Anthropology

Transitional justice policy, although predicated on an ideology of transition, often homogenizes victims and fails to respond to victims’ diverse and dynamic needs during the ‘transitional period.’ In this article, based on 14 months of ethnographic research in Nepal, I examine the perceptions and experiences of adults who were children when their fathers were killed or disappeared during the decade-long internal armed conflict between the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists and the Nepali government. Through their varied experiences and ongoing transitions, I challenge homogeneous and fixed conceptualizations of ‘children’ and ‘the local’ and argue for greater attention to the intersectional experiences of victims and the redress of entrenched systems of domination and inequality.

This guest-edited special issue of Practicing Anthropology examines anthropological research on the missing due to war and migration. Primarily, this issue aims to create accessible dialogues about rapidly communicating research findings and building collaborations with families of the missing. Each article is collaboratively paired and emphasizes the processes, possibilities, and complications of collaboration.

This article, and its collaboratively paired article written solely by victim-activists (Bhandari, Chaudhary, and Chaudhary 2018 in this special issue), focus on the families of people who were forcibly disappeared during Nepal's decade-long internal armed conflict and their continued exclusion from processes of transitional justice. In this article, I highlight my continued conversations with victim-activists after I returned to the United States from Nepal and question what kinds of collaborations are possible to facilitate inclusion and social justice for marginalized victims.

Conspiratorial thought is one of the hallmarks of late modernity. This article focuses on the wealth of conspiracy theories that crystallized around chemtrails and the Californian drought to examine the genre more generally. It suggests that the particular constellation of certainty and doubt present in conspiracy arguments is a product of the fundamentally mimetic nature of conspiratorial thought, which espouses the contours of the infrastructural environment in which it emerges. In our case, this infrastructural environment is that of bureaucracy on the one hand and the architecture of the internet on the other. Each of these infrastructures helps to shape conspiratorial thought in a distinct manner, and the confluence of the two imparts to the genre its particular flavour.

In the deserts of Southern California, a series of climate crises has disturbed the form and content of the ordinary. In this context of unfolding change, Californians are experimenting with the spaces, surfaces, objects, and infrastructures of their homes, harnessing the material elements of the house as a site not only of repetition and reproduction but also of reinvention. At times, these experiments in the ecologies of everyday life unleash a range of transformative effects on both self and world, accreting into instances of cosmological reconfiguration. Rather than analyze such experiments as practices of adaptation or recovery, we can better understand them as attempts to cultivate alternative ways of feeling at home in the Anthropocene. Such experiments take up the relations among aesthetics, ethics, and affect as their primary site of improvisation and innovation.

In the Southern California desert, a group of primarily young women seek to enlist the assistance of wild plants as simultaneously material, social, and spiritual beings in negotiating what they perceive to be the signature challenge of the present moment: how to fortify the boundaries of the self against harm while staying open to the prospect of positive interpersonal connection. An analysis of the concrete practices through which these spiritual herbalists relate to plants, their selves, and each other will contribute to efforts made by anthropologists to rethink the constitution of the interior landscape of the self from the perspective of lived experience, while also demonstrating how the constitution of the human self is in practice actively scaffolded by an exterior landscape of nonhuman others.

Bioarchaeological studies can provide biological information on sex differences/similarities in subsistence patterns and labor intensification through the analysis of sexual dimorphism and bilateral asymmetry of specific skeletal elements of a population. Current research suggests that sexual dimorphism and bilateral asymmetry has decreased over time due to a shift in subsistence patterns (hunter-gathering to agriculture) that requires both sexes to participate in similar activities, and the utilization of both limbs for agricultural production. Also, nutrition can impact the sexual dimorphism of a population, because nutritional deficiencies can decrease cortical bone thickness, and males are more physically impacted by environmental stressors than females.

