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In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai'i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai'i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice. [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.

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 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 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.

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. 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 presents information on book publishing in the field of Anthropology in the U.S. The publishing of Anthropological books has been affected by the shrinkage of the market and financial shortage. The current situation of the book publishing in Anthropology can be determined by a study commissioned by the Association of American University Presses in 1988. In the U.S., university presses, academically oriented commercial publishing houses and the textbook divisions of commercial publishers publish Anthropology books. Despite the fragmentation of the field and the lack of anthropologists and students, book publishing in anthropology has remained healthy.

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.

This article examines the development and usage of ceramics by prehistoric hunting and gathering societies in the Western Great Basin. Anthropological and archaeological records contain numerous examples of mobile groups that produce pots. Certain questions that have important implications have been discussed, important amongst those are whether the degree of residential mobility affects the design of pots and whether mobility restricts pottery use. For a distributional study, the author chose to examine the presence and density of potsheds in lower elevation areas in six different regions. Western Great Basin people were using some set of strategies to counteract the restrictions imposed by a mobile lifestyle to make pottery a worthwhile technology. To provide some degree of standardization to the technological study, only rim sheds were measured. Significance of paired t-test comparisons between regions have been elaborated. A clear picture is given as to how mobile hunter gatherers utilized earthen-ware in the western basin.

Applied anthropology in the United States emerged as a mixture of New Deal humanitarian liberalism and progressive industrial management ideology and in Britain as a humanitarian advisory function for colonial administration in Africa. In both countries applied practitioners were subjected to considerable ideological criticism during the 1960s and '70s. In the U.S. case, one manifestation of this critical approach was Sol Tax's populist-inspired action anthropology, which renounced the employment of practitioners by government or any large organization in favor of voluntary academic projects engaging in intensive intervention in the problems and needs of local communities. The approach did not prevail, but its ideas continue to stimulate interest. Meanwhile, applied anthropology was undergoing attenuation as cultural anthropology proliferated into ‘institutional anthropologies.’ The significance of these subfields (e.g., educational anthropology) was that they replicated the approach of sociology and economics: social scientific intervention as a normal part of the institutional activities of modem society. The basic problem in fitting anthropology for practical application was the preoccupation of the discipline with tribal (not contemporary urban-industrial) society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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.

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.

The article presents the author's views on the article "Ghost Dancing the Grand Canyon," by Richard W. Stoffle and colleagues, which has been published within the issue. Stoffle's article focused on cultural resources, ghost dancing and rock art. The author thinks that Stoffle's study highlights the condition of cultural resources in the United States. The author appreciates Stoffle's efforts in providing information about the cultural landscape at the Kanab Creek Canyon site.

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 presents the author's comments on anthropologist Kalman Applbaum's analysis of Western cosmology of needs and suffering, marketing and consumer behavior. One major concern raised by the author is over the connection between cosmology and economic behavior used as a background in a U.S. case study of consumer-marketer interaction.

