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The bat is often portrayed as a vampire, a taxonomic monstrosity, and a source of the worst evils. Whenever pandemics occur, such as the one currently spread by SARS-CoV-2, this animal is quickly identified as a "reservoir of emerging pathogens" and is among the first to be blamed. Yet many human groups live in daily contact with multiple bat species and eat their flesh, which they praise for its medicinal benefits. Such groups see the bat as a "companion species" with which they cohabit and establish cooperative relationships. In this paper, we use recently gathered ethnographic data from Southeast Asia to show how humans imagine bats and enter into relationships with them. By blurring the boundaries between nature and society, this animal has made itself an appropriate subject of study for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Global South, disability is often lived as a family experience. The spatiotemporal context in neoliberal India, characterized by rapid social and cultural change disrupting traditional family structures and creating the possibility for the emergence of new and alternative kinship imaginaries. This paper positions disability within families, to explore intrahousehold dynamics around care work and caring. Using a contextual approach to disability and care, it is the purpose of this paper to capture these micro- and macro-level dynamics in the context of urban families in contemporary India through ethnographically informed fieldwork. The discussion is positioned on the cusp of disability and feminist scholarship and activism. Care is considered as a multidimensional polysemous concept that is both universal and specific in definition and scope; labor, affect, and justice are its predominant components as it intersects with disability. Historically, the biological family is most germane to care. It is families that continue to matter as a critical source of survival for disabled people particularly in low-income countries; and in many instances, they also play the dual role of being oppressive toward the disabled family member(s) to whom they provide support. Gender is a critical structuring principle in the organization of care throughout the life cycle, given women's centrality in procreation, childcare, and the larger domestic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of "figuring out" and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children's experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a significant interpretive issue for prehistoric archaeology: distinguishing adult ritual actions from the activities of children in the archaeological record. Through examining ethnographic accounts of recent huntergatherer children and reconsidering archaeological patterns and assemblages in light of these data, we explore how the results of children's play can be--and likely have been--misinterpreted by archaeologists as evidence for adult ritual behavior in prehistoric contexts. Given that children were a significant component of past hunter-gatherer (and other) societies, the fact that the material components of their activities overlap tremendously with items used in adult rituals must be routinely considered by archaeologists if we are to reconstruct robust understandings of past peoples all over the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically reviews reconstructions of cultural development in prehistoric Amazonia and argues for the primacy of regional and interregional exchange in generating the complex distributions of ethno-linguistic identities traced by linguists and archaeologists in the area. This approach requires an explicit abandonment of notions of migrating "peoples" in favor of modern anthropological understandings of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Further, the paper discusses the significance of such a regional system perspective on Amazonian ethnogenesis for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the fioodplains and wet savannas of lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium BC signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, social stratification, economy, and ecology were all recursively intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the Indo-European words commonly treated as kinship terms. The traditional approach fails to explain such linguistic and historical phenomena as the use of the reflexes of these terms mostly in the plural as markers of belonging to certain social groups or as terms pertaining to authority and headship. Reinterpretation of the traditional reconstruction enables one to regard the etyma in question as classifiers of age-sex groups and provides a coherent explanation of unexpected semantic shifts such as the terminological identification of grandparents of both sexes with grandchildren. Consequently, the paper argues that patriarchal clan society was not the earliest form of Indo-European social organization as has been believed and that the latter seems to have been based on age-sex stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I outline an integrated framework for the study of culture, called evolutionary cultural anthropology, that highlights culture and its interactions with biology and ecology. Applied research during Ebola outbreaks and several decades of research with hunter-gatherer children of the Congo Basin are utilized to illustrate evolutionary cultural anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeing bodies and evolutionary histories as quantifiable features that can be measured separately from the human cultural experience is an erroneous approach. Seeing cultural perceptions and the human experience as disentangled from biological form and function and evolutionary history is equally misguided. An integrative anthropology moves past dichotomous perspectives and seeks to entangle the "inside" and "outside," methodologically and theoretically, to move beyond isolationist trends in understanding the human. In this paper I illustrate the underlying rationale for some anthropological lack of engagement with neo-Darwinian approaches and review contemporary evolutionary theory discussing how, in combination with a dynamic approach to human culture, it can facilitate integration in anthropology. Finally, I offer an overview of the human niche concept and propose a heuristic framework as a set of shared assumptions about human systems to help frame a sincerely anthropological and emphatically evolutionary approach to the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the failure of anthropology, at least since the 1970s, to look at the big picture: what the four fields can contribute to each other. It focuses on kinship as a key example, on other aspects of sociality, and on language and symbolic thought. I argue that an understanding of humanity as a whole, and especially hunter-gatherers, is important for grasping the nature of the human species. Cultural or social anthropology progressed to a large extent through kinship studies, and it is here also that we should look. The transformation of a Ju/'hoan kinship structure to a Khoe one is used as one key example. The deeper history of language itself is another. After these examples, I return to general issues, including the ways in which the diverse branches of anthropology, especially social anthropology and linguistic anthropology, serve to enlighten each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the outline of an anthropological political ecology that fully acknowledges the constructedness of nature while suggesting steps to weave together the cultural and the biological on constructivist grounds. From tropical rain forests to advanced biotechnology laboratories, the resources for inventing natures and cultures are unevenly distributed. The paper proposes an antiessentialist framework for investigating the manifold forms that the natural takes in today's world. This proposal builds on current trends in ecological anthropology, political ecology, and social and cultural studies of science and technology. The resulting framework identifies and conceptualizes three distinct but interrelated nature regimes-organic, capitalist, and techno-and sketches their characteristics, their articulations, and their contradictions. The political implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the strategies of hybrid natures that most social groups seem to be faced with as they encounter, and try to stem, particular manifestations of the environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world becomes more complex, the work of anthropology, both theoretical and practical, becomes more demanding. People at the local level are increasingly being drawn into larger circuits through economic linkages, demographic processes, social interactions, and flows of information that transcend local and national boundaries. Such global linkages and the new embeddedness they produce require more sophisticated approaches to ethnography. This paper proposes social network analysis as a valuable approach to that end. The concept of embeddedness, which is central to the social networks perspective, is introduced. Hierarchical embeddedness of the local level in the larger society, economy, and polity is distinguished from domain embeddedness, the interpenetration of different fields of activity. Network studies of two ethnographic cases, gift giving among Kung and ritual celebrations in a Javanese village, illustrate the potential of social network analysis for investigating embeddedness. The paper concludes with substantive and methodological suggestions for the study of embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyandry has long been viewed as an anomalous form of marriage that raises fundamental questions about variability in human kinship systems. This paper integrates and evaluates a set of hypotheses derived from sociocultural anthropological and evolutionary biological theories of polyandry against data collected on the Nyinba, a well-studied ethnically Tibetan population living in northwestern Nepal. In this population, polyandry is fraternal, it is the normative form of marriage and highly valued culturally. Nonetheless, certain polyandrous marriages fail—men occasionally leave their natal households and abandon their joint marriages. In exploring the reasons for these marital breakdowns and the characteristics of men who instigate them, this paper offers a new perspective on the presumed contradictions of polyandry and a more fruitful approach to understanding how polyandrous practice comes to be perpetuated from one generation to the next. It also contributes to discussions about how sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives may provide complementary viewpoints for ethnographic data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent critics of anthropological theorizing and ethnographic authority have claimed "reflexivity," "polyphony," and "dialog" as core values for anthropology's self-deconstruction. This paper examines this claim and these values with a particular emphasis on their (perhaps unintended) institutional consequences. It argues that the boundaries of reflexivity constructed in "postmodernist" discourse (focusing mainly on authority in texts) have been