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The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement...

Since the earliest class-based societies, social leveling mechanisms have limited, actively as well as unconsciously, social stratification. Understanding how such power structures have operated in the past and present requires the integration of social dimensions to the political economy in a way that does not assume that elites and/or urban centers drive the course of history. Here, the Middle and Late Iron Age in southern Africa (AD 900–1650) highlight the importance of these local dynamics in tandem with broader regional changes. At a time when protoglobal trade links Africa to the Middle East and Asia, cities emerged up to 1,000 km inland along with the material evidence for hereditary inequality. Yet the population at the trade center of Bosutswe at the eastern edge of the Kalahari responded flexibly to environmental and social variables, which, perhaps unintentionally, limited the consolidation of power in the hands of the elite. The following case study of Khubu la Dintsa, a small agropastoral sit...

In June 2013, a series of large demonstrations throughout Brazil started to shake its main cities and political landscape. In this article I juxtapose these protests, the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s that brought the poor peripheries of Sao Paulo to the center of the political scene, and the cultural production coming from these peripheries after the 1990s. This juxtaposition creates a perspective from which to look at the changes that have transformed cities, citizens, and the polity in Brazil during the last decades. One of my main arguments is that in Sao Paulo, as in many other metropolises shaped by peripheral urbanization, political agency is inseparable from the spatial configuration of the city and from its shifting patterns of spatial segregation and social inequality. I focus on the peripheries and argue that the quality of both poverty, the urban environment, and citizens’ engagement have changed a great deal from the 1970s to the present. Poverty has different signifiers in a city o...

Nonstate providers are often more important in the everyday lives of the poor than outposts of the state. In this essay, I focus on one type of provider, sectarian organizations, which are an integral component of politics and welfare regimes in parts of the Middle East and other developing regions. Focusing on Lebanon, I describe how sectarian welfare providers emerge from and help to constitute political sectarianism while tracing what is at stake for the poor. First, by holding public offices and dominating informal channels that mediate access to public benefits, these actors mediate the experience of accessing the “rights” of citizenship. Second, while they provide benefits and services that might not otherwise be available, the modes of allocating welfare by sectarian parties can be discriminatory, notably along partisan and religious lines. Third, sectarian groups politicize the process of accessing social benefits while undercutting the political voice of the poor by weakening alternative channels...

This study of La Salada, renamed by Cuartel’s residents as the “poor people’s shopping mall,” was founded in the early 1990s, at the height of neoliberalism, by several dozen undocumented Bolivian immigrants and Argentine street hawkers in Cuartel, a pauperized, stigmatized, and disenfranchised district near the city of Buenos Aires. By the early 2000s, La Salada occupied a central place in public life in Cuartel and beyond and was described by the European Union as “emblematic of counterfeit markets” and among the 10 worst of its kind. In studying this market and the network of satellite “Saladitas” that have proliferated in hundreds of neighborhoods across the country, my aim is to analyze the way the “structural poor” and the recently impoverished middle class—in the course of practicing noninstitutional politics, socioeconomic informality, and a-legality—transformed themselves into plebeian citizens. These practices have contributed to the emergence of a new form of life: plebeian democracy. In order ...

How do we explore the relationship between the urban poor and large-scale revolutions? What kind of politics do they espouse in such extraordinary times? In this article I narrate the story of the poor people’s struggles for sustenance and citizenship during and after the Arab uprisings, focusing on Egypt and Tunisia. I suggest that while the abject poor and rural migrants avoid direct involvement in large-scale uprisings, the nature of which they do not comprehend, the “middle-class poor,” a product of the neoliberal restructuring, tend to engage in and lead others to these broader revolts. But most take advantage of the collapse of state control to extend their everyday struggles to secure life chances in their immediate environs—neighborhoods and work sites. This is also a time when they engage in extraordinary mobilization and organized protests to demand collective consumption and recognition as legitimate citizens of the city. Yet in the aftermath of the revolutions, when the new elites show their i...

Rather than being sedentary strata of urban existence, the urban poor move in and out of heterogeneous transformations, becoming a body of critical experimentation in ongoing calibrations of circulation and emplacement. They are sometimes the “wild cards” of urbanization itself, less excluded from rights and livelihood or a reserve surplus of wasted lives than vehicles for both conjoining and disrupting clearly delineated sectors, territories, and policies. Reviewing various dynamics of local economic practice, provisioning systems, and the built environment in Jakarta, in this article I explore the ambiguous presence of the poor in contemporary urban systems of the so-called global south.

Poverty and violence crisscross ethnographies of the African city. This is especially pronounced in anthropological research from South Africa, where considerable efforts are made to describe and document poverty and violence across segregated cityscapes. Correlations between poverty and vulnerability are often asserted in the literature: the “poorest of the poor” are presented repeatedly as the persons most susceptible to violence and harm. In this paper I aim to complicate how poverty and vulnerability are conventionally linked. Drawing from fieldwork on young African migrants’ informal work in Cape Town, I show how hazardous slight gains in prosperity can prove. Once the migrants’ entrepreneurial ventures took off, the youths were recast quickly as persons of suspicion and acceptable targeting. I present an episode in counterpoint of other migrants losing their property and means of livelihood. Countering expectations, these migrants’ descent into poverty’s inconspicuousness protected them during an ou...

In the literature on property rights, there is general consensus framed by people such as Boserup and Demsetz that common property regimes will change to private property regimes when resources are scarce and population increases. This is mostly correct where land tenure is concerned. However, there are many cases where common property regimes continue even though the population has grown and resources have become scarcer. Ocean areas are almost always held as common property. This article analyzes property regimes that develop for land and ocean and the conditions under which they do so. The analysis is based on worldwide ethnographic case studies. I argue that the form property regimes take is determined by economic defendability. Many variables influence economic defendability, ranging from technical change and physical attributes of the resource to government action and cultural factors. That arable land is usually held privately suggests this solution is adaptive for land with high economic defendabi...

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.

Economic concepts have a double status. They are elaborated for scientific purposes, but they are also used in the real world, especially by decision makers. In this paper I focus on the latter aspect and address the question of the uses of these concepts in welfare reform. I base my reflections on the case of the renewal of welfare-control policy in France. Findings from ethnographic fieldwork on the daily practices of welfare control provide the occasion to confront the economic vulgate of welfare reform with the actual situations of welfare recipients and ground a critical evaluation of the effect of reforms inspired by this vulgate. By doing so I propose a basis for a socioanthropological critique of the political implications of economic concepts.

Over the last two decades, rapid urban expansion building on landgrabs has become ubiquitous in China. The pursuit of urban-centered economic growth has created crises of land deprivation and rural identity in Chinese rural society. Land-related protests have become the focal point of movements for the protection of Chinese farmers’ rights. Drawing on ethnographic materials concerning a series of influential protests over landgrabs in Wukan village, this paper presents a critical rethinking of the economy and an examination of how the restoration of villagers’ collective identity has led to communal resistance that has successfully reclaimed governing power and social order, sowing the seed of hope for a better life. A revitalized and reinvented clan system organized around extended kinship networks has played a critical role in reconstituting the collective identity of villagers. The Wukan events constitute the first steps in an ambitious project to turn around farmers’ subordinate and vulnerable role wi...

In this article I explore how financialization works among the poor, based on the case of a group of migrants living in Barcelona’s urban periphery, who were granted mortgages during the climactic years of the Spanish housing boom (2004–2007). I argue that the hopes and values that underpin relations of reciprocity among the disadvantaged are transformed as they start accessing home ownership via predatory loans. Undeniably, forms of financial exploitation are rooted in and depend on a high degree of commodification. However, people tend to deal with the abstract logics of accumulation that underpin their domination through concrete interpersonal relations framed by moral values and mutual obligations.

This essay examines the long-standing Malagasy role of vadimbazaha, a word that literally means “the spouse of a European.” Malagasy women have historically aspired to this role to gain status and wealth as intermediaries who link social networks, enabling the flow of wealth, people, and opportunities among families. Prior generations of vadimbazaha stayed in Madagascar. Today, in the context of economic hardship, women seek European men and migrate to France. Their goal is to use their position in France to build a life-sustaining flow of resources back to Madagascar. Women achieve this goal by managing their French husbands’ and Malagasy kin’s horizons of expectation with respect to race, gender, kinship, and reputation. Understanding vadimbazaha’s economic practice requires attending to their ability to manage the meanings associated with their sexual, reproductive, and caring labor as much as the money they earn through low-wage labor and remittances.

Though climate change is a global process, current discussions emphasize its local impacts. A review of media representations, public opinion polls, international organization documents, and scientific reports shows that global attention to climate change is distributed unevenly, with the impacts of climate change seen as an urgent concern in some places and less pressing in others. This uneven attention, or specificity, is linked to issues of selectivity (the inclusion of some cases and exclusion of others), historicity (the long temporal depth of the pathways to inclusion or exclusion), and consequentiality (the effects of this specificity on claims of responsibility for climate change). These issues are explored through a historical examination of four cases—two (the Arctic, low-lying islands) strongly engaged with climate change frameworks, and two (mountains, deserts) closely associated with other frameworks of sustainable development rather than climate change. For all four regions, the 1960s and 19...

The right to health and life is firmly established in the industrialized world, and advanced age is no longer a reason to deny medical treatment. Yet scarce and expensive medical resources, changing demographics, and expanding societal demands reveal how that right is more controversial than ever before. The case of kidney transplantation in the United States is a quintessential example of a broad health equity predicament in which the potential for greater longevity brings with it the problems of fairness and equity. As those over 70 and 80 come to constitute more of the “public” in aging societies, how then are nations to reconstitute the practice of fairness and the idea of public good? This essay examines this quandary by describing the potentiality we assign to kidneys, older persons, and the organ supply itself and by exploring the effects of that potentiality in three realms: schemes for fairness in the US organ transplant distribution system, living donation from younger to older persons, and the ...

Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are rule of law indicators, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for non-governmental organizations and that the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of non-governmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugarplantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community’s evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure. Is excess the problem of the twenty-first century? Expenditure beyond sustainable limits stands behind crises of resource depletion, environmental degradation, and greenhouse gas emissions, which potentially threaten not only to destabilize advanced industrial ways of life but possibly render the planet as a whole unlivable. These crises, paired with growing material inequalities and food entitlement instability, are worsening geopolitical tensions, heightening militarized competition for control of natural resources, and raising new challenges to international governance. A common background to the crises of excess are runaway rates of consumption growth, which, far from slowing, seem destined to be amplified by the spread of the global consumption boom from the industrially advanced countries to newly industrializing states. Anthropology, through its multidisciplinary and holistic methods of study and modes of theorizing, would seem well prepared to speak to the causes and possible remedies for the global crises that make up the problem of excess. Our discipline is particularly well endowed in research questions and strategies relating to the massive growth in commodity consumption that fuels all the other problems. It goes beyond

Focusing mainly on Asia, this article tracks a link between the collective, inalienable land‐tenure regimes currently associated with indigeneity and attempts to prevent piecemeal dispossession of small‐scale farmers through land sale and debt. Collective landholding is sometimes imposed by local groups on their own members as they act to defend their livelihoods and communities. More often, however, it has been imposed from outside, first by paternalistic officials of the colonial period and now by a new set of experts and advocates who assume responsibility for deciding who should and who should not be exposed to the risks and opportunities of market engagement. From the perspective of their proponents, however, attempts to institutionalize collective landholdings are not impositions at all. They simply confirm a culturally distinct formation naturally present among “tribal” or “indigenous” people. Yet rural populations have repeatedly failed to conform to the assumptions embedded in schemes designed fo...

This paper uses data from eight past and present societies practicing intensive agriculture to measure the transmission of wealth across generations in preindustrial agricultural societies. Focusing on embodied, material, and relational forms of wealth, we compare levels of wealth between parents and children to estimate how effectively wealth is transmitted from one generation to the next and how inequality in one generation impacts inequality in the next generation. We find that material wealth is by far the most important, unequally distributed, and highly transmitted form of wealth in these societies, while embodied and relational forms of wealth show much weaker importance and transmission. We conclude that the unique characteristics of material wealth, and especially wealth in land, are key to the high and persistent levels of inequality seen in societies practicing intensive agriculture. We explore the implications of our findings for the evolution of inequality in the course of human history and s...

We present empirical measures of wealth inequality and its intergenerational transmission among four horticulturalist populations. Wealth is construed broadly as embodied somatic and neural capital, including body size, fertility and cultural knowledge, material capital such as land and household wealth, and relational capital in the form of coalitional support and field labor. Wealth inequality is moderate for most forms of wealth, and intergenerational wealth transmission is low for material resources and moderate for embodied and relational wealth. Our analysis suggests that domestication alone does not transform social structure; rather, the presence of scarce, defensible resources may be required before inequality and wealth transmission patterns resemble the familiar pattern in more complex societies. Land ownership based on usufruct and low‐intensity cultivation, especially in the context of other economic activities such as hunting and fishing, is associated with more egalitarian wealth distributions as found among hunter‐gatherers.

Premodern human societies differ greatly in socioeconomic inequality. Despite much useful theorizing on the causes of these differences, individual‐level quantitative data on wealth inequality is lacking. The papers in this special section provide the first comparable estimates of intergenerational wealth transmission and inequality in premodern societies, with data on more than 40 measures of embodied, material, and relational wealth from 21 premodern societies representing four production systems (hunter‐gatherers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, and agriculturalists). Key findings include (1) the importance of material, embodied, and relational wealth differs significantly across production systems, with material wealth more important in pastoral and agricultural systems; (2) the degree of wealth transmission from parent to offspring is markedly higher for material wealth than embodied and relational wealth; (3) aggregate wealth is transmitted to a higher degree among pastoralists and agriculturalists...

Drawing on fieldwork among environmental activists and housing advocates in one of South Asia’s fastest‐growing cities—and the capital of one of the world’s most politically volatile nation‐states—this article explores how and when specific forms of urban housing were problematized and reformed through environmental logics. I ask when and how housing was framed as an environmental problem in Kathmandu. In so doing, I demonstrate that a fuller understanding of housing as an environmental problem rests not only in evaluations of public health parameters, risks of toxic exposure, and disaster vulnerability but also in the shifting ideologies of belonging, morality, and governance that animate urban environmental anxieties in specific cities. I illustrate how categories fundamental to the intersection of ecology and housing were produced, effaced, and reproduced over time in Nepal’s capital. I argue that the making and unmaking of these categories had clear material consequences that are often difficult to di...

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.

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.

UNESCO's World Heritage program, which aims to encourage participation in the preservation of local cultural and natural heritage and international cooperation in conservation, now includes some 830 sites of “outstanding value to humanity.” The notion of world heritage has been quickly embraced by the tourism industry, and consequently countries in which commodified tourism was nonexistent 20 years ago are experiencing a tourism boom. Examination of the social construction of heritage tourism in two post‐“Socialist” states, Russia and China, suggests that the “treasures of all humankind” there are not so much sites of a “global cultural commons” as laboratories and mirrors of new cultural practices and ideologies that reflect the two countries' different historical traditions, views of development and the “good life,” structures of social order, and positions in the current global order. The story of World Heritage in these two countries reinforces the need to restore the nation, with its distinctive prac...

Biological anthropologists are being urged to pay greater attention to politics and economics in health analyses. Rather than building larger and larger models in which health is merely an output, it is more useful to focus on the way in which political and economic circumstances create local biologies which in turn become a focus for further policy development. Analysis of historical changes in developmental defects of tooth enamel in a group of Warlpiri people resident at Yuendumu, Australia, reveals increases in the frequency of these defects and a changing age distribution from 1890 to 1950. This reflects the changing economic situation and government policies affecting Aboriginal people. Government officials had a particular construction of “traditional” Aboriginal lifestyles that contributed to their policy of establishing settlements. The settlements then served to create a uniform pattern of childhood growth and development which was one stimulant to further changes in policy. In this instance a p...

