This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

This chapter explores how the conceptual shift from ‘tribes’ to ‘ethnic groups’ contributed to the dismantling of the standard of civilisation. Whereas the binary distinction between civilised nations and primitive tribes reinforced the imperial hierarchy between European and non-European peoples, the concept of ethnicity is characterised by a cultural relativism that acknowledges the formal equality of all peoples. The chapter also shows how these conceptual changes enabled the reimagining of the international order as an ‘anarchical’ system populated by sovereign nation-states: at the very moment that anthropologists were moving away from colonial notions of ‘primitive society’ and ‘ordered anarchy’, IR theorists were adopting this vocabulary to conceptualise their own object. In this way, IR effectively accumulated the functions of colonial anthropology as the scientific vehicle for the study of the modern state’s primitive ‘other’. The chapter wraps up with a discussion of indigenous rights and their relationship to minority rights.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This chapter explores the debates over human origins in the popular media to show how the topic influenced the ways in which Darwin’s theory was perceived (and misunderstood). The impact of the public’s fascination with the gorilla as a possible human ancestor helped to sustain the image of evolution as the ascent of a ladder. The cultural evolutionism promoted by archaeologists and anthropologists also adopted the linear model of development. Physical anthropologists saw the allegedly ‘lower’ races as intermediate steps in the ascent from the apes, in effect as ‘living fossils’ filling the gap created by the lack of genuinely ancient remains at the time. The impact of Darwin’s Descent of Man is explored in the context of the existing preconceptions generated in the 1860s. The relationship between general models of evolution and emerging ideas of social evolution, not all Darwinian in form, is explained.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

This chapter introduces social scientific perspectives and methods applicable to observing the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and religion. It discusses the contributions that anthropological and sociological approaches can make to this entanglement of two modern social phenomena while also drawing attention to the inherent biases and perspectives that both fields bring with them due to their histories. Examples of research on religion and AI are highlighted, especially when they demonstrate agile and new methodologies for engaging with AI in its many applications; including but not limited to online worlds, multimedia formats, games, social media and the new spaces made by technological innovation such as the innovations such as the platforms underpinning the gig economy. All these AI-enabled spaces can be entangled with religious and spiritual conceptions of the world. This chapter also aims to expand upon the relationship between AI and religion as it is perceived as a general concept or object within human society and civilisation. It explains how both anthropology and sociology can provide frameworks for conceptualising that relationship and give us ways to account for our narratives of secularisation – informed by AI development – that see religion as a remnant of a prior, less rational stage of human civilisation.

This chapter considers socialist intellectual Roumain’s significance as a creative writer and political activist whose shadow looms large over twentieth-century Haitian letters. Looking closely at Roumain’s singular position as an internationally circulating witness to and participant in critical moments in both Haitian and global history, Chemla offers a thorough accounting of Roumain’s astonishing impact on literary modernity. He argues that while Roumain wrote of the specific context of the US American occupation and the rise of Indigenism, the insights and perspective that mark his essays and prose fiction likewise anticipated the fascist, colorist statecraft of the Duvalier regime from its origins in the Indigenist perspectives and racialized thinking of the late 1920s. Chemla places Roumain at the center of an extended network of thinkers, writers, and political actors in France, the United States, and throughout the Caribbean.

This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.