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This essay draws on ideas from the history of the natural sciences—on "personae" and "paper technology"—to explain how the subculture of social anthropology emerged at the London School of Economics in the 1930s. It argues that the figure of the social anthropologist coalesced around a number of practices and symbols that Bronislaw Malinowski had done much to imbue with charisma and that his students attempted to reproduce in their own research. Historians have proposed that part of social anthropology's success lay in its practitioners' ability to foster a fictive individualism in their writing, cultivating an inward attitude of experience founded on acts of the self upon the self. This essay shows that the kind of knowledge produced in Malinowski's seminar was, in fact, a highly sociable, rather than an individualistic, affair. Social anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a mutually constitutive relationship of field and seminar. These were connected spaces, held together in the act of fieldwork—a practice that transcended and linked the geographical distance between the metropole and the periphery in the crucial years of the discipline's development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley in western India displaced more than 30,000 families, mostly from Indigenous communities. Many of those displaced were resettled in regions that had a starkly different ecological and social composition from the mountainous areas they were forced to leave. In this paper we draw on the anthropology of landscape, linguistic anthropology, and ethnophysiography to chart the transformation of referential landscape terminology in the indigenous Bhili language as a result of displacement and subsequent resettlement. We focus on semantic domains covering ecological features such as soil, rivers, and forests, as well as the use of land for functional purposes. In doing so, we demonstrate how bridging conceptual and perceptual ethnographic approaches to landscape provides a more holistic view of displacement that encompasses both the memories of the places left behind as well as the unfolding process of resettlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the corporeal and affectual dimensions of the relation between people and objects in Western societies as seen through the lens of notions of "ensoulment" held by the Yanesha of Western Amazonia. Ethnographic evidence suggests that processes of ensoulment play a crucial role in the relation between people and objects, bodies, and artifacts in Indigenous Amazonia. Expressed in corporeal terms as a transfer/absorption of vitality and in affectual terms as the communication of sets of affects and social agency, ensoulment is always a two-way process. Through the analysis of Western perceptions on a broad variety of objects, I explore how the Amazonian notion that artifacts are constitutive of bodies and bodies are constitutive of artifacts plays out in Euro-American contexts. I argue that despite the dominance of the scientific paradigm, notions of ensoulment and transfer of agency between people and objects persist in Western popular perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper focuses on a priest's wife, Froibirg, who donated a manuscript to the Bavarian monastery of Benediktbeuern in 1055 and was remembered by the monks as an "uxor presbiteri" until the eighteenth century. Although Froibirg appears in the historical record only once during her lifetime, the broader social and religious contexts of her donation were richly documented by the communities with which she was associated: the monastery of Benediktbeuern, the cathedral community of Augsburg, and the eleventh-century church, which was deeply concerned with the "problem" of clerical marriage around the time of her gift. By focusing on Froibirg and on her social role as a priest's wife at the mid-eleventh century, the paper considers the celibacy movement from the standpoint of individuals and communities, rather than clerical denunciations or restrictive papal legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should we describe and conceptualize the simplest tools imaginable, especially in relation to distinctions between found, minimal, and repurposed objects? Most ethnographic accounts pay little attention to them, and neither does the organization of museums and the anthropological curriculum. Addressing the literature on the theory of tool use, this paper argues why rudimentary objects observed ethnographically, such as used as containers, scrapers, whetstones and strike-a-lights, should not be neglected. The argument is illustrated with reference to data on the Nuaulu people of Seram, eastern Indonesia. The main exception to this neglect has been archaeological, in the context of understanding the earliest possible human tools, and in animal behavior studies where the very idea of tool use is being interrogated. Holistic claims about tools require that we understand the scale and significance of minimal tools both for modern nonindustrial peoples and for ordinary people living and working in industrial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long been aware that theoretical perspectives guide ethnographic research and scholarly production. More recently the reflexive turn in ethnography laid bare the importance of the ethnographer's social position and unequal power relations. This paper focuses on these and other semiconscious forces, as well as contingent events, that prime ethnographers to focus on some things but not others. Prior graduate training and an era's intellectual zeitgeist often frame research goals. The investigator's mental map, age, maturity, psychological state, experience, and innumerable experiences outside university training similarly influence research. Chance events in the field add further complications. Focusing on my own half-century trajectory in the Andes, this paper examines how these forces shaped my research and ultimately the production of anthropological knowledge, reinforcing the need to bring these sometimes-distorting constraints into conscious reflection, as well as the utility of sequential research in the same community. [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]

The author comments on several papers in which anthropologists explore instances of omission and/or silencing in their earlier ethnographic research. She discusses the distinction between omissions and silences as well as possible reasons behind the omissions according to one of the authors, Jim Weil, including decisions about what is pertinent or irrelevant to a study. She also describes the significance of the authors' efforts to address such omissions and silences in their work.

