AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Supporting the use of genetic genealogy in restoring family narratives following the transatlantic slave trade
David LT
Solidarity exclusions: Problematizing kinship and humanitarianism from the perspective of transnational adoption
Marre D and Leinaweaver J
What is, or should be, the role of solidarity within the (transnationally adoptive) family? In Spain, is a prized value in family life, political organization, and humanitarian action, yet adoption professionals actively discouraged its use as a motivation for transnational adoption. This article offers a genealogy of the concept of , a consideration of its enduring currency in kinship discourse in Spain, and a critical analysis of case studies from our respective research projects. We show that kinship and humanitarianism are considered very differently in terms of their temporalities and entailments-the terms, and specificities, of their engagements. We argue that 's multivocality within the transnational adoptive family context has broader significance for kinship, both adoptive and nonadoptive, as well as for social and political engagement across inequality. 's exclusions from transnational adoption reveal how kinship and humanitarianism both involve the work of identifying, accommodating, and resolving social difference. [].
Belief correlations with parental vaccine hesitancy: Results from a national survey
Matthews LJ, Nowak SA, Gidengil CC, Chen C, Stubbersfield JM, Tehrani JJ and Parker AM
We conducted a nationally representative survey of parents' beliefs and self-reported behaviors regarding childhood vaccinations. Using Bayesian selection among multivariate models, we found that beliefs, even those without any vaccine or health content, predicted vaccine-hesitant behaviors better than demographics, social network effects, or scientific reasoning. The multivariate structure of beliefs combined many types of ideation that included concerns about both conspiracies and side effects. Although they are not strongly related to vaccine-hesitant behavior, demographics were key predictors of beliefs. Our results support some of the previously proposed pro-vaccination messaging strategies and suggest some new strategies not previously considered.
The intersection of violence and early COVID-19 policies in El Salvador
Ross N
Leveraging anthropological expertise to respond to the COVID-19 global mental health syndemic
Azevedo KJ, Kalvesmaki AF, Riendeau RP, Sweet PA and Holmes SM
This commentary asks anthropologists to work within communities to actively address the global mental health impact of COVID-19 and contribute to the pandemic response. Multiple social and physical losses, worsened by numerous factors, have produced syndemic traumatic stress and suffering across populations, highlighting persistent inequalities further amplified by the effects of COVID-19. Specifically, anthropologists can work to contribute to the development of mental health programs; confront the racialization of COVID-19 alongside marginalized communities; support real-time policy making with community responses; and innovate transparent collaborative research methods through open science. This pandemic can serve as an opportunity to prioritize research endeavors, public service, and teaching to better align with societal needs while providing new opportunities for synergy and collaborations between anthropologists in and outside the academy. Anthropologists collaborating directly with mental health clinicians and the public can contribute to knowledge specifically through direct program development and implementation of interventions designed to improve mental well-being. Innovating to find impactful solutions in response to the unprecedented mental health challenges exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to promote more equitable recovery around the world.
Water Sharing Is a Distressing Form of Reciprocity: Shame, Upset, Anger, and Conflict Over Water in Twenty Cross-Cultural Sites
Wutich A, Rosinger AY, Brewis A, Beresford M, Young SL and
Anthropological theories of reciprocity suggest it enhances prestige, social solidarity, and material security. Yet, some ethnographic cases suggest that water sharing-a form of reciprocity newly gaining scholarly attention-might work in the opposite way, increasing conflict and emotional distress. Using cross-cultural survey data from twenty global sites (n=4,267), we test how household water reciprocity (giving and receiving) is associated with negative emotional and social outcomes. Participation in water sharing as both givers and receivers is consistently associated with greater odds of reporting shame, upset, and conflict over water. Water sharing experiences in a large, diverse sample confirm a lack of alignment with predictions of classic reciprocity theories. Recent ethnographic research on reciprocity in contexts of deepening contemporary poverty will allow development of ethnographically informed theories to better explain negative experiences tied to water reciprocity.
Between privileges and precariousness: Remaking whiteness in China's teaching English as a second language industry
Lan S
 This research examines the multiple and contradictory racialization of white identities in China's booming ESL (English as a second language) industry. China represents a new geography of whiteness studies beyond Euro-America due to the transformation of corporeal whiteness into a minority identity as a result of international migration. This research makes distinctions between white privilege as a form of structural domination in Western societies and white-skin privilege as a form of embodied racial capital in China, which can be easily transformed into white-skin vulnerability. It interprets the tension between white-skin privilege and precariousness as a concurrent and mutually constitutive process that foregrounds the open-ended nature of white racial formation in China. By focusing on the intersections between global white supremacist ideologies and local Chinese constructions of self/Other relations, this project explores new forms of racialization beyond the Black/white, superiority/inferiority binaries in the Western context.
