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This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical assessment of the field of common property. After discussing briefly the major findings and accomplishments of the scholarship on the commons, the paper pursues two strategies of critique. The first strategy of friendly critique accepts the basic assumptions of most writings on common property to show that scholars of commons have discovered far more variables that potentially affect resource management than is possible to analyze carefully. The paper identifies some potential means to address the problem of too many variables. The second line of critique proceeds differently. It asks how analyses of common property might change, and what they need to consider, if they loosen assumptions about sovereign selves and apolitical property rights institutions. My examination of these questions concludes this review with an emphasis on the need to (a) attend more carefully to processes of subject formation, and (b) investigate common property arrangements and associated subject positions with greater historical depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a brief review of cross-cultural human sexuality and the concerns anthropologists have highlighted in the study of sexual practices. The paper is divided into a discussion of the topics heterosexual behavior and homosexual behavior. Focus is given on cross-cultural studies of sexual practice that attempt to deal with human sexual arousal, attraction, and customary means of dealing with sexuality in non-Western cultures. The paper excluded discussions of human biology and evolution, reproductive health and hygiene, gender role and status, the psychodynamic approach to understanding human sexual behavior, and historical surveys of Western sexual practice.

The article focuses on issues and topics related to the concept of slavery in the different cultural perspectives. The author decided to write this paper in response to a study of the Western notion of slavery. Anthropologists have contributed some 6 percent of the total bibliographical entries. The rest comes overwhelmingly from history, with economic history a distant second. Overall, the anthropological contribution is narrowly focused on Africa and the Caribbean. Two African collections of papers of the middle nineteen-seventies account for fully a third of the some 75 anthropological entries on African slavery. Anthropology almost completely forgot slavery in the 1920 to 1960 period, when so much of its modem world view was being forged. However, slavery was noted in local contexts through ethnographic monographs rather than in articles which are the main vehicle for theory in American anthropology.

The article offers information about a study done to examine the trend in the use of the meaning-text theory (MTT) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. MTT operates on the principle that language consists in a mapping from the content or meaning of an utterance to its form or text. It was developed by Alexander K. Zholkovsky with the aim of formulating formal lexicons according to the principles of explanatory-combinatorial lexicology. However, the technology gained the refusal of professional journals to accept papers on MTT for publication. The papers had supposedly reflected the level on the representation of utterance in the meaning-text model (MTM), a proposal of a semantic transcription within the framework of MTT as well as the basic components of MTM.