Spanish speaking populations in the USA have long been categorised under the umbrella term 'Hispanic', which is a cultural construct. The term Hispanic ignores the unique ethnohistories and biological variation among Hispanic groups with various European, African and indigenous American influences. Considerable heterogene-ity has been identified in pre-contact America and has continued to influence the cultural and biological compositions of various regions today. The purpose of this research is to examine biological variation in Mexico, which was influenced by indigenous migration patterns and the Old World conquests of the Americans. Using multivar-iate statistics, this paper compares 16 three-dimensional craniometric landmarks of samples from northern Central Mexico, northern Yucatan and western Mexico to examine the regional biological variation present in Mexico in both prehistoric and historic groups and also compares Mexican, Spanish and African American groups to examine patterns of Old World conquests. Multivariate statistics detected significant group differences for both size and shape (centroid size, p < 0.0001; shape, p < 0.0001) and showed that while significantly different , all the Mexican groups are more similar to one another except for one prehistoric inland-western Mexican group, which is morphologically distinct from the other Mexican groups. Previous mtDNA research in these areas shows a low prevalence of African American admixture and a high indigenous component in the northern Mexican groups, which is consistent with the findings of this paper. The prehistoric and historic Mexican groups were the most similar indicating the retention of indigenous admixture after contact. The results from this analysis demonstrate that all groups are significantly different from one another supporting other findings that have shown that the indigenous populations of the New World are heterogeneous and that this variation may also contribute to the heterogeneity of contemporary populations.

Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) data are used to explore the structure of obsidian acquisition for groups in the King Range National Conservation Area of northern California. The data indicate that, contrary to a distance-decay model, obsidian from more distant sources in the Medicine Lake Highlands, dominates the obsidian found at sites in the area. Furthermore, metric data indicate a positive relationship between size and distance to source with more distant sources represented by larger flakes. It is suggested that this pattern is the result of culturally mediated exchange relations under which Athabaskan speakers concentrated trade relations with one another to the exclusion of trade with linguistic groups to the south, with longer histories in the area, such as the Pomo and Yuki. Additionally, the use of redwood dugouts on rivers in northern California and the importance of northeastern Californian obsidian in ritual practices of Cal-ifornia Athabaskan groups may have further encouraged the use of more distant, northeastern Californian, sources.

We compare the organization of obsidian flaked stone technologies in two different time periods at CA-INY-30, a village site in southern Owens Valley, eastern California. Previous archaeological studies suggest a reorganization in settlement patterns between the Newberry (ca. 3500e1500 BP) and Marana (ca. 650-contact) periods, from a highly mobile to a more residentially sedentary one. New geochemical data, based on laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analyses of obsidian artifacts associated with discrete house floors, support this basic settlement model, but reveal new detail in how people moved across the landscape and accessed, extracted, reduced and used obsidian resources. In the earlier Newberry period, there is no relationship between flake size and distance-to-source, and the falloff curve relating frequency of obsidian against distance is more gradual, as expected, but contrary to our expectations, source diversity is not higher.
These factors suggest extremely high mobility, but also selective extraction of particular sources. Newberry obsidian may have been acquired by groups of hunters who embedded quarrying within long-distance trips to distant hunting grounds, and subsequently transported bifacial cores to base camps. By contrast, Marana patterns show strong relationships between flake size and distance from source and steeper fall-off curves, suggesting groups acquired their obsidian primarily from closer sources, likely via exchange networks. At the same time, geochemical diversity,
especially among smaller resharpening flakes, is higher in the Marana period, highlighting the wide-ranging conveyance systems through which
obsidian moved.

Plant subsistence economies for native peoples in the Mojave Desert have been well-documented ethnographically and historically, but less so archaeologically. Ethnographic accounts taken from southern
California Native Americans (Palmer 1878), including the Panamint (Coville 1892), Kawaiisu (Zigmond 1981), Timbisha Shoshone, and Southern Paiute (Fowler 1995; Kelly 1932–1934) report that Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia Engelm.), Mojave yucca (Y. schidigera Roezl ex Ortgies.), and other yucca species (all Asparagaceae) were harvested as reproduction progressed from early to late spring. Harvesting and processing methods varied between groups, but in general, immature and mature fruits were roasted in pits and stored for later consumption. The time depth of these subsistence practices, however, remains unknown because of a scant archaeological record. Recent archaeological excavations of several pit features yielded Yucca spp. seeds and fruit in association with fire-cracked rock (FCR) and charcoal. The mix of immature and mature seeds and fruits suggest some early spring gathering and processing, however the majority were collected later in the season. Thus, the archaeological evidence supports and elaborates on the ethnographic observations about Yucca as a food source. A combination of ethnographic and archaeological evidence allows for a more detailed and robust picture of past human behavior and dietary practices.