Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 27, 1998

A major and continuing debate in anthropology concerns the question of whether modern Homo sapiens emerged as a separate species roughly 200,000 years ago in Africa (recent African origin model) or as the consequence of evolution within a polytypic species spread across several regions of the Old World (multiregional model). Genetic data have been used to address this debate, focusing on the analysis of gene trees, genetic diversity within populations, and genetic differences between populations. Although the genetic data do provide support for the recent African origin model, they also are compatible with the multiregional model. The genetic evidence provides little direct inference regarding phylogeny, but it can tell us a great deal about ancient demography. Currently, neither model of modern human origins is unequivocally supported to the exclusion of the other.

“Mission archaeology” is a novel conjunction of terms devised to focus attention on an archaeology of mission sites, and thereby on the light that can be shed on the process of the Christianization of the Americas by examining the material culture of missions. Discussion centers on a summary of mission research in the Spanish-occupied territories of North America and Mayan Mesoamerica. I then draw conclusions from these data, and from anthropological and historical analyses of mission encounters, to suggest where mission studies should be headed and the role that archaeology can play in expanding our knowledge of the mission transformation.

Archaeologists currently studying the African diaspora generally examine three broad issues, in decreasing order of prominence: the material identification of African identity, the archaeology of freedom at maroon sites, and race and racism. While conducting this research, several scholars have learned that many nonarchaeologists are deeply interested in their interpretations. At the present time, the archaeology of the African diaspora is not a truly global pursuit and the New World is overrepresented. This situation should change as archaeologists around the world discover post-Columbian archaeology and take up diasporic investigations.

The late twentieth century has seen far-reaching changes in the translocal cultural regimes known as world religions. This review examines the politics and meanings of recent changes in three such religions: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It highlights the nature of the forces reshaping religious meanings and authority, the processes promoting conversion and standardization, and the implications of these religious refigurations for our understanding of late modernity itself. Though modernity is multiple and every tradition unique, this review suggests that all contemporary religions confront a similar structural predicament, related to the globalization of mass societies and the porous pluralism of late modernity.

For a long time anthropology was defined by the exoticism of its subject matter and by the distance, conceived as both cultural and geographic, that separated the researcher from the researched group. This situation has changed. In a few years we may assess the twentieth century as characterized by a long and complex movement, with theoretical and political implications, that replaced the ideal of the radical encounter with alterity with research at home. But “home” will, as always, incorporate many meanings, and anthropology will maintain, in its paradigmatic assumption, a socio-genetic aim toward an appreciation for, and an understanding of, difference. In some cases, difference will be the route to theoretical universalism via comparison; in others, it will surface as a denunciation of exoticism or a denial of its appeal. This review examines different moments and contexts in which an attempt at developing anthropology “at home” became an appropriate quest.

African influence in a nation must be examined within the framework of the nation's formation of diversity, ethno-racial paradigm, and particular history. Based on the paradigmatic cases of Brazil and the United States, I contend here that racial attitudes and the position and role of African traditions in a nation are interrelated. Discerning racial conceptions, perceptions, and patterns of discrimination in a nation provides us with strong clues about the place and role assigned to the African presence in that context. Racisms may not differ much in intensity, but they do in the cognitive operations they imply, because they are grounded in encoded ethnic knowledge accumulated through specific historical experiences.

This article summarizes recent genetic evidence about the population history of our species. There is a congruence of evidence from different systems showing that the genetic effective size of humans is about 10,000 reproducing adults. We discuss how the magnitude and fluctuation of this number over time is important for evaluating competing hypotheses about the nature of human evolution during the Pleistocene. The differences in estimates of effective size derived from high mutation rate and low mutation rate genetic systems allow us to trace broad-scale changes in population size. The ultimate goal is to produce a comprehensive history of our own gene pool and its spread and differentiation over the world. The genetic evidence should also complement archaeological evidence of our past by revealing aspects of our history that are not readily visible from the archaeological record, such as whether hominid populations in the Pleistocene were different species.

This essay explores the theme of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture. The primary text on which the essay is based is Philosophical Investigations; it treats Stanley Cavell's work as a major guide for the understanding and reception of Wittgenstein into anthropology. Some Wittgensteinian themes explored in the essay are the idea of culture as capability, horizontal and vertical limits to forms of life, concepts of everyday life in the face of skepticism, and the complexity of the inner in relation to questions of belief and pain. While an attempt has been made to relate these ideas to ethnographic descriptions, the emphasis in this essay is on the question of how anthropology may receive Wittgenstein.

