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This chapter reviews the anthropology of male and female circumcision over the past century. After surveying classic sociocultural and psychodynamic interpretations of male circumcision, I shift to the biblical and Jewish rite, focusing on gender symbolism and counter-hegemonic practice within European-Christian society. The chapter then reviews the relationship between male circumcision in sub-Saharan Africa and reduced rates of HIV. Next, I address female circumcision, focusing again on symbolism but especially on highly impassioned debates over cultural relativism and human rights, medical complications, criticism and imperialism, and female agency versus brute patriarchy. What are the moral, political, and scientific obligations of anthropology to a cultural practice that is increasingly vilified in Western popular culture and jurisprudence? Should anthropology advocate eradication, contextualize Western opposition, or critique one's own bodily practices? Finally, I critically analyze the growing movement to ban the medical and ritual circumcision of infant boys in the West.

This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressing and generative avenues of research and thought in phenomenologically oriented anthropology.

Historicity has emerged within anthropology to refer to cultural perceptions of the past. It calls attention to the techniques such as rituals that people use to learn about the past, the principles that guide them, and the performances and genres in which information about the past can be presented. The concept is in essential tension with the meaning of the term as "factuality" within the discipline of history and in wider society. Anthropologists also sometimes compose histories within this Western paradigm, but historicity in anthropology orientates a different objective, namely to discover the ways (beyond Western historicism) in which people, whether within or outside the West, construe and represent the past. Historicity, which is grounded on a notion of temporality, offers a framework for approaching time as nonlinear and may thus be suited to studying other histories without fundamentally measuring how well they conform to Western history.

The turn to ontology, often associated with the recent works of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour, but evident in many other places as well, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli's formulation, "symptomatic" and "diagnostic" of something. It is, I here argue, a response to the sense that sociocultural anthropology, founded in the footsteps of a broad humanist "linguistic" turn, a field that takes social construction as the special kind of human reality that frames its inquiries, is not fully capable of grappling with the kinds of problems that are confronting us in the so-called Anthropocene—an epoch in which human and nonhuman kinds and futures have become so increasingly entangled that ethical and political problems can no longer be treated as exclusively human problems. Attending to these issues requires new conceptual tools, something that a nonreductionistic, ethnographically inspired, ontological anthropology may be in a privileged position to provide.

Voice is both a set of sonic, material, and literary practices shaped by culturally and historically specific moments and a category invoked in discourse about personal agency, communication and representation, and political power. This review focuses on scholarship produced since the 1990s in a variety of fields, addressing the status of the voice within Euro-Western modernity, voice as sound and embodied practice, technological mediation, and voicing. It then turns to the ways in which anthropology and related fields have framed the relationship between voice and identity, status, subjectivity, and publics. The review suggests that attending to voice in its multiple registers gives particular insight into the intimate, affective, and material/embodied dimensions of cultural life and sociopolitical identity. Questions of voice are implicated in many issues of concern to contemporary anthropology and can lend theoretical acuity to broader concepts of more general concern to social theory as well.