation and showing that local and grassroots organisation are central to its appeal and success.

Recent studies of modern-day Peronist labour unions in Argentina have shown them to be far less oriented towards personalist political representation than one might assume. Instead, these unions are primarily spaces of negotiation. For Sian Lazar, labour unions allow for decision-making and debate that do not follow a strictly top-down structure by which a leader gives a command that is then carried out without deliberation or debate (2017). Such work stands in tension to a widespread concern that leaders and their charisma may be a chief organising force of populist movements. Anthropologists of populism elsewhere have also emphasised the importance of populism’s supporters by focusing on crowds and grassroots political organising, showing that populist mobilisation is not purely explained by the pull of a charismatic leader (Cody 2015, Tambar 2014).

The work on Eastern European populism emphasises sentiments on the ground as the source of populist cohesion more than shared loyalty to a single figure (Buzalka 2021; Kurti 2020; Malewska-Szyalgin 2021b). These studies underscore how populist discourse speaks to practical concerns of citizens who feel excluded, unmoored, and disenfranchised by economic and social transformation.

Many scholars of populism have focused on the nature of its conceptions of leadership. They contend that populist notions of political representation often fetishise larger-than-life figures (Finchelstein 2017; Wedeen 1995). Such figures can play a generative role in populist movements, as they help absorb the differences between the diverse social sectors that constitute ‘the people’ (Laclau 2005; Müller 2014). This was famously argued by Sigmund Freud in his examination of crowd psychology. For Freud ([1921] 2001), the leader is a love object. While the crowd is turned against others outside of itself—others whom it has come together against—its attention is also lovingly turned toward the leader, who is held to be a surrogate father figure (Derby 2009). Because populism depends on a coalition between diverse social sectors, the charismatic leader functions as an ‘arbiter of contradiction’.

Of course, the personality and even body of the leader are relevant to other political paradigms beyond populism: Monarchical leaders represent a classical notion of sovereignty in which they are above and beyond the laws that constrict their subjects. German historian Ernst Kantrowicz famously examined how divine right monarchs both embody and represent the divine and the human. He studied the genealogy of political leadership in Europe, examining the king’s two bodies as both divine and human, reflecting the doubling of Christ as, at once, both flesh and blood and godly (Kantrowicz [1937] 2016). Fetishism of a political leader—the reification of a human into a deified figure—has been part of political traditions far before the first populist party even emerged. It should thus not be surprising that followers of populist political leaders may consider them both eminently human and inherently not human, even divine (Coronil 1997; Derby 2009).

Scholars of regimes that are cults of personality, but not necessarily populist, also often have leaders that are both intended to be relatable and incomparable—their fetish quality is essential to their capacity to bring together diverse populations (Wedeen 1999). In the anthropological literature, the role of fetishised political leaders is conceived of in symbolic and psychoanalytical terms. Studies of totalitarianism and dictatorships have drawn on structuralist theories of the ‘master-signifier’—a signifier that does not refer to specific content (or ‘signified’) but is the anchor for a whole symbolic system—to understand how certain figures occupy singular symbolic functions. Thus, work on the Soviet Union has shown how certain historical figures like Lenin come to be reified as beyond reproach and critique, serving as master-signifiers that serve as an anchor through which subjects make sense of themselves and the world around them through a shared official discourse (Yurchak 2006). Scholarship on social uncertainty in times of political upheaval has shown how the deposal of brutal dictators, whose larger-than-life presence had previously served as a constant point of reference for their citizens, leads to a state of social ambiguity in which people feel the loss of a referential anchor (Siegel 2006).

Conclusion: A political question of our time

Ethnographic inquiry makes anthropology uniquely suited to give insights into why populist politics are so popular in today’s world. Anthropological work on populism has centred on its highly diverse manifestations. It generally avoids labelling populism as inherently left or right, but, instead, views it as a discursive style that can be adapted to many different ideological programs. The discipline makes sense of populism by focusing on themes including sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, and the nature of group belonging. A major topic of investigation is the nature and importance of emotions at play in populist movements. Another main topic concerns the complicated and dynamic relationship between liberal paradigms of deliberative democracy and populism, which demonstrates that democracy encourages mobilisation in the name of popular sovereignty and yet seeks to contain it. While anthropology considers the importance of charismatic leadership, it errs on the side of highlighting the agency of the subjects who engage in populist politics. What unites much of the anthropology of populism is the nature of political representation. Who should or should not be represented, how emotional or direct this representation should be, and who really defines the nature of representation are pressing questions that we need to keep asking against the rapid rise of populist parties globally.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.

———. 2022. “The post-peasant populism of Eastern Europe: On resilience and the mobilisation of an economic base.” Ethnologia Polona 43: 41–62.

De Abreu, María José. 2021. The charismatic gymnasium: Breath, media, and religious revivalism in contemporary Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Aciksoz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial limbs: Masculinity, disability, and political violence in Turkey. Oakland: University of California Press.

Auyero, Javier. 2000. Poor people’s politics: Peronist survival networks and the legacy of Evita. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Beasley-Murray, Jon. 2010. Posthegemony: Political theory and Latin America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Buzalka, Juraj. 2021. “Village fascists and progressive populists: Two faces of the countermovement in Slovakia.” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 9: 1658–82.

Canetti, Elias. (1960) 1984. Crowds and power. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Canovan, Margaret. 1999. “Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy.” Political Studies 47, no. 1: 2–16.

———. 2005. The people. Cambridge: Polity.

Chatterjee, Partha. 2011. Lineages of political society: Studies in postcolonial democracy. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cody, Francis. 2015. “Populist politics: Print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks.” Comparative Studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 1: 50–65.

Copeland, Nicholas. 2019. The democracy development machine: Neoliberalism, radical pessimism, and authoritarian populism in Mayan Guatemala. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Cox, Aimee Meredith. 2016. Shapeshifters: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Derby, Lauren. 2009. The dictator’s seduction: Politics and the popular imagination in the era of Trujillo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Finchelstein, Federico. 2017. From fascism to populism in history. Oakland: University of California Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1921) 2001. “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego” in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Volume 18. London: The Hogarth Press.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2010. Integral Europe: Fast capitalism, multiculturalism, neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2019. “Fascism at eye level.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 84: 62–90.

Geschiere, Peter. 2013. Witchcraft, intimacy, and trust: Africa in comparison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the rise of nationalist populism.” American Ethnologist 44, no. 2: 209–14.

Hann, Chris. 2019. “Anthropology and populism.” Anthropology Today 35, no. 1: 1–2.

Hota, Pinky. 2020. “Populist panics: Sex as excess in right wing India.” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 3: 377–400.

Kalb, Don. 2009a. “Headlines of nationalism, subtexts of class: Poland and popular paranoia, 1989-2009.” Anthropologica 51, no. 2: 289–300.

———. 2009b. “Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond).” American Ethnologist 36, no.2: 207–23.

———. 2023. “Double devaluations: Class, value and the rise of the right in the Global North.” Journal of Agrarian Change 23, no. 1: 204–19.

Kantorowicz, Ernst. (1937) 2016. The king’s two bodies: A study in medieval political theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kurti, Laszlo. 2020. “Orbánism: The culture of illiberalism in Hungary.” Ethnologia Europaea 50, no. 2: 62–79.

Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On populist reason. New York: Verso.

Lazar, Sian. 2017. The social life of politics: Ethics, kinship, and union activism in Argentina. Oakland: University of California Press.

Le Bon, Gustave. (1895) 1995. The crowd. New Brunswick: Transactions Publishers.

Malewska-Szalgin, Anna. 2011. “Postsocialism as a diagnostic tool.” Ethnologia Europaea 41, no. 2: 71–80.

———. 2021a. “Countermovements: Rural social imaginaries confronting neoliberal economics and politics in southern Poland.” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 9: 1641–57.

———. 2021b. “Self-silencing strategies in casual conversations about politics in rural Poland.” Ethnologia Polona 42: 49–63.

Mazauric, Claude. 2014. "Haim Burstin, Révolutionnaires. Pour une anthropologie politique de la Révolution française." Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 377: 221-2. https://doi.org/10.4000/ahrf.13324

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The anthropology of populism: Beyond the liberal settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 45–60.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2018. For a left populism. New York: Verso.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2011. The moral neoliberal: Welfare and citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Ostiguy, Pierre. 2009. “The high and the low in politics: A two-dimensional political space for comparative analysis and electoral studies.” University of Notre Dame: Kellogg Institute Working Paper #360. https://doi.org/10.7274/26126035.v1

———. 2017. “A socio-cultural approach.” In The Oxford handbook of populism, edited by Rovira Kaltwasser, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Paul Taggart and Pierre Ostiguy, 73–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pannizza, Francisco. 2005. Populism and the mirror of democracy. New York: Verso.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “Beyond the names of the people.” Cultural Studies 26, nos. 2-3: 370–90.

Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2008. Counter-democracy: Politics in an age of distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Samet, Robert. 2019. Deadline: Populism and the press in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Samet, Robert and Naomi Schiller. 2017. “All populisms are not created equal.” Anthropology News 58, no. 3: e63–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.432

Sánchez, Rafael. 2016. Dancing Jacobins: A Venezuelan genealogy of Latin American populism. New York: Fordham University Press.

Savell, Stephanie. 2015. “‘I’m not a aeader’: Cynicism and good citizenship in Brazil.” PoLar: Politcal and Legal Anthropology Review 38, no. 2: 300–17.

Siegel, James. 2006. Naming the witch. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Song, Hoon. 2012. Pigeon trouble: Bestiary biopolitics in deindustrialized America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Stavrakakis, Yannis, Giorgos Katsambekis, Nikos Nikisianis, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, and Thomas Siomis. 2017. “Extreme right-wing populism in Europe: Revisiting a reified association.” Critical Discourse Studies 14, no. 4: 420–39.

Tambar, Kabir. 2014. The reckoning of pluralism: Political belonging and the demands of history in Turkey. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

Tarde, Gabriel. (1898) 1989. L’opinion et la foule. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Urbinati, Nadia. 2014. Democracy disfigured: Opinion, truth, and the people. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Muller, Jan-Werner. 2014. “The people must be extracted from within the people: Reflections on populism.” Constellations 21, no. 4: 483–93.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1: 1–18.

Yurchak, Alexei. 2005. Everything was forever until it was no more: The last Soviet generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wedeen, Lisa. 1999. Ambiguities of domination: Politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary Syria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Note on contributor

Julia Fierman is currently Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard University. Starting in 2025, she will take up the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her monograph on Peronism—the world’s most enduring populist movement. She has previously published articles in various journals on the topics of populism, Peronism, and Argentine political culture.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Affect

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:28:00 +0000

Detail of "The fallen Angel" (1847) by Alex Andre Cabanel, depicting the devil after being expelled from heaven. Picture by Wikipedia.

Daniel White Andrea De Antoni

University of Cambridge, Kyoto University

Initially published 26 Feb 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25affect

Abstract:

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although registered through biological and bodily sensation, affects are also culturally conditioned and can, in turn, strongly influence sociocultural dynamics. Anthropologists have long explored the varieties of emotional experience across cultures, from the analysis of different patterns of emotional behaviour in the early twentieth century to the linguistic comparison of different emotional expressions through the 1970s and 80s. Since around the 1990s, however, anthropologists began to shift their focus to the diverse ways that emotions also involve less linguistically determined but nevertheless socially conditioned bodily experiences they called ‘affect’. This entry documents early psychological and philosophical genealogies of affect; the relation of affect to anthropological studies of emotion; critiques of and counterpoints to the affect concept; and enduring themes in ethnographic studies of affect.

Introduction

An uneasy tingling of your skin when you pass through an unknown patch of forest; a sigh of comforting relief when you taste a familiar home-cooked dish after months away; the joyous energy of singing along with friends—word-for-word—the lyrics of a hit song; the high-intensity movements of a shamanic ritual; the low-intensity stillness of meditation; a dampness in the spleen; a longing in the heart; an ache. Many experiences are sensed but are not easily identified with a familiar emotion word like ‘fear’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘joy’, ‘transcendence’, ‘equanimity’, ‘worry’, ‘heartache’, or even ‘pain’. Moreover, feelings can often be surprising, arising at unexpected moments and carrying with them little indication of their origin or cause.

Although anthropologists have long been interested in these types of felt experiences, they have traditionally focused more explicitly on the public expression and symbolic display of feeling, which they called ‘emotion’. Since the 1990s, however, anthropologists in partnership with many others in allied social science and humanities disciplines began to explicitly emphasise the value of describing feelings that were sensed within and between bodies but did not always take linguistic or conceptual form. They called these ‘affect’.

Affect refers to a variety of bodily experiences, sensations, or simply perceived shifts in atmospheric intensities that, although conditioned through sociocultural environments, may not take form through culture-specific conventions and meanings. Despite their conceptual ambiguity, affects can feel sensorially distinct. They can feel strong, sharp, or subdued. Alternatively, they can also not feel like much at all, seemingly falling outside a person’s conscious perceptions. As an analytical concept, affect offers new ways to investigate what anthropologists have in the past variously referred to as ‘collective effervescence’, ‘sentiment’, ‘emotion’, ‘feelings’, ‘sensations’, and ‘the senses’. The broad semantic spectrum of these terms suggests not only that emotional experiences are diverse but so too are the conditions that shape them. The adoption of affect as a key conceptual tool was driven in part by a desire to address dimensions of experiences that eluded clearly circumscribed cultural frameworks and linguistic structures of meaning.

Affect theory brings together perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and several other fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and literature to explore the bodily and relational aspects of feeling. The following sections outline the development of the affect concept in anthropological theory. The first section traces influential genealogical roots for affect found within psychology and philosophy. The second highlights the relation between affect and earlier anthropological work on emotion. Section three evaluates critiques of and counterpoints to affect, given that the term is highly contested and debated within the emerging field of affect theory. The fourth section features distinctive features of the affect concept, and the conclusion considers enduring themes of affect studies, including implications for ethnographic method and disciplinary critique.

Psychological and philosophical forerunners to affect

Literature on affect in anthropology can be theoretical, abstract, and contested (see introductions to affect such as De Antoni 2019; Liljeström 2016; Rutherford 2016; White 2017). Therefore, it is helpful to outline key theoretical discussions in the past, which have traditionally emphasised Western traditions and that inform contemporary anthropological debates on affect. Two genealogies of this concept are particularly prominent, one psychological and the other philosophical. Each contributes distinct but complementary perspectives to shed light on how affect operates as an embodied and relational phenomenon. A common theme of this literature is a concern with how to relate somatic, or bodily, aspects of emotional processes (the ‘affective’) with its symbolic, conceptual, and representational components (the ‘emotional’).

Early psychological debates on affect adopted the worldview of Western science, which understood emotional energies as grounded in bodies and inherited through processes of evolution. As part of a natural continuum that humans share with non-human animals, according to Charles Darwin, emotional capacities could be identified through expressional behaviours, such as tendencies to bear one’s teeth when angry (Darwin [1872] 2018). This evolutionary view remained apparent in an early debate on the definition of emotion, which centred around a famous anecdote that questioned, for instance, whether fear is a condition that triggers one to run upon encountering a bear in the woods or is rather the post-hoc ascription of fear to an aroused body. Psychologist William James’ (1884) idea is that the ‘subjective experience [of sensations like] fear or disgust is the result of a process that unfolds after the alerting change in core affect’ (Beatty 2019, 202). In other words, although the common view sees emotion as a sensation that comes after one is ‘afraid’ (one sees a bear, becomes afraid, and runs away), James argued the reverse: that one is ‘afraid’ because of the physical experience of bodily sensations (one sees a bear, runs away, and finds oneself afraid).

These early debates on emotion became even more contested with the arrival of Freudian theory and the globalisation of discourses on instincts, Id, and the unconscious (W. Anderson, Jenson, and Keller 2011). With the spread of Freud’s idea that one’s psyche could be split between conscious and subconscious elements, scholars began to more commonly distinguish between feelings as containing both emotionally conscious and affectively un- or non-conscious components. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1962a; 1962b) expanded on these ideas, proposing a taxonomy of core affective instincts, such as interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, or anger-rage. His work posited that while these states are universally shared, their expressions vary across cultural contexts. Early innovative essays in critical theory that began using the word ‘affect’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995a; 1995b) revisited Tomkins’ theories, paving the way for a culturally oriented affect theory. For affect theorists today, this psychological lineage has inspired a set of questions focused on whether affect is universal or culturally distinct, to what degree it is grounded in bodies, minds, or both, and whether affect emerges before, simultaneously with, or after a conscious recognition of an experience of emotion.

Western philosophers also demonstrated an early interest in the relation between the somatic and ideological components of emotion. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza ([1677] 1994) defined affect (or what he called affectus) as the capacity to ‘affect and be affected’, a common phrase that many anthropologists would later cite. Spinoza described affect as ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ ([1677] 1994, 70, emphasis added). Spinoza’s view was that affect (bodily capacities) and emotion (‘the ideas of these affections’) are two dimensions of an inseparable single process, an argument which reflects his opposition to the mind-body dualism of his time.

Spinoza continues to inspire contemporary affect theorists who highlight the enduring open-ended, processual, and mutable qualities of the affective body as it exists in relation to different social and material environments. His ideas were rekindled in the widely read materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and popularised most prominently by the philosopher Brian Massumi (1995; 2002). From Massumi’s point of view, affect indicates pre-conscious modulations of ‘intensity’ moving through and between bodies (Massumi 1995; 2002). Emotion, on the other hand, is ‘qualified intensity’, its conceptual ‘capture’ in meaning, or the ‘socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (Massumi 1995, 88). From this perspective, affect could be understood as a kind of physiological flux of sensation that is registered in bodies and travels between them; emotion, on the other hand, is the conceptualisation of that sensation in a culturally shared and often linguistically coded meaning.

Within contemporary debates on affect, the philosophical idea that ‘arrangements’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner 2017) of humans and non-human objects shape and are shaped by affect prior to affect’s capture in meaning became a popular and highly contested idea. Many contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences cite this particular philosophical genealogy of affect as influential, even if they are also critical of it (Ahmed 2004b; Berlant 2011; Berlant and Stewart 2019; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Seigworth and Pedwell 2023). For example, some scholars argue that the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ identify qualitatively distinct experiences that follow ‘different logics’ and ‘pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27). Other scholars see emotion and affect as existing along a continuum (Ngai 2005). Still others have proposed that the perception of an ‘affect-emotion gap’ is itself the product of particular discursive knowledge regimes, and varies based on different cultural, political, and socioeconomic applications of affect and emotion as technical terms (White 2017; 2022).

As a result of these debates, affect became a helpful conceptual lens through which ethnographers could focus attention on nuanced felt experiences that could exceed or precede cognition and language. It also provided a more fine-grained way to approach the contagious involvement and coordination of bodies that can be witnessed during rituals, political rallies, festivals, or in stadiums. In this regard, affect offered anthropologists more diverse and detailed perspectives on classic sociological theories of sentiment, such as Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim [1912] 2008), which conveys a homogenisation of affects into one single group experience.

For example, ethnographic research on contemporary militarism in Pakistan demonstrates how the state can mobilise affect to sustain its authority over other political groups in society (Rashid 2020). Through a study of mourning rituals orchestrated by military personnel, anthropologists have shown how the military transforms grief into a resource for national solidarity. Ritual activities like public commemorations of martyred soldiers and state-sponsored funerals create ‘affective subjects’ who embody both personal loss and collective loyalty. Such examples show how affect operates not only as a homogenous collective force that can emerge through large-scale rituals but also as a constellation of complex feelings that can be specifically cultivated by certain social groups and selectively fostered or resisted by others.

Anthropologies of emotion

Anthropological work on affect builds closely on anthropological studies of emotions. These studies looked primarily to non-Western case studies of emotional experiences to examine how emotions varied from one context to another, providing evidence that challenged universal perspectives assumed by early research. Prominent works on this theme from the early twentieth century approached emotion as a marker of cultural difference. These works were influenced by psychological approaches and were later categorised under the label ‘culture and personality studies’. Representative studies depicted cultures as comparable through their dominant ‘patterns’ of dispositions, attitudes, beliefs, and personalities that make up a specific cultural entity (Benedict [1934] 2005). One influential study of the Japanese by Ruth Benedict, for example, juxtaposed individualistic ‘Americans’ motivated by emotional matrices of guilt and free expression with a more group-oriented ‘Japanese’, who were portrayed as motivated by shame, interdependence, and an obligation to different in-groups (Benedict [1946] 1974). In the case of interpersonal transgression, for example, ‘instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would’, says Benedict, Japanese ‘specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to’, and pointing to the particular ‘province’ or ‘code’ that was violated (195). Therefore, in cases of socially perceived bad behaviour, an American ‘may suffer from guilt’, whereas for ‘the Japanese’ ‘a failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior…is a shame’ (223–4).

In the 1970s and 80s, anthropologists reformulated these ideas of cultural difference imagined through constructs of emotion-based patterns and personality types, critiquing them as too rigid, culture-bound, and resistant to change. Instead, they focused on analysing emotional differences that could be observed through linguistic discourses and ‘emotional lexicons’ (Frevert et al. 2014). These anthropologists of emotion focused on cultural differences primarily by scrutinising emotion words in the languages of those they studied that did not neatly translate into English. This method offered insights into a broad human spectrum of emotional experiences existing both across and within different cultural groups.

For example, in a prominent 1980s study of the Ifaluk in Micronesia, based on fieldwork carried out in the late 1970s, anthropologists highlighted local words such as fago (loneliness/sadness) and song (justified anger) to build a critique of the ‘unnatural’ gendered division between reason and emotion in Western cultures (Lutz 1982; 1988). Other anthropologists working among the Pintupi of Australia examined emotions such as rarru (anger), which arose from threats to ‘shared identity or kinship’ (walytja) with others. These studies suggested that emotions emerge as semiotic—or meaning-making—practices rooted ‘in social life and its relationship to other signs’ (Myers 1988, 607). Among the Ilongot in the northern Philippines, strong feelings like liget resembled sentiments of anger and grief but did not have exact equivalents in Anglophone cultures, and appeared highly nuanced, complex, and variable (M. Rosaldo 1980, 1983, 143; R. Rosaldo 1989, 3; Spiegel 2017). These works demonstrated that emotions go beyond discrete bio-psychological categories and are embedded in social processes of language, meaning-making, and ethics (Lutz 1982; 1988; 2017).

Despite their innovative and nuanced approaches to emotion, some anthropologists perceived limits in what they saw as an increasingly outdated and culture-bound model of comparison. These critiques came in the wake of globalising processes that rendered the cultural boundaries of emotional words less distinct. Additionally, a theoretical turn in the 1980s emphasised a reflexive analysis of the Western literary conventions of anthropological writing, and challenged an ‘us-them’ model of culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). In light of their focus on culturally specific language and public symbols, previous studies of emotion were also criticised for overlooking aspects of bodily intensity that could exceed and confound language, potentially impacting bodies beyond conscious reflection.

These critiques grew throughout the 2000s, extending to disciplines beyond anthropology, and resulted in a theoretical shift away from the discursive dynamics of emotion toward sensations that did not neatly map onto emotional lexicons. Some scholars referred to this shift as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2007). Authors associated with this ‘turn’ sought to address more explicitly what language-centred analyses in the 1980s and 90s had partly and implicitly left out. Thus, affect theory provided alternatives to certain critiques made of the anthropology of emotion. Yet, it also became the target of new critiques, which argued that affect approaches overlook aspects of sociality in favour of describing bodily sensations, physiology, and abstract energetic processes of cultural dynamics.

Critiques of affect and counterpoints

With the rise of theoretical literature on affect, the term became increasingly targeted for critique and reformulation. For example, some critics took issue with an idea of affect as a field of ‘direct feeling’ that is supposedly distinct from the ‘conscious recognition’ of emotion (Ahmed 2004b, 39). They worried this approach risked universalising affect as a natural phenomenon disconnected from the socio-political forces that shape it. Related critiques argued that such a distinction even resembles a form of biological essentialism and reductionism, in which affect is treated as autonomous from ideology (e.g., Leys 2011, 2017).

Despite these on-going critiques of affect theory, some early studies of emotional and affective processes had specifically sought to show how social dynamics could shape physiological processes that were usually identified as purely biological or psychological phenomena. For instance, while a sensation such as pain may be commonly seen as an objective measure of a body’s biological response to a harmful stimulus, it can also be understood as operating through implicit value judgements of gender, ethnicity, and racial difference that ‘code’ pain in ways that register differently in the surfaces of skin. A study of an Australian government report on testimony of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their families in Australia, for example, shows how historical narratives and contemporary legal practices can result in different effects upon the surfaces of bodies. While the report includes Aboriginal testimonies that read painfully to Indigenous communities, its suggestion that white Australians should acknowledge ‘national shame’ but not necessarily feel ‘personal guilt’ could be read as producing different affective results for readers with different skin colours: ‘Indigenous Australians tell their personal stories, but white readers are allowed to disappear from this history, having no part in what was done’ (Ahmed 2004a, 34–5). From this point of view, pain emerges as an immediate sensation, shaped through histories that read and feel differently for different people. Such studies show that ‘sensations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us’ (Ahmed 2004a, 30).

Although some studies like the above had directly addressed how bodily sensations could surface through social categories, other scholars still worried that broader trends in affect theory ignored how gender (Boler and Zembylas 2016; Thien 2005), ethnicity (Ramos-Zayas 2011), and racialisation (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015) shape and socialise affect. In adopting this perspective, affect theorists were entering territory covered by scholars of feminism, ethnic studies, and critical race theory. Some called for ‘critical examinations of “whiteness”’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 654) and sought to point out explicit examples from historical studies and queer theory that analyse the affective dimensions of racial dynamics. For example, historical studies of Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States have shown how certain depressive states were described by predominantly white mental health professionals through culture-bound taxonomies, such as familismo, fatalismo, or the ‘Puerto Rican syndrome’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Muñoz 2006). Certain painful feelings tied to migration experiences, surfacing as uncontrollable screaming, trembling, or aggression in young women, were labelled as ‘abnormal’ and characterised through ethnic categorisations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660). Conversely, as other historical studies have shown, the perception of schizophrenia changed significantly in the 1960s from being seen as a ‘harmless’ condition primarily affecting white people to being viewed as a dangerous disorder characterised by anger and linked with the civil rights and Black Power movements (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Metzl 2009). These studies show how institutional practices and ways of talking about race can condition negative affective states through racial frames.

Other critics argued that many affect studies ignored the role of history and place in conditioning affective responses, and offered compelling ethnographic examples as counterpoints. For instance, in a study on the ‘affective geographies’ of post-war Cyprus, after a 1974 partition of the island’s residents into a distinct northern Turkish-Cypriot and southern Greek-Cypriot territory, residents told stories of the melancholic feelings they encountered within ruined landscapes. Turkish Cypriots living in the abandoned homes of Greek Cypriots in the north faced an ‘atmosphere’ that ‘discharged a feeling of the uncanny, a strange feeling’ that was derived for some ‘out of a sense of impropriety, haunting, or an act of violation’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 11). Such studies raise the question of whether the feelings encountered in these landscapes are subjective, coming from the individual’s perception of a historically storied space, or the material environment itself, filled with abandoned objects and unkempt fields. Ethnographic evidence suggests that ‘neither the ruin…nor the people who live around it are affective on their own […] but both produce and transmit affect relationally’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 14). Detailed ethnographic studies of these socio-historical qualities of environments and space can help anthropologists unpack the multilayered impacts that some geographers have called ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2009).

Still other critics worried that philosophical oriented theorists of affect too heavily emphasise a ‘gap’ between the ‘signifying order’ and ‘affective order’; that is, between that which can be articulated and that which escapes linguistic expression (Martin 2013, S155; Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Navaro 2017; Navaro-Yashin 2009). They wondered whether such a distinction was needed between emotion and affect at all. To this question, some of today’s affect theorists respond that neither early formative philosophical works on affect nor much of the affect literature that followed it subscribed to as hard of a break between affect and emotion as was characterised in some critiques of affect. As noted by Massumi in his popular work on affect, ‘The approach suggested here does not accept any categorical separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of “raw” nature or experience… The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social’ (Massumi 2002, 9). Choosing to avoid this debate altogether, some scholars have advocated using the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably (see Lutz 2017) or argued for ‘modal’ approaches that posit affect and emotion on a continuum, ‘whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects’ (Ngai 2005, 27).

Anthropologists of ‘embodiment’ have also contributed to discussions of how emotional and affective practices can exist along a continuum. These scholars argue that a focus on embodiment helps situate affect not as distinct from meaning-making processes, suggestive of body-mind dichotomies, but as something through which ‘dualities such as subject and object or meaning and the material world (evoking mind/body) can be collapsed’ (McDonald 2018, 187; also see Csordas 1990; 1993). For example, studies of exorcism rituals in Italy show how feelings and affects situated in embodied practices like prayer and touch constitute the basis for the experiential emergence of spiritual entities such as the devil. These felt experiences of the possessed person and the participants in exorcisms, in turn, contribute to the reality and the ‘capturing’ of particular entities into historicised, cultural structures of meaning—namely one demon or angel rather than another (De Antoni 2022). This ethnographically grounded approach to bodily feelings showcases what a focus on affect can offer anthropology.

Finally, some critics raised a methodological concern about philosophical descriptions of affect as an ‘escape’ from ‘perception’ (Massumi 2002, 36) or, in other words, as something that was difficult to articulate or ‘capture’ in language (see also Stodulka et al., 2019). For some ethnographers accustomed to describing their interlocutors through narratives, thinking of affect as that which always escapes its articulation has led to practical and methodological frustrations. It has also invited evocative experimental forms of writing about affect, such as works on everyday American life that attempt to capture the somatic contours of daily routines and ‘ordinary affects’ in poetic language that does not correspond to common analytical concepts (Stewart 2007, 1; also see Berlant and Stewart 2019). Many anthropological works on affect can be both highly theoretical and/or poetic in their approaches, and thus offer powerful insights through virtuosity in prose. At the same time, they can appear to some as overly abstracted from ethnographic contexts (Beatty 2019, 210–6). Thus, writing against the aforementioned critiques, many recent ethnographies analyse affect as situated in historical and cultural contexts (Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016; Muehlebach 2011; Muñoz 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2009; 2012; Newell 2018; Ngai 2005). Such works emphasise the simultaneously material, historical, social, somatic, and semiotic aspects of affect, and how these components relationally feed back into one another through dynamic ‘affective-discursive loops’ (Wetherell 2012, 7).

Indeed, some recent studies of affect have addressed the challenging question of how socio-material arrangements take on a force that is felt before it is conceived by revisiting classic arguments in social theory, such as in the popular discussion around mana (Mazzarella 2017a). Mana is a concept found throughout Polynesia that refers to a transhuman ‘force or efficacy’ that was ascribed to certain people or places that expressed palpable power and ‘vital energetics’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1). Sociologist Émile Durkheim described mana as ‘at once a physical force and a moral power’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1), resembling contemporary anthropologists’ interest in the relation between the emotional-conceptual and affective-somatic aspects of social processes. Such innovate reinterpretations of social theory show that what anthropologists today call ‘affect’ can be used to shed light on classic anthropological debates, resulting in a series of productive connections between anthropological studies of affect, emotions, mana, collective effervescence, and the ‘senses’ (Howes 2005; Pink 2009).

Advancing distinctive contributions of affect

Despite the many critiques of affect, including constructive suggestions to consider the overlapping territory between affect and emotion, there remain strong arguments for maintaining the distinctiveness of the term. For example, given that human acts of sensing or ‘feeling with the world’ (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017) incorporate complex, fluid dimensions of both somatic and semiotic phenomenon, the word ‘affect’ can help disambiguate multiple processes. It can help anthropologists discern somatic processes that seem to function in part outside or below discourse more discretely, catalogue them more comprehensively, and add to ethnographic descriptions’ clarity, granularity, and sensitivity. This can sometimes require the modulation of the ethnographer’s own senses, which broadens previous conceptions of what makes for good ethnographic training.

For example, a case study of the French perfume industry demonstrates how affective capacities can develop through pedagogies of training, sensory exercises, and objects like an odour kit (Teil 1998). An odour kit is ‘made of a series of sharply distinct pure fragrances arranged in such a way that one can go from sharpest to the smallest contrasts. To register those contrasts one needs to be trained’ (Latour 2004, 207). In so doing, a perfumer, or an ethnographer studying perfume, must learn to ‘have a nose’ that allows one to inhabit a (richly differentiated odoriferous) world’ (207). New bodily capacities develop alongside encounters with objects that also operate affectively on the body. The result is that one develops a new, more discrete sensory capacity that at the same time unveils a more sensory-rich world particular to the modern French perfume industry.

