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Since the demise in the 1980s of research by psychologists who attempted to teach human language to apes, a range of other perspectives has arisen that explore how humans can communicate with animals and what the possibility of such communication means. Sociologists interested in symbolic interactionism, anthropologists writing about ontology, equestrian and canine trainers, people with autism who say they understand animals because they think like animals, and a ragbag of sundry New Age women who claim to be able to converse with animals through telepathy have started discussing human–animal communication in ways that recast the whole point of thinking about it. This review charts how interest in human–animal communication has moved from a concern with cognition to a concern with ethics, and it discusses the similarities and differences that exist among the range of writing on this topic.

This review article approaches the turn to affect theory as diagnostic of broader currents in cultural anthropology. This is a time of increased curiosity within the subfield. It is also a time of increased anxiety, as researchers feel mounting pressure to make a case for the empirical value of what they do. Affect theory seems to offer cultural anthropologists a way of getting to the bottom of things: to the forces that compel, attract, and provoke. And yet what affect theory is offering cultural anthropologists may be less an account of how the world works than a new awareness of the premises that guide their research. I base these observations on a discussion of recent ethnographies that deploy affect theory in the study of labor, governance, and animal–human relations. I conclude with an assessment of the risks and opportunities associated with the adoption of theoretical models from other fields.

This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise showcases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.

The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of power in the contemporary world, there is surprisingly little dialogue between FTS and mainstream cultural anthropology. This review begins by outlining FTS and its concepts and methods. I then turn to the anthropology of technology, which also offers useful conceptual frameworks and methods for exploring gender regimes. Then, to highlight the ideological and methodological contrasts between social and cultural analyses of technology and the implications for gender analysis, I discuss the treatment of technology in two leading theoretical fields in the cultural anthropology of modernity and globalization: the anthropology of technoscience, and material culture studies. I conclude by asking which forms of engagement might be envisaged between the fields.

This review traces the development of the field of cultural primatology from its origins in Japan in the 1950s to the present. The field has experienced a number of theoretical and methodological influences from diverse fields, including comparative experimental psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, behavioral ecology, cultural anthropology, and gene-culture coevolution theory. Our understanding of cultural dynamics and the evolution of culture cannot be complete without comparative studies of (a) how socioecological variables affect cultural transmission dynamics, (b) the proximate mechanisms by which social learning is achieved, (c) developmental studies of the role of social influence in acquiring behavioral traits, and (d) the fitness consequences of engaging in social learning.

▪ Abstract During the past twenty years the human body evolved from a rather marginal social fact into a notion of central concern to current social and cultural anthropology. But recent studies question the idea of the body as a given physical entity. They focus on the experience or threat of finiteness, limitation, and vulnerability and also raise doubts regarding the individuality of the self: Instead they emphasize its fragmentary character and focus on the embodied uncertainties (such as hybridity or irony) of human existence. In three main sections (respectively, on the social body, embodiment, and subjectivity) this review eclectically explores an anthropological debate that also betrays a more generalized and rising concern in Western society with bodiliness and bodily appearance. From the discussion, the body emerges as a changing relationship that, at the same time, unfolds as an ethical horizon—and challenge—for the (un)making of self, identity, and belonging.

▪ Abstract This review examines current research in the subfields of anthropology and related disciplines on the biocultural process of breastfeeding and broader questions of infant and young-child feeding. The themes of sexuality, reproduction, embodiment, and subjective experience are then linked to the problems women who breastfeed face in bottle-feeding cultures. Anthropologists have contributed to policy-relevant debates concerning women's work and scheduling in relation to infant care and exclusive breastfeeding. The extensive ethnographic work on children's transition to consuming household foods demonstrates the need to integrate research on breastfeeding with research on complementary feeding. Current debates around HIV and chemical residues in breastmilk call for a critical examination of the effects of globalization and corporate control on infant feeding practices. The literature shows how the narrow specialty of infant feeding has broad implications for the discipline.

▪ Abstract This review describes a paradigmatic shift in anthropological studies of human movement, from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of body movement as dynamically embodied action. After outlining the scope of such study, historical and cultural reasons for the relative neglect of body movement in anthropological enquiry are examined critically and placed in the wider context of recent social and cultural theorizing about the body and the problem of dynamic embodiment. A historical overview situates earlier approaches, such as kinesics and proxemics, in relation to more recent developments in theory and method, such as those offered by semasiology and the concept of the “action sign.” Overlapping interests with linguistic and cognitive anthropology are described. The emergence of a holistic “anthropology of human movement” has raised new research questions that require new resources. Theoretical insights have challenged researchers to devise new methods and to adopt or devise new technologies, such as videotape and an adequate transcription system. An example of the latter illustrates the analytic advantages of literacy in the medium.

An account, spanning 50 years, of how I became an anthropologist, my graduate education at Columbia University, and my academic positions at Brooklyn and Queens College and at Duke University. I discuss my fieldwork among the Chippewa of Wisconsin and among modern Greeks in Boetia and Athens. I comment on the new ethnography as it applies to modern Greek studies and discuss how and why I turned to gender studies. I comment on teaching, university administration, and trends in contemporary anthropology and make a recommendation for a future thrust of the field. Reconnecting biology and cultural anthropology is, I believe, a necessary step if anthropology is to continue to be useful for ameliorating the human condition.

