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Using long-term research in a Navajo community as an example, this paper examines how the social construction of anthropological research (including theoretical frameworks and writing strategies) shapes the silences and omissions in any particular historical period. Gender, ethnicity, age, and economic/political transformation also play roles unveiling some omissions while creating others as relationships shift and deepen over decades. I outline three major periods: the 1960s, when a social science model that emphasized theoretical problems, data analysis, and objectivist prose held sway; the 1970s, when feminist anthropology reoriented analysis to a focus on women, power, and authority; and the "dialogic turn," when ethnography began to include women's voices, the presence of the anthropologist in the text, and attention to the power relationship between the researcher and the interviewee. Each period entails its own omissions and silences, but acknowledging them allows anthropologists to make more provisional conclusions and be forward looking, seeking ways to shift our future theoretical frameworks and reinterpret our observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which explores the interpersonal and inter-group violence in pre-contact Polynesian islands, focusing on islands that developed from a common cultural heritage. The author distinguished interpersonal violence as violence that involves a dyadic action between two or a few individuals. He notes that most of the peaceful islands had populations under about 1,000 people, and that within this group, the most peaceful societies were those located more than 100 kilometer (km) from their nearest neighbor.

Although the concept of creolization is undergoing avid and close examination by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, the foundational assumptions by which the concept is constituted, both implicit and explicit, have been unevenly examined. The notion of agency is a key dimension of the creolization concept. Discussion of creolization and agency in a number of different usage contexts makes the creolization concept's theoretical and ideological tasks more transparent, and these tasks have implications for our understanding of the relationship between structure and agency, between power and forms of consciousness, and between theory building and ethnographic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of anthropology, according to George Stocking, represents an argument between Enlightenment and Romantic impulses: on the one hand the universalism of anthropos, on the other the diversitarianism of ethnos. In its structural and relativist emphases, the latter impulse has tended to predominate in social and cultural anthropology. A case can be made for the importance of emphasizing a continuing Enlightenment heritage in social-scientific thought. Introspection provides a methodology for gaining access to universal human truths concerning individual human capacities and conditions. Through the psychically intensive study of the self one accedes to a psychically extensive appreciation of the other, of Everyone. One comes to know the psyche as a constant in human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was will die Anthropologie? Freud's analysis of masochism can serve as a lens with which to explore the long-standing anthropological interest in powerless or disenfranchised people. Recent anthropological work can be examined not only in the terms encouraged by its own diegesis as a relation between anthropologist and the powerless but also as elements in a constellation that includes anthropology as a discipline and capitalism. Exploration of the libidinal structure within which our discipline has taken shape—that is to say, the structure that gives not just possibility and meaning but also pleasure to the practice of anthropology—can shed light on the nature of the pleasure that anthropologists derive from identification with the powerless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What might an ethnographic study of late capitalism look like? Anthropologists have answered this question by increasingly assuming that what distinguishes their discipline is the study of culture- the culture of capitalism, of globalization, and so forth. Instead, we need to balance such concerns with a focus on the material conditions of capitalist reproduction that are not immediately available to experience so that we can expose the way in which processes of social reproduction relate to our experience of being in the world. An exploration of programmes for the development of ‘regional economies’ in Europe shows how these programmes have repositioned social science intellectuals, thereby affecting the ways in which they configure their research and their images of reality. Insofar as these ‘findings’ become the basis for policy, they produce a reality with which the people in these sites have to deal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines female-biased breastfeeding in Bwa Mawego, a horticultural community in the Commonwealth of Dominica, and test hypotheses from parental investment theory about the reasons for such bias. Multiple linear regression suggests that sex differences in children's time allocation to productive activity account for female-biased breastfeeding in this community. Ethnographic data from Bwa Mawego suggest that female-biased maternal care results from male socioeconomic marginality and its effects on sex-specific risks of parental investment.

This article comments on the relationship between tradition and the manufacture of stone tools in finding the holy grail of lithic studies. The authors question whether the evidence presented justifies dismissing the presence of knapping traditions. To resolve this debate, they propose an alternative approach to the meaning of social traditions. They suggest that the given definition for social tradition has an obvious flaw, namely, that it requires the existence of a tightly bounded social group. Social traditions exist despite good evidence from human foragers indicating that localized gatherings of humans are fluid and fuzzy, not tightly bounded.