Virtually all 4.25 million babies born annually in the United States are screened for more than 50 rare genetic conditions. In a country plagued with widespread health-service access problems, this remarkable public health achievement depends on policy visions of newborn screening as the linchpin of secondary prevention and saving children's lives. Based on ethnographic research and drawing from a semiotic framework, we illustrate that newborn screening has had a much wider range of effects in the clinic than those anticipated by policy makers. How does the disconnect between policy potential and clinical experience affect the technology? We demonstrate that only some discrepancies are considered in policy circles and that instead, parents, geneticists, and policy makers renew visions of potentiality that preserve the technology's benefits in spite of evidence to the contrary. While rearticulating the potential of technologies may help actors cope with situations that do not measure up to expectations, the inevitable cost of reformulating potentiality once a technology has been implemented is that some accumulated experiences will be rendered invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the undocumented status of 1.5-generation Latinos (those who migrated at a young age) in the United States affect their political, civic, and public selves? Our approach to this question begins with a theoretical framework based on the concept of abjectivity, which draws together abject status and subjectivity. We argue that the practices of the biopolitics of citizenship and governmentality—surveillance, immigration documents, employment forms, birth certificates, tax forms, drivers' licenses, credit card applications, bank accounts, medical insurance, car insurance, random detentions, and deportations—enclose, penetrate, define, limit, and frustrate the lives of undocumented 1.5-generation Latino immigrants. We examine data from a random-sample telephone survey of 805 Latinos and 396 whites in Orange County, California, to provide general patterns that distinguish 1.5-generation Latino immigrants from their first-generation counterparts and to suggest the contours of their lives as undocumented immigrants. We then examine in-depth interviews with 80 respondents also in Orange County who provide extensive qualitative information and personal narratives. The analysis shows how abjectivity and illegality constrain daily life, create internalized fears, in some ways immobilize their victims, and in other ways motivate them to engage politically to resist the dire conditions of their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American capitalism finds its force and legitimacy in hegemonic understandings of nature and society, especially as expressed in human biology. In this article, I address the ways American capitalism depends on the deployment of sleep and wakefulness within the institutional contexts of school and labor, with particular attention to the recent medicalization of sleep disorders. Across American institutions and social science literature, I argue that sleep, like capitalism, has been discursively ascribed the powers of inevitability and universality, rendering them both transhistorically natural. To make these claims, I draw on ethnographic research in sleep clinics with scientists and clinicians, interviews with disordered sleepers, and textual and policy analysis. In conclusion, I offer suggestions toward elucidating the historical and continuing biopolitical projects of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Florida Seminole corporations and tribal government gaming together as a case study of the production of the state-society divide. In 2007, the Seminole Tribe of Florida acquired Hard Rock International, a major corporation with cafés, hotels, and casinos around the globe. This $965-million deal, which remains the largest purchase of a corporation by an indigenous nation, created a media storm and extended Seminoles' geographical and financial reach far beyond reservation borders. Like Seminole casino gaming, which is possible only because of tribal sovereignty, the Hard Rock deal called attention to the fuzzy boundaries of indigenous corporate and national forms. This has been the case insofar as Seminoles' governmental statues as a sovereign undergirds some of their economic activities while impeding others. Seminole corporations and tribal gaming show the project of differentiating economy from government and family to be a cultural and historical one that creates distinct yet broadly relevant dilemmas for indigenous peoples in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term indigenous, long used to distinguish between those who are "native" and their "others" in specific locales, has also become a term for a geocultural category, presupposing a world collectivity of "indigenous peoples" in contrast to their various "others." Many observers have noted that the stimuli for internationalization of the indigenous category originated principally from particular nation-states-Anglo-American settler colonies and Scandinavia. All, I argue, are relevantly political cultures of liberal democracy and weighty (in different ways) in international institutional affairs. However, international indigeneity has not been supported in any unqualified way by actions taken in the name of several nation-states that were among its main points of origin. In fact, staunch resistance to the international indigenous project has recently come from four of them. In 2007, the only four voting countries to reject the main product of international indigenist activity over the past 30 years, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, were Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. In these locations, forms of "indigenous relationship" emerged that launched international indigeneity and that strongly influenced international perceptions of what "indigeneity" is and who "indigenous peoples" may be. Some other countries say the model of indigenous relationship that they see represented by the "establishing" set is inapplicable to themselves (but have nonetheless had to take notice of expanding internationalist indigenism). The apparently paradoxical rejection of the draft declaration by the establishing countries is consistent with the combination of enabling and constraining forces that liberal democratic political cultures offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Westerners are supposed to embrace a notion of unfettered personal agency. An analysis of public commentary (interviews, editorials, and online message boards) in the United States about the Columbine school shootings shows that the voluntarist cultural model of persons as autonomous agents, while certainly very important, is just one of a number of cultural models Americans use to explain human action and has particular political and interpersonal uses. We might think that conceptions as basic as those of personhood and agency would be hegemonic: both singular and internalized as unexamined, taken-for-granted assumptions. In some contexts, voluntarist ideas about agency are taken for granted, but in others they are promoted quite deliberately. A particularly interesting phenomenon in the United States at this time is the presence of a discourse that may be called defensive voluntarism, an explicit, argumentative version of voluntarism invoked to combat other widely circulating views of behavior. The very need for emphatic pronouncement betrays speakers' awareness that voluntarism needs to be defended. These findings point to the need for a person-and-context-centered approach to social discourses instead of one that assumes discourses to be constitutive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global eminence of the United States is diminishing relative to non-Western economic, political, and cultural formations. Despite its unprecedented military superiority, its compromised recent attempts to assert dominance through armed occupation and economic pressure underscore the growing importance of non-Western cultures and political economics. Amid the proliferation and permutation of neoliberalism abroad—including alternative forms of capitalist development and political and religious self-determination—American efforts to extend its hegemony in the Gramscian sense are opposed by national and transnational self-assertion, states of insurgency, and capitalist competition. Dynamics of resistance and resurgence in various world areas rival and recast American political, economic, and cultural influence. Understanding these emergent processes, which portend the provincialization of America, will be pivotal for sociocultural anthropology in the twenty-first century. Comprehending new developments will require fresh combinations of an anthropological perspective with comparative political economy, international relations, the ethnography of the state, geographies of cultural resistance, and networks of transnational, national, and subnational influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that targeted development can help to reduce the internal pressures contributing to emigration from Mexico. Focusing development on economically depressed regions, it is suggested, may reduce some of the differences between Mexico and the United States, thus reducing the incentive to emigrate. For the past few decades the Mexican government has been exploring tourism development as a way of strengthening locally depressed economies. The outcome of such development in Huatulco, Oaxaca, has in fact been increased pressure to emigrate because of the restrictions it has placed on access to resources, especially land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the history of a family across three generations, from enslavement in eighteenth-century West Africa through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution and subsequent resettlement in New Orleans, then France, then Belgium, can shed light on phenomena that are Atlantic in scope. A business letter written in 1899 by the cigar merchant Edouard Tinchant to General Máximo Gómez in Cuba frames an inquiry that opens out onto a family itinerary that spanned the long nineteenth century. Rosalie Vincent's achievement of freedom in the shadow of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793-1803 can be seen as linked to her grandson Edouard Tinchant's participation as a delegate in the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867-68. Together, the experiences of the Vincent/Tinchant family illuminate an Atlantic and Caribbean rights-consciousness that crossed the usual boundaries of language and citizenship. Uncovering these experiences suggests the value of combining the close focus displayed in Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane with the Atlantic approach of his later Sweetness and Power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial data on sex ratios through time from archaeological sites in the late pre-Hispanic northern U.S. Southwest reveal significant regional and subregional departures from the expected values. In the eleventh century AD, Chaco Canyon and its subregion contain more women (or, possibly, fewer men) than expected, as does Aztec and its subregion in the thirteenth century AD. At Aztec the female bias is coupled with a contemporaneous male bias in the Mesa Verde subregion to the northwest. Consideration of possible explanations for these discrepancies suggests that there is strong evidence for raiding for women in the thirteenth-century northern Southwest. This is also a possible explanation for the eleventh-century Chacoan discrepancies, though in this case other explanations cannot be ruled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents fieldwork conducted in Somaliland examining a group of Somalis who were deported from the U.S., and comments on the sociology of deportation. It focuses specifically on the economic and legal aspects of deportation, detailing the experiences of the Somalis beginning with their imprisonment in the U.S. for "illegal alien" status and discusses subsequent difficulties they faced socially incorporating themselves into their country of origin after being deported. The study is aimed at establishing a need for an ethnographic investigation of deportation and its prevalence in the U.S. Comments on the article by several anthropologists are also presented.