Despite numerous review articles and programmatic essays surveying the social and cultural anthropology of old age (2, 13, 14,41,47,53,55,79,82, 99, 102, 103), a theme in many of them is the relative paucity of anthropologi­ cal attention to the topic. In 1967 Clark made the classic observation that "if one is to judge from typical anthropological accounts, the span of years be­ tween the achievement of adult status and one's funerary rites is either an ethnographic vacuum or a vast monotonous plateau of invariable behavior" (13). Clark's criticism, opening anthropology's future while closing its past to old age, was soon routinized into a requisite lament preceding many essays on the anthropology of aging (79). This gerontological lament did not, however, correlate with the writing of actual monographs. In 1980, after thirteen years and much productive research by many scholars, Fry could still begin her edited anthology by noting that "anthropology has a long history of being interested in age, but not in aging or the aged" (41). Similarly, in 1981 Amoss & Harrell offered an anthology to "help to remedy a massive neglect of old age by the discipline of anthropol­ ogy" (2); and in 1984 Keith & Kertzer began their introduction to another anthology by again drawing attention to the need in anthropology to "pay more systematic attention to the role of age in human societies and cultural sys

In this essay I explore studies of theater and spectacle as distinct cultural institutions. Several kinds of cultural activity closely related to this topic have extensive literatures of their own, but I do not treat them here. These include play and games, sports and contests, verbal art and poetry, and dance and music outside the context of theater and spectacle. The distinction is arbitrary. The boundary between theater and spectacle and many other forms of enactment is difficult to determine. Theatrical activ­ ity is a component of many performance genres, and vice versa. Here I attempt to elucidate the specifically theatrical aspect of human life. I have not limited myself to works written by anthropologists. Indeed, I hope to excite anthropol­ ogists with an awareness of the work done in other fields. This essay treats 1. the study of performance in anthropology and related disciplines, 2. the institutions of theater and spectacle, 3. specific genres of theater and spectacle, and 4. the creation of cultural meaning within frame­ works of theater and spectacle.

Since the body mediates all reflection and action upon the world, its centrality to the anthropological endeavor seems assured, but a perusal of the canon of social and cultural anthropology indicates that the body's explicit appearance has been sporadic throughout the history of the discipline. In much the same way as Munn noted that the topic of time has often been "handmaiden to other anthropological frames and issues" (178:93), the body, despite its ubiquity, has suffered a similar fate, thus remaining largely unproblematized. The ma­ jority of researchers have in effect simply "bracketed" it as a black box and set it aside. There have been recent reviews of topics that implicate the body, including the politics of reproduction (81), human sexuality (39), the emotions (164),­ and shamanisms (6). A prolegpmena to an anthropological physiology has also appeared (20), but aside from two edited collections from the 1970s (14, 201) and one position piece (159), there has been no substantial review of research in connection with an anthropology of the body per se. I believe this lacuna highlights a long-standing ambivalence on the part of many anthropologists

The encounter between anthropological theory and any region of the globe says as much about anthropology as it does about that region. Caribbean anthropology is a case in point. This region where boundaries are notoriously fuzzy has long been the open frontier of cultural anthropology: neither center nor periphery, but a sort of no man's land where pioneers get lost, where some stop overnight on their way to greater opportunities, and where yet others manage to create their own "new" world amidst First-World indifference. Accordingly, the object of this essay is dual: I write here about the Caribbean as viewed by anthropologists, but also about anthropology as viewed from the Caribbean. The review dwells on the coincidence between some zones of weakness in anthropological theory and areas of concern for Caribbeanists. I claim neither exhaustiveness nor statistical representativeness in dealing with the literature, and my boundaries are both arbitrary and fuzzy. I emphasize a present that encompasses most of the last 20 years, but my framework-not to mention the absence of any Caribbean focus in previous issues of this seriesjustifies forays into more distant pasts. I concentrate on works available in English, which happens to be the predominant language of Caribbean ethnology; but this emphasis here is no less arbitrary. More importantly, since I am addressing outsiders and insiders alike, I flatten some rough edges and over

Writing a review of the cultural anthropology of time is something like reading Borges's (19a) infinite "Book of Sand": as one opens this book, pages keep growing from it-it has no beginning or end. Borges's book could be taken as the spa ce of time: A page once seen is never seen again, and the book's harried possessors keep trying to escape its "monstrous" self-production by surrepti­ tiously selling or losing it. The diffuse, endlessly multiplying studies of sociocultural time reflect time's pervasiveness as an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice. This apparently "infinite complexity" (1:200) seems

