Browse Entries

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence by machines, allowing them to perform tasks that typically require human cognitive functions, such as problem-solving...

‘Repair’ has emerged as a key concept in contemporary anthropology, invoked across domains as diverse as technological maintenance, post-conflict reconciliation, ecological restoration, and...

Using and valuing resources is a vital component of human life. Yet as much as resources such as water, land, or fuel contribute to the flourishing of communities, they also constitute...

The concept of ‘planetary health’ asks how human health and disease relate to the environment and to other species on a planetary scale. Cutting across scales, it allows us to think of human...

In popular uses of ‘culture’, the term often refers to sets of artistic accomplishments or pleasant manners. In anthropology, however, ‘culture’ means something much broader and its use...

Blood is a polyvalent substance. Its dual nature as a vital physical entity and a potent symbolic medium makes it indispensable to medicine but also to ritual practice, symbolism, and...

Beauty is an aesthetic value that is tied to embodied practices, affects, and the senses. Whereas philosophers have long discussed beauty as disembodied aesthetics, and scientists have...

The anthropology of secularism studies how nation-states actively shape ‘religion’ as a category, institutional structure, and lived experience. It does not treat secularism as an impersonal...

Democracy is a system of governance and a value with a widespread presence worldwide. However, anthropological literature has shown that the transition to democracy articulates practices...

‘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...

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...

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...

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human...

Humanitarianism can be broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It manifests not only through discrete acts of helping, but also through a set...

The mystery evoked by the deep sea—its darkness, remoteness, and inaccessibility—has long captivated the public imagination. Iconic works of science fiction as well as pioneering...

Technology broadly refers to objects or actions that are linked to tekhne , an ancient Greek term for ‘skill’ or ‘craftmanship’. Anthropologists of technology sometimes employ this...

The term ‘sustainability’, as used in policy and common contemporary parlance, has a very European heritage, but its meanings and implications defy easy definition. While perhaps most...

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is...

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...

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...

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 global circulation of goods connects economic processes worldwide—from extraction and production to distribution, consumption, and waste disposal. The resultant web of economic activity...

Energy is central to everyday life and industrial production, and is a major concern and focus of public policy. Its production from different sources, its use, and the societal and climatic...

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their...

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions...

Most of our lives are spent working, as we frequently engage in purposeful activity to build and maintain our physical and social worlds. The anthropology of work and labour provides a...

Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that...

Anthropologists have shown an interest in architecture since at least the end of the nineteenth century, though not to the extent that may be expected given the prominent position that...

Surveillance —watching over through human and/or non-human technologies for an intended purpose —can connote a dystopian imaginary in which all activity becomes visible before a hostile gaze...

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...

Palliative care has been developing since the 1960s as a form of caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or when a patient is at the end of...

L’anthropologue Jean Price-Mars est une figure importante de l’Atlantique noir. Diplomate, écrivain, homme politique et anthropologue, l’auteur a exercé une influence qui va au-delà d’Haïti...

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...

When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific...

'Resilience’ is becoming a new policy buzzword. The term describes the ability to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to...

Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they...

Silence is a common occurrence in everyday social interactions, yet anthropological research, like most research in the social sciences and humanities, has mostly focused on what people say...

‘Intellectual disability’ is a widely used psychiatric category that conceives of certain minds as impaired in their development. By approaching intellectual disability from a cross-cultural...

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are...

The definition of ‘art’ is extremely complicated. Its meaning has shifted radically, in particular in the last century. Originally, in Latin, it meant ‘craft’, but then for the last few...

Cash transfers—direct regular and non-contributory payments to eligible individuals—are one of the most discussed, celebrated, and contested social assistance innovations of the twenty-first...

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...

Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted...

Anthropology makes a unique contribution to the study of egalitarianism. While ‘egalitarianism’ has long been the purview of moral philosophy, anthropology is unique in that it is the only...

Haitian Vodou first took shape in the context of slavery. Once the religion of the royal family in Dahomey, in West Africa, it was then transformed by the slaves of the island of Haiti as a...

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the...

Vodou ayisyen an pran nesans nan kontèks esklavaj la. Yon relijyon fanmi Wa nan peyi Dawome, nan Afrik oksidantal, esklav sou lil Dayiti yo te tranfòme l kòm yon zouti pou yo rekonstui tèt...

Pandemics tend to be defined as large epidemics, i.e. as sudden and widespread rises in disease incidence that occur over a very wide area, cross international boundaries, and affect a great...

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated...

Le vodou haïtien a été formé dans le contexte de l’esclavage. Culte de la famille royale au Dahomey, en Afrique Occidentale, il a été transformé par les esclaves de l’île d’Haïti en moyen de...

Anthropology and history are inseparable, sharing concerns with societies other than the one we currently inhabit—whether in time or in space. This entry considers how the relation between...

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...

Monsters are not only key protagonists in myths, legends, fairy tales, fiction, and films; they also haunt cellars, cyberspace, and crossroads. Based on encounters with monsters in their...

There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet...

Social reproduction is a lens through which to analyse the persistence of society over time, even as its human and material components keep changing. Its main value is in identifying and...

The collapse of the socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union drastically changed the lives of millions of people and offered a new and exciting field of research...

There are many universal assumptions about what care is and how it ought to be provided. Such assumptions are widely embedded in public debates, government policies, and institutional forms...

Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows...

Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural...

Buddhism has existed for around two and half millennia, and is practiced by over 500 million people in the world today. The anthropology of Buddhism spans the breadth of the Buddhist world...

Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the...

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different medical approaches, treatments, and institutions that people can use while pursuing health: for example, combining biomedicine with...

