Humans

Anthropologists increasingly engage with healthcare systems, using ethnographic research as a critical tool for understanding and improving healthcare practices. The resulting interactions and collaborations between ethnographers, healthcare practitioners, and administrators often give rise to ‘frictions’—moments of tension, frustrations, misalignments, and misunderstandings. In physics, friction is the force that one object’s surface exerts over another’s to slow its motion, push back against its inherent energy and movement, and is a constant at all touchpoints between the objects, from both sides. While friction often evokes negative connotations, in this article, we look beyond frictions as obstacles, and instead explore them as productive forces that can drive transformation in the healthcare improvement field. Drawing both on the authors’ own experiences and on the work of other anthropologists, we reflect on how friction helps shed light on the dynamics of interdisciplinary work and improve collaboration. We unpack how conceptual and ethical frictions in applied ethnographic work reveal deeper structural and relational insights that would otherwise remain obscured. This article contributes to anthropological discussions on interdisciplinary collaboration and applied practice, and it offers concrete strategies for handling different kinds of friction in health-related ethnographic research. Full article

This theoretical article explores the contrasting ontologies, axiologies, and political economies of transhumanism and posthumanism. Transhumanism envisions the human as an enhanced, autonomous agent shaped by neoliberal and Enlightenment ideals. Posthumanism challenges this by emphasizing relationality, ecological entanglement, and critiques of commodification. Both engage with technology’s role in reshaping humanity. Drawing on Braidotti’s posthumanism, Haraway’s cyborg figuration, Ahmed’s politics of emotion, Berlant’s cruel optimism, Massumi’s affective modulation, Seigworth and Gregg’s affective intensities, Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, Fisher’s capitalist realism, Cooper’s surplus life, Sadowski’s digital capitalism, Lupton’s quantified self, Schafheitle et al.’s datafied subject, Pasquale’s black box society, Terranova’s network culture, Bratton’s platform sovereignty, Dean’s communicative capitalism, and Morozov’s technological solutionism, the article elucidates how subjectivity, data, and infrastructure are reorganized by corporate systems. Introducing technogensis as the co-creation of human and technological subjectivities, it links corporate-platform practices to future trajectories governed by Apple, Meta, and Google. These branded technologies function not only as enhancements but as infrastructures of governance that commodify subjectivity, regulate affect and behavior, and reproduce socio-economic stratification. A future is extrapolated where humans are not liberated by technology but incubated, intubated, and ventilated by techno-conglomerate governments. These attention-monopolizing, affective-capturing, behavior-modulating, and profit-extracting platforms do more than enhance; they brand subjectivity, rendering existence subscription-based under the guise of personal optimization and freedom. This reframes transhumanism as a cybernetic intensification of liberal subjectivity, offering tools to interrogate governance, equity, agency, and democratic participation, and resist techno-utopian narratives. Building on this, a posthumanist alternative emphasizes relational, multispecies subjectivities, collective agency, and ecological accountability, outlining pathways for ethical design and participatory governance to resist neoliberal commodification and foster emergent, open-ended techno-social futures. Full article

Humans are a curious mix of biology and culture, and one interaction area between these two that has recently come into focus is located in the senses, our biological apparatus to connect with the world. In this essay, I address the variation in appreciation of the senses in various cultures, both historical and contemporaneous, in order to explore the extent to which culture steers not only our observations, but also our appreciation of the epistemological weight of those senses. I concentrate on three senses—vision, hearing, and smell—and show how the relative weight attributed to each of them shifts in different cultures or historical periods. Using data from anthropology, history, literature, psychology, and linguistics, I argue that vision, sound, and smell occupy different positions in various cultures, and that our sensory balance shifts with culture. Thus, our present epistemological dominance of sight over all other senses is neither a biological given nor a cultural necessity. Full article

