Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to “stay with the trouble” through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long‐standing themes in cultural anthropology—tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency—even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders? The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long‐standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste]

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