Using long-term research in a Navajo community as an example, this paper examines how the social construction of anthropological research (including theoretical frameworks and writing strategies) shapes the silences and omissions in any particular historical period. Gender, ethnicity, age, and economic/political transformation also play roles unveiling some omissions while creating others as relationships shift and deepen over decades. I outline three major periods: the 1960s, when a social science model that emphasized theoretical problems, data analysis, and objectivist prose held sway; the 1970s, when feminist anthropology reoriented analysis to a focus on women, power, and authority; and the "dialogic turn," when ethnography began to include women's voices, the presence of the anthropologist in the text, and attention to the power relationship between the researcher and the interviewee. Each period entails its own omissions and silences, but acknowledging them allows anthropologists to make more provisional conclusions and be forward looking, seeking ways to shift our future theoretical frameworks and reinterpret our observations. [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 deals with formal language at the chiefly palaces of the Akan people of Ghana. The Akan language is spoken in six regions in the southern parts of Ghana. These areas are inhabited by native Akans and by Ghanaian immigrants representing other ethnic groups. The approaches used in this study are formality (Irvine 2001) and register, as outlined by Agha (2007). The paper looks at Akan palace language from the point of view of the norms and values of Akan culture and shows the rich use of language in sociocultural communicative events at the Akan palace. Ifocus on the following questions: How different is royal oratory from ordinary language? What is the place offormality and politeness in palace language? How do children acquire competence in palace language? What is required ofparticipants? What are the functions ofpalace language? What is the current state of the palace language? And, have there been any dramatic changes in the palace language from urbanization, modernization, and the influence of Western cultures and religion? [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]

This paper investigates how ideas and sociocultural preferences with regard to "public" versus "private" spheres can account for bribery and corruption. An improved understanding of corruption in terms of differences among cultures concerning which goods are considered private or public not only can have new and unexpected implications for a general theory on this phenomenon, but more significantly it can provide insights into the high level of variation among societies. The methodology used in this research is a quantitative analysis of ethnographic data collected from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) which explores the relationship between economic subsistence and bribery. The ways in which bribery is understood in different cultures relate not to different moral understandings of the problem of corruption, but rather to how different societies value the difference between private and public goods and the convertibility or blurring of goods belonging to the public and private spheres. [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]

While analyses of numerals typically focus on presenting morphological and phonological data as well as on comparative historical analyses of the numeral systems of related languages, numerals are rarely analyzed as indices of the kinds of cultural information seen in such semantic fields as, e.g., kinship terminology. On the contrary, an examination of the two counting systems of Elem Pomo reveals a network of sociocultural connections. This paper presents an analysis of these two systems and suggests that locating the data gained through an in-depth linguistic analysis within their proper sociocultural context can both clarify an understanding of these two counting systems and inform language planning. [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]