This study examines the impact of reproductive inequality on the long-term survival of Homo sapiens by comparing two reproductive models: the Pareto (power-law) distribution of unequal reproduction and the Gaussian (normal) distribution of equal reproduction. We conducted simulations to explore how genetic diversity, measured by heterozygosity, evolves over time. The results predict population crashes due to genetic bottlenecks under both models, but with large differences in timing. We refer to Pareto reproductive inequality as the Genghis Khan effect. This effect accelerates the loss of genetic diversity, increasing the species’ vulnerability to environmental stressors, resource depletion, and genetic drift, and thereby raising the risk of an earlier population collapse. Our findings showcase the importance of reproductive balance for the prolonged presence of Homo sapiens on this planet. Full article

This review essay proposes that the influence of individualism, the tendency to prefer individual freedoms over collective obligations, in American society impacted the manner in which the US population responded to the recent global COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, societal rifts were exposed that questioned the infringement on personal freedoms by governmental authority in the effort to protect public health. The essay traces the development of individualism from the Enlightenment through the emergence of the United States, during which individualism entwined with American identity. A review of social science research in the fields sociology, psychology, and anthropology demonstrates the ways in which individualism, in varying degrees from self-centered to collectivist tendencies, can be observed to affect social interaction and perception. With that background, it is possible to use individualism as a lens to investigate cultural responses to affliction. Societal responses to leprosy, syphilis, and COVID-19 are examined, and it is argued that the influence of degrees of individualism greatly impacted the social responses, and the extent to which individual freedoms were lost was notably varied in each case. Full article

In this article, we employ a Batesonian systems thinking approach to analyze politically polarized and politically polarizing encounters in the contemporary United States. We bring together Bateson’s concepts of schismogenesis, double binds, metacommunication, and transcontextualism with recent work on recognition and resonance in order to show how these encounters create moments of transcontextual double binds that produce mutual dysrecognition. We show how these moments of mutual dysrecognition become both animating forces of political polarization in the moment while also becoming constitutive poetic resonances for making sense of future events. When these moments of dysrecognition are considered alongside the removal of mechanisms that restrain schismogenesis, the United States body politic is becoming increasingly schizophrenic—split in two with both parts incommunicado with the other such that the whole system is veering towards collapse. We close by briefly considering the kind of deutero-learning, to use Bateson’s term, that might help to stave off such a collapse. Full article

The following work is based on the historical–anthropological analysis of 93 skeletal remains belonging to post-war casualties who died in 1946 and remained missing for years. In 2019, 93 metal boxes containing skeletal remains of Slavic origin, belonging to civilians and soldiers who perished in the immediate postwar period following World War II, were found inside the ossuary of the Monumental Cemetery in Bari (Italy). At the beginning of the search, these people were thought to have died in prison camps in Apulia, such as Torre Tresca and Grumo Appula, in the province of Bari. Later, thanks to the discovery of war badges and years of extensive historical research, it was discovered that these remains had been missing for 75 years and belonged to soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army and civilians, probably their relatives, who died in 1946 in the refugee camp of Eboli, in the province of Salerno, Campania (Italy). To unveil this truth that remained hidden for over 75 years, a multidisciplinary study divided into two phases was applied. The first phase, grounded in historical research study, aimed to determine the historical and temporal context in which they lived and confirm the life they actually lived in the Eboli refugee camp. The second phase, grounded in anthropological research, aimed to reconstruct the biological profile of each individual, identify the presence of antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem lesions, assess potential pathological conditions, and determine, where possible, the cause of death. Finally, a correlation of the collected data was conducted to ascertain and corroborate, with reasonable certainty, the living conditions to which they were subjected in the refugee camp where they resided. Italy after 1943 became the scene of intense fighting and a dramatic situation for prisoners of war, including many Yugoslav soldiers. This work brought to light a history that had been lost for as many as 75 years, highlighted the importance, specifically, of the role of the Eboli refugee camp, a context little known and forgotten by many, and above all made it possible to remember and restore dignity to the victims of the Great War. Full article