Markets are key contemporary institutions, yet there is little agreement concerning their history or diversity. To complicate matters, markets have been considered by different academic disciplines that approach the nature of such exchange systems from diametrically opposed perspectives that impede cross-disciplinary dialogue. This paper reviews the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the detection, development, and significance of markets in the preindustrial past. We challenge both the view that marketing is natural and the perspective that market exchange is unique to modern capitalist contexts. Both of these frameworks fail to recognize that past and present market activities are embedded in their larger societal contexts, albeit in different ways that can be understood only if examined through a broadly shared theoretical lens. We examine the origins, change, and diversity of preindustrial markets, calling for multiscalar, cross-disciplinary approaches to investigate the long-term history of this economic institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minor controversies notwithstanding, the evolution of the human brain has been an intermingled composite of allometric and nonallometric increases of brain volume and reorganizational events such as the reduction of primary visual cortex and a relative increase in both posterior association and (most probably) prefrontal cortex, as well as increased cerebral asymmetries, including Broca's and Wernicke's regions, with some of these changes already occurring in australopithecine times. As outlined in Holloway (1967), positive feedback (amplification-deviation) has been a major mechanism in size increases. Exactly how this melange of organs evolved will require many more paleontological discoveries with relatively intact crania, an unraveling of the genetic bases for both brain structures and their relationship to behaviors, and a far more complete picture of how the brain varies between male and female and among different populations throughout the world. After all, the human brain is still evolving, but for how long is quite uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology has been linked to colonialist attitudes and scientific imperialism. But what are the perspectives of Indigenous groups concerning the practice of archaeology? Numerous organizations recognize the distinctive needs of Indigenous communities throughout the world and have adopted agreements and definitions that govern their relationships with those populations. The specific name by which Indigenous groups are known varies from country to country, as local governments are involved in determining the appropriateness of particular definitions to populations within their borders. This paper begins with an examination of the various aspects that have been used to determine whether or not a group of people might be considered "indigenous" under various definitions, and then uses the history of the relationships between North American archaeologists and Indigenous populations as a background for the examination of some of the political aspects of archaeology that have impacted Indigenous populations. It then proceeds to discuss perspectives on archaeology offered by members of various Indigenous populations throughout the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everywhere the issue has been examined, people make discriminations about others' physical attractiveness. Can human standards of physical attractiveness be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology? In the past decade, this question has guided much theoretical and empirical work. In this paper, we (a) outline the basic adaptationist approach that has guided the bulk of this work, (b) describe evolutionary models of signaling that have been applied to understand human physical attractiveness, and (c) discuss and evaluate specific lines of empirical research attempting to address the selective history of human standards of physical attractiveness. We also discuss ways evolutionary scientists have attempted to understand variability in standards of attractiveness across cultures as well as the ways current literature speaks to body modification in modern Western cultures. Though much work has been done, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is enunciated through the discourses of nationalism, sociopolitics, postcolonialism, diaspora, and globalism. Both trends have been tacitly shaped by anthropological and social theory, but they are fundamentally driven by the powerful voices of once marginalized groups and their newfound place in the circles of academic legitimacy. I argue that our disciplinary reticence to embrace the politics of identity, both in our investigations of the past and our imbrications in the present, has much to do with archaeology's lack of reflexivity, both personal and disciplinary, concurrent with its antitheoretical tendencies. The residual force of the latter should not be underestimated, specifically in regard to field practices and the tenacity of academic boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. Explanations of the observable archaeological phenomena in Eurasia, or the lack of such evidence in other regions, include biological arguments (the role of Cro-Magnons and the demise of the Neanderthals), as well as cultural-technological, and environmental arguments. The paper discusses issues of terminological ambiguities, chronological and geographical aspects of change, the emergence of what is viewed as the arch-types of modern forager societies, and the hotly debated and loaded issue of modern behavior. Finally, the various causes for the Upper Paleolithic revolution are enumerated, from the biological through the technocultural that relies on the analogy with the Neolithic revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The genus Homo as represented by Homo ergaster (= early African Homo erectus) is characterized by a pattern of features that is more similar to modern humans than to the earlier and contemporaneous australopithecines and paranthropines. These features include larger relative brain sizes, larger bodies, slower rates of growth and maturation, dedicated bipedal locomotion, and smaller teeth and jaws. These features are phenotypic expressions of a very different lifestyle for the earliest members of the genus Homo. This paper considers the energetic correlates of the emergence of the genus Homo and suggests that there were three major changes in maintenance energy requirements. First, there was an absolute increase in energy requirements due to greater body size. Second, there was a shift in the relative requirements of the different organs, with increased energy diverted to brain metabolism at the expense of gut tissue, possibly mediated by changes in the proportion of weight comprised of fat. And third, there was a slower rate of childhood growth, offset by higher growth costs during infancy and adolescence. These changes, as well as energetic requirements of reproduction and bipedal locomotion, are considered in a discussion of one of the major transitions in adaptation in human evolution, the appearance of our own genus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power an inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, an situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the main approaches to the discursive analysis of racist utterances. Moreover, we discuss the notions of racism and race historically and from the point of view of different cultures and languages. We restrict ourselves to the discourse analytical concepts and methodologies, which vary greatly, both in theory and in analysis. We present one example and analyze it in detail as an illustration of the linguistic tools that help make hidden and latent meanings transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the current state and future prospects of quantitative archaeology. It explores the limitations of quantitative archaeology, as well as the mathematical or formal techniques that are applied by archaeologists who advocate the quantitative movement. It also examines the history, the working assumptions, the frustrations and the basic attitudes of the field. It comments on some of the main trends in the field of quantitative archaeology between 1950 and 1980, and reviews the collected papers in "Quantitative Research in Archaeology: Progress and Prospects," edited by M. S. Aldenderfer and "Mathematics and Information Science in Archaeology: A Flexible Framework," edited by A. Voorrips.

