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In contemporary society, global population movements, global conflict and ensuing migration have resulted in the presence of bicultural children in many nations, with multiple possibilities for musical engagement emerging within their home and host cultures. For these children, issues of social integration, identity construction, and cultural maintenance and change must be negotiated on a continual basis. This paper explores some of the ways in which music participation, and more specifically, participation in musical play, contributes to the well-being of bicultural children. In particular, the paper addresses the contribution of musical activities to the well-being of newly arrived refugee and voluntary migrant children and the ways in which these musical activities provide new musical and social beginnings for these children and young people. Drawing on research from the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology, anthropology, psychology and refugee studies, this paper focuses on my current research involving newly arrived forced and voluntary migrant children in Australia, but also on my previous cross-cultural study of musical play in a number of countries. Specific reference is made to Iraqi, South Sudanese and Sierra Leonean refugee children and young people in Australia, Punjabi children in the UK and newly arrived Central and South American immigrants in the USA.

Tobin's work has been groundbreaking. Famously, he and his team put together a sophisticated comparative study of three ways of doing pre-school--in Japan, China, and the United States (1989). As such, this study has precedents in anthropology. What is unique in Tobin's work is that he got people from one place to comment on what they saw people from "other" places do, including what these Others said about Them. This is not only a study about cultural difference but, more significantly, a study about what might be called "meta-culture" or "meta-ideology," culture "about" culture, ideology "about" ideology. In this article, the author analyzes Tobin's study and shares his personal views on the results of Tobin's study.

The article shares the author's views about groovology and its importance to the music industry in the U.S. It states that groovology is created as a useful anthropological science for understanding musicking, performance practices and it can illuminate social action where non-participatory discrepancies stop the flow or groove. It mentions that learning to move and groove is a vital protection if children are immunized against passivity and consumerism.

This paper examines the decisions and motivations of graduate students in cultural anthropology when defining the field sites and topics of their final projects. The decisions among students at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia are contrasted with those at the University of Pittsburgh in the United States. A review of recent final projects in both universities was conducted, along with a survey and some follow-up questions with students in both institutions. A main difference found is that students at los Andes are more willing to do applied fieldwork at "home", while students at Pittsburgh are far more reluctant to do so and prefer to go to distant fields. This distinction is partly explained by the histories of the anthropologies practised in each locale, and of what have been considered "proper" field sites in cultural anthropology. In particular, a vision of anthropology as an applied enterprise emerged at different historical moments in these two geo-political locations, and those visions are associated with quite different, opposed values today. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 6 notes.)

It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and research programs in Native studies. The institutional conditions under which Native literary studies takes place in a European context give rise to four primary methodological approaches: (1) national (though not necessarily tribal nationalist); (2) multiethnic; (3) universal; and (4) postcolonial. European scholars of Native American literary studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative "American studies" approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their groundbreaking book "American Indian Literary Nationalism". It is to these claims that the author's title gestures while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American literature, and in scholarly publications are used as "the basis for the cynical absorption into the "melting pot," pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice." (Contains 2 notes.)

Findings from a four-year action research project at a highly diverse, West Coast U.S. university reveal that a large percentage of white students cannot trace their identities to a particular nation in Europe and are, as a result, unable to name the shared meanings of a particular ethnic culture. Each time Latino, Asian American, and African American classmates describe their families' ethnic histories, it is the European American student who feels dissociated. Extracted from a polyphonic novelistic ethnography, this essay focuses on an exchange among three students at a town hall meeting and explores the ramifications for social cohesion when members of "the dominant group" appear to be experiencing declining subjectivity. This reflection also raises two larger disciplinary questions: (1) How can 10,000 U.S. anthropologists continue to deploy the concept of culture at field sites outside the United States when so many in their own population cannot claim an ethnic culture of their own? and (2) Given the recent turn in events in the U.S. political scene, shouldn't anthropologists now begin developing new constructs for social analysis after race and culture?

The effect of law on research and scholarship is amply illustrated by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and other statutes, which, when they impel reburial of archaeological discoveries, result in a very real sacrificing of our past. In this case, the Act seems driven by a misguided notion that anthropology is not the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge, but the persistent urge of powerful white men to oppress Indians. The claim that tampering with prehistoric relics disturbs spirits is much too eagerly embraced by our judges and bureaucrats from the legal briefs of native activists and entrepreneurs, who could have no ancestral or any other ties to the remains. James W. Springer laments the crucial scientific data lost through such folly. (Contains 104 notes.)

