Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 29, 2000

This article reviews the history of British social anthropology, concentrating on the expansion of the discipline in the British university sector since the 1960s. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between social anthropology and the main source of its funding, the British government, in particular the Economic and Social Research Council. After a particularly difficult time in the 1980s, social anthropology in the 1990s has grown swiftly. In this period of growth, formerly crucial boundaries—between academic anthropology and practical policy-related research, between “social” and “cultural” anthropology—appear to have withered away. Yet British social anthropology retains much of its distinctive identity, not least because of the peculiar institutional structures, such as the research seminar, in which the social anthropological habitus is reproduced in new generations of researchers.

This article reviews neo-Weberian, neo-institutionalist economic, and neo-Marxian approaches to the analysis of capitalism in late modern societies. It argues that all make important contributions to the understanding of the increasing economic variability reported in capitalist societies. The approaches also may be profitably combined to assess the degree to which specific cases identified deviate in significant ways from current hegemonic patterns of capitalist development. Finally, consumption theory is assessed for its value in revising standard capitalist development theory.

Property determines exclusive rights to things. It is a key theoretical concept in the social sciences and a material reality in human societies. Since the defining work of Lewis Henry Morgan, property has been studied by anthropologists interested in human economies, societies, and social evolution. Cross-cultural studies suggest systematic associations of contrasting property rights with particular characteristics of social institutions and resource developments. From the works of Childe, Adams, and Renfrew, archaeologists have considered property as related to ecological concepts of territoriality and to Marxist concepts of control and alienation. Techniques to study property archaeologically included patterns of labor investment, warfare, settlement distributions, and physical marking. Although each technique is open to alternative interpretations, combining the techniques provides a robust description of property regimes in prehistory.

The aim of this review is to contribute to a dialogue between anthropologists and sociolinguists who work on the Arab world. One of the most distinctive features of the Arab world is that Classical Arabic co-exists with national vernaculars such as Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and so on. The first is the language of writing, education, and administration, whereas the latter are the media of oral exchanges, nonprint media, poetry, and plays. The proximity or distance between the “Classical” and the “colloquials,” whether the latter are also “Arabic” or have been so accepting of foreign borrowings that they ceased to be so, whether they are languages or “inferior dialects” are all contentious issues that continue to be debated within the Arab world. In fact, such debates have become inseparable from the central concerns and dilemmas of social and intellectual movements in this century. After providing a broad outline of work in Arabic sociolinguistics, the review moves to the literature on education. Debates on education are intimately linked with larger questions regarding colonialism, nationalism, and modernization. The last part of the review is devoted to anthropological works on the region. The complexities of the sociolinguistic settings in the Arab world provide promising and challenging grounds for contributions to anthropological theory.

This article examines the relationship between history and anthropology in South Asia during the past two decades, a relationship that has done much to shape the emerging intellectual practices of postcolonial anthropology. After locating the current conjuncture in an earlier moment of American anthropology in South Asia—village studies of the 1950s—the article reviews a body of interdisciplinary scholarship published during the 1980s and 1990s, paying specific attention to the impact of debates in Indian historiography generated by subaltern studies. The article goes on to identify five interlinked sets of themes in the literature for discussion: the “problem” of Europe, the interpenetration of power and knowledge in the colonial archive, the search for indigenous forms of knowledge, the phenomenon of violence and ethnic conflict, and the specific concerns of gender and feminist criticism. It argues that it is no longer feasible to do anthropology in South Asia without attending to one or more of these five themes. Any concern with contemporary transnational or cultural configurations in South Asia, or with the future of the postcolonial nation state, must be considered in relation to colonial history and the specific formations of modernity it generated.

As we enter the twenty-first century, the terrain on which social policy is made is changing rapidly. This has resulted in anthropologists, in combination with other social scientists, giving serious attention to the impact of this new phase of globalization on changes in social and environmental policies. This review focuses on the ways in which anthropology as a field has contributed, and continues to contribute, to social policy research, practice, and advocacy in the current international context. Given the limited space allotted, we have selected the following six arenas of public policy for analysis and description: (a) links between globalization processes and policy on the national and local levels; (b) social welfare policy, including employment and family welfare survival strategies; (c) the impact of structural adjustment and economic restructuring on migration and labor force incorporation; (d) policies in the north and south related to global agriculture, social inequality, and the manipulations of some multinational corporations; (e) policies affecting sustainable agriculture; and (f) the role of anthropologists in examining the impact of political and economic hegemony on the environment.

