Desiring Bureaucracy

This review presents new perspectives on the anthropology of bureaucracy. Since Weber's account of the importance of this organizational mode to the functioning of contemporary socioeconomic systems, the inescapability of bureaucracy has been repeatedly theorized to show its good and ill effects. Yet anthropologists retain an ambivalent relation to this topic and can struggle to move beyond critique. I consider this ambivalence, suggesting that it reflects a frustrated desire for better governance, and offer neglected topics as potentially productive ways to tackle bureaucracy as an omnipresent yet difficult-to-pinpoint cultural form. Finally, the review makes the case for an impenitently anthropological approach to the fullness of bureaucracy, including testing the ethnographer's founding categories of thought, over a position of pure denunciation or evaluation.

Psychology Within and Without the State

Psychological research in small-scale societies is crucial for what it stands to tell us about human psychological diversity. However, people in these communities, typically Indigenous communities in the global South, have been underrepresented and sometimes misrepresented in psychological research. Here I discuss the promises and pitfalls of psychological research in these communities, reviewing why they have been of interest to social scientists and how cross-cultural comparisons have been used to test psychological hypotheses. I consider factors that may be undertheorized in our research, such as political and economic marginalization, and how these might influence our data and conclusions. I argue that more just and accurate representation of people from small-scale communities around the world will provide us with a fuller picture of human psychological similarity and diversity, and it will help us to better understand how this diversity is shaped by historical and social processes. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Communicating Citizenship

Citizenship has become a major topic in anthropology and the study of language (including sociolinguistics) since the early 1990s, with scholars in these fields especially examining the status and political claims of immigrants, refugees, indigenous groups, and other subaltern populations. This article argues that models of communication lie at the heart of debates about citizenship and explores two fundamentally communicative processes: first, the mutual recognition of citizens as citizens, and second, the interpellation by state apparatuses of citizens. It first discusses the emergence of the question of citizenship within anthropology and the study of language. It then considers the tension that arises as any recognition of difference confronts the normative model of citizenship already institutionalized in the state apparatus. Finally, this article examines the interlacing of these scholarly trajectories in one of the premier sites where citizens communicate as citizens: the public sphere.

Precarious Placemaking

This review brings anthropological accounts of place and placemaking into dialogue with the concepts of precarity and precariousness. In recent years, precarity has become a widespread empirical and theoretical concern across the humanities. The article traces the simultaneous rise alongside precarity of network and ontology as post-place-based frameworks for anthropological analysis. Although these new frames facilitate anthropological explorations in the spirit of the times, this review argues that both network and ontology lack the capacity to identify what is being transformed and what is at stake when and where precarity takes hold. To see models of placemaking as spaces of transformative possibility requires an account of coexisting, qualitatively distinctive forms of relationship to places.