There are perhaps 10,000 technicians in the United States who work in the field known as cultural resource management (CRM). The typical field technician possesses a bachelor's degree in anthropology, geography, or a closely allied discipline. The author's experience has been that few CRM field technicians receive adequate undergraduate training in geographic field methods, such as cartography and orienteering, which are considered critical to the demands of CRM studies. This paper assesses a practical on-the-job-training approach not uncommon to the industry and concludes with a recommended curriculum. As a result, there is an opportunity to offer courses in basic geographic field methods at the college level.

In the present paper, I first discuss the lack of a truly global anthropology in the world today and consider why such a world anthropology does not exist. I then offer a more personal account, based on my experience as an editor of an international journal attempting, to some extent, to counter the hegemony of the American anthropological core. Finally, I look at the referee system and argue that, for all its benefits, it nonetheless serves to prevent the emergence of a global anthropology. The major questions raised in this paper are how, in an anthropological world riven by a huge gap between the core and periphery, as well as by different national schools of anthropology, can refereeing of journal articles take place in a fair and balanced way; and, if it cannot take place, what does this mean about the nature and future of anthropology as a discipline? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a case example of qualitative research that applied productive hermeneutics and the central concept, fusion of horizons. Interpretation of meaning is a fusing of the researchers' and subjects' perspectives and serves to expand understanding. The purpose is to illustrate an exemplar of qualitative research without establishing a rigid recipe of methodology. The illustration is based on in-depth observational and textual data from an applied anthropological study conducted in western Alaska with Yup'ik hunters and fishers and government agency employees as they worked towards collaborative management. The metaphor of the hermeneutical circle is showcased to help the reader understand the philosophical underpinnings and the analytical processes used to realize a meaningful interpretation. A series of organizing systems for the interpretation is described, culminating in a final organizing system to communicate a fully realized understanding of collaborative management at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global rise of populism and concomitant polarizations across disenfranchised and marginalized groups has been magnified by so-called echo chambers, and a major public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to fuel these intergroup tensions. Media institutions disseminating information on ways to prevent the propagation of the virus have reactivated a specific discursive phenomenon previously observed in many epidemics: the construction of a defiled 'Other'. With anthropological lenses, discourse on defilement is an interesting path to understand the continuous emergence of pseudo-scientific forms of racism. In this paper, the authors focus on 'borderline racism', that is the use of an institutionally 'impartial' discourse to reaffirm the inferiority of another race. The authors employed inductive thematic analysis of 1200 social media comments reacting to articles and videos published by six media in three different countries (France, United States and India). Results delineate four major themes structuring defilement discourses: food (and the relationship to animals), religion, nationalism and gender. Media articles and videos portrayed Western and Eastern countries through contrasting images and elicited a range of reaction in readers and viewers. The discussion reflects on how borderline racism can be an appropriate concept to understand the appearance of hygienic othering of specific subgroups on social media. Theoretical implications and recommendations on a more culturally sensitive approach of media coverage of epidemics and pandemics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the Internet opens new possibilities for web-based data collection in cognitive anthropology. This study examines whether free-list data collected online are comparable to those collected with face to face interviews or with self-administered paper questionnaires. We collected free lists for two cultural domains in the United States: one diffuse (things that mothers do) and one relatively well defined (racial and ethnic groups). We selected a purposive sample of 318 university students and randomly assigned participants to provide free lists for one of these domains using a web-based survey, a face to face interview, or a self-administered paper questionnaire. All three modes identified the same set of salient concepts in each domain. Median list length per respondent varied across modes in response to a standard free-list question and to supplementary probes. For the well-defined domain of “racial and ethnic groups,” supplementary probes widened differences among modes; for the more diffuse domain of “things that mothers do,” probes erased evidence of mode effects. Collecting free lists online is viable but may yield different results depending on the study population and attributes of the cultural domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the ideological and material reproduction of "effective schooling" in the Age of Capital functions to normalize and perpetuate the unequal social relations and oppressive dynamics that characterize free market economies and their accompanying political and cultural practices in the historical and educational context of the United States of America. I argue that the intersection of three perspectives furthers the work of scholars grounded in the various disciplines--advocacy anthropology, the anthropology of education, and the mutual engagement of anthropology and critical disability studies--and demonstrates that a multi-intertransdisciplinary lens is essential for deepening an understanding of the discourses as well as the concrete practices that push 'disorderly' student subjects into precarious circumstances that threaten their physical, emotional, and psychological integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the relationship between anthropology and the Black experience from the first importation of slaves to North America to the present. Discusses the role of Black anthropologists. (MK)

Comments on several studies which deal with the participation of United States (U.S.)-based anthropology in the promotion of U.S. national and strategic interests. Issue of indigenous scholars and their role in the processes of decolonization and modernization; Concept of power and moral judgments; Importance of social science to national security interests.