framed in ultimately misleading and surprisingly unreflective ways that diminish both the legitimacy and the logic of postmodernist claims. Thus, this paper is intended in part to defend the traditional bases of ethnography's authority, but more significantly it intends to suggest how anthropology can be reflexive in ways unelaborated by postmodernist critics. It also attempts to show how a particular "totalizing" theoretical stance (one that locates the logic and reproduction of power and authority in society as a whole&including academic institutions& rather than in texts alone) can dispel some of the "paradoxes" left unaddressed by postmodernist critics. An ironic effect of postmodernists' eschewing anthropology's self-definition as a science is an indirect institutional legitimation of the kinds of scientisms that postmodernists find most reprehensible (e.g., biological and economic reductionism). Moreover, postmodernist "privileging" of experience unintentionally reproduces the epistemology of Western individualism in the name of its radical deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on 30 months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in a high-poverty, crime-ridden area in metropolitan Buenos Aires, this paper scrutinizes the political character of interpersonal violence. The violence described here is not the subaltern violence that, thoroughly documented by historians and social scientists, directs against the state, the powerful, or their symbols. It is a violence that is neither redemptive nor cleansing, but it is deeply political in a threefold sense: (a) it is entangled with the intermittent and contradictory form in which the police intervene in this relegated neighborhood, (b) it has the potential to give birth to collective action that targets the state while simultaneously signaling it as the main actor responsible for the skyrocketing physical aggression in the area, and (c) it provokes paradoxical forms of informal social control as residents rely on state agents who are themselves enmeshed in the production of this violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts–rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)–and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretical picture of power over life and death, particularly that posited by Giorgio Agamben's (1998) distinction between bare and qualified life. They also foreground the ways in which gender is implicated in practices of world making that James Holston (2008) describes as "insurgent" and "differentiated" citizenship. Exploring the ways that people seek to craft lives in contexts that undermine many possibilities, I demonstrate ethnographically both the forms of exposure that poverty produces and the ways that these are countered. I propose a genealogy of bareness that, contra Agamben's emphasis on sovereign power, is deeply embedded in local ways of understanding persons, relationships, history's effects, and life's possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic concepts have a double status. They are elaborated for scientific purposes, but they are also used in the real world, especially by decision makers. In this paper I focus on the latter aspect and address the question of the uses of these concepts in welfare reform. I base my reflections on the case of the renewal of welfare-control policy in France. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork on the daily practices of welfare control provide the occasion to confront the economic vulgate of welfare reform with the actual situations of welfare recipients and ground a critical evaluation of the effect of reforms inspired by this vulgate. By doing so I propose a basis for a socioanthropological critique of the political implications of economic concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical scholarship on the banishment of subjectivity from experimental psychology led me to explore a current theoretical enterprise in literary and cultural studies that goes by the name "affect theory." This approach, tied to contemporary neuroscience research, at once joins the effort to banish subjectivity from human experience and introduces the apparently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality. The potentiality revealed by affect theory lies deep in the human brain, hidden below the level of conscious intentionality. Affect theory draws on a long history in the human sciences going back to the late nineteenth century. Therefore, in this paper I take a fresh look at the early history of experimental psychology from the vantage point of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898. I intend this early anthropological approach to subjectivity to serve as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the later banishment of subjectivity from the methods used in experimental psychology and from the models proposed in affect theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyze the trajectory of Brazilian physical anthropology from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, framing it within the prevailing historical and sociopolitical context. The focus will be on the research and reflections of anthropologists at the Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil's most influential anthropological research centers, from 1870 to 1930. The main aim is to understand why these anthropologists distanced themselves from explanatory approaches that placed mestizos and other non-Europeans on inferior levels in the hierarchy of human races. I argue that the position taken by physical anthropology at the National Museum was the result of far-reaching intellectual and political dynamics operating well beyond academic borders. Anthropologists from the National Museum--and Edgard Roquette-Pinto in particular--shared the nationalist ideals defended by a portion of the early twentieth-century Brazilian intelligentsia. It is also argued that, contrary to some historical interpretations, the antideterministic position of physical anthropology at the National Museum was independent of the Boasian influence. Although there were superficial similarities between the Boasian ideas and those of a segment of the physical anthropology produced in Brazil, the most significant influences came from other, locally produced sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the quest by physical anthropologists in Japan for the origins of the Japanese. A major focus of this research has been the Ainu people of the northern island of Hokkaidō, who have recently been declared an indigenous people of Japan. The relationship between mainstream Japanese and the very much living community of the Ainu has been the subject of over 100 years of research. Integral to research has been the collection of Ainu skulls, skeletons, and artefacts that have provided a critical if controversial resource for physical anthropologists. This has all been against the backdrop of changing political ideologies about the so-called purity of the Japanese. In the post-World War II period, with the loss of empire, the idea of Japan as a homogeneous nation took hold, and it was only in the last two decades that this notion has been discredited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the so-called offshore-base dispute after the 1995 rape incident, this article examines the intricacies of Okinawan resistance in the context of the nation-state and the larger processes of global history. In so doing, it aims to advance the potentialities of the new-social-movements literature (concerning everyday practices of culture, identity, and difference) by explicitly restoring old politico-economic questions (class structure and the material conditions of life, along with the unity of agendas and actors) to contemporary social criticism. Showing that a particular Okinawan identity has been produced in the context of improved material conditions of life, it ethnographically examines the articulation of Okinawa's historical unity and contemporary diversity. Attention is given to Okinawa's endeavors to ground its collective consciousness not so much in the notion of a poor, oppressed "people" as in the notion of confident, affluent "citizens" of diverse backgrounds awakened to globally disseminated ideas concerning ecology, peace, women's issues, and human rights. The paper concludes by reclaiming "the romance of resistance" from the somewhat excessive concern of the new-social-movements literature with issues of everyday power and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 40 years, traditional perspectives on the constitution of human groups have been subjected to stringent critique within anthropology. This began with the dismantling of accepted "race" divisions after World War II and continued with analyses of the meaning and reality of African "tribal" distinctions from the 1960s until the present. Archaeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and historians of Africa now work within a research milieu where social interactions, cultural exchange, and the dynamic nature of group identifications are accepted as a normal part of the human experience. At the same time, new techniques have been developed for the examination of human history, techniques based upon an expanding repertoire of tools for the analysis of genetic variability in human populations. Perhaps the most striking result of this research has been Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza's The History and Geography of Human Genes. Rather less attention has been paid, however, to the conceptual relationships between the human groups defined through such analyses, in Africa and elsewhere, and those defined through other kinds of research. This paper is a preliminary examination of the fit between genetic, archaeological, and ethnographic data on the African past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization, changing views of science, and alterations in the culture concept have gradually modified the way fieldwork is perceived within anthropology. This paper briefly examines the contributions of four ethnographers in order to argue that ethnography based on fieldwork remains essential to our definition as a profession. The claim is made here that unless anthropologists continue to make fieldwork central, anthropological theory will be cut off from its grounding in data. Other observers, less skilled than anthropologists but more daring, will increasingly supplant ethnographers in gathering new information that they then interpret and in claiming the public readership that anthropologists were once able successfully to address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining rock art studies with ethnohistory, contemporary ethnographic analysis, and the interpretations of people who share the cultural traditions being studied, this paper documents a rock art site in Kanab Creek Canyon that appears to have been the location of a Ghost Dance ceremony performed by Southern Paiute and perhaps Hualapai people in the late 1800s. Using the site as a point of departure, it focuses on the way in which synergistic associations among place, artifact, resources, events, and historic and contemporary Indian people contribute to the construction of a contextual cultural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