Affect as a conceptual tool can also point to the experience of feelings that, while conditioned by cultural contexts, often misalign with or even challenge established cultural values. It can also help anthropologists articulate what happens in spaces of intimacy, whether of private homes or of selves, that do not fit—or fit only in queer relation—with established social values. In the Sindh Province of Pakistan, fakirs (meaning ‘beggars’ in Urdu and, in some cases, ‘transgenders’ in Sindhi) refer to persons who voluntarily take up poverty as a practice of ascetic devotion to Islamic saints, often motivated by ‘prophetic dreams and personal callings’ (Kasmani 2022, 8). Through devotional practices and mystical encounters with saints, some fakirs describe experiences of closeness and intimacy with saints that serve both as compelling testimonies of desirable affect for other ascetics and morally troubling stories for religious and political authorities. Thus, affects of ‘private feelings’ and ‘intimate relations with saints carry ramifications for broader regimes and critiques of power’ (10).

Another helpful approach to affect is a reflexive one, which subjects conceptualisations of affect, such as ‘the affect-emotion gap’ described above, to ethnographic observation. When doing so, it becomes clear how anthropologists’ practices of theorising affect can resemble those of their interlocutors. In national branding campaigns in Japan, for example, anthropologists noted how something like an ‘affect-emotion gap’ was also conceptualised by bureaucrats and national cultural policy makers. These officials observed an affective excitement among global consumers of pop-culture commodities produced in Japan and sought to convert it into an emotionally charged affinity for Japan itself. For example, through government-funded events promoting cultures of manga, to which many readers are attracted for its minor and counter-cultural themes, officials attempted to mainstream manga as a national cultural property of Japan. In this way, an increasingly global cultural commodity could be transformed into a potential national resource of soft power (Galbraith 2019; Leheny 2018; White 2022).

A similar process of gapping or splitting emotional processes can be observed within the global technological world of modelling affection, preference, and taste. For example, computer scientists at academic labs and corporate offices in the US who build taste recommendation algorithms for social media feeds presume that an affective appeal for a certain music style can be coded into numbers (Seaver 2022). Such a perspective splits a feeling of affection into the affective dimensions of personal experience and the emotional dimensions of ‘preference’ that can be computed. Similarly, engineers and computer scientists operating in the field of ‘affective computing’ (Picard 1997) at prominent labs at MIT and Cambridge rely on models that understand ‘affect’ as physiological changes in the body and ‘emotion’ as something codable in a machine system and translatable to humans interpreting those systems. Adapting work on affective computing to East Asian contexts, some robot engineers in Japan have experimented with building ‘affective engines’ into emotionally intelligent technologies, which could theoretically discern the affective states of people by reading the signal of an emotion, such as ‘happiness’, through the facial-expression recognition of a smile (see Fujita and Kitano 1998; White and Katsuno 2021; 2023). These examples illustrate how many specialists in the hard sciences are currently operationalising their own theories of affect to much greater impact than anthropologists. In fieldwork within rapidly changing technological worlds, the term ‘affect’ can therefore help anthropologists track significant transformations in the meanings, applications, and experiences of both human and more-than-human emotion.

Conclusions

As the above theoretical debates and ethnographic examples illustrate, studies of affect are diverse and contested. Nevertheless, enduring themes remain. Three are prominent. The first is the proposition that affect can point to feelings experienced beyond language or cognition—although not necessarily unaffected by them. Affect is indeed something more than just meaning. Rather, affect holds promise to add dimensionality to meaning, showing that meaning incorporates dynamic aspects of exchange between bodily experience and signification (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018; Newell 2018; and Mazzarella 2009; 2017b). Affect points to somatic worlds in a way that is shared among others and consequentially entangled with semiotic concepts and conditioning. Bringing affect and semiotics together in this way can offer ‘improved understanding of both as the intertwined core of sociality itself’ (Newell 2018, 2).

A second enduring theme of affect is relationality. Although human bodies can be understood as individual sense-making and sense-registering entities, they are far from being merely an individuated product of established discourse. Rather, bodies can function as nodes that register, exchange, mediate, reciprocate, co-participate, and change in relation with other bodies or simply bodily parts—human or otherwise, living or inanimate (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Bennett 2010). This relationality of affect points directly to affect’s political dimensions and power dynamics, which incorporate aspects of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and several other theoretical concepts commonly used in socio-cultural anthropology (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016).

Third, although affects may be distinguished by their uneasy alignment with conventional cultural categories, this by no means implies that affects are socially unconditioned. This point suggests that studies of affect hold potential to not only enrich previous anthropological studies of emotion but also to expand anthropologists’ understanding of the ‘culture’ concept on which the discipline still heavily depends. Through its ability to point anthropologists to the dynamic relation between public symbols and private feeling, the affect lens can unearth experiential dimensions of culture that have not been fully explored until recently.

Finally, beyond these enduring themes, affect may hold the greatest potential not in its theory-heavy analytics, which can draw disproportionately from the Western and philosophical traditions outlined above, but rather in its ethnographic applications in fieldwork. A growing collection of richly detailed ethnographies of religious practices, digital media, and human-nature interactions—many of non-Western contexts—show that affective practices exist in diverse and dynamic forms that don’t accommodate easily to established analytical theorising. For example, the deep cultivation of balanced states of feeling through Buddhist meditation in Thailand (Cook 2010); the pursuit of ‘queer companionship’ between Islamic saints and ascetics (Kasmani 2022); the mediation of the paranormal in Chile (Espírito Santo 2023); or the making of intimate and sometimes indifferent relationships with non-human others such as palms (Chao 2022), orangutans (Chua 2018; Parreñas 2012, 2018), mushrooms (Tsing 2021), and microbes (Benezra 2023): these innovative studies of affective themes diversify anthropology’s traditional understandings of culture; expand who speaks for and feels ethnographic knowledge; and offer reflexive resources for productively undoing and remaking the affective modes through which anthropological work is undertaken.

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004a. The cultural politics of emotion. London: Routledge.

———. 2004b. “Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others.” Theory, Culture & Society 21: 25–42.

Anderson, Ben. 2009. “Affective atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2: 77–81.

Anderson, Warwick, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, eds. 2011. Unconscious dominions: Psychoanalysis, colonial trauma, and global sovereignties. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Beatty, Andrew. 2019. Emotional worlds: Beyond an anthropology of emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benedict, Ruth. (1934) 2005. Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

———. (1946) 1974. The chrysanthemum and the sword: Patterns of Japanese culture. New York: Meridian Books.

Benezra, Amber. 2023. Gut anthro: An experiment in thinking with microbes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Berg, Ulla D., and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas. 2015. “Racializing affect: A theoretical proposition.” Current Anthropology 56: 654–77.

Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren Gail, and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The hundreds. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Boler, Megan, and Michalinos Zembylas. 2016. “Interview with Megan Boler: From ‘feminist politics of emotions’ to the ‘affective turn.’” In Methodological advances in research on emotion and education, edited by Michalinos Zembylas and Paul A. Schutz, 17–30. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Chao, Sophie. 2022. In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Chua, Liana. 2018. “Too cute to cuddle? ‘Witnessing publics’ and interspecies relations on the social media-scape of orangutan conservation.” Anthropological Quarterly 91, no. 3: 873–904.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2007. “Introduction.” In The affective turn: Theorizing the social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, 1–33. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Cook, Joanna. 2010. Meditation in modern Buddhism: Renunciation and change in Thai monastic life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. “Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology.” Ethos 18: 5–47.

———. 1993. “Somatic modes of attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–56.

Darwin, Charles. (1872) 2018. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Mineola: Dover Publications.

De Antoni, Andrea. 2019. “Affect.” In The international encyclopedia of anthropology, edited by Hilary Callan, 1–8. Oxford: Wiley.

———. 2022. “She talks to angels: Spirit becomings, embodied memories and affective imagination skills in catholic exorcism in contemporary Italy.” In Re-creating anthropology: Sociality, matter, and the imagination, edited by David N. Gellner and Dolores P. Martinez, 108–25. Abingdon: Routledge.

De Antoni, Andrea, and Paul Dumouchel. 2017. “Practices of feeling with the world: Towards an anthropology of affect, the senses and materiality - introduction.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 18: 91–8.

Durkheim, Émile. (1912) 2008. The elementary forms of religious life. Translated by Joseph W. Swain. Mineola: Dover Publications.

Espírito Santo, Diana. 2023. Spirited histories: Technologies, media, and trauma in paranormal Chile. London: Routledge

Frevert, Ute, Christian Bailey, Pascal Eitler, Benno Gammerl, Bettina Hitzer, Margrit Pernau, Monique Scheer, Anne Schmidt, and Nina Verheyen, eds. 2014. Emotional lexicons: Continuity and change in the vocabulary of feeling 1700-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fujita, Masahiro, and Hiroaki Kitano. 1998. “Development of an autonomous quadruped robot for robot entertainment.” Autonomous Robots 5: 7–18.

Galbraith, Patrick. 2019. Otaku and the struggle for imagination in Japan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Howes, David. 2005. Empire of the senses: The sensual culture reader. Oxford: Berg.

James, William. 1884. “What is an emotion?” Mind 9: 188–205.

Kasmani, Omar. 2022. Queer companions: Religion, public intimacy, and saintly affects in Pakistan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. “How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies.” Body & Society 10: 205–29.

Leheny, David. 2018. Empire of hope: The sentimental politics of Japanese decline. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Levy, Robert I. 1984. “The emotions in comparative perspective.” In Approaches to emotion, edited by Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman, 397–412. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The turn to affect: A critique.” Critical Inquiry 37: 434–72.

———. 2017. The ascent of affect: Genealogy and critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Liljeström, Marianne. 2016. “Affect.” In The Oxford handbook of feminist theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 16–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lutz, Catherine. 1982. “The domain of emotion words on Ifaluk.” American Ethnologist 9: 113–28.

———. 1988. Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to western theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2017. “What matters.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 181–91.

Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, Emily. 2013. “The potentiality of ethnography and the limits of affect theory.” Current Anthropology 54: S149–S58.

Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The autonomy of affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31: 83–109.

———. 2002. Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2009. “Affect: What is it good for?” In Enchantments of modernity: Empire, nation, globalization, edited by Saurabh Dube, 291–309. London: Routledge.

———. 2017a. The mana of mass society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

———. 2017b. “Sense out of sense: Notes on the affect/ethics impasse.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 199–208.

McDonald, Maryon. 2018. “From “the body” to “embodiment”, with help from phenomenology.” In Schools and styles of anthropological theory, edited by Matei Candea, 185–94. Oxon: Routledge.

Metzl, Jonathan. 2009. The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a Black disease. Boston: Beacon.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2011. “On affective labor in post-Fordist Italy.” Cultural Anthropology 26: 59–82.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2006. “Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina affect, the performativity of race, and the depressive position.” Signs 31: 675–88.

Myers, Fred R. 1988. “The logic and meaning of anger among Pintupi Aborigines.” Man 23: 589–610.

Navaro, Yael. 2017. “Diversifying affect.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 209–14.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective spaces, melancholic objects: Ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 1–18.

———. 2012. The make-believe space: Affective geography in a postwar polity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Newell, Sasha. 2018. “The affectiveness of symbols: Materiality, magicality, and the limits of the antisemiotic turn.” Current Anthropology 59: 1–22.

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing extinction: The work of care in orangutan rehabilitation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Picard, Rosalind W. 1997. Affective computing. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Pink, Sarah. 2009. Doing sensory ethnography. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2011. “Learning affect, embodying race: Youth, Blackness, and neoliberal emotions in Latino Newark.” Transforming Anthropology. 19, no 2: 86–104.

Rashid, Maria. 2020. Dying to serve: Militarism, affect, and the politics of sacrifice in the Pakistan Army. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist. 1980. Knowledge and passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1983. “The shame of headhunters and the autonomy of self.” Ethnos 11, no. 3: 135–51.

Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Introduction: Grief and a headhunter’s rage.” In Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis, 1–21. Boston: Beacon Press.

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2016. “Affect theory and the empirical.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 285–300.

Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing taste: Algorithms and the makers of music recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. 1995a. “Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” Critical Inquiry 21: 496–522.

———, ed. 1995b. Shame and its sisters: A Silvan Tomkins reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. 2010. “An inventory of shimmers.” In The affect theory reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1–25. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Seigworth, Gregory J., and Carolyn Pedwell. 2023. “Introduction: A shimmer of inventories.” In The affect theory reader 2: Worldings, tensions, futures, edited by Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, 1–59. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Slaby, Jan, Rainer Mühlhoff, and Philipp Wüschner. 2017. “Affective arrangements.” Emotion Review 11: 3–12.

Slaby, Jan, and Birgitt Röttger-Rössler. 2018. “Introduction: Affect in relation.” In Affect in relation: Families, places, technologies, edited by Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and Jan Slaby, 1–28. Abingdon: Routledge.

Spiegel, Alix. 2017. “Invisibilia: A man finds an explosive emotion locked in a word.” NPR, June 1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word.

Spinoza, Baruch de. (1677) 1994. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary affects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stodulka, Thomas, Samia Dinkelaker, and Ferdiansyah Thajib, eds. 2019. Affective dimensions of fieldwork and ethnography. Cham: Springer.

Teil, Geneviève. 1998. “Devenir expert aromaticien: Y a-t-il une place pour le goût da Cussinns les goûts alimentaires?” Revue de Sociologie du Travail 40, no. 4: 503–22.

Thien, Deborah. 2005. “After or beyond feeling? A consideration of affect and emotion in geography.” Area 37: 450–4.

Tomkins, Silvan S. 1962a. Affect imagery consciousness: The positive affects. New York: Springer.

———. 1962b. Affect imagery consciousness: The negative affects. New York: Springer.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2021. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. Los Angeles: SAGE.

White, Daniel. 2017. “Affect: An introduction.” Cultural Anthropology 32: 175–80.

———. 2022. Administering affect: Pop-culture Japan and the politics of anxiety. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

White, Daniel, and Hirofumi Katsuno. 2021. “Toward an affective sense of life: Artificial intelligence, animacy, and amusement at a robot pet memorial service in Japan.” Cultural Anthropology 36: 222–51.

———. 2023. “Modelling emotion, perfecting heart: Disassembling technologies of affect with an android bodhisattva in Japan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29: 103–23.

Note on contributors

Daniel White is a research affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research examines emotion, politics, and emerging media technologies, with a geographic concentration on Japan and the Asia-Pacific. His recent book is Administering affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the politics of anxiety (2022, Stanford).

Daniel White, Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Level 1, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 1SB, United Kingdom. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-2866-6587

Andrea De Antoni is associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and Research Coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto. He specializes in anthropology of religion, experiences with spirits, spiritual healing in contemporary Japan and Italy, the anthropology of the body, affect, and emotions. He has published extensively about these topics in English and Japanese.

Andrea De Antoni, Associate Professor, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Yoshida Nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6480-0790

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Finance

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:23:20 +0000

Village savings and loan group in Gulu District, Uganda in 2016. Picture by Kristina Just, CARE International and CARE Denmark

Daromir Rudnyckyj

University of Victoria

Initially published 7 Feb 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25finance

Abstract:

Finance is a critical dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Finance refers to the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. Financial practices and techniques date to the dawn of human communities characterised by the division of labour. Indeed, the earliest written records kept in ancient Mesopotamia are records of credit and debt. As such, finance should not be understood as a synonym for capitalism or modernity, but rather as means of administering populations through the management of money. Financial instruments have been deployed in economic systems based on both markets and redistribution. More recently finance has become increasingly indispensable to the organisation of human life, an essential economic sector, and a key domain of employment. As such, it has attracted the attention of anthropologists seeking to understand the systems and practices that undergird human organisation, production, and motivation. Historically, anthropologists have focused most intensively on personal finance, beginning with rotating credit associations and continuing through development initiatives premised on microfinance. More recently, corporate finance has come into focus, with critical work on the discursive practices of market traders, investment bankers, and financial analysts. Less attention has been paid to public finance, with the notable exception of ethnographic research in central banks and newer work on pension funds and municipal bond markets. Anthropology has played a critical role in understanding the black box that is contemporary finance by addressing its practices and its effects on human beings today.

Introduction

Finance has become a critical, if often unremarked, dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Anyone who borrows money, uses a public road, attends a school, has a cell phone, or plans to retire, is affected by finance. Finance can be broadly glossed as the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. It has been defined as ‘the management of money or other assets, and, in particular, the management of debt and equity as a means of raising capital: making money with money’ (Maurer 2005, 178). Leaving aside the question of what money is, such a definition draws attention to the temporality of money (Miyazaki 2013), or how the value of money changes over time. This is evident, for example, in interest-bearing debt in which the value of money today is greater than its value in the future. Furthermore, finance presumes a community that relies, at least in part, on money or money-like objects and has developed techniques to manage those objects through the processes of organising and allocating labour and resources.

In approaching finance, it is useful, on the one hand, to distinguish it from capitalism, and on the other hand, to understand that there are at least three broad categories of finance with distinct particularities: personal, corporate, and public. ‘Personal finance’ involves the saving, borrowing, and investment decisions of individuals and households. Much of the early work in the anthropology of finance, especially that examining financial institutions and practices, falls under this rubric. Anthropologists examined practices like rotating savings and credit associations (RoSCAs) in Asia and Africa, where a group of individuals contribute a fixed amount of money to a common pool at regular intervals, and each member takes turns to receive the pooled funds (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). Personal finance also includes home financing, mortgage schemes, and student loans (Stout 2019; Zaloom 2019) as well as efforts to finance small-scale enterprises through techniques such as ‘microfinance’. Through microfinancing, low-income individuals or business who lack access to traditional banking are provided with small-scale financial services, such as loans, with the aim of promoting financial inclusion and to reduce poverty (Elyachar 2005; Kar 2018; Schuster 2015). ‘Corporate finance’ describes how firms procure capital through equity investment or credit devices (Lepinay 2011; Ortiz 2021; Souleles 2019) and the analysis of these arrangements (Ho 2009; Leins 2018). It further entails how the instruments and contracts devised to facilitate these sorts of commercial relations themselves become the object of investment and speculation (Hertz 1998; Zaloom 2006). ‘Public finance’ examines the role of states in managing economies through financial techniques as well as the deployment of finance for broader collective goals (Peebles 2021; Riles 2011). This includes activities such as managing inflation (Holmes 2023) or raising funds for public projects (Mizes 2023). Monetary policy, the management of national currencies executed by central bankers and other financial experts, constitutes fertile ground for anthropological analysis of public finance (Abolafia 2020). Taxation represents another emerging domain in which critical anthropological questions regarding finance and the public might be asked (Kauppinen 2020; Mugler, Johansson, and Smith 2024).

The importance of public finance, even in economies organised primarily around market action, illuminates the distinction between finance and capitalism. Given that capitalism relies on the management of money to facilitate the pursuit of profit, finance is essential to it. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conflate finance with either modernity or capitalism, as finance is also indispensable in any monetised economy whether based on redistribution or the pursuit of profit. Ancient Mesopotamian communities in which redistribution served as the primary mode of exchange required financial mechanisms to ensure the equitable allocation of resources and the preservation of public order. Indeed, the earliest complex human communities that left written records in Mesopotamia developed their systems of writing to initially serve financial purposes, such as the allocation of grain, which was made equivalent to monetary units (Hudson 2004). The vast majority of written records from ancient Mesopotamia document financial transactions, and set interest rates are a distinctive feature of these records (Goetzmann 2016). Soviet communism was also dependent on complex systems of financial management (Mills and Brown 1966). Today, finance is indispensable to any economic endeavour dedicated toward the public good. Sovereign wealth funds utilise ‘custodial finance’ which seeks to benefit the public and meet an array of social commitments (Myhre 2020, 171). Anyone who works at a public university likely does so in a building whose construction was financed through the issuance of bonds.^[1]Indeed, bonds serve as a critical means through which public infrastructure is financed, including universities, roads, hospitals, ports, rail lines, electrical grids, and water and sewer systems (Anand 2018; Muehlebach 2023). Such projects may facilitate the capitalist pursuit of profit, but they are not capitalist in themselves and may serve public or non-profit aims. For example, financing public higher education was justified under the prerogative of fostering a liberal citizenry capable of self-government. As Wendy Brown has argued, the massive post-WWII investment that North Atlantic states made in post-secondary institutions was instrumental to creating robust democratic polities (2015). Financial instruments such as bonds were critical to financing the establishment and expansion of these institutions. As the financing of higher education illustrates, although the bonds used for financing may circulate as tradable commodities on bond markets, it would be a mistake to reduce public finance strictly to the pursuit of profit.

In addition to distinguishing finance from capitalism, it is useful to differentiate it from the type of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can be conceived of as an extension of market rationality to domains of life not previously conceived of as economic, such as child-rearing, crime rates, or even religious practice (Foucault [1979] 2008; Rudnyckyj 2010). Finance, as the management of money, can be a means or tool through which such an extension can be executed, but is not reducible to it. An emergent literature on financialisation, which examines the influence of capital markets in contemporary economic and political life (Pike and Pollard 2010), addresses how finance increasingly frames the practices of citizens in their everyday lives (Elder 2017; Pitluck, Mattioli and Souleles 2018; Rethel 2018).

Anthropology has made distinct contributions to understanding finance by focusing on the embodied practices of financiers, the reflexivity of financial knowledge, the symbolic nature of financial knowledge and practice, the irrational aspects of financial practice, the formation of subjects through finance, the politics of finance, and the ways in which finance reflects normative values. But before delving into these aspects, it is important to trace the development of anthropological scholarship on finance.

Contextualising anthropological scholarship

Domains of production and reproduction have long been foci of anthropological inquiry (Meillassoux 1981). In this regard, the discipline has focused on how human communities sustain and reproduce themselves, whether through hunting and gathering (DeVore and Lee 1968; Sahlins 1972), agriculture (Mintz 1960; Rappaport 1967; Wolf 1966), or industry (Dunn 2004; Ong 1987; Rudnyckyj 2010). Yet, despite this, finance is often regarded as a novel object of anthropological focus, best left to economists, or as constituting a distinct academic discipline. Business schools typically have several faculty members who focus on finance as a sub-specialisation of degrees in business or commerce (Orta 2019). Such scholars are engaged in the practical dimension of finance, pursuing research on applied topics such as investment strategy, portfolio management, financial engineering, risk management, and the trading of financial instruments, such as equities,^[2] bonds, and derivatives.^[3]This work may entail building mathematical models of investment techniques, the development of formulas through which to understand financial markets, and tools to facilitate risk management.

Finance as an object of anthropological inquiry is an outgrowth of the changing focus of the discipline. Whereas in its initial iteration, anthropology assumed a distinction between tradition and modernity and took as its object a primitive other presumed to be outside history (Fabian 1983), subsequently anthropology has focused on problems of modernisation and social change (Nash 1965; Peacock 1968; Wilson 1971). As a result, modernity itself became the object of anthropological analysis (Barker et al. 2009; Ferguson 1999; Holston 2008; Newell 2012). Given the constitutive role of finance as a tool of rationalisation (Weber 1958), finance, like other constitutive features of modernity such as science (Rabinow 1999), bureaucracy (Bear and Mathur 2015; Gupta 2012), and capitalism (Nash 1981), has become a focus of anthropological inquiry.

Since shortly after World War II, anthropologists became increasingly interested in addressing finance (Bascom 1952). Given the disciplinary engagement with economic development that emerged in this period and the ensuing wave of decolonisation that took place across Asia and Africa, where extensive ethnographic fieldwork was underway, this was a logical turn of events. Economic growth was the central problem in many of these locations (Bohannan and Dalton 1965; Geertz ed. 1963; 1963). Situated within these shifts, early anthropological works on finance approached it by focusing on development, including bottlenecks to it as well as by studying the existing institutions that might provide the capital to fund development. Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz pursued this line of inquiry and, through their ethnographic work, showed how anthropology could understand factors that inhibited economic growth. For example, in Indonesia, two different communities were seen to lack different critical elements to enable their and the nation-state’s development. While Muslim traders in Java had individual initiative but lacked collective institutions, villagers in Bali had strong collective institutions but lacked individual initiative (Geertz 1963). On the one hand, the Javanese traders were capable entrepreneurs but they did not have forms of social solidarity that facilitated institutions beyond individual or family units. On the other hand, people in Bali readily formed collaborative initiatives, but lacked entrepreneurial dynamism. Engaging with questions of economic development, anthropologists also drew attention to microfinance practices and institutions that were already an integral part of different societies. In this vein, RoSCAs were identified as pivotal institutions that facilitated household investment and consumption in both Asia and Africa (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). A major theme of these early studies in emergent post-colonial societies was how financial forms cemented social ties and served as a means of facilitating collective cohesion.

Over the past four decades finance has become an increasingly critical facet of global economic activity (Kalb 2023, 94). In the US, the financial sector accounts for over 20% of the value added to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), compared to 11% for manufacturing (Tran 2023). In the UK, the financial sector provides for over 8% of national economic output (Hutton, et al 2024). Given the increasingly important role of finance in contemporary economic life, this domain has become an ever-more important site for ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, perhaps the most widely read anthropologist in the world, and certainly one of the most influential, is the long-time columnist for the Financial Times, Gillian Tett. Tett has brought an ethnographic sensibility to her explanation of financial crises (Tett 2009) and written explicitly on the value of an anthropological perspective on finance and other domains of contemporary capitalism (Tett 2021).

The difference between finance as an academic specialisation and anthropological work on finance is that anthropological approaches typically entail a ‘second-order observation’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006) and ‘para-ethnography’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006). Second-order observation involves documenting the observations of expert observers. Para-ethnography enjoins anthropologists to recognise the ethnographic practices in which their interlocutors might engage and take them as starting points for their own ethnographic inquiries. In this sense, anthropological work on finance sheds light on the context, assumptions, and background knowledge that constitute knowledge and practice in finance (Rudnyckyj 2024). This disciplinary approach has yielded many generative insights.

As a form of knowledge, practice, and academic discipline, finance is sometimes represented as an objective form of transcendental knowledge. Like other hegemonic forms of positivist knowledge, such as science or medicine, finance presumes that its facts are unassailable, its methods are objective, and the context of its knowledge production are irrelevant. Anthropology interrogates these assumptions by drawing close attention to the embodied, reflexive, and irrational dimensions of financial knowledge instead.

Embodied finance and the reflexivity of financial knowledge

Rather than abstract calculation, anthropologists of finance have shown how finance is embodied in its practitioners. In open outcry financial markets, where traders physically met to buy and sell financial contracts in trading pits, the physical size, gestures, and voices of traders were critical to the operation of the market. Bids and offers were articulated orally in full view of other traders as a means of ensuring the transparent functioning of the market. Traders added ‘lifts’ to the soles of their shoes and wore brightly coloured trading jackets to enhance their visibility and increase their chances of being recognised in trading pits (Zaloom 2003, 6). Even more revealing than the material characteristics of trading is the fact that those participating in the exchange of financial instruments came to embody the market, relying on their bodies rather than mental calculation in deciding when to buy and sell. As Caitlin Zaloom explains, ‘In training their bodies as instruments of both reception and delivery of the underlying information of market numbers, the first step is learning not to calculate’ (Zaloom 2003, 7). Although open outcry equity, bond, and derivative markets are largely an historical relic today and most trading is done through algorithms, this work offers broader insights into the embodied domains of financial action.

The embodied nature of finance and bodily dispositions also impact financial action. Thus, there are ‘ways of knowing that are normally repressed, subordinated, and considered slightly illicit—the ways of knowing relegated in such technocratic organizations to the realm of the anecdotal, hype, of intuition, of experience’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 237). A specific example is the gut pain that former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is reported to experience in response to market gyrations and movements in the rate of inflation; the decision of whether to raise (or lower) interest rates in response to such movements is often felt by Greenspan through a ‘pain in the stomach’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 241). In this sense, anthropologists have documented how managing the money supply in the largest economy in the world is not a purely mental or rational process but is quite literally conducted according to gut feeling.

A related intervention in qualitative studies of finance has been to show that financial knowledge differs from other forms of positivist knowledge in its reflexive power. In some scientific disciplines such as physics or geology, the objects of analysis are not fundamentally transformed by or through the act of scientific investigation. Yet financial knowledge can have profound effects on the objects it studies (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Take, for example, the Black-Scholes options pricing model, created by several professors of finance who were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. This mathematical model was developed in 1973 to approximate the value of derivatives based on other investment instruments, taking into account the impact of time and other risk factors, and became used to price options contracts.^[4]Critically, the model became more accurate over time as financial theory reflexively conditioned the financial world that it purported to describe. Traders began to adopt the Black-Scholes model as a ‘guide to trading’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Thus, it was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but it was reflexively used by traders as a basis for their action in the market. ‘Gradually, “reality” (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 127).

While scholars of finance often presume efficient markets, such markets do not exist outside of textbooks and theoretical models. This is evident in financial practices such as arbitrage trading, which entails exploiting the price differences of an asset in two different markets (Miyazaki 2013). If markets were truly efficient, such differences should disappear as soon as they are noted, yet financial firms and traders can generate profits by exploiting these differences (Donovan 2021). Arbitrage traders themselves facilitate the disappearance of these price differences. In this sense, the practices of arbitrage traders are indispensable in the production of market truths.

Anthropologists have shown how financial techniques are deployed to extend the ideology of the market to reconfigure different aspects of life, including to alter employment and labour conditions. For example, ‘shareholder value’—the value assigned to different stockholders based on estimated calculations of the company’s profit generating potential over a period of time—was instrumental to rationalise the everyday operations of American business (Ho 2009). Dating to the New Deal,^[5]American corporations exercised paternalistic corporate practices and were largely insulated from the pressures of the stock market (Ho 2009, 136). This resulted in extensive hiring and generous employee compensation. According to investment bankers, until the 1980s, corporations could disregard the pressures and expectations of the stock market, which led them to insufficiently heed market norms. Instead, they sought to cultivate employee loyalty through generous salaries and benefits and the guarantee of lifetime employment. However, in a bid to make US corporations conform more thoroughly to market calculations and the dictates of economic rationality, in the 1980s, Wall Street investment banks began the widespread deployment of the notion of shareholder value. Making shareholder value the central tenet of corporate life precipitated a stunning transformation by forcing firms to conform more rigidly to market imperatives. Thus, shareholder value served as a vehicle to rationalise corporate practice in an effort to make firms more efficient, productive, and competitive, but at the same time leading to massive dislocations as many employees were laid off, or ‘liquidated’ (Ho 2009).

Representational effects and decentring numerical calculation

A key anthropological insight has been to document the effects of financial representation. In this sense, anthropologists have analysed how the presentation and communication of financial information impacts individuals and groups. Anthropologists working in central banks have shown how regulators introduce new guidelines to transform the market and achieve desired outcomes. For example, in an attempt to minimize ‘systemic risk’, that is, the potential for a disruption in one part of the financial system to spread and cause widespread instability or collapse of the system as a whole, regulators in the Bank of Japan transformed interbank payments from a ‘designated time net settlement’ system, in which balances are settled at a fixed point in time each day, to a new ‘real time gross settlement’ system, in which each transaction is settled individually, fully, and in real time (Riles 2004, 397). In so doing, regulators sought to transform the market practices of bankers. The new order that they envisioned would reduce the technocratic intervention of regulators and create an interbank settlement scheme which would reflect the ‘aggregation of the actions of individuals, rather than as an artifact of…planning’ (Riles 2004, 397). Ethnographic studies by Annelise Riles, Douglas Holmes, and others document not simply the actions of financial regulators, but rather how those actors seek to reflexively act on the actions of others.

Research in central banks reveals how financial regulators deploy representations to manipulate their objects. Here financial experimentation takes place in practice, rather than at an artificially created distance from the world, as is characteristic of the natural sciences. Often, language itself is mobilised by economic authorities and financial governors to create conditions conducive to economic growth. This creates an ‘economy of words’ in which the deliberate use of language by central banks influences economic behaviour, market expectations, and public perceptions (Holmes 2014). In this sense, regulators rely as much, if not more, on language than statistics and numbers in managing inflation. There becomes a complex but subtle practice of reflexive interpretation among the key economic players, including bankers, journalists, investors, and corporate managers, when they read the policy pronouncements of central banks. The economy of words operates at the limits of calculation ‘where knowledge is imperfect and experience and intuition can or must inform judgment’ (Holmes 2014, 28). Thus, modern financial power acts, through language, on the action of those who are subject to an economy. For example, central banks realise that doubts about the stability of a bank can become ‘self-fulfilling’, leading to the possibility of a bank run, an occurrence when a large number of customers withdraw their deposits simultaneously due to fears that the bank may become insolvent, potentially causing the bank to collapse. In response, central bankers must issue ‘calming statements’ to reassure the public. In this sense, central bankers self-consciously seek to ensure that they are ‘widely believed by the public to be more knowledgeable about the economy and its current state and path than the public itself’ (Holmes 2014, 117). In sum, the economy of words describes how central bankers, through communicative statements, enlist the practices of those who in turn constitute the economy—that is, the public—to realise the representation of central bankers.