The article presents the linguistic typology and the three way language classification through morphological typology. Morphological typology states that world languages are isolating, agglutinating and fusional. Greenberg's paper on work order universals revealed the four word order types: subject-object-verb, possessor-noun, adjective-noun, noun-postposition; like a but with noun-adjective; verb-subject-object, noun-possessor, noun-adjective, preposition-noun; like c but with subject-verb-object. Government and Binding Theory's versions of generative grammar are pro-drop and configurationality that manifested language as correlated and hierarchical.

The article focuses on anthropological writings on Chicano studies between 1970 to 1984. Anthropologist Octavio Romano, and a sociologist, published a series of papers on the characteristics of Chicano studies which appeared in "El Grito," the Chicano journal they founded. The stance that has become prevalent in anthropological works on Chicanos faces two directions: looking inward toward the academic discipline itself, and looking out outward toward Anglo American society. Researchers have developed broad sketches of the characteristics and boundaries of regions and subregions within the area inhabited by people of Mexican ancestry.

The article presents an anthropological review of the social processes and the themes of conflict and conflict resolutions taken by the Manchester School in South-Central Africa after the World War II. Anthropologist released different papers that tackled the different aspects of the school which included the social field, situational analysis, perpetual succession, intercalary roles, situational selection, cross-cutting ties, the dominant cleavage, redressive ritual, repetitive and changing social systems, processional form, processual change and much of the rhetoric studied has been concerned in disputes and court arguments.

The article investigates the concern of anthropologists with social and cultural changes in human development. Anthropologists have long made significant contributions to the understanding on these changes. In this paper, the researchers have focused on the involvement of anthropologists in the deliberately planned bilateral, multilateral, and private efforts to foster economic development and social change in low income countries that have flourished since the close of the Second World War. The review analyzes the renewed and expanded involvement of anthropologists in development in the last decade.

The article studies the history of anthropology in the historical perspective. The history of anthropology has a long-established history within the discipline. Virtually every major graduate program requires of its students a course in the history, sometimes combined with the theory, of anthropology. However, it is not obvious that this has caused history of anthropology to fill a significant or integral role in the teaching and practice of the discipline. Indeed, the opposite has traditionally been true. The required course is frequently taught by the eldest member of the department, who is presumably qualified to teach the history because he has lived through more of it than anyone else.

The article examines the themes that have dominated in prehistorical studies of eastern North America. Of the various areas of studies, experts noted three themes that have dominated Midwestern prehistorical studies. They include the gradual evolution from hunting and gathering bands to settled agricultural societies over a period of 15,000 years, the achievement of two cultural climaxes, and the strong impact on cultural evolution of cultivated plant introductions from Mesoamerica. The purpose of this paper is to review the directions in major research approaches as well as current thought on the major factors underlying Midwestern cultural evolution.

The article focuses on the interplay between nutritional anthropology and biological adaptation. Adaptation has become a pervasive theme in biological anthropology. And the anthropological literature has produced several theoretical papers that discuss the concept of adaptation and its application in sociocultural and biological anthropology. A significant feature of these discussions is the treatment of population and even individual adaptation as neither solely biological nor social in origin or effect. The role of the nutritional environment in human adaptation may serve as an organizing framework for this broad area of multidisciplinary research.

The article introduces the basic concepts and methods of historical materialism for anthropology, that emphasizes the aspects of Marxism. The author used anthropological work in explaining the theoretical constructs and methodological principles of the Marxist. The paper focuses on the criticism of conventional anthropological theoretical practice. The discussion includes the basic premises regarding dialectical materialism, the details of the mode of production, and the necessity of theoretical clarification of the work in anthropology given by sociologist Karl Marx.

The article explores the idea of social networks, which have been becoming increasingly popular among both social anthropologists and sociologists as one way of understanding behavior, particularly in larger scale complex or less structured societies. It reviews several literature related to the topic including those that were regarded as the most effective treatment for the subject. Furthermore, it concentrates on the developments that have taken place after the discoveries made by these related literature. It discusses a range of topics that include the question of the network theory, structural and transactional perspectives, network concepts, data collection, and finally, it presents an analysis of the social networks.