California's statehood and assimilation into the United States during the 19th century were accompanied by genocide against the indigenous population; among those peoples that survived, a large number were officially erased by a federal policy of nonrecognition in which anthropologists and anthropological knowledge played a role. At the end of the 20th century the descendants of these peoples, the "unacknowledged tribes," are engaged in struggles both to gain federal recognition and to revive their languages and cultural heritage, processes in which anthropologists once again are involved. This paper explores the relationships between the unacknowledged tribes and anthropologists in both eras, focusing upon the mixture of essentialist and constructionist approaches to indigenous identity which underlies contemporary collaborations between indigenous intellectuals and leaders and anthropologist interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Animism" is projected in the literature as simple religion and a failed epistemology, to a large extent because it has hitherto been viewed from modernist perspectives. In this paper previous theories, from classical to recent, are critiqued. An ethnographic example of a hunter-gatherer people is given to explore how animistic ideas operate within the context of social practices, with attention to local constructions of a relational personhood and to its relationship with ecologies) perceptions of the environment. A reformulation of their animism as a relational epistemology is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper of E. Wilmsen entitled "On the Search for (Truth) and Authority: A Reply to Lee and Guenther," which was published in volume 34 of the "Current Anthropology" journal. Wilmsen claimed that the mid-19th-century, Dobe region was an area of mercantile activity. The author remarks that Wilmsen's evidence for the early penetration and subjugation of the Nyae Nyae-Dobe by merchant capital is entirely incorrect, revealing an error and misrepsentation unrivaled in recent anthropology, citing the detailed 19th-century maps where the Nyae Nyae-Dobe was represented as virtual blank from the period of Wilmsen's alleged mercantile boom.