A focus on the language deployed in financial contracts illuminates critical economic events, such as the economic crisis of 2008. This cataclysm can largely be attributed to the reliance of derivative contracts on promises, whereby derivatives can be used to make promises to repay in the event that other promises will be broken (Austin 1962 in Appadurai 2016). Leading up to the crisis, US banks had issued mortgages with adjustable rates to high-risk borrowers who promised to repay the mortgages. These risky loans were bundled into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which were sold to investors. Because they were bundled together, the true risk was obscured. To protect against the potential defaults on these securities, investors and financial institutions had purchased a particular type of derivative called ‘credit default swaps’. These were essentially insurance against the failure of the MBS and thus represented a second set of promises: the promise by an insurer, most notably AIG, to compensate the purchaser in the event of default. When housing prices fell across the board, many of the subprime borrowers defaulted. This led to a collapse in the value of the mortgage-backed securities. AIG then faced massive payouts due to the second set of promises to repay. On a broad scale, what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘failure of language’ can be disastrous, precipitating the waves of defaults that characterise financial collapse after asset bubbles burst (2016).

Attention to financial representation enables reflection on the tendency by financial actors and economists to naturalise economic events such as financial crises (Roitman 2014). Liberal economists represent financial crises as the result of failures in judgement. Such failures cause them to misrecognise value in false value. Marxist economists, in contrast, take financial crises as the inevitable outcome of the boom-and-bust business cycle endemic to capitalism. These accounts naturalise crises, rather than viewing them as the contingent outcome of human action and decision-making. Financial actors and economists thus represented the precipitous drop in house prices after 2008 as a ‘natural development’ (Roitman 2014, 44). This interpretation suggests that home values reset of their own organic accord, rather than as the concrete effects of the practices of financial professionals who made credit readily available to borrowers based on financial models that did not accurately represent the real estate reality that they were reflexively creating through subprime loans, the securitisation of these loans, and the credit default swaps that insured them. The chain reaction of financial losses that came from these decisions undermined the stability of major institutions and contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The limits to the purely scientific and calculative nature of finance is further called into question through the empirical observation that financial actors are not strictly rational actors, but are prone to story-telling and emotional reactions (Chong and Tuckett 2015). This aspect distinguishes the anthropological approach to finance from the social studies of finance approach common in disciplines such as sociology and geography. The latter approaches can reproduce the very epistemology of finance by presuming that ‘markets are more or less analogous to scientific practice’ (Riles 2010, 795). Financial markets do not conform to predictable, rational models, despite the claims of practitioners (Riles 2010, 796). Indeed, anthropological work has shown that rational calculation can be an obstacle to financial action. As described above, many derivatives traders at the Chicago Board of Trade, for example, actively sought to avoid calculating and assessing risks mathematically because they found it a hindrance to profitable action (Zaloom 2003).

Ethnographic work on financial analysis shows how important narrative accounts, stories, and representations are in the transmission of financial knowledge (Leins 2018). Financial analysis entails evaluating financial markets by focusing on the present and future prospects of the share prices of listed companies. Qualitative stories provide a critical frame for the numerical data that constitute the intellectual products created by financial analysts. Rather than starting with statistical and quantitative data, financial analysts start with a qualitative narrative about the economy. This story explains the position of a specific company within the broader economy. Statistics and other quantitative data are then mobilised to augment the narrative. Relatedly, anthropologists have found that ideologically laden concepts, such as the efficient markets hypothesis—the idea that share prices reflect all available information—are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation.^[6]Making a determination of financial value on Wall Street is not an abstract process of calculation, but rather a practice that is shaped by subjective notions, such as investment skill and the presumption that share prices actually reflect available information (Ortiz 2021, 244-5).

Subject formation and the reproduction of norms

Anthropological work has found that financial technologies and practices create subjects insofar as they elicit certain habits, constitute identities, and mould dispositions (Chong 2018, 35-63). Some finance practitioners adopt the practices that constitute their work lives in their lives outside work as well. For example, some arbitrage traders, whose work involves buying and selling assets to profit from price discrepancies in different markets, extend the logic of the market and apply it to their own lives and surroundings (Miyazaki 2003). However, this can become more than just a job pursuit or means of earning a living. Tada, a trader with whom Hiro Miyazaki engages at length, proposes various domains in which to exercise fiscal reason. One idea he floats is purchasing a money-losing religion, restructuring it to operate better, and thus turning it into a financially viable enterprise (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada also notes that golf club memberships are overvalued in Japan and that people purchase memberships based on concerns about status and prestige. Tada proposes buying poorly managed golf courses, improving their management, and selling memberships to the public at large instead of just a select group, ‘thereby at once turning a profit and dealing a blow to the irrational Japanese propensity to overvalue status’ (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada is fixated on extending economic rationality into domains that were not strictly organised according to its calculus, both on the side of management and consumers. Consumers do not act according to the dictates of market logic as they overpay for something that is not as valuable as they make it out to be. Managers do not act rationally because they are mismanaging their enterprises, at once profiting off the irrationality of consumers but also not garnering maximum profit due to poor administration of their resource. Rather, traders like Tada seek to implement market logic in action to reform institutions and individuals that do not conform to its logic.

Similar to the extension of economic rationality, promoting risk-taking action is another critical tool for shaping a financial actor. Working with risk is a means through which traders form themselves and differentiate themselves from others (Zaloom 2004, 371). The prospect of accruing large profits or suffering devastating losses creates subjects who can not only tolerate the high-stakes scene of the trading floor, but also become vehicles for the accumulation of profits through risk-taking. Financial contracts are also deployed as key means of subject formation as evident in the ways that various branches of the Malaysian state sought to transform the types of contracts used in Islamic finance in the country from debt-based to equity-based (Rudnyckyj 2019). Whereas debt-based contracts encourage risk-averse, rent-seeking behaviour, equity-based ones entail more risk and encourage entrepreneurial dispositions. As part of its efforts to foster more entrepreneurial dispositions among segments of the population, especially among the Malay-Muslim majority, the state sought to re-centre Islamic finance around equity-based contracts (Rudnyckyj 2017).

Work on personal finance has shown how financial relations are not merely economic, but are embedded in moral obligations, social status, and kinship networks. In countries on the global periphery undergoing rapid economic transformation, such as Mongolia and Chile, finance shapes collective ties and everyday experiences. Given the breach between formal market economies and traditional systems of exchange, contemporary Mongolians engage in a mix of formal and informal economic practices, navigating risks and the unpredictability of income, market prices, and employment opportunities through flexible strategies (Empson 2020). This includes both a reliance on informal economic practices, such as bartering, family support networks, and small-scale trade, alongside formal employment in sectors like mining, government, or retail. Mongolian women navigating change live ‘in the gap’ between futures they desire and the difficulty of their everyday existence. Similarly, in Chile, financial precarity shapes everyday life. Families live in a constant state of economic vulnerability, where income is uncertain, and the need to rely on credit or loans is unavoidable. People use a variety of strategies to cope with their financial instability, including borrowing from formal financial institutions, local moneylenders, or friends and relatives (Han 2012).

The role of finance in producing subjects illuminates that it is a profoundly political tool and domain. Whereas disciplines like the scholarly study of business seek to represent commerce and the market as apolitical, anthropological work has documented the power relations inherent in financial relationships. In one of the earliest analyses that took engagement in financial markets as a central object, Ellen Hertz recognised that the ‘interpretative framework through which Shanghainese read their stock market is firstly political, and secondly, if at all, “economic”’ (Hertz 1998, 23). Indeed, although ostensibly communist, political leaders in China experiment with stock markets to tap into the individual savings of millions of petty entrepreneurs in the interest of national development. This initiative has yielded one of the most impressive economic transformations of recent times in which hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been elevated out of dire poverty (Pieke 2014).

In Malaysia, elites sought to make the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, into what they called ‘the New York of the Muslim world’ (Rudnyckyj 2014). By this, they meant making it a central node in a transnational alternative to the conventional financial system with its key hubs in the US, the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, and Germany. In so doing, they envisioned a new ‘geoeconomics’ based on hubs not only in Kuala Lumpur but also in places such as Istanbul, Dubai, and Manama. Malaysia is a particularly advantageous site from which to imagine such a project, given its strategic location between the world’s greatest source of surplus capital (the oil states of the Middle East) and its foremost site of industrial production (most notably China, but also the rapidly expanding economies of Southeast Asia). In this emergent economic configuration, Islamic finance experts seek to balance the ethical imperatives of Islam, such as fairness, transparency, and the prohibition of interest, with the practical need to remain competitive and financially profitable in the global market.

Ethical concerns are not only limited to efforts to reconcile religious imperatives with financial action. The emergence of environmental and social governance (ESG) concerns in the management and operations of corporations has drawn critical anthropological attention. Anthropologists have found that investors dedicated toward socially responsible investment use ethics as a tool to manage uncertainty in financial markets. In a field marked by unpredictability, ethics are employed not only as a moral guide but also as a practical resource to help investors make decisions when the future of investments is unclear. By embedding ethical considerations into financial practices, investors can create a sense of certainty and confidence about their investments, as they believe they are aligning their actions with long-term societal good (Leins 2020). Shareholder activism constitutes another domain in which ethical concerns intersect and shape financial action. Activist investors focus on issues like environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and corporate governance. Such shareholder activism offers a way for investors to participate in shaping the moral direction of corporations, challenging the traditional view that financial markets are purely profit-driven (Welker and Wood 2011).

Relatedly, anthropologists have emphasised how finance can also be a site to address inequality. Following the financial crisis of 2008, a group of financial professionals formerly employed on Wall Street came together to deploy their expertise to rethink finance in the interest of creating a more equal and just society (Appel 2014). More recently, financial frontiers, as spaces where financial concepts and products are reimagined in ways that challenge traditional boundaries or structures, have become key sites for rethinking normative financial practices and values (Ballestero, Muehlebach, and Pérez-Rivera 2023). The use of microfinance, informal financial networks, or alternative banking systems that cater to populations that are not well served by traditional banking institutions, are some examples of such reimagining. In contrast, finance can also provide an avenue for deepening inequality, as in Macedonia, where finance served as a means by which an authoritarian regime could strengthen its grip on power (Mattioli 2020). Construction in the country’s capital, Skopje, was enabled by international investment. Although credit relationships expanded, political elites were able to monopolise access to this international credit. As financial flows were centralised and restricted, these elites were able to create a vast network of exploitative domestic debt relations.

Ethnographic work has revealed how normative values shape the perceptions of financial actors, particularly in their own understanding of the effects of their action. A case in point is private equity, a form of investment where firms invest in private companies, often taking a controlling interest, with the goal of increasing their value and selling them for a profit. Private equity investors justify their wealth and privilege based on the notion that they are hard workers and create value, and the Protestant values that attribute moral worth to labour provide a frame for the activities of these well-off private equity investors and serve to justify their actions (Souleles 2019). Similarly, Wall Street financiers enter the career of investment banking as fresh graduates of certain Ivy League universities as ‘the smartest’ and ‘the brightest’, and thereby become socialised into a world of high risk and high reward (Ho 2009). Moreover, the corridors of finance reproduced many of the same race, class, and gender hierarchies that likewise structure other domains of modern life (Fisher 2012).

Conclusion

Finance is a constitutive pillar of contemporary life for most human beings today. Whether considering credit provided though microfinance, the impact of stock market gyrations on retirement accounts, or public bonds that build our places of work, modern life seems almost unimaginable outside the management of money. Hence, finance constitutes a critical domain for analysis and inquiry. Given its centrality to modern life, yet how poorly it is understood, anthropological work dedicated toward understanding how power works must engage with dominant forms of finance as well as alternatives to it. Germinal anthropological accounts have opened the ‘black box’ of finance and illuminated many of its presumptions. These include its claims to scientific status, its apolitical nature, the power of its representations, the reflexive relationship that it has with the broader economy, and its power to mould subjects.

Finance is a complex system comprised of esoteric practices and symbolic representation. Whereas anthropology has long attended to symbolic systems such as language (Basso 1979), religion (Geertz 1973), kinship (Schneider 1968) and the symbolic dimensions of capitalism (Sahlins 1976), the symbolic nature of finance has yet to be thoroughly unpacked. Symbolic representation in finance is premised on stochastic models and high-level mathematical reasoning. With some notable exceptions (Maurer 2002; Myhre and Holmes 2022), anthropologists have avoided extensive inquiry into the symbolic nature of finance. It will be incumbent upon future anthropological research projects to engage on this level if the discipline is to continue to create generative insights into the operations of finance in the future and fulfil its role of unmasking the taken-for-granted truths of modern life.

In this sense, ethnographic research has the potential to raise the veil on the inner mechanisms of finance, demystify its opacity, and relativise its truth claims, perhaps contributing to bringing into being a more equitable future. To achieve this end, research in the domain of finance will be most effective if it entails analysis rather than critique or denunciation. Anthropologists can generate future insights into how finance operates by reporting on its practices and decoding its mode of knowledge, much as they have done with other domains of human life, such as kinship, religion, or language.

This is an unprecedented moment in the history of finance. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 violated long-accepted truisms about the behaviour of real estate markets and challenged the models that financiers use to model markets (Taleb 2007). The response to the crisis brought about widespread experiments with zero and negative interest rates, meaning that borrowing money at an institutional level was free and, in some cases, subsidised. More recently, states around the world have struggled to control inflation. The common strategy of controlling inflation through raising interest rates has proven to be inadequate. A recent paper published by an official of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US, contends that economists have a poor understanding of how economies operate and the effects of the financial models they use (Rudd 2021). Given these developments, the time is nigh for anthropologists to further engage with this critical domain of expertise and bring to light precisely how these opaque domains shape contemporary human life.

Note

Research for this entry was carried out as part of research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Insight Program, Grant Number 435-2018-0453.

References

Abolafia, Mitchel. 2020. Stewards of the market: How the Federal Reserve made sense of the financial crisis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The promise of infrastructure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2016. Banking on words: The failure of language in the age of derivative finance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appel, Hannah. 2014. “Occupy Wall Street and the economic imagination.” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 4: 602–25.

Ardener, Shirley. 1964. “The comparative study of rotating credit associations.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 94, no. 2: 201–29.

Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Ballestero, Andrea, Andrea Muehlebach, and Gloria Pérez-Rivera. 2023. “What is a financial frontier?” Journal of Cultural Economy 16, no. 3: 311–22.

Barker, J., J. Lindquist, T. Boellstorff, C. Brown, A. Danusiri, D. Darmadi, S. Gibbings, J. H. Grayman, J. Hoesterey, and C. Jones. 2009. “Figures of Indonesian modernity.” Indonesia 87: 35–72.

Bascom, William R. 1952. “The Esusu: A credit institution of the Yoruba.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 82, no. 1: 63–9.

Basso, Keith H. 1979. Portraits of "the whiteman": Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bear, Laura, and Nayanika Mathur. 2015. “Introduction: Remaking the public good.” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, no. 1: 18–34.

Bohannan, Paul, and George Dalton. 1965. Markets in Africa: Eight subsistence economies in transition. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Chong, Kimberly. 2018. Best practice: Management consulting and the ethics of financialization in China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Chong, Kimberly, and David Tuckett. 2015. “Constructing conviction through action and narrative: How money managers manage uncertainty and the consequence for financial market functioning.” Socio-Economic Review 13, no. 2: 309–30.

DeVore, Irven, and Richard B. Lee, eds. 1968. Man the hunter. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Donovan, Kevin P. 2021. “Magendo: Arbitrage and ambiguity on an East African frontier.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 1: 110–37.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby food, big business, and the remaking of labor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Elder, Laura. 2017. "Gendered accounts of expertise within Islamic finance and financialization in Malaysia." In Sharia dynamics: Islamic law and sociopolitical processes, edited by Timothy P. Daniels, 171–203. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of dispossession: NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Empson, Rebecca M. 2020. Subjective lives and economic transformations in Mongolia: Life in the gap. London: UCL Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fisher, Melisa S. 2012. Wall Street women. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1979) 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Geertz, Clifford. 1962. “The rotating credit association: A 'middle rung' in development.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 10, no. 3: 241–63.

———, ed. 1963. Old societies and new states: The quest for modernity in Asia and Africa. Glencoe: Free Press.

——— 1963. Peddlers and princes: Social change and economic modernization in two Indonesian towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 1973. "Religion as a cultural system." In The interpretation of cultures, edited by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books.

Goetzmann, William N. 2016. Money changes everything: How finance made civilization possible. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gupta, Akhil. 2012. Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Han, Clara. 2012. Life in debt: Times of care and violence in neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hertz, Ellen. 1998. The trading crowd: An ethnography of the Shanghai stock market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Holmes, Douglas. 2006. "Fast capitalism: Para-ethnography and the rise of the symbolic analyst." In Frontiers of capital: Ethnographic reflections on the new economy, edited by Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, 33–57. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2014. Economy of words: Communicative imperatives in central banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 2023. “Quelling inflation: The role of the public.” Anthropology Today 39, no. 2: 6–11.

Holmes, Douglas, and George Marcus. 2005. "Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: Toward the re-functioning of ethnography." In Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 235–52. Malden: Blackwell.

Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hudson, Michael. 2004. "The archaeology of money: Debt vs. barter theories of money’s origins." In Credit and state theories of money, edited by L. Randall Wray, 99–127. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Hutton, Georgina, Abbas Panjwani, and Matthew Ward. 2024. "Financial services in the UK." House of Commons Library, November 18. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06193/SN06193.pdf

Kalb, Don. 2023. “Two theories of money: On the historical anthropology of the state-finance nexus.” Focaal 95: 92–112.

Kar, Sohini. 2018. Financializing poverty: Labor and risk in Indian microfinance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Kauppinen, Anna-Riikka. 2020. “God's delivery state: Taxes, tithes, and a rightful return in urban Ghana.” Social Analysis 64, no. 2: 38–58.

Leins, Stefan. 2018. Stories of capitalism: Inside the role of financial analysts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 2020. “‘Responsible investment’: ESG and the post-crisis ethical order.” Economy and Society 49, no. 1: 71–91.

Lepinay, Vincent 2011. Codes of finance: Engineering derivatives in a global bank. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

MacKenzie, Donald, and Yuval Millo. 2003. “Constructing a market, performing a theory: The historical sociology of a financial derivatives exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1: 107–45.

Mattioli, Fabio. 2020. Dark finance: Illiquidity and authoritarianism at the margins of Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Maurer, Bill. 2002. “Repressed futures: Financial derivatives' theological unconscious.” Economy and Society 31, no. 1: 15–36.

——— 2005. "Finance 2.0." In A handbook of economic anthropology, edited by James Carrier, 183–201. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. Maidens, meal and money: Capitalism and the domestic community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Robert H., and Abbott L. Brown. 1966. “Soviet economic developments and accounting.” Journal of Accountancy 121, no. 6: 40–6.

Mintz, Sidney. 1960. “Peasant markets.” Scientific American 203, no. 2: 112–23.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2003. “The temporalities of the market.” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2: 255–65.

——— 2013. Arbitraging Japan: Dreams of capitalism at the end of finance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mizes, James Christopher. 2023. “Anti-public finance? The democratic effects of municipal bond markets.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47, no. 6: 917–39.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2023. A vital frontier: Water insurgencies in Europe. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mugler, Johanna, Miranda Sheild Johansson, and Robin Smith. 2024. Anthropology and tax: Ethnographies of fiscal relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myhre, Knut Christian. 2020. "Financialization and the Norwegian state: Constraints, contestations, and custodial finance in the world's largest sovereign wealth fund." In Financialization: Relational approaches, edited by Don Kalb and Chris Hann, 157–76. New York: Berghahn.

Myhre, Knut Christian, and Douglas R. Holmes. 2022. “Reframing welfare: Expectations, collaboration and ownership at the world’s largest sovereign wealth-fund.” Anthropological Forum 32, no. 2: 158–80.

Nash, June. 1981. “Ethnographic aspects of the world capitalist system.” Annual Review of Anthropology 10: 393–423.

Nash, Manning. 1965. “The role of village schools in the process of cultural and economic modernization.” Social and Economic Studies 14, no. 1: 131–43.

Newell, Sasha. 2012. The modernity bluff: Crime, consumption, and citizenship in Côte d'Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: Factory women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making global MBAs: The culture of business and the business of culture. Oakland: University of California Press.

Ortiz, Horacio. 2021. The everyday practice of valuation and investment: Political imaginaries of shareholder value. New York: Columbia University Press.

Peacock, James L. 1968. Rites of modernization: Symbolic and social aspects of Indonesian proletarian drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peebles, Gustav. 2021. “Banking on digital money: Swedish cashlessness and the fraying currency tether.” Cultural Anthropology 36, no. 1: 1–24.

Pieke, Frank. 2014. "Anthropology, China, and the Chinese century." Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, no. 1: 123-138.

Pike, Andy, and Jane Pollard. 2010. “Economic geographies of financialization.” Economic Geography 86, no. 1: 29–51.

Pitluck, Aaron. Z., Fabio Mattioli, and Daniel Souleles. 2018. “Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization.” Economic Anthropology 5, no. 2: 157–71.

Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rappaport, Roy A. 1967. Pigs for the ancestors: Ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea people. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Rethel, Lena. 2018. “Capital market development in Southeast Asia: From speculative crisis to spectacles of financialization.” Economic Anthropology 5, no. 2: 185–97.

Riles, Annelise. 2004. “Real time: Unwinding technocratic and anthropological knowledge.” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3: 392–405.

——— 2010. “Collateral expertise: Legal knowledge in the global financial markets.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6: 795–806.

——— 2011. Collateral knowledge: Legal reasoning in the global financial markets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Roitman, Janet. 2014. Anti-crisis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rudd, Jeremy B. 2021. Why do we think that inflation expectations matter for inflation? (and should we?). Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2021-062. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://doi.org/10.17016/FEDS.2021.062.

Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

——— 2014. “Economy in practice: Islamic finance and the problem of market reason.” American Ethnologist 41, no. 1: 110–27.

——— 2017. “Subjects of debt: Financial subjectification and collaborative risk in Malaysian Islamic finance.” American Anthropologist 119, no. 2: 269–83.

——— 2019. Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 2024. “Econography: Observing expert capitalism.” Current Anthropology 65, no. 4: 674–700.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.

——— 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schneider, David M. 1968. American kinship: A cultural account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.

Schuster, Caroline E. 2015. Social collateral: Women and microfinance in Paraguay's smuggling economy. Oakland: University of California Press.

Souleles, Daniel Scott 2019. Songs of profit, songs of loss: Private equity, wealth, and inequality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Stout, Noelle. 2019. Dispossessed: How predatory bureaucracy foreclosed on the American middle class. Oakland: University of California Press.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable. 1st edition. New York: Random House.

Tett, Gillian. 2009. Fool's gold: The inside story of J.P. Morgan and how Wall Street greed corrupted its bold dream and created a financial catastrophe. New York: Free Press.

——— 2021. Anthro-vision: A new way to see in business and life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Tran, Hung. 2023. "Financialization has increased economic fragility." Econographics (The Atlantic Council), December 1. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/financialization-has-increased-economic-fragility/.

Weber, Max. 1958. "Bureaucracy." In From Max Weber: Essays in sociology, edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 196–244. New York: Oxford University Press.

Welker, Marina A., and David Wood. 2011. “Shareholder activism and alienation.” Current Anthropology 52 (S3): 57–69.

Wilson, Monica. 1971. Religion and the transformation of society: A study in social change in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1966. Peasants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2003. “Ambiguous numbers: Trading technologies and interpretation in financial markets.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2: 1–15.

——— 2004. “The productive life of risk.” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 3: 365–91.

——— 2006. Out of the pits: Trading and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 2019. Indebted: How families make college work at any cost. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Note on contributor

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. He is the author of Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance (2019, Chicago University Press) and Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development (2010, Cornell University Press). He is the co-editor of Religion and the morality of the market (2017, Cambridge University Press).

Professor Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, PO Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria BC V8W 2Y2, Canada. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3940-4881

[1] 2025. “Bond.” Encyclopedia Britannica, February 3. https://www.britannica.com/money/bond-finance.

For a more technical definition, please see Lee, Cheng Few, and Alice C. Lee, eds. Encyclopedia of finance. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

[2] 2025. “Equities.” Encyclopedia Britannica, January 26. https://www.britannica.com/money/stock-finance.

[3] Ashburn, Doug. 2025. “Derivatives.” Encyclopedia Britannica, January 29. https://www.britannica.com/money/derivatives.

[4] 2025. “Option (finance).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, last modified January 26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_(finance).

For a more technical definition, please see Lee, Cheng Few, and Alice C. Lee, eds. Encyclopedia of finance. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International.

[5] 2025. “New Deal.” Encyclopedia Britannica, January 29. https://www.britannica.com/event/New-Deal.

[6] Financial valuation refers to the relationship between the market value of a company, derived from its share price, and the revenue stream that it generates.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Race and racism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:30:34 +0000

Photo: Ernest Cole: Segregational signs at a South-African train station, before 1972.

Sindre Bangstad Agustín Fuentes

KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Princeton University

Initially published 30 Nov 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23raceandracism

Abstract:

Racism is premised on the idea that humanity could and should be divided into distinct biological groups or ‘races’, and that different races stand in a ranked and hierarchical relation to one another. Racism understands human races to be separate and clear-cut clusters of people, based on biological criteria that are fixed and relevant for their behavior. While humans do vary biologically, their variation does not fall into such clusters that correspond to racial categories. Speaking of human races thus ignores the contemporary science of human variation, whilst intimately mixing the study of human biology with hierarchy, stigma and prejudice.

As a worldview, racism was historically pervasive in the academy and in anthropology, a discipline that emerged in the context of colonialism, colonial discovery, and the exploration of human diversity. While the concept of race was in many respects foundational to the development and practice of anthropology it is now contested. As we will discover in this entry, the concepts and definitions of race, and their applicability, have changed greatly over time. Drawing on ethnographic material from various social and political contexts, and attempts at theorising race and racism, this entry will discuss important ways in which anthropologists have shaped both concepts in the past and in the present. Their work contributes to the important insight that race is not biologically but socially constituted. ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’ (Coates 2015, 7).

Introduction

There are no biological races in humans. This is the conclusion of scientific bodies such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as well as the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA; formerly the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, or AABA). As the 2019 AABA statement makes clear, ‘no group of people is biologically homogeneous’, and human populations are ‘not biologically discrete, truly isolated or fixed’.^[1] The 1998 AAA Statement identifies ‘race’ as ‘an ideology about human differences’, and states that physical variations in the human species have problematic non-biological meanings culturally and politically ascribed onto them.^[2] These anthropological associations are not alone in rejecting the biological nature of racial groups, with genetic, psychological, and other scientific associations also publishing concordant statements.^[3]

Yet, one need only look at news items about police violence towards African-Americans in the US; ethnic minority mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK; xenophobic violence against African migrants in South Africa; or the on-going hardening of borders of Europe to prevent the resettlement of migrants and refugees from African and Asian countries (de Genova 2018), to understand why race and racism remain such important topics in our time.

Knowledge about race and racism is produced in the interstices between popular and scientific ideas (Reardon 2005). Anthropology is one of the social sciences that has a contradictory disciplinary heritage (Mullings 2005, 669). ‘Anthropology’s early professionalization as a science was associated closely with the elaboration of typologies and techniques for classifying and operationalizing the discrete “races of man”’ (Harrison 1995, 50). Historically, the discipline has been involved in and complicit with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023; Asad 1973). We may even regard the concept of race as a ‘master concept’ in anthropology, emerging from the context of colonialism and settler colonialism and continuing right until the emergence of powerful critiques of the concept of race in the twenty-first century. Recent anthropological critiques of race grew out of a long-standing concern relating to the origins and uses of the concept in the era of so-called ‘scientific racism’. Scientific racism tried to prove the existence of distinct human races by seemingly scientific means, building on biological concepts of race that had been in existence since the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday from the late 18th century, and was disproven in the early 20th century.^[4]

The ideas which underpinned scientific racism were anything but scientific. They flowed from the very racism they were evoked to support. Its lingering effects are still with us, and its central tenets of hierarchical biological difference between human groups have made a disturbing return in recent years (Saini 2019). Concern with scientific racism, and against race as a fixed socio-biological category, was spurred by some anthropologists gradually adopting explicitly anti-racist positions, in line with insights from biological and socio-cultural studies: all humans are now seen as belonging to one and the same human race, thus being endowed with the same inherent value, and the same right to life and dignity. This perspective is broadly recognised as socially and biologically accurate by much (but not all) of the academy and a smaller portion of the broader public. It took long and protracted struggles to undo racist understandings of human groups. The term ‘racism’ was coined in the late nineteenth century, but only adopted in the twentieth century (see below). It provided a starting point for what would mature into a critique of the concept of race both in anthropology and beyond.

Race does not reflect biological reality

Humans vary biologically and that variation is important in understanding the human experience. However, that variation is not distributed in clusters that correspond to racial categories based on phenotype (e.g. Black, white, Asian, etc.) or continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) (Lewis et al. 2022). In the context of human variation, it is often assumed that specific physical differences attest to specific racial, biological, or evolved group differences between racial categories of people, but they do not. In spite of over 300 years of trying to classify humans into mostly distinct biological units, human genetic, morphological and physiological variation does not correspond to racial categories such as Black, white, Caucasian or Asian. Instead most evolutionary scientists today think of human group variation in terms of existing populations, i.e. groups of people who either live in the same place or share other connections such as eating similar food or having children together. Human blood groups, body sizes, immune systems and skin colour simply do not map onto racial categories (Fuentes 2022, 74-91). The vast majority of genetic variation does not even occur across human populations but within them, as different parts of the human genome have different ancestral histories. In fact, there is nearly twice as much genetic variation among human populations in Africa as among all populations elsewhere (Fuentes 2022, 74-91).

This has not stopped humans in the past from trying to impose hierarchical social orders based on assumed biological differences. For example, in the era of segregation in the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ meant that a person known to have one ancestor who was Black was, for the purposes of the law, considered to be Black. Under the racist regime of apartheid in South Africa (1948-1990), the authorities introduced laws which imposed a system of racial classification on the South African population in the form of the 1950 Population Registration Act. Under this and other South African apartheid laws, ‘coloureds’ were classified as an intermediate racial category, and deprived of many basic rights as citizens. In the context of the Population Registration Act, South African citizens whose racial classification was unclear to the authorities were subjected to the so-called ‘pencil test’. The pencil test involved running a pencil through a person’s hair to determine that person’s racial classification. If the hair was straight, and the pencil dropped out of the person’s hair, the person would be classified as ‘white’; if the person had curly, coily or kinky hair, the person would be classified as ‘coloured’ or in some cases as ‘native’ (i.e. Black). Long after the demise of apartheid, such apartheid categories of racial difference remain socially and materially salient.

The category of being ‘native’, also holds negative connotations in Europe. An ethnographic study of a small and mixed coastal community in Northern Norway in the late 1940s found that public identity markers of the Sami ethnic group carried with them a significant social stigma. Locals of Sami background avoided such markers by avoiding use of Sami language and attire in public, and making derogatory remarks about nomadic Sami as ‘primitive’, especially when in the presence of non-Sami Norwegians. Being Sami was associatively linked to ‘uncleanliness’, and some locals of Sami background even referred to Samis as forming part of ‘an inferior race’ (Eidheim 1966; Eidheim 1969). Even today, Norwegian Samis remain targets of discrimination. These few historical examples of which there are countless others testify to the persistence of official and popular beliefs about the existence of biological race.