Anthropological approaches to understanding regional household economic strategies in complex societies have been poorly theorized and modeled. This paper contributes to theoretical development in this area by describing a model based on intensification and diversification. Then, the model is evaluated using systematic archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data from five premodern/early modern states (Mesoamerica, England, Mediterranean Europe, China, and Thailand). The results indicate that peasant households made decisions regarding agricultural intensification and craft specialization that match theoretical expectations based on a rational-choice approach. Cross-culturally, the outcome of these choices has been the development of a spatial division of labor with agricultural intensification in areas of prime arable land and a mix of extensive agriculture and craft specialization in marginal areas, under specific demand conditions. This model provides an alternative to the traditional approaches of neoevolutionism and the Asiatic mode of production (e.g., Marx, Polanyi, Sahlins). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents ethnographic documentations of Israeli Palestinian "women without men," who seek out married men and use the notion of polygyny to make moral sense of their non-normative heterosexual relationships. The women's presentations of self are construed against popular attitudes to polygyny as practically negligible and morally anachronistic. Following a political-economic approach to gender as constructed, historical, and embedded in multiple structures of power, the cases are interpreted as providing a lens into the structural contradictions that inform the lives of Palestinians inside Israel It is argued that the women's uses of an explicitly traditional and patriarchal script of gender morality to legitimize lifestyles that are easily stigmatized as immoral have a quality of social poetics. These day-to-day subversions of norms expose the strategic nature of "big" power structures of state, nation, religion, and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Familism, as used by Don Kalb, is a process whereby companies shape families to reproduce a flexible laborforce. Familism, I argue, is inseparable from how we imagine the family: the family at work and the work of the family This paper looks at how familial relatedness, namely union siblingship, played a role in conflict over a two-tier wage system being implemented in a Detroit-area auto plant. Engaging with recent ideas about kinship, social and psychological anthropology, and theories of the imaginary, I treat the UAW local studied as a kind of rural family arising out of a specific, path-dependent history—a family which brings with it rights and obligations, but also a social imagination of those rights and obligations, to the shop floor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have long noted the importance of Spondylus in the archaeological record of Ecuador. However, no one has attempted to understand contemporary Spondylus use and its relation to the precolumbian past. This research attempts to understand contemporary Spondylus use in coastal Ecuador by focusing on issues of craft production and identity formation. Using an approach that combines both archaeological and ethnographic information, this paper attempts to understand the role of Spondylus craft production in the formation of a localized identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the analytic points made about ‘contested spaces’ is that they can bring to the fore the tacit cultural understandings and unexamined ideological frameworks which, precisely by virtue of their being tacit and unexamined, are integral to the routine flow off everyday life. This paper amplifies the proposition ethnographically by selectivelv examining an extended conflict over the Irish state's intention to build an interpretive center at Mullaghmore, a mountain in the west of Ireland. It is argued that at one level local people were at odds over whether the mountain was land or a landscape, whilst at another level they were divided over appropriate ways of living in this peripheral setting in the final decade of the twentieth century. It was only in the process of contesting Mullaghmore as space, however, that these cultural differences and ideological divisions became explicit and open to public critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological surveys and satellite images are used to provide insights into the structure and scale of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. When this empire attained its peak during the eighth and seventh centuries b.c., it resulted in a distinct imprint on the landscape which differs significantly from that of the Bronze Age. In the Neo-Assyrian period, capital cities attained unprecedented size, rural settlement patterns were predominantly dispersed, the scale and extent of visible route systems increased, and irrigation systems were constructed for the intensification of agriculture and for the irrigation of parks and gardens. Beyond the core region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a distinct outer zone of the Assyrian landscape in the northwest Levant is also recognizable, in the form of tell-based settlements. This may reflect the persistence of earlier Bronze Age social organization. This paper demonstrates the contribution that landscape archaeology can make to an understanding of the development of empires, particularly when it is applied with the record derived from excavated sites and cuneiform texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consensus view appears to prevail among academics from diverse disciplines that biological races do not exist, at least in humans, and that race-concepts and race-objects are socially constructed. The consensus view has been challenged recently by Robin O. Andreasen's cladistic account of biological race. This paper argues that from a scientific viewpoint there are methodological, empirical, and conceptual problems with Andreasen's position, and that from a philosophical perspective Andreasen's adherence to rigid dichotomies between science and society, facts and values, nature and culture, and the biological and the social needs to be relinquished. DNA forensics is just one field of research that reveals how race remains both idea and object for human population biologists, an indication that it is premature to accept the existence of a no-race consensus across the disciplines. DNA forensics research also demonstrates ways in which race is reified by scientists by the representation of what is cultural or social as natural or biological, and of what is dynamic, relative, and continuous as static, absolute, and discrete. The philosophical analysis of foundational concepts of human population biology such as population, race, and ethnic group is best served by foregoing traditional objectivist approaches for a critical stance that reeognises the inextricability of the biological and the social. [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]

Leslie White is known as one of the most important cultural theoreticians of the mid-twentieth century. However, his ethnography, on the Keresan pueblos, is generally treated as irrelevant to his general evolutionary theory and vice versa. This paper argues that White's little-known work among the Hopi, where he led the 1932 Laboratory of Anthropology Field Training Course in Ethnology, reflects a more active conjunction of theory with ethnography. White's analytical perspectives contain valuable insights for current problems in Hopi ethnology. His arguments, in some brief published paragraphs, in correspondence, and in his field records, provide a flexible, processual model of Hopi social structure in accord with his cultural evolutionism. In some important respects, White's approach is more explanatorily adequate to the cultural reality than the conventional account established by two of his students in the field school, Fred Eggan and Mischa Titiev. White's contribution to Hopi ethnology is of neglected importance and reveals a substantive dialog between his ethnography and his evolutionist theory. [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]

Examines the social constructionist approach taken by G. Watson and J-G. A. Goulet in their paper entitled `Gold In; Gold Out: The Objectification of Dene Tha Accounts of Dreams and Visions' on the belief system of the Dene Tha. Display of the assumptions of social constructionist analysis; Imposition of arbitrary and unwarranted designations on the ethnographic facts as the effect of the social constructionist perspective.

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]