A new master plan to restructure the city of Kunming in southwestern China in the context of Chinas transition to a progrowth, commercialized consumer society has led to massive destruction of centuryold innercity neighborhoods and the displacement of tens of thousands of families. The combination of a sense of lateness (lagging behind national and global development) and an emerging progrowth coalition between local governments and real estate developers is shaping postMao urban redevelopment. Several forms of civic opposition and popular discontent have been elicited by the restructuring. Although largely marginalized, these alternative views of urban forms and counterpractices help sustain a muchneeded critical point of view that questions and destabilizes the seemingly inescapable machine of development. The insights emerging from the Kunming example help deepen our understanding of latesocialist power dynamics and suggest a new way of understanding stateinitiated projects of modernity and development...

In many subsistence communities worldwide, laborsaving technologies such as mechanized water pumps and grain mills are introduced during the first stages of economic acculturation. These technologi...

The emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa after the decolonization revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s has resulted in a renewed concern with the problems of government in multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic countries. I discuss the issues thus produced, including the viability of states that are not underpinned by a compact and sovereign nation, and the role anthropology can play in clarifying such issues.

Socioeconomic growth is an elite‐directed process that concentrates social power in direct proportion to increases in culture scale. Power elites have controlled social power to their own advantage in at least three different ways: domestically, by means of kinship, politically, by means of rulers, and commercially, by means of the market. Each method produces its own growth trajectory and scale of culture and a distinctive distribution of elite power and household living standards. Ethnographic data on urban property ownership in 27 municipalities in the Palouse region of eastern Washington suggest that when power is commercially organized and villages become towns and cities, there is a dramatic increase not only in the number of prosperous households but even more in the number of poor and maintenance‐level households. Elite property owners, who most benefit from growth, assume a larger role in municipal government, where they can encourage further growth through municipal annexations and zoning change...

Ethnographic characterizations of pastoralists as egalitarian have recently been contested on the grounds that new studies have demonstrated a widespread inequality in livestock ownership, thus proving that the notion of pastoral egalitarianism is a myth. This revisionist rejection of the egalitarianism of pastoralists appears difficult to sustain after examination of the literature. Ethnographic accounts show a wide range of pastoral societies, some more hierarchical and some quite egalitarian, and this variation was well recognized by at least 1940. “Egalitarian” is used in the literature to characterize pastoral tribesmen primarily in a political rather than an economic sense. Differences in livestock ownership were recognized by ethnographers characterizing the peoples they studied as “egalitarian”, but these differences were known not to cause either social stratification or economic class differentiation. To suggest as the revisionists do that all societies and cultures are characterized by inequali...

Farmer or folk crop varieties developed over many generations by indigenous farmers are an important component of global crop genetic resources for use by both industrial and indigenous agriculture. Currently there is a debate between advocates of indigenous farmers' rights in their folk varieties and the dominant world system, which vests intellectual property rights to crop genetic resources only in users of those resources for industrial agriculture. While indigenous peoples at the individual and group levels do have a broad range of intellectual property rights in their folk varieties, they define and use them differently than does the industrial world. Therefore, industrial‐world intellectual propery rights mechanisms are generally inappropriate for protecting the intellectual property rights of indigenous farmers, but some could be used effectively. To meet indigenous farmers' need for protection, new approaches are being developed that embed indigenous farmers' rights in folk varieties in cultural,...

One of the most significant transformations in the emergence of economically and socially complex societies has been the development of social groups with differential access to productive resources. Anthropologists have puzzled over the number of empirical cases suggesting that women have disproportionately lost access to productive resources. This paper follows one such case—the development of textile workshops in Mesopotamia—to offer new insights into the alienation of women producers in the ancient Near East and the development of Mesopotamia's political economies. During the transformation from a series of relatively self‐sufficient communities to a highly integrated complex of rural and urban settlements, a fundamental shift took place from the use of flax to the use of wool for the majority of textile production. This shift has extremely important implications for archaeologists' reconstructions of agricultural production, labor roles, and social relationships. This paper explores the socioeconomic...