But race has real social and material consequences

Race is not biologically real, but its social and material consequences surely are (Hartigan 2013, 188). Racist systems, processes, and structures create the linkages between non-biological racialised groups and specific social, political, economic, and health-related outcomes. For example, statistics pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US found that whilst average life expectancies had fallen by two years in the population at large as a result of the pandemic, that figure rose to seven years for Native Americans and Alaskan Americans.^[5] The social and material realities of racism can create specific biological consequences connected to racial categories, such as the reality that Black American women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white American women.^[6]

Ethnographic studies from Brazil also point to the important effects of racism and discrimination on Black Brazilians. One early 1990s study of a small town in Rio’s coffee-growing interior, shows that racial inequality was upheld as the town’s inhabitants embraced aesthetic features that pointed to European ancestry, denigrated physical traits that point to African ancestry and wilfully forgot the non-white parts of their family histories (Twine 1998). Here racism endured, in part because commonsense definitions of it focused on direct human interactions. They excluded more complex and covert forms of racism, such as institutional racism or racist media imagery. As a result, Black Brazilians were routinely the subject of racist jokes, remained underpaid and were excluded from privileged social, educational and occupational spaces (Twine 1998).

While insisting on biological racial difference is not scientifically defensible, refuting the idea of biological race can also have negative consequences. In large parts of Latin America, the idea of mestizaje, or of people being biologically and culturally mixed, often serves attempts to whiten the population or to facilitate nation building (Hordge-Freeman 2015, 11-13). However, it is also part of more recent efforts to stop focusing on biological differences and to remedy centuries of racism and discrimination as part of democratic nation building (Wade 2017). Yet this emphasis on ‘mixture’ has its limits. It continues to provide a space within which Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness can implicitly be hierarchically valued. Insisting on people’s sameness may even blend into opposition to affirmative action policies. In Brazil for example, the insistence that race is not a primarily biological category has led some activists on the political left and right to argue against policies that explicitly recognised racial groups in society so as to give them special rights (Wade 2017, 129). This undermines efforts of those Black and Indigenous activists who are actively fighting to be recognized as racially and culturally distinct. The myth of a Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ thereby undercuts affirmative action policies, with the argument being that if race does not exist in Brazil, racial quotas should not either. It equally obscures the important processes of racialisation, which routinely lead to gendered racism and racialised sexism in the country (Caldwell 2007, 8).

Histories of race, histories of racism

‘The history of race and racism is a major component in the development of modern anthropology’ (Sussman 2014, 9). Anthropologists now generally contend that racism is epistemologically prior to race, or that ‘racism made race’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 5). This can be a bit confusing, because the term ‘racism’ is in fact a much more recent addition to the lexicon than ‘race’.

As a designator for biological ideas about human difference, the term ‘race’ emerged in the period of 1730-1790 in Europe (Bancel, David and Thomas 2019), whereas the first recorded instance of the term ‘racism’ in a Western language appears to be that of the French anarchist Charles Malato in his Philosophie de l’anarchie (1888), and in English that of the US military commander Richard Henry Pratt in Proceedings of the Mohonk conference (1902). Arguably the most central scholarly contribution to popularising the term came in the form of the exiled German Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s posthumously published monograph Rassismus (1938).^[7]It was not until 1942 that the term ‘racism’ appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for the first time.

A first clear-cut example of racism in Europe that historians tend to point to is the discrimination faced by Muslim and Jewish converts to Catholicism—moriscos and conversos—during the Catholic Reconquista of the Muslim-controlled al-Andalus area of the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth century onwards (Bethencourt 2013). These converts to Catholicism and their patrilineal descendants were for centuries denied full civil rights with reference to their alleged lack of ‘purity of blood’ ('limpieza de sangre'). We may distinguish between biology as a science which assesses the organic dynamics of bodies, and biology as popular ideas about the body. Biology as a contemporary science did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Catholic Reconquista. And yet, the idea of an essential link between blood and descent appears to be already present, although there was no underlying concept of biological race involved: raza or ‘race’ in Spanish referred at the time to ‘noble birth’, rather than biological race.

The biological conceptions of race, in which skin colour and other phenotypical markers of human difference are made salient and prominent, are a product of the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment science enabled race to ‘become biological’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 21). For example, botanist Carl Linnaeus’ classified humans into ‘five varieties’ in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae from 1758 (Marks 2017; Blunt 2002). Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology linked skin colour to human character and intellect, describing humans of paler skin as superior to humans of darker skin (Mills 2017). ‘Skin colour is the primary criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition’ (Jablonski 2021, 437), but skin colour was only one of the criteria: physical markers such as hair texture, head size, bodily shape, eye colour and shape, and the size of one’s lips, nose, and sexual organs have at various times also been seen as marking race. What is rarely appreciated is ‘the extent to which current thought and research remain influenced by colour-based race concepts’ (Jablonski 2021, 437).

European colonialism was also integral to the development of racism, as European conquest sought to legitimate itself by recourse to arguments about human difference in an age of European discovery of other parts of the world. Given that anthropology emerged as a science intimately linked to European colonialism (Asad 1975, Trouillot 2003; Gupta and Stoolman 2022), it is hardly surprising that early anthropology would play a central role in the development and elaboration of ideas about human difference and otherness intrinsic to European colonialism that created ‘biological’ (but actually social) conceptions of race. These ‘biological’ understandings of human difference have adapted to highly variegated historical, social, and political contexts, and have adopted different forms. It is in reference to this that cultural theorist Stuart Hall referred to race as a ‘floating’ or ‘sliding signifier’ (2017) or a concept with no fixed categories or meanings. Hall’s is not an argument for the timelessness and universalism of all forms of racism but rather for the malleability of race concepts underpinning racism. According to him, race works like a language. The meaning of racial categories is not primarily defined by what they refer to. Instead, their meaning depends on other meaning making concepts. People’s different histories, experiences and modes of living determine which racial categories they may find convincing. For Hall, the study of how racial categories are made and remade is thus not primarily about human and scientific progress, but it is driven by socio-cultural ruptures and continuities.

For example, racial regimes of colonialism and settler colonialism varied according to time, context, and targets: the racism faced by African-Americans and Indigenous American Indians in the US differed from others in form and character. The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a racialisation whereby African-Americans were seen as property and sources of labour, while settler colonialism resulted in Indigenous Americans being viewed as obstacles to extraction and control of resources (Mamdani 2020). Simply subsuming them under the same umbrella of racism risks under-emphasizing the specific forms of violence that people in different times and places have had to endure.

Scientific racism

By the nineteenth century the idea that there were innate human differences attributable to assumed races was considered as established scientific knowledge, as well as simple common sense in large parts of the world (Saini 2019). Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for scientific racism, included humans among the animal species and divided them into different varieties based on skin colour as well as real and assumed behaviour (Kenyon-Hyatt 2021). Linnaeus’ contemporary, the eighteenth century biologist Comte de Buffon believed that an original white ‘Caucasian’ race had degraded into other races due to environmental factors such as difficult climates and poor diets. Though he admitted that humans were one single species and any classification of humans was bound to be arbitrary, he still held the view that there was a biological racial hierarchy. The biologist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) divided humans into ultimately five hierarchically structured races, based on people’s anatomy as well as their linguistic and psychological features (Bethencourt 2013; Gates, Jr. and Curran 2022). Race thinking in scientific racism cut across the divisions between ‘monogenism’, which posited a single origin of humanity, and ‘polygenism’, which held that human races had different origins. Historians have documented how the tenets of Western scientific racism were exported to other parts of the world and applied to local circumstances by local elites (see Skidmore 1993 for Brazil, Zia-Ebrahimi 2016 for Persia/Iran and Weaver 2022 for India).

Scientific racism also provided license and legitimation for eugenics (el-Haj 2007), the belief that human ‘stock’ could and should be ‘perfected’ by means of restricting the right to reproduce for certain categories of humans. Such reproductive restrictions were usually imposed on racialised others, the poor and people with mental or physical disabilities. Eugenics counted on widespread support from white academic, social, political, and media elites in both Europe and the US (Rutherford 2022). The eugenicist idea that humans could and should be ‘perfected’ was intrinsically linked to a racial hierarchy in which the supposed ‘white race’ was placed on top. ‘Miscegenation’ between supposedly different races of humans was declared either undesirable or outlawed. Moreover, the right to biological reproduction of people or groups of people of all colours was limited. In places like South Africa under apartheid, the US South in the era of segregation, and in Nazi Germany, sexual relations, co-habitation, and marriage between individuals deemed to belong to different ‘races’ was prohibited by state law. The obsession with ‘interracial’ sex, and the casting of hypersexualised Black and brown men, in particular, as sexual threats against white women, has been and remains an ever-recurrent facet of racist thought from slavery and colonialism to the present (Stoler 2010).

Arguments for eugenics often came wrapped in arguments about the supposed ‘superiority’ of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, and physical anthropologists provided data in the form of cranial and other physical measurements meant to lend credence to these ideas (Kyllingstad 2012). Given these ideas about alleged racial superiority of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, it should not be any surprise that the eugenicists’ calls for restricting the right to reproduce often also entailed calls to restrict ‘non-white immigration’ and interracial sexual relations in the name of ‘preserving racial purity’ both in the US and in Europe. There was in fact an extensive trans- and inter-continental traffic of racist ideas about the ‘white’ race and/or ‘Nordic’ and/or ‘Aryan’ racial superiority with the US white supremacist and eugenicist movement (Whitman 2017).

Though European colonialists legitimated any number of atrocities and violence inflicted on colonised peoples by recourse to ideas central to scientific racism—such as the transatlantic slave trade, genocide, and the forced removal of children from their families and communities—broader European and Euro-American popular recognition of how lethal and dehumanising these ideas actually were was catalysed by Nazi extermination policies. These views culminated in the Holocaust against - among others - Jews, Roma, queer, and disabled peoples from 1942 to 1945. The central role of some German anthropologists in this horror is well documented (Schafft 2003).

The Boasian turn

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideas of scientific racism were dominant among liberal Western elites. They were also dominant and widely taken for granted among anthropologists—and not least in physical anthropology. Work by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin (1885) directly countered and challenged 19th century racial typologies and their associated racism. He insisted on focusing on people’s moral and intellectual dimensions, rather than their physical attributes, leading him to argue for the essential equality of humans. His work did not make a global impact during his time or over coming decades, in part due to the racist biases of the academy. However, it did foreshadow later arguments about the social construction of race (Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his successors received the most attention in challenging the ideas about biological race so central to scientific racism. Influenced by and in dialogue with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Boas and his students took on key elements in the push against racial essentialism and the racism it supported (but not without issues: see Baker 2021 and below).

Physical anthropology in Boas’ time was wedded to the idea that one could derive conclusions about the mental and intellectual capacities of purportedly different races through determining physical attributes such as head size and shape. It was Boas’ 1912 monograph Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants that demonstrated that, contrary to dominant claims at the time, the lived human environment was a significant factor in the development of physical attributes among humans (Baker 2004; Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard 2003). The book showed that the physical aspects of European immigrants to the United States changed more drastically than expected, and more the longer their parents had been to the United States. Boas and his successors conducted this study in the context of struggles against eugenics and white supremacist movements in Europe and the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and not the least German Nazism (King 2019). Central in the new anthropological conceptualisation of what was and should be the focus in the study of human difference and variety was the concept of culture. Cultural differences were increasingly seen as being more important than biological differences. More specifically, the ‘Boasian turn’ in anthropology disrupted the ideology that biology underlay culture. Previously presumed biological traits and cultural phenomena were no longer causally linked (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997, 525), and one could no longer proclaim that ‘group X does this because of biological trait Y’.

Whereas Boas had hedged his bets, and retained the concept of race itself, his radical student Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) launched a full attack on the concept in anthropology (for a related, if somewhat more demure, anti-racism in mainstream physical anthropology, see Washburn 1963). For Montagu, race was a myth, and ought to be replaced by the concept of ‘ethnic group’. The ethnic group was not intended to merely ‘substitute’ for race; it entailed adopting an entirely new viewpoint (Montagu 1962, 926). Montagu, who during World War II published the seminal monograph Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race (1942), would later become the main author of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race, in which race was declared to be a non-scientific concept (Brattain 2012). The Statement foregrounded humanity’s common ancestry and genetic similarities across populations to argue that racism was nothing but an inherently aggressive ideology and a misguided feeling. Montagu believed that the concept of race was so intertwined with racism that one could not do away with the latter without first doing away with the former (Yudell 2014).

Though they have in time become part of the anthropological common sense, it often seems forgotten, even within anthropology itself, how radical Montagu’s ideas about race and racism were at the time. The years that followed the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race also revealed that Montagu’s radical anti-racist stance as a drafter of the statement had uneven support among the cross-disciplinary group of scientists involved in UNESCO: it would be followed by more anodyne UNESCO statements on race in 1951, 1967 and 1978 (Hazard, Jr. 2012). Another anthropologist involved in the 1950 UNESCO Statement, and critical of the concept of race, was Claude Lévi-Strauss (Rouse 2019). But in anthropology, Montagu, building on Firmin, Boas, Washburn, and the work of many others, won out, and the lingering effects of his contribution can also be found in the various institutional statements on race and racism today.

The critique of Boasian racial liberalism

Changes brought by the Boasian turn were incomplete. In the eyes of its detractors, the dominant Boasian ‘racial liberalism’ in anthropology in the post-World War II era turned out to be quite compatible with the continued exclusion and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and other racialised scholars (Baker 2021). The idea of racial liberalism foregrounds that liberalism has been racialised, as liberal theory long restricted full personhood to white men, and its insistence on liberal values trivialises white supremacy (Rana 2020). Liberalism has historically tended to describe white supremacist and racist imaginaries about state and nation as pertaining to the political fringes (Shoshan 2015). This is an analytical and conceptual move which often exceptionalises racism and reinforces notions of ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2015).

Radical critiques of Boasian racial liberalism starting in the 1960s, inspired by the nascent field of Black studies (Anderson 2019; de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023). They took aim at what they declared to be the fiction that anthropology itself and the societies it studies had become ‘post-racial’ by declaring race to be a social construct and adopting a ‘no race’ position. Boasian racial liberalism would also at times appear to efface the central role that transatlantic slavery played in the formulation of anti-Black racism (Harrison 1995, 52), and to have reduced racism to a matter of individual attitudes rather than social structures and systemic practice. Critiques of Boasian racial liberalism have also taken aim at the notion that replacing the concept of race with the concept of ethnicity—as popularised by the works of Montagu (1942) and anthropologist Fredrik W. Barth (1969)—would do away with racism. For turning ethnicity into the ‘master principle of classification’, in the words of its critics, ‘euphemized, if not denied race’ by not specifying the conditions under which racism emerges and persists (Harrison 1995, 48).

The radical critique of Boasian racial liberalism also took on board the empirically registrable fact that far-right and racist movements had shifted from a discourse highlighting immigrants and minorities’ physical and phenotypical features to a discourse about the culture and religion of ‘racial others’. They had done so in a very elaborate and conscious attempt at evading the very accusations of racism that often blocked their popular appeal. Diagnosed as ‘cultural racism’ by Frantz Fanon (1967), this was not so much a ‘new racism’ (Balibar 1991), as a return to the very origins of European racism by making culture and religion the central markers of exclusion of ‘others’ (Stolcke 1995). Peter Wade makes the important point that ‘race has always been seen as a natural-cultural assemblage in which “nature” and “culture” are always shaping each other and the differences between them are not always clear’ (Wade 2015, 53).

What this return to cultural racism translated into in practice was the racist and discriminatory treatment of Muslim and/or Black populations throughout Western societies in particular, a form of racism often described as ‘Islamophobia’ (Bangstad 2022). Islamophobia is by no means limited to the West. The new forms of racism represented a ‘racism without races’ or a supposedly ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Omi and Winant 1986). By the 1990s, it had arguably become a dominant form of racism in Europe and the US. Regardless of the elaboration and differentiation of the concept of culture in anthropology, out in the real world, ‘culture’ would, over the course of the 1990s, assume some of the very same essentialised properties as the concept of race once had. The new ‘culture talk’ was exemplified in the political construction of the category of ‘Muslim’ which followed in the wake of al-Qaida’s terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001 (Mamdani 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).

Noteworthy in this context of racism against Muslims was also the ubiquity of racist stereotyping of Muslim males as existential sexual threats against women and women’s rights worldwide (Abu-Lughod 2015). That racist trope travelled fast and far and has been present in, for example, the anti-Muslim hate speech and rhetoric of Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar as well as among Hindutva nationalists in India in recent years. Darren Byler has also noted that the production of Uyghur Muslim men, in particular, as ‘subhuman under the sign of terror’ is characteristic of both state authorities and settler colonial discourse in Xinjang, China (2022, 9). Arjun Appadurai identified a ‘fear of small numbers’ (2006) as a central element of global racisms: with the rise, mainstreaming, and circulation of far-right and racist ideas about white ‘replacement’ or ‘extinction’ in various societies such as Europe, the US, India, and South Africa. Those fears have long since become global.

New frontiers in the anthropological study of race and racisms

Anthropology has been taken to task for largely ignoring race and racism as central to its history, practice, and development (Pierre 2013; Jobson 2020). That anthropological scholarship about race and racism has overwhelmingly focused on Western contexts should not blind us to the fact that while racism is not a human universal (i.e., found in all human cultures), it is certainly a global phenomenon (i.e., found in contemporary human societies in all parts of the world) (Hage 1998; Twine 1998; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Pierre 2012). Anthropological studies have also demonstrated that many societies that are profoundly multiracial and multicultural—such as in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa (Pierre 2012)—have developed and sustained elaborate racial hierarchies premised on the retention of privileges for the ‘least Black parts’ of the population (Wade 2017). Anthropologists have equally documented how racism can even pervade institutions in which there is a formal commitment to equal treatment or the eradication of racism (Rouse 2009; Shange 2019). Inspired by critical whiteness studies, they have also reversed the tendency to study race through the study of people of colour, and explored the intersections between class, gender, and race among white people (Hartigan 2005). In the ‘decolonizing turn’ in anthropology in recent years, critical calls to dismantle past and present structures of white privilege and white supremacy within anthropology (de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023) as well as to de-centre white epistemologies have been central (Allen and Jobson 2016; Gupta and Stoolman 2022).

Anthropological theories and analyses do not evolve in isolation from developments in society and politics at large. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has engendered a shift from definitions and analyses of racism premised on seeing it as the articulation of individual attitudes, to definitions and analyses with concepts such as ‘systemic’ and/or ‘structural’ racism. That shift now provides directions and new avenues for future research (see, among others, Gilmore 2022), and is discernible in Laurence Ralph’s study of the use of torture alongside everyday incidents of police violence against Black Americans in Chicago (2020) as well as in Ruha Benjamin’s studies of how digital technology structures (coders, developers, users) reinforce racial discrimination and biases that create and inform coded inequity or what Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code” (2019). Inspired by work on science and technology, anthropologists have also taken an interest in how the rise and popularity of modern and privatised DNA testing and the new science of genomics may re-inscribe racial frames and engender racism (M’charek 2005; el-Haj 2007; Fullwiley 2011; Nelson 2016; Abel and Schroeder 2020; Abel 2022). Yet, they have also discussed how the use of genomic analyses can be used to push against racist and colonial frames, for example by solidifying empowering forms of otherness (Benn-Torres and Torres-Colon 2021).

For what it will be worth, in an uncertain human future under conditions of man-made and intertwined ‘polycrises’ including global climate change and environmental destruction, increased migration flows coupled with the bordering of the richer parts of the world, global pandemics, and ravaging wars, anthropology seems in recent years to have taken more substantive steps in the direction of anti-racism (Mullings 2005). As anthropology helps us recognise and address racism, we may in turn be in a better position to deal with looming threats to the idea of a shared humanity.

References

Abel, Sarah. 2022. Permanent markers: Race, ancestry, and the body after the genome. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press.

Abel, Sarah, and Hannes Schroeder. 2020. “From country marks to DNA makers: The genomic turn in the production of African identities.” Current Anthropology 61, no. 22: 198–209.

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. “Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 783–90.

———. 2015. Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Allen, Jafari S. and Ryan C. Jobson. 2016. “The decolonizing generation: (Race and) theory in anthropology since the Eighties.” Current Anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–49.

Alves, Jaime A. 2018. The anti-Black city: Police terror and Black urban life in Brazil. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, liberalism and American anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. The fear of small numbers: An essay on the geography of anger. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Asad, Talal, ed. (1973) 1995. Anthropology and the colonial encounter. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Baker, Lee D. 2004. “Franz Boas out of the ivory tower.” Anthropological Theory 4, no. 1: 29–51.

———. 2022. “The racist anti-racism of American anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 290, no. 2: 127–42.

Balibar, Étienne. 1991. “Is there a ‘neo-racism’? In Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities, edited by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 17-29 . London: Verso.

Bancel, Nicolas, Thomas David, and Dominic Thomas. 2019. “Introduction: The invention of race: Scientific and popular representations of race from Linnaeus to the Ethnic Shows. In The invention of race: Scientific and popular representations, edited by Nicolas Bancel, Thomas David and Dominic Thomas, 1–17 . London: Routledge.

Bangstad, Sindre. 2022. “Western Islamophobia: The origins of a concept.” In Routledge handbook of Islam in the West, 2^nd edition, edited by Roberto Tottoli. London: Routledge.

Barth, Fredrik W., ed. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha, Jemima Pierre, and Junaid Rana. 2023. “White supremacy and the making of anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 52: 413–35.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. New York: Polity Press.

Benn-Torres, Jada and Gabriel A. Torres-Colon. 2021. Genetic ancestry: Our stories, our pasts. London: Routledge.

Bethencourt, Francisco. 2013. Racisms: From the Crusades to the early twentieth-century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Blunt, Wilfrid. 2002. Linnaeus: The compleat naturalist. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Boas, Franz. 1912. Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2003. Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial equality in America. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror capitalism: Uyghur dispossession and masculinity in a Chinese city. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the world and me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Caldwell, Kia L. 2007. Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black women, citizenship and the politics of identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

De Genova, Nicholas. 2018. “The ‘migrant crisis’ as racial crisis: Do Black Lives Matter in Europe?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 10: 1765–82.

Eidheim, Harald. 1966. “Lappish guest relationships under conditions of cultural change.” American Anthropologist 68, no. 2: 426–37.

———. 1969. “When ethnic identity is a social stigma.” In Ethnic groups and boundaries: The social organization of difference, edited by Fredrik Barth, 39–58 . Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

El-Haj, Nadia A. 2007. “The genetic reinscription of race.” Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 283–300.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skins, white masks. New York: Groove Press.

Fleuhr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology.” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3: 449–66.

Fuentes, Agustín. 2022. Race, monogamy and other lies they told you: Busting myths about human nature. Oakland: University of California Press.

Fullwiley, Duana. 2011. The enculturated gene: Sickle cell health politics and biological difference in West Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran, eds. 2022. Who’s black and why? A hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis. 2012. Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim violence in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gilmore, Ruth W. 2022. Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation. London: Verso.

Gravlee, Clarence C., H.R. Bernard and William R. Leonard. 2003. “Boas’s ‘Changes in bodily form’: The immigrant study, cranial plasticity, and Boas’s physical anthropology.” American Anthropologist 105, no. 2: 326–32.

Graves, Joseph L., Jr. and Alan H. Goodman. 2021. Racism, not race: Answers to frequently asked questions. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gupta, Akhil and Jessie Stoolman. 2022. “Decolonizing US anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124, no. 4: 778–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13775

Hall, Stuart. 2017. The fateful triangle: Race, ethnicity, nation. Edited by Kobena Mercer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. London: Routledge.

Harrison, Faye V. 1995. “The persistent power of ‘race’ in the cultural and political economy of racism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 47–74.

Hartigan, John, Jr. 2005. Odd tribes: Toward a cultural analysis of white people. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

———. 2013. “Conclusion: Anthropology of race.” In Anthropology of race, edited by John Hartigan, Jr., 187–98. Santa Fe, NM: School For Advanced Research Press.

Hazard, Anthony Q., Jr. 2012. Postwar anti-racism: The United States, UNESCO and ‘race’ 1945–68. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth. 2015. The color of love: Racial features, stigma and socialization in black Brazilian families. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Jablonski, Nina G. 2021. “Skin color and race.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175, no. 1: 437–47.

Jobson, Ryan C. 2020. “The case for letting anthropology burn: Sociocultural anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2: 259–72.

King, Charles. 2019. Gods of the upper air: How a group of renegade anthropologists remade race, sex and gender in the twentieth century. New York: Anchor Books.

Kenyon-Hyatt. Brittany. 2021. “How scientific taxonomy contributed to the myth of race.” SAPIENS, March 19. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/race-scientific-taxonomy/

Kyllingstad, Jon R. 2012. “Norwegian physical anthropology and the idea of a Nordic race.” Current Anthropology 57, no. 5: 46–57.

Lewis, Anna C.F., Santiago J. Molina, Paul S. Appelbaum, Bege Dauda, Anna Di Rienzo, Agustin Fuentes et al. 2022. “Getting genetic ancestry right for science and society.” Science 376, no. 6590: 250–2.

Loftsdóttir, Kristín and Lars Jensen, eds. 2014. Whiteness and postcolonialism in the Nordic region: Exceptionalism, migrant others and national identities. Farnham: Ashgate.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. “Good Muslim, bad Muslim: A political perspective on culture and terrorism.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 766–75.

———. 2020. Neither settler nor native: The making and unmaking of permanent minorities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Marks, Jonathon. 2017. Is science racist? London: Polity Press.

M’charek, Amade. 2005. The Human Genome Diversity Project: An ethnography of scientific practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2017. Black rights/white wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Montagu, Ashley. 1942. Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race. New York: Harper.

———. 1962. “The concept of race.” American Anthropologist 64, no. 5: 919–28.

Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. and Yolanda T. Moses. 1997. “Reestablishing ‘race’ in anthropological discourse.” American Anthropologist 99, no. 3: 517–33.

Mullings, Leith. 2005. “Interrogating racism: Toward an antiracist anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667–93.

Nelson, Alondra. 2016. The social life of DNA: Race, reparations and reconciliation after the genome. Boston: Beacon Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States. London: Routledge.

Pierre, Jemima. 2012. The predicament of blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2013. “Race in Africa today: A commentary.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 3: 547–51.

Ralph, Laurence. 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Rana, Junaid. 2020. “Anthropology and the riddle of white supremacy.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1: 99–111.

Reardon, Jenny. 2005. Race to the finish: Identity and governance in an age of genomics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rouse, Carolyn. 2009. Uncertain suffering: Racial health disparities and sickle cell disease. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

———. 2019. “Claude Lévi-Strauss’ contribution to the race question: Race and history.” American Anthropologist 121, no. 3: 721–4.

Rutherford, Adam. 2022. Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The return of race science. New York: Penguin Random House.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Shoshan, Nitzan. 2015. The management of hate: Nation, affect, and the governance of right-wing extremism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schafft, Gretchen. E. 2003. From racism to genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Stolcke, Verena. 1995. “Talking culture: New boundaries, new rhetorics of exclusion in Europe.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1: 1–24.

Stoler, Ann L. 2010. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sussman, Robert W. 2014. The myth of race: The troubling persistence of an unscientific idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Topolski, Anya. 2018. “The race-religion constellation: A European contribution to the critical philosophy of race.” Critical Philosophy of Race 1, no. 6: 58–81.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. “Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. In Global transformations: Anthropology and the modern world, edited by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 7–29 . New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Turda, Marius and Maria S. Quine. 2018. Historicizing race. London: Bloomsbury.

Twine, France W. 1998. Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

UNESCO. 1950. The race concept: Results of an inquiry. Paris: UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073351

Wade, Peter. 2015. Race: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2017. Degrees of mixture, degrees of freedom: Genomics, multiculturalism, and race in Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Washburn, S.L. 1963. “The study of race.” American Anthropologist 63, no. 3: 521–31.

Weaver, Lesley J. 2022. “The laboratory of scientific racism: India and the origins of anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51: 67–83.

Wekker, Gloria. 2015. White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler’s American model: The United States and the making of Nazi race law. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yuddell, Michael. 2014. Race unmasked: Biology and race in the twentieth century. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zia-Ebrahimi, Reza. 2016. The emergence of Iranian nationalism: Race and the politics of dislocation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Note on contributors

Sindre Bangstad is a Research Professor at KIFO, Oslo, Norway. He was a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at Princeton University 2022-23.

Sindre Bangstad, KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Øvre Slottsgate 6B, 0192 Oslo, Norway. sindre.bangstad@kifo.no

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Agustín Fuentes, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. afuentes2@princeton.edu

[1] ”AABA statement on race & racism.” 2019. American Association of Biological Anthropologists, March 27. https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

[2] “AAA statement on race.” 1998. American Anthropological Association, May 17. https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-race/

[3] See, for example, ” American Society of Human Genetics statement regarding concepts of ’good genes’ and human genetics.” 2020. American Society of Human Genetics, September 24. https://www.ashg.org/publications-news/ashg-news/statement-regarding-good-genes-human-genetics/#:~:text=Genetics%20demonstrates%20that%20humans%20cannot,ancestry%20have%20no%20scientific%20evidence

[4] From roughly 1840-1945; see “Scientific racism.” Confronting anti-Black racism resource, Harvard Library. https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism

[5] Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2022. “U.S. life expectancy falls again in ‘historic’ setback.” The New York Times, August 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-covid-pandemic.html

[6] Population Reference Bureau. 2021. Black women over three times more likely to die in pregnancy, postpartum than white women, new research finds. Washington, D.C.: PRB. https://www.prb.org/resources/black-women-over-three-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-postpartum-than-white-women-new-research-finds/

[7] The authors would like to thank Dr. Tobias Hübinette, Karlstad University, Sweden for information on this.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Diabetes

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 01 May 2023 08:04:50 +0000

Person getting tested for high blood pressure and diabetes at Prince Mshiyeni Memorial Hospital in South Africa in 2012. Photo: GovernmentZA

Shir Lerman Ginzburg

Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Initially published 1 May 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23diabetes

Abstract:

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a global disease that involves the body’s impaired ability to regulate blood sugar (glucose) due to malfunctioning insulin, a hormone produced in the pancreas which is responsible for transporting the glucose into the cells. Anthropologists have provided meaningful insights into the causes (aetiologies) and prevalence of diabetes, particularly focusing on the social, political, and economic factors that underlie the ways in which diabetes continues to afflict millions of people worldwide. As a chronic illness with no cure, diabetes poses unique challenges for people struggling to manage medications, food changes, and multiple medical appointments, particularly for those who are already suffering from other structural barriers to health. Furthermore, anthropologists have highlighted the importance of identifying the overlaps between diabetes and other chronic diseases in order to provide better treatment options and to understand the underlying structural conditions that contribute to diabetes, such as poverty and unemployment. The ‘syndemics’ framework is a useful tool for considering the multileveled approaches to diabetes aetiologies and preventions.

Introduction

Diabetes, a cluster of diseases that impact the body’s ability to process insulin, is well-established as a chronic illness, having been described as such as early as 1500 BCE, when an Egyptian manuscript described a ‘too great emptying of the urine’, although Apollonius of Memphis was the first to call the disease ‘diabetes’ in 250 BCE (Trikkalinou et al. 2017). Several centuries later, an unnamed seventeenth-century English surgeon called diabetes ‘the pissing evile’ due to the frequent urination common to people with the disease (Karamanou et al. 2016; Kelleher 1988). Unfortunately, most diabetes itself is rather less colourful, albeit equally dangerous if left unchecked. Diabetes is a chronic disease characterised by high glucose due to the body’s inability to produce and/or process insulin, a hormone that helps the body use energy (Carruth et al. 2019; Mendenhall et al. 2010; Schoenberg et al. 2005). People are clinically diagnosed with diabetes if their fasting glucose blood test levels are over 126 mg/L or have a three-month average hemoglobin (HbA1c) level of at least 6.0%.^[1] The number of adults (ages 20-79) worldwide living with diabetes reached 537 million people in 2021 and researchers estimate that by 2045, 783 million individuals worldwide will have diabetes.^[2]

Symptoms for diabetes include increased urination and thirst, unintentional weight loss, blurred vision, exhaustion, tingling hands and feet, and dry skin. Diabetes is sometimes called ‘the silent killer’ because these symptoms are so common that they are oftentimes attributed to other things, leading to worsening disease outcomes and decreased quality of life before a diagnosis is even made. Untreated diabetes can lead to coronary artery disease, renal failure, and blindness, and is correlated with high blood pressure (hypertension), high cholesterol (dyslipidaemia), arthritis, and depression (Mendenhall 2019; Trikkalinou et al. 2017).

Healthcare providers generally diagnose individuals as having one of three broad types of diabetes: type 1, type 2, and gestational. All three types share the same general symptoms and basic cause (a cellular inability to absorb glucose for fuel due to a failure to recognise insulin) but differ in the physiological details and cultural paradigms of aetiology and treatment. This entry will begin by outlining the three general types of diabetes and then discuss how anthropologists shed light on interacting cultural models of diabetes diagnosis, treatment, and long-term care.

Types of diabetes

Type 1 diabetes mellitus is an autoimmune reaction wherein the body’s defence system attacks the cells that create insulin, causing a severe insulin shortage in the body and allowing for a dangerous accumulation of glucose in the blood. Unchecked type 1 diabetes can contribute to nerve damage (neuropathy), kidney damage (nephropathy), eye damage (diabetic retinopathy), foot damage, heart disease, and skin infections.^[3] It is linked to both genetic and environmental factors, although the exact causes are not yet known and there is no known cure. Type 1 typically develops in children and young adults and requires individuals to inject insulin daily to remain healthy.^[4] Approximately 10% of people worldwide have type 1 diabetes as of July 2020.^[5]

Gestational diabetes develops in pregnant women who did not already have diabetes prior to pregnancy. This type of diabetes physiologically resembles the other types in that the body struggles to recognise insulin, which leads to higher levels of glucose in the bloodstream. While glucose levels generally return to normal after giving birth, women who have gestational diabetes are at higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes later in life.^[6]The precise origins of gestational diabetes are unknown, yet researchers suggest that the mother’s pre-pregnancy weight, physical inactivity during pregnancy, being of certain races or ethnicities (such as Black, Hispanic, and American Indian), having a family history of diabetes, and having polycystic ovarian syndrome are all contributing factors.^[7] Approximately 14% of women worldwide had gestational diabetes during pregnancy in 2021 (Wang et al. 2022).

Type 2 diabetes has become a pandemic, catching the attention of researchers and healthcare providers alike due to the urgent nature of its scope. Like the other diabetes types, type 2 involves high blood glucose levels, but unlike the other types, in type 2 the pancreas produces sufficient insulin. Instead, cells resist insulin’s efforts to transport glucose into the cells (insulin resistance), resulting in rising blood glucose levels and causing the pancreas to create more insulin. However, the cells continue to resist the insulin’s efforts, resulting in even higher glucose levels which can cause major health problems, such as heart disease, liver and kidney failure, and vision loss.^[8] Type 2 diabetes accounts for 95% of diabetes cases worldwide, with physical inactivity, being overweight or obese, and socioeconomic factors like poverty being major contributing factors.^[9]

This entry focuses on type 2 diabetes due to its overwhelming global prevalence and due to the biomedical focus on solely individual behaviours. Diabetes is commonly known among biomedical healthcare providers as the ‘lifestyle type’ due to its association with overconsumption and sedentary behaviours, which are generally blamed on individual patients (Carruth et al. 2019; Yates-Doerr 2011). However, this framing ignores the social, economic, and political contexts that impact the diabetes experiences of many patients. While anthropologists acknowledge the different clinical diabetes types, they also recognise the limitations of clinical diagnosis in getting to the deeper causes of diabetes.

Structural roots and barriers to care

Diabetes is what medical anthropologists term a ‘disease of modernisation’ due to its association with structural factors, such as poverty, unemployment, and colonisation (Baglar 2013; Ely et al. 2011; Mendenhall et al. 2010; Singer 2020; Wiedman 2012). At the same time, diabetes management has become exponentially more expensive due to the rise in transportation, housing, healthcare, and food costs, which negatively impact many peoples’ ability to consistently afford the many changes that are recommended by healthcare providers, particularly when many individuals are already struggling to pay for rent and other necessary living expenses (Mendenhall 2015; Thorsen et al. 2020; Vest et al. 2013; Weaver 2018). High costs of diagnosis and treatment contribute to diabetes being diagnosed later in its development and enable it to have more destructive effects.

Quality of life for people with diabetes depends on their financial resources, geographic proximity to healthcare services and social support networks, physical pain or discomfort levels, and dietary patterns. The uncertain, long-term benefits of living with minimal complications often conflict with the day-to-day difficulties of diabetes maintenance, which negatively impacts stress levels (Black et al. 2017; Speight et al. 2019). Anthropologists tend to note that not all populations experience the same quality of life in living with diabetes, as some communities face additional social, economic, and racial disparities on top of pre-existing health disparities that make a life of diabetes much harder (e.g. Rock 2003a; Wiedman 2021 and Weaver 2018). For example, Janet Page-Reeves and colleagues (2013) note that individual decisions and human agency is heavily constrained by social environments (structure) when it comes to diagnosing and treating diabetes. The social environment that Page-Reeves and others study is that of Hispanics in the state of New Mexico. They incorporate specific conceptual models of illness such as emotional regulation of symptom experience and biomedical diabetes aetiology, and core cultural values such as religiosity and prioritising the family to understand and deal with the disease. Page-Reeves and colleagues observe that in situations with limited economic resources, deciding where to spend money can be a difficult choice, particularly if family members with diabetes need to buy healthier (and more expensive) foods on top of multiple visits to the doctor.

The structural nature of diabetes reflects community-level inequalities in access to different foods, healthcare, education, and other necessary resources. While diabetes is currently present in all populations worldwide, it disproportionately affects low-income populations due to multiple factors that intersect with poverty, such as unemployment, food insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, and non-existent social support (Ferzacca 2012; Lerman Ginzburg 2020; Mendenhall et al. 2017; Rock 2003a; Solomon 2016; Weaver 2018).

A significant ethnography on the structural experiences of vulnerable populations with diabetes is Carolyn Smith-Morris’ 2006 ethnography of diabetes among the Akimel O’odham (colloquially known by outsiders as the Pima), a Native American tribe based by the Gila River in the state of Arizona and the northern Mexican desert. Smith-Morris found that the sweltering Arizona heat, unemployment, and poverty were all factors in the Akimel O’odham developing diabetes. Here, starkly high levels of unemployment and high reliance on government assistance coupled with limited economic resources, reduced physical exercise due to the heat, limited affordable healthy food options on the Pima reservation, and use of food as a comfort against daily struggles, were all contributing factors to developing diabetes. Although the Akimel O’odham have lived near the Gila River for centuries and are familiar with the high temperatures, their responses to it have changed in the past hundred years. As the Gila River has dried up, the Akimel O’odham lost their traditional farms and increasingly relied on government-subsidised foodstuffs (Smith-Morris 2006). Notably, the drying up of the Gila River was not a natural phenomenon, but resulted from the Arizona government’s extensive irrigation efforts as well as damming by non-Native farmers. However, policies of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which extended into the 1980s, forbade the Akimel O’odham from receiving help from agricultural loans. Combined with the loss of traditional food pathways, these policies forced the Akimel O’odham to obtain sedentary jobs and rely on high-calorie, poor-nutrition governmental food handouts (Booth et al. 2017; Smith-Morris 2006). Indeed, diabetes is so ubiquitous in the Akimel O’odham that participants in Smith-Morris’ research naturalised it more and more, observing, ‘it’s just how Pimas are’ (2006: 33).

Smith-Morris’s work with the Akimel O’odham highlights how political and economic factors contributed to diabetes aetiology in a population already facing racism and other abuses from the very government that was supposed to care for them. Recent work in Nepal supports these findings. Here, governmental inaction in the face of rigid social hierarchies and discrimination against the Dalits–members of the lowest social caste–creates structural situations of high diabetes risk (Thapa 2014). While caste-based discrimination is officially illegal in Nepal, social hierarchies forbid Dalits from participating in many social, religious, educational, and employment opportunities, forcing them into poverty, food insecurity, and occupational and housing uncertainty—all of which elevate diabetes risk. Given that existing social hierarchies are deeply entrenched, the Nepalese government has found it difficult to enforce anti-discrimination laws; in doing so, the Nepalese government failed to take care of its most vulnerable members and reduce Dalit diabetes risk. In this example, it is government negligence, rather than active mismanagement, that increases diabetes risk.

Additionally, colonisation is a structural factor that boosts diabetes risk, particularly as its effects continue for generations after the dissolution of the original colonising state. Indigenous communities that have experienced colonisation face extremely high diabetes rates due to a loss of traditional lands and food sources, cycles of food insecurity, and mental distress from oppressive regimes. In Canada, the diabetes prevalence rate is four times higher among Indigenous communities than in the general population due to decades of the Canadian government enforcing starvation, stress, food insecurity, and the environmental degradation of traditional food sources such as fishing (Temblay et al. 2021). Similarly, high diabetes rates in the Marshall Islands have been linked to the World War II-era devastation of breadfruit trees, which were a traditional food source for Indigenous communities (Duke 2017). The US began distributing canned meat and white rice when it colonised the Marshall Islands after the war. This abrupt change in food acquisition and preparation negatively impacted the Marshallese’s relationship with their environments and their bodies by increasing their reliance on imported canned foods, which are high in additives, rather than on fresh and local resources.

The geographic diversity of these case studies emphasises an urgent need for studying the complex historical, structural, and traumatic roots of diabetes in greater depth. Prolonged exposure to colonialism is associated with a profound loss of traditional food acquisition, preparation and consumption, and subsequently high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition even when a colonising regime no longer exists. The loss of traditional livelihoods and diminished community self-determination undermine socioeconomic development among oppressed communities. Particularly, it leaves rural communities in debilitating working conditions with only limited access to comprehensive primary care or physical activity options, like walking trails, that are weather-safe for year-round use (Rice et al. 2016; Tremblay et al. 2021).

The colonial roots of diabetes serve as a stark reminder that health is due as much to structural environments as it is to biology. As these and other ethnographies demonstrate, structural environments contribute to diabetes being a social disease as participants shared stories about their etiological foundations of diabetes and the ways in which adjusting to a new life required new perspectives.

Diabetes and biopower

Although, as the ethnographies above elucidate, anthropologists have studied diabetes susceptibility among different populations, anthropological literature has also cautioned against relying on rigid, overly simplistic ethnic categories to understand diabetes because they miss the nuanced biological human variations between and among ethnic groups that contribute to diabetes risk (Montoya 2007). Labelling individuals or entire populations as ‘at risk’ for diabetes based on easy single-gene categories risks ‘naïve genetic determinism’ that glosses over the need for deeper analysis of the social and environmental histories of different populations that shape their susceptibility to diabetes (Montoya 2007). Anthropologists have contributed valuable insight into the social, political, and environmental pressures that individuals and populations face, particularly by incorporating biopower—the regulation of human life at the population and individual body levels—and the politics of health, body image, illness metaphors, and explanatory models into the frameworks of diabetes aetiologies and lived experiences (Ferzacca 2012).

For example, research on the clinical encounters of diabetes highlights the difference between clinicians’ perspectives on diabetes and the perspectives of patients with diabetes (Guell 2011; Hernandez 1995; Hunt et al. 1998). Cheri Hernandez (1995), in an ethnographic study on the clinical parameters of diabetes management, observed that while healthcare providers emphasise maintaining acceptable glucose levels and adhering to medication and weight loss regimens, patients prioritise learning how to live with diabetes. Patients with diabetes often found biomedical explanations for diabetes to be insufficient and attributed their diabetes to personally-relevant triggering events and behaviours. Those who believed that their own behaviours were causes of diabetes tended to be more involved in their treatment; the act of being involved in treatment was associated with long-term behaviour change (Hunt et al. 1998).

While Hernandez and Linda Hunt et al. focused on the individual’s biomedical encounters for diabetes treatment, others have expanded this approach to the collective diabetes experience. Cornelia Guell (2011) draws attention to the conflicting hierarchies of diabetes knowledge in Germany that arose among Turkish migrants in Berlin. Tensions arose between Turkish healthcare providers and layperson self-help groups over conflicting values and knowledge hierarchies about diabetes. Along with fierce competition for limited funding for community diabetes clinics and health education classes, these differences in diabetes knowledge not only pitted the community and healthcare providers against one another but also created rifts in a community already facing severe marginalisation. Similarly, healthcare providers frequently place the responsibility for diabetes management squarely on the patient, making them ‘morally liable for their own ill health’, as Rebecca Seligman and colleagues have highlighted in their work on Mexican immigrants with diabetes in the city of Chicago (2015: 64). Many physicians believed that structural and social interventions were not part of their jobs, preferring to focus solely on clinical treatments without being concerned for the underlying social and structural roots of diabetes (Mendenhall et al. 2017). This arbitrary dividing of responsibility is harmful and perpetuates the deeper structures contributing to diabetes. It also conflicts with how people living with diabetes view their own diabetes aetiologies. Many people who spoke with Seligman et al. (2015) attributed their diabetes to structural factors, such as interpersonal violence, poverty, and unemployment, indicating that the biomedical emphasis on individual patient responsibility overlooks patients’ lived experiences with diabetes.

Diabetes management is complex and fraught with overlapping layers of meaning. A major theme in the anthropological literature on diabetes is that of responsibility and control over diabetic bodies. Biomedicine, in its fervent pursuit of individualised health, places the locus of control directly onto the patient to manage self-care; when diabetic bodies do not behave according to biomedically prescribed plans, the onus of responsibility falls squarely on the patient. Biopower, or the regulation of human life at the population and individual body levels, is used to discipline misbehaving bodies into docile conformity through state-controlled sites, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons (Foucault 1976). Bodies become political and economic battlegrounds between policymakers and healthcare providers as debates rage over the best ways to prevent and treat diabetes, while at the same time these forces exert control over the individuals who are inhabiting the very bodies at the centre of these debates (Gibson and Dempsey 2015).

One example of biopower in a colonisation framework is among Indigenous communities in Canada. Indigenous children at residential schools in Canada developed negative relationships with food due to malnourishment, abuse, punishment, and humiliation perpetuated in the residential school environment (Howard 2014). These collective traumas and negative lived experiences of residential school food were passed on to subsequent generations, where, aided by a loss of traditional food pathways due to aggressive colonisation by the Canadian government, they are embodied as diabetes among Canada’s Indigenous communities. Indigenous interactions with contemporary healthcare systems in Canada have reinforced colonisation through racism, stereotyping, and discrimination (Jacklin et al. 2017). Patients reported being repeatedly ignored or patronised at medical appointments despite having travelled long distances for check-ups. Physician shortages and geographic isolation from clinics contributed to diabetes mismanagement, as patients sometimes waited for several months without seeing a physician or having their medications refilled. In both cases, colonialism reinforced the stereotype of misbehaving diabetic bodies and placed the blame firmly on Indigenous communities for their own diabetes while diffusing blame from the state-sanctioned violence of colonisation that is responsible for diabetes perpetuation.

One of the most fundamental contributing factors to biopower and diabetes is the question of control over the very parameters of health. US doctors who led medical missions to Belize taught the locals that diabetes was the individual’s responsibility, rather than the doctor’s liability (Moran-Thomas 2019). This biomedical focus on patient responsibility for diabetes maintenance absolved doctors of the obligation to consider the roles of broader social, economic, and political milieus in which their patients lived. Doctors did not spend much time helping patients identify the early warning signs of diabetes but simply told them to lose weight and get more physical activity, despite limited access to healthy, affordable foods, safe infrastructure for outdoor activity, or disposable income for gym memberships. Amy Moran-Thomas notes that this lack of comprehensive medical care is notable because, as diabetes is not transmitted between people, there is less biomedical focus on the ways in which people’s interactions propagate the disease and more on the individual’s genetics and decisions that make someone more at risk for diabetes, despite the blatant social risk factors. As such, patients are blamed for noncompliance, frequently without evidence, despite the structural factors that exacerbate diabetes risk.

The physical body is also shaped by cultural metaphors of health and diabetes and naturalises certain cultural norms while stigmatising others (Martin 1987; Solomon 2016; Hardin 2018). This is evident in the ways in which diabetes is stigmatised due to its socially perceived associations with uncontrollable food consumption (Aghamohammadi-Kalkhoran and Valizadeh 2016; Broom and Whittaker 2004; Ferzacca 2012; Lee et al. 2015). For example, Amanda Willig and colleagues (2014) found that African American women with diabetes reported experiencing diabetes stigma when they were the only ones in their extended families with the disease, as they were perceived as having no self-control over their health and were treated as children without the ability to make decisions for themselves. Denise Bockwoldt and colleagues (2016) found that African Americans are less likely to adhere to insulin-based medication regimes due to a plethora of negative emotions associated with insulin, such as self-blame, frustration, fear of complications, and of being a burden on loved ones. Some study participants admitted to hiding their insulin from their loved ones so as to not be outed as insulin dependent. These results were replicated by Kryseana Harper et al. (2018), who found that family-based diabetes stigma was common in their mixed-gender African American cohort. This stigma both perpetuated a reduction in diabetes self-management and created resentment towards diabetes for the disruption it caused to peoples’ personal lives.

Additionally, healthcare providers sometimes stigmatise people with diabetes if they do not lose weight or adhere to their prescribed medication regimens, which further discourages people from visiting a healthcare provider (McNaughton 2013; Shahab et al. 2019). People with diabetes who need to inject insulin may also be mistaken for and stigmatised as drug users should they need to inject insulin in public (Balfe and Jackson 2007; Bock 2012). In the United States, a country in which productivity is highly valued, any loss of individual productivity is devalued and stigmatised, particularly if the cause of that loss is concealed or is a manageable disease, as diabetes is commonly thought to be (Ferzacca 2012; Hopper 1981; Shahab et al. 2019). External stigma over perceived loss of productivity and lack of individual discipline that are thought to contribute to diabetes become internalised among those living with diabetes or are involved in its treatment, and perpetuate individual and biomedical diabetes mismanagement (Aghamohammadi-Kalkhoran and Valizadeh 2016; Ferzacca 2012; Seligman et al. 2015).

Anthropologists reject the overly simplistic categorisations of diabetes as a disease of racial and genetic determinism, preferring instead to trace the overlapping intersections between biological pathways and structural factors. In her work with the Native community in Chicago, Margaret Pollak (2018) notes that anthropologists reject the thrifty genotype hypotheses, which speculates that people are biologically predisposed to diabetes, which is then triggered by social environments. Instead, the alarmingly high diabetes rates among certain communities are explored in relation to external influences, such as colonisation and land loss among American Indians in Chicago. Diabetes care is also a multigenerational, life-long social activity in Native communities, with friends and family helping one another inject insulin, manage medication schedules, and eat diabetes-friendly meals. In this way, diabetes is transformed from a biological disease into a form of social cohesion against colonial forces that attempt to destroy Native physical and collective bodies.

As these studies and ethnographies highlight, the biological and social spheres of diabetes consistently intersect, and these intersections manifest differently depending on the population and their social, psychological, and structural circumstances.

Syndemic interactions

In keeping with the anthropological emphasis on complex, multileveled interactions that underscore disease perpetuations, scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which structural factors exacerbate diabetes outcomes by focusing on parts of the world that have reported abrupt increases in diabetes prevalence (Mendenhall 2012; Weaver 2018).

The theory of syndemics has gained traction in anthropological diabetes research, as it provides a framework for understanding the social, political, and economic underpinnings of illness and disease interactions. Syndemics examines the concentration and deleterious interaction of two or more diseases or other health conditions in a population, particularly as a consequence of social inequality and the unjust exercise of power (Singer 2009: xv). Multiple anthropologists have observed that diabetes is a common component of syndemics research due to its increased incidence and prevalence (Everett and Wieland 2013; Lerman 2017, 2022; Mendenhall 2012; Ryan and Raja 2016; Weaver 2018; Weaver and Mendenhall 2014). Specifically, diabetes interacts synergistically with two other common occurrences: depression and food insecurity.

Research indicates that slightly over one-third of individuals with diabetes will develop depression and vice versa, and that individuals with diabetes are twice as likely as individuals without diabetes to develop depression (Gask et al. 2011; Katon et al. 2010; McSharry et al. 2013; Mendenhall 2012). While some evidence implicates depression as a precursor and major contributor to diabetes (Joseph and Golden 2017; Mendenhall 2015; Vrshek-Schallhorn et al. 2013), diabetes also increases the risk for developing depression (Katon 2010; Gask et al. 2011; Nash 2013). Depression, in turn, contributes to decreased diabetes self-care and access to healthcare, including decreased glucose monitoring, missed medical appointments, and increased likelihood of diabetes complications through diabetes mismanagement (Nash 2013; Weaver and Hadley 2011). Conversely, diabetes contributes to depression by deteriorating social networks, draining financial resources, and changing dietary patterns (Katon et al. 2010; McSharry et al. 2013). Food is a cohesive force: holidays, meetings, family meals, and casual gatherings often include food sharing (Lerman Ginzburg 2022b). When an individual cannot partake due to diabetes-related dietary limitations, the ensuing feelings of guilt or shame may provoke reluctance to attend the event, adding to social isolation. This is particularly true of women, who tend to be the primary cooks in their families and do not always receive support from their families to prepare healthier meals (Lerman Ginzburg 2022b).

The relationship between food insecurity and diabetes is rooted in structural factors. For example, Olayinka Shiyanbola and colleagues (2018) found that African Americans with diabetes attributed their disease outcomes to eating habits that were rooted in slavery and an ensuing consistent lack of healthy foods. Shiyanbola and colleagues’ work adds on to Lisa Sumlin and Sharon Brown (2017), who found that African American women attributed their diabetes rates to dietary patterns and cultural culinary practices that are grounded in slavery and expounded by centuries of poverty. Populations that have been abruptly introduced to and adopted Westernised dietary patterns, such as the Pima Native Americans in Arizona and the Nauruan Islanders in Micronesia, are exceptionally vulnerable to developing diabetes due to rapid changes in nutrition, through increased consumption of highly processed foods that are high in sodium, fats, and carbohydrates (Hardin 2015; Smith-Morris 2006; Solomon 2016; Weaver 2018). Western eating patterns were oftentimes forcibly imposed on unwilling communities, and these forced eating patterns went hand-in-hand with overlapping structural factors that accentuated the incidence of diabetes among the affected communities (Hardin 2015; Smith-Morris 2006).

Diabetes and food insecurity are also correlated with poverty, particularly in combination with the absence of affordable healthcare and housing (McNaughton 2013; Mendenhall 2015; Vest et al. 2013). In their study on diabetes among Canadians living in poverty, Dennis Raphael and colleagues (2012) found that since the government’s public policy dictates the incidence and experience of poverty, and that poverty and ensuing material deprivation are contributors to increased rates of diabetes, mitigating diabetes levels require changes at the government level, and not merely at the individual level. Studies such as these serve as a reminder that food insecurity cannot be attributed merely to individual-level food decisions, but also depends on government policies that impact access to financial assistance for low-income families. For example, my research in Puerto Rico explores participants’ experiences of eating whichever food was most easily economically and geographically accessible due to an influx of food taxes, high-end supermarkets in gated communities, and economic and political instability (Lerman Ginzburg 2022a). Thus, merely turning health and treatment into easy formulae ignores the agricultural, historical, social, and political specificities that are interwoven into food consumption (Emily Yates-Doerr 2015). This critical scholarship underscores the need for ethnographic research that situates food insecurity and diabetes not merely within biomedical milieus, but also as products of social, political, and economic forces.

Just as structural factors, such as interpersonal violence and poverty, are critical syndemic perpetuators, similarly community responsibility and collective care play a role in diabetes management. Jessica Hardin (2018), in her ethnographic work on cardiometabolic disorders in Samoa, highlights how healing is both individualistic and collective that both ‘transform individual bodies while impacting the broader community, making evident the problems of the collective in the bodies of individual Christians’, a process which she calls ‘embodied critique’ (5-6). Hardin found that her Samoan participants encouraged one another to link illness events with the state of their relationships. Concepts such as embodied critique move beyond individual bodies to encompass the broader community and the structural factors that underlie diabetes aetiology. While part of the responsibility was on the individual to manage their diabetes, including taking medications, structural factors like poverty and unemployment also contributed to diabetes, which made it harder for study participants to make the necessary changes.

In Puerto Rico too, the participants I worked with linked diabetes with broader socio-political problems, such as Puerto Rico's status as a US territory (Lerman Ginzburg 2017, 2022a). The 1917 Jones Act forced food shipped to Puerto Rico to be marked up in price to compensate for the shipping, but this cost is borne by Puerto Ricans. Their experiences of eating whichever foods were most easily economically and geographically accessible connected food insecurity and diabetes with US colonisation and political nepotism. People developed depression because of the high unemployment and crime rates, ate large quantities of cheap high-fat food because of food insecurity and food apartheid, and developed diabetes. Similarly, in tracing the syndemic underpinnings of diabetes and COVID-19, anthropologists like Merrill Singer (2020) have commented that NAFTA created ‘diabetes-inducing’ environments in Mexico by triggering a growing dependence on unhealthy food imports, mostly from the US, amid a national agricultural deficit that limited Mexicans’ access to the fresh produce grown in their own backyards. The rapid change in agricultural output and ensuing urbanisation created situations of stress, identity loss, and profound changes in dietary practices that contributed to diabetes risk.

Corporate influences on diabetes

Most of this entry has focused on the structural factors that impact the lived experiences of diabetes. However, there is also a corporate component to diabetes that impacts the quality of care. Medical anthropologists studying diabetes in the United States have argued that clinical care in the country is increasingly driven by large corporations, with a mounting emphasis on financial and managerial logics that reduce diabetes care to a narrow set of quantifiable metrics (Hunt et al. 2019). Healthcare providers measure successful diabetes management by monitoring glucose and HbA1c levels, medication regimen adherence, and significant weight loss, all of which are easily enumerated but difficult to achieve due to the multiple structural barriers associated with diabetes. Health insurance plans in the US use these quantitative parameters to determine approval of healthcare expenses while ignoring the underlying structural and social barriers that might prevent patients from managing their diabetes. Scholars also argue that screening, diagnosis, and treatment guidelines over the past forty years have changed under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry despite weak evidence of efficacy in order to benefit from promoting expensive medications to unsuspecting patients (Hunt et al. 2019). Additionally, easing the diagnostic criteria for diabetes means that more people are diagnosed with the illness, and therefore required to take medications. In tracing these linkages, scholars have recommended that individual vigilance over diabetes management be augmented with systemic surveillance by healthcare providers and by policymakers who are at the forefront of medical innovations, healthcare funding, and institutional policies (Rock 2003b). Such recommendations reiterate that structural factors that impact underserved populations with high diabetes rates are rooted in unjust policies that can only be remedied at a higher political level.

Conclusion

Diabetes continues to be a globally pervasive disease, particularly in low- and middle-income countries which are facing rapid changes in the mechanisation of labour, political stability, economic independence, and profound social unrest. Despite the advances in biomedical treatment options, diabetes continues to afflict millions of people around the world, which indicates that there is a pressing need for accessible treatment options. For example, the price of insulin is ten times more expensive in the US than in any other developed country, leading many people with diabetes to ration their insulin and risk their health if their health insurance doesn’t cover the cost (Rajkumar 2020). This travesty highlights the need for thorough healthcare reform in the US in particular. Furthermore, it is imperative that the structural factors underlying diabetes in societies throughout the world be considered during treatment. Multiple, overlapping factors, such as colonisation, poverty, and unemployment are inexorably linked to diabetes, and it is those factors which we must address as we move forward with diabetes treatment options. Thinking of syndemics is a useful way for digging more deeply into the aetiologies of diabetes, so that culturally-specific and affordable preventions might be developed and rapidly implemented.

References

Aghamohammadi-Kalkhoran, Masoumeh and Sousan Valizadeh. 2016. “Fears and concerns of Iranian diabetic women: A phenomenological study.” Journal of Health Psychology 21, no. 7: 1322–30.

Baglar, Rosslyn. 2013. “Oh God, save us from sugar”: An ethnographic exploration of diabetes mellitus in the United Arab Emirates.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 32, no. 2: 109–25.

Balfe, Myles and Peter Jackson. 2007. “Technologies, diabetes, and the student body.” Health & Place 13, no. 4: 775–87.

Berkowitz, Seth A., Travis P. Baggett, Deborah J. Wexler, Karen Huskey and Christina C. Wee. 2013. “Food insecurity and metabolic control among U.S. adults with diabetes.” Diabetes Care 36: 3093–99.

Black, Stephen, Catherine Maitland, Julieanne Hilbers and Kirsty Orinuela. 2017. “Diabetes literacy and informal social support: a qualitative study of patients at a diabetes centre.” Journal of Clinical Nursing 26, no. 1: 248–57.

Bock, Sheila. 2012. “Contextualization, reflexivity, and the study of diabetes-related stigma.” Journal of Folklore Research 49, no. 2: 153–78.

Bockwoldt, Denise, Beth A. Staffileno, Lola Coke and Lauretta Quinn. 2016. “Perceptions of insulin treatment among African Americans with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes.” Journal of Transcultural Nursing 27, no. 2: 172–80.

Booth, Clayton, Maziar M. Nourian, Shannon Weaver and Bethany Gull. 2017. Policy and social factors influencing diabetes among Pima Indians in Arizona, USA.” Public Policy and Administration Research 7, no. 3: 35–9.

Broom, Dorothy and Andrea Whittaker. 2004. “Controlling diabetes, controlling diabetics: Moral language in the management of diabetes type 2.” Social Science & Medicine 58: 2371–82.

Bunkley, Emma. 2021. “Diagnosing diabetes, diagnosing colonialism: An ethnography of the classification and counting of a Senegalese metabolic disease.” Medical Anthropology Theory 8, no. 2: 1–26.

Carruth, Lauren, Sarah Chard, Heather A. Howard, Lenore Manderson, Emily Mendenhall, Emily Vasquez and Emily Yates-Doerr. 2019. “Disaggregating diabetes: New subtypes, causes, and care.” Medical Anthropology Theory 6, no. 4: 119–26.

Duke, Michael. 2017. “Neo-colonialism and health care access among Marshall Islanders in the United States.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31, no. 3: 422–49.

Ely, John, Tony Zavaskis and Susan L. Wilson. 2011. “Diabetes and stress: An anthropological review for study of modernizing populations in the US-Mexico border region.” Rural and Remote Health 11, no. 3: 1758.

Everett, Margaret and Josef Wieland. 2013. “Diabetes among Oaxaca’s transnational population: An emerging syndemic.” Annals of Anthropological Practice 36, no. 2: 295–311.

Everson, Susan A., Siobhan C. Maty, John W. Lynch and George A. Kaplan. 2002. “Epidemiologic evidence for the relation between socioeconomic status and depression, obesity, and diabetes.” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 53, no. 4: 891–5.

Ferzacca, Steve. 2000. “‘Actually, I don’t feel that bad’: Managing diabetes and the clinical encounter.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14, no. 1: 28–50.

———. 2012. “Diabetes and culture.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 411–26.

Foucault, Michel. 1976. The history of sexuality, volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Gask, Linda, Wendy Macdonald and Peter Bower. 2011. “What is the relationship between diabetes and depression? A qualitative meta-synthesis of patient experience of co-morbidity.” Chronic Illness 7, no. 3: 239–52.

Gibson, Kristina and Sarah Dempsey. 2015. “Make good choices, kid: Biopolitics of children’s bodies and school lunch reform in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” Children’s Geographies 13, no. 1: 44–58.

Greenhalgh, Susan and Megan Carney. 2014. “Bad biocitizens? Latinos and the US ‘obesity epidemic’.” Human Organization 73, no. 3: 267–76.

Guell, Cornelia. 2011. “Candi(e)d action: Biosocialities of Turkish Berliners living with diabetes.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25, no. 3: 377–94.

Hardin, Jessica. 2018. Faith and the pursuit of health: Cardiometabolic disorders in Samoa. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Harper, Kryseana, Chandra Y. Osborn and Lindsay Satterwhite Mayberry. 2018. “Patient-perceived family stigma of type 2 diabetes and its consequences.” Families, Systems, & Health 36, no. 1: 113–7.

Hay, M. Cameron. 2010. “Suffering in a productive world: Chronic illness, visibility, and the space beyond agency.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2: 259–74.

Hernandez, Cheri A. 1995. “The experiences of living with insulin-dependent diabetes: Lessons for the diabetes educator.” The Diabetes Educator 21, no. 1: 33–7.

Howard, Heather A. 2014. “Canadian residential schools and urban Indigenous knowledge production about diabetes.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33, no. 6: 529–45.

Hunt, Linda M., Miguel Valenzuela, & Jacqueline Pugh. 1998. “Porque me tocó a mi? Mexican American diabetes patients’ causal stories and their relationship to treatment behaviors.” Social Science & Medicine 26, no. 8: 959–69.

Hunt, Linda M., Hannah S. Bell, Anna C. Martinez-Hume, Funmi Odumosu, and Heather A. Howard. 2019. “Corporate logic in clinical care: The case of diabetes management.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33, no. 4: 463–82.

Hunt, Linda M., Elisabeth A. Arndt, Hannah S. Bell, and Heather A. Howard. 2021. “Are corporations re-defining illness and health? The diabetes epidemic, goal numbers, and blockbuster drugs.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 18, no. 3: 477–97.

