Annual Review of Anthropology

Typologies, Typifications,
and Types
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Department of Anthropology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0380, USA;

email: [email protected]
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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020. 49:193–208 Keywords

First published as a Review in Advance on
epistemology, categories, classification, representation, ethnography,
July 13, 2020
expertise
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org Abstract
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-
This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge pro-
011235
duction, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of
Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews.
expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of ev-
All rights reserved
eryday practices of typification. Proposing what an “anthropology of types,”
This article is part of a special theme on Race. For a
broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine
list of other articles in this theme, see https://www.
annualreviews.org/toc/anthro/49/1 the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology,
highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political
questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological founda-
tions of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have
approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and
representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type
production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again
to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that
further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual
and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes.

193
 INTRODUCTION
Types are a complicated symbol within anthropology. While anthropologists have used types to
Types: symbolic scale- construct and critique theories of evolution, culture, and change; systematically compare, contrast,
and relation-building and connect disparate languages, technologies, and cultures across time and space; and communi-
representations used to cate these ideas to broader publics, in the past 50 years, many have eschewed types and typological
categorize or classify
thinking as essentialist, drawing attention to their integral and instrumental use in racist pseudo-
that work by being
apparent science and racialist science that solidified ideas of discrete racial and cultural differences orga-
nized into colonial hierarchies (Ewen & Ewen 2006, Marks 2017). Yet, types, like categories and
Typifications:
classifications, are inescapable (Bowker & Star 1999, Goodenough 1999, Hacking 2007). Archae-
practical, experientially
driven categorizations ology would not be possible without them (Adams & Adams 1991, Gnecco & Langebaek 2014,
that operate on an Whittaker et al. 1998). Even with its shift from types to populations, biological anthropology still
embodied, relies on phenotypes and genotypes as shorthand to describe a range of visible and nonvisible
nonconscious level and genetic variation and expression (Caspari 2003, 2018). Sociocultural and linguistic anthropology
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

feel natural and real,

likewise depend, in part, on understanding individuals’ everyday typifications, or the “taken-for-
despite being
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socialized granted habits of thought and perception” (Segal 1999, p. 236) as a way of understanding cultural
practices.
Typologies: abstract,
Moreover, while anthropologists have moved past types as an organizing rubric for the field, the
closed classification
systems that render concept endures in popular discourse. There has been an explosion of type creation on multiple
complexities, nuances, fronts beyond it. From algorithms (Besteman & Gusterson 2019, Crawford & Paglen 2019, Noble
and continuous 2018), advertising (Dávila 2001, Shankar 2015), and design (Benjamin 2019, Murphy 2016) to
features discrete and policing (Beliso-De Jesús 2020, Maguire et al. 2018, Rosa & Díaz 2020), performance (Herrera
comparable for a
2015, Kondo 2018), and policy making (Eubanks 2017, Merry 2016), ad hoc and everyday ways of
theory-driven goal
perceiving and making sense of difference are rapidly becoming routinized and institutionalized
into newly professionalized practices or are augmenting already established fields. Many of these
new forms either directly or obliquely reference earlier anthropological projects as they seek to
construct, commodify, and discipline groups of people as types (Sadre-Orafai 2019). As such, types
remain a key symbol of anthropology to broader publics, which poses the question, How are we as a
field grappling with the complicated legacies of type production in our own discipline (Rana 2011)
and among other professional domains, where experts are involved in similar work of typological
world making?
In this review article, I propose an anthropology of types as a strategy for highlighting key
epistemological challenges in our field and their mutual imbrication in domains beyond it. An
anthropology of types connects work from across the subdisciplines that theorizes culture, evolu-
tion, and change both through and against types. It positions types at the center of anthropological
knowledge production, considering them from both the abstract, analytical perspective of expert
typologies, on the one hand, and the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of
typification, on the other. An anthropology of types helps us focus on the circuit of typification–
typology–type and back again or how new forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge as ex-
pert knowledge that further solidifies the misrecognition of types as real and natural in the world
(Goodwin 1994). A cross-subdisciplinary anthropological analysis is needed, given that much of
the legacy of type is rooted in early holistic approaches that blended cultural, linguistic, biological,
and material features together in their construction (Braun & Hammonds 2012).
Although there is an impressive body of literature on the multiple, braided histories of types
and typological thinking both within and beyond anthropology (e.g., Arvin 2019, Baker 1998,
Bennett et al. 2017, Edwards 1990, Ewen & Ewen 2006, Kim 2018, Morris-Reich 2016, Poole
1997), tracing these overlapping and distinct intellectual lineages in the same level of depth and
detail is beyond the scope of this review. Instead, here, I knit together multiple scales and vantages