Research on Africa is full of surprises. Much of the best cultural anthropology on famines south of the Sahara has been written by historians and geogra­ phers, while some of the best agricultural economics comes from an­ thropologists. African food problems make a mockery of northern disciplin­ ary divisions. These things should not be so surprising. Famines are hard to study in depth except from safer times and places, but the causes and effects of seasonal supplies and demands are best understood by getting dusty ankles, then muddy ones-the humble hallmarks of anthropology. Concentrating mainly on agrarian peoples (but including references on others, too), this preliminary scan reviews a few findings in the thinly bridged gap between anthropology and economics, mainly by anthropologists and other researchers who have done extended rural research south of the Sahara since 1970. I note previous summaries and survey several schools of thought on famines' interthreading causes. Then I address three questions about famines and food shortages-who suffers, what do they do about it, and what becomes of society in the process-and this means addressing some hotly debated issues of human nature. Understanding African food problems re­ quires not fixating on a particular unit of analysis (the individual, household, ethnic group, nation) but observing the changing bonds and alliances among

No topic in cultural anthropology bears more significantly on the relation between the anthropologist's understanding or explanation of a culture, and its own internal relations, than ritual does. Ritual, then, relates-and sometimes confounds-two different sorts of relativity: that of the anthropological analyst and the subject culture, and that of significant parts or categories of the subject culture. The study of ritual amounts to a sort of double relation. It is a communication between the anthropologist and his readership of what he has learned, through fieldwork and analysis, regarding the ritual and its signifi­ cance. And on another level it is a communication involving its performers and perhaps significant others-persons, groups, spirits, deities

This review focuses on studies of selected themes and theoretical issues relating to women's status published by anthropologists within the subdiscipline of cultural anthropology/ethnology from 1977 to 1987. The first section of the review seeks to determine what advances have been made in understanding the universality of gender asymmetry by looking at women's status in a cross-cultural manner. The next major section highlights major areas of concern in the ethnographic literature of the decade 1977-87, including economics, studies of sexuality, women's family roles, women's political activities, women's rituals, and women's culture. The third section reviews the development of the concept of women's "status" and looks at universal determinants of women's status such as differences from men in aggressive behavior, in strength, and in reproductive and economic roles. The next section reviews developing gender theory that moves beyond reproductive determinism to "deconstruct" gender concepts. A number of common themes that run through the various approaches to this research are identified. These include the fact that gender must be examined in its historical, economic, social, and conceptual framework. Ultimately, these themes require that the old and simple determinants of status, along with the concept itself, be viewed as complex, multidimensional processes. Language: en

my family. Here was a mixture of biological evolution, archaeology, and cultural anthropology which appealed to me. At that time I had been consider­ ing majoring in zoology and, possibly, going to medical school, but I quickly changed the plan to a major in anthropology with the idea of choosing a career later on. I never went back to the earlier plans. During vacations from school I had done volunteer work in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology for which eventually I was paid 25 cents an hour. This was the depth of the Great Depression, and any pay was appr eciated. Although my major was anthropology, friends in the MCZ were very important in my life. Glover Allen, then Curator of Mammals, not only supervised my first job and advised me over many years, but finally served on my oral examinations. I took his course on mammals and wrote my undergraduate honors thesis in his department. Barbara Lawrence, Allen's assistant and later successor, was a great help, guiding me through the problems of classification. The Director of the MCZ, Thomas Barbour, was an encouraging friend, and Harold Coolidge helped me and later included me in his research plans. I stress this network of old friends in the Museum because over a number of years they provided guidance and escape from a number of anthropological errors which were common at that time. The late E. A. Hooton was my principal professor and his teaching strongly influenced my interests. Up From the Ape was the bible for physical anthropo­ logists for a number of years, and that, plus the one-year laboratory course, formed the basis of the physical anthropology program. Peop le have often asked me about Hooton and about the reasons for his success as a teacher. Hooton was enthusiastic, imaginative, and helpful. These qualities, plus his sense of humor, came across very clearly in the introductory course. The

Since World War II, West Africa has been the source of consistently innovative work, much of it relevant to the field of anthropology in general. British structural-functionalist ethnography, particularly the Cambridge school of Fortes and Goody, set theoretical and empirical standards which have rarely been matched anywhere. Again, briefly in the 1970s, anglophone social anthropology was almost overwhelmed by a school of French structuralist Marxists' with its base in West African research. Moreover, the region has been a crucible for the emergent synthesis of anthropology and history; economic anthropology, the study of urbanization and economic development, and the politics of decolonization have all been prominent there; and West Africa's independent women have attracted the attention of numerous feminist anthro­ pologists. For these and many other reasons, developments in the social anthropology of West Africa are of more than parochial interest. This paper is an introduction to the best regional literature of the last four decades, paying most attention to the period since 1970. It cites many more books than articles. The subject matter is social anthropology, which means that much cultural anthropology and archaeology has been omitted. The bias in materials selected is toward anglophone writings. The majority of texts are introduced with only a few words each. The paper is therefore a discursive means of entry for interested outsiders rather than a critical addition to profes­ sional knowledge of the region. The presentation is divided into three main sections. The first of these covers the late colonial period (ca 1940-1960); the second addresses the immediate postcolonial decade (roughly the 1960s); and the third seeks to identify the trends of the last 15 years or so. The periods refer to date of pUblication, not to the time of original research, thereby lending a