Collaborative ethnography-the collaboration of researchers and subjects in the production of ethnographic texts-offers us a powerful way to engage the public with anthropology. As one of many academic/applied approaches, contemporary collaborative ethnography stems from a well-established historical tradition of collaboratively produced texts that are often overlooked. Feminist and postmodernist efforts to recenter ethnography along dialogical lines further contextualize this historically situated collaborative practice. The goals of collaborative ethnography (both historical and contemporary) are now powerfully converging with those of a public anthropology that pulls together academic and applied anthropology in an effort to serve humankind more directly and more immediately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a reply on the argument of Kuper against the indigenous rights in Canada. Argument on the assertion that anthropological knowldge effects views of indigenous people; Comment on the pronouncements of Kuper about indigenous people; Estrangement of indigenous representatives from native communities.

The article presents an investigation of the circumstances under which helping-at-the-nest might be advantageous in a Hungarian Gypsy population. Several topics are also discussed in the article, including the reasons for the Gypsies' practice of female-biased investment, the evaluation of the behavior of the Gypsies, and the assumptions and predictions on the helpers-at-the-nest hypothesis. It mentions that unlike from other Gypsies, Hungarian Gypsies live in small settled communities, some of which form isolated villages.

The article presents a study on regions based on social structure relative to diffusionism. Three regions were formed, the Middle Old World, Canada West and Eurasian-Circumpolar. Ethnic groups populating these three regions belong to three linguistic macrofamilies: Nostratic, Afrisian and Sino-Caucasian. These three macrofamilies belong to a single megafamily, suggested as Paleolithic. However, the name seems misleading since at the end of Upper Palaeolithic there would have been other languages.

The article investigates whether cultural consensus analysis can be used to examine the central conceptual goal of idealism. The cultural consensus analysis has following advantages: it permits testing of its claims, its assumptions are made explicit and it has been validated using simulated data. However, cultural consensus analysis has not been tested using ethnographic data. It was concluded that operational and conceptual difficulties associated with idealism are dire enough to turn to an alternative approach--realism.

The article discusses on the social and behavioral scientists that conventionally judge the reliability, validity, and generalizability of findings on the reference to the criteria set by classical statistical theory. The social and behavioral research entails the study of cultural phenomena and on what the anthropologists call ethnography, as it refers to the processes and the products of research that seeks to document on what the people believe, feel, and do to situate those phenomena at specific times in the history of their life experiences, which includes pertinent global events and processes.

Anthropology is today in search of a public voice for communicating its knowledge, insights, and understanding to a broad public audience. One of the key historical voices of anthropology, the museum, has grown increasingly silent as it struggles with issues of power in the representation of Native peoples and the burden of large, dated collections of material culture. The potential remains for the museum to regain its role as a voice for anthropology by ceding power and easing its overwhelming dependence on the material objects of culture. Museums with a focus on public learning can serve as forums for bringing the full range of anthropological endeavor to a wide and diverse audience, Reintegrating museums into anthropology will require changes in both sides of the relationship: academic anthropology will have to accept museums as a critical vehicle for public communication, and museums will have to commit to significant changes in curatorial responsibilities, exhibits, and collection practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In bracketing certain ‘Western’ Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoretically a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be ‘suspending the ethical’ in our dealings with the ‘other.’ Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to he worth anything at all, must he ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imagine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged anthropology might take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the international conference entitled "Ethnic Traditional Culture and Folk Knowledge" which was held in Moscow on March 21-24, 1994, organized by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Papers being presented covered an array of geographical settings and historical context from authors coming from U.S. and Western Europe along with Argentina, India, Israel, Kuwait and from other former Soviet Republics.

The article comments on the paper of E. Wilmsen entitled "On the Search for (Truth) and Authority: A Reply to Lee and Guenther," which was published in volume 34 of the "Current Anthropology" journal. Wilmsen claimed that the mid-19th-century, Dobe region was an area of mercantile activity. The author remarks that Wilmsen's evidence for the early penetration and subjugation of the Nyae Nyae-Dobe by merchant capital is entirely incorrect, revealing an error and misrepsentation unrivaled in recent anthropology, citing the detailed 19th-century maps where the Nyae Nyae-Dobe was represented as virtual blank from the period of Wilmsen's alleged mercantile boom.

The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) is used by some researchers to argue that foragers are less virilocal than nonforagers. Anthropologists have assumed that humans generally tend to disperse females, resulting in the dominance of virilocal organization. This assumption has been used in evolutionary models which sometimes highlight the importance of virilocality in early hominid social evolution. However, in this article, the author would like to argue that given the structure of the data available about human societies, especially in the form found in the "Ethnographic Atlas" and the SCCS, trends can be expected even in the absence of systematic patterning or correlation between traits. They need not be and, are indeed, likely not to be the result of evolutionary or social rules. Using a simple Monte Carlo simulation method, the author tested the hypothesis that clear trends could emerge from SCCS-like data in which there was no relationship between subsistence and postmarital residence.