The article presents a conference paper read at a session sponsored by the General Anthropology Division at the American Anthropological Association meeting held in 2014 that focused on general anthropology and its future. Topics of the papers include teaching general anthropology; cross-disciplinary research in the anthropology of science, technology and medicine; and the relationship between archaeology, anthropology and the public sector in the U.S. in the 21st century.

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures-- economics and anthropology--enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callón), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question--important to environmental expertise and politics--of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many ways, grief is thought to be outside the realm of bioethics and clinical ethics, and grieving patients or family members may be passed off to grief counselors or therapists. Yet grief can play a particularly poignant role in the ethical encounter, especially in cases of brain death, where the line between life and death has been blurred. Although brain death is legally and medically recognized as death in the United States and elsewhere, the concept has been contentious since its inception in 1968. Yet in most cases, families are not allowed to reject the determination of brain death. Apart from religious exemptions, families have no recourse to reject this controversial determination of death. This paper explores the role of grief in brain death determinations and argues that bioethics has failed to address the complexity of grief in determinations of brain death. Grief ought to have epistemological weight in brain death determinations because of the contested nature of the diagnosis and the unique ways in which grief informs the situation. Thus, I argue that, in some rare cases, reasonable accommodation policies should be expanded to allow for refusals of brain death determinations based on the emotional and moral force of grief. By drawing on ethnographic accounts of grief in other cultures, I problematize the current procedural and linear understandings of grief in brain death determinations, and I conclude by offering a new way in which to understand the case of Jahi McMath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Franz Boas as an aspiring professional geographer during the 1880s: his Baffin Land research, his publications, his participation in geography organizations, and his struggle to attain a university appointment in geography. Frustrated by a seeming lack of opportunity for advancement in Germany, Boas explored career opportunities as a geographer in America and launched a series of unsuccessful but meaningful attempts to dominate the intellectual direction of American geography. Finally, the article reviews the circumstances surrounding Boas's appointment as an anthropologist at Clark University in 1889. Through examining Boas's own words and actions, the paper demonstrates that his professional identification with geography was lengthier and stronger than earlier accounts have suggested. It also critiques the myth of a Baffin Land “conversion” to anthropology, and delineates the circumstances of his shift from German human geography to his Americanist recasting of anthropology after 1889. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a corresponding bias in favor of the poor when they handle casework, essentially giving policy to the rich and services to the poor. In this paper, we test this casework prediction using four experiments in which confederates sent simple requests to state or local officials. In each, our confederates’ reported social classes were randomly assigned and signaled with a brief introductory statement mentioning the sender’s occupation or economic situation. Across our samples, we find precisely-estimated null effects of social class biases: the officials we studied were equally likely to respond regardless of the constituent’s class. These findings raise doubts about whether casework is really a class-biased process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am a US citizen working as an anthropologist (research and teaching) in Taipei. 1 live and work in Taiwan primarily because it allows me to work on local/globalizing and global/ localizing popular culture simultaneously from the ethnographic inside and outside. On the one hand I have become an active member of the interpretive and creative communities I study, yet on the other, my foreigner status is irreducible and 1 am constantly reminded of the differences between my perspectives and those of my informants. For most anthropologists, those we represent and those to whom we represent them are different, and to be ethical we have to acknowledge their differences. But now the groups of my informants, students, colleagues and readers all overlap to varying degrees. In this paper, I will discuss the problems of addressing a public of informant-interlocutors - how to construct a "we" that can engage with shared problematics while recognizing the different positionalities of "I" and "you." Trying to create such a "we" has forced me to challenge disciplinary boundaries, and to ponder what the lived experiences of globalization in the post-industrial non-West mean for the politics of both ethnography and critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest Burch's long and varied career spanning the circumpolar Arctic began with excursions to Labrador, Greenland, and Newfoundland in 1954, 1959, and 1962. His initiation into arctic anthropology through the mentorship of Elmer Harp, Jr., his later collaboration with the Smithsonian Handbook Project, and his Research Associate appointment with the Arctic Studies Center created much common ground with the Smithsonian. This paper reviews Burch's career-long relationship with the Smithsonian Institution and through a short personal memorial he wrote in 2010 for Elmer Harp's Memorial reveals the beginning of his career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use narratives from the Indian diaspora to provide a counterargument to models of acculturation that claim that all immigrants undergo a universal psychological process of acculturation and adaptation. More specifically, I show how members from the Indian diaspora re-examined their ethnic and racial identity after the events of 9/11. Given the conceptual nature of this paper, my goal is to present an argument, supported by select autobiographical accounts and cases, to explain why the universal model of acculturation should be re-examined within the context of postcolonial, diaspora cultures. First, I undertake a brief review of the concept of acculturation in cross-cultural psychology. Next, I examine three autobiographical narratives of first-generation Indians living in south-eastern Connecticut in the USA to demonstrate how their discourses about 9/11 contests universal models of assimilation. Finally, I conclude with implications for understanding the construction of racialised identities within diaspora communities. [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.