In bracketing certain ‘Western’ Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be ‘suspending the ethical’ in our dealings with the ‘other.’ Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to he worth anything at all, must he ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imagine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged anthropology might take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the international conference entitled "Ethnic Traditional Culture and Folk Knowledge" which was held in Moscow on March 21-24, 1994, organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Papers being presented covered an array of geographical settings and historical context from authors coming from U.S. and Western Europe along with Argentina, India, Israel, Kuwait and from other former Soviet Republics.

There are two basic analytical approaches in social research. The first, using formal methods (e.g., standard statistical analysis), aggregates over the attributes of individual cases to determine the influence of abstract effects on events. This approach, which results in correlations between variables, is unable to provide adequate causal explanations for what happens in particular cases. The interpretive or narrative approach, in contrast, aggregates over events to trace the causal development of a single case. This type of analysis cannot be made reflexive (i.e., cannot account explicitly for the intersubjective nature of data collection procedures in human studies). Thus each method, by itself, is problematic. There have been a number of attempts to combine the two approaches in a single theoretical framework. However, because the constituent approaches are fundamentally different in their ontological and epistemological stances, the proposed reconciliations remain forced. This paper outlines a strategy that sequentially utilizes both approaches, preserving their independent and complementary virtues, while providing formal links that allow the results of one approach to inform use of the other directly. It is hoped that practice of this two-step method will dissipate some of the recent doubts about the value of ethnographic fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant changes in the nature of social life are being brought about by computer, information, and biological technologies, to the extent that—some argue—a new cultural order, "cyberculture," is coming into being. This paper presents an overview of the types of anthropological analyses that are being conducted in the area of new technologies and suggests additional steps for the articulation of an anthropology of cyberculture. It builds upon science, technology, and society studies in various fields and on critical studies of modernity. The implications of technoscience for both anthropological theory and ethnographic research are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing isolation of political evolutionary theory from theoretical developments in cultural anthropology is evidenced by a proclivity to interpret social change primarily in terms of material or demographic conditions and contingencies and functional or adaptive processes. This approach overlooks the enormous range of nonmaterial circumstances to which actors and the political systems they create also respond and tends to leave the processes involved in the emergence of political hierarchy undescribed and the human agent dimly sketched at best. An alternative perspective that addresses these shortcomings is offered by practice theory, which insists on incorporating nonmaterial as well as material circumstances into social process, stressing the role of individual agents in using these conditions and contingencies to create social life. This paper attempts to demonstrate the value of practice theory for the study of political centralisation by drawing out and empirically testing its novel predictions about the relationship between centralisation and demography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reply on the comments made to his article "The New Guinea High Lands: Region, Culture Area, or Fuzzy Set?" The author admits that the focus of his paper is not the highland peoples of New Guinea but the New Guinea Highlands. The purpose of his article was to criticize anthropologists on the use of their notions on the region.

