Humans, Volume 2, Issue 3 (September 2022) – 5 articles

First anthropology became unbound from “the village”, then from the single site, and gradually from the physical site altogether. As humans resume their push into space, anthropology is set to become unbound from the earth itself. This essay considers what the discipline has offered and can offer toward understanding the present and future of space colonization. It begins by examining the surprisingly long and productive history of anthropology’s engagement with the subject, going back at least to the 1950s. Then it surveys current analysis of law, sovereignty, and nationalism in space, which largely imagines law and identity in off-earth settlements as more-or-less direct extensions or transfers of earth law and identity; in other words, space settlers will remain affiliated with and loyal to their source countries (or companies). However, taking seriously the analogy of terran migration and colonialism, where colonies developed distinct and separatist identities, the essay predicts the emergence of exonationalism, in which over generations colonists will invent new identities and shift their affiliations to their non-terran homes and ultimately seek independence from the earth. The essay concludes with reflections on how the settlement of space, still a distant goal, will reshape our definition of the human and therefore the practice of anthropology as the science of human diversity. Full article

This article studies and provides a narrative review of the history of the native Orang Kallang people residing on Singapore’s Kallang River before Singapore’s modernization. The first section delves into the Orang Laut and how a group of them moved to the Kallang River to form the independent tribe of the Orang Kallang. This is followed by the historical significance of the Kallang River and its role in trade and maritime commerce in early Singapore. Subsequently, the second section investigates the Orang Kallang’s origins, livelihood, language, and reasons for their eventual decline. As the Orang Kallang tribe split after the arrival of the British in 1819, the group that settled in Pulai River, Johor, was recorded to have dwindled staggeringly in population due to a smallpox epidemic. The third section will focus on the impact of smallpox on the early aboriginal populations of Singapore (and the overarching region of Malaya), failed vaccination attempts, and how the Orang Kallang was likely to have been impacted. The last section will sum up the themes discussed in the paper. Full article

Wari is thought by many to be the first Andean Empire (ca. 600–1000 AD); however, the means of expansion, the areas controlled, the strength of the polity, and the nature of Wari institutions remain largely contested. In general, models describing the Wari polity are simplistic and do not exploit sophisticated approaches developed by historical archaeologists. Wari expansion into the Moquegua Valley, Peru, was originally interpreted as an intrusive colony or distant outpost, perhaps to engage its southern neighbor, Tiwanaku. It was presumed that migrants from the polity’s core established settlements and imperial infrastructure in an unoccupied ecozone. Recent research of households in the colony reveals diverse domestic material culture, diets, and use of living space. Those who lived in Wari-affiliated settlements were probably drawn from other imperial provinces and communities from other areas of the drainage. Forced relocations are common among historically documented empires, but willing pioneers may have selected for this tenuous frontier. Regional-scale data show that Wari had the strength to change the local economy and control this distant frontier province; household-scale data reveal the polyethnic nature of the colonial enclave and provide clues to understand early imperial institutions. Full article

The claim of possessing supernatural abilities is a commonly reported phenomenon across human societies. To bolster the credibility of such claims, performers may make use of illusions and sleight of hand to give the appearance of impressive powers. One common trick found among culturally independent hunter–gatherers on every continent they inhabit involves a healer ostensibly extracting from a sick person an object, such as a pebble or insect, that is supposedly causing the patient’s illness. The use and functions of the ‘extraction trick’ are here explored across a global sample of hunter–gatherer societies (N = 74), with attention given to the possible costs and benefits accrued by performers and their patients or audiences. This and similar tricks can be highly deceptive, but they can also be undertaken for entertainment, symbolic reasons, their placebo-like utility to sick patients, or some mixture of each. The recurrent invention of the trick across independent societies, as well as its cultural inheritance and diffusion between groups, indicates that it likely appeals to certain universal facets of human psychology, where experiences of sickness and pain commonly induce one to seek interventive cures from specialists, who in turn may use deceptive displays to give the appearance of greater skill and powers. Full article

This paper makes a case for Buried Culture—humanly modified packages of sediments and artifacts. Specifically, it argues that Buried Culture amounts to an a-social, literally posthuman, cultural being. The argument proceeds through three main steps. Firstly, drawing on the prototypical example of landfills, it demonstrates that while ontically solid, Buried Culture is epistemically vacuous. Secondly, placing it between sedimentology and archaeology, a diagnosis is offered: The epistemic vehicles at our disposal either acknowledge Buried Culture’s existence as a proper being or appreciate its cultural qualities, but not both. Thirdly, an aesthetically oriented approach is proposed, adopting the analytical reasoning of the art critic as a means to straddle this gap. To illustrate this, a small-scale case study is presented, concerned with an early 20th-century landfill near Tel Aviv, Israel. Full article