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Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tells the remarkable story of Franz Boas, one of the leading scholars and public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book in a two-part biography,Franz Boas begins with the anthropologist's birth in Minden, Germany, in 1858 and ends with his resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, while also examining his role in training professional anthropologists from his berth at Columbia University in New York City. Zumwalt follows the stepping-stones that led Boas to his vision of anthropology as a four-field discipline, a journey demonstrating especially his tenacity to succeed, the passions that animated his life, and the toll that the professional struggle took on him. Zumwalt guides the reader through Boas's childhood and university education, describes his joy at finding the great love of his life, Marie Krackowizer, traces his 1883 trip to Baffin Land, and recounts his efforts to find employment in the United States. A central interest in the book is Boas's widely influential publications on cultural relativism and issues of race, particularly his bookThe Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which reshaped anthropology, the social sciences, and public debates about the problem of racism in American society. Franz Boas presents the remarkable life story of an American intellectual giant as told in his own words through his unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes. Zumwalt weaves together the strands of the personal and the professional to reveal Boas's love for his family and for the discipline of anthropology as he shaped it.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor Francis, an informa company.

The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. “Patchy Anthropocene” is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call “modular simplifications” and “feral proliferations.” This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; “structure” here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss “systems” as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address “hope” without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement’s predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation–sponsored 1956 volume, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description.

The following conversation took place as an online round table organized by the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security research network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists on 14 March 2023. The aim of the round table was to create a space where Ukrainian anthropologists would reflect collectively on the anthropological approach to the invasion of Ukraine one year on. We asked them: What kinds of debates, narratives, imaginaries, and forms of activism have emerged under the invasion, and how have they shifted with time? How does an anthropological lens complicate some of the debates that have perhaps been posed in too simplistic terms? What is the view “from below” in Ukraine regarding life under the invasion, prospects for peace, solidarity, hope, and resistance? And last, but not least: how can we—anthropologists, non-Ukrainians—support them?

A roundtable on studying indigeneity in Southeast Asia is presented. This roundtable took place at the end of a two-day workshop, 'Unpacking Indigeneity in Southeast Asia', which was held on Apr 25-26, 2019 at the University of Malaya. The participants in the workshop were all Indigenous and non-Indigenous Southeast Asian scholars (mainly anthropologists) who were trained in different disciplinary centres and traditions, and who worked in various parts of the region. They talk about the challenges and opportunities Southeast Asian anthropologists working on indigeneity currently face.

This article suggests that although there is not much of an explicitly defined anthropology of populism, anthropologists have nevertheless been working for many years on the things we talk about when we talk about populism. Anthropologists should thus be exceptionally well situated to divert the debate on populism in creative ways. In particular, I argue that the term populism registers an intensified insistence of collective forces that are no longer adequately organized by formerly hegemonic social forms: a mattering-forth of the collective flesh. The article also shows why populism is such an awkward topic for anthropologists. In part, this discomfort has to do with a tension between anthropologists' effectively populist commitments to the common sense of common people at a time when that common sense can often look ugly. In part, it has to do with how the populist challenge to liberalism both aligns populist politics with anthropological critiques of liberal norms and puts pressure on anthropology's continued dependence on liberal categories for its own relevance to broader public debates.

Anthropologists, like neoliberal economists, have often assumed that competition (re)orders society in broadly predictable ways. By contrast, we contend that competition always facilitates changes beyond its anticipated outcomes and disciplinary effects. We argue that the outcomes of competition are contingent on the varied and co-existing interpretations of audiences, arbiters, and competitors about the nature of competition, what is worth competing for, and how to go about it. Hence, although it is often instituted with the intention of authoritatively determining value, generating order, or engineering predefined changes, competition inherently affords alternative and unexpected possibilities for sociality. In doing so, competition mediates divergent social orders and modes of relating, rather than instituting one order or another.

As a response to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's critique of my essay \"Fetishes are gods in the process of construction,\" this paper enters into critical engagement with anthropological proponents of what has been called the \"ontological turn.\" Among other engagements, I note that my own reflections on Malagasy fanafody, or medicine, are informed by just the sort of self-conscious reflections my informants make on epistemology, something that anthropologists typically ignore. After making note of the arguments of Roy Bhaskar that most post-Cartesian philosophy rests on an \"epistemic fallacy,\" I further argue that a realist ontology, combined with broad theoretical relativism, is a more compelling political position than the \"ontological anarchy\" and theoretical intolerance of ontological turn exponents.