Our aim in this paper is to make a complete break from the theoretical framework in which the transition from hunting and gathering to herding or cultivation is conceived as an evolutionary progression from one distinct type of society to another. Instead we explore the usefulness of treating hunting and gathering, herding, and cultivation as alternative strategies which are, singly or in combination, appropriate to particular social or natural environments. We consider the ranking of foods in hunter-gatherer diets in terms of the return they offer for energy invested in procuring them and ask which of these foods come to predominate in the diet of cultivators or herders. We consider cases of symbiosis between hunter-gatherers and others and cases of mixed economies and of reversion to hunting and gathering by people who previously practised herding or cultivation. We conclude that population growth is unlikely of itself to provide an adequate explanation for the transition away from hunting and gathering. Rather it appears likely that the cause lies in changes in the availability of certain foods brought about by social or natural modification of the hunter-gatherers' environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper participates in the discussion of ethnography as text. It seeks to articulate more clearly the distinction between "writing" and "composing" culture and to explore the consequences of this distinction for authorial authority. Ethnography need not always be written, for the dominance of the printed text is a historical phenomenon. Printed matter has certain characteristics that are artifacts of its physical nature and should not be confused with the information inscribed on the page. Practical experience in developing a large multimedia database about ancient Greek society is here used to problematise certain assumptions about how author and reader relate to one another with a view to extending the discussion of how culture can be represented and subsequently explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to the comments on the paper "Composing Culture: The Authority of an Electronic Text," by Gregory Crane in this issue. The author agrees with Eric Hirsch's focus on the element of craft. He is surprised that the example of hamartia has caused several reactions. It is pointed out that while anthropologists explore possibilities for research, they continue to investigate the effect of the linguistic tools on students.

The article discusses the author's views on the discussion paper by Glenn Davis Stone which explores the impact of genetically modified cotton (GMC) on agricultural skilling process in Warangal. The author commented that Stone did not provide adequate and appropriate empirical data to support his claims that the rapid spread of GMC hinders the individual and social learning critical to the process. He added that Stone's ethnographic research did not consider aspects of agrarian structure, like class gender, age, educational level, and others. Moreover, the author cited that no explanation was made on how Bt cotton is different from non-Bt hybrid cotton varieties in terms of agricultural deskilling.