In contrast to its parallel community study, the Yankee City study, the Old City study is not as well known and has not been recognized for substantive contributions to management thought. This paper discusses the Old City study and its influence on Burleigh B. Gardner and Allison Davis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical anthropology has long appreciated the clinical encounter as a rich source of data and a key site for critical inquiry. It is no surprise, then, that a number of physician-anthropologists have used their clinical insights to make important contributions to the field. How does this duality challenge and enhance the moral practice and ethics of care inherent both to ethnography and to medicine? How do bureaucratic and professional obligations of HIPAA and the IRB intersect with aspirations of anthropology to understand human experience and of medicine to heal with compassion? In this paper, I describe my simultaneous fieldwork and clinical practice at an urban women's jail in the United States. In this setting, being a physician facilitates privileged access to people and spaces within, garners easy trust, and enables an insider perspective more akin to observant participation than participant observation. Through experiences of delivering the infants of incarcerated pregnant women and of being with the mothers as they navigate drug addiction, child custody battles, and re-incarceration, the roles of doctor and anthropologist become mutually constitutive and transformative. Moreover, the dual practice reveals congruities and cracks in each discipline's ethics of care. Being an anthropologist among informants who may have been patients reworks expectations of care and necessitates ethical practice informed by the dual roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When thinking about human evolution across the disciplines, terms such as "anthropological genetics" or "genetic anthropology" that brazenly defy the existence of the two-cultures divide seem to promise important insights. They refer to the application of genetic techniques to the past of humankind and human groups, a fact emphasized most strongly by the expression "genetic history." Such daring linguistic alliances have been forming since 1962 when the name "molecular anthropology" was introduced in the American context. This was an opportune moment for biochemists and physical chemists to enter anthropology, because in the U.S. a rapprochement between the fields was aimed for. However, a belief in and a discourse of a hierarchy of disciplines structured along the lines of methodology and epistemic object worked as an obstacle to the achievement of transdisciplinarity. Especially the DNA-sequence, initially approached through the proxy of the protein, was regarded as the most informative historical document due to its distance from the environment and its amenability to rigorous scientific techniques. These notions had a particular power at a time when anthropology was confronted with its legacy of race science. For some, the perceived objectivity of the new molecular approaches and the neutrality of molecules would render anthropology more natural-scientific and by inference less culturally contaminated. Others, to the contrary, believed that this legacy demanded a holistic and ethically reflexive anthropology. The different perceptions thus went along with different understandings of such crucial terms as "anthropology" and "history." In the paper, I revisit interfaces between different anthropological fields in the U.S. context and suggest that the beliefs in a hierarchy of approaches as well as in a nature free from culture embodied in the DNA-sequence has worked as one of the primary obstacles to an integration of these fields.

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As the number of persons aged 65 and older is increasing dramatically in both developed and developing nations of the world, the health and well-being of elders has become a worldwide public health concern. Although older adults are now found in higher proportions across all cultures, the biology, behavior, and environment vary tremendously across older populations. Biomedical research largely follows a reductionist paradigm separating the domains of culture and biology. Even when health is examined in association with culture and behavior, biomedical researchers largely focus on static unidirectional associations instead of examining the dynamic multidirectional impact of culture, behavior, and the environment on physiology and ultimately health. Since aging and the processes of senescence clearly involve complex interactions among biological, environmental, and cultural domains, anthropologists with a bio-cultural and evolutionary perspective are well-equipped to study variation in aging and senescence. While relatively few biological anthropologists have focused their attention on aging, a growing literature has demonstrated the utility of biocultural approaches to aging. This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue that highlights the core of the biological anthropology of aging.