The landmark Philippine Supreme Court case Llorente vs. Llorente illuminates the complex intersections of transnational migration, inheritance law, and colonial legacies in the Philippines. The case centers on Lorenzo Llorente, a Filipino US Navy serviceman whose estate became the subject of a fifteen-year legal battle between his first wife Paula and his second wife Alicia. Lorenzo returned from the battles of World War II to find his wife in Nabua living with his brother and pregnant with his brother’s child. Lorenzo obtained a divorce in California in 1952. He later returned to the Philippines and married Alicia, naming her and their three adopted children as heirs in his will. Upon his death in 1985, Paula challenged the validity of the US divorce and claimed rights to Lorenzo’s estate under Philippine succession laws. While lower courts initially favored Paula’s claims by rigidly applying Philippine laws that are rooted in the colonial era and privileged blood relations, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Lorenzo’s will in 2000, recognizing his right to divorce as a US citizen. This case reveals how postcolonial Philippine legal frameworks, still heavily influenced by Spanish colonial law, often fail to accommodate the complex realities of transnational families and diverse kinship practices, instead imposing rigid interpretations that fracture rather than heal family relations. Inheritance, previously a highly shared and negotiated process mediated by the elders, can now escalate to family disputes which play out in the impersonal space of the courtroom. Full article

In zooarchaeological research, animal bone fractures can result from various processes including slaughtering, dismemberment, marrow/grease extraction, craft processing, carnivore gnawing/trampling, sediment compression, bioturbation, and recovery bias. These fractures are further influenced by bone freshness/dryness and environmental temperature. The animal bones analysed in this study, excavated from Han dynasty tombs in the Xinxiang Plain New District, China, represent ritual offerings. These specimens exhibit distinct truncation features—chop surfaces, rough planes, and fracture traces—created by ancient iron tools for culinary purposes such as stewing preparation or consumption facilitation. These characteristics differ significantly, from the V-shaped butchery marks produced by stone/bronze tools and fracture patterns from marrow/grease extraction to post-depositional breakage formed during burial processes. In this study, steel tools were employed in the rocking slicing and rolling slicing of animal bones, complemented by techniques such as breaking to sever bone shafts. Subsequently, the marks on the cross-sections were observed using a stereomicroscope, and the results were compared and analysed with the materials from Han dynasty tombs unearthed at Xinxiang city, Henan Province. From the comparison between experimental observation results and archaeological materials, it is evident that the fine processing of meat-bearing bone materials mainly involved the use of rocking and rolling slicing methods. The cross-sections of the slices revealed shearing surfaces, rough patches, bone splinters, and sliced ends. The shearing surfaces in particular exhibited numerous visible trace characteristics, with the types and quantities of these traces varying with different cutting tools. This study holds significant reference value for exploring cutting tools and techniques in antiquity. Full article

The human pelvis is adapted to accommodate bipedal locomotion while retaining a wide enough pelvic canal to birth large babies. Many forces act on the pubic bone, with the pelvis being in charge of supporting the organs of the abdominopelvic cavity. In this research, we investigate whether increases in gut volume (GV) and number of births (parity) impact the skeletal morphology of the pubic bone at two regions: the pubic symphysis and the pubic arch. Our results indicate that in our female sample, the pubic symphysis width increased with increased GV and parity, while the pubic arch width decreased with increased GV and parity, although not significantly. In the male sample, there was almost no effect of increased GV on the pubic symphysis, while the pubic arch width increased in response to increased GV. We hypothesize that while significance is not present for this entire data set, these pelvic structures are impacted by GV and parity, and these changes should be investigated further. These changes in the structure can impact the function of the pelvic girdle and result in pain and changes to mobility. Pelvic girdle pain may be one result of these structural changes due to increased forces, and thus it is vital to investigate what factors may or may not contribute to these bone morphology changes. Full article