194 Sadre-Orafai
 across a range of domains to point to key moments and questions that can surface when centering
types, typologies, and typifications. I argue that in addition to deconstructing current pernicious
type production practices, this perspective can reveal and place in tension the multiple domains
and trajectories from which they are emerging. While the proliferation of types risks flattening
difference, removing nuance, and sucking out the vitality, contingency, and ultimately unknowable
interiority of people ( Jackson 2005), when juxtaposed against one another, they can also enliven,
activate, and animate a range of concerns in unique ways that are worthy of our attention.
To outline this approach, I begin with a brief history on the use of typologies and types in
anthropological methods and theories, showing how the type concept crosses subdisciplines and
multiple scales of fieldwork. I discuss the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and po-
litical questions they raise. Next, I chart the shift away from types to figures in social theory, the
phenomenological foundations of typification that are implicated in this reframing, and how so-
ciocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached both and their related issues of scale,
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

translation, and ethnographic representation. I then review ethnographic analyses of a range of

experts involved in cultural practices of type production—in criminology and policing; policy and
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government; science and technology; and advertising and media—and how anthropologists have
used visual and arts-based approaches to reimagine the discipline and its relationship to types.

TYPOLOGIES AND TYPES IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Typologies are abstract systems of classification and comparison that render the complexities and
nuances of everyday life or continuous features of biological and material diversity discrete and
comparable through the modeling and use of types. Based on identifiable, isolatable, and bounded
characteristics and features, typologies are “made for the sorting of entities” (Adams & Adams
1991, p. 47). Typologies are always created from a particular perspective and with a specific purpose
in mind (Adams & Adams 1991, pp. 48–49; Gnecco & Langebaek 2014, p. v). From the nineteenth
century through the first half of the twentieth century, anthropologists vigorously debated the
merits of a range of typological methods and practices, not just their theoretical and analytical
utility, but the number, kind, and realness of types they contained. Goals ranged from making
anthropology more systematic and scientific to making it more metaphorical and amenable to
theoretical abstraction. Aptly summarizing an ongoing concern, Kluckhohn (1939; 1960, p. 135),
a frequent contributor to these debates, bemoaned, “Most [anthropologists’] classifications are
either crudely empirical or grossly impressionistic. We are relatively rich in content categories but
poor in conceptual or relational categories.” Theorists sought inspiration from math, philosophy,
linguistics, and biology, while also highlighting the distinctiveness of anthropological data and
the limitations of various methods and materials. Early anthropological typologies drew data and
theories from across the subdisciplines, with archaeological models heavily influenced by theories
of evolution (Lyman et al. 1997) and racial typologies informed not just by perceived physical
differences, but by linguistic and cultural ones as well (Braun & Hammonds 2012, pp. 67–68;
Edwards 1990, p. 256).
Because typologies are “explicitly theoretical in intent as opposed to . . . [purely] descriptive
categorization” (Kluckhohn 1960, p. 134), theorists use types heuristically to construct them. As
Adams & Adams (1991) note, “A type, unlike other kinds of classes, is also a sorting category”
(p. 47). Types are symbolic representations that build both scale and relations (Irvine 2016); they
can be iconic, indexical, part of type–token relationships, or various combinations therein (Agha
2011, Reyes 2017). Types are reductive, making it possible to compare disparate phenomena, fea-
tures, or idiosyncratic differences. Within typologies, types are designed as a means to an end
but are frequently misrecognized as ends unto themselves. They are imperfect frames. Types are

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 sense-making devices but are prone to distortion, simultaneously flattening and heightening dif-
ferences. In some formulations, such as Weber’s ideal type, this distortion is the point: “Ideal types
were never meant to conceptualize the objective world. They allow us to conceptualize and de-
lineate the value-laden world of culture, history, and human subjectivity” (Fernandez 2016, p. 46).
Types do not exist empirically but are used to distill key features, sharpen boundaries, and aid in
analysis. Still, types work by being apparent. In many of the mid-twentieth-century debates about
types, theorists juxtaposed typologies—with their graphic, revelatory structure—against purely
quantitative, statistical ways of knowing that lurked beneath the surface. While typologies are
amenable to statistical quantification, they are of a different logical order. They rely on expert
analyses and consensus that the qualities and features highlighted are both meaningful and, with
the appropriate frame, readily evident.
In their historical research on types, visual anthropologists have shown the importance of
graphic representations (e.g., drawings, photographs, sculptures, and museum displays) in both
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anthropological practices of typological and type production and their mediation beyond the dis-
cipline (Edwards 1990, 1997; Pinney 1990, 2011; Poole 1997, 2005). These representational prac-
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tices include anthropologists’ use of type photographs as scientific data alongside and in service
of anthropometric measurements (Delaplace 2019), as well as their translation into nonscientific
artistic renderings for broader publics. For example, writing about American sculptor Malvina
Hoffman and the Chicago Field Museum’s 1933 The Races of Mankind exhibition, Kim notes that
Hoffman “mediated race for American common sense . . . [by modifying] the terms of anthropo-
logical typology . . . presenting not a series of racial types but a series of racial portraits . . . [replac-
ing] biometrics and mechanical objectivity with portraiture’s ethos of embodiment, physical and
psychological immediacy, and interpersonal connection” (Kim 2018, p. 127, emphasis in original).
Despite these different orientations, however, anthropological and artistic representations of types
share a similar visual aesthetic.
Writing about anthropological type photography in the mid-nineteenth century, Edwards
(1990) observes, “Photographically, the ‘type’ is expressed in a way which isolates, suppressing
context and thus individuality. The specimen is in scientific isolation, physically, and metaphori-
cally, the plain background accentuates the physical characteristics and denies context” (p. 241).
This erasure of context is the prerequisite for typological comparison. As Poole argues, writing in
relation to early-nineteenth-century biological drawings and the visual discourse of type, “Delet-
ing the observer . . . allowed the artist to isolate the represented figure from any specifically nar-
rative frame and to make it speak—as it were—for itself. The represented, visual type acquired a
materiality and existence of its own” (Poole 1997, p. 103). Decontextualization works as a form of
highlighting that helps define an anthropological professional vision. As Goodwin (1994) notes,
“[T]he way in which such highlighting structures the perception of others by reshaping a domain
of scrutiny so that some phenomena are made salient, while others fade into the background, has
strong rhetorical and political consequences” (p. 628). Moreover, this style of visual evidence, in
turn, serves as an insignia of the discipline, a fact that has been productively refracted and used as a
form of critique by a range of contemporary visual artists, such as South African visual activist and
photographer Zanele Muholi (2018) in their Somnyama Ngonyama: Hail the Dark Lioness series and
Indian artist Pushpamala N and Bangalore-based Scottish photographer Clare Arni’s 2000–2004
collaboration Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (Pushpamala & Arni 2006). Yet
as Poole argues, both in the case of type photographs and in contemporary reinterpretations and
interventions of them, the apparent fixity of these categories must be tempered by the ontological
instability of photography’s form: “[T]he understanding of race that emerges from a history of
anthropological photography is clearly as much about the instability of the photograph as ethno-
logical evidence and the unshakeable suspicion that perhaps things are not what they appear to be