The general picture of human health that has emerged from bioarchaeological studies of the agricultural transition is one of health decline, although the nature and severity of the biological impacts have varied in accordance with worldwide diversity in the timing, duration, and specific characteristics of this economic shift. Conversely and somewhat paradoxically, the emerging picture has also been one of enhanced fertility and population growth. These findings raise challenging questions about the measures bioarchaeologists use to assess the biological costs and benefits of agriculture. It is argued here that these measures fall into two potentially quite distinct categories-physiological fitness (homeostasis) and reproductive (Darwinian) fitness, measures that may assess the costs and benefits of a biocultural system very differently. Both provide valuable insights into questions about our past at levels ranging from the evolution of our species to the unique experiences of individuals and their kin. However, the relative importance of each in larger questions about human adaptation needs to be carefully considered when assessing the biological evidence in questions of causation.

2 case studies of the Western Kweneng San and Dobi San in Botswana are examined historically to show that contact with the Bantu-speaking neighbors or dominant societies may take other autonomous forms rather than dependency and abandonment of foraging. Revisionists have argued that hunter-gatherers were absorbed into regional economic networks and ceased to be independent societies however it they continued to exhibit traits of hunter-gathers it was because of their poverty and resistance to domination by stronger societies. This is a spacious argument. The Kweneng San are described as having lived for 200 years among the Bantu-speaking people in the southern Kalahari. Loss of autonomy was neither automatic nor complete. The pre and protohistoric period and the fur trade period are described as having some subservient to effect but institutionalization came later. The San had a flexible social organization and there was fluidity between village and bush. Agropastoralism reduced the Sans foraging base and the fur trade was the link between the San and Kgalagadi. By the 1950s the San became the Kgalagadis labor force when foraging became more precarious. The Dobi San were isolated from 19th century colonial southern Africa as hunter-gatherers and traded with the Goba between A.D. 500-1500. The trade involved indirect contact through the Goba and later the Tswana and direct contact with European hunters and traders. The prehistoric and fur trade periods are described. There were barter systems and mafisa or contracted animal husbandry which afforded the ]Kung a complement of beef to be added to their foraging diet. After 1954 non-San (Hereros) dominated the areas with the ]Kung as herders. There were 2 groups: a foraging mafisa herding and horticulture group living in camps and client groups attached to cattle posts. The pattern of hunter-gatherers remained as one of collective ownership of resources and food sharing. This final dependency from fierce autonomy was a result of the inability of the land to support foraging due to environmental degradation. The relationships between the Kwena San and Dobi San with non San-were different. The internal organization of the San was unaffected. In the discussion of genuine and spurious foragers attention is paid to terminology and distinguishing between fact and discussion. In the transition to dependency it is cautioned that revisionism trivializes the history of these people and inaccurately characterizes the nature of their autonomy. Commentary which supports the general position and provides constructive criticism is provided by replies from by 19 anthropologists.

During the past decade, obesity has taken center stage as one of the most pressing health problems of the new millennium. Health experts and policy makers have termed the phenomenon of relative rapid weight gain at population levels a “crisis” and an “epidemic.” Public discourses have primarily focused on what causes obesity, either blaming environmental factors—such as the prevalence of cheap, energy-dense, highly processed foods and beverages—or blaming individuals who fail to eat healthfully and engage in regular physical activity. The spread of obesity worldwide is attributed to processes associated with globalization, including mass industrialization, rapid urbanization, and the increasing presence of multinational corporations. Experts predict catastrophic health, economic, and social consequences if the trend toward obesity continues; yet, as Brewis points out in Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives, public health interventions, which have historically focused on changing individual behaviors through knowledge and awareness, have been ineffective to date. Brewis delves beneath the surface of obesity-crisis rhetoric to examine adaptive, ecological, and cultural perspectives on obesity; discuss what we can learn from prevention and intervention efforts that have consistently failed; and suggest methods for moving beyond the limitations of statistics and cultural theorizing to better understand the complex, dynamic web of intersections between proximate and distal influences within biological, ecological, and cultural contexts. The author’s research on body image and nutrition, conducted during the past 20 years in the Pacific Islands, the United States, and Mexico, is discussed in conjunction with other similarly focused studies to explore historical and cross-cultural variation in obesity rates, risk, and beliefs about body size. Brewis addresses such critical questions as whether obesity is a disease, an illness, or simply a moral panic; why minority and poor urban populations are most at risk; why obesity remains