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Social scientists have long argued about the relationship between ethnic phenomena, symbolic markers, and cultural traits. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of functionalist cultural and genetic evolutionary models to reconcile these debates. Specifically, we argue that we must take seriously the role of cultural similarity in delineating certain category boundaries if we are to understand the origins and development of ethnic stereotyping. We examine whether symbolic markers—namely, sartorial ones—are privileged in the development of social stereotypes by comparing how children and adults in the urban United States and rural highland Peru perform a categorization task. We find that arbitrary sartorial markers motivate generalizations about novel traits in all samples except among US children, even when they crosscut body morphology, emotional expression, and socioeconomic cues. Unlike children in the United States, children in the Peruvian sample demonstrate an even stronger reliance on sartorial and work site cues than do adults of the same community. This suggests a role for early-developing evolved biases that guide learning and require appropriate cultural inputs or different niches for adults and children. We document further cross-cultural variation, in that US participants privilege socioeconomic cues to occupational status more than other cues, whereas Peruvian participants rely on sartorial cues more than other cues, indicating the importance of cognitive rules for learning locally relevant social taxonomies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines campaigns in two US social movements, an African American unionization struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, and a recent environmental justice campaign in a Latina/o community. These and the larger movements of which they are a part have been movements of the most economically precarious sectors of the population and have also been historically reliable sources of hope and inclusive regimes of economic and civic value. These regimes manifest in everyday ways that participants in these campaigns construct economic value and in how they link that economic value to their claims for full civic membership. I develop the concept of economic citizenship-namely, that clashes over economic values and social worth are double stranded and mutually constituting. That is, economic regimes of value (capitalist and otherwise) are key to constituting social worth and civic belonging, and notions of civic worthiness in turn constitute economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As genotyping technologies have precipitously decreased in cost since the completion of the Human Genome Project, personal genetic testing has increasingly been marketed to consumers. Genetic testing is now available for an everexpanding list of genetic mutations associated with diseases—including breast cancer, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's—as well as traits such as ancestry, intelligence, and athleticism. Close examination of the direct-to-consumer personal genomic industry reveals several forms of potentiality at work that are informed by imagined and real power over bodily information. The marketing and consumption of personal genetic information relies on constructions of biological potential that result from struggles over the ability to control and act on individualized genetic information and to translate it into meaning. This paper explores the emerging discourse over personal genetic testing—and the marketing and consumption of the alluring and carefully tailored idea of potentiality that fuels American entrepreneurialism—and concepts of freedom and self-actualization. Policy debates over rights of access to genotyping fail to recognize the shifting landscape of human genomics in the United States. Genes in the marketplace are justified by liberalism, civic republicanism, and multiculturalism propelling a paradigm shift away from traditional models of governance toward open access to genetic testing and minimization of individual harm. The turn to the market emboldens the consumer and creates a new set of social meanings and ethical quandaries over who may harness the potential attributed to genetic information and for what purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present an overview of an increasingly global community of physical (biological) anthropologists as it pertains to the study of living human variation (human biology) and as it is represented in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (AJPA), focusing especially on the period of 2001-2007, when Clark Spencer Larsen served as editor in chief. The journal was founded by Aleš Hrdlička in order to provide professional identity of physical (biological) anthropology as practiced in the United States. By the mid-twentieth century, the journal editorship under T. Dale Stewart called for greater presence of international research collaboration and publication in AJPA. By 1960, international collaboration and non-U.S. authorship began to have significant presence in the journal, a pattern that has continued to the present. As in the pre-2000 period, although non-U.S. contributions cover all major topics in human biology, they tend to focus on population genetics and population history. For the period of 2001-2007, there is an increased presence of multinational collaborative research and non-U.S. authorship, a trend that will likely increase. The recent rise in non-U.S. submissions and authorship is due in large part to increased international collaboration and electronic access to the submission process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teaching and public education, (3) social critique, (4) collaboration, (5) advocacy, and (6) activism. They show that engagement takes place during field- work; through applied practice; in institutions such as Cultural Survival, the Institute for Community Research, and the Hispanic Health Council; and as individual activists work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice, human rights, and violence. A close examination of the history of engaged anthropology in the United States also reveals an enduring set of dilemmas, many of which persist in contemporary anthropological practice. These dilemmas were raised by the anthropologists who attended the Wenner-Gren workshop titled "The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working toward a More Engaged Anthropology," January 22-25, 2008. Their papers, many of which are included in this collection, highlight both the expansion and growth of engaged anthropology and the problems its practitioners face. To introduce this collection of articles, we discuss forms of engaged anthropology, its history, and its ongoing dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the moral work of a controversial psychiatric diagnosis-Borderline Personality Disorder-in an American eating disorder treatment center in the era of managed mental health care. Based on fieldwork at this clinic spanning more than 6 years, I consider how clinicians invoke aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder in everyday conversation, in a practice I call "borderline talk." I argue that borderline talk emerges in response to being caught between contradictory models of the subject entailed in managed care and psychodynamic discourses. Specifically, borderline talk enables clinicians to endorse a formulation of the subject that, although considered pathological, provides them with a clear path of ethical action in otherwise ethically ambiguous situations. These kinds of everyday ethical negotiations percolate throughout the American health care system and are key mechanisms through which notions of economic expediency become entangled with concepts of the healthy subject. As clinicians struggle out a course of action between competing ethical imperatives, they also struggle out the workability-and failures-of various articulations of the subject within contemporary American cultural ideologies of health and pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's views on a paper related to the abundant sources of imagery in the archaeological record by Rosemary A. Joyce, an American anthropologist. The author appreciates Joyace's paper saying it shows that an archaeology of symbolism can be illuminating when it stimulates interests in establishing types and defining styles. According to the author, Joyce holds that the object of symbolic archeology is the mutual definition of motifs and conventions.

