Anthropological connections at the turn of the century. Graphic generated by authors.

As an accompaniment to the recently published 25th Anniversary interview between Samiri Hernández Hiraldo and Jorge Duany, celebrating Duany’s article “Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identities in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora,” here we re-surface some additional notable works from American Ethnologist: Volume 27, published in 2000. We place some key themes and questions of these works in conversation with a number of contemporary concerns, including those explored in American Ethnologist: Volume 52, published in 2025. This 25-year retrospective allows us to trace critical points of convergence and divergence over a quarter century of work in AE.

We look back at American Ethnologist at the turn of the century, considering how anthropologists were conceptualizing ideas of “the global” as a key concept in relation to long-standing disciplinary interests in kinship, power, nature, and exchange. Writing in the spring 2000 issue of American Ethnologist, Kalman Applbaum identifies a “new condition” proliferating in the social sciences: globalization (258). Applbaum contends that this emergent literature often teetered between the contradictory ends of “fragmentation and connectivity” in its examination of an increasingly global world (258). What did anthropology—and its attention to ethnographic specificity—offer to expand this supposed binary?

The articles from AE 2000 that we highlight below speak to the stakes of global migration, development, capitalism, dispossession, agency and resistance in everyday lives. Writing in the wake of discipline-shifting work emerging in 1990s—including Appadurai (1990), Gupta and Ferguson (1992), and Marcus (1995)—these authors add nuance to circumscribed conceptions of “the local” and “the global,” favoring increasingly complex, contingent, and hybridized frameworks.

From Karen Brodkin’s critique of the racialized and gendered logics of global capitalism, to K. Sivaramakrishnan’s commentary on the tensions of globally exported frameworks of participatory conservation, to Bill Mauer’s history of the transnational flow of commodities, these authors consider how the movement of people, frameworks, things, commodities, capital, and identities permeate borders and boundaries. In so doing, they complicate the bind of globalization as a force of disintegration on the one hand and homogenization on the other, foregrounding instead how people negotiate shifting notions of identity, community, and belonging in their social worlds.

Celebrated as this year’s 25th anniversary feature, Jorge Duany’s “Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identities in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora” argues for a reconsideration of Puerto Rican identity that includes the diaspora. Duany employs the term “nation on the move” (nación en vaivén) to demonstrate how increasing movement between the island and mainland US provokes hybridized and reterritorialized conceptions of Puerto Rican identity. The recent conversation between Jorge Duany and Samiri Hernández Hiraldo shows the continuing, if shifting, relevance of this concept. While migration patterns between the island and mainland US have dramatically changed and more Puerto Ricans than ever are living stateside, the back-and-forth motion suggested by vaivén remains useful in describing the ways Puerto Ricans navigate a “perpetual cultural tug-of-war,” in terms of language, culture, and identity (Hernández Hiraldo and Duany 2025). Duany’s piece remains relevant in today’s pressing discussions of citizenship, migration, and belonging.

Kalman Applbaum’s “Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing” examines how increasingly homogenized marketing logics participate in the production and destruction of place-based identity. Published during a period of heightened anthropological engagement with globalization studies, this work reflects the discipline’s growing interest in institutional mechanisms of multinational corporations and broader turn toward concentrated hubs of power. Applbaum’s piece carries continued relevance regarding the relationship between corporate marketing, consumer identity, place-based imagination, and transnational economic flows—perhaps especially so in the wake of fracturing global markets and parallel shifts in mythology. A revisit of this piece might pair particularly well with recent American Ethnologist publications “Crypto, Charisma, and Trump’s Chaos Economy: AE Interviews Bill Maurer and Chris Vasantkumar” (April 2025) and Gil Hizi’s “Cliché Anthropologists and the Interactive Probing of Aspirations under Market Expansion” (December 2024).

Iris Jean-Klein’s “Mothercraft, Statecraft, and Subjectivity in the Palestinian Intifada” offers a rigorous examination of how extended political conflict makes selves and subjectivities. It delivers on what it promises—a deep dive into the entanglements of gender, kinship, statehood, and personhood during the intifada of 1989—with impressive ethnographic detail. This piece makes significant contributions to anthropological scholarship on the contingent nature of boundaries between self and other, individuals and communities, and the mundane and spectacular. Most notable, perhaps, is Jean-Klein’s sharp attention to the dialectical relationship between the multiple forms of dispossession under Israeli occupation and intimately negotiated modes of resistance.

With nearly 100 citations at the time of this feature, K. Sivaramakrishnan’s “Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy, Development, and Political Action” offers enduringly poignant provocations for anthropological engagement with shifting landscapes of statehood, locality, environmental ethics, and political power. Sivaramakrishnan roots these provocations in state-led efforts to manage the forests of West Bengal, India in the 1990s. Along the way, he pays close attention to how globally circulating frameworks of participatory conservation stand to restructure local contours of publicness—which in turn threaten to unsettle the forms and flows of those exported frameworks. This piece highlights critical tensions between ideas of democracy, development, and modernity—particularly in the so-called Global South—while focusing on the everyday “micropolitics” that proliferate within and beyond them. It carries notable resonance with Tim Burger’s “Horticulture as History Making,” published in the April 2025 edition of American Ethnologist.