The article presents the author's arguments on the paper "Why Hunter-Gatherers Work," which presented an empirical, sociological framework of small-scale society with reference to hunting behavior. He comments on the field research entitled "Warao of the Orinoco Delta." The Warao are matrilocal fishers and gatherers, with hunting as a specialty with a few of them, mainly of large mammals such as deer and tapirs. For the Warao, young men from neighboring communities married into the village, were required to fish and hunt, as well as to construct houses for their fathers-in-law. The author further makes a comparison between the reciprocity system of the society during the Warao period and today's society. According to him, institutionalized reciprocity works only under social pressure. Furthermore, the formal models presented indicate that there are different strategies for women and men, the former emphasizing "private goods" and the latter "public goods." The author also tries to differentiate cultural evolution from biological evolution, and thus reflects on the domain of a narrow evolutionary ecology.

The article presents the author's comments on a paper related to the issue of time resolution, taphonomy and overlapping accumulations in Early Pleistocene prehistory. According to the author, given appropriate questions and findings in an adequate context, one can productively examine split-second decisions made by extinct hominids or long-term trends over thousands of years. The approach of the author of the said paper tends to eliminate the individual from the past and will only enlighten with regard to the most macroscopic trends in Pleistocene prehistory. Contemporary researchers are using faunal, lithic, and structural remains to trace the activities of individuals on the time scale of weeks, days, and minutes. He states that lithic studies utilizing refitting have become increasingly commonplace and productive avenues of research. His dismissal of the prospects for research focuses on relatively short periods of time in the distant past is unwarrantedly pessimistic. Researchers might eventually make progress toward writing the ethnography of the extinct with new fieldwork and the aid of creative theoretical and analytical insight.

The article comments on the paper "Composing Culture: The Authority of an Electronic Text," by Gregory Crane in this issue. It is pointed out that what is lacking in Crane's paper is the element of craft contained in a style of reasoning that establishes the possibility of truth in the ethnographic endeavor. Crane has not considered the craft that results from training, empathy, luck, and composing ability.

This paper advances the notion of judicious opportunism to explain social action under conditions of uncertainty in contemporary Africa. It is significant in providing a means of theorizing social action in African settings in ways that avoid what one identifies as the ideological construction of Africa and Africans as prone to decisions based on emotion or reaction rather than on rationality, objectivity, or long-term planning. The author considers Jennifer Johnson-Hanks' article on social action and fertility as ambitious in its attempt to chart questions of aspirations and attitudes as ethnographic terrain. The author also recognizes the ability of Johnson-Hanks to carve out stimulating analytical space for wide-ranging comparative inquiry that provides a model for understanding present action as it relates to future intentions.

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Chimpanzee and Human Cultures," by Christophe Boesch and his colleague, which has been published within the issue. The author views that they have taken up various topics including ethnography, cross-cultural comparisons, ratchating, sign languages and the human cultural process. The author believes that the researchers have done a considerably important work on two species of hominids.

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Chimpanzee and Human Cultures," by Christophe Boesch and his colleague, published within the issue, which focuses on the cultural similarities between humans and chimpanzees. The author argues that there is no contradiction between imitation and individual testing, hence, all imitations are emulative. He criticizes the researchers' rehearsal of an old hypothesis between individual innovation and social convention.

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Chimpanzee and Human Cultures," by Christophe Boesch and his colleague. He views that if the researchers had cleared earlier that they were using the simplest definition of human evolution, the biologically inclined would have found the project more apprehensible. He argues that selectional mechanism is a conscious choice rather than an unconscious acquisition guided by environmental and social factors.

The article comments on the paper "Composing Culture: The Authority of an Electronic Text," by Gregory Crane in this issue. The author agrees with Crane's view that the attitude of the reader to the written text is changed with a multimedia database. There will be some consequences but there can be no doubt a different kind of ethnography is emerging.

The article presents a reply to a suggestion of bias made by paleoanthropologist Milford H. Wolpoff in the planning of the 1992 Royal Society and CIBA meetings in Great Britain. According to the author, who is one of the event organizers, the meeting is not primarily about multiregional versus recent African origin models. He states that those who believe in Wolpoff that Allan Templeton's critiques of mitochondrial DNA analyses have eliminated genetic support for a recent African origin for modern humans, need to refer to current publications on the issue. Further, he comments on the circumstance that did not bring Wolpoff to the meetings to present his paper on dating sites for the origins of modern humans.