The article responds to the comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is clarified that common sense is not societally or culturally determined. He also concurs that archaeologists should be concerned with theory. The author also explains that there can be no separate theory of archaeology.

This paper is intended as a follow-up to Marshall Sahlins's "The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology" (1996). It isolates one field of practical action—marketing and consumer behavior—to explore the ways in which the implicit theory of needs that Sahlins elucidates is embedded in marketplace behavior, broadly defined, in the United States. Supported by an ethnographic illustration, it hypothesizes the process whereby professional marketers and consumers, via their practical disposition toward each other in the mutually constituted sociocultural field of the "market," help perpetuate the Western cosmological duality of suffering and salvation. A critique of three writers on the subject of marketing and consumer behavior, Lefebvre, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu, forms the basis for a theory of cultural construction of the market and of consumer identities within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is pointed out that Watson failed to live up to his promise of providing a survey of the concrete knowledge about prehistoric times accomplished since the 1960s by the followers of the New Archaeology. Nevertheless, the paper offers fresh knowledge but it should be pointed out that, contrary to Watson's joke, archaeology is not boring at all.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. The paper simply reaffirms concepts and characteristics already known from Watson's previous writings. However, while it claims to offer a retrospective evaluation of the American New Archaeology movement, it mostly focuses on the current and future shape of archaeological thinking.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. The author points out that while he is in substantial agreement with Watson on the significance of scientific archaeology, he differs strongly with him on what comprises science. A more encompassing definition that includes both processual and postprocessual programs is needed.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. Watson is commended for doing an excellent work on placing the arguments of modern skeptics in archaeology within their historical framework. Agreements or disagreements are presented for the various proposals of Watson that archaeologists might follow in the pursuit of their endeavors.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. It is pointed out that contrary of Watson's view, the Hempelian deductive-nomological model of explanation is not the same as Popper's model of hypothetico-deductive confirmation of hypotheses. However, it is true that archaeology is threatened by descriptivism, relativism and idiographicism.

The article announces that the Wenner-Gren Foundation will start a new biannual series of supplements to publish papers resulting from Wenner-Gren sponsored symposia in the U.S. on October 2010. The Foundation believes that open-access publication in "Current Anthropology" is the best way of nurturing new approaches in anthropology and the highest-quality research in the field. It encourages anthropologists to share their ideas at any stage of development.

This article presents the author's views on a paper related to the sources of imagery in the archaeological record by Rosemary A. Joyce, an American anthropologist. The article author holds that Joyce's article presents an important insight into the possible meanings of prehistoric Central American figural representations. The author appreciates Joyce's discussion on material culture.

The article comments on the paper "What the New Archaeology Has Accomplished," by Richard A. Watson in this issue. The author questions Watson's view that archaeologists suggest and test hypotheses established on the basis of common sense and scientific knowledge obtained from other sciences. It is also pointed out that Watson considers only hypotheses that can be tested, without looking into their various levels and backgrounds.