Food and eating were important aspects of the negotiation of social relationships and power in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. A comparison of archaeological assemblages in Spanish households in sites in Florida, the Caribbean, and the Andes reveals a variety of patterns of incorporation of indigenous pottery, especially serving vessels, into the daily lives of the colonizers. Archaeological patterns in several Spanish houses in Mexico City, combined with historical documents, reveal that patterns of incorporation of indigenous pottery, food, and eating practices varied also at a local level from household to household. Focusing on pottery and food remains in these archaeological assemblages, I argue that in spite of moral judgments against Spaniards for "eating like an Indian," some colonizers ate with Indians and incorporated indigenous food and pottery to negotiate social relationships with indigenous elites. These relationships provided the Spaniards with material rewards and served to negotiate power. This model challenges the common assumption that the Spaniards generally used cultural separatism as a strategy for obtaining power and demonstrates the roles of material culture in the negotiation of power between Spaniards and Indians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Native Heritage, The ambivalent legacy of anthropologists' relations with local communities presents contemporary researchers with both obstacles and opportunities. No longer justifiable by assumptions of free scientific access and interpersonal rapport, research increasingly calls for explicit contract agreements and negotiated reciprocities. The complex, unfinished colonial entanglements of anthropology and Native communities are being undone and rewoven, and even the most severe indigenous critics of anthropology recognize the potential for alliances when they are based on shared resources, repositioned indigenous and academic authorities, and relations of genuine respect. This essay probes the possibilities and limits of collaborative work, focusing on recent Native heritage exhibitions in south-central and southwestern Alaska. It also discusses the cultural politics of identity and tradition, stressing social processes of articulation, performance, and translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of Huna Tlingit traditional gull-egg harvests in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska, indicates that local traditional environmental knowledge includes a sophisticated appreciation of glaucous­winged gull (Larus glaucescens) nesting biology and behavior—in particular, an understanding of this gull as an indeterminate layer with a modal clutch size of three. The community has applied knowledge to the design of sustainable egg-harvesting strategies. The dominant strategy is to take eggs from nests with one or two eggs but leave nests with three or more; an alternative strategy advocates partial harvests from three-egg clutches. The case study is related to a critical review of work questioning the contributions of traditional environmental knowledge to sustainable resource management, past and present. In particular we argue against a new orthodoxy that discounts the capacity of indigenous communities to conserve the natural resources of their lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in context, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Although each new paradigm bas reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the archaeological record and models of colonization among the U.S., Europe and Australia. It presents a comparison systematically, considering the implications of interregional differences in greater detail in terms of both the accumulated archaeological record and current models of colonization. The North America and Australia have no systematically gathered all-encompassing databases of dated archeological sites and list of dates sites is gathered from general literature reviews. Europe has a very large database of archaeological sites and dates from the late Quaternary and is unlikely that all of them have been discussed with the same care as those in America and Australia because many sites and dates have been found there.

