American Anthropologist: futures, languages and minor ways of publishing

The June issue of American Anthropologist (vol. 128, no. 2) brings together several useful clues for thinking about where the discipline is moving today, and almost all of them have to do with sustaining what the dominant frameworks push to the margins.

One appears in Eliana Ritts’s article on Kai Language Heroes, presented as the world’s first indigenous-language television game show, produced by Taiwan Indigenous Television. What is interesting is not only that television becomes a tool for linguistic revitalisation, but that learning is not organised solely around right and wrong. Ritts describes a “production culture of lightness” — her translation of the Mandarin term qingsong — where humour, play and care make it possible to sustain languages marked by histories of colonialism, shame and erasure.

The second thread is the block on indigenous futurities, a special section co-edited by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Heather Law Pezzarossi whose introduction (“Indigenous Futurities: Theorizing Futurity in the Past and Present”) sets the frame. Against an idea of the future inherited from modern progress or colonial temporality, these works ask how archaeology and anthropology can narrate indigenous pasts and presents without locking them into loss, disappearance or survival. The point is not to add indigenous peoples to a future already designed by others, but to recognise that they also produce futures of their own.

The third thread, apparently minor but very suggestive, is Nicholas C. Kawa’s defence of the anthropological zine — or self-published booklet — (“Welcome to the Anthropozine!”, published open access). Kawa proposes self-published booklets as a partial alternative to conventional academic publishing: more tactile, more experimental, more accessible to students and more open to combining text, image and theory. Taken together, the issue reminds us that anthropology changes not only through its themes; it also changes through its media, its publics and its material forms of circulation.

Human remains, museums and restitution: when the archive is also a body

An investigation by The Guardian published on 7 March 2026 offered the most complete count to date of the human remains held in British institutions: 241 museums, universities and administrations declare that they hold 263,228 items — bones, skeletons, mummies, hair, teeth, fragments — of which 37,996 are recorded as being of foreign origin (28,914 from outside Europe) and another 16,236 with no known continent of origin. Only 100 institutions could give a figure for individuals: an estimated 79,334 people. The real figure, the researchers warn, is almost certainly higher.

The debate can no longer be framed only as conservation versus research. We must also ask who has the right to name those remains, to decide whether they should be displayed, studied, buried or restituted. Many arrived through plunder, in colonial, racial or extractive contexts, often with incomplete documentation. To rehumanise does not mean simply removing bodies from display cases, but reconstructing relations: with communities of origin, descendants, states and non-Western ways of understanding death. Restitution thus appears less as a final gesture than as a political and ethical process: a way of revisiting what science did with bodies and what responsibilities museums inherit today.

Marisol de la Cadena and the worlds that do not fit

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced its new cohort of members in 2026, and anthropology had a notable presence: in the same intake came Marisol de la Cadena (UC Davis) and Anna Tsing (UC Santa Cruz), alongside figures such as George Marcus, Barbara Mills and John L. Jackson Jr. This is no minor detail for AIthropology: two of the voices we follow — that of the ontological pluriverse and that of the patchy Anthropocene — recognised at once by one of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in the United States.

De la Cadena’s case is the one that best condenses the axis of this radar. Her work on Andean worlds, earth-beings and the politics of knowledge — gathered in Earth Beings — has insisted on a decisive question: what happens when what other peoples say exists does not fit the categories with which academia, the state or science order reality. A mountain can be a mountain, but not only a mountain. An animal can be livestock in a capitalist economy, but also form part of another relation of life and care. De la Cadena compels us to hear those “not onlys” not as cultural metaphors, but as ontological frictions: points where different worlds brush against each other without being reduced to one another.

For an anthropology of artificial intelligence, the reading is especially fertile. Technical systems tend to classify, translate and normalise; De la Cadena reminds us that there are forms of life and thought whose importance lies precisely in not letting themselves be fully translated. To think with her — and with Tsing, who instead of abstract global models starts from concrete “patches” and from the material assemblages of the Anthropocene — is to ask not only what an AI can know, but what worlds are left out when knowing means turning everything into compatible data.

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