Discrimination as a Moderator of the Effects of Acculturation and Cultural Values on Mental Health Among Pregnant and Postpartum Latina Women
Fox M
It is important to consider how identity, culture, and social adversity influence maternal mental health among Latina women both because this community faces unique cultural stressors and also because factors that undermine women's mental health during pregnancy and postpartum could have injurious consequences that cascade across generations. This study uses data from a questionnaire administered to Latina pregnant and postpartum women in Southern California, examining cultural orientation, discrimination, and mental health. Results demonstrate mental health benefits for both American and Latino cultural orientations, but the latter's benefit of lower anxiety was only apparent with high discrimination. American and Latino cultural values systems had opposite relationships with depression, with the latter protective and also positively associated with happiness. More traditional gender roles values were associated with greater perceived stress and lower happiness. Different aspects of familism had opposite effects as obligation was associated with less anxiety and referent (defining oneself communally with kin) with more. Results suggest that social adversity and cultural identity and values influence maternal psychology. This study makes a unique contribution by integrating anthropological and biopsychosocial methods and theories towards addressing an issue of public-health importance.
Against Methodological Essentialism, Fragmentation, and Instrumentalism in Times of COVID-19
Briggs CL
Resistance and Care in the Time of COVID-19: Archaeology in 2020
d'Alpoim Guedes J, Gonzalez S and Rivera-Collazo I
The COVID-19 pandemic offered humanity a portal through which we could break with the past and imagine our world anew. This article reviews how over the course of 2020, a series of intersecting crises at the nexus of racism, settler colonialism, climate change, and sexual harassment have prompted acts of resistance and care in the field of archaeology. Throughout the article, we provide concrete suggestions as to how we can continue the work of movements begun over the course of the past year to improve dynamics within our field and use the lessons from our field to improve life for all people in the world and for our planet. [].
Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic
Patnaik SM
Chrono-Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Temporal Balancing and Moralities of Time in Contemporary Urban China
Mason KA
This article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle-class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle-class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, and interpersonal claims on time, creating hybrid approaches to time management that I refer to as . This balancing act is gendered: women, and especially mothers, are charged with protecting the moral status of their families and their children through effective temporal balancing. Paying attention to moments of discordant expectations, in the form of expressions of impatience, can illuminate the logics of temporal balancing in the domains of work, play, and rest. [].
Panic and Pandemics
Thomas DA
Tentacular Faces: Race and the Return of the Phenotype in Forensic Identification
M'charek A
The face, just like DNA, is taken to represent a unique individual. This article proposes to move beyond this representational model and to attend to the work that a face can . I introduce the concept of to capture the multiple works accomplished by the face. Drawing on the example of DNA phenotyping, which is used to produce a composite face of an unknown suspect, I first show that this novel technology does not so much produce the face of an but that of a . Second, I demonstrate how the face draws the interest of diverse publics, who with their gaze flesh out its content and contours; the face engages and yields an affective response. I argue that the biologization of appearance by way of the face contributes to the racialization of populations. [].
Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation
Yates-Doerr E
The recent push for multidisciplinary collaboration confronts anthropologists with a long-standing ethnographic problem. The terms we have to talk about what we do are very often the same as the terms used by those with whom we work, and yet we are often doing very different things with these terms. I draw on over a decade of "awkward collaboration" with scientists working in highland Guatemala to explore how challenges of equivocation play out in research focused on improving maternal/child nutrition. In the interactions I describe, epidemiologists undertake ethnography, anthropologists study scientists, and a Mam-Spanish translator works for projects organized around English-language funding structures and aspirations. I detail situations in which methods, interests, and goals coalesce and diverge to argue for the importance of , a research technique attuned to unsettling binaries that does not result in sameness or unity. I offer suggestions for how this technique might productively reshape the emerging global health imperative to work together. [].