The article examines a number of areas of anthropological literature published since the middle of nineteen-seventies which have been concerned, in one way or another, with sociocultural knowledge. In this paper, the author attempts to explore briefly a more reflexive line of inquiry in order to sketch other aspects that must be a part of anthropological studies of knowledge. Anthropology is part of itself. Any statement about culture is also a statement about anthropology, and the self-knowledge of the discipline is vital in any development of the anthropology of knowledge.

The article examines the factors that contribute to the underdevelopment, desertification and famine among pastoralists in Sahel. A large number of fields of study are relevant to the origin of the Sahel famine during 1968 to 1973. In this regard, the author have chosen to focus his paper on three issues that seem to be the most important. The issues that pose anthropological significance, include some aspects of the Sahelian pastoral economy and its relation to wider market economies; the demography of Sahelian pastoralists; changes in the last half century, corresponding to the period from the imposition of French colonial rule.

The article examines the dynamic processes in the transmission of human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV). It is explained that the four interacting factors in HIV transmission are: the infectiousness of the HIV-positive person; the susceptibility of the uninfected individual; the efficiency of the mode of transmission; and the infectivity of the viral strain. Meanwhile, most of the HIV transmission models are developed by mathematical epidemiologists by focusing on the transmission dynamics in hypothetical populations.

The article discusses the contributions of the early pioneers in physical anthropology. The popularity of physical anthropology could be attributed to certain individuals. Most of them have been teachers of the subject. They include Earnest Hooton, Alex HrdliĀka and Franz Boas. Hooton educated his students on human evolution and bone course as well as race mixture and anthropology of the criminal. HrdliĀka contributed to the building up of the cranial collections and indulged in skull measurement. Boas contributed much to the biological anthropology field. Others include W. C. Boyd, S. L. Washburn and F. Weidenreich.

The article presents critical trends in the study of hunter-gatherer. Optimal foraging theory (socioecology), historicist (ethnohistorical) approach, comparative sociology in the Marxist and structuralist tradition, and humanistic approach are the four categories of critique reviewed by the author. He emphasizes hermeneutic and meaningful interpretation of insider's views and reflexive works. He comments on antipositivism of "comparative method" diminishing the impulse to universalize and creating problem in anthropology. The author concluded that the most effective ways of understanding the "hunter-gatherer" social form are the reflexive approach and the advocacy focus of recent works attempting to translate between indigenous concepts and the legal codes of dominant societies.

The article discusses Hominid Paleoneurology, a branch of science involved in the study of brain evolution based on direct examination of the human fossil records. The study also involves the examination of the fossil records of the closest hominid relatives of humans. Paleoneurologists have a different way of analyzing endocranial casts. Paleoneurology has a significant role in deciphering hominid evolution. Various endocranial casts were described to offer an insight on the work of paleoneurologists.

The article focuses on the comparative study of language use in various islands of the Pacific Ocean collectively known as Oceania. The study was made to clarify the relationship between language variations and social processes, the nature of language differences, the nature and extent of multilingualism, and the role of language in social classification and political power. The study of language use in South Pacific made use of speech activities and events within the framework of communication ethnography . A study of speech systems in the islands of Samoa, Tonga and Ponape revealed that they have three levels of politeness or respect. Oratorical skills are found to be critical in politics and leadership in the islands of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji.

The article offers information about some of the grammatical theories compatible with the assumptions of anthropologically oriented students of language and with the theoretical work of scholars. The study aims at closing the gap between the study of language and the study of communication and tries to give grammar a direct material grounding in the communicative situation. It also provides a survey intended to give some idea of the goals and types of functionalist thought in linguistics. Finally, the study concludes that the various functionalist approaches are essentially complementary. Most functionalists seem to perceive a unity of goals and methods, despite the plethora of senses of function.