Significant changes occurred in human evolution between 2.5 and 1.8 million years ago. Stone tools first appeared, brains expanded, bodies enlarged, sexual dimorphism in body size decreased, limb proportions changed, cheek teeth reduced in size, and crania began to share more unique features with later Homo. Although the two earliest species of Homo, H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, retained many primitive features in common with australopithecine species, they both shared key unique features with later species of Homo. Two of the most conspicuous shared derived characters were the sizes of the brain and masticatory apparatus relative to body weight. Despite the shared derived characters of H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, one unexpected complication in the transition from australopithecine to Homo was that the postcranial anatomy of H. habilis retained many australopithecine characteristics. H. rudolfensis, however, seems to have had a more human-like body plan, similar to later species of Homo. H. rudolfensis may therefore represent a link between Australopithecus and Homo.

Anthropoidea is a clade of primates including Platyrrhini and Catarrhini. Definitive fossil anthropoids include the early Oligocene Propliopithecidae and the late Eocene–early Oligocene Parapithecidae and Oligopithecidae. Middle Eocene Eosimiidae are probable fossil anthropoids from Asia. Relationships of anthropoids to other primates are debated, although parsimony argues for a tarsier-anthropoid clade (Haplorhini) arising within omomyiforms. Distinctive features of the anthropoid visual system related to diurnality include highly convergent orbits, small corneal diameter/posterior nodal distance, high concentrations of cones and ganglion cells, and extreme magnification of foveal and parafoveal regions of the visual field in the visual cortex. Anthropoid origins was associated with a shift from a nocturnal visually predatory ancestor to diurnal visual predation at small body size (<100 g). This shift may have occurred in the stem lineage of the tarsier-anthropoid clade. The early anthropoids were insectivore-frugivores with unfused mandibular symphyses, small brains, and either dichromatic or trichromatic vision. The evolution of larger brains, symphyseal fusion, and definitive trichromacy occurred later in anthropoid evolution.

Ethnographies and anthropological analyses of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union published in the last decade have been shaped by two major circumstances. First, they reflect the discursive possibilities opened up by the political upheavals of November 1989 in Eastern Europe and of August 1991 in the Soviet Union; second, they express and represent the theoretical heterogeneity of contemporary American anthropology. We can characterize anthropological work in the former Soviet Union as attempts to use and explore the concept of culture in various sites of social, economic, and political transformation. By contrast, anthropologists studying postsocialist societies in Eastern Europe have turned from analyses of the cultural practices of groups on the margins of modernizing state projects to accounts of how communities are shaped by systemic changes in the political economy of states.

Nucleic acids are preserved in prehistoric samples under a wide range of depositional environments. The development of new molecular methods, especially the polymerase chain reaction, has made possible the recovery and manipulation of these molecules, and the subsequent molecular genetic characterization of the ancient samples. The analysis of ancient (a)DNA is complicated by the degraded nature of ancient nucleic acids, as well as the presence of enzymatic inhibitors in aDNA extracts. We review aspects of ancient DNA preservation, a variety of methods for the extraction and amplification of informative DNA segments from ancient samples, and the difficulties encountered in documenting the authenticity of ancient DNA template. Studies using aDNA to address questions in human population history or human evolution are reviewed and discussed. Future prospects for the field and potential directions for future aDNA research efforts in physical anthropology are identified.

The past two decades have witnessed a minor explosion in publications dealing with the ways in which gay men and lesbians use language. In fact, though, work on the topic has been appearing in several disciplines (philology, linguistics, women's studies, anthropology, and speech communication) since the 1940s. This review charts the history of research on “gay and lesbian language,” detailing earlier concerns and showing how work of the 1980s and 1990s both grows out of and differs from previous scholarship. Through a critical analysis of key assumptions that guide research, this review argues that gay and lesbian language does not and cannot exist in the way it is widely imagined to do. The review concludes with the suggestion that scholars abandon the search for gay and lesbian language and move on to develop and refine concepts that permit the study of language and sexuality, and language and desire.

