This chapter explores the debates over human origins in the popular media to show how the topic influenced the ways in which Darwin’s theory was perceived (and misunderstood). The impact of the public’s fascination with the gorilla as a possible human ancestor helped to sustain the image of evolution as the ascent of a ladder. The cultural evolutionism promoted by archaeologists and anthropologists also adopted the linear model of development. Physical anthropologists saw the allegedly ‘lower’ races as intermediate steps in the ascent from the apes, in effect as ‘living fossils’ filling the gap created by the lack of genuinely ancient remains at the time. The impact of Darwin’s Descent of Man is explored in the context of the existing preconceptions generated in the 1860s. The relationship between general models of evolution and emerging ideas of social evolution, not all Darwinian in form, is explained.

Several versions of ‘social Darwinism’ flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with ideologies derived from non-Darwinian evolution theories. They exploited discoveries of fossil hominids including Neanderthals and the Piltdown fraud to construct rival explanations of the emergence of human characteristics that might shape social development. The linear hierarchy of races erected in the nineteenth century remained the basis of many popular accounts, even though professional anthropologists began to turn their backs on it. Ideologies based on national or racial competition were advocated even by writers who did not accept the Darwinian theory of competition within populations. Fear of racial degeneration fuelled the eugenics movement’s calls for the elimination of ‘harmful’ characters, although the input from genetics encouraged an analogy with artificial rather than natural selection.

This chapter introduces social scientific perspectives and methods applicable to observing the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and religion. It discusses the contributions that anthropological and sociological approaches can make to this entanglement of two modern social phenomena while also drawing attention to the inherent biases and perspectives that both fields bring with them due to their histories. Examples of research on religion and AI are highlighted, especially when they demonstrate agile and new methodologies for engaging with AI in its many applications; including but not limited to online worlds, multimedia formats, games, social media and the new spaces made by technological innovation such as the innovations such as the platforms underpinning the gig economy. All these AI-enabled spaces can be entangled with religious and spiritual conceptions of the world. This chapter also aims to expand upon the relationship between AI and religion as it is perceived as a general concept or object within human society and civilisation. It explains how both anthropology and sociology can provide frameworks for conceptualising that relationship and give us ways to account for our narratives of secularisation – informed by AI development – that see religion as a remnant of a prior, less rational stage of human civilisation.

This chapter considers socialist intellectual Roumain’s significance as a creative writer and political activist whose shadow looms large over twentieth-century Haitian letters. Looking closely at Roumain’s singular position as an internationally circulating witness to and participant in critical moments in both Haitian and global history, Chemla offers a thorough accounting of Roumain’s astonishing impact on literary modernity. He argues that while Roumain wrote of the specific context of the US American occupation and the rise of Indigenism, the insights and perspective that mark his essays and prose fiction likewise anticipated the fascist, colorist statecraft of the Duvalier regime from its origins in the Indigenist perspectives and racialized thinking of the late 1920s. Chemla places Roumain at the center of an extended network of thinkers, writers, and political actors in France, the United States, and throughout the Caribbean.

This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

First, I argue that the aspiration to become like a god is an inescapable part of the human condition and is as common among atheists as among theists. I set aside the whole question of the existence of the gods and treat theology as a guide to anthropology. Ideas of the divine reveal essential truths about human beings. Second, I explore the ambivalence about this aspiration to divinity – an ambivalence found both in philosophy and in biblical religion. Third, I discuss the relation of philosophy to religion by showing that the great philosophers, especially the Socratic philosophers, have attempted to think through the presuppositions of religious thought. Fourth, I argue that common attempts to contrast Athens and Jerusalem as reason and faith are absurd. I show that the true differences between Greek philosophy and biblical religion emerge only against the background of the common project of attempting to become divine in both Athens and Jerusalem.

A general introduction, with a description of the author’s intention, personal background, and approach.

This chapter discusses the contribution of anthropology to the understanding of the diversity of practices and attitudes towards sexualized bodies developed by different human cultures, beginning with the works of classical anthropologists, including E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead and Bronisław Malinowski. It discusses Marxist, feminist, and postmodern anthropology, and reflects on the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of the dispositif, the device of sexuality. The chapter argues that the device of sexuality—that is, that there is such a thing as “sexuality”—is modern and Western. The sexual life of the peoples studied by anthropologists is an inseparable part of their social order and its reproduction, and in no way constitutes a separate sphere of existence that can be studied as such, nor does it constitute the core of any identity, either personal or collective. The task of anthropology consists in restoring how these peoples deal with the sexual in their own social and cultural terms, respecting their radical otherness.

This chapter examines the origins and legacy of sexology – the scientific study of sexuality – in the modern world. First consolidated into a coherent programme in the late nineteenth century, sexology has its roots in the re-organization of knowledge about nature in the frameworks of taxonomy, evolutionism, and race. A pervasive preoccupation with heredity gave rise to powerful eugenics movements around the world. The interest in controlling variability and unlocking the secrets of the soul generated parallel developments in biomedicine, especially psychoanalysis and endocrinology. Sex experts worldwide converged in diagnosing cultural signs of homosexuality for the purpose of national modernization. As the centre of gravity in sexual science began to shift from Europe to North America, researchers gave growing support to the sex/gender distinction and redefined the meanings of normality. In the waning days of hereditarian theories, the rise of cultural anthropology coupled with a renewed scientific investment of colonial powers to reverse hierarchical templates of sexual practices and norms emanating from the metropoles. A public health crisis (HIV/AIDS), social movements (gender and sexual minority rights), and the systematization of research protocols (bioethics) shaped a comeback of biological sexology in the closing decades of the twentieth century.