The article discusses issues in ecology and anthropology which are relevant to the study of contemporary hunting and gathering societies. According to Bernard Arcand, hunting and gathering societies did not make a meaningful distinction. Other issues concerning the study of hunter-gatherers include settlement patterns, subsistence ecology and affluence, evolution and typology, the application of mathematical and ecological models to ethnographic data and problems of social organization and cognition. The extent to which hunter-gatherers can be differentiated from non-hunter-gatherers is important for the comparative study of the aspects of culture.

The article investigates the anthropological aspect of the illnesses and sickness throughout the history of man's civilization by researchers from Cleveland, Ohio. Medical anthropology, as a field of research, writing, and professional activity, has grown remarkably since the journal "Annual Review of Anthropology" published its last articles on this subject. With regards to methods, anthropologists have three distinct ways of writing about sickness and healing. First, some anthropologists describe medical beliefs and practices by using conceptual systems which were originally intended for studying other phenomenological domains. This is clear if we look back at some classic ethnographies which predate the growth of contemporary medical anthropology.

The article discusses the history of sampling in archaeology. Accordingly, quantitative sampling techniques based on probabilistic models have become a popular way of making decisions. The archaeologists have long recognized their collections as samples from larger populations, and only in the late 1950s and early 1960s when they began commonly to employ explicitly probabilistic sampling. In 1960, a study has been formulated that concerns ways of estimating the proportion of one kind of artifact within all the artifacts from a site, and advocated the use of probabilistic sampling as a means of drawing legitimate conclusions about the composition of populations from samples.

The article discusses the physical anthropology of Aborigines in Australia which is divided into two areas of inquiry which includes the origin of the Aborigines and the operation of microevolutionary processes in the very special environment of the country. This literature presents an anthropometric research on the living Aborigine Australians. Furthermore, it discusses the increase in the number of professional workers interested in the Australian Aborigines as models for human evolution as well as the areas of inquiry involved in the pursuit of biological anthropology in Aboriginal Australia.

The article provides an overview of the articles and topics contained in the October 1977 issue of the journal "Annual Review of Anthropology." Twenty other chapters follow this brief essay. They cover a wide range of subjects, including applied anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and social anthropology. Of the total chapters, only four are devoted to specific subjects, while the others are broad surveys and exercises in theory. The articles faithfully reflect two of the three major issues that beset the American and related Western people at the present.

The article discusses several studies related to pidgin and creole languages of the Caribbean region and provides a background of its origin and development. The developments in the study of pidgins and creoles includes the evolution of studies on its similarities, variability, the clarification of the debate over the origin of the Black English and the idea about it as sociolinguistic. At the end of the study, the author notes that the study of pidgins and creoles had passed a rapid growth and diversification and projects that the field of study for both languages still have a long way to go.

The article focuses on the anthropological bibliography and provides a sketch of anthropology, libraries and bibliography problems in 1876. It discusses several proposals and works published by scholars and librarians in western countries to address the problem in the arrangement of published materials. One of the most systematic and comprehensive tool for the social anthropologists discussed was the publication of "International Bibliography for Social Cultural Anthropology" that was produced by the committee appointed by the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Another turn in the field was sought in the beginning of computer indexing and abstracting during the advancement of technology in the 1960's and 1970's.

The article discusses the author's experience of working on physical anthropology for fifty years. He narrates how anthropologists like Ales Hrdlicka, Earnest Hooton and T. Wingate Todd, whom he worked with influenced his professional life. He also talks about their works and contribution to physical anthology and discusses his own interpretation of physical anthropology based on the works of those scholars.