The 2000 issue of American Ethnologist also engages with and builds on classic anthropological topics in area studies. Sara Dickey’s article “Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India” engages with the nuances of spatial politics in the context of domestic work in South Indian households. While she discusses the significance of the binaries of insider/outsider, closeness/distance and purity/pollution, she underscores the role of class in producing exemptions or grey areas within these binaries and discusses class and status as featuring more strongly than considerations of caste in the way the space of the home is policed, negotiated and navigated in the context of domestic work. This study, while focusing on the intimate space of the home and gendered social relations within, speaks to larger concepts of agency and power in the context of domestic work in South Asia.

Hirokazu Miyazaki also theorizes on agency in his article “Faith and its Fulfilment: Agency, Exchange and Fijian Aesthetics of Completion,” on the classic anthropological theme of gift-giving and receiving. This article is a forerunner to his work on agency, the gift and hope developed in subsequent articles and books. In this article, he presents the concept of the abeyance of agency as a framework to understand various rituals of exchange that involve a sequence of actors and require reciprocity and/or completion. Drawing ethnographic insights from an instance of a mortuary gift giving ritual and a Christian ritual of question and answer sequences in Fiji, he argues that the gift giver and the questioner temporarily suspend their agency to the gift receiver or to god and anticipate completion of the ritual through acceptance and reciprocation of the gift and, in the case of the Christian ritual, an acceptable response to the question. Thus, according to Miyazaki, faith emerges as a capacity to place one’s agency in abeyance. The abeyance of agency is a means of conceptualizing the intangible, relational and power dynamics of exchange.

At the spring 2025 AES conference, scholars were asked to reflect on the use of archipelagic thinking (Glissant 1997) as a frame to “analyze pressing global challenges” and “encourage multiplicity and connections without flattening material and conceptual differences” (James 2024). In 2025, anthropological debates and theoretical framings have continued to shift in the face of today’s acute global challenges. What remains is the enduring power of ethnography to reveal the shape and texture of these challenges in everyday life.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Public Culture 2(2): 1-24.

Applbaum, Kalman. 2000. “Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing.” American Ethnologist 27(2): 257-282.

Brodkin, Karen. 2000. “Global Capitalism: What’s Race Got to Do With It?” American Ethnologist 27(2): 237-256.

Burger, Tim. 2025. “Horticulture as History Making.” American Ethnologist 52(2): 195-207.

Dickey, Sara. 2000. “Permeable Homes: Domestic Service, Household Space, and the Vulnerability of Class Boundaries in Urban India.” American Ethnologist 27(2): 462-489.  

Duany, Jorge. 2000. “Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identity in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora.” American Ethnologist 27(1): 5-30.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7(1): 6-23.

Hernández Hiraldo, Samiri and Jorge Duany. 2025. “The 25th Anniversary of ‘Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identities in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora.’” American Ethnologist website, 24 September 2025.

Hizi, Gil. 2025. “Cliché Anthropologists and the Interactive Probing of Aspirations under Market Expansion.” American Ethnologist 52(1): 64-67.

James, Erica. 2024. “AES 2025 Archipelagos.” American Ethnologist website, 3 December 2024.

Jean-Klein, Iris. 2000. “Mothercraft, Statecraft, and Subjectivity in the Palestinian Intifada.”  American Ethnologist 27(1): 100-127.

Marcus, George. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.

Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2000. “Faith and its Fulfillment: Agency, Exchange and the Fijian Aesthetics of Completion.” American Ethnologist 27(1): 31-51.

Maurer, Bill, Chris Vasantkumar, Susanna Trnka, Jesse Hession Grayman, L. L. Wynn. 2025. “Crypto, Charisma, and Trump’s Chaos Economy.” American Ethnologist 52(2): 150-158.

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 2000. “Crafting the Public Sphere in the Forests of West Bengal: Democracy, Development, and Political Action.” American Ethnologist 27(2): 431-461.

Emma Kahn is a second year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. Her research focuses on trajectories of urban planning in the US, with particular attention to housing and land-use in the American Southwest.

Katie Donlan is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research explores questions of history, memory, and power in Native North America, with a focus on the Northeast.

Nadine Vanniasinkam is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on Tamil placemaking in Sri Lanka and explores the intersections of religion, nationalism and sacred space in identity building in post-war Sri Lanka.

Cite as: Kahn, Emma, Katie Donlan, and Nadine Vanniasinkam. 2025. “25th Anniversary Retrospective: American Ethnologist in the Year 2000.” In “AE Curated Collections” American Ethnologist website, 3 December. [https://americanethnologist.org/online-content/25th-anniversary-retrospective-american-ethnologist-in-the-year-2000-by-emma-kahn-katie-donlan-and-nadine-vanniasinkam/]

This piece was edited by American Ethnological Society Digital Content Editor Kathryn E. Goldfarb (kathryn.goldfarb@colorado.edu).