196 Sadre-Orafai
 as it is about fixing the native subject as a particular racial type” (Poole 2005, p. 165). This tension
runs throughout anthropological uses of types.
The epistemological uncertainty about types, typologies, and their operational inferences
structured decades of archaeological debates. Theorists and practitioners sought to refine the
use of types from pure description to connecting time, space, and history through functional-
ist analyses or mentalist approaches aimed at accessing emic perspectives, to refining theories of
assemblage and culture in a more positivist, scientistic way, to leveraging computational prowess
in the refinement of types (Adams & Adams 1991, pp. 265–77; Ford 1954; Krieger 1944; McKern
1939; Rouse 1960; Spaulding 1953; Sullivan & Rozen 1985). As Adams & Adams stress, however,
there was a disjuncture between the volatility of typological debates within archaeological theory
and the mundane classificatory practices at archaeological sites that, at the time of their writing,
had remained largely unchanged. Recent work, however, has sought to shift this relationship, us-
ing theory to transform these practices. Inspired in part by the ontological turn and informed by
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ethnographic insights from Indigenous descendent groups and textual interpretations of histori-
cal sources, new scholarship has revised intake categories and classifications themselves, building
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up alternative, coequal relational typologies that focus on “sets of objects rather than on single
artifact classes or types” (Zedeño 2009, p. 415) and “the labile nature of material qualities and
essences . . . that invite us to resee objects as dynamic and involved in ongoing and relational nar-
ratives” ( Jackson 2017, p. 603).
Many of these same issues—the relationship between theory and method, the realness of
categories—have structured debates about types in biological anthropology. While the post-1960s
“new physical anthropology” shifted the subdiscipline’s focus from type to population and away
from descriptivism toward theory-driven questions about evolution and adaptation, vestiges of
typological thinking remained (Caspari 2003). Caspari (2018) points to the endurance of essen-
tialist thinking and the continued search for real categories focused now at the molecular level
rather than the skeletal level. Writing about osteology’s transformation from racial science to
skeletal biology and back again, Armelagos & Van Gerven (2003) argue that a narrow focus on
methods has entrenched typological approaches by encouraging forms of applied descriptivism
that reinforces racial categories rather than challenging them: “Rather than being obsessed with
constructing racial classification, we should be examining the biological consequences of racial
analysis” (Armelagos & Van Gerven 2003, p. 62). Stojanowski (2018) argues that the lack of an-
thropological training for geneticists working on ancient DNA and prehistoric migrations has
led to the reproduction of typological thinking owing to the “primacy of methodology at the ex-
pense of asking different types of questions with our data” (p. 183). As anthropologists from across
the subdisciplines have shown, these are not just epistemological issues, but political ones as well
(Norton et al. 2019), which can also be seen from the inception of the discipline itself.
While Boas famously rejected the prevailing racial typological theory of the late nineteenth
century, ushering in a new paradigm of cultural holism and relativism that extended to how he
and his students not only studied culture, difference, and change, but also displayed them in mu-
seum contexts (Bennett et al. 2017), he did so using the same anthropometric techniques of skull
measurement and type photography as did his opponents (Maxwell 2013). As Caspari notes, racial
science and early anthropology were one and the same; Boas “never really relinquished essen-
tialist notions of major races—broad geographic entities—even as he questioned the validity of
human types for smaller racial categories” (Caspari 2003, p. 68). In this way, his work and that
of his students can be seen as a shift in number and kind of types and typologies rather than as
a rejection of them outright. Indeed, early-twentieth-century cultural anthropologists were still
invested in the ethnological project, finding ways to compare and classify cultures through cross-
cultural categories, units, and features and, in this process, creating and refining types as necessary