Whether concerned with kinship or with kula, anthropology's interest in credit and debt goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline. Nevertheless, this review dedicates itself primarily to more recent research trends into credit and debt's powerful nature and effects. Following Mauss, credit and debt are treated as an indissoluble dyad that contributes to diverse regulatory mechanisms of sociality, time, space, and the body. Anthropology's overarching contribution to this field of inquiry rotates around its refusal to segregate the moral from the material, seeing the ubiquitous moral debates surrounding credit and debt in various ethnographic settings as coconstitutive of their material effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review considers research on language and affect, with particular attention to gender, that has appeared in the past two decades in ways informed by the recent effloresence of work on affect in feminist, queer, (post)colonial, and critical race studies. The review is selective: It focuses on a few key ways that recent research is responding to gaps identified in earlier research and opening up promising areas for future research. This review thus attempts to connect linguistic anthropological and discourse analytic studies more fully with contemporary debates in feminist, queer, antiracist, and postcolonial studies. In general, I look at the rise of more fully historical approaches; in particular, I look at ( a) affect in imperial and other global encounters; ( b) language, neoliberalism, and affective labor; and ( c) terror and hate, compassion, and conviviality in public speech. It also considers why we are, at this particular moment, witnessing such interest in affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. Engaging these three categories of scholarship on digital media, I consider how ethnographers are exploring the complex relationships between the local practices and global implications of digital media, their materiality and politics, and their banal, as well as profound, presence in cultural life and modes of communication. I consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where, and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what people do rather than what people possess, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized as the latter. Across its many domains, expertise is both inherently interactional, involving the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge, and inescapably ideological, implicated in the evolving hierarchies of value that legitimate particular ways of knowing as 'expert.' This review focuses on the semiotics of expertise, highlighting four constitutive processes: socialization practices through which people establish intimacy with classes of cultural objects and learn to communicate that familiarity; evaluation, or the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects; institutionalization, wherein ways of knowing are organized and authorized; and naturalization, or the essentialization of expert enactments as bodies of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological studies of sensory impairment address biological conditions and cultural disablement while contributing to theoretical discussions of cultural competence, communicative practices, the role of narrative, and features of identity, ideologies, and technology. As boundary cases, impairments can disclose essential aspects of the senses in human life. Sensory impairment studies navigate the complexities of comparing dominant sensory discourses with individual sense differences, cross-linguistic incomparabilities among sense categories, and how impairment categories tend to fuse together highly diverse conditions. The category of disability, which includes sensory impairment, comprises chronic deficit relative to priority competencies. With special emphasis on blindness/visual impairment and deafness/hearing impairment, we overview sensory impairment on three levels: the social partitioning of the sensorium, differential ramifications of sensory impairments cross-culturally, and the classification of the person based on cultural priorities. We identify ten common themes in ethnographically oriented studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although anthropological and critical social theory have a long interest in sensory experience, work on the senses has intensified within the past 20 years. This article traces three sensory genealogies within anthropology: the work of Ong and McLuhan as critiqued and advanced by David Howes and the Concordia Project; phenomenological studies as advanced by Paul Stoller; and a focus on materialities as advanced by Nadia Seremetakis. Studies of individual senses, which we survey, led to calls for a more integrated approach to the senses, both within anthropology and from cinema and media studies. In various ways, the senses are constituted by their imbrication in mediated cultural practices, whether mediated by technology, discourse, or local epistemologies. We argue that integrating language and discourse into the study of the senses along with new media insights more fully articulates the significance of body-sensorial knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By late in the twentieth century, scientists had succeeded in manipulating organisms at the genetic level, mainly by gene transfer. The major impact of this technology has been seen in the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops, which has occurred with little controversy in some areas and with fierce controversy elsewhere. GM crops raise a very wide range of questions, and I address three areas of particular interest for anthropology and its allied fields. First are the political-economic aspects of GM, which include patenting of life forms and new relationships among agriculture, industry, and the academy. Second is the wide diversity in response and resistance to the technology. Third is the much-debated question of GM crops for the developing world. This analysis is approached first by determining what controls research agendas and then by evaluating actual impacts of crops to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thirty years since its first public use in 1980, the phrase structural adjustment remains obscure for many anthropologists and public health workers. However, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) are the practical tools used by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to promote the market fundamentalism that constitutes the core of neoliberalism. A robust debate continues on the impact of SAPs on national economies and public health. But the stories that anthropologists tell from the field overwhelmingly speak to a new intensity of immiseration produced by adjustment programs that have undermined public sector services for the poor. This review provides a brief history of structural adjustment, and then presents anthropological analyses of adjustment and public health. The first section reviews studies of health services and the second section examines literature that assesses broader social determinants of health influenced by adjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]