This chapter reviews the current state of knowledge concerning the demography of primates. It compiles demographic systems (mortality and fertility estimates) for four broad grades of primates: New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans. The characteristics of each system, including its demographic stability, are presented and discussed. The environmentally induced variation in human and nonhuman primate vital rates are explored whenever possible. Findings include (a) that more data are needed particularly with respect to nonhuman primate fertility, (b) that human demographic systems are the least stable, and (c) that Pan troglodytes demography is probably evolutionarily derived from the general primate pattern.

Nationalism requires the elaboration of a real or invented remote past. This review considers how archaeological data are manipulated for nationalist purposes, and it discusses the development of archaeology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the relationship of archaeology to nation-building, particularly in Europe. Contrastive conceptions of nationality and ethnicity are presented, and it is argued that adoption of modern constructivist perspectives is incompatible with attempting to identify ethnic/national groups solely on the basis of archaeological evidence. The political uses of archaeology are also reviewed for the construction of national identities in immigrant and postcolonial states. The problematic nature of nationalistic interpretations of the archaeological record is discussed, and the essay concludes with a consideration of the professional and ethical responsibilities of archaeologists confronted with such interpretations.

We use an expanded framework of multiple epidemiologic transitions to review the issues of re/emerging infection. The first epidemiologic transition was associated with a rise in infectious diseases that accompanied the Neolithic Revolution. The second epidemiologic transition involved the shift from infectious to chronic disease mortality associated with industrialization. The recent resurgence of infectious disease mortality marks a third epidemiologic transition characterized by newly emerging, re- emerging, and antibiotic resistant pathogens in the context of an accelerated globalization of human disease ecologies. These transitions illustrate recurring sociohistorical and ecological themes in human–disease relationships from the Paleolithic Age to the present day.

Genetics has become the major tool of the life sciences. This is driven partly by technology, and partly by the belief that genes are the ultimate units of biomedical or evolutionary information. The search for variation associated with disease has motivated the Human Genome Project to construct a detailed road map of the entire set of human genetic material, and some additional form of globally representative human genome diversity resource has been proposed for the anthropological purposes of reconstructing human population history. Any such resource raises complex societal and ethical issues as well as scientific ones. However, the amount and complexity of genetic variation has frustrated hopes for simple genetic answers to important biomedical or anthropological questions, and a consequent converging of these differing interests suggests that developing a genetic variation resource will be important in many disciplines.

Cultural primatology is hypothesized on the basis of social learning of group-specific behavior by nonhuman primates, especially in nature. Scholars ask different questions in testing this idea: what? (anthropologists), how? (psychologists), and why? (zoologists). Most evidence comes from five genera: Cebus (capuchin monkeys), Macaca (macaque monkeys), Gorilla (gorilla), Pongo (orangutan), and Pan (chimpanzees). Two species especially, Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata) and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), show innovation, dissemination, standardization, durability, diffusion, and tradition in both subsistence and nonsubsistence activities, as revealed by decades of longitudinal study.

Why should archaeologists deal with symbols and how can they do so? This article outlines three major traditions archaeologists have followed in conceptualizing symbols, each with its own preferred topics of study, understanding of power and social relations, and epistemology. These include the processual view of symbols as tokens that represent reality, the structuralist view of symbols as mental girders framing a cultural reality, and the postmodern view of symbols as arbitrary fragments incorporated into phenomenological experience. The primary conclusions are that (a) any serious consideration of ancient society requires us to deal with its symbols; (b) human symbolism is so diverse (it includes cognitive structures; ritual icons; identities such as gender, prestige, and ethnicity; technological knowledge; and political ideologies) that multiple approaches are needed to deal adequately with it; and (c) a major problem in the archaeology of symbols is understanding how varied kinds of symbols relate to each other.