This paper contributes to the development of an anthropological understanding of the emerging political economies of renewable energy in the contemporary United States. It explores efforts to develop place-based, local systems of renewable energy production and places them in the context of a larger history of the political economy and social construction of U. S. energy systems. Marked by emancipatory discourses of local self-reliance, decentralization, ecological sustainability, energy security, and community-scale governance, contemporary renewable energy initiatives bear a strong resemblance to the small-scale, grassroots energy actions that emerged during the energy crises of the 1970s. Both past and current local renewable energy efforts are also deeply embedded within and subject to contemporary regimes of environmental governance, ecological modernization, and neoliberal responses to ecological crises. Using emerging energy initiatives in Washington, DC as a case study, I discuss three key elements of the political and social construction of contemporary local renewable energy production-ownership, governance, and sustainable urban place-making-and examine the problematic theme of 'localism' that links them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers anthropology news briefs as of August 2013. It states that former editor Tom Boelstroff reacted with the decision relative to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) allowing the same-sex marriage in the U.S. In addition, the stone circles which was found in Gambia in 1964 and was considered as tombs were declared to be World Heritage site. Moreover, the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) awarded professor Tim Ingold a 2014 Huxley Medal for his service to anthropology.

Sensory science is a scientific discipline that measures human responses to the sensory qualities of food products. In order for study subjects to reflect on their tasting experience, the products under study have to be put into the mouth: chewed, sucked, savored, and (possibly) swallowed. The mouth and its actions are key areas of interest for sensory science: the movements of the mouth can potentially affect how subjects perceive sensory qualities and thus determine the reliability of data. To control the actions of the mouth, sensory tests may include strict instructions on chewing behavior. This paper explores the concept of the mouth in sensory science: how is the mouth controlled, imagined, and organized in an experimental modality? It draws on the analogy of work to elucidate the mouth as a regulated and productive instrument in sensory tests. As a correlate to the productive mouth, it also shows how the consumer's mouth is conceptualized either in contrast to, or as emanating from, standardized behaviors. Based on ethnographic research with US sensory scientists and on sensory science literature, it examines how a focus on work and its excesses can illuminate the mouth as the intimate site that scales up to mass markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2000, the self-styled 'anthropological journalist' Patrick Tierney began to make public his work claiming that the Yanomamö people of South America had been actively-indeed brutally-harmed by the sociobiological anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist-physician James Neel. Following a florid summary of Tierney's claims by the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) saw fit to take Tierney's claims seriously by conducting a major investigation into the matter. This paper focuses on the AAA's problematic actions in this case but also provides previously unpublished information on Tierney's falsehoods. The work presented is based on a year of research by a historian of medicine and science. The author intends the work to function as a cautionary tale to scholarly associations, which have the challenging duty of protecting scholarship and scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges in the era of the Internet and twenty-four-hour news cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we first discuss various vantage points gained through the authors’ experience of approaching conservation through a “cultural lens.” We then draw out more general concerns that many anthropologists hold with respect to conservation, summarizing and commenting on the work of the Conservation and Community Working Group within the Anthropology and Environment Section of the American Anthropological Association. Here we focus on both critiques and contributions the discipline of anthropology makes with regard to conservation, and show how anthropologists are moving beyond conservation critiques to engage actively with conservation practice and policy. We conclude with reflections on the possibilities for enhancing transdisciplinary dialogue and practice through reflexive questioning, the adoption of disciplinary humility, and the realization that “cross-border” collaboration among conservation scholars and practitioners can strengthen the political will necessary to stem the growing commoditization and ensuing degradation of the earth’s ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a meditation on contemporary rituals in the United States associated with death-in this case, the memorial. The essay addresses David R. MAINES' advocacy of using narrative to address a social (and anthropological) event. There are social expectations at memorials, rituals of talking good about the deceased, rituals of grief. Friends and family come together to communicate about the deceased. Strangers connect by their mutual connection to the dead. Every culture has its own set of rituals and rules when it comes to honoring and admiring the dead; this one is American. From an autoethnographical approach, the author reveals his own inner ritual, a personal memory, of a friend and former lover who has passed. The author discusses the processes of recording dialogue and experience via memory, and the criteria for quality in this autoethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1920s