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 kinds of sorting categories. As holistic and functional analyses gave way to structural ones, cultural
anthropologists shifted in how they used types and typologies, seeking to map cultural practices
and organizations onto underlying cognitive patterns and language structures (Keck 2009, Lakoff
1987, MacLaury 1991). This search to refine types waned, however, with the postmodern and post-
structural turns. Fewer sociocultural anthropologists were interested in debating the explanatory
power of types, seeking instead to deconstruct them.

AGAINST TYPE: FROM TYPES TO FIGURES

As Barker et al. (2014) note,

At best, social types can map the diverse landscape of individuals populating a society and reveal the
classificatory concerns of specific moments in a society, or as in Max Weber’s concept of the ideal type,
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stress certain elements at the expense of others in order to facilitate comparison. At worst, social types
can collapse into ideological stereotypes. (p. 3)
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Over the past 25 years, sociocultural anthropologists have used the concept “figure” to remedi-
ate the baggage that comes with type, seeking to move beyond functionalist approaches of so-
cial types (see Barker et al. 2013, pp. 160–64, for an overview; cf. le Grand 2019), on the one
hand, and cultural studies analyses that focus on the demystification of stereotypes (see Herrera
2015, pp. 134–39, for an overview), on the other. Their disciplinary debts—from sociology and
psychology to art history, literary theory, and science and technology studies—are as disparate
as the figures they have analyzed, which have included cross-cultural figures such as the broker
(Lindquist 2015), the tourist (Graburn 2017), the exile (Hackl 2017), the nomad (Engebrigtsen
2017), the pilgrim (Feldman 2017), the model (Sadre-Orafai 2012), the flâneur (Coates 2017), and
the pedestrian (Vergunst 2017), as well as more culturally specific figures such as the dundus in
Jamaica (Carnegie 1996), cholas and pishtacos in the Andes (Weismantel 2001), “white trash”
in the United States (Hartigan 2005), the street vendor in Indonesia (Gibbings 2013), and
“Moroccan youth” in the Netherlands (de Koning & Vollebergh 2019), not to mention the 80+
chronicled in Barker and colleagues’ (2014) Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity. This literature
pulls in two primary directions: One focuses on the figure as an ethnographically situated “real
person who also is a symbol that embodies the structures of feeling of a particular time and place”
(Lindquist 2015, p. 163), while the other emphasizes “the representational dynamics involved with
invoking collective forms of identity without reductively asserting that these collectives are ‘real’
or ‘unreal’ in an empirical sense” (Hartigan 2005, p. 18; cf. Jackson 2005).
Yet, across its diversity, this work shares an interest in “the tropic quality of all material-semiotic
processes” (Haraway 1997, p. 11) and the embodied and enacted effects of figures in unfolding,
contingent social interactions. Barker et al. (2013) draw on Gestalt psychology to argue that the
figure takes shape only in relation to its sociohistorical context, or ground, and that both are “in
a constant, never-ending process of mutual production and immanent becoming” (p. 165). For
Haraway (1997), figures “involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifica-
tions and certainties” (p. 11). Weismantel (2001) and de Koning & Vollebergh (2019) use similar
language to describe figures as “haunting shadows that both shape senses of self and inspire coun-
ternarratives” (de Koning & Vollebergh 2019, p. 394) as they “hover above everyday life, distort-
ing actual relations between people and recasting them in their own strange image” (Weismantel
2001, p. xxvi). Figures transform social interactions, operating not according to an abstract logic
amenable to typological thinking, but according to a practical one that is embodied, enacted, and
felt.

