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AbstractWith ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples' economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

This article reviews recent research in sociocultural anthropology that has been conducted in and about the United States. I show that anthropologists of the United States have been concerned to locate the anthropological field in three ways: spatial investigations of region, community, and territory; epistemological and methodological projects of cultural critique and defamiliarization; and reconsideration of the place of Native North America in the anthropology of the United States. Emergent inquiry into settler colonialism and the politics of indigeneity has the potential to strengthen the anthropology of the United States by accounting for the ways that being a settler society structures all American lives.

ABSTRACT  In this article, I examine Florida Seminoles' governmental distributions of tribal‐gaming revenues that take the form of per capita dividends. Dividends reveal the political and cultural stakes of money's fungibility—its ability to substitute for itself. From tribal policy debates over children's dividends to the legitimization of political leadership through monetary redistribution, Seminoles selectively exploit the fungibility of money to break or make ties with one another and with non‐Seminoles. They do so in ways that reinforce indigenous political authority and autonomy, and they thereby challenge structural expectations in U.S. public culture and policy that would oppose indigenous distinctiveness to the embrace of money. [Keywords: money, tribal gaming, American Indians, Florida Seminoles]

The twenty-first century has witnessed a surge of scholarship at the sometimes-perilously sharp edge of anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies. This review sets forth from a disciplinary conjuncture of the early 2000s, when anthropology newly engaged with the topic of sovereignty, which had long been the focus of American Indian studies, and when the long-standing anthropological interest in colonialism was reshaped by Indigenous studies attention to the distinctive form labeled settler colonialism. Scholars working at this edge address political relationality as both concept and methodology. Anthropologists, in turn, have contributed to Indigenous studies a commitment to territorially grounded and community-based research and theory building. After outlining the conjuncture and its methodological entailments, the review turns to two directions in scholarship: reinvigorated ethnographic research on environment and on culture and economy. It concludes with reflection on the implications of this conjuncture for anthropological epistemology and disciplinary formation.

What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of 'water flourishing' leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.