Evolutionary ecology of human reproduction is defined as the application of natural selection theory to the study of human reproductive strategies and decision-making in an ecological context. The basic Darwinian assumption is that humans—like all other organisms—are designed to maximize their inclusive fitness within the ecological constraints to which they are exposed. Life history theory, which identifies trade-off problems in reproductive investment, and evolutionary physiology and psychology, which analyzes the adaptive mechanisms regulating reproduction, are two crucial tools of evolutionary reproductive ecology. Advanced empirical insights have been obtained mainly with respect to the ecology of fecundity, fertility, child-care strategies, and differential parental investment. Much less is known about the ecology of nepotism and the postgenerative life span. The following three theoretical aspects, which are not well understood, belong to the desiderata of future improvement in evolutionary human reproductive ecology: (a) the significance of and the interactions between different levels of adaptability (genetic, ontogenetic, and contextual) for the adaptive solution of reproductive problems; (b) the dialectics of constraints and adaptive choices in reproductive decisions; and (c) the dynamics of demographic change.

Current methods in skeletal biology have improved significantly our ability to estimate the demographic parameters of extinct populations. Gross morphological and histological age indicators have been developed and tested in a variety of contexts, revealing great variation in the levels of accuracy of age prediction of each indicator. Primary attention is given here to the best-performing hard-tissue indicators of age and to composite methods of recovering the age and sex distribution of a cemetery. It is becoming increasingly apparent that some cemetaries should not be used for demographic reconstruction. Such collections have no bearing on the feasibility of paleodemographic research. Our review concludes with discussions about the role of comparing modern mortality patterns to those of paleodemography, and the issue and impact of departures from stationary demographic conditions during prehistoric times.

An emergent focus of linguistic anthropological research is discernible in the investigation of the causes and consequences of contact of local language communities with forces of the wider polities in which they have become incorporated. This focus can be sketched by surveying a number of its component conceptual approaches, such as anthropological linguistics, ethnography of communication, variationist sociolinguistics, and the sociology and politics of languages. Its consideration of language as a total cultural fact is outlined by reference to studies that differentially emphasize language structure, entextualization/contextualization of language, and language ideology.

In the last decade, anthropology has faced challenges to its self-definition associated both with new worldly circumstances and scholarly trends inside and outside the discipline. Recent interest in globalization has provoked discussion concerning what anthropology should be about, how it might be done, and what its relationships are to other bodies of literature and knowledge practices. Unsettling questions have been raised about working concepts of culture, ethnography, the field, fieldwork, and comparative analysis. Extending the rethinking of “place” in anthropology begun by Appadurai, I consider the future of “culture areas” as discursive frameworks for organizing disciplinary practices. Some characteristics of anthropological regionalism are located by contrasting them to interdisciplinary area studies, insofar as globalization poses apparently similar challenges to each. Because of its iconic disciplinary status as an exemplar of “real” anthropology, Melanesianist ethnography is given extended consideration as a particularly interesting case.

The genealogical classification of languages has been the subject of investigation for more than two centuries, and progress continues to be made in deepening our understanding of language change, both in theoretical terms and in the study of specific language families. In recent years, as in the past, many new proposals of linguistic relationships have been constructed, some promising to various degrees and others clearly untenable. The debate about specific recent proposals is part of the healthy process needed to evaluate proposed relationships, discard those that prove incorrect, and refine those of merit. Rather than evaluating the relative linguistic “distance” between potentially related languages, with temporal distance leading to some point where we cannot distinguish real relationships from chance similarities, we propose a scale of easy to difficult relationships in which temporal distance is only one factor that makes some relationships more recognizable than others.

In the past several decades, biological sciences have been revolutionized by their increased understanding of how life works at the molecular level. In what ways, and to what extent, will this scientific revolution affect the human societies within which the science is situated? The legal, ethical, and social implications of research in human genetics have been discussed in depth, particularly in the context of the Human Genome Project and, to a lesser extent, the proposed Human Genome Diversity Project. Both projects could have significant effects on society, the former largely at the level of individuals or families and the latter primarily at the level of ethnic groups or nations. These effects can be grouped in six broad categories: identity, prediction, history, manipulation, ownership and control, and destiny.

Since the mid-1980s, there has been an explosion of dance studies as scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to dance. Anthropologists have played a critical role in this new dance scholarship, contributing comparative analyses, critiquing colonial and ethnocentric categories, and situating studies of dance and movement within broader frameworks of embodiment and the politics of culture. This review highlights ethnographic and historical studies that foreground dance and other structured movement systems in the making of colonial cultures; the constitution of gender, ethnic and national identities; the formation of discourses of exoticization; and the production of social bodies. Several works that employ innovative approaches to the study of dance and movement are explored in detail.