198 Sadre-Orafai
 EMBODIED TYPES: FROM TYPIFICATIONS TO TYPES
In this way, the literature on figures dovetails with earlier approaches rooted in practice-based
social theory (e.g., symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and practice theory) that argue
that social interactions depend on the perception and organization of reality based on trust and
routines [Berger & Luckmann 1966; Garfinkel 1967; Giddens 1991; Goffman 1959, 1972 (1955),
1986; Heritage 1988; Merleau-Ponty 2002 (1962); Schutz 1972; Simmel 1981]. Differing from
rule-based understandings of social structures, trust-based approaches emphasize the conditional
and subjunctive management styles people use to cope with the uncertainties of social interaction,
to attain what Giddens (1991) describes as “ontological security,” or the “shared—unproven and
unprovable—framework of reality” (p. 36). This literature draws on phenomenology and under-
scores the inescapable role of typification in everyday interactions, arguing that since the amount
of social information available at any given time is potentially unlimited, individuals use bracket-
ing, typification, social stereotyping, and the routinization of activities to manage the contingen-
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cies of daily social life. These routines are embodied: The body is both a repository for socialized
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dispositions (Bourdieu 1977, Mauss 1973) and a medium for the display and perception of these
dispositions in social interactions [Goffman 1959, 1972 (1955)]. These presentations and obser-
vations are compulsory, unavoidable features of social interactions, done largely out of awareness.
The continuous, embodied, and nonconscious dimensions of these routines make typifications
seem or feel natural and real, although they are ideologically constructed and received. Typifica-
tions are tacit, contextual, anticipatory, sedimented, adaptive, and fuzzy (Fernandez 2016, p. 41).
As Segal (1999) notes, “When our sensory typifications have some reliability, it is thus not that
there are objective signs of identity present in the world, but that our constructions of appearance
and identity are components of a self-confirming and largely closed system” (p. 239). Thus, while
typifications help individuals make sense of the world, they also narrow people’s perspectives about
what visual differences mean and look like, which, in turn, shape individuals’ social interactions,
both real and imagined, with one another.
Activist-oriented visual culture scholars have shown how to intervene in typifying encoun-
ters by drawing attention to and short-circuiting their recuperative smoothness. For example,
Garland-Thomson (2009) exhorts activists to redirect the impulse to look at novel sights in ways
that enliven and draw attention to the contingencies of face-to-face encounters. Her critical dis-
ability studies framework centers the perspectives and experiences of starees, given their exten-
sive face-management repertoires, rather than starers, to achieve this goal. Drawing on Rancière
and Arendt, Mirzoeff’s decolonial approach focuses on how “the sensory is deployed to make so-
cial, cultural, and above all political claims seem ‘natural’” (Mirzoeff 2009, p. 17) or, in the words
of Mitchell (2005), to create a pedagogy of “showing seeing.” This research squares with recent
ethnographic collections that highlight the epistemological and representational challenges of
showing “becoming,” in either their Deleuzian (Biehl & Locke 2017) or phenomenological (Ram
& Houston 2015) orientations (see also Desjarlais & Throop 2011). This work has sought to move
from typological representations to strategies that refuse categorization (Luvaas 2016), challenge
the idea of commensurability (Povinelli 2001), or deconstruct and reconstruct categories as part of
their method and representational strategy (Cox 2015, Jackson 2005, Valentine 2007). As Valen-
tine notes in his “ethnography of a category,” “Crucially, the limits of ‘transgender’ (as with the
limits of ‘homosexuality’) are not simply the failure of the categories to account for a complex
world. Rather, the reiteration of these categories in a wide range of day-to-day and institutional
contexts is productive of that failure” (Valentine 2007, p. 233, emphasis in original).
Linguistic anthropologists have examined the pragmatics of typification and type production
in relation to qualia (Harkness 2015, Reyes 2017), stance (Keane 2011), participant-denoting

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 discourse (Wortham 2003), expressives (Choksi 2020), and self-objectifying performance
(Lindfors 2019), providing microanalytic tools to isolate and study their mechanics—such as foot-
ing and stylization—and their effects. A key finding has been the constitutive role that discourse
about types plays in instantiating them. As Reyes (2017) argues, “Talk about what constitutes an
emblem of a type or a token of a type often purports to describe an already existing ontology.
Yet such talk plays a necessary role in constituting (or troubling) an emblem-token-type-ontology
configuration” (p. S104). Anthropologists have also sought to intervene in the popularization of
“implicit bias” mediated through the language of our natural drive to sort, classify, and typify peo-
ple (Caspari 2018), which simultaneously absolves individual agency (i.e., one cannot help but do
this) while also placing the onus on individuals to be aware of their unconscious biases, deflect-
ing attention away from structural and institutional forces (Kahn 2018, Rosa & Díaz 2020). One
way they have successfully reframed individualizing discussions of implicit bias is by showing how
typifications are hardened, valorized, and embedded within institutional structures and made to
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seem natural.
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ETHNOGRAPHIES OF EXPERT TYPE PRODUCTION:

FROM TYPIFICATIONS TO TYPOLOGIES
Ethnographies and anthropological analyses of experts engaged in parallel projects of type pro-
duction offer a way of bridging scales between typologies and typifications. They show how types
become rationalized within their respective fields and naturalized as social facts (Shankar 2015).
Here I review four broad areas of expertise—criminology and policing; policy and government;
science and technology; and advertising and media—that anthropologists have engaged, high-
lighting both their role in human type production and their connection to broader anthropo-
logical ways of knowing. Using Goodwin’s (1994) framework, I argue that both of these profes-
sional visions shape broader social and visual landscapes, institutionalizing ways of seeing that are
recognized as more legitimate than others. I conclude by examining recent visual and arts-based
approaches within and beyond the field that productively reframe classifications, types, and typolo-
gies, as well as recent design-informed theorizations of prototypes. I argue that these, alongside
multidomain ethnographic analyses of expert type production, both within and beyond anthro-
pology, together can form an emergent anthropology of types.
Given the centrality of typologies in early criminal anthropology (Horn 2003, Pugliese 2008),
the anthropology of police and policing (Fassin 2017, Karpiak & Garriott 2018, Martin 2018)
is a rich site to explore its legacies and new manifestations. In his study of predictive policing,
Maguire (2018) argues that this new algorithm-driven form is qualitatively different from previous
kinds of police profiling. He charts a new lineage that still leads back to anthropology: University
of California Los Angeles evolutionary anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham used his research on
hunter-gatherers to cofound PredPol, a software company that uses optimal foraging theory to
predict where crime will happen. While PredPol and other technologies like it have been widely
adopted by police forces, Maguire’s ethnography among an urban UK police force shows how
its approach and underlying logic apply unevenly to different types of crime, offering variable
levels of security among the different neighborhoods it serves. His research also highlights the
ambivalence that police officers have about its efficacy and how it has transformed their day-to-
day work, showing the textured ways in which new technologies and logics are taken up and used
by experts. In his applied research and work with the New York Police Department (NYPD),
Bornstein (2015, 2018) shows how supposedly color-blind policing logics and mandates—here,
numbers-driven management and zero-tolerance policies—distort root causes of contemporary
racial type production by police officers, preventing meaningful reforms, noting that “institutional