Indigenous claims about "culture loss" pose a problem for contemporary definitions of culture as a process that continually undergoes change rather than something which can be damaged or lost. This issue is examined in the context of hearings at the Nuclear Claims Tribunal in the Marshall Islands, which was established to adjudicate claims regarding damage and loss to persons and property resulting from United States nuclear weapons testing during the 1940s and '50s. The concept of cultural property rights is used to identify the referents of discourse about culture loss, including local knowledge, subsistence production, and connections to place. The problems caused by the taking of inalienable possessions are also considered. At issue is whether indigenous relationships to land are of ownership, belonging, or both. The definition and significance of culture and loss are increasingly debated in legal contexts ranging from tribunals and truth commissions to land rights hearings and heritage legislation around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the nature of the concepts of race and racism as presented in 15 American textbooks of cultural anthropology. The author suggests that the subject is well presented in 5 of these books by anthropologists Marvin Harris, Conard Kottak, and Serena Nanda. According to the author, American anthropologists and anthropological literature have been unsuccessful in recognizing and bringing forth the true extent and nature of racism in the United States.

The article presents an interview with Sydel Silverman, an anthropologist in the United States, about her career in anthropology. When asked about, in what manner was her life in Chicago, Illinois, significant in relation to his subsequent career in anthropology, she referred to the institutional framework which kept him on the right track. She wrote about biological, psychological and cross-cultural effect of menopause.

Comments on an article written by anthropologist Valery Tishkov on the conditions of Russian and American anthropologists. Ignorance of foreigners regarding Russian archaeology; Criticism of American social scientist for their inability to predict the collapse of Russia; Discussion on the public condemnation of the anti-Semitic and racist statements made on behalf of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.

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 focuses on the article written by Elizabeth Sandager, an employee at Peabody Museum in Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts about the archaeology and history legislation and the condition of museums and archives in the U.S. Sandager's article makes it clear that the archivists and curators routinely confront an ever-widening series of dilemmas after the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. NAGPRA establishes a legal framework for the repatriation of North American Indian remains and ritual objects to Indian tribes that request them, if the claimants can justify their ownership of the cultural property.