Cannibalism, the eating of one’s own kind, is a practice that occurs in both humans and non-humans. Some people consumed their own kin to ensure that their spirits joined those of their...

Sharing is a particularly versatile and widespread human practice that features in all domains of life, including religion and politics, family life, and economics. It has a long...

Climate change, largely a product of human activities, is arguably the most comprehensive and dramatic challenge facing humanity. In the first decades of this century, its implications have...

Depression, which psychiatrists regard as a most common mental illness, has been examined by anthropologists especially closely since the 1980s. While most medical experts consider...

Dependence is often considered as a primarily negative state of being. It has gone from being described as a threat to individual self-reliance in early modern political theory in Western...

Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how...

‘Latin’ America is a region constructed in a context of imperial rivalries and disputes about how to build ‘modern’ nations that made it an ‘other America’ distinct from ‘Anglo’ America...

Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a nexus...

Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But...

The emic/etic distinction originated in linguistics in the 1950s to designate two complementary standpoints for the analysis of human language and behaviour. It has been subject to debates...

‘Neoliberalism’ is a widely used term that travelled from economic philosophy into policymaking, and from policymaking into critical social scientific discourse in the late twentieth century...

What is addiction? As an umbrella term, addiction is often used to describe activities where there is an overwhelming drive to engage in destructive, distressing or compulsive behavioural...

Numbers, enumeration, and the quantification of contemporary life seem to govern our existence more and more. Particularly since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of...

Political ecology is a critical research field within anthropology and related disciplines that examines how and why economic structures and power relations drive environmental change in an...

Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of livelihood. Co...

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of...

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage...

Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present. Correspondingly...

Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a...

Money is a formidable subject — an intimate object in our everyday lives, a claim over resources, and a topic of academic inquiry. Textbooks define money by its various functions, e.g., as a...

Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of the...

Because water permeates every aspect of human existence, ethnographic accounts describe many forms of engagement with it: for example, its centrality to modes of production; its influence on...

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close...

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational...

Revolutions encompass political mobilizations that attempt rapid transformations of both the nature of political authority and wider social, political, and economic structures. Although...

Mining has occurred for thousands of years, and social anthropologists have studied it for almost a century. This entry explains anthropology's principle findings about mining, beginning...

The concept of autism is historically contingent. It did not exist, in any proper sense, before it was invoked by medical and mental health professionals in the twentieth century. This entry...

From plastics in the oceans, to the export of toxic materials, waste is an issue that increasingly attracts public attention as well as demands for political and environmental action. Within...

Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in twentieth...

Animism is a particular sensibility and way of relating to various beings in the world. It involves attributing sentience to other beings that may include persons, animals, plants, spirits...

Global health is a field of expertise that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century alongside changing disease profiles, health technologies, and governance structures. This entry...

Activities that one can retrospectively label as ‘sport’ have probably been part of human beings’ repertoire for millennia, but sports as we know them today are the product of a modernity...

Though there is no universally accepted definition for what constitutes a ‘game’, games are typically defined as goal-oriented, rules-based activities closely associated with the notion of...

Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The...

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and...

Islam is not an anthropological concept in the way, for example, culture, or even religion, are. People have thought about and discussed Islam long before anthropologists started thinking...

‘The digital’ is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to share. The...

Cet article aborde la charité comme un terme «étique» qui facilite la comparaison entre des traditions différentes. Les bases théoriques en ont été posées par deux grands anthropologues au...

The variety of ways in which death has been handled in human societies has been a source of much scholarly fascination. In this brief overview, anthropological approaches to the study of...

Disability is a form of difference that is created when the social participation of someone with an impairment is ‘dis-abled’ by normative expectations and material conditions. This entry...

What is adoption? To answer this question is to jump directly into one of the key controversies of anthropology: anthropologists, associated for over a century with the close study of...

To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not...

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical...

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention...

Precarity emerged as a central concern in scholarly research and writing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to political mobilizations against unemployment and social exclusion...

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the...

This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the...

This entry considers charity as an ‘etic’ term that facilitates comparison between different traditions. Theoretical foundations were laid by two great anthropologists at the beginning of...

Tourism is a new phenomenon in world history, but today more people travel long distances for this purpose than for any other. This entry traces some main contributions anthropologists have...

Bureaucracy quite literally translates into rule by public office (‘bureau’). The anthropology of bureaucracy can be seen as falling under two broad approaches. Firstly, there is an...

Voice is a salient category in our contemporary lives. We speak of marginalised groups ‘lacking voice’ and celebrate their efforts at ‘raising their voices’; we are advised to listen to our...

‘Culture’ is in many ways the most fundamental of anthropological concepts. Yet it has been the subject of a range of critical interventions in the course of the discipline’s history, the...

It is possible to argue that the anthropology of ethics has always been part of the discipline but also that it is a radically new and transformative venture. This entry explains why both...

Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating and...

'Science' features twice in anthropology. On the one hand, science is an object of anthropological enquiry, in much the same way as ‘kinship’, ‘religion’, or ‘nationalism’. Anthropologists...

With images of protest and dissent widespread and frequently circulated in news broadcasts and social media posts, resistance to prevailing power structures seems to be an expected and...

This entry provides an overview of the history, politics and changing roles of anthropology museums. It explores the developing field of museum anthropology, which encompasses the work that...

What is citizenship? The word itself is now used in a wide range of arenas, from citizenship education in schools to development agencies’ programmes of good governance, and public...

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary...

Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of their age...

The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding dynamics of...

When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities...

The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely...

Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before considering how...

The concept of values has recently re-emerged as the object of explicit theoretical attention in a number of disciplines, including anthropology. The aim of this entry is to review the...

Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed...