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A tribe is a regional security organization. It ties together a number of local primary face-to-face groups. It is charged with control of territory, defense against outside intruders, and protection of humans, livestock, and productive resources, such as wells and cultivation. Whatever productive activity tribesmen are primarily engaged in, such as pastoralism or cultivation, each male, with the exception of holy men, serves also as a warrior. Tribes are usually defined by a symbolic idiom that asserts a primordial connection among tribesmen. Descent from a common ancestor is an idiom used to define many tribes. Tribal names are often those of the ancestor that all members share. Internal divisions may also be defined by ancestry; a descent idiom allows group divisions at every level of the genealogy. Tribal subgroups are also charged with security and are defined as having “collective responsibility”; that is, the moral norm is that each member is responsible for what other members do and, as a consequence, all members are seen by outsiders as equivalent. There is also a moral norm to aid fellow tribesmen, the obligation stronger for close kin, weaker for more distant kin. Internal tribal relations among subgroups are based on what anthropologists call “balanced opposition” or “complementary opposition.” Each tribal subgroup is “balanced” against other subgroups of the same genealogical order, which in principle, and often in practice, serves as a deterrent against hostile acts. Tribal leadership can take the form of primus inter pares. However, in tribes in contact with states, more formal leadership roles, with at least the trappings of authority and power, can develop. Whatever the role of the tribal leader, he depends upon consent of the tribesmen. In tribal subgroups, political process tends to be highly democratic, and leaders are those who can elicit agreement among the members and then carry out the will of the community. Tribes are social organizations that are not static and do not always maintain form. They respond to environmental opportunities and constraints. If a state nearby is in trouble, with failing leadership and an unruly population, a tribe may mount a campaign to invade and conquer the state, setting itself up as a ruling dynasty. In these cases, tribes lose their tribal characteristics and become a ruling elite. However, if a nearby state gains strength and expands its territorial control, it may overrun and defeat the tribe, encapsulating it, incorporating it, and even assimilating it.

Whether one is employed or unemployed depends on both a series of sociopolitical processes and individual career paths. Work subjectivities—both as a way of thinking about access to resources and as the pursuit of a life with dignity—allows understanding how people give meaning to the tasks they perform in order to earn a living. In Argentina, since the 1970s, full-time employment and access to salaried work, as well as social benefits through employment, have been central components of the work subjectivities of thousands of people. Salaried work and benefits continue to be the way one accesses a dignified life, even as the labor force deteriorates. At the same time, there are thousands of people who have never earned a living through employment or a “job” and who embody different work subjectivities. The work subjectivities of people who are not “formal” employees allow us to reconstruct the lines between employment and unemployment, between work and nonwork, and between lives controlled by salaried work and those that are not.

Urban societies have been defined as stratified, and sometimes literate, societies that build large, densely populated, and monumental centers that serve specialized political, economic, and ritual functions for their regions. Mesoamerica is one of six world regions where urban societies developed, independently, in antiquity. Mesoamerican cities sometimes fit traditional definitions, and other times defy them. There are examples of dispersed low-density urban settlements (Classic Maya, Veracruz) or cities where evidence of writing remains elusive (Teotihuacan). Functional urban definitions have led to debates regarding the urban standing of earlier, Middle Formative Olmec centers, as no contemporary settlements match the monumentality and regional prominence of La Venta or San Lorenzo. The regional settlement studies that have proliferated in the Basin of Mexico and Valley of Oaxaca since the 1960s have helped scholars demonstrate the demographic and political might of Late Formative, Classic, and Postclassic cities such as Monte Albán, Teotihuacan, and Tenochtitlan. Urbanism was demonstrably shown to be a regional phenomenon, one that developed from autochthonous processes as settlements became prominent population centers whose functions, monuments, and institutions served and ruled over their larger regions. While some of the best-known Mesoamerican cities were the capitals of large regional states (Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlán, Monte Albán, and Tzintzuntzan), researchers have documented an even greater number of city-states, which are defined as small states socially and territorially centered around their capital city. The Classic and Postclassic cities of the Maya lowlands, the Postclassic polities or altepemeh of the Basin of Mexico, and the kingdoms of Postclassic Oaxaca are examples of city-states. Among Mesoamerican cities, there was diversity in the form of government, ranging from cities where rulers’ names and royal tombs appear prominently in the archaeological record (Classic Maya cities, Postclassic Oaxacan city-states), to cities where, despite decades of research, no single royal palace or tomb has been found (Teotihuacan). The material record of cities of the latter type suggests that they were governed through more corporate forms of political organization. In the early 21st century research has focused on the role of collectives in city construction, configuration, and governance and the challenge of archaeologically identifying neighborhoods, districts, or other suprahousehold social groups (tlaxilacalli and calpolli, social units above the household in Postclassic Nahuatl polities). Although Classic period Maya centers were not originally considered urban, thanks to settlement studies and, later on, LiDAR technology, scholars have demonstrated that beyond their monumental acropolises there was extensive low-density settlement that was unmistakably urban. The Maya model of low-density lowland urbanism features dispersed populations and extensive urban footprints that integrate complex webs of agricultural areas, terraces, raised fields, hydraulic features, and house mounds. This model may have useful applications for modern-day planning efforts in low-lying cities that need to adapt to climate change. Indeed, Mesoamerican urbanism has much to contribute as the world’s population becomes increasingly urban. Humanity must learn from its past successes, and failures, with urban living.

When the tell site of Jenne-jeno was brought to light in the vast floodplain of the southern Middle Niger of Mali, archaeologists had to question certain expectations about just what constitutes an ancient city. The city was certainly too early (3rd century bce rather than the expected late first millennium ce) and Jenne-jeno did not conform to the standard city form (a mosaic of satellites rather than the expected agglomeration). But it was the persistent lack of evidence of a centralized ruler, social strata of elites, and of the hierarchical decision-making mechanisms of the state that set this urban landscape so at odds with then prevalent urban theory. The seventy apparently contemporaneous hamlets and specialists’ occupation mounds surrounding Jenne-jeno form the Jenne-jeno Urban Complex. It is a classic example of African originality in evolving urban landscapes. In place of the top-down, often despotic state control as the organizing principle of the city, here there is a classic city without citadel—and thus heterarchy (authority and power relations arrayed horizontally) instead of a social and political hierarchy at the heart of the city can be posited. The search for the pre-Jenne-jeno antecedents has taken a newer generation of archaeologists to look at “pre-urban” landscapes in other, now-dry parts of the Middle Niger deep in the northern. Sahel and Sahara. Back to the second millennium bce, the single site can be found to be the exception; clustering had roots deep in time.

Since Antiquity, sporting bodies and performances have been assigned an economic value, and sporting events, particularly those with large audiences, have been organized with a view to their capacity to generate wealth and reinforce social hierarchies. At the same time, athletes have long embodied moral and ethical values such as virtue, beauty, purity, and sacrifice. Sport is thus a prime context in which a society negotiates the relationship between the material, in the form of value, and the symbolic or ideational, in the form of values. Sport and the sporting body can be commodified when they are assigned a value calculated in terms of a standardized currency and traded in a market. However, even in capitalist societies, sport often retains features that are shaped not by the market economy but the gift economy—in which exchange is governed by values such as honor, trust, and prestige. Sport offers a wealth of examples in which value and values come into conflict, exposing the fact that they are not incommensurable, but rather economic value is simply one kind of culturally constructed value among many. Victors in the ancient Greek Olympic Games received only awards made from plants, including a crown of olive branches, but returned home to be bestowed with material riches. An elite Roman man produced gladiator games as a “gift” to his supporters, but in deciding whether to allow a defeated fighter to live, he had to weigh the cost of losing a gladiator (who was a valuable piece of property) against displeasing his supporters. The association that runs Japanese sumo is not a modern legal corporation; rather, its members are retired wrestlers who have bought the wrestling name of an elder that has been passed along for as long as 250 years—and the name cannot be bought with a bank loan. In the name of amateurism, 19th-century Victorians banned professionals from taking part in Olympic sports amidst the massive commodification of leisure and popular culture that accompanied the rise of the modern industrial economy. Much of the Cold War was fought using athletes as proxies for the socialist and capitalist economic systems, as socialist nations denounced the exclusive gender and class values of “bourgeois” sports and sought to create an alternative model. After the end of the Cold War, the influx of capital into sports finally led to the death of the amateur ideal, quickly followed by the emergence of the migrant professional athlete. At the start of the 21st century, the massive revenues in college sport challenged the American notion of the unpaid student-athlete, while the global trade in athletes sucked ever greater numbers of athletes from the Global South into the professional sports of the wealthy Western countries as well as, increasingly, East Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Sport is a fascinating realm for examining conflicts between value and values, and how they are shaped by the global economy in the 21st century, taking on new forms that echo the past while moving into uncharted territory.

Water is key to human life, both biophysically and socioculturally. Having long been regarded in anthropology as a circumstantial backdrop to human society and culture, water—alongside other nonhuman substances and beings—has received growing attention as a material with specific potentials and histories in the 21st century. This research explores the fundamental connectivity and relationality of water, through which social relations and hydrological flows are often two sides of the same coin, shaping and transforming each other. Watery materiality is frequently characterized by movement and instability, defying control but also intersecting with other social and material processes to create ever new arrangements. Water practices, infrastructures, and experiences participate in the formation and transformation of spaces and landscapes, and may inspire novel theoretical insights on meaning-making, kinship, learning, and space, among other topics. Water’s valuation and the tensions that arise regarding how to govern it emerge in part from its material properties. Ongoing discussions explore the links between these properties, water infrastructures, unequal distribution, and political power. Watery materiality is not a single thing, but has multiple manifestations, including saltwater, ice, and humidity. Some scholars therefore propose studying water and materiality in terms of various forms of wetness or amphibious processes. Research into water and materiality suggests that the material world consists of open processes rather than of fixed objects, and that water’s multiple manifestations and flows actively participate in shaping human lives.

There are many different and distinct types of religious waters: holy, sacred, neutral, and even evil. The ways various divinities invest waters with specific qualities and capacities depend upon a wide range of ecological, theological, and eschatological factors; some are shaped by the environment while others are purely ontological and concerned with otherworldly realms, and often there is an intimate relation between the mundane and the divine. Rivers, rain, lakes, springs, and waterfalls are some specific forms of religious water, which also relate to seasonality and changing hydrological cycles. All these variations create different dependencies not only to ecological factors but more importantly to divine actors. Religious water may heal and bless individuals and be a communal source for fertility and plentiful harvests, but may also work as a penalty, wreaking havoc on society as floods or the absence of the life-giving rains in agricultural communities. Given the great variation of religious waters throughout history where even the same water may attain different qualities and divine embodiments, divine waters define structuring practices and principles in ecology and cosmology.

Water infrastructures have been central to anthropological theory and practice for many decades. Early research tended to focus on infrastructures related to agriculture, such as irrigation systems, and often emphasized their consequences for social and political organization. While these and other studies (e.g., on hydroelectric dams) continue, work since the early 2000s considers household and community plumbing networks for both potable water and wastewater (sanitation). These studies conceive of water infrastructures broadly—as social and technical assemblages of materials and matter as well as people and their behaviors—and examine them from sociotechnical, technopolitical, and phenomenological perspectives. Sociotechnical approaches emphasize the ways in which water infrastructures mediate the relationships between people and social institutions, and between people and the biophysical environment more generally. Technopolitical perspectives often focus on the bureaucratic and governance implications of water infrastructures, especially how states strategically deploy or withhold certain infrastructures to craft citizenship, for instance. Phenomenological approaches are widely varied, but tend to give the most agency, and sometimes animacy, to water infrastructures, and to consider the sensorial and emotional implications of human-nonhuman interactions. Future research will be facilitated by decolonizing studies of water infrastructure, incorporating other disciplinary approaches and perspectives such as engineering, and better articulating the policy implications of research findings.

Water governance refers to the material and regulatory control of water and waters. It involves questions such as who makes decisions about water and how; at what scale such decisions are made in relation to different waters; and who and which water or ecosystem benefits. Classical work in anthropology considered how irrigation practices may have given rise to the development of state forms, and in response to early-21st-century privatization regimes, anthropologists have considered how different groups have challenged the apparent global dominance of commodity values and water as property. Infrastructures for water distribution in urban areas (such as systems of canals, pipes, and faucets), and considerations of the sociocultural effects of hydrological unit delineation and definition (e.g., groundwater or river “basins”) have become key sites for the ethnographic investigation of water governance, emerging forms of personhood, and societal inequalities. The diversity in anthropologies of water unsettles generalized models in global regimes of water governance. The anthropology of water governance and ownership considers the context and contingencies of water and power. It reveals the global dominance of markets, rights, and technical approaches to water management, such as the case of “private water” in Chile, in which water markets have failed to provide equity and environmental health, but also how certain groups avoided complete privatization of water under this extreme example. Ethnographic studies of the cultural organization of resource scarcity over topographically complex and remote terrain, such as that of irrigators in the Andean cordillera, express the diversity of human innovation at the intersection of politics and ecology. In arid South Eastern Australia, basin plans that treat water as a unit of calculation and economic trade place social and ecological relations in peril. Infrastructures of development provide a narrative of unsettled state and development ideologies, and the problem of groundwater management reveals governance challenges in the face of unstable, unknown, and invisible material. Anthropological studies of water contribute to knowledge of earth’s diverse humanity, knowledge practices, and ecologies. Researchers propose that water governance might engage with human differences articulated at multiple scales, as well as in understanding water’s material agency and waters as dynamic, especially in an ever-changing climate.

Anthropological thinking on water security and scarcity can be traced through four scholarly approaches: political ecology of water scarcity, water insecurity, water economics, and human-water relationality. Political ecologists argue that water scarcity a sociopolitical process and not necessarily related to physical water availability. The political ecological approach is concerned with power, global-local dynamics, and how water scarcity is unevenly distributed within and across communities. Water insecurity research is concerned with how injustice and inequity shape household and individual variability in water insecurity. Inspired by biocultural research, water insecurity scholars have used systematic methods to advance theories of how water insecurity impacts mental health, food insecurity, dehydration, and other human biological outcomes. Economic anthropologists explore how economic dynamics—including formal and capitalist economies, noncapitalist and hybridized economies, reciprocity, social reproduction, and theft—shape water scarcity and insecurity. Research priorities in economic anthropology include water valuation, meanings of water, and water as an economic good. Building from Indigenous scholars’ insights, relational approaches argue that humans have reciprocal obligations to respect and care for water as a living being. Water justice, these scholars argue, requires restoring human-water relations and upholding Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. All four of these research areas—scarcity, insecurity, economics, and relationality—are producing cutting-edge research, with significant implications for research agendas in the anthropology of water security and scarcity.

Although the data are incomplete, the Acheulean seems to occupy the longest share of the prehistoric period of West Africa. Whereas some sites suggest the arrival of the first hominids beginning in the Early Pleistocene, the majority of the Acheulean sites show evidence of activity throughout almost the entirety of the Mid-Pleistocene. From the Sahel to tropical forests, numerous valleys in nearly every West African country have offered up lithic artifacts dated to the Acheulean. The available data from the primary regions that have been studied suggest a colonization of the coastal and forest zones, of the Senegal River Basin as well as the Falémé Valley, of Niger, the Adrar in Mauritania, the Tilemsi, the Volta, and Lake Chad. However, this idea is based primarily on the continuous geographic repartition of “Acheulean localities” defined in this article as the entire collection of areas in which only a few artifacts attributed to the Acheulean on the basis of typological criteria have been found. On the other hand, the “Acheulean sites,” which are very scarce, are defined here as places where excavations have taken place or as the area layout of significant collections. The repartition of Acheulean sites and localities marked by this geography bears witness to the adaptation of human groups to a great, mosaic-like diversity of environments.

The study of ironworking in West Africa encompasses a fascinating set of research topics which inevitably draw upon theories, methods, and issues from the African continent as a whole. An underlying perspective is the notion that African iron production can best be understood within its various cultural contexts, rather than from strictly Western technological perspectives, theoretical models, and universalist generalizations that have often separated science from anthropology, and which often do not work well, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Among the many topics of interest, the most intellectually useful and rewarding for their insights include those that: (a) involve debates that have been of importance in the literature on African ironworking, such as the extent to which ironworking led to serious deforestation; (b) investigate important methodological, typological, theoretical, and ontological issues, such as understanding the role of ritual and ideology within ironworking processes; (c) involve important substantive issues, such as the rise and utility of archaeometallurgy in the study of ironworking; (d) are historically important in our changing concepts of sub-Saharan Africa, African peoples, and African societies, such as African invention and innovation within ironworking technology in the historical and racial context of the African’s supposed lack of technological inventiveness; and (e) taken together, and individually, emphasize a holistic approach to the field of African ironworking, especially the interrelationships between the technical and the social, such as the development of distinct technological styles and understanding the significant variability in African furnace designs and ironworking technologies. Indeed, the rise of ironworking in Africa had major effects upon the technical, social, cultural, political, symbolic, and ideological aspects of African societies over time. This is especially true for West Africa which became the center of several major iron-producing regions.

In terms of artefacts present, West Africa is not short of evidence relating to human occupation during the Quaternary. The problem hitherto has been one of context and dating; there has been some progress in this regard but poor preservation conditions still restrict the presence of organic remains prior to the beginning of the Late Stone Age (LSA). Nonetheless, an excellent climatic record for the last 520 kya has been established on the basis of cores obtained from Lake Bosumtwi. Stratified Acheulean sites have been excavated at Sansandé and Ravin Blanc on the Falémé River in eastern Senegal. The succeeding Sangoan is an entity for which a consistent and reliable classification remains to be achieved. Despite this, excavations at Anyama in the Ivory Coast have produced a sizeable quantity of material, with a terminus post quem thermoluminescence (TL) date of 254 ± 51 kya. Our knowledge of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) has been transformed by the work carried out at Ounjougou in Mali. More than twenty-five distinct archaeological occurrences have been detected, extending from about 75 to 25 kya. The MSA elsewhere is abundant, and at Adrar Bous is in place beneath the Aterian, but much of it lacks a good stratigraphic context. The following dry period, the Ogolian, must have had a dramatic effect on human settlement, and the majority of LSA sites postdate this episode. There is no apparent link between them and the MSA. Nonetheless, the LSA at Shum Lake in Cameroon does have 14C dates in the range 32,700–12,800 BP. The most significant LSA site is Iwo Eleru, notable for the presence of modern human remains with “archaic” characteristics. A parallel situation has been detected at Ishango in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo both indicating a hitherto unsuspected “deep substructure” in Late Pleistocene African populations.

World Heritage and Sustainable Development are connecting, complex, and inseparable global concepts operating at the local levels of World Heritage sites in developing nations. World Heritage is defined as cultural and natural sites considered to have outstanding universal values (OUV) and are legally protected by international treaties, in this case the 1972 World Heritage Convention, which provide the criteria for inscribing such sites and for keeping them on the World Heritage List. World Heritage promotes conservation of such heritage for the benefit of humanity. Sustainable Development, however, refers to development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and its implementation is largely directed by guidelines and principles endorsed by a broad range of stakeholders. Both concepts, World Heritage and Sustainable Development, have present and futuristic functionalities, but the former appears to be more emphasized than the latter in their application to heritage management. The present and futuristic functionalities of these two concepts constitute a complex but continuously evolving relationship that remains topical in the 21st century and beyond. As such, and in order to deepen our understanding the relationship between World Heritage and Sustainable Development, empirical analysis of their respective implementation at the local levels is a continuous process. Advancing the localization of World Heritage and Sustainable Development, including reducing theory into practice for the benefit of both conservation and the well-being of society, remains a mutually beneficiary process for both concepts. While conservation is premised on maintaining and retaining the significance of a heritage site, the well-being of society is driven by efforts toward meeting society’s diverse and growing needs on a daily basis. The balancing of World Heritage, Sustainable Development, conservation, and the well-being of society remains a contested but unavoidable engagement. All these aspects are still yet to find full acceptance and a localization matrix in the geo-socioeconomic and cultural contexts of Africa. Conservation and socioeconomic development for the well-being of society are viewed as issues that are as old as humanity itself. Both are embedded in the traditional management systems that guided protection of heritage and utilization of both renewable and nonrenewable resources available to communities in Africa. Therefore, these issues are a local phenomenon before becoming issues of global concern. While solutions from outside the context of these local phenomena may assist and bring good practices for World Heritage and Sustainable Development, they cannot be effective without being infused with local input and adaptation of local experiences to improve policy implementation. Understandably, the well-being of society has always been in existence and remains a priority; however, what is changing is the scale, diversity, and urgency of the needs of society due to multiple factors. Continuous research is required to find a balance between global processes and the local needs of society at World Heritage sites in Africa. The future of World Heritage in Africa lies in its adaptive ability to embrace continuously emerging local dynamics of sustainable development, offering alternative and creative solutions, embracing an inclusive stakeholder governance approach, and quantifying the contribution of heritage to development targets. World Heritage has to be part of a broader localized solution to local socioeconomic challenges in Africa.

Globalization and neoliberalism changed the structure and dynamics of contemporary society and imposed a new social question dominated by exclusion, precariousness, and inequality. Social exclusion is not an individual attribute but a social process; it is an inherent result of a neoliberal capitalist society that produces different disposable figures around the world. Exclusion means not “being outside” of society but “being inside” in unfavorable, subordinated, and devalued material, social, and symbolic conditions. Therefore, youth social exclusion implies a process of socialization, subjectivation, and life trajectories in an unfavorable world: a process of inclusion in exclusion. This process crystalizes in at least three main spheres: space, the self, and the life course of young people. In Latin America, extreme social and material deprivation intersects with gender inequality relations, social (mis)recognition, violence and crime, institutional weakness, and growing spaces of (i)legalisms, among other dimensions. All of them shape the place, subjectivity, and biography of most disadvantaged young people throughout the Latin American continent.