and 1930s geneticist L.C. Dunn of Columbia University cautioned Americans against endorsing eugenic policies and called attention to eugenicists’ less than rigorous practices. Then, from the mid-1940s to early 1950s he attacked scientific racism and Nazi Rassenhygiene by co-authoring Heredity, Race and Society with Theodosius Dobzhansky and collaborating with members of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) on their international campaign against racism. Even though shaking the foundations of scientific discrimination was Dunn’s primary concern during the interwar and post-World War II years, his campaigns had ancillary consequences for the discipline. He contributed to the professionalization of genetics during the 1920s and 1930s and sought respectability for human genetics in the 1940s and 1950s. My article aims to elucidate the activist scientist’s role in undermining scientific discrimination by exploring aspects of Dunn’s scientific work and political activism from the 1920s to 1950s. Definitions are provided for scientific discrimination and activist scientist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with maturities, genders, spaces, and bodies as historicizable co-constructs, pluralized rubrics and gradients that emerge and function as interdependent ideas. This view allows reflection on nuances between children, boys, men, boyhood, and masculinities as anchors for geographic inquiry. Diverse contexts are reviewed with an eye on mutual if mutable reciprocities between ideas of gender and maturity, and between gender/maturity and locality. The body of boys importantly figures in, and is figured by, these reciprocal significations which is explored in anthropological descriptions of 'male transition', and in contemporary historical observations in the West, and 'America' more specifically. A rigorous and cross-cultural intersectional focus is required to anchor children's geographies not just to 'childhood' as a site of entitlement, but more inclusively to local and interpenetrated ideas of becoming, belonging, and embodiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most projections of climate change and its regional impacts focus on overall changes in the state of the climate system, useful information can also be found in the evolution of the climate system from one state to another. Here the authors introduce one method for identifying regions in which significant and systematic long-term nonlinear evolutions may be present, even given quasi-linear anthropogenic forcing. Using climate change projections taken from simulations of NCAR’s Community Climate System Model, version 3 (CCSM3), the authors then employ the technique to isolate systematic nonlinear behavior of soil moisture variations over the United States. While the projections presented here only represent the results from one model system, it is argued that such nonlinear behavior is an important characteristic of future climate change that should be considered when discussing both short-term and long-term impacts of anthropogenic climate forcing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My article inaugurates a new Transforming Anthropology series entitled "Interrogating Race and National Consciousness in the Diaspora." The new series originates from a research workshop held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The 2003 workshop signaled the need for an ongoing forum for engaging our international colleagues who are transforming anthropology from their respective corners of the world. I begin the series by highlighting the insights gained from a comparative reading of the first two articles to appear in the series: Hayumi Higuchi's "The Billiken Club: 'Race Leaders' Educating Children (1921-1940)" and Ken Chujo's "The Daughters of the American Revolution and Its Attitude toward African Americans." The latter article explores elite efforts to produce a hegemonic definition of American citizenship, in contrast to the former article, which reveals counter-hegemonic maneuvers to construct a more dynamic space of American belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The determination of sex and estimation of stature are among the important aspect of forensic anthropology. These characteristics display population specific variation and therefore, need further attention for major populations of the world. The aim of this special issue is to bring together scientific papers dealing with new anthropological techniques and knowledge about populations that are least known. The present issue is composed of 12 papers by individual scientists from Germany, South Africa, India, The United States, Croatia, Spain, Poland, and Turkey. The samples, those were analyses by these authors had wide range including remains from archaeological and mass grave sites and dictatorial regimes. The papers show that still osteometry seems to be the preferred technique because they are more effective in determining sex and estimating body height. Forensic anthropology seems to be developing technique for specific population groups and increasing its ability to deal with diverse population around the world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The relatively slim social science literature on drug treatment is reviewed. Attention is paid to the institutionalization of treatment at the meso (local community or clinic) level and the micro (client) level rather than to the more commonly examined macro (societal or national) level. The inter-penetration across these levels of ideologies and practices around drugs is revealed through discussion of the targeting of certain populations for treatment, methods of client control in treatment settings, and the client's view of treatment. In the literature, drug users are often presented as passive individuals, subject to various forms of restrictive social control in therapeutic settings. Their perspective on the processes or efficacy of treatment is rarely sought. The concept of drug treatment as necessarily beneficial to clients is questioned in this paper.