Ordinary Icons: Public Discourses and Everyday Lives in an Anxious Europe
de Koning A and Vollebergh A
Across Europe, ethnically diverse neighborhoods figure as key sites in racialized public debates that imagine the nation as white and nonwhite citizens as foreign to the body politic. Drawing on research in Antwerp and Amsterdam, we examine how public discourses come to shape the lives of residents in such iconic sites. We propose the notion of as a way to understand these connections. Ordinary iconic figures represent generic types that populate national narratives and connect the local and the national as well as the individual and larger categories. These figures come into being in public discourses but are taken up beyond the sphere of politics and media. Such ordinary iconic figures offer commonsense frames for understanding urban landscapes, carve out speaking positions, and come to haunt residents' sense of self as iconic shadows. They thereby help transport the inequalities laid out in public discourses into people's everyday lives. [].
The Descendant Bargain: Latina Youth Remaking Kinship and Generation through Educational Sibcare in Nashville, Tennessee
Flores A
Older sisters in Latino, immigrant-origin families in the United States bear significant caretaking responsibilities for their siblings, especially regarding their siblings' educations. Young women in Nashville, Tennessee, frame their same-generation caretaking commitments and educational expectations for their siblings in intergenerational terms-what I term the descendant bargain. This intergenerational framing reveals how elder sisters position their siblingship-and their educational carework-as vital to forging socioeconomic mobility and kinship obligations, labor often understood as the domain of parents. Youthful siblings' educational carework is a critical kinship practice that demonstrates the central role of youth in making kinship and remaking genealogical generation in immigrant families.
Acculturation and health: the moderating role of socio-cultural context
Fox M, Thayer Z and Wadhwa PD
Acculturation represents an important construct for elucidating the determinants and consequences of health disparities in minority populations. However, the processes and mechanisms underlying acculturation's effects on health are largely undetermined and warrant further study. We integrate concepts from anthropology and statistics to describe the role of sociocultural context as a putative modifier of the relationship between acculturation and health. Sociocultural context may influence the extent to which exposure to host culture leads to internalization of host cultural orientation, and may influence the extent to which acculturation leads to stress and adoption of unhealthy behaviors. We focus on specific aspects of sociocultural context: (1) neighborhood ethno-cultural composition; (2) discrimination; (3) discrepancy between origin and host environments; (4) discrepancy between heritage and host cultures; (5) origin group, host group, and individual attitudes towards assimilation; (6) variation in targets of assimilation within host community; (7) public policy and resources; (8) migration selection bias. We review and synthesize evidence for these moderation effects among first- and later-generation immigrants, refugees, and indigenous populations. Furthermore, we propose best-practices data-collection and statistical-analysis methods for this purpose, in order to improve our understanding of the complex, multilevel aspects of the relationship between acculturation and health.
A Qualitative Analysis of How Anthropologists Interpret the Race Construct
Ifekwunigwe JO, Wagner JK, Yu JH, Harrell TM, Bamshad MJ and Royal CD
This article assesses anthropological thinking about the race concept and its applications. Drawn from a broader national survey of geneticists' and anthropologists' views on race, in this analysis, we provide a qualitative account of anthropologists' perspectives. We delve deeper than simply asserting that "race is a social construct." Instead, we explore the differential ways in which anthropologists describe and interpret how race is constructed. Utilizing the heuristic of , and , we also illustrate the ways in which anthropologists conceptualize their interpretations of race along a broad spectrum as well as what these differential approaches reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular. [].
Local in Practice: Professional Distinctions in Angolan Development Work
Peters RW
Development workers employed by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are commonly classified as national (local) or international (expatriate) staff members. The distinction is presumed to reflect the varieties of expertise required for the work and the workers' different biographies. I examine the experiences of Angolans working in an international democratization program to demonstrate how some professionals at the lowest tiers of international development NGOs engage in social practices that strategically emphasize or conceal certain skills, kinds of knowledge, or family circumstances to fulfill industry expectations of "local staff." Doing so allows them access to employment with international organizations and pursuit of a variety of personal and professional goals. These practices reinforce hierarchical inequalities within the development industry, however, limiting these workers' influence over programmatic action. I argue that professional distinctions among development workers are social achievements and instruments of strategic manipulation by individuals and NGOs rather than accurate reflections of work or workers. The case study provides insight into the institutional reproduction of hierarchical inequalities and the complexly social reasons why those who suffer their limitations may act in ways that reinforce, rather than resist, unequal social structures.
ENGAGING NATIVE AMERICANS IN GENOMICS RESEARCH
Malhi RS and Bader A