Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 25, 1996

Across cultures, narrative emerges early in communicative development and is a fundamental means of making sense of experience. Narrative and self are inseparable in that narrative is simultaneously born out of experience and gives shape to experience. Narrative activity provides tellers with an opportunity to impose order on otherwise disconnected events, and to create continuity between past, present, and imagined worlds. Narrative also interfaces self and society, constituting a crucial resource for socializing emotions, attitudes, and identities, developing interpersonal relationships, and constituting membership in a community. Through various genres and modes; through discourse, grammar, lexicon, and prosody; and through the dynamics of collaborative authorship, narratives bring multiple, partial selves to life.

The household has emerged as a focus of archaeological inquiry over the past decade. This review summarizes issues raised by economic and feminist anthropologists about the meaning of the terms household and domestic and then considers research on household archaeology, craft specialization, and gender relevant to the study of the organization of domestic labor. It is argued that the common functional definition of the household as an adaptive mechanism reacting to environmental and social conditions underconceptualizes the household and renders its study unlikely to contribute to our understanding of economic and social processes in past societies. Studies of craft specialization and women's economic production that emphasize what members of the domestic group do and how that action is valued are more successful in demonstrating the dynamic interaction between household and society.

Archaeologists are in the midst of restructuring their relationship with Native Americans. The legal, political, social, and intellectual ramifications of this process are reviewed to examine the fundamental changes occurring in the way archaeology is conducted in the Americas. Much of the impetus for this change resulted from the criticism of archaeology by Native Americans, which led to passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). NAGPRA has indelibly changed how archaeologists will work in the United States. The issues raised by Native Americans about why and how archaeological research is conducted, however, go beyond NAGPRA to the paradigmatic basis of archaeology. Archaeologists will have new opportunities available to them if they work in partnership with Native Americans in studying the rich archaeological record in the Americas.

The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires universities, museums, and federal agencies to inventory their archeological collections to prepare for the repatriation of skeletons to their Native American descendants. The loss of these collections will be a detriment to the study of North American osteology, but the inventory and repatriation process has increased the number of skeletons studied from about 30% to nearly 100%. The availability of funds stimulated by this law produced osteological data collection and systematization unprecedented in the history of osteology. The possibility of forming partnerships between Native Americans and osteologists has the potential of producing a vibrant future for North American osteology and the new bioarcheology.

Any understanding of contemporary biodiversity change in the Americas is likely to be uninformative and misleading if it employs a prehistoric baseline imbued with pristine characteristics. Archaeological evidence clearly displays a protracted history of environmental transformations at varying geographical and temporal scales throughout the Holocene (that is, the past 10,000 years). Because of problems inherent to the interpretation of the archaeological record, the genesis of these transformations often can only be ambiguously attributed to environmental and/or anthropogenic origins. However, at any given time or place, both the distribution of the numbers of different kinds of organisms and their relative abundances were in a constant state of flux since the retreat of glacial cover some 10,000 years ago. Here I review archaeological evidence to illustrate the dynamism of prehistoric biodiversity, which can be attributed to environmental events, to anthropogenic causation, or as a response of these to each other.

This review contrasts the relative lack of interest in “popular culture” within anthropology with the close, increasingly critical attention this concept has received within cultural studies. Rejecting both a production-oriented model of a manipulative mass culture imposed from above and a reception-oriented model of an expressive culture of the people, cultural studies scholars broke with essentialized conceptions and redefined the popular in Gramscian terms, as a zone of contestation, a site where the struggle for hegemony unfolds. The review uses this approach to relate the production of popular culture to class formation in the United States. Against overemphasis on the ideological effectivity of popular culture and a revisionist tendency to redefine it in affirmative, politically essentialized terms, the review suggests that contradictions and instabilities characterize all stages of the popular cultural circuit: commodity, text, and lived culture.

This review discusses pharmaceuticals as social and cultural phenomena by following their “life cycle” from production, marketing, and prescription to distribution, purchasing, consumption, and finally their efficacy. Each phase has its own particular context, actors, and transactions and is characterized by different sets of values and ideas. The anthropology of pharmaceuticals is relevant to medical anthropology and health policy. It also touches the heart of general anthropology with its long-time interest in the concepts of culture vs nature, symbolization and social transformation, and its more recent concerns with the cultural construction of the body and processes of globalization and localization. The study of transactions and meanings of pharmaceuticals in diverse social settings provides a particularly appropriate empirical base for addressing these new theoretical issues.

This review discusses changes in Amazonian indigenous anthropology since the synthesis presented in the Handbook of South American Indians. The past few years have seen the emergence of an image of Amazonia characterized by a growing emphasis on the complexity of indigenous social formations and the ecological diversity of the region. This new image of society and nature is taking shape in a theoretical context characterized by the synergistic interaction between structural and historical approaches, by an attempt to go beyond monocausal explanatory models (whether naturalistic or culturalistic) in favor of a dialectical view of the relations between society and nature, and by hopes of a “new synthesis” that could integrate the knowledge accumulated in the fields of human ecology, social anthropology, archeology, and history.

