Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 26, 1997

Archaeology has begun to contribute to the history of spirituality in the Eastern Woodlands of North America to complement the perspectives offered by the comparative study of religions and by ethnological, folkloric, art historical, and astronomical research. Support can be found in the forms and types of ritual paraphernalia and in the associated iconography for the thesis that shamanism was a basic form of religious experience that extended back to the earliest material traces. Elaborations upon this foundation became most conspicuous during the Mississippian Period when social hierarchies developed upon an expanded, agriculturally supported population. Animal imagery changed, ancestor cults became elaborated, and cosmography took on increased importance in architecture, site layout, and mortuary rites. The canonical forms of the iconography of this period have become known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. Since European contact, practices and beliefs associated with social hierarchies have disappeared or transformed.

As a strategy of self-representation and a device of power, Europeanization is fundamentally reorganizing territoriality and peoplehood, the two principles of group identification that have shaped modern European order. It is the result of a new level and intensity of integration that has been a reaction to the destruction of this century's first and second world wars and the collapse of the cold-war division of Europe into an East and West. Driven above all by the organizational and administrative power of the European Union (EU), Europeanization is still distinct from the EU. Neither Europeanization nor the EU will replace the nation-state, which, for now, remains a superior form for organizing democratic participation and territoriality. Nonetheless, they will likely force states to yield some questions of sovereignty—above all, military, political, and economic—to the EU or other transnational bodies. Nations are now being brought into new relations with each other, creating new alliances and enmities, and are even recreating themselves. The authors explore five domains of practice where the process of Europeanization might be fruitfully studied: language, money, tourism, sex, and sport. They suggest dealing with the EU as a continental political unit of a novel order and with Europeanization pragmatically as both a vision and a process.

Humans are only one of the species produced by the hominoid evolutionary radiation. Common and pygmy chimpanzees (our closest relatives), gorillas, orangutans, and the lesser apes also belong to this group. In humans, patterns of genetic variation are becoming increasingly better characterized by modern molecular methods. Understanding human variation in an evolutionary context, however, requires comparison of human patterns with those of other hominoids, to reveal features shared among hominoids and those unique to humans. Genetic variation among chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans is beginning to be characterized, so that comparisons are now possible.

From genetic data, several different kinds of information can be reconstructed, including the evolutionary relatedness of subspecies and populations, time estimates for evolutionary divergences, past population dynamics, extent of gene flow over geographical landscapes, and group social structure. Knowledge of hominoid genetic variation is also relevant to applied fields such as primate conservation and medicine.

This chapter reviews current understanding of the associations between physical activity and nutrition in children 1 to 10 years of age. In general, both undernutrition and overnutrition are accompanied by lower levels of physical activity than in controls. In children of normal nutritional status, an association between physical activity and body composition has been difficult to demonstrate. It is clear that levels of physical activity in children are responsive to the physical and social environments, as well as to a child's nutritional status. In children of normal nutritional status, the level of physical activity increases with age in young children and then decreases in early adolescence, and males tend to be more physically active than females in a given population. Although there is a perception that children are less physically active than they were in the past, trends in physical activity through time are not known.

The phrase “identity politics” has come to encapsulate a wide diversity of oppositional movements in contemporary Latin America, marking a transition away from the previous moment of unified, “national-popular” projects. This review takes a dual approach to the literature emerging from that transition, focusing on changes in both the objects of study and the analysts' lens. Four questions drive this inquiry: When did the moment of identity politics arise? What accounts for the shift? How to characterize its contents? What consequences follow for the people involved? Past answers to such questions often have tended to fall into polarized materialist and discursive theoretical camps. In contrast, this review emphasizes emergent scholarship that takes insights from both while refusing the dichotomy, and assigning renewed importance to empirically grounded and politically engaged research.

This review essay illustrates how changes in the conception of gender define the historical production of feminist ethnography in four distinct periods. In the first period (1880–1920), biological sex was seen to determine social roles, and gender was not seen as separable from sex, though it was beginning to emerge as an analytical category. The second period (1920–1960) marks the separation of sex from gender as sex was increasingly seen as indeterminative of gender roles. In the third period (1960–1980), the distinction between sex and gender was elaborated into the notion of a sex/gender system—the idea that different societies organized brute biological facts into particular gender regimes. By the contemporary period (1980–1996), critiques of “gender essentialism” (the reification of “woman” as a biological or universal category) suggest that the analytical separation between sex and gender is miscast because “sex” is itself a social category.