This article comments on a study entitled "On Tools and Traditions," previously published in "Current Anthropology." The study presents a much-needed anthropological approach to tradition that allows individual hominins to absorb an understanding of the ways others do things and then reproduce those actions and outcomes for themselves. The definition presented for tradition decouples learning from teaching while at the same time allowing traditional knowledge to frame a broad understanding of how things are done.

The article presents the author's response on comments made on his study "Language as Culture in U.S. Anthropology: Three Paradigms." According to the author, language is so universal in human affairs that one can never talks too much about it. In the beginning of the 20th century, language tended to be taken for granted or reduced to the mere expression of already formed thoughts and social processes, in the consolidations of the social sciences in Europe.

The article presents various topics related to anthropology. A study conducted by first-time mother Uta Papen discusses the potential of autoethnography as a new methodology in literacy studies that includes the emotional side of literacy. Another study conducted by the researchers from Great Britain focuses on the value of bringing perspectives from contemporary social theory to studies of human teeth. The 2005 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act was specifically designed to stop the flood of immigrants and the general uncertainty accompanying rapid socioeconomic change.

The article presents the reply of Susana Narotzky regarding the comments made by Vasiliki P. Neofotistos to her ethnographic project "The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Ethnographic Realism." She comments that ethnographic literature need to put into communication publicly and she cited that it is a kind of awareness that people should know about. She pointed out that her article did not focus on the contemporaneous ethnographical work and its sociological and anthropological points of view are utilized in a common sense manner.

The article offers news briefs related to anthropology. An ethnographic work in Antwerp, Belgium by Jürgen Jaspers published in the journal "Linguistics and Education," embraces self-conscious speech used by Belgian-born Moroccan adolescents. A study published in "Folia Primatologica," by C. Ross and G. Regan indicates that marmosets acquire genes from their fraternal twins besides their parents. Alex Chepstow-lusty and colleagues used the knowledge of mites habitats to study the social and economic changes of prehistoric Andean groups.

The article presents the author's views regarding the article "Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines," by Immanuel Wallerstein. While the author supports much of Wallerstein's agenda, he questions whether these points actually benefit from a merger of the social sciences. He also questions if classic disciplinary boundaries in anthropology and sociology cited by Wallerstein really are a major obstacle.

The article presents the author's views on the significance of cultural-social anthropology. Anthropologists had started studying tribal, forest dwelling communities as anthropology was considered the study of other cultures, so there was some reluctance when the author wanted to study the Kashmiri Pandit community. The validity of anthropologist Immanuel Wallerstein's argument regarding the abolition of the barriers of social science disciplines should be recognized.

The article presents the author's comment on the article "Sows' Ears and Silver Linings," by Sidney W. Mintz, published within the issue, which focuses on the fieldwork in anthropology. According to the author, Mintz explores the relationship between anthropology and ethnography which is the direct, up-close, full-bodied observation of human practices and ideas. The author views that both anthropology and ethnography are effective and difficult to separate.

Examines the history of anthropology. Concreteness of the history of anthropology; History of ethnography; Complexity of the origins of the academic anthropology; Influence of science and technology to anthropology.

The article presents the author's views regarding the article "Anthropology, Sociology, and Other Dubious Disciplines," by Immanuel Wallerstein, which has been published within the issue of the periodical. Wallerstein's article focused on anthropology and the current state of social sciences. A person's position in the global division of labor should be considered to determine the prospects of reconstruction of the social sciences and anthropological research.

The article presents a calendar of events by various social science organizations around the world from June 2001 to July 2003. The Brunel International Conference in Social Anthropology will be held on June 21-23, 2001. The 6th Annual Pakistan Workshop will be held on September 15-17, 2001. The 15th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences will be held on July 5-12, 2003.

The article presents a calendar of events related to anthropology. An Annual Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics will be held during March 14-17 in Seattle, Washington. Another event titled "Working Group on Law, Culture, and the Humanities," will be held during March 27-29 in Washington D.C. A conference titled "Delta Studies Symposium IV: Creative Expressions Beyond the Blues," will be held during April 16-18 in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Another conference titled "Third International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences," will be held during May 21-23 in Copenhagen, Denmark.