The article reflects on an approach to the context of the relations between the United States anthropology and the former communist world. The U.S. social scientists have made a slow recovery from their failure to predict the explosion of an ethnic bomb. Large scale participant observation of socialist societies have been avoided by the American anthropology which helped the discipline to avoid painful reflections on responsibilities, faults, and failures. A wide array of topics, related to the former Soviet Union, is under investigation by the Americans. Ethnic groups are used by the main body of the U.S. anthropology all over the world with Russia as an exception.

The article presents information on the factors associated with sex ratio. A finding suggested that the sex of human newborns is controlled by maternal factors and not by factors in fathers. Another finding suggested that occupation of mothers affected the sex ratio of offspring. Mothers in androgenic occupations had a significantly greater percentage of sons than women in feminine occupations. It was also found that those who had had a fast pulse rate had 17 years later fathered more sons than daughters, whereas those who had had a slow pulse rate had fathered more girls than boys. If the parents were in androgenic occupations the percentage of sons was 58.2 but if the parents were in feminine occupations the percentage of sons was only 46.2. Genes which control the sex ratio work equally in human males and females.

The article cites a statistical examination on the effect of gender on the achievement and unfolding of professional careers in anthropology from the early 1960s into the late 1980s, using the data from the published Guides to Departments of Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association 1962-1989, in a cohort analysis. The data consist a list of doctorates awarded in 1964 onward and the staffing roasters of academic departments in the U.S. and Canada. The study shows that direct intramarket bias against women in the hiring promotion procedure was concentrated at the entry level, with irregularity of appointments, manifested in gaps of service or part-time appointment and low citation counts.

The anthropology of bureaucracy should address the role of organized power in orchestrating complex and unequal societies. This article reviews the development of bureaucracy studies focusing on the thinking done by bureaucrats in their efforts to control the actions of others. Then the central concept of thought-work is placed within a series of queries about levels and relationships of power, with particular attention to the encompassing classifications and assumptions embodied in organizational worldviews. The worldviews of officers of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, examined as a case study, are found to give cohesion to a contradictory policy that balances publicly visible arrests and invisible but effective perpetuation of undocumented labor migration. Human rights abuses and avoidance of abuses are both explainable as outcomes of these thought-work routines. A stronger theoretical approach to organized power enhances applied anthropology's ability to address the behavior of state and private bureaucracies with respect to the rights and interests of nonbureaucrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the study conducted by an anthropologist Gayle J. Fritz which finds that the first American Farmers are getting younger and have set that the beginning date on agriculture in Meso-america was no earlier than 6,000-5,000 years before the present. He argues that a major revision for New World agricultural beginnings is premature as applied to Mesoamerica, does not fit the existing evidence from lower Central America and northern South America, and fails to appreciate the plants and ecological contexts with the production of tropical food in the New World.

In the United States and a few other Western countries, multiple transplants of human organs and experimental transplants using nonhuman primate organs are receiving much media attention, while implants have been so naturalized that they are no longer newsworthy. However, even some so-called advanced countries, which possess both the financial and the technical capability to adopt transplant technology, remain resistant to this new medical technology. Their refusal or reluctance in part derives from the cultural underpinnings of the transplant technology that are deeply embedded in the Enlightenment tradition and thus alien to peoples of other cultural and intellectual traditions. I argue that transplant technology leads to a series of transgressions of received categories in almost all cultures-life and death, animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman animal, self and other, and nature and culture. It leads to the creation of the hybrid human—a person whose identity is solely based on rationality located in the brain—and the emergence of a new type of culturalized nature represented in the body-cum-nature which is thoroughly transformed by medical technology. The introduction of this new technology to other peoples has profound implications, especially when it is "gift wrapped" as "the gift of life"; anthropological study informs us that donated organs can never be gifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with Gordon Willey, an American archaeologists . Willey describes his experiences regarding major turning points in American archaeology. Willey discusses the meaning and theoretical relevance of the concepts of cultural tradition and history in postprocessual era in American archaeology. He reflects on the notion of American archaeology as anthropology .

Features the story of Ishi, believed to be the last Stone Age Indian in North America. Fate of his remains; Views regarding the significance of Ishi; Life of Ishi as a reflection of the changing relationships among and between anthropologists, Indians and the society of the U.S.