200 Sadre-Orafai
 forms of racism are interwoven with, but distinct from, cognitive racial bias that leads people to
associate blackness with criminality” (Bornstein 2015, p. 51). Developing the concept “raciontolo-
gies,” Rosa & Díaz (2020) likewise distinguish between the institutional and the individual, argu-
ing that “ontological statuses of bodies, practices, and various materialities are racially constituted
in relation to the institutionalized modes of perception through which they are apprehended”
(p. 121). Showing the ontologically transformative power of race, they point to the ways that
typifications are materialized and enacted within institutions. Beliso-De Jesús (2020) traces these
interweavings in her ethnographic analysis of US police academies and the molding of police re-
cruits. She argues, “The police academy is embodied and ontological. White cis-hetero masculinity
is constantly reinforced as the top of a presumed hierarchy of humanity through somatic inti-
macies and affirmations” (Beliso-De Jesús 2020, p. 154). Bornstein (2018) describes his attempts
to intervene in these logics by teaching anthropology in the NYPD Police Leadership Certifi-
cate Program. He writes that he tries to “cultivate officers’ critical awareness of how distorting
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stereotypes encourage generalized racial suspicion and undermine public safety” (Bornstein 2018,
p. 82).
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Beyond policing algorithms, anthropologists have also begun to turn to numbers and the rise
of what Merry (2016) calls “indicator culture” to understand how quantification (and with it, com-
mensurability, categorization, and encoding) shapes new forms of governmentality (Nelson 2015).
As Merry (2016) argues, “Things that are seen as objective are measured, and others become ac-
cepted as measurable over time: they become real, not just constructs” (p. 214). It is significant that
these quantified data both require and become forms of visualization. As Haraway (1997) explains,
“Figurations are performative images that can be inhabited. Verbal or visual, figurations can be
condensed maps of contestable worlds. All language, including mathematics, is figurative” (p. 11).
This explanation dovetails with work by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists who have
investigated shifting boundaries of Census categories, and other biopolitical ways of enumerating
difference, and their impact on everyday racial reckoning (Hinterberger 2012, Maghbouleh 2017,
Strmic-Pawl et al. 2018).
Beyond policy and government, anthropologists have also examined the production of biotypes
in science and technology. While sociologists, critical race theorists, and communication scholars
have developed incisive analyses of digital biotypologies created through artificial intelligence (AI)
and other algorithmic ways of knowing and critiques of implicit bias and the individuation of sys-
tematic racism (Benjamin 2019, Browne 2015, Gates 2011, Kahn 2018, Magnet 2011, Noble 2018),
anthropologists have focused mostly on DNA, both through population genetics and genomic an-
thropological approaches and through their mediation via commercial ancestry DNA companies.
TallBear (2013) and Fullwilley (2014) both conducted fieldwork in genomics laboratories, finding
that new language of populations and professed liberal aims and agendas often clashed with the
resulting reification and reproduction of racial categories and types. Torres (2019) and Roberts
(2012) have shown how federal mandates for inclusion in biomedical research without a critical
reflection on how race is used as a proxy have also contributed to reifying racial categories and
types, pointing again to the importance of understanding science as a situated practice. Phelan
et al. (2014) affirm that ancestry DNA consumers also interpret their genetic ancestry results in
this way, while Pálsson (2012) has reframed ancestry DNA consumers as collaborators in building
genetic databases, thereby blurring lay and expert knowledge. Hartigan (2013, 2017) has pushed
the work on DNA and types further, looking at the relationship between human and nonhuman
genome projects and their uses of race and species transnationally. His work suggests the need to
think more expansively about the origins and multiple, recursive trajectories of racial and other
kinds of typological thinking and their legacies, as well as the stakes and directionality of subjec-
tification and objectification.