This chapter reviews what is presently known about the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and examines the role that infant sleeping arrangements may play in reducing SIDS risks. Alongside sleep laboratory-based experimental evidence comparing bedsharing and solitary sleeping mother-infant pairs, an evolutionary and cross-cultural framework is used to argue that infant-parent cosleeping is biologically, psychologically, and socially the most appropriate context for the development of healthy infant sleep physiology. It is also the context within which potentially more optimal breastfeeding activities for both the mother and infant are most likely to emerge. A survey of cross-cultural data and laboratory findings suggest that where infant-parent cosleeping and breastfeeding are practiced in tandem in nonsmoking households, and are practiced by parents specifically to promote infant health, the chances of an infant dying from SIDS should be reduced.

Grammaticalization—the transformation of lexical items and phrases into grammatical forms—has been the focus of considerable study. Two chief directions can be identified. The first involves etymology and the taxonomy of possible changes in language, in which semantic and cognitive accounts of words and categories of words are considered to explain the changes. The second involves the discourse contexts within which grammaticalization occurs. Some researchers have questioned the standard idea of a stable synchronic a priori grammar in which linguistic structure is distinct from discourse, and have sought to replace this with the idea of “emergent grammar” in which repetitions of various kinds in discourse lead to perpetual structuration.

In relating the child labor debate to the observed variety of children's work patterns, this review reveals the limits of current notions such as labor, gender, and exploitation in the analysis of this work. Particularly in the developing world, most work undertaken by children has for a long time been explained away as socialization, education, training, and play. Anthropology has helped disclose that age is used with gender as the justification for the value accorded to work. The low valuation of children's work translates not only in children's vulnerability in the labor market but, more importantly, in their exclusion from remunerated employment. I argue that current child labor policies, because they fail to address the exclusion of children from the production of value, reinforce paradoxically children's vulnerability to exploitation.

Over the past decade anthropologists and epidemiologists have begun to move beyond the “benign neglect” that characterized their prior relationship. Some of the most important collaborations between these disciplines concern themes of culture change and stress, social stratification, and the unpacking of other social and cultural variables. Anthropologists have criticized and expanded epidemiological notions of risk and vulnerability. Multidisciplinary teams of anthropologists and epidemiologists have constructed new measures and used multiple methods to increase the validity of their results. Disputes about classification have also linked the two disciplines. Collaborative projects between anthropologists and epidemiologists are leading to more nuanced and accurate descriptions of human behavior and more appropriate and effective interventions. Epidemiological techniques and ideas are also being used for anthropological ends, because disease often spreads along the framework of social structure. These many forms of collaboration create the foundations of a cultural epidemiology.

The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number of fossil human specimens discovered in China. A better understanding of the tempo and mode of human evolution in Asia during the Pleistocene can be gained as a result. This new evidence has important implications for understanding the course of human evolution not only in Asia but throughout the world. Major issues in human evolutionary studies such as the timing of the initial hominid dispersal event and the factors behind major transitions in the fossil record are addressed in light of these recent finds.

Recent perspectives in anthropological research define a disaster as a process/event involving the combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of vulnerability. From this basic understanding three general topical areas have developed: (a) a behavioral and organizational response approach, (b) a social change approach, and (c) a political economic/environmental approach, focusing on the historical-structural dimensions of vulnerability to hazards, particularly in the developing world. Applied anthropological contributions to disaster management are discussed as well as research on perception and assessment of hazard risk. The article closes with a discussion of potentials in hazard and disaster research for theory building in anthropology, particularly in issues of human-environment relations and sociocultural change.

Conservation programs for protected areas and plant genetic resources have evolved in similar ways, beginning with a focus on single species and expanding to ecosystem strategies that involve the participation of local people. Anthropologists have described the increasing importance of the participation of local people in conservation programs, both of local populations in protected area management and of farmers in plant genetic resources. Both protected areas and plant genetic resources link local populations, national agencies, and international organizations. Anthropological research (a) documents local knowledge and practices that influence the selection and maintenance of crop varieties and the conservation of rare and endangered species in protected areas, and (b) clarifies the different concerns and definitions of biodiversity held by local populations and international conservationists. In addition, anthropologists operate in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies, participating in policy debates and acting as advocates and allies of local populations of farmers and indigenous peoples.

This review describes some recent, unexpected findings concerning variation in spatial language across cultures, and places them in the context of the general anthropology of space on the one hand, and theories of spatial cognition in the cognitive sciences on the other. There has been much concern with the symbolism of space in anthropological writings, but little on concepts of space in practical activities. This neglect of everyday spatial notions may be due to unwitting ethnocentrism, the assumption in Western thinking generally that notions of space are universally of a single kind. Recent work shows that systems of spatial reckoning and description can in fact be quite divergent across cultures, linguistic differences correlating with distinct cognitive tendencies. This unexpected cultural variation raises interesting questions concerning the relation between cultural and linguistic concepts and the biological foundations of cognition. It argues for more sophisticated models relating culture and cognition than we currently have available.

This review considers the following questions: Why is the city undertheorized in anthropology? Why is an anthropological voice rarely heard in the urban studies and urban policy discourse? Anthropological literature published since 1989 is reviewed, with an emphasis on contributions to urban theory and the locating of anthropological studies within the broader context of urban studies. The city is found not to be absent in anthropological theory, but it has had no major theoretical impact. The images of the ethnic city, divided city, deindustrialized city, and global city have been most influential, as has research in the areas of racism, migration, poststructural studies of conflict and resistance, and critiques of architecture and urban planning. The literature continues to focus on the links between the experience of individuals and sociopolitical and economic processes as well as on the cultural meaning of the urban environment. The newest areas of inquiry include the study of urban space and time, metropolitan knowledge, and ethnoaesthetics.