Jacklin, Kristen M., Rita I. Henderson, Michael E. Green, Leah M. Walker, Betty Calam and Lynden J. Crowshoe. 2017. “Health care experiences of Indigenous people living with type 2 diabetes in Canada.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 189, no. 3: E106–12.

Joseph, Joseph J. and Sherita H. Golden. 2017. “Cortisol dysregulation: The bidirectional link between stress, depression, and type 2 diabetes mellitus.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1391, no. 1: 20–34.

Karamanou, Marianna, Athanase Protogerou, Gregory Tsoucalas, George Androutsos and Effie Poulakou-Rebelakou. 2016. “Milestones in the history of diabetes mellitus: The main contributors.” World Journal of Diabetes 7, no. 1: 1–7.

Katon, Wayne, Mario Maj and Norman Sartorius, eds. 2010. Depression and diabetes. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kelleher, David. 1988. “Coming to terms with diabetes: Coping strategies and non-compliance.” In Living with chronic illness: The experience of patients and their families, edited by Robert Anderson and Michael Bury, 137–55. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Lee, See-Muah, L.C. Lim, and David Koh. 2015. “Stigma among workers attending a hospital specialist diabetes clinic.” Occupational Medicine 65, no. 1: 67–71.

Lerman, Shir. 2017. “Disordered minds and disordered bodies: Stigma, depression, and obesity syndemics in Puerto Rico.” In Foundations of biosocial health: Stigma and illness interactions, edited by Shir Lerman, Bayla Ostrach and Merrill Singer, 47–83. Lanham, MD: Lexington Press.

Lerman Ginzburg, Shir. 2022a. “Colonial comida: The colonization of food insecurity in Puerto Rico.” Food, Culture & Society 25, no. 1: 18–31.

Lerman Ginzburg, Shir. 2022b. “Sweetened syndemics: Diabetes, obesity, and politics in Puerto Rico.” Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice 30, no. 1: 701–9.

Martin, Emily. 1987. The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.

Manderson, Lenore and Carolyn Smith-Morris, eds. 2010. Chronic conditions, fluid states: Chronicity and the anthropology of illness. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

McNoughton, Darlene. 2013. “‘Diabesity’ and the stigmatizing of lifestyle in Australia.” In Obesity: The meaning of measures and the measure of meanings, edited by M. B. McCullough and Jessica H. Hardin, 71–86. New York: Berghahn Press.

McSharry, Jennifer, Felicity L. Bishop, Rona Moss-Morris and Tony Kendrick. 2013. “‘The chicken and egg thing’: Cognitive representations and self-management of multimorbidity in people with diabetes and depression.” Psychology & Health 28, no. 1: 103-19.

Mendenhall, Emily. 2015. “The ‘cost’ of health care: Poverty, depression, and diabetes among Mexican immigrants in the United States.” In Global mental health: Anthropological perspectives, edited by Brandon Kohrt and Emily Mendenhall, 205–20. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Mendenhall, Emily. 2019. Rethinking diabetes: Entanglements with trauma, poverty, and HIV. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Mendenhall, Emily, Rebecca Seligman, Alicia Fernandez and Elizabeth A. Jacobs. 2010. “Speaking through diabetes: Rethinking the significance of lay discourses on diabetes.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24, no. 2: 220–39.

Mendenhall, Emily, Brandon A. Kohrt, Shane A. Norris, David Ndetei and Dorairaj Prabhakaran. 2017. “Non-communicable disease syndemics: poverty, depression, and diabetes among low-income populations.” The Lancet 389, no. 10072: 951–93.

Montoya, Michael. 2007. “Bioethnic conscription: Genes, race, and Mexicana/o ethnicity in diabetes research.” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 1: 94–128.

———. 2011. Making the Mexican diabetic: Race, science, and the genetics of inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moran-Thomas, Amy. 2019. Traveling with sugar: Chronicles of a global epidemic. Oakland: The University of California Press.

Nash, Jen. 2013. Diabetes and wellbeing: Managing the psychological and emotional challenges of diabetes types 1 and 2. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons.

Page-Reeves, Janet, Shiraz I. Mishra, Joshua Niforatos, Lidia Regino, and Robert Bulten. 2013. “An integrated approach to diabetes prevention: Anthropology, public health, and community engagement.” The Qualitative Report 18, no. 2: 1–22.

Pollak, Margaret. 2018. “Care in the context of a chronic epidemic: Caring for diabetes in Chicago’s Native community.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 32, no. 2: 196–213.

Rajkumar, S. Vincent. 2020. “The high cost of insulin in the United States: An urgent call to action.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 95, no. 1: P22–8.

Rasmussen, Nicolas. 2019. Fat in the Fifties: America’s first obesity crisis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rice, Kathleen, Braden Te Hiwi, Merrick Zwarenstein, Barry Lavallee, Douglas Edward Barre, Stewart B. Harris, and the FORGE AHEAD program team. 2016. “Best practices for the prevention and management of diabetes and obesity-related chronic disease among Indigenous peoples in Canada: A review.” Canadian Journal of Diabetes 40, no. 3: 216–25.

Rock, Melanie. 2003a. “Sweet blood and social suffering: Rethinking cause-effect relationships in diabetes, distress, and duress.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 22, no. 2: 31–74.

———. 2003b. “Death, taxes, public opinion, and the Midas touch of Mary Tyler Moore: Accounting for promises by politicians to help avert and control diabetes.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17, no. 2: 200–32.

Ryan, Maria Emanuel and Veena Raja. 2016. Diet, obesity, diabetes, and periodontitis: A syndemic approach to management.” Current Oral Health Reports 3: 14–27.

Schoenberg, Nancy, Elaine M. Drew, Eleanor Palo Stoller and Cary S. Kart. 2005. “Situating stress: Lessons from lay discourses on diabetes.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 19, no. 2: 171–93.

Seligman, Rebecca, Emily Mendenhall, Maria D. Valdovinos, Alicia Fernandez and Elizabeth A. Jacobs. 2015. “Self-care and subjectivity among Mexican diabetes patients in the United States.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 29, no. 1: 61–79.

Shahab, Yasin, Olataga Alofivae-Doorbinnia, Jennifer Reath, Freya MacMillan, David Simmons, Kate McBride and Penelope Abbott. 2019. “Samoan migrants’ perspectives on diabetes: A qualitative study.” Health Promotion Journal of Australia 30, no. 3: 317–23.

Shiyanbola, Olayinka O., Earlise Ward and Carolyn Brown. 2018. “Sociocultural influences on African Americans’ representations of type 2 diabetes: A qualitative study.” Ethnicity & Disease 28, no. 1: 25–32.

Singer, Merrill. 2009. Introduction to syndemics: A critical systems approach to public and community health. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.

———. 2020. “Deadly companions: COVID-19 and diabetes in Mexico.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 39, no. 8: 660–5.

Smith-Morris, Carolyn. 2006. Diabetes among the Pima: Stories of survival. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Solomon, Harris. 2016. Metabolic living: Food, fat, and the absorption of illness in India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Speight, Jane, Elizabeth Holmes-Truscott, Christel Hendrieckx, and Soren E. Skovlund. 2019. “Assessing the impact of diabetes on quality of life: What have the past 25 years taught us?” Diabetic Medicine 37, no. 3: 483–92.

SturtzSreetharan, Cindi L., Sarah Trainer, Amber Wutich and Alexandra A. Brewis. 2018. “Moral biocitizenship: Discursively managing food and the body after bariatric surgery.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25, no. 2: 221–40.

Sumlin, Lisa L. and Sharon A. Brown. 2017. “Culture and food practices of African American women with type 2 diabetes.” The Diabetes Educator 43, no. 6: 565–75.

Thapa, Tirtha B. 2014. “Living with diabetes: Lay narratives as idioms of distress among the low-caste Dalit of Nepal.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 33, no. 5: 428–40.

Thorsen, Maggie, Ronald McGarvey and Andreas Thorsen. 2020. “Diabetes management at community health centers: Examining associations with patient and regional characteristics, efficiency, and staffing patterns.” Social Science & Medicine 255: 113017.

Tremblay, Marie-Claude, Maude Bradette-Laplante, Holly O. Witteman, Maman Joyce Dogba, Pascale Breault, Jean-Sebastien Paquette, Emmanuelle Careau, and Sandro Echaquan. 2021. “Providing culturally safe care to Indigenous people living with diabetes: Identifying barriers and enablers from different perspectives.” Health Expectations 24, no. 2: 296–306.

Ulijaszek, Stanley and Hayley Lofink. 2006. “Obesity in biocultural perspective.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 337–60.

Vest, Bonnie M., Linda S. Kahn, Andrew Danzo, Laurene Tumiel-Berhalter, Roseanne C. Schuster, Renee Karl, Robert Taylor, Kathryn Glaser, Alexandra Danakas, and Chester H. Fox. 2013. “Diabetes self-management in a low-income population: Impacts of social support and relationships with the health care system.” Chronic Illness 9, no. 2: 145-55.

Vrshek-Schallhorn, Suzanne, Catherine B. Stroud, Leah D. Doane, Susan Minekia, Richard E. Zinbarg, Michelle G. Craske and Emma K. Adam. 2013. “The cortisol awakening response predicts major depression: predictive stability over a 4-year follow-up and effect of depression history.” Psychological Medicine 43, no. 3: 483–93.

Wang, Hui, Ninghua Li, Tawanda Chivese, Mahmoud Werfalli, Hong Sun, Lili Yuen et al and the IDF Diabetes Atlas Committee Hyperglaecemia in Pregnancy Special Interest Group. 2022. “IDF diabetes atlas: Estimation of global and regional gestational diabetes mellitus prevalence for 2021 by International Association of Diabetes in Pregnancy Study Group’s criteria. Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice 183: 109050. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diabres.2021.109050

Weaver, Lesley Jo. 2018. Sugar and tension: Diabetes and gender in modern India. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Weaver, Lesley Jo and Craig Hadley. 2011. “Social pathways in the comorbidity between type 2 diabetes and mental health concerns in a pilot study of urban middle- and upper-class Indian women.” Ethos 29, no. 2: 211–25.

Weaver, Lesley Jo and Emily Mendenhall. 2014. “Applying syndemics and chronicity: Interpretations from studies of poverty, depression, and diabetes.” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 33, no. 2: 92–108.

Weaver, Lesley Jo, Carol M. Worthman, Jason A. DeCaro and S.V. Madhu. 2015. “The signs of stress: Embodiment of biosocial stress among type 2 diabetic women in New Delhi, India.” Social Science & Medicine 131: 122–30.

Wiedman, Dennis. 2012. “Native American embodiment of the chronicities of modernity: Reservation food, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26, no. 4: 595–612.

Willig, Amanda L., Brittany S. Richardson, April Agne and Andrea Cherrington. 2014. “Intuitive eating practices among African-American women living with type 2 diabetes: A qualitative study.” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 114, no. 6: 889–96.

Yates-Doerr, Emily. 2015. The weight of obesity: Hunger and global health in postwar Guatemala. Oakland: The University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Shir Lerman Ginzburg is an assistant professor of public health at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. Her research interests include mental health, diabetes, food insecurity, health disparities, Hispanics, obesity, syndemics, and colonisation. She earned her PhD in medical anthropology from the University of Connecticut. She practices yoga and meditation in her free time.

[1] International Diabetes Federation. 2021. “Diabetes facts & figures.” https://www.idf.org/aboutdiabetes/what-is-diabetes/facts-figures.html. Accessed 18 January 2022.

[2] International Diabetes Federation. 2021. “Diabetes facts & figures.” https://www.idf.org/aboutdiabetes/what-is-diabetes/facts-figures.html. Accessed 18 January 2022.

[3] Mayo Clinic. 2022a. “Type 1 diabetes.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/type-1-diabetes/symptoms-causes/syc-20353011. Accessed 28 November 2022.

[4] Mayo Clinic. 2022a. “Type 1 diabetes.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/type-1-diabetes/symptoms-causes/syc-20353011. Accessed 28 November 2022.

[5] International Diabetes Federation. 2020. “Type 1 diabetes.” https://idf.org/aboutdiabetes/type-1-diabetes.html. Accessed 28 November 2022.

[6] Mayo Clinic. 2002b. “Gestational diabetes.” https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gestational-diabetes/symptoms-causes/syc-20355339. Accessed 29 November 2022.

[7] National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. 2022. “Gestational diabetes.” https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/what-is-diabetes/gestational. Accessed 29 November 2022.

[8] Harvard Medical School. 2022. “Type 2 diabetes mellitus.” https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/type-2-diabetes-mellitus-a-to-z. Accessed 29 November 2022.

[9] International Diabetes Federation. 2021. “Diabetes facts & figures.” https://www.idf.org/aboutdiabetes/what-is-diabetes/facts-figures.html. Accessed 18 January 2022.

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Transhumanism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 02:55:58 +0000

A brain-computer interface. Photo: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber, 2009

Abou Farman

The New School for Social Research

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22transhumanism

Abstract:

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

Introduction

Transhumanism is a recent set of common ideals, or ideology, with the stated aim of transcending the current physical and mental limitations of the human by technological means. It has primarily taken shape as an American secular scientific project, albeit with growing international reach. Proponents of transhumanism explicitly state that the current form of our species is not its final one, and that a technologically enhanced computational form—transcending the human—will emerge through what they see as the inevitable and exponential acceleration of technoscience, especially in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the informatic and cognitive sciences (NBIC).

Because of its unwavering espousal of these technologies as the only and ideal route to transcending human limits, transhumanism has grown in reach, appeal, and power alongside the twenty-first century rise of Silicon Valley and the digital tech and biotech sectors more generally. Many of the tech sector’s power players at companies such as Google, Paypal, and Space X are associated with transhumanism. What’s more, ideas that have circulated amongst transhumanists have entered a broader social milieu: for instance, as anthropologist and media scholar Tamara Kneese (forthcoming) has documented, digital and cybernetic immortality (the maintenance of avatars, profiles, and conversations after death) are now part of the discourse and concerns of many tech companies and start-ups.

Transhumanism is part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’, a series of ideas and social and technological developments that have put under question the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. Scholars trace humanism’s roots to currents in Greek and Roman thought, and later to the European Renaissance where writers and thinkers began to focus their concerns on human affairs, human thought, and the human condition, rather than on theological (pertaining to a transcendent God) or parochial (pertaining only to their own group delimited by religion, ethnicity, or geography) concerns. But as a specific intellectual tradition and social ideology bearing the name, humanism took form starting in the early nineteenth century. The central tenets held that humans, unlike other parts of nature, are endowed with reason and the capacity for thought and self-awareness; that humans are undetermined and free to make their own laws, and shape their own environment with tools and imagination; and that there is no pre-determined future, fixed destiny, or a transcendent and otherworldly destination, meaning that humans were entirely responsible for making their own history and hence their own future in this earthly world (Janicaud 2005; Sartre [1946] 2007 Chakrabarty 1997; Taylor 2005). This set of claims outlined at once the nature of humanity as a whole and built an idea of humans in contrast to other beings to which the same attributes did not apply and hence the same set of political and legal rights did not extend.

Critics of humanism have pointed out that the supposedly universal figure of the human was at the same time an exclusionary device, erasing or even explicitly justifying the on-going exploitations of non-European people through slavery and colonialism. Along with colonial expansion, the rise of scientific thought, and the gradual advance of secularism, a supposedly universal humanism was marshalled to exclude a vast range of non-European peoples from full participation in modern politics and power. Thus, for example, women were barred from political participation because they were said to not be as fully endowed with reason as men. People of African descent, as well as Indigenous, Aboriginal, and tribal people, were not included in the Euro-American image of humanity (Wynter 2003) and were rendered morally and legally subject to enslavement, extermination, and exploitation.

In another vein, there has been a critique of humanism as a form of unwarranted and destructive exceptionalism. That is, by imagining human thought and action as categorically different from the way the rest of the universe operates (the universe being biologically or physically determined, without thought or self-awareness), humanism rendered the human an exception to nature, with tragic consequences. For example, this exceptionalism has led to the over-exploitation of nature and the hubristic use of technology to harness unlimited but destructive power beyond the control of humans such as with nuclear bombs or the use of fossil fuels, causing climate change.

These critiques gave rise to a range of posthumanist positions, such as new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), vitalist materialism (Braidotti 2013), multispecies ethnographies (Helmreich and Kirksey 2010), new animism (Harvey 2006) and animacies (Chen 2012), cyborg studies (Downey and Dumit 2006) and critical posthumanism (Roden 2015). These attempt to dissolve the figure of the exceptional human into a broader context wherein the human is neither master of its environment nor maker of its own future; rather, the human appears as part of (indeed, as an effect of) a wide array of forces, agents, and relations over which it cannot have proper and predictable control.

On one level, transhumanism has emerged as one of the many symptoms of the exhaustion of humanism, breaking down and transcending ideas of human exceptionalism in the way that other posthumanisms purport to, for example by merging humans with the technology that they have created. Some analysts, however, describe transhumanism as simply humanism on steroids (Wolfe 2010, Fuller and Lipinska 2015); that is, as a set of goals and practices that merely extend Enlightenment notions of a human essence set apart from the world by language, reason, culture, emotions, and so on (Pickering 2011).

Transhumanist arguments and narratives themselves often claim both: on the one hand, they claim humanism and the Enlightenment as their true heritage (Bostrom 2005, Hughes 2012) and argue that humans have always used tools and have co-evolved with their technologies, so that contemporary versions such as cyborgs or other human-machine hybrids are not new but only a more complex and more intelligent aspect of this history (Bostrom 2014); on the other, they project a radical break from humanity and human history, such that superior forms of machine intelligence will take over and be an independent force in the universe, transcending the human condition, including the evolutionary inheritance of a biological body, and making humans obsolete (Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom 2014). What’s more, this process of technological advancement towards a superintelligent computational civilisation, started off by human projects of mind uploading, is regarded as part of a universal telos (or ultimate purpose) of existence beyond the human, where the emergence of humans is only an instance of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe. Thus, human intelligence, which results in control over and the modification of nature via science and technology, becomes part of a nonhuman destiny. In these instances, transhumanism breaks with its humanist roots.

If transhumanism’s speculative ideology of posthuman intelligence and destiny is often disregarded by anthropologists and other social theorists, it may be due in part to the focus on more immediate social concerns regarding the body, technological enhancement, and genetic manipulation. It also may be due in part to the fact that transhumanism’s projection of nonhuman intelligence and destiny in the universe are difficult to place within a recognisable political philosophy or genealogy. This division between the enhancement projects of transhumanism, which may well fit the limits of a secular humanism, and the speculative focus on mind, consciousness, and eventually superintelligence, is sometimes characterised as carbon-based versus silicon-based transhumanism (Sorgner 2021). Regardless, given the centrality of the figure of the human (anthropos) for anthropology, these debates coincide with long-standing core concerns in the discipline on the nature of human nature. Ironically, transhumanism’s position that there is nothing either fixed or sacred about human nature overlaps with a strong trend in anthropology that challenges unitary theories of the human (Fuentes et al. 2010).

This entry first traces the formation of transhumanism in relation to relevant histories of humanism. It then highlights people and ideas that speculate on and project futures reflective of transhumanism’s specific stripe of posthumanism. It will review some of the anthropological studies of transhumanism and conclude by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of posthumanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

The emergence of transhumanism

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist with eugenicist visions of a future scientific utopia honed through a strange mid-twentieth century marriage of socialism and evolutionary biology, of social equality and eugenicist reform. By the time he published the now-famous essay titled plainly ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley had already written on humanism, biology, and evolution, including a seminal text on the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was an atheist and, in his own terms, a ‘scientific humanist’, serving as the first president of the British Humanist Association (Weindling 2012), and later as first director of UNESCO. Importantly, Huxley begins the essay not with humans but with the cosmos and specifically ‘cosmic self-awareness’. That is, he begins by applying evolutionary schemas not just to biology on earth, but to consciousness in the universe: ‘As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself’. The emergence of self-awareness, he continues, ‘is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe - in a few of us human beings’. (2015, 12) The formulation is striking as much for its teleological vision (some latent potential is being realised in the cosmos) as for the odd place it assigns humans in that realisation. For humans appear at once as central actors and incidental vectors: ‘man’s responsibility and destiny’, Huxley writes, is to ‘be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible’. Humans are appointed to take charge in this new version of evolution, driving the universe towards its self-awareness, yet they are mere vehicles for the fulfilment of a destiny beyond the human. Later, transhumanists would push this logic to its end in imagining a future yielded by humanity to superior computational forms of intelligence.

It is noteworthy that Huxley, along with a cohort of fellow scientists and eugenicists such as J.B.S. Haldane, was very much engaged in technological prediction, speculating on space travel, reproductive technologies, and mechanical and industrial prowess (Farman 2015), and yet his essay on transhumanism does not mention any of that. Rather, its vision is centred on ‘the most ultimate satisfaction’ which he describes as the ‘depth and wholeness of the inner life’ for which we need ‘techniques of spiritual development’. In proper pursuit of this dimension,

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity (2015, 15).

Two main tensions in these passages remain coiled in transhumanism’s practical, ideological, and anthropological features. The first is the tension between a humanist (i.e. non-theistic) sense of responsibility for humanity’s own future and the fulfilment of a larger non-human potential: a notion of a human destiny beyond the human that characterises the strongest posthumanist vision in transhumanism. The second is the tension between a scientific, materialist notion of consciousness and a non-reductive one, often glossed as spiritual.

The focus on consciousness and an awakening universe would be taken up by later transhumanists, notably Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt, but the first re-uptake of the term ‘transhuman’ comes via the ‘father of cryonics’ (that is, the low temperature freezing and storage of human bodies), Robert Ettinger. A physics teacher, Ettinger began ruminations on death and the power of science in hospital beds after being wounded in World War II, publishing his own science fiction story about freezing and immortality in 1948. He shifted to non-fiction, describing the technical possibility of storing humans in cold freeze. Initially self-published, his first book, The prospect of immortality (1965), was eventually distributed by the publishing company Doubleday after the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave Ettinger a thumbs up. The idea garnered some attention in the United States at the time, with Ettinger securing an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and the book getting translated into 11 languages. But none of that translated into a large following or a proper movement nor into volunteers who wanted to get frozen.

Cryonics attracted a small, motley crew of dedicated people who wanted to push the limits and utopian possibilities of science in remaking humans and society. With a set of actual practices (storing bodies for the future), and the prospect of defeating death—the hardest of human and humanist limits—cryonics became transhumanism’s catchment site (Farman 2020), attracting space enthusiasts, biologists, cryobiologists, physicists, writers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and, crucially, computer scientists. This assemblage, navigating the space between science and science fiction, a space that later came to be known as futurism, became the core of the transhumanist movement, though it did not yet bear that name.

The term ‘transhuman’ does not appear in The prospect of immortality, but the book does set out to explore the key notion of non-human intelligence:

Modes and standards of conduct and intercourse may have to be developed with respect to intelligent creatures other than human. The three outstanding possibilities seem to concern the dolphins, robots, and extraterrestrial life forms. (1965, 152)

The anti-exceptionalist move to shift intelligence away from an exclusively human attribute to one shared by aquatic creatures, aliens, and robots had roots in the emerging post-war theories of cybernetics. Without distinguishing between the organic and non-organic, cybernetics examined the behaviour of complex systems in terms of feedback loops, wherein all behaviour could be gauged based on input and output signals which would then modify the system. The simplest example was a thermostat which could be thought of as self-aware, on some level, because it would constantly gauge and modify its behaviour based on information it received from the environment. All behaviour and communication, according to cybernetics (Wiener 1954), was based on this kind of loop, whether the system in question be biological or machinic. Here information and feedback loops became merged with behaviour and intelligence, blurring the boundaries that separated humans from other animals, animals from machines, and inanimate matter from animate beings.

Whilst many secular humanists recoiled from the prospect of the computational reductionism of mind and machine, Ettinger, following cybernetics, tapped into the potential offered by this line of thinking, suggesting the continuation of personal identity beyond biological death through some version of non-organic or artificial intelligence (AI) where a human mind/self would be instantiated on non-biological platforms (1965, 129-33). This was, as Ettinger himself acknowledges, an older trope in science fiction, but from early on, cryonics and immortalism moved beyond simple biological survival to imagine and claim such a post-human future.

It is in Ettinger’s next book, first published in 1972 and provocatively titled Man into super man, that the terms transhuman and transhumanity begin to find a place in the vocabulary of immortality and technological futurism for the first time. Without referencing Julian Huxley (even though he writes several pages on his anti-utopian brother Aldous), Ettinger discusses the achievement of transhumanity as a human goal, with prospects for greater intra-human warmth (110) as well as ‘the storage of personalities in electronic data banks’ (35), an idea he takes, like many others, from science fiction, where disembodied brains had been present at least since 1929 when Huxley’s colleague, another socialist scientist, J.D. Bernal proposed the possibility in his well-known work of speculation The world, the flesh and the devil. Like Huxley, Bernal is amongst the figures claimed today by transhumanists as a predecessor.

Attempts to move away from humanism feature in Ettinger’s earlier edition of the book, in which he counts ‘Eastern Communism and Western humanism’ as ‘the flakiest forms of the traditional insanity – idealism’, and calls them ‘principal secular religions’ (120). However, it’s in the preface for the 1989 edition that he clearly marks a division with humanism: ‘What is happening is a discontinuity in history, with mortality and humanity on one side - on the other immortality and transhumanity’ (5). This position becomes a call that continues to echo in the transhuman world in many ways: humanity must choose transhumanism or fall behind and possibly keep on dying, for, as Ettinger writes, ‘Human stupidity is formidable’ (162).

Transhumanism as a term and an ideology gained additional traction through an Iranian-born populariser and author, Fereidoun Esfandiary, known by his transhumanist name FM-2030. Wanting a better world but disillusioned with cold war politics, nationalism, and the framework of human rights, Esfandiary moved from earthly to cosmic politics with Upwingers, a book he published in 1973. His futuristic predictions and plans got him TV appearances and teaching contracts at the New School and then at UCLA where he became another nucleus around which the futurist movement would cluster. In 1989, having formally renamed himself, FM-2030 published Are you a transhuman?, a manifesto challenging the status quo and envisioning a utopian world of limitless energy, food, and joy. After his medical death, FM-2030 entered cryopreservation at Alcor on July 8, 2000.

It was in the California of the 1980s that transhumanism began to take shape as a movement, and would later continue its growth. FM-2030’s early collaborator in West Coast futurism was Natasha Vita-More, now a leading transhumanist artist and writer married to Max More, a transhumanist philosopher and president and CEO of Alcor, the main cryonics company in the United States. Born Max T. O’Connor in the United Kingdom, More changed his name a year after he moved across the Atlantic to the University of Southern California in 1988 to complete a Ph.D. With Tom Morrow, another man with a signifying name, they launched a journal and an institute called Extropy, named to counter the pessimistic destiny promised by entropy. The Extropy Institute, joined by many who had recently gathered around a space exploration group called L-5, became the new hub of West Coast futurism, focusing on enhancement technologies that, in the early 1990s, were beginning to hold up a new set of promises: control over biology, control over the brain, control over the size and speed of computational processes, control over all matter in the universe. Many current futurists and immortalists trace their roots and early sense of transhumanist excitement back to the Extropian gatherings. The dissolution of the Extropy Institute would lead, in 1998, to the formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), the first of its kind, co-founded by philosophers David Pearce and Nick Bostrom, who later set up the Future of Humanity Institute, a transhumanist think tank at Oxford University advocating strongly for technofuturistic solutions to human problems.

With a representative body also came conferences (Transvision) and publications (Journal of Transhumanism), declarations, mission statements, as well as internal conflicts. Although transhumanists generally see themselves as iconoclasts eschewing doctrine and imagine technology as an independent force apart from, even transcending, politics, transhumanism was never free of ideology. From the early years, social regulations and religious congregations were feared as threats to technological advancement. With its emphasis on the individual body as well as on individualism as an accompanying ethical stance, transhumanism moved in step with libertarianism. Libertarianism had and continues to have two strands: a left anarchist one and a capitalist, free-market individualist one, the latter where Ayn Rand is a common influence and innovation through the market is assumed to be the only way forward with no regard for historical and structural forms of inequality. Whilst some transhumanists have espoused a more liberal democratic ethic based on a regulated civil libertarianism (Hughes 2004), the dominant Silicon Valley tendency has been marked by strong anti-government individualism and free-market ideology.

Even as the link to the power and capital of Silicon Valley has made the souped-up capitalism of Randian techno-libertarians dominant, transhumanism is not a uniform project. For example, former WTA president and sociologist James Hughes (2004, 2012) has tried to underline the distance between the Silicon Valley billionaires and socially progressive transhumanism. Additionally, there are other variations in transhumanism besides: the transgender transhumanism of inventor Martine Rothblatt (2013); AI guru Ben Goertzel’s cosmism (2010); propositions for a Black transhuman liberation theology (Butler 2020); and budding anarchist attempts to reshape the propositions of transhumanism.

If Silicon Valley has influenced transhumanism, so transhumanism has transformed Silicon Valley. As transhumanists gained ground and moved into powerful positions, their propositions for immortality, mind uploading, nanotechnology, space colonisation, and the expansion of consciousness into the cosmos have gained ground in the tech world. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, known for his theory of the singularity, helped set up the Singularity University at NASA and was hired as an adviser by Google. In turn, Google would start its own company to do research into extending lives – the California Life Company (CALICO). Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, took on the mantle of transhumanism and has funded biotech projects aimed at defeating death, or advancing brain mapping and mind uploading options. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has also espoused transhumanism, whilst anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey transplanted his research organisation, the SENS Foundation, to Mountain View, California.

Due in part to its espousal of right-wing libertarianism and heroic individualism, its ideological linkages to eugenics, and calls for the maximisation of ‘personal autonomy’ (Anders 2001, 3) over an analysis of social forces, transhumanism as a movement has remained overwhelmingly white and mostly Anglo-American in membership. Racism, colonialism, imperialism, or class inequality are almost never taken up as issues of importance for thinking about the past or future of humanity, with some key actors promoting far-right ideologies. For example, Thiel has also co-authored a nativist book called The diversity myth, reportedly donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, and backed the Donald Trump presidency.

Although the membership continues to skew male, gender has become an important point of inflection within transhumanist thinking in part because of the presence of inventor, CEO, and writer Martine Rothblatt who has seen gender as the paradigmatic site for jettisoning biological heritage. Rothblatt, who herself transitioned in the 90s and has advocated for transgender rights, has written about The apartheid of sex (1995) and the creative freedom and technological power to determine one’s own form (2011), what transhumanist philosopher Anders Sandberg has called ‘morphological freedom’ (2013).

**Consciousness, telos, and cosmic utopianism**

When today’s transhumanists trace their history back to the Enlightenment, it is to a particular strain of science-based utopian humanism that focuses on the human power to determine its own future. This largely eschews the tragic strain of humanism (Eagleton 2009), in which the human condition is thought to be locked into insurmountable contradictions and the inevitability of death. Of course, the very basic notion of progress at the centre of the Enlightenment and modern thought is inseparable from European utopianism and scientific advancement. Science and technological advances, for example, were already part of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, with its vision of a future state in which humans live long and can use technology to satisfy their needs. Transhumanists have been most attracted to the stadial framework of progress and utopia, such as the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1792 Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind which presents an atheistic telos moving through ten epochs of development to arrive at the ‘epoch of the future progress of mankind’ when the growth of scientific knowledge would put an end to inequality, and human moral progress would start on its final path. Whereas European thinkers such as Condorcet are mentioned as ‘proto-transhumanists’ by the WTA (now called ‘Humanity+’) and by thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, it is important to note that the original European Enlightenment project was to create a better world through the proper rearrangement of social units. Transhumanism, on the other hand, hinges its utopian vision on the rearrangement of molecular, even atomic, units as per nanotechnology, or the ‘informatisation’ of the universe. In this sense, it fits the neoliberal paradigm where state and society are pushed aside in favour of individual responsibility for health and advancement.

The informatic approach, influenced by cybernetics, was popularised by Ray Kurzweil in The singularity is near (2005), a widely-read book on the emergence of an intelligent universe. In this view, the rise of intelligence is the telos of the universe, and technology is the means and the index of this evolution. From its origins in flint-knapping to the current digital platforms whose power and speed are rising exponentially, human intelligence has brought the world to the brink of a vast machinic, nonhuman ‘intelligence explosion’ coming upon us so fast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will soon no longer apply. That event-horizon is called ‘the singularity’, a concept originated in 1993 with computer scientist, mathematician, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and institutionalised by AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Tyler Emerson, who set up the Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) in 2000.

The key aspects of the informatic theory of the universe are that A) all matter is constituted, or at least can be captured and encoded, by information and complexity; since all matter, including the human brain, is constituted by and legible as patterns of information, there must be a continuum between not only human and nonhuman animals but also biological and nonbiological matter. Thus, B) humans may be regarded as one instance of the evolution of the universe from simple to complex informatic formations, bound to be superseded by super-intelligence. And since computation can capture and modify information, so C) information in the informatic cosmos may be translated from one medium to another, making all mental states potentially transferrable across matter. Minds may be downloaded and uploaded, migrating from the electrochemistry of the brain to a computational platform, rendering the biological body obsolete. This latter is the task and promise of AI. After humans create real AI, Kurzweil writes,

the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. (2005, 389)

This progression of intelligence over time and into all matter in the universe has also been called a ‘telos of rationality’ (Bostrom 2008).

A number of philosophical objections have been raised regarding the informatic view. Scholars like Katherine Hayles (1999) have argued that the informatic approach, in which any mind may be transferred to other substrates (i.e. downloaded and uploaded) because it is reducible to information, mistakenly reinscribes a Cartesian dualism of mind that presumes the separation of mind from the matter in which it arises. In this way, it is actually undermining its own materialist assumptions. The transhumanist goal of reproducing consciousness in silicon-based substrates will fail because a state in silicon can simply not be the same as a state in the synaptic and neuronal assemblage that is the biological brain. As David Roden (2015, 56) points out, however, this does not preclude the development of other kinds of powerful if unpredictable mental states (and thus versions of personhood) in computational agents, in which case a kind of posthuman being, ‘Human 2.0’ as he calls it, would emerge. A thornier distinction between consciousness and computation may make that debate moot. Reviewing Kurzweil’s work in The New York Review of Books, for example, the philosopher John Searle (2002) argued that ‘increased computational power’ is a different order of thing from ‘consciousness in computers’. In that case, there would be no posthuman case to make, as human consciousness will not have been broached at all.

Either way, as most scholars agree, consciousness is a hard problem to crack (Chalmers 2002, Nagel 2012), and no view regarding it is settled. Anthropologically, it is just the absence of convincing accounts of what it is that opens up an undetermined realm in which speculative ideas grow, giving shape to current transhuman practices and subjectivities. These in turn shift the function and valence of important, though unstable, categories such as ‘consciousness’ itself, and challenge established notions of ‘personhood’ and ‘human’, two categories whose distinct coherence relies on the kind of self-awareness associated with human consciousness.

Transhumanism as subject of scholarly inquiry

Much of the scholarship on transhumanism has moved along two paths. The first is in relation to the enhancement and modification of the body (brains included) and, ultimately, of the nature of being human. In these debates, transhumanism becomes a bellwether for technology’s dangers and possibilities. It has been termed as one of the greatest threats to humanity by its detractors (Fukuyama 2002) and heralded as the best way to save humanity by its proponents (Bostrom 2014). Susan Levin (2022) has made a convincing argument that the empirical bases of transhumanist speculation are too often erroneous, especially with regards to the components of intelligence and rational decision-making. For example, whereas transhumanists tend to dismiss emotions as irrational, cognitive neuroscience has shown the importance of emotions in good decision-making and creative thinking. Similarly, the individualism of some transhumanist visions belies the fact that intelligence is distributed and contextual. Critics also liken the enhancement fantasies of transhumanists to eugenicist fantasies that reek of racism and will lead to the abandonment of fellow humans who are not enhanced or on their way to technological posthumanity (Levin 2018, Farman 2020). In response, transhumanists tend to flatten all medical and technological intervention as proto-transhumanist, arguing that you cannot coherently accept hearing aids whilst rejecting neural implants, or promote lifesaving medicine in one instance whilst rejecting the technological quest to eliminate death. Either way, the discussion about transforming human nature via technology and the control of biology is not unique to transhumanism; it has been part of an older general debate about the power of science, especially since the emergence of genetic biology, the identification of DNA, and the manipulation of species genomes gave humans a vision of ‘limitless self-modification’, to use ethicist Paul Ramsey’s (2009) words from the 1970s.

A second path has run along attempts to identify transhumanism as essentially a kind of religion. Some (Geraci 2010) have read visions of a machinic future in which the human species must be superseded in order for a better world to emerge as an extension, not of secular humanism, but of the Christian dialectics of apocalypse and salvation. However, this approach does not account for the new forms, subjectivities, technologies, and philosophies that emerge through transhumanism. Jon Bialecki (2022) takes a nuanced approach in his ethnography of Mormon transhumanists, suggesting that Mormonism and transhumanism ‘rhyme’; that is, they have affinities that resonate with each other, and a group of Mormons recognising this have been building on the resonance. Such resonances between Mormonism and transhumanism include attempts to resurrect the dead, the conviction that man can become god, and the possibility that humans live in infinitely simulated worlds. One might point equally to affinities between transhumanism and an unlikely mix of emerging intellectual trends, such as the growing interest in panpsychism (Klinge 2020), the mixture of animism and technology in ‘techno-animist’ perspectives (Richardson 2016), or the emergence of informatic selves (Farman 2014), in which selves are increasingly understood and enacted through informational or algorithmic platforms that record one’s movements, choices, desires, or physiology as informational patterns.

Despite its engagement with the core figure of anthropology—anthropos—transhumanism has yielded only a handful of sustained studies in anthropology. The overall anthropological question turns around subject formation: what kinds of subjects are made through the ideals, technologies, practices, and social formations of transhumanism? Bialecki’s (2019, 2022) aforementioned work on Mormon transhumanists examines how these two sets of ideas have come together in shaping the new subjectivity of Mormon transhumanism. Anya Bernstein (2015, 2019) studied Russian transhumanists, tracing their history through Russian cosmism, pre-revolutionary esoteric futurist movements, and the Soviet scientific and utopian secularist project, showing how Russian transhumanists disagree amongst themselves over the relationship of mind to body, over notions of personhood, and over the spiritual ideas and practices as opposed to mechanical approaches to body and mind. In either case, Bernstein argues, their approach is quite different from the American libertarian hyper-individualist vein, embracing a more collective, kin-based approach. Nevertheless, she identifies a tension that echoes the North American version of transhumanism: seeking life beyond mortality under the constant shadow of and obsession with extermination and other world-ending scenarios. Jenny Huberman (2021) brings a comparative approach to suggest that within transhumanism, kinship and personhood are being reconfigured. Drawing on Irving Hallowell, for instance, she argues that transhumanists are envisaging an Ojibwa-like world in which personhood is distributed among an array of other-than-human powerful beings, and relations with robots and software-based kin are already changing what the future family may look like. I have examined the development of algorithmic subjectivities (Farman 2014), transhuman spiritualities (Farman 2019), and suspended personhood, produced by transhumanism’s quest for immortality, specifically via cryonics, and the challenges to the category of personhood in secular law (Farman 2013, 2020). The Technoscientific Immortality project at the University of Bergen, led by anthropologist Annelin Eriksen, is researching changes in social relations and notions of the human through six transhumanist case studies between the US and Russia that are radically transforming practices and awareness around death, long considered as one of the central markers of humanity. Together, these studies underline the ways in which transhumanism is unstable and destabilising, not fitting neatly into categorical divides, becoming a contested but flexible site for further thinking and rethinking of what it is to be human and to be conscious.

This may be one reason why some social theorists have found it hard to simply brush transhumanism aside, even if they disagree with its libertarian tendencies (Hayles 2011). Andrew Pickering (2011) has made the argument that transhumanist cyborgs are interesting in their human-nonhuman ‘mangle’, but overall transhumanism starts from a very narrow premise regarding the kinds of possible mind-body capacities that exist and may be imagined for the future. As powerful as a human-machine cyborg may be in some respects (for example, in knowing what you should buy!), computationalism only cultivates one aspect of possible powers in what Pickering (2009) calls the ‘performative brain’, many others of which may be cultivated through other modalities, from psychedelic experiments to meditation. The machinic, in other words, is not attentive to other emergent selves and ‘the continual bubbling up of irreducible novelty in the world’. Thus, the problem is not that transhumanism is essentialist with respect to human nature—indeed, transhumanists see humans as a species whose nature is to change its nature, and breaking up the category ‘human’ presents the opportunity to transcend our ‘natural heritage’ and its limits (Bailey 2005; Kurzweil 2005). Rather, the problem is that transhumanism values only a specific form of intelligence or life, one that is translatable and shapeable via computation (Farman 2020). In this mode, the machinic and the computational are turned into their own reified nonbiological value—that is, they are valued in and of themselves as though they were meaningful aside from the human social contexts in which they exist. To transhumanists, the value of nonhuman superintelligence overrides human interests, and is encoded in efforts to achieve the vaunted telos of a posthuman techno-civilisation. For example, in transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom’s (2002, 5) influential analysis, one of the existential risks to humanity is argued, paradoxically, to be when ‘the potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted’ by human societies, even if ‘human life continues in some form’. What is valued over humanness in this informatic cosmology is the perpetuation of a posthuman form of life—in which the power, accuracy, and speed of computational technologies become the utmost measures of worth, mainly because these are also supposed to lead to the rise of conscious beings who, as one famous blog has it, are ‘less wrong’.

Transhumanism then may be properly understood as a social project for claiming particular techno-libertarian futures, imagined as part of an inevitable and universal trajectory of intelligence and informatic complexity. Whereas these futures promise emancipation from the limitations of human biology and embodiment, including those of race, gender, and even labour, they keep erasing and so in practice reproducing the racial and settler colonial histories and on-going structural inequalities that undergird the development of such technologies and the accrual of power and wealth to a few. In this way, they follow the white mythos of the autonomous subject ‘whose freedom is in actuality possible only because of the surrogate effect of servants, slaves, wives, and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor’ (Atanasoki and Vorna 2019, 17-9). In other words, whatever is invoked in the name of humanity or transhumanity, the futures idealised by transhumanists cannot be valued universally.

Indeed, transhumanist forms of life represent a danger, especially to those in already structurally precarious situations (racially, geopolitically, by class, by status, by physical ability) as well as those engaged in political struggles that aim against the wider contemporary socioeconomic and civilisational formations. As others have remarked, America’s soldiers are the most advanced transhumanist prototypes,

with their smart weapons, their body armor, their night-vision goggles, their special diets, their training in and integration into remote robotic combat systems, and, we would suspect, their ingestion of neuropharmaceuticals such as Modafinil to keep them alert even when deprived of sleep for 36 hours (Allenby and Sarewitz 2011, 24).

This is no accident. The projected transhumanist technologies often emerge from military research and are fed back into the military. Despite their libertarian gestures against the state, high-powered transhumanists are enmeshed with the American state and the military: for example, Ray Kurzweil has worked closely with DARPA and NASA, whilst Peter Thiel owns a policing and surveillance company called Palantir (closely linked to Cambridge Analytica).

Conclusion

Transhumanism is part of the wider set of posthumanisms that have ripped apart the common Enlightenment-era conjunction of person and human—that is, of an entity whose dignity and rights were premised on a notion of special consciousness that emphasised self-awareness, reason, and the ability to speak and act freely. If, as transhumanists claim, those features are not exclusively based in biological forms, and may be attributes of computational devices, then personhood is decoupled from exclusive humanism, and even multi-specieism, and its attributes and pursuant rights may be extended to what was previously thought of as inert or disenchanted matter.

Transhumanism will likely raise questions of personhood in anthropology, forcing us to rethink its relations to nature and technology: is it enough to be able to attribute agency or consciousness to mountains or avatars in order to make them count as persons? Do agency and consciousness only arise relationally, as an effect of interactions between beings? Or is there some metaphysical or subjective essence that agency or consciousness refer to and which may or may not be discerned in entities such as mountains or avatars? Is ‘personhood’ a more inclusive category than ‘human’? Or are these questions moot, because they are effects of formations of power that constantly work to render certain people’s claims to rights and power impossible, regardless of the categories used, and despite the struggles of people to expand the embrace of those categories?

Whilst the informatic cosmology of mind and cosmos allows transhumanists to move beyond the secular humanist disenchantment of matter and argue for such things as robot rights or intelligent matter in the universe, it also narrows the possibilities of mind by fetishising algorithmic intelligence (Ziewitz 2016). For in the name of expanding human capacities and transcending human limits, algorithmic modalities are narrowing the range of valued forms of life in ways often reminiscent of the colonial divides that separated ‘primitive’ from ‘civilised’—in this case, separating the technologically enhanced forms of life from regular old Homo sapiens, and without acknowledging the social and historical conditions that enable enhancement. Thus the populations overvalued and undervalued in these imaginaries have been de facto racially and geopolitically defined; that is, white Americans, or Western-educated urban denizens more generally, are the main proponents as well as the assumed subjects of that future. Other human socialities and possible lifeways are erased from that future, and quite likely a particular human subjectivity is being produced by the mediation of computational devices that makes for a recursive loop of algorithmic affirmation: we learn with computers how to behave computationally and so we value computational behaviour. What is noticeable in the meantime is that as transhumanism has gotten increasingly entrenched in the tech world’s networks of power, its discourse, anxieties, and projects have become harder to distinguish from those of the military, scientific, technological, and financial institutions of late capitalism: existential risk, space colonies, neural implants, robotic automation, avatar selves, and mind uploading have moved from being the maligned concerns of a few technofuturists to more common, popular goals of a post-human future.

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to those whose comments helped me think through these matters more deeply, especially the editor of the encyclopedia Felix Stein, two anonymous reviewers, and Noreen Khawaja.

References

Allenby, Braden and Daniel Sarewitz. 2011. The techno-human condition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bailey, Ronald. 2005. Liberation biology: The scientific and moral case for biotechnology. New York: Prometheus Books.

Bernal, J.D. 1929. The world, the flesh and the devil: An enquiry into the future of the three enemies of the rational soul. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co.

Bernstein, Anya. 2015. “Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 4: 766–81.

———. 2019. The future of immortality: Remaking life and death in contemporary Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bialecki, Jon. 2017. “After, and before, anthropos.” Platypus: Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) Blog, April 6. Accessed July 20, 2018. http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/after-and-before-anthropos/.

———. 2019. “Gods, AIs, and Mormon transhumanism.” Platypus: Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) Blog, February 14. Accessed April 20, 2021. http://blog.castac.org/2019/02/gods-ais-mormon-transhumanism/

———. 2022. Machines for making gods: Mormonism, transhumanism and worlds without end. New York: Fordham University Press.

Bostrom, Nick. 2002. “Existential risks and related hazards.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1: 1–30.

———. 2005. “A history of transhumanist thought.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 14, no. 1: 1–25 .

———. 2008. “Why I want to be a posthuman when I grow up.” In Medical enhancement and posthumanity, edited by B. Gordijn and R. Chadwick, 107–36. Dordrecht: Springer.

———. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. New York: Oxford University Press.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

Butler, Philip. 2020. Black transhuman liberation theology: Technology and spirituality. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1997. “The time of history and the times of gods.” In The politics of culture in the shadow of capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, 35–60. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chalmers, David J. 2002. “The puzzle of conscious experience.” Scientific American 286, no. 4: 90–9.

Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New materialisms: Ontology, agency and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Downey, Gary L. and Joseph Dumit, eds. 2006. Cyborgs and citadels: Anthropological interventions in emerging sciences and technologies. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Eagleton, Terry. 2009. Sweet violence: The idea of the tragic. New York: Wiley.

Ettinger, Robert. 1965. The prospect of immortality. https://www.cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/Prospect_Book.pdf.

———. 1989. Man into superman. http://www.cryonics.org/book2.html.

———. 1994. “The past, the present, the future, and everything.” Cryonics 15, no. 3: 27–32. https://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics1994-3.pdf.

Evans, Woody. 2007. “Singularity warfare: A bibliometric survey of militarized transhumanism.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 16, no. 1: 161–5.

Farman, Abou. 2013. “Speculative matter: Secular bodies, minds and persons.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4: 737–59.

———. 2014. “The informatic self.” In Ecologies of care: Innovations through technologies, collectives and the senses, edited by Gergely Mohacsi, 273–82. Osaka: Osaka University Press.

———. 2015. “Social science, socialist scientists and the future of utopias.” Platypus: Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) Blog, September 29. http://blog.castac.org/2015/09/socialist-scientists/.

———. 2019. “Mind out of place: Transhuman spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87, no. 1: 57–80.

———. 2020. On not dying: Secular immortality in the age of technoscience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

FM 2030. 1989. Are you a transhuman? New York: Warner Books.

Fuentes, Agustin, Jonathan Marks, Tim Ingold, Robert Sussman, Patrick Kirch, Elizabeth Brumfiel, Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg, Laura Nader, and Conrad Kottak. 2010. “On nature and the human.” American Anthropologist 112, no. 4: 512–21.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2002. Our posthuman future: Consequences of the biotechnology revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Fuller, Steve, and Veronika Lipinska. 2015. “Transhumanism.” In The encyclopedia of ethics, science, technology, and engineering, edited by J. B. Holbrook et al., 410–13. 2nd ed. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Goertzel, Ben. 2010. A cosmist manifesto: Practical philosophy for the posthuman age. https://goertzel.org/CosmistManifesto_July2010.pdf.

Harvey, Graham. 2006. Animism: Respecting the living world. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hayles, Katherine. 1999. How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2011. Wrestling with transhumanism. Metanexus: Transhumanism and Its Critics. Metanexus Institute. https://www.metanexus.net/h-wrestling-transhumanism/

Helmreich, Stefan, and Eben Kirksey. 2010. “The emergence of multispecies ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4: 545–76.

Huberman, Jenny. Transhumanism: From ancestors to avatars. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hughes, James. 2004. Citizen cyborg: Why democratic societies must respond to the redesigned human of the future. Cambridge, MA: Westview Press.

———. 2012. “The politics of transhumanism and the techno-millennial imagination, 1626–2030.” Zygon 47, no. 4: 757–76.

Huxley, Julian. (1957) 2015. Transhumanism. Reprint, Ethics in Progress, 6, no.1: 12–16. https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/eip/article/view/9303.

Janicaud, Dominique. 2005. On the human condition. Translated by Eileen Brennan. New York: Routledge.

Klinge, Fabian. 2020. Panpsychism and the emergence of consciousness: A proposal for a new solution to the mind-body problem. Heidelberg, Germany: JD Metzler/Springer Verlag.

Kneese, Tamara, n.d. Death glitch: How techno-solutionism fails us in this life and beyond. Forthcoming. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.

Levin, Susan B. 2018. Creating a higher breed: Transhumanism and the prophecy of Anglo-American eugenics. In Reproductive Ethics II, edited by Lisa Campo-Engelstein and Paul Burcher, 37-58. New York: Springer.

Levin, Susan B. Posthuman bliss? The failed promise of transhumanism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nyong’o, Tavia. 2019. Afro-fabulations: The queer drama of black life. New York: NYU Press.

Pearce, David. N.d. The hedonistic imperative. https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm

Pickering, Andrew. 2009. The cybernetic brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pickering, Andrew. 2011. Brains, selves and spirituality in the history of cybernetics. Metanexus: Transhumanism and its critics. Metanexus Institute. https://www.metanexus.net/h-brains-selves-and-spirituality-history-cybernetics/.

Ramsey, Paul. 2009. Fabricated man: The ethics of generic control. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Richardson, Kathleen. 2016. Technological animism: The uncanny personhood of humanoid machines. Social Analysis 60, no. 1: 110–28.

Roden, David. 2015. Posthuman life: Philosophy at the edge of the human. New York: Routledge.

Rothblatt, Martine. 1995. The apartheid of sex: A manifesto on the freedom of gender. New York: Crown.

Rothblatt, Martine. 2009. “How can we know consciousness is really there?” Mindclone, October 6. Accessed October 3, 2010. http://mindclones.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=10.

Rothblatt, Martine. 2013. “Mind is deeper than matter: Transgenderism, transhumanism and the freedom of form.” In Transhumanist reader: Classical and contemporary essays on the science, technology, and philosophy of the human future, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More, 317–26. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Sandberg, Anders. 2013. Morphological freedom: Why we not just want it, but need it. In The transhumanist reader, edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More, 56–64. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1946) 2007. Existentialism is a humanism. Translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Searle, John. 2002. “I married a computer.” In Are we spiritual machines? Ray Kurzweil vs. the critics of strong AI, edited by Jay Richards, 56–76. Seattle: Discovery Institute.

Sorgner, Stefan Lorenz. 2021. On transhumanism. University Park: Penn State University Press.

Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. 2012. “Transhumanism as a secularist faith.” Zygon 47, no. 4: 710–34.

Weindling P. 2012. “Julian Huxley and the continuity of eugenics in twentieth-century Britain.” Journal of Modern European History 10, no. 4: 480–99. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4366572/

Wiener, Norbert. (1954) 1989. The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society. London: Free Association Books.

Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257–337.

Ziewitz, Malte. 2016. “Governing algorithms: Myth, mess, and methods.” Science, Technology and Human Values 41: 3–16.

Note on contributor

An anthropologist, writer, and artist, Abou Farman is author of the books On not dying: Secular immortality in the age of technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.

Abou Farman, The New School for Social Research. farmanfa@newschool.edu

Masculinity

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 20:57:05 +0000

Matthew Gutmann

Initially published 6 Nov 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21masculinity

Abstract:

To know what men are, anthropologists look beyond dictionary definitions, personal experience, and opinions and study societies across the globe and throughout history. They study not only people who call themselves men, but also people who call themselves men only some of the time, people who have testicles but know they’re not men, people with ovaries who know they are men, and many more. Until the early 1980s, anthropology’s contribution to the understanding of men, maleness, and masculinities was more talk than actual empirical study of men as having gender. Among the major anthropological contributions to the study of gender and society in general are grounded ethnographies of men as gendered human beings (i.e. ‘men-as-men’), as well as synthetic work across subdisciplines, linking cultural and biological, contemporary and historical approaches to issues like reproductive health, aggression, and fatherhood. Anthropologists pay special attention to the language used in reference to men and masculinities, including terms such as ‘toxic’, ‘dominant’, ‘traditional’, ‘alpha’, etc. They try to understand not only what, if anything, biology tells us about maleness, but also what people may believe biology says about men and masculinities. This entry provides an overview of this work and examines whether anyone is indeed better served by labels like ‘alternative’, ‘emerging’, and ‘new’ masculinities, and whether it may be more useful to avoid sweeping categories like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in the first place.

Introduction

Around the world and throughout history, one of the first questions asked after a baby is born is often, ‘Is it a girl or a boy?’. However, today as never before, there is growing criticism of this very question, because, some believe, no one should be pigeon-holed from birth in this way, and because, it is also argued, such a binary distinction between male and female may be archaic and should be made obsolete. The controversy does not stop there, since even the terms ‘male’ and ‘female’ are contested when used with humans. They may enhance comparisons between species, which in turn may make us prone to simply assume interspecies similarities in sexual, reproductive, and other forms of behaviour that may not actually exist. Gender is thus simultaneously taken-for-granted and the subject of debate in the world today, and anthropologists are among the scholars who study it the most carefully and on a large, comparative scale.

In some parts of the world (like the United States and Mexico) it is common for anthropology departments to include not only ethnographers but also archaeologists and biological anthropologists. They combine the study of culture and biology to understand human male patterns and disparities (e.g. Gutmann, Nelson & Fuentes 2021). Sometimes this is done by comparing humans with nonhuman animals, like chimpanzees and bonobos (e.g. Bribiescas 2005 and Fuentes 2012). Instead of repeating a hierarchy of components that starts with evolution, throws in anatomy, and mixes a dollop of culture, such biocultural analyses usually seek to combine a focus on pan-human physical traits and an attention to the vastly different cultural manifestations of human life on equal terms. And, sometimes anthropologists discover significantly different ‘local’ biologies, proving that superficially male and female anatomies cannot always be easily or profitably compared (see Lock 2017).

In order to better understand masculinity, it is helpful to consider the meanings of related terms like ‘gender’ and ‘sex’. Notoriously slippery concepts, for some researchers and practitioners ‘sex’ is the biological constant while ‘gender’ is the cultural variable (see WHO 2021). Many feminist scholars in recent decades have found this formulation problematic, arguing firstly that gender and sex are too mutually related and dependent to separate them off so neatly, and secondly that gender is often based on perceived sex differences, just as sex is often shoehorned into perceived biological differences (see Rubin 1975; Butler 1990). What is most important for our purposes here is that neither gender nor sex can easily be defined by universal dictionary definitions. That doesn’t mean people don’t use words like ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘nonbinary’, ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘transsexual’ to address the world they live in. It just means that people tend to associate a broad range of different meanings with each of these terms. A widespread premise for the study of masculinity is the understanding that men, too, ‘have gender’ and that ‘manhood’, ‘masculinity’, and related terms refer to the symbolic, embodied, performative, and practiced natures of real engendered persons. The complex and dynamic nature of masculinity is part of the challenge and charm of the anthropological study of men, masculinities, and maleness. This entry addresses the part of gender studies in anthropology that focuses on men and masculinities, a topic that is both obviously relevant to gender overall, and one whose significance has often been underrated outside gender studies.

From its earliest days, and for several decades as a discipline, anthropology was ostensibly about men. There were important and prominent exceptions (such as Margaret Mead’s 1928 Coming of age in Samoa [1961] and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1935 Mules and men [2008]), but anthropologists were most often men, and the people on whom they concentrated their attention were as well. In fact, men were generally considered the best representatives of ‘their people’, so male anthropologists often did not bother studying with and about women. In the early days of the discipline, if a male anthropologist had any interest in learning about the women in the area he studied, he often recruited his spouse to do so (for example, in his study of Andalusia, Stanley Brandes writes, ‘My wife … provided me access to the world of Monteros women’ [1980, 15].) The problems with this neglect of women’s lives only began to be systematically addressed in the 1970s. At that point, a boom of feminist studies in anthropology began to fill in the blanks and indeed transformed our understanding of basic concepts of politics, religion, kinship, language, economics, medicine, and much more (a very early exemplar is Wolf 1960; see also, Weiner 1983). Two major collections of feminist anthropology published for English readers in the mid-1970s were crucial: Woman, culture and society (Rosaldo & Lamphere 1974) and Toward an anthropology of women (Reiter 1975). Both collections powerfully made the case that no society can be understood if the nature and the activity of women remain under-studied. Other pioneering studies include Myths of male dominance (Leacock 1981), a book that challenged the universality of female subjugation and foregrounded the frequently egalitarian gender relations across societies. These volumes in turn contained key essays by Sherry Ortner (reprinted in 1996), Gayle Rubin (1975), and Karen Sacks (1975), among others, that became cornerstones in the anthropology of gender and sexuality, and proved similarly influential in the anthropological study of men and masculinities.

Feminist anthropologists soon invigorated debates and discussions even further by challenging the universality of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that underlie patriarchal stereotypes of universal male dominance (see, for example, MacCormick & Strathern 1980). In their studies of men and masculinity, unfortunately, male anthropologists too seldom engaged directly with these dialogues or, for that matter, explored conceptual differences among themselves.

The first noteworthy contribution of anthropology to the study of men and masculinity was simply to look at men as having gender at all. Inspired by the catalytic impact of feminist anthropology that had itself been launched by feminist and gay liberation movements in the 1970s, anthropologists began to turn a more critical eye on men and masculinities in the 1980s (Brandes 1980; Herdt 1981). They discovered that there had previously been plenty of talk about men but precious few actual studies of men-as-men that treated them as having gender and not just as the textbook exemplars of particular societies. To a large extent, early studies on men and masculinities focused exclusively on interactions between men, conversations with men, and observations of men. Women were, at most, implied in the lives of men.

The second set of contributions that anthropologists provided to the overall study of men and masculinities came in detailed, grounded ethnographies from around the world. This research used a new, gendered lens to examine a broad set of issues like sexuality (including sex between men in Latin America [Parker 1999] and New Guinea [Herdt 1981], and masculinities and multiple sex partners in southern Africa [Hunter 2005]); fatherhood (everything from ‘paternity uncertainty’ in Palaeolithic times, when doubts existed about who had fathered whom, to ‘milk fathers’ in Brazil who provide baby formula to children they have not biologically fathered); the possibility of evolutionary origins of men (Bribiescas 2005); the link between masculinity, colonialism, and racism in South Africa (Morrell 2001); relations between nationalism and manhood in Hawai’i (Tengan 2008); AIDS, masculinity, and privilege in Africa (Wynod 2016); the role of language, ‘gender-variance’ (nonconformity with gender binaries), and humanitarian work in Syria (Saleh 2020); masculinity and suicide in northern China (Wu 2009); masculinity and work in Eurasia (Marsden 2019); money and masculinity in Nigeria (Smith 2017); and the links between masculinity and violence, including in the Turkish military (Açıksöz 2012), the police in the banlieues of Paris (Fassin 2013), and gender-based violence in India (Baxi 2021).

This ‘ethnographic moment’ in anthropological studies of men and masculinity that began in the 1980s has been anything but parochial and atheoretical. It has often been aimed at upsetting views that posit all-encompassing categories of men and masculinities; for example, ‘honour/shame societies’. In the decades following World War II, anthropologists tended to make broad generalisations about men in societies circling the Mediterranean (both European and North African), arguing that the honour of men (acting in manly ways, whatever that might mean) and shame of men often in relation to not being manly enough (whatever that might mean) were both ubiquitous and could broadly explain attitudes and behaviour from marriage patterns to animal husbandry. Among the many problems with the ‘honour/shame’ complex, as it was sometimes known, is that there are widespread beliefs and practices that are nonetheless anything but uniform in the real world; one man (or woman) can feel an act honourable or shameful (for instance, premarital sex, the theft of animals, being able to drink, fight, or play sports well) that others may not worry about whatsoever. Variation by age, class, and other factors were deemed less important than the ideology of honour and shame as motivators and constraints on life in this region (for a critique of the honour/shame concept and ‘problems in the comparative analysis of moral systems’, see Herzfeld 1980).

At the same time, important work in anthropology as well as history has shown clearly that the impact of empire, colonialism, imperialism, and racism on men and masculinities worldwide has been profound if not uniform. Franz Fanon (2008 [1952]) has shown that racialised black masculinity is part and parcel of the repression inherent in colonial regimes in Africa and elsewhere. Tom Boellstorff’s (2005) study of same-sex desire in non-Western contexts such as Indonesia has shown how post-coloniality shapes gay subjectivity, while Rick Smith’s (2021) writings on ‘queer molecular ecology of colonial masculinities’ describe the gendered effects of white conquest of Native American lands. Today, as gender theorist Raewyn Connell writes, ‘a gender order is emerging in transnational space’ that is both contested and is marked by changing power structures related to masculinities (Connell 2016).

Drawing on their broad interest in all things human, from testosterone to tea ceremonies, sociocultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological anthropologists have thus been at the forefront of debates around how nature and nurture affect human sexuality and gender, seeking a biocultural synthesis that emphasises human malleability and environmental factors (often emphasising poverty, colonialism, and oppression) as key to understanding human relationships and activities. More recently still, synthetic work across subdisciplines within anthropology, linking biology and biocultural approaches to cultural ones, have challenged our understanding of topics like gender-based violence (Gutmann, Nelson & Fuentes 2021), trans politics (Rogers 2020), and reproductive health (Inhorn 2012).

Apart from anthropology’s contributions of paying attention to men as engendered and engendering, and offering ethnographies rich in detail and conceptual framing of men, maleness, and masculinities, a third major contribution of anthropology to the study of men and masculinities has been a series of conceptual debates over whether and how maleness is relevant to understanding cognitive frameworks and actual practices—in human and all species—or whether cultural preconceptions have fostered more than a few erroneous ideas about innate qualities of maleness, males, men, and masculinities. This discussion about human maleness has been complicated further by major cultural developments witnessed by anthropologists and other scholars, charting the growing independence of women politically and financially, and assertions of bodily autonomy, together with the ensuing backlash among some men who deem these changes unwarranted and unwelcome. Studies of male rape of females show this ‘backlash’ clearly, as male rapists attempt to reassert male privilege violently in this way (see Sanday 1990).

In general, anthropology’s insights regarding men and masculinities may be nothing surprising: they illustrate that there is a diversity of ways of being a man and thinking about men, just as there is a wide range of opinion (within and across societies) about what constitutes a more ‘manly’ man, a good or a bad man, father, or son. The rest of this entry will outline some of these insights, focusing on sex and power; language and religion; hormones and violence; and renegotiating the gender binary.