www.annualreviews.org • Typologies, Typifications, and Types 201

 Finally, anthropological research on advertising has shown how marketers produce not just
commercial messages, but also populations as commercial types (Dávila 2001, Mazzarella 2003,
Miller 1997, Moeran 1996, Shankar 2015). That is, advertisers must first construct and sell groups
of consumers as viable market segments before they can pitch ads that target those demographics.
Dávila’s pioneering work on the US Hispanic advertising industry describes the interrelationship
between state statistics, such as US Census categories, and the emergence of new markets and
tailored representations. She finds, however, that the need to defend Latinos as a viable market
segment requires the exotification and essentialization of Latinos as a monolithic and culturally
foreign group, which runs counter to producers’ and consumers’ attempts to challenge media
stereotypes: “[S]uch representations are in fact produced in conversation and often in complic-
ity with—rather than as a response or challenge to—dominant hierarchies of race, culture, and
nationality” (Dávila 2001, p. 5). Shankar’s investigation of the Asian American advertising indus-
try more than a decade later finds that little has changed in terms of this kind of trade-off. She
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highlights how Asian American advertisers’ “intercultural affect and ethnoracial expertise rely on
biomediated bodies that are conjured to serve a capitalist purpose” (Shankar 2015, p. 150). Using
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the concept of assemblage, Shankar (2015) underscores the contingency of and multiple levels at
which these representations are created and interpreted, showing how, depending on the audience,
these commercial categories, performances of ethnoracial expertise, and displays of diversity can
“further particular notions of racialization, antiracism, activism, and social transformation” (p. 15)
simultaneously. Her approach and careful attention to language materiality and the operation of
diversity as qualisign show how Asian American advertisers and their creative work travel the cir-
cuit of typification–typology–type and back again. As Londoño (2015) and Murphy (2017) have
shown, this work is achieved not only through representations of human types, but also through
nonhuman letterforms, which carry racial and affective resonances.

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF TYPES
Anthropologists have used arts-based and experimental methods, in addition to ethnography, and
often in tandem with it, to create visual representations (Bray 2018, Jain 2018, Luvaas 2016), in-
stallations (Cantarella et al. 2019), performances (Kondo 2018), and design interventions ( Jönsson
& Lenskjold 2018) that reframe anthropology’s engagement with types and reenvision its episte-
mological foundations. I see this work as a key part of an anthropology of types, in that it provides
methods for reflexively and self-consciously producing new types, tracing their continuities and
transmutations across domains, connecting them to cross-subdisciplinary debates and intellectual
genealogies, and explicitly theorizing their ethical, political, analytical, and methodological im-
plications. Using concepts such as collections, prototypes, stereotypes, and ethnographic portrai-
ture, this work has foregrounded the constructed nature of both typological and typifying ways of
seeing.
For example, in the drawing series “Things that Art,” Jain (2018) creates new taxonomies and
categories in multiple, seemingly absurd or surreal collections to refocus viewers’ attention on the
construction of categories themselves, both as foundational to language and epistemology and also
as always political, partial, and ultimately changeable. This multiplication and juxtaposition of cat-
egories echo the work that archaeologists are doing in developing decolonial, relational typologies
that can be layered on top of existing ones to show their gaps and seams (Gnecco & Langebaek
2014, Jackson 2017, Zedeño 2009).
Engaging the history of ethnographic portraiture, Bray and Luvaas’s image-making practices
seek to go beyond types, emphasizing the processual, dialogical dimensions of realist portrait
painting (Bray 2018) and the singularities that street style portraits represent (Luvaas 2016).

202 Sadre-Orafai
 Luvaas (2019) details the impact that his process of becoming a street style blogger had on his
everyday typifications, changing his thoughts, habits, and ways of seeing himself and others on
the street, and how eager he was to leave these kinds of unthinking typifications behind. In a sim-
ilar transformative process, Kondo details how becoming a dramaturg and playwright changed
her awareness of how stereotypes function in theater performances. She writes that shifting from
anthropologist and critic to inhabiting these roles “means that one is accountable for the politics
of representation, even when one cannot completely control production or reception” (Kondo
2018, p. 234). This accountability and mutual vulnerability mirror the work of activist-oriented
visual culture scholars such as Garland-Thomson (2009) who seek to add friction to face-to-face
typifying interactions.
Anthropologists have also engaged prototypes—specifically nonproprietary, open-source de-
sign prototypes—to rethink anthropological theory (Corsín Jiménez 2014, 2018; Corsín Jiménez
& Estalella 2017; Marcus 2014; Suchman et al. 2002). This work draws heavily on feminist science
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studies and focuses on “prototyping from a white-boxing perspective, where the emphasis is on how
socio-technical practices constantly exfoliate, disclose and resource their capacities for agency and
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relation” (Corsín Jiménez 2018, p. 123, emphasis in original). It stresses prototypes’ multiple ac-
countabilities (Suchman et al. 2002, p. 175), their future, open-ended orientations, and how they
materialize a range of recursive possibilities. In this way, this work is congruent with practice-based
approaches that theorize the fuzziness of typifications alongside other practical logics.
In an opposing orientation focused on revealing the construction of rigid typologies and
politics of classification, data ethicist Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen’s (2019) platform
ImageNet Roulette invites users to upload photos of themselves to have their AI model trained on
the person categories of ImageNet return problematic classifications. As they note, “AI classifica-
tions of people are rarely made visible to the people being classified. ImageNet Roulette provides
a glimpse into that process—and to show how things can go wrong.” This project instantiates
the findings of critical algorithm studies (Benjamin 2019, Noble 2018). Like the earlier All Look
Same? (http://alllooksame.com/), an online portal that includes quizzes that challenge the
reliability of test takers’ typifications by asking viewers to identify whether individuals depicted
in a series of images are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, ImageNet Roulette was developed from
questions raised by facial recognition and machine learning, which the creators explicitly link
back to early criminal anthropology.
An anthropology of types enlarges the frame of this work and pushes us to ask questions that
cross domains and reveal our discipline’s entangled histories and interconnected futures with them.
An anthropology of types is capacious; it brings human and nonhuman types, stereotypes and ideal
types, biotypes and prototypes, and typifications and typologies all together in a single frame. It
facilitates tracing typification–typology–type trajectories and offers new reflexive modes of cri-
tiquing their naturalization and our disciplinary legacies in creating them.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks go to Todd Nicewonger and Susanna Rosenbaum for their constructive comments at every
stage of the writing process; to Bambi Schieffelin for her incisive feedback and encouragement,
particularly during the initial framing of this review; to Alan Sullivan, Heather Norton, Sarah

