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The social networks of Hadza hunter-gatherers are structurally similar to modern social networks and show signs of clustering in cooperative behaviour, which suggests that these networks may have contributed to the emergence of cooperation in early humans. The origins of social networking The Hadza bushmen of northern Tanzania are almost totally cut off from the modern developed world, providing anthropologists with a useful model of an early hunter-gatherer society. A study of Hadza social networks, quantifying their ties to each other and their propensity to cooperate, shows that the main characteristics of modernized networks, such as transitivity and homophily, are observed in the Hadza. In addition, social ties are more likely between individuals with similar levels of public goods game donations, and Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in cooperation. Taken together, these results provide the strongest evidence so far that these key features of human networks reflect shared ancestry and may have developed at an early point in human history. Social networks show striking structural regularities 1 , 2 , and both theory and evidence suggest that networks may have facilitated the development of large-scale cooperation in humans 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 . Here, we characterize the social networks of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania 8 . We show that Hadza networks have important properties also seen in modernized social networks, including a skewed degree distribution, degree assortativity, transitivity, reciprocity, geographic decay and homophily. We demonstrate that Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in public goods game donations. Network ties are also more likely between people who give the same amount, and the similarity in cooperative behaviour extends up to two degrees of separation. Social distance appears to be as important as genetic relatedness and physical proximity in explaining assortativity in cooperation. Our results suggest that certain elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history. Also, early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based in part on their tendency to cooperate. Social networks may thus have contributed to the emergence of cooperation.

Food and water shortages are two of the greatest challenges facing humans in the coming century. While our theoretical understanding of how humans become vulnerable to and cope with hunger is relatively well developed, anthropological research on parallel problems in the water domain is limited. By carefully considering well-established propositions derived from the food literature against what is known about water, our goal in this essay is to advance identifying, theorizing, and testing a broader anthropology of resource insecurity. Our analysis focuses on (1) the causes of resource insecurity at the community level, (2) “coping” responses to resource insecurity at the household level, and (3) the effect of insecurity on emotional well-being and mental health at the individual level. Based on our findings, we argue that human experiences of food and water insecurity are sufficiently similar to facilitate a broader theory of resource insecurity, including in how households and individuals cope. There are also important differences between food and water insecurity, including the role of structural factors (such as markets) in creating community-level vulnerabilities. These suggest food and water insecurity may also produce household struggles and individual suffering along independent pathways.

The disintegration of the Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatán Peninsula and Central America was a complex process that occurred over an approximately 200-year interval and involved a catastrophic depopulation of the region. Although it is well established that the civilization collapse coincided with widespread episodes of drought, their nature and severity remain enigmatic. We present a quantitative analysis that offers a coherent interpretation of four of the most detailed paleoclimate records of the event. We conclude that the droughts occurring during the disintegration of the Maya civilization represented up to a 40% reduction in annual precipitation, probably due to a reduction in summer season tropical storm frequency and intensity.

The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.

This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and thier banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.

Whether concerned with kinship or with kula, anthropology's interest in credit and debt goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline. Nevertheless, this review dedicates itself primarily to more recent research trends into credit and debt's powerful nature and effects. Following Mauss, credit and debt are treated as an indissoluble dyad that contributes to diverse regulatory mechanisms of sociality, time, space, and the body. Anthropology's overarching contribution to this field of inquiry rotates around its refusal to segregate the moral from the material, seeing the ubiquitous moral debates surrounding credit and debt in various ethnographic settings as coconstitutive of their material effects.

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land‐tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small‐scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend their livelihoods and communities. More often, however, it has been imposed from outside, first by paternalistic officials of the colonial period and now by a new set of experts and advocates who assume responsibility for deciding who should and who should not be exposed to the risks and opportunities of market engagement. From the perspective of their proponents, however, attempts to institutionalize collective landholdings are not impositions at all. They simply confirm a culturally distinct formation naturally present among “tribal” or “indigenous” people. Yet rural populations have repeatedly failed to conform to the assumptions embedded in schemes designed for their protection. They cross social and spatial boundaries. Some demand recognition of individualized land rights as they respond to market opportunities. Others are unable to escape the extractive relations that visions of cultural alterity and harmonious collectivity too often overlook. Meanwhile, dispossessory processes roll on unrecognized or unobserved.

Does the undocumented status of 1.5-generation Latinos (those who migrated at a young age) in the United States affect their political, civic, and public selves? Our approach to this question begins with a theoretical framework based on the concept of abjectivity, which draws together abject status and subjectivity. We argue that the practices of the biopolitics of citizenship and governmentality—surveillance, immigration documents, employment forms, birth certificates, tax forms, drivers’ licenses, credit card applications, bank accounts, medical insurance, car insurance, random detentions, and deportations—enclose, penetrate, define, limit, and frustrate the lives of undocumented 1.5-generation Latino immigrants. We examine data from a random-sample telephone survey of 805 Latinos and 396 whites in Orange County, California, to provide general patterns that distinguish 1.5-generation Latino immigrants from their first-generation counterparts and to suggest the contours of their lives as undocumented immigrants. We then examine in-depth interviews with 80 respondents also in Orange County who provide extensive qualitative information and personal narratives. The analysis shows how abjectivity and illegality constrain daily life, create internalized fears, in some ways immobilize their victims, and in other ways motivate them to engage politically to resist the dire conditions of their lives.

Oil scholarship often focuses on oil as money, as if the industry were a mere revenue-producing machine—a black box with predictable effects. Drawing on fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea, I take the industry as my object of analysis: infrastructures, labor regimes, forms of expertise and fantasy. Starting from a visit to an offshore rig, I explore the idea of \"modularity\"—mobile personnel, technologies, and legal structures that enable offshore work in Equatorial Guinea to function \"just like\" offshore work elsewhere. Anthropologists often characterize as naive the simplifications of modular processes, the evacuation of specificity they entail. Yet for the industry in Equatorial Guinea, this evacuation of specificity was neither mistake nor flaw. Tracing the making of modularity shows how corporations can appear removed from local entanglements and also helps to clarify the \"how\" of capitalism—the work required to frame heterogeneity and contingency into the profit and power found in many global capitalist projects.

Recent work in ecology suggests that the diversity of responses to environmental change among species contributing to the same ecosystem function can strongly influence ecosystem resilience. To render this important realization more useful for understanding coupled human-natural systems, we broaden the concept of response diversity to include heterogeneity in human decisions and action. Simply put, not all actors respond the same way to challenges, opportunities, and risks. The range, prevalence, and spatial and temporal distributions of different responses may be crucial to the resilience or the transformation of a social-ecological system and thus have a bearing on human vulnerability and well-being in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political change. Response diversity can be seen at multiple scales (e.g., household, village, region), and response diversity at one scale may act synergistically with or contrary to the effects of diversity at another scale. Although considerable research on thesourcesof response diversity has been done, our argument is that theconsequencesof response diversity warrant closer attention. We illustrate this argument with examples drawn from our studies of two East African pastoral populations and discuss the relationship of response diversity to characteristics of social-ecological systems that can promote or diminish resilience.