Sex and power

Take sex, for instance. Based on their meticulous ethnographies, archaeologies, and field research, anthropologists have tended to expand our appreciation of the variety of ways humans think about and engage in sex. This is not surprising given that not all men have penises (Rogers 2020) and some men who have low levels of testosterone are violent (see Jordan-Young & Karkazis 2019). Some of the most significant work has focused on people who identify as men who have sex with other people who also identify as men. These studies have reshaped our understanding of what it means to be gay—whether this is an identity that permeates and determines people’s daily lives, a sexual practice, an emotional state, or something else entirely. Guillermo Núñez Noriega (2014), for example, has written an ethnography of cowboys in northern Mexico, many of whom are married to women with whom they have sex, while they also have sex with other men from time to time. They do not identify as gay in any sense that they understand the term. Núñez Noriega has also questioned old-fashioned descriptions of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ sexual acts (who penetrates, who is penetrated). The binary way of looking at men who were said to be ‘active’ versus men who were thought ‘passive’ in sex simply didn’t hold up, as men do all sorts of things sexually at different times. Among other things, this was part of a refutation of the older notion of males being ‘active’ and females ‘passive’ in sex that has come to seem ridiculous to almost all students of sexuality. Noriega and other scholars have also illustrated that asexuality can defy simplistic notions of biological male sexual drives.

In another example, Gilbert Herdt (1996) describes boy-to-man ritual practices among the Sambia of New Guinea in which boys as young as seven years old are taught and compelled to perform fellatio on older boys. When these same boys become adolescents themselves, they are fellated by younger boys. When they are a few years older, they marry young women and, according to Herdt, never resume sexual relations with boys or men. Among the Sambia, the belief was at the time of study widespread that this practice enabled boys to develop their adult sense of masculinity.

Anthropologists have also contributed important studies of heterosexual men and masculinities, including in regards to birth control, circumcision, impotence, and infertility. For example, Everett Zhang (2015) discusses an ‘impotence epidemic’ in China, distinguishing between biomedical doctors there who see erectile dysfunction (ED) as mainly a result of lack of blood flow, while practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine more often see ED as a series of problems throughout a man’s body, often requiring more attention to kidneys than penises.

The anthropology of heterosexual men and masculinities has been especially useful in showing the influence that women have on men, including but not limited to sexuality and sexual conduct. From circumcision of adult men in Japan (Castro-Vazquez 2015)^[1] to vasectomies in Oaxaca, Mexico (Gutmann 2007), anthropologists have countered a commonplace view that the primary power of women over men is the relationship of mothers with their boys. In the case of vasectomies, for example, men may not just decide to get sterilised because they have had enough children but also because their wives have had to shoulder the burden of birth control, pregnancy, and childbirth over the years, and men now consider it to be their turn (Gutmann 2007).

Through their fine-grained studies of diverse populations across space and time, anthropological ethnographies and archaeologies of men and masculinities have also contributed in important ways to our understanding of basic questions of power and privilege; for example, at the level of governments, economies, and cultural institutions, as well as in more intimate spheres of family and neighbourhood life (see, for example, Peletz 2021). The more we learn through historical reconstructions, the shibboleth that in the distant past there was a rigid division of labour in which all men were hunters and all women were gatherers has proved less accurate than some firm believers in the gender binary wanted to believe. It now appears clear that women, too, participated to a far greater extent in hunting, and men in gathering, and that cultural bias may have contributed to looking back at the past through contemporary gender prisms (Widlok 2020).

Relatedly, the notion that men through the millennia have had little to do with their children beyond procreation is remarkable for its pervasiveness and its historical inaccuracy. On many matters relating to paternity and paternal investment in offspring, of course, debates among anthropologists mirror wider social disagreements about what men do and don’t do, what men should and shouldn’t do with children. Certain realities, however, are beyond dispute. To begin with, the variety of paternal patterns in societies around the world today and in the past belies simple generalisations about fathering. What is more, in every agricultural society on earth for at least the last 10,000 years, human males have been more actively and regularly involved in day-to-day ‘childcare’ than is true in modern, urban settings, because, among other reasons, men in cities can no longer take their children to work with them (see Gutmann 2006 [1996]).

This does not negate the very real burden for women and mothers of a ‘second shift’ after wage labour, that includes housework and childcare, which have become commonplace for women in contemporary households. (‘Second shift’ is a term coined by feminists to emphasise when domestic labour is carried out by women far more than men, thus forcing women to work so much extra that it constitutes an essentially second job shift each day.) The point anthropologists have emphasised, instead, is that men shirking their share of childcare is not simply a matter of attitudes and ideologies, but also structural changes in societies worldwide that have contributed to these challenges. In recent decades, in parts of southeast Asia and other locations where women and not men have had to migrate for better employment opportunities in order to support their families financially, anthropologists have showed clear changes in parenting practices. In these situations, fathers may assume the lion’s share of every aspect of childcare (Thao 2015). The rapidity of such transformations in nurturing and support of children is a testament to the malleability of patterns that have been commonly taken for granted in recent decades.

Language and religion

In the terminology of linguistic anthropologists, by calling attention to the gendered identities and practices of men-as-men, one ‘marks the unmarked’. Men as a category have long been the implicit stand-in for ‘people’, ‘citizens’, ‘residents’, and other generic categories, and therefore are said to be unmarked for special notice. In one of the earliest anthropological studies of men-as-men, Stanley Brandes (1980) explores the language of and about men as exemplified in the folklore of Andalusia, Spain. Men reported that there were two factors central to their conception of masculinity: their place in the social hierarchy and their relationships with women. ‘Just as a man in infancy depends on milk to survive, so too he relinquishes his milk in adulthood in order to produce children’, Brandes was taught (1980: 83).

The language used by and about men in other contexts reflect similar concerns, as descriptions of masculinity and maleness can have a regulatory effect, turning mere ‘norms’ into normalising political projects. For example, the label ‘alpha male’, ostensibly adopted from primate studies has the cachet of scientific rigor, derived from observational research in the wild. Indeed, the phrase has become ubiquitous in English-language disparagement of certain kinds of controlling male demeanour that usually have nothing to do with any primate behaviour, in the wild or in captivity. Similarly, anthropologists have showed that the casual invocation of words referring to anatomical qualities considered by some to incarnate maleness—like testosterone and Y chromosomes—usually tells us more about particular social mores of those employing these words than it does about boys or men themselves—or girls and women, who after all also carry testosterone.

The term ‘testosterone’ didn’t even exist before 1905, and for most of the twentieth century it was simply one component of male (and female) bodies contributing to the functioning of various other body parts. Since the 1990s, however, more due to the prevailing winds of evolutionary psychology and an overreliance on biology to explain human behaviour than any especially noteworthy new discoveries related to the hormone, testosterone has come to take on an outsized role in explaining male sexuality and aggression. Beliefs that high testosterone levels, for example, necessarily lead to violence are as specious as they are widespread. In men who have between 20 percent and two times normal levels, there is generally no correlation whatsoever between aggression and testosterone (see Sapolsky 1997; Fuentes 2012; Bribiescas 2006).

Of critical importance in discussing language related to men and masculinities, and more broadly gender, sex, and sexualities, is the fact that, because of the global influence and dominance of English and English-language texts, even when it can be argued that key words in English reflect important social relationships, identities, and struggles, these same words do not necessarily translate well in non-English-speaking contexts. To show how this can work, Fadi Saleh (2020: 49) discusses ‘the risks of the global institutionalization of [the word] transgender’, linking the introduction of the name in Syria in the context of war, migration, and asylum by human rights workers from Europe and the United States. Although the term ‘transgender’ may capture what these advocates think they encounter in Syria, an anthropological approach instead favours local ways of describing and naming gender variance. Saleh thus shows that local terms that denote gender variance are not simply subsumed by the term ‘transgender’. Instead, local terms continue to exist alongside it, carry different meanings, and remain useful, not least because they avoid the negative stigma of being seen as ‘Western’ impositions. Saleh writes of one person:

Sara, despite fully presenting as a woman in public and applying at the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] as a transgender woman … adamantly identifies as a tant, a word that within al-Jaw [‘a community-invented word that literally translates as “the atmosphere” and refers to the large, well connected, imagined, and real queer and gender-variant communities across the big cities of Syria and now in the diaspora as well’] indexes an array of ways of being gendered, including feminine gay men, cross-dressers, and transfeminine persons pre-op or feminine gay men taking birth-control pills aiming for a more androgynous (read: female) body, but ultimately, any person assigned male at birth who has no problem with being given a female name or addressed with feminine pronouns, even if they were presenting as masculine within al-Jaw or in their everyday lives’ (2020: 45).

Since studies such as these enable anthropology to develop new ways to think and talk about gender, they can put the discipline itself at odds with institutions who aim to determine gender discourse. The Vatican, for example, issued a major statement on ‘gender theory’, in the summer of 2019, weighing in on terminology and beliefs related to the gender binary, masculine mentality, transgender politics, queer, and ‘third gender’ (a concept invented to name and emphasise people who do not consider themselves and/or are not considered by others to fit neatly into the gender male-female binary).

The text, entitled ‘Male and female He created them’ (Versaldi & Zani 2019) took square aim at putative ‘gender confusion’ in the world, invoking medical science and the Almighty to counteract the growing and pernicious influence of … yes, anthropologists in particular. The substance, agenda, and theoretical armature of anthropology as a discipline were called to task for spreading gender ‘confusion’, and as an impediment in resurrecting the gender binary to its once hallowed and unchallenged place in the hearts and minds of Catholic parishioners. Gender and the gender binary, according to the Vatican document, are not social constructions, as anthropologists aver, but unchanging and unchangeable. The crux of the argument is that the wishful thinking of gender theorists have deterred them from accepting the material world of ‘the actual biological difference between male and female’, and in so doing, have taken scholarship too far afield from the realities of nature (emphasis in original, Versaldi & Zani 2019: 12).

Anthropologists have therefore challenged not just Church doctrine, but what might be even more damning: they are held to have attempted the ‘denaturalization’ of the gender binary through talk of sexual indeterminacy and the like. The authors of the report criticise what they believe is pandering to the hope that individuals have more control over their lives than God and nature actually will allow. As they put it,

the underlying presuppositions of these theories can be traced back to a dualistic anthropology, separating body (reduced to the status of inert matter) from human will, which itself becomes an absolute that can manipulate the body as it pleases. This combination of physicalism and voluntarism gives rise to relativism (Versaldi & Zani 2019: 11).

In particular, the text in question contends that the Church, and societies more broadly, needed to reaffirm an appreciation of ‘the values of femininity’ and the place of husbands within the family as pater familias. No good will come, they argue, if anthropologists persist in spreading these ‘wilful untruths’.

This forceful statement points to the interplay of gender (and masculinity) and religion. A recent collection of essays on the anthropology of religion and masculinities shows that,

By considering the stakes of masculinity for the religious and the wages of religion for the masculine, we hope to highlight religion’s role as a strategic avenue of identity formation for many actors, men included, and to uncover new areas of cultural reproduction, contestation, and change (see Dawley & Thornton 2018: 15).

At the least, the Vatican document should provide encouragement to those who seek to break down the gender binary; if these efforts had not had such a powerful impact among youths and others around the world, there would have been no need to launch such a broad scale critique of anthropology’s contributions to gender studies.

Hormones and violence

Hormones are frequently invoked to explain male behaviour when it comes to sex and violence. Yet, as stated above, when you know a man’s testosterone level, you cannot predict the likelihood he might come to blows. Instead, work on militaries, militarism, and masculinity, for example, has shown that appeals to social attributes (service, sacrifice, protection, invincibility, determination) matter to male violence and are frequently couched by militaries and the general public in terms of men and masculinities. For example, Kimberly Theidon (2009) examines masculinity among ex-guerrillas in Colombia, while Andrew Bickford (2011, 2020) addresses manhood among German and US troops. These anthropologists and others have shown that the allures of participation in armies—in invasions, conquest, war, and occupation—are routinely expressed as the highest form of patriotism and citizenship, and that a soldier, usually male, never epitomises masculinity more than he does in taking life and putting his life in harm’s way. Killing and masculinity are here culturally conflated. Centring her archaeological study on Black male soldiers in the 1870s US-Mexico borderlands, Laurie Wilkie uses historical artefacts to trace ‘opportunities for reimagining the confines of racialized categories of manhood’ among Black soldiers, specifically performances of masculine gentility that reveal their ambitions and experiences as freedmen and citizens (2019: 135).

Rape, in wartime and in all times, has become a pivot point in discussions in about men’s supposedly natural proclivities toward aggression, violence, and physical domination of others. In gender studies broadly, including in the anthropology of men and masculinities, forms of gender-based violence like rape are examined to understand the role of power and control, and the enormous variations in rates of rape from one society to another. For example, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2009) conducted interviews with soldiers and officers in the Congo, where rapes were widespread in a conflict in the 1990s and 2000s that killed over five million people. The authors show that rape in this context must be understood in relation to a broader cycle of violence driven by social factors that include learned gender behaviours, hostile civil-military relations, marginalisation, and attempts at reasserting power and authority. Rape is here not simply a strategic weapon of war but a frequently chaotic outcome of dysfunctional institutions. Alexandra Stiglmayer studied mass rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, writing, ‘rape seems to be part and parcel of a [male] soldier’s life, a “normal” accompaniment to war’ (1994: 84). Yet she also shows that rape was in this instance conducted to facilitate mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing, reflecting the overall goals of military intervention.

Such examples stand in contrast to the notion that there are any ‘underlying’ biological and evolutionary factors making human rapes obligatory. The comparative study of other species does not help much in this instance. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, hundreds of millions of people around the world had access to the program Animal Planet on television. Based on their viewing of this program, they might reasonably have concluded that when it comes to sexuality, there are more similarities than differences between the males of various primate species. They might have also learned that forty percent of male mallard ducks participate in what some researchers call ‘gang rape’ (see Prum 2017). Yet the producers of this program and the researchers cited should have been horrified by the use of this term in this context, because it implies that there is something predetermined about rape throughout the animal kingdom and that, for humans as well as ducks, it is a matter of acting out one’s male nature. This ignores that for humans rape is a matter of choosing to impose one’s (male) power through force. Adaptability among humans means that there is not only a far wider range of attitudes and manners, but that unlike ducks and even our closest primate cousins, humans have an almost bottomless well of capacities to alter and transform their attitudes and manners. Anthropologists and sociologists have thus been keen to point out that there is no biological basis to sexual coercion, and that the fact that rape can be found in nature does not make it natural for human beings. They show that in a human context, rape is not primarily about sex, and sex is not primarily about procreation (see Kimmel 2003).

Similar arguments hold in the anthropological study of suicide. Three to four times more men commit suicide than women in the world, though more women try to commit suicide (see WHO 2014). Male suicide is thus assessed from many perspectives in anthropology, and violence and masculinity are certainly among the most important filters through which to chronicle this pressing health concern. Although most academic writings on suicide in the last forty years have come from psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and have emphasised individuals with crippling depression, anthropologists have looked to social factors, including the effect on young men of participating in wars of invasion and conquest, as well as suicide among migrant men who are no longer able to support their families back home. Silvia Sara Canetto (2017) has found that ‘rigidity in coping’ with less obvious purpose in life, and an inability to develop a new ‘sense of self’ are social factors that may contribute to a higher incidence of suicide among white, middle class, retired men in the United States (see also Wu 2009, Imberton 2012, and Chua 2014). Again, the variability of suicidal tendencies among men outweighs the role of hormones, and socio-cultural factors seem to account for the largest share of male violent behaviour.

Anthropologists do not argue that hormones or any other physiological factor are irrelevant in human or other animal aggression. Yet, what they do emphasise is that social factors outweigh biological tendencies, and that aggression (and sexuality, and much more about human activity) is ultimately a chicken and egg situation: not only do biological processes in bodies change human behaviour, but changes in behaviour and environmental conditions, for instance, can significantly change our bodies.

Renegotiating the gender binary

Anthropological theorist Gayle Rubin writes that there are moments in history in which the tussle and tumult around erotic life seem more fraught with possibility and danger (1984: 4). She was referring in particular to sexual mores in times of religious upheaval, but the point is relevant here, too. In these times there is a widespread renegotiation of norms that may have been taken for granted in earlier times. In 1900, few national political leaders in the world were women. It would have been easier at that point to claim that men made naturally better leaders. Today, women ministers and heads of government have become commonplace around the world and are often extremely successful. On an entirely different scale, but along the same lines, in 1950 if you analysed alcohol use and abuse in many parts of the world, you might have concluded that there were stark differences based on gender in terms of what people drank, how much, and how often. Today, far fewer distinctions exist based on purely gender lines (see de Garine & de Garine 2001).

Finally, by way of example, until the creation of the Internet, pornography was rather exclusively associated with men and not women. There were even scientific papers explaining that this was the case because men were hard-wired differently, especially with respect to visual stimulation. Yet, when porn could be viewed anonymously in the privacy of one’s own home, it turned out that many women also availed themselves of the opportunity (see Gutmann 2019). In all three cases, you could say, there has occurred a degendering of both actions and our association of particular actions and abilities with a uniform and ubiquitous gender binary (see Gutmann 2019).

The study of transgender politics illuminates this tendency, as it challenges a broad array of issues regarding biological sex and assumptions about people’s lives. In the field of forensic anthropology, for instance, Jenna L. Schall, Tracy L. Rogers, and Jordan C. Deschamps-Braly make a clear case that when exhuming human remains, researchers should ‘consider the possibility that an unidentified individual could be transgender, and not limit their analyses and conclusions to binary sex categories’ (2020: 8). This outlook represents a radical departure from standard practice for disinterments throughout history until the early twenty-first century. It is an excellent example that an anthropological sensibility is tremendously valuable in reframing taken-for-granted conventions.

Similarly, in an ethnographic study of Puerto Rican transwomen, Mark Padilla and Sheilla Rodríguez-Madera ‘consider the ways that the transgender body is systematically excluded and “designed to die”’ through exclusion and benign neglect on the part of biomedical practitioners (2021: S26). Gender transitioning is often facilitated through commercial sex networks and very low-quality silicone and hormones, exposing transwomen to multiple health risks. In part, this is due to the state medical system that refuses to facilitate sex transitioning, whereby it essentially abandons and further marginalises these women. In this case, the systemic othering of people is directly related to transitioning women’s elevated risk of disease and bodily distress.

Constructions of masculinities can vary significantly even within countries. Studying trans masculinities in the southeast of the United States, Baker A. Rogers has argued that regional identities ‘shape how trans men understand and do gender’ (Rogers 2020). The men Rogers studied were found to enact masculinities much like their cis counterparts, holding stereotypical ideas about masculinity that link it to values of honour, independence, and mastery. While the people Rogers writes about do care about what kind of bodies they have, their issues of maleness and manhood are not reducible to male bodies. Anthropologists who have focused their studies on women have also contributed directly and indirectly to our appreciation of men and masculinities. As simplistic as it may sound, the idea that only men can study men and only women can study women took some debunking in anthropology. Some of that clarity came about by studying more carefully intimate interactions between men and women, for instance regarding sex work. Sealing Cheng (2010) and other scholars have turned the tables on previous interpretations of women’s agency, giving voice and volition to sex workers, for example, and providing an alternative to the view that all women sex workers are helpless victims who have no choice in how they earn a living. Through giving women in these circumstances agency, our view of the men involved also has had to shift. Our assessment of men has thus been called into question, in particular the disconnect between men’s professed control over various situations and the new reading that makes decision-making and domination along strict gender binary lines more complicated (see Viveros 2015).

Where will these renegotiations of gender lead? As anthropologists are at pains to demonstrate, nothing along these lines is preordained. The extent to which degendering will expand into more and more realms, or whether the gender binary will be reasserted as some might wish, will depend largely on the outcome of the fierce renegotiations around gender, sexuality, and the gender binary that are taking place in bedrooms and boardrooms across the globe.

Conclusion: a modest proposal

In anthropology and other academic disciplines that have paid attention in recent decades to the study of men and masculinities, ethnographers have sought to capture developing trends and directions in how people in a range of walks of life are thinking about and being men. More attentive parenting by men is called a new way of being a father. Anger management has emerged as code for men’s aggressive inclinations (see Kimmel 2013). Negative traits and tendencies associated with men, maleness, and masculinity—toxic, hegemonic, patriarchal—are counterpoised to emergent, new, and alternative masculinities. Anthropologists have tried to capture these transformations with an array of labels, such as ‘sensitive’ or ‘nontoxic’ masculinities (see Carabí & Armengol 2014).

At the same time, and reflecting the influence in particular of feminist and queer theories and social movements, anthropologists have recorded the anguish of coming to terms with maleness, as well as pride in defying views and practices associated with certain men and masculinities regarded as sexist, homophobic, and transphobic.

Recent work has developed around descriptions and concepts rooted in nonbinary gender identities, bodies, and analysis. What this has meant, among other things, is that the simplistic use of terms like ‘masculinity’ (or even ‘masculinities’) has been problematised, as being biologically male is no longer universally a prerequisite for being masculine. Some, but by far not all, anthropologists are even engaged in the more radical pursuits of getting rid of the binary gender paradigm altogether. Perhaps one of the strongest examples for their applied work is the movement to upend gender pronouns; it has spread throughout the world, in creative and linguistically-specific ways, reflecting frustrations on the part of some, often young people, with the restrictions of binary gender conceptions.

At the very least, anthropologists increasingly hold that it is no longer sufficient to merely seek novel forms of masculinity. Instead, their comparative and empirical study has led them to consider that we live in a world in which gender is more fluid and nebulous than a binary gender model allows. This is directly relevant to the undercurrent in all gender studies that seeks to address inequalities that manifest along gender lines. The language used to describe men, maleness, and masculinities in anthropology has always emphasised the relational nature of gender, sex, and sexuality. If inaccurate portrayals of men and masculinities have rarely had the same social consequences as similar mischaracterisations of women for example, they nonetheless have contributed to misleading explanations, and therefore excuses, for male deeds, including those related to gender-based violence (see Merry 2006; Das 2008; Merry 2008; Wies & Haldate 2011).

By highlighting that men and masculinities exist, anthropologists have attempted to highlight the problems of male dominance and also the tremendous variation and malleability of human maleness. Their modest proposal is for the world to recognise this diversity and to sweep away overly constraining prisms of current gender analysis in the name of greater human flourishing.

At the end of a detailed treatment of changing men and masculinities in the United States, journalist Susan Faludi quotes Michael Bernhardt, a veteran of the US war in Vietnam: ‘All these years I was trying to be all these stereotypes of manhood, and what was the use? I’m beginning to think now of not even defining it anymore. I’m beginning to think now just in terms of people’ (1999: 607). Faludi concludes that Bernhardt was thus beginning ‘to conceive of other ways of being “human”, and hence, of being a man’.

Anthropologists know that there is still good reason not to ignore what men-as-men do, say, and think in the world. But they also know that there is an evident need not to reduce everything every man does to masculinity, and to look for ways that someday we might associate a range of human practices—from political leadership to sex to alcohol use and abuse to childcare—less with men and masculinities and more simply with what it means to be human.

References

Açıksöz, S.C. 2012. Sacrificial limbs of sovereignty: disabled veterans, masculinity, and nationalist politics in Turkey. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26(1), 4-25.

Baxi, P. 2021. Law, emasculation, and sexual violence in India. Current Anthropology 62(S23), S145-S154.

Bickford, A. 2011. Fallen elites: the military other in post-unification Germany. Stanford: University Press.

——— 2020. Chemical heroes: pharmacological supersoldiers in the US military. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Boellstorff, T. 2005. The gay archipelago: sexuality and nation in Indonesia. Princeton: University Press.

Brandes, S. 1980. Metaphors of masculinity: sex and status in Andalusian folklore. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bribiescas, R. 2006. Men: evolutionary and life history. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Canetto, S.S. 2017. Suicide: why are older men so vulnerable? Men and Masculinities 20(1), 49-70.

Carabí, À. & J. Armengol (eds) 2014. Alternative masculinities for a changing world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Carrillo, H. 2002. The night is young: sexuality in Mexico in the time of AIDS. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2017. Pathways of desire: the sexual migration of Mexican gay men. Chicago: University Press.

Castro-Vázquez, G. 2015. Male circumcision in Japan. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Cheng, S. 2013. On the move for love: migrant entertainers and the U.S. military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Chua, J.L. 2014. In pursuit of the good life: aspiration and suicide in globalizing South India. Oakland: University of California Press.

Connell, R. 2016. Masculinities in global perspective: hegemony, contestation, and changing structures of power. Theory and Society 45, 303-18.

Das, V. 2008. Violence, gender, and subjectivity. Annual Review of Anthropology 37, 283-99.

Dawley, W. & B.J. Thornton 2018. New directions in the anthropology of religion and gender: faith and emergent masculinities. Anthropological Quarterly 91(1), 5-24.

de Garine, I. & V. de Garine (eds) 2001. Drinking: anthropological approaches. New York: Berghahn.

Eriksson Baaz, M. & M. Stern 2009. Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence, and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC). International Studies Quarterly 53, 495-518.

Faludi, S. 1999. Stiffed: the betrayal of the American man. New York: Harper Collins.

Fanon, F. 2008 [1952]. Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove.

Fassin, D. 2013. Enforcing order: an ethnography of urban policing. Oxford: Polity.

Fuentes, A. 2012. Race, monogamy, and other lies they told you: busting myths about human nature. Oakland: University of California Press.

Gutmann, M. 2006 [1996]. The meanings of macho: being a man in Mexico City. Oakland: University of California Press.

——— 2007. Fixing men: sex, birth control, and AIDS in Mexico. Oakland: University of California Press.

——— 2019. Are men animals? How modern masculinity sells men short. New York: Basic Books.

———, R. Nelson & A. Fuentes 2021. Epidemic errors in understanding masculinity, maleness, and violence. Current Anthropology 62(23) Supplement: Toward an Anthropological Understanding of Masculinities, Maleness, and Violence, S5-S12.

Heald, S. 1999. Manhood and morality: sex, violence and ritual in Gisu society. New York: Routledge.

Herdt, G. 1981. Guardians of the flutes: idioms of masculinity. Chicago: University Press.

——— 1996. Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history. Brooklyn: Zone.

Herzfeld, M. 1980. Honour and shame: problems in the comparative analysis of moral systems. Man 15(2), 229-351.

Hunter, M. 2005. Cultural politics and masculinities: multiple-partners in historical perspective in KwaZulu-Natal. Culture, Health, and Society 7(4), 389-403.

Hurston, Z.N. 2008 [1935]. Mules and men. New York: Harper Perennial.

Imberton Deneke, G. 2012. Chol understandings of suicide and human agency. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 36, 245-63.

Inhorn, M. 2012. The new Arab man: emergent masculinities, technologies, and Islam in the Middle East. Princeton: University Press.

Jordan-Young, R.M. & K. Karkazis 2019. Testosterone: an unauthorized biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Kimmel, M. 2003. An unnatural history of rape. In Evolution, gender, and rape (ed.) C. Brown Travis, 221-33. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

——— 2013. Angry white men: American masculinity at the end of an era. New York: Nation Books.

Leacock, E.B. 1981. Myths of male dominance: collected articles on women-cross culturally. New York: Monthly Review.

Lock, M. 2017. Recovering the body. Annual Review of Anthropology 46, 1-14.

MacCormack, C. & M. Strathern (eds) 1980. Nature, culture and gender. Cambridge: University Press.

Marsden, M. 2019. Manly merchants: commerce, mobility and masculinity among Afghan traders in Eurasia. Anthropology of the Middle East 14(2), 55-76.

Mead, M. 1961 [1928]. Coming of age in Samoa: a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilization. New York: William Morrow.

Merry, S.E. 2006. Human rights and gender violence: translating international law into local justice. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2008. Gender violence: a cultural perspective. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Morrell, R. 2001. From boys to gentlemen: settler masculinity in Colonia Natal, 1880-1920. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.

Núñez Noriega, G. 2014. Just between us: an ethnography of male identity and intimacy in rural communities of Northern Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Ortner, S. 1996. Making gender: the politics and erotics of culture. Boston: Beacon.

Padilla, M. & S. Rodríguez-Madera 2021. Embodiment, gender transitioning, and necropolitics among transwomen in Puerto Rico. Current Anthropology 62(S23), S26-S37.

Parker, R. 1999. Beneath the equator: cultures of desire, male homosexuality, and emerging gay communities in Brazil. New York: Routledge.

Peletz, M.G. 2021. Hegemonic Muslim masculinities and their others: perspectives from South and Southeast Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 63(3), 534-65.

Prum, R.O. 2017. The evolution of beauty: how Darwin’s forgotten theory of mate choice shapes the animal world—and us. New York: Doubleday.

Reiter, R. (ed.) 1975. Toward an anthropology of women. New York: Monthly Review.

Rogers, B.A. 2020. Trans manhood: the intersections of masculinities, queerness, and the South. Men & Masculinities (available on-line: doi:10.1177/1097184X20927058).

Rosaldo, M.Z. & L. Lamphere (eds) 1974. Woman, culture, and society. Stanford: University Press.

Rubin, G. 1975. The traffic in women: notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex. In Toward an anthropology of women (ed.) R. Reiter, 157-210. New York: Monthly Review.

——— 1984. Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality. C.S. Vance, 3-44. New York: Routledge.

Sacks, K. 1975. Engels revisited: women, the organization of production, and private property. In Toward an anthropology of women (ed.) R. Reiter, 211-34. New York: Monthly Review.

Saleh, F. 2020. Transgender as a humanitarian category: the case of Syrian queer and gender-variant refugees. Transgender Studies Quarterly 7(1), 37-55.

Sanday, P. 1990. Fraternity gang rape: sex, brotherhood and privilege on campus. New York: New York University Press.

Sapolsky, R.M. 1997. The trouble with testosterone and other essays on the biology of the human predicament. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Schall, J.L., T.L. Rogers, J.C. Deschamps-Braly 2020. Breaking the binary: the identification of trans-women in forensic anthropology. Forensic Science International 309(110220) (available on-line: doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2020.110220).

Smith, D.J. 2017. To be a man is not a one-day job: masculinity, money, and intimacy in Nigeria. Chicago: University Press.

Smith, R. 2021. Imperial terroir: toward a queer molecular ecology of colonial masculinities. Cultural Anthropology 62(S23), S155-68.

Stiglmayer, A. 1994. The rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Mass rape: the war against women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (ed.) A. Stiglmayer, 82-169. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Tengan, T.P.K. 2008. Native men remade: gender and nation in contemporary Hawai’i. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Thao, V.T. 2015. When the pillar of the home is shaking: female labor migration and stay-at-home fathers in Vietnam. In Globalized fatherhood (eds) M.C. Inhorn, W. Chavkin & J.-A. Navarro, 129-51. New York: Berghahn.

Theidon, K. 2009. Reconstructing masculinities: the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants in Colombia. Human Rights Quarterly 31, 1-34.

Versaldi, G.C. & A.A.V. Zani 2019. ‘Male and female He created them’: towards a path of dialogue on the question of gender theory in education. Vatican City: Congregation for Catholic Education.

Viveros, M. 2015. Sex/gender. Oxford handbook of feminist theory (eds) L. Disch & M. Hawkesworth. Oxford: University Press (available on-line: https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.revproxy.brown.edu/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199328581-e-42?print=pdf).

Weiner, A.B. 1983. Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Widlok, T. 2020. Hunting and gathering. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology(eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (available on-line:http://doi.org/10.29164/20hunt).

Wies, J.R. & H. J. Haldane (eds) 2011. Anthropology at the front lines of gender-based violence. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Wilkie, L.L. 2019. At freedom’s borderland: the Black regulars and masculinity at Fort Davis, Texas. Historical Archaeology 53, 126-37.

Wolf, M. 1960. The house of Lim: a study of a Chinese family. New York: Pearson.

World Health Organization 2014. Preventing suicide: a global imperative. Geneva: World Health Organization.

——— 2021. Gender and health (available on-line: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1).

Wu, F. 2009. Suicide and justice: a Chinese perspective. New York: Routledge.

Wynod, R. 2016. AIDS and masculinity in the African city: privilege, inequality, and modern manhood. Oakland: University of California Press.

Zhang, E.Y. 2015. The impotence epidemic: men’s medicine and sexual desire in contemporary China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Note on contributor

Matthew Gutmann is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Brown University. His research has focused on men and masculinities, especially in relation to politics and health. He is currently studying men and suicide in China, Mexico, and the United States.

Matthew Gutmann, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA. gutmann@brown.edu

[1] On adolescent circumcision, more common in parts of Africa and the Middle East, see also Heald 1999.