Contemporary European Politics

Publisher:
Wiley Online Library
Publication date:
2025-10-17

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Acheulean in Southern Africa: Latest Perspectives

    Acheulean sites in southern Africa continue to play an important role in understanding the evolution of Earlier Stone Age technology. While there are over fifty Acheulean localities documented in this region, contextual challenges often limit their potential to develop well-defined stratigraphic and chronological constraints. Despite this, recent trends in Acheulean research have emphasized the importance of examining site formation issues on both site and regional scales. Understanding where Acheulean sites are located on the southern African landscape provides insight into the mobility patterns of Early and Middle Pleistocene hominin populations. Furthermore, recent studies using geometric morphometric methods to analyze handaxes and cleavers have provided new avenues for illuminating sources of variation in their size and shape across both temporal and geographical boundaries. Continued expansion in these focal areas of research will aid our ability to understand how Acheulean toolmakers adapted to local and regional landscapes in southern Africa.

  • Anthrozoology and Conservation

    Conservation is traditionally the domain of biologically or ecologically trained researchers and practitioners. As a result, conservation science has historically focused on how wildlife is affected by anthropogenic factors such as habitat destruction and exploitation. In recent years, practitioners have come to realize that the social, historical, political, and symbolic meanings around conservation and wildlife all influence how people relate to and behave towards wildlife and conservationists. Methodological approaches specific to, or as used in, anthropology allow for a more nuanced understanding of what are often complex, historically grounded interactions/relations. Such research can reveal complex sociocultural consequences for individuals living around wildlife and also reveal that people may hold favorable views about species but demonstrate contradictory behaviors. Anthrozoology provides a nuanced perspective on people–wildlife relations which can enhance conservation efforts.

  • Latin America, Decolonizing Anthropology in

    Decolonization anthropologies in and from Latin America involve disrupting a certain disciplinary common sense that takes some assumptions for granted. These assumptions include the belief that anthropology is singular and universal, a product of Western modernity, originating in Europe and the United States, and spreading from there to the rest of the world. This universality rests on the idea that there is a privileged object of study and a specific method that define the discipline. Another assumption is the notion of otherness as something that precedes the discourse that constitutes it, with culture as an artifice to address it. Finally, the current situation of academia in the region is addressed as a condition of im/possibility for Latin American anthropologies. All of this is articulated around the ethical-political question about the raison d'être of anthropologies and their consequent relevance in the contemporary world.

  • China Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (CUAES)

    In 2003, China won the bid to host the sixteenth congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). In order to organize this congress, with the approval of the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the China Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (CUAES) was established in Beijing on March 30, 2007. CUAES now has thirty professional committees and holds academic conferences on a regular basis. CUAES aims to unite Chinese researchers in anthropology, ethnology, and related disciplines, to promote the development of anthropology and ethnology in China and international exchanges, to enhance people's understanding of solidarity among different ethnic groups and cultures, to provide consulting services to the relevant government departments, and to put forward suggestions and opinions for the unity and progress of the various ethnic groups and for the economic and social development of the state.

  • Textiles

    Within anthropology, textiles have a complex relationship as both material and metaphor. Antithetically, they are used to articulate the intangible through their figurative application, expressing epistemological discourses through allegory and their mnemonic association with the body, revealing narratives on gender, social hierarchies, personhood, and cosmology. Textiles as tactile, corporeal, and sensual objects serve to open new ethnographic windows through practice-based, visual, and multimodal methodologies within the social sciences. The material quality of textiles frames an interdisciplinary and collaborative territory for their study in anthropology, recognizing them as haptic technologies that contribute to both theory and practice within the discipline.

  • Gender and Populism

    While there is some truth to the public commentary linking populism and aggrieved (white) masculinity, there is much more to the interplay between gender and populism. This entry explores the diversity of ways that gender and populist projects are implicated in one another. Rather than treat populism as a monolithic phenomenon, anthropologists have shown its flexibility, particularly with regard to questions of gender and sexuality. This has included showing the public spaces that women might open for themselves through populist militancy and exploring how populists attempt to garner support among women by recasting the “traditional” gender roles that such movements promote as appealing. Anthropologists have tracked both the gender and sexual conservativism of populist movements and the way that populists distinguish themselves as the (self-purported) defenders of the rights of women and sexual minorities. For anthropologists, understanding the deeply gendered nature of populism can offer insights regarding the evident appeal that populism has throughout Europe, the Americas, and India.

  • Kinship, Gender, and Ancient DNA

    Despite their importance to social and cultural anthropology, kinship studies have rarely featured in archaeological research. This situation has rapidly changed, in large part as a response to the explosion of paleogenomic data, and a whole raft of new approaches to kinship, relationality, and biological relatedness are emerging. Here, we discuss this dynamic new field of archaeological kinship research with regard to both its genomic and social archaeological aspects. We build on feminist critiques of bio-essentialism to draw out the limitations of genetic data for telling us about social relations and take inspiration from First Nations scholarship to argue that an expansive, complex, and deeply social understanding of kinship is accessible to archaeologists.

  • Gender and Waithood

    As originally defined by political scientist Diane Singerman, “waithood” refers to the situation of youth, particularly young men, in parts of the global South who are unable to achieve the transition to full adulthood due to economic precarity and subsequent barriers to marriage. As a result, they remain in a liminal space where they are considered neither children nor adults. Increasingly, however, the marital delays associated with waithood may involve a significant measure of social and individual choice, especially in societies where women are entering higher education in record numbers and looking for equal partners in marriage and childbearing. Four major aspects of waithood must thus be considered: involuntary versus voluntary waithood; youth agency amid waithood; gendered aspects of waithood; and waithood's effects on reproduction, including the global rise in fertility preservation through egg freezing.

  • Repatriation of Anthropological Knowledge

    The question of repatriation of anthropological knowledge is perhaps best considered by comparing past and present museum practic es. To investigate what it means to repatriate knowledge, we must understand the processes involved in repatriating museum objects, including what it involves to become a museum object. Such knowledge may produce new insights into our disciplinary histories as well as our current practices of anthropological knowledge production.

  • Bureaucracy and Sex

    Attention to the role of bureaucracy in classifying and governing sex in anthropology has been a topic of diverse interest. The historical role of anthropological theories of kinship and genealogy in establishing systems of classification highlights the lasting influence of racial and colonial legacies on binary sex. In the 1990s, interest in gender as performative resulted in a shift in focus from what sex is to what sex does. Ethnographic studies of sex classification have provided robust concepts for understanding the social, political, and technological processes invested in sex as a bureaucratic object. Anthropologists have investigated these material and semiotic processes, attending to how some jurisdictions expand possibilities for changing legal gender even as others further entrench essentialist definitions of biological sex. Ethnographic investigation of the primacy granted to sex/gender located in the body/mind allows for a fuller evaluation of state efforts to assert a monopoly over powers of recognition.

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