www.annualreviews.org • Typologies, Typifications, and Types 203

 Jackson, and Susan Allen for ongoing cross-subdisciplinary conversations about types in hallways,
offices, and shared classrooms; to Ilana Gershon and Eugenia Kisin for their advice on approaching
the genre; and to the reviewer for their helpful suggestions that broadened my reading. Of course,
any errors or omissions are my own.

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Annual Review of
Anthropology

Contents Volume 49, 2020

Perspectives

Reflections of an Imperfect Anthropologist

Linda Marie Fedigan p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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Archaeology

Mobility and Alterity in Iberian Late Prehistoric Archaeology: Current

Research on the Neolithic–Early Bronze Age (6000–1500 BCE)
Katina T. Lillios p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p49
The Neolithic of Southeast Europe: Recent Trends
John Chapman and Stella Souvatzi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 123
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Randall H. McGuire p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 175
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
Stephen E. Nash and Chip Colwell p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 225
The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology
Omer Gokcumen and Michael Frachetti p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 277
Archaeology of Cuisine and Cooking
Sarah R. Graff p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 337
Archaeology of Everyday Life
Cynthia Robin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 373

Biological Anthropology

Aging, Life History, and Human Evolution

Richard G. Bribiescas p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 101
Broadening Perspectives on the Evolution of Human Paternal Care
and Fathers’ Effects on Children
Lee T. Gettler, Adam H. Boyette, and Stacy Rosenbaum p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 141
Liminal Light and Primate Evolution
Nathaniel J. Dominy and Amanda D. Melin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 257

vii
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Socio-Ecological Challenges as Modulators of Women’s Reproductive

Trajectories
Pablo A. Nepomnaschy, Amanda Rowlands, Ana Paula Prescivalli Costa,
and Katrina G. Salvante p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 317
Beyond the Household: Caribbean Families and Biocultural Models of
Alloparenting
Robin G. Nelson p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 355

Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices

Deaf Anthropology
Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p31
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

Typologies, Typifications, and Types

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Stephanie Sadre-Orafai p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 193

Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability
Sonya E. Pritzker p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 241

Sociocultural Anthropology

Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities

Jessica O’Reilly, Cindy Isenhour, Pamela McElwee, and Ben Orlove p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p13
Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and
Collaborations
Andrew S. Mathews p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p67
Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities
Winifred Tate p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p83
The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology
Yael Navaro p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 161
Living in a Toxic World
Alex M. Nading p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 209
Madness: Recursive Ethnography and the Critical Uses of
Psychopathology
Sarah Pinto p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 299

Theme I: Anthropocene

Climate Change: Expanding Anthropological Possibilities

Jessica O’Reilly, Cindy Isenhour, Pamela McElwee, and Ben Orlove p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p13

viii Contents
AN49_FrontMatter ARjats.cls September 23, 2020 8:14

Anthropology and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and

Collaborations
Andrew S. Mathews p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p67
The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology
Yael Navaro p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 161
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Randall H. McGuire p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 175
Living in a Toxic World
Alex M. Nading p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 209

Theme II: Race

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020.49:193-208. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
Access provided by McGill University on 04/05/22. For personal use only.

Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities

Winifred Tate p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p83
The Aftermath of Mass Violence: A Negative Methodology
Yael Navaro p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 161
The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration
Randall H. McGuire p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 175
Typologies, Typifications, and Types
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 193
NAGPRA at 30: The Effects of Repatriation
Stephen E. Nash and Chip Colwell p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 225
The Impact of Ancient Genome Studies in Archaeology
Omer Gokcumen and Michael Frachetti p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 277

Indexes

Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 40–49 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 391

Cumulative Index of Article Titles, Volumes 40–49 p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 395

Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology articles may be found at

http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/anthro

Contents ix