The urgency of managing the COVID-19 health crisis in workplaces led to tensions, work overload, and confusion about preventive measures. This study presents a secondary analysis of qualitative data on paradoxes and double binds (PDBs) experienced by precarious essential workers in Canada who interacted with the public and their supervisors. Based on 13 interviews from a larger qualitative dataset, we examine how workers navigated public health recommendations and organisational demands during the pandemic. Findings reveal multiple organisational and managerial PDBs—both COVID-19-related and pre-existing—that contributed to psychological distress and compromised well-being. We argue that PDBs represent a significant occupational health hazard for precarious workers. Addressing these structural contradictions through proactive management strategies could help mitigate workplace tensions, reduce stress, and enhance resilience in both crisis situations and regular organisational contexts. Our study contributes to occupational health and safety (OHS) by underscoring the risks posed by PDBs and advocating for strategies to support vulnerable workers in navigating conflicting demands. Full article

Accepting the premise that sociocultural anthropology is colonialist and Audre Lorde’s maxim that the master’s tools cannot remake the master’s house, I consider the value of a tool from outside the master’s house to reconstruct sociocultural anthropology. Intersectionality, variously known as a theory, a lens, or a metaphor, is rooted in U.S. Black women’s abolitionism of the mid-nineteenth century, which argued that rights-seeking efforts framed out Black women. The 1970s and 1980s brought increased attention, especially from Black American feminists, to the multiplying effects of the intersections of race, gender, and class. In 1989, the term intersectionality first appeared in print, and a theory was named. Since then, many fields of study and activism have embraced intersectionality. Edward Said posited that radical theories lose their edge when they travel outside their original context. I explore intersectionality’s travels to sociocultural anthropology—its chronology, advocates, and transformations. Although barely visible in much of sociocultural anthropology’s Whitestream, intersectionality has gained not only in numbers but also a stronger voice since its first published appearance in 2001. Nearly two centuries have passed since intersectionality’s origins in U.S. enslavement, but interlocking conditions of inequality pervade the world today, nurturing intersectionality’s radical ethos in sociocultural anthropology. Full article

Sustainability is currently seen as the central unifying idea necessary to mobilize collective responsibility to address the set of serious problems and challenges facing humanity, appealing to cooperation and the defense of the general interest. This article analyzes the social sustainability of the rural environment, in order to enhance its value beyond the traditional agricultural activities of the territory. Methodologically, it is based on ethnographic fieldwork through participant observation and in-depth interviews, carried out in the rural environment of Castilla y León. This has allowed us to reflect on the strategies that we have tried to articulate, combine, and relate to achieve rural social sustainability. The conclusions show the need to give political content to the rural space and the elements that derive from it. Political, economic, and social problems cannot be solved only from the local level; they need to create alliances beyond the communities to deal with economic structures that seek continuous growth. Full article

This paper explores the co-constitution of systems of social distinction, culinary habits, and political economies. During the Depression in British Honduras (Belize), unemployment, hunger, and malnutrition ignited panic, unrest, and uprising. At the same time, agents of a mahogany company and the colonial government displaced an entire Maya farming community. Why was Maya farming not considered a pillar of the colony’s economy? For more than a century, colonial administrators had made scarce attempts to stimulate domestic food production and distribution, and stimulating corn production was not even considered. Corn had become racialized, called “Indian corn”, and was considered disgusting, unhealthy, and the cause of high Indian mortality rates. A visceral disgust for corn was hard to disentangle from British disgust for Indians more generally. The racialization of corn emerged alongside and reinforced colonial economic policies of structural underdevelopment, all of which ensured that when Belize City residents were standing in food lines, the abundant harvests of Indian corn were nowhere within reach. Full article

In this paper, we revisit the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in western Scotland and the links between early European farmers and middens in light of new aDNA, radiocarbon, and stable isotopic evidence. New carbon and nitrogen stable isotopic data for food sources (plant and animal remains) from a Mesolithic site are presented, and dietary FRUITS models are recalculated based on these data. We also respond to recent criticisms of the Bayesian approach to diet reconstruction. Results support the view that Neolithic people had at most a minimal contribution of marine foods in their diet and also point to a dual population model of transition in western Scotland. A significant aspect of the transition in coastal western Scotland is the co-occurrence of Neolithic human remains with shell-midden deposits, which appears to contradict stable isotopic evidence indicating a minimal contribution of marine resources to the diet of early farming communities in the region. Finally, we highlight the need for further research to fully address these issues, including (1) targeted isotopic analyses of potential plant and animal resources, (2) single-entity radiocarbon and ZooMS analyses of animal bones and artefacts from shell middens, and (3) further aDNA analyses of the remains of Late Mesolithic and Neolithic people. Full article