The human body—and its parts—has long been a target for commodification within myriad cultural settings. A discussion of commodification requires that one consider, first, the significance of the body within anthropology and, second, what defines a body “part.” After exploring these initial questions, this article outlines dominant theoretical approaches to commodification within anthropology, with Mauss and Marx figuring prominently. The discussion then turns to historically well-documented forms of body commodification: These include slavery and other oppressive labor practices; female reproduction; and the realms of sorcery and endocannibalism. An analysis here uncovers dominant established approaches that continue to drive current studies. The remainder of this article concerns emergent biotechnologies, whose application in clinical and other related scientific arenas marks a paradigmatic shift in anthropological understandings of the commodified, fragmented body. The following contexts are explored with care: reproductive technologies; organ transplantation; cosmetic and transsexual surgeries; genetics and immunology; and, finally, the category of the cyborg. The article concludes with suggestions for an integrated theoretical vision, advocating greater cross-fertilization of analytical approaches and the inclusion of an ethics of body commodification within anthropology.

This review inverts the idiom “family values” to show the value of the family. It grounds this value in family economic activity but advocates an interactive approach in which cultural commitments to the family influence economic and political outcomes. Historical and ethnographic research on the family is mustered to illustrate the interaction and then combined with theories of capitalism and nationalism to account for the resonance of the family values discourse. A final section reviews the potential dangers of family-focused research.

That tradesman who does not delight in his family will never long delight in his business.

D. Defoe

The New Guinea region is the most linguistically diverse region in the world, with some 1000 languages in an area smaller than 900,000 km². There are about three dozen language families and close to the same number of language isolates, although two very different language families, each with about 300 languages, dominate: the coastal Austronesian languages, and the montane Trans New Guinea family. The other, smaller families are largely restricted to the northern lowlands. Typologically, the languages exhibit enormous variation and many unusual properties. Vowel systems in which central vowels predominate and consonantal systems lacking fricatives and, rarer still, nasals are attested. Morphological types range from isolating to polysynthetic, and most languages are head marking. Verbs normally carry more complex inflection than do nouns. Of nominal categories, gender is often exuberantly elaborated, but surprisingly case is not, the weak development being an areal feature, in contrast to Australian languages on the one hand and those of Eurasia on the other. Syntactically, languages fall into left-headed and right-headed types, represented by Austronesian and Trans New Guinea, respectively. Clause chaining and associated morphological structures such as switch reference are a salient feature of right-headed and particularly Trans New Guinea languages. Discourse structures are often highly elliptical, with the verbal morphology providing signals for the recovery of elided information and the cohesion of the text. Highly ritualized texts, such as songs, are characterized by strict formal rules of parallelism and trope usage. Other than Austronesian, no language family has congeners outside the region, and within it, large-scale processes of convergence have shaped languages over many millennia, giving rise to areal traits.

This article presents arguments for supplementing linguistic work focused on abstract social systems (languages, dialects, varieties) with linguistic work focused on individual speakers. It begins by reviewing how the individual speaker has been conceived of (when at all) in linguistics and linguistic anthropology. Two areas of linguistic research, discourse processing and linguistic variation and change, serve as examples of what is to be gained by supplementing a linguistics of systems with a linguistics of speakers. Finally, interest in the individual voice is placed in the context of a larger shift toward a more phenomenological approach to language and greater particularity in methods for its study.

Historical archaeologists have given relatively scant attention to the study of Native Americans. Despite the potential to contribute to new understandings about Native peoples during and after European contact, the research commitment has been ambivalent at best. In this review, I ground this relationship in early debates about the field's subject matter and concurrent discussions in anthropology about direct-historical and acculturation models. In addition, I highlight currents in research that have refined these approaches as well as those that have charted new directions. The latter are notable for helping comprehend the role of place and tradition in Native peoples' lives, but also for reminding us of the complexities of identity construction in America after European contact. I reason that historical archaeology's use of multiple sources, if linked creatively, can be crucial in producing knowledge about the past that illuminates the rich diversity of experiences among Native Americans.

“Did these occurrences have a paradigm…that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern?”

Erdrich (1998:240)

“…all of us remembering what we have heard together—that creates the whole story the long story of the people.”

Silko (1981:7)

This paper provides a survey of critical discourse analysis (CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis that concerns itself with relations of power and inequality in language. CDA explicitly intends to incorporate social-theoretical insights into discourse analysis and advocates social commitment and interventionism in research. The main programmatic features and domains of enquiry of CDA are discussed, with emphasis on attempts toward theory formation by one of CDA's most prominent scholars, Norman Fairclough. Another section reviews the genesis and disciplinary growth of CDA, mentions some of the recent critical reactions to it, and situates it within the wider picture of a new critical paradigm developing in a number of language-oriented (sub) disciplines. In this critical paradigm, topics such as ideology, inequality, and power figure prominently, and many scholars productively attempt to incorporate social-theoretical insights into the study of language.