This article, based on systems thinking, explores how community organizations in Montreal providing newcomers support through the various stages of their settlement process operate within a local municipal system and a broader provincial system, both promoting integration and intercultural relations. On a local scale, the City of Montreal has set itself the goal of raising public awareness of the benefits of cultural diversity and wishes to encourage positive interactions in the public space. For those interviewed during our research, this municipal model of integration does not necessarily align with Quebec’s unique and unofficial integration model, interculturalism, which can be perceived as a political project supporting the French-speaking majority’s interests and which may seem incompatible with the social justice values espoused by community organizations. This article is based on verbatim excerpts gathered from individual and group in-depth interviews conducted with 37 community workers in the spring of 2023. Full article

This study evaluates the applicability of Demirjian and Willems’ methods for age estimation in Portuguese children aged 6–9 years based on orthopantomographs (OPGs). The main objective was to compare the precision of both methods in estimating chronological age (CA). This study analyzed 160 OPGs, equally distributed by sex, and the dental age (DA) was calculated twice, using both methodologies. The findings reveal that Demirjian’s method consistently overestimated the chronological age by an average of 1.47 years for males and 1.45 years for females. Similarly, the Willems method also overestimated the age but to a lesser extent, with mean differences of 1.18 years for males and 0.91 years for females. Statistical analysis confirmed that both methods significantly overestimate age, with the most considerable discrepancies observed in 8-year-old individuals. Despite the Willems method providing slightly more accurate results, neither method was reliable, particularly for male subjects. This study highlights the need for further refinement of these methods, considering their tendency to overestimate age, especially in specific age groups. This research improves age estimation techniques in forensic and clinical settings, especially within the Portuguese pediatric population. Full article

Is there a qualitative difference between apes’ and humans ‘ability to estimate others’ mental states’, a.k.a. ‘Theory-of-Mind’? After opting for the idea that expectations are empty profiles that recognize a particular content when it arrives, I apply the same description to ‘vicarious expectations’—very probably present in apes. Thus, (empty) vicarious expectations and one’s (full) contents are distinguished without needing meta-representation. Then, I propose: First, vicarious expectations are enough to support apes’ Theory-of-Mind (including ‘spontaneous altruism’). Second, since vicarious expectations require a profile previously built in the subject that activates them, this subject cannot activate any vicarious expectation of mental states that are intrinsically impossible for him. Third, your mental states that think of me as a distal individual are intrinsically impossible states for me, and therefore, to estimate them, I must estimate your mental contents. This ability (the original nucleus of the human Theory-of-Mind) is essential in the human lifestyle. It is involved in unpleasant and pleasant self-conscious emotions, which respectively contribute to ‘social order’ and to cultural innovations. More basically, it makes possible human (prelinguistic or linguistic) communication, since it originally made possible the understanding of others’ mental states as states that are addressed to me, and that are therefore impossible for me. Full article

The development of transhumant livestock farming in the Iberian Peninsula from the Late Middle Ages onward is one of the most thoroughly studied aspects of economic history, as it laid the foundation for the prosperity of the Kingdom of Castile throughout the Early Modern period. In contrast, there is very little information about livestock activity in the earlier period of al-Andalus, the part of the peninsula under Islamic rule from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. This lack of information is due to epistemological reasons, as the absence of written sources makes archaeological data on pastoralism highly elusive. Additionally, historiographical reasons have led to the belief that livestock farming played a secondary role in the Andalusi economy. Given the current state of research, this work is significant as it presents convincing archaeological evidence of Andalusi livestock farming as early as the 11th century, linked to rural communities where sheep herding for wool production was the primary activity. Full article