Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 30, 2001

Cross-cultural comparative approaches have been used widely in archaeological research, yet to date none seem to have achieved their full potential. Synchronic cross-cultural comparisons have provided a number of material correlates of behavior, as well as a few causal and noncausal associations that allow behavior to be inferred from material remains. However, large areas of material culture, such as ceramics and lithics, have not yet been subject to extensive comparative analysis, and thus large areas of archaeological research that might be aided by synchronic comparative findings have been left unassisted. Diachronic cross-cultural comparisons have been used extensively to chart and analyze cultural evolution. However, these comparisons are typically based on grab-bag samples and only rarely employ statistics to aid in the discovery or testing of evolutionary patterns. New research tools providing a statistically valid sampling universe and information resources for coding archaeological data are being developed to facilitate cross-cultural comparisons.

Academic knowledge of human linguistic diversity owes much to descriptions written, over four centuries ago, under the aegis of European colonial regimes around the world. This comparative review considers a small part of that body of linguistic descriptive work relative to its conditions of production: authorial interests that animated such writings, ideological and institutional milieux that enabled and shaped them, and the authoritative character they took on as natural symbols of colonial difference. European technologies of literacy enabled missionary and nonmissionary linguistic work that resulted in representations of languages as powerful icons of spiritual, territorial, and historical hierarchies that emerged in colonial societies. As descriptions of languages traveled from exotic colonial peripheries to European metropoles, they came under the purview of comparative philology. This disciplinary precursor to modern linguistics helped to legitimize colonial linguistic projects and legislate colonial difference on a global scale.

The earliest states developed in the central Andean highlands and along the central Pacific coast of western South America. The consensus in the archaeological literature is that state societies first developed in the central Andes in the early part of the first millennium C.E. A minority opinion holds that first-generation states developed as early as the late second millennium B.C.E. in the same area. The Andean region constitutes one of a few areas of first-generation state development in the world. This area therefore represents an important case study for the comparative analysis of state formation. This article outlines the arguments for state formation in South America, presents the evidence, analyzes the underlying assumptions about these arguments, and assesses the South American data in terms of contemporary anthropological theory of state evolution.

The late twentieth century saw an intense expansion of the prison system in the United States during the same period in which Foucault's Discipline and Punish influenced academic approaches to power and subjection. This article reviews the history, sociology, and anthropology of the prison, as well as some recent popular critiques of the current situation. It highlights critical perspectives on modern forms of punishment and reform and suggests areas in which an anthropology of prisons might take up questions of modernity, subjection, classification, social suffering, and ethnographic possibility in the context of an increasingly politicized and racialized system of incarceration.

This review examines the current state of knowledge about HIV/AIDS in terms of its origins, pathogenesis, genetic variation, and evolutionary biology. The HIV virus damages the host's immune system, resulting in AIDS, which is characterized by immunodeficiency, opportunistic infections, neoplasms, and neurological problems. HIV is a complex retrovirus with a high mutation rate. This mutation rate allows the virus to evade host immune responses, and evidence indicates that selection favors more virulent strains with rapid replication. While a number of controversial theories attempt to explain the origin of HIV/AIDS, phylogenetic evidence suggests a zoonotic transmission of HIV to humans and implicates the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) as the source of HIV-1 infection and the sooty mangabey as the source of HIV-2 infection in human populations. New therapies provide hope for increased longevity among people living with AIDS, but the biology of HIV presents significant obstacles to finding a cure and/or vaccine. HIV continues to be a threat to the global population because of its fast mutation rate, recombinogenic effect, and its use of human defenses to replicate itself.

This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.

Since the beginning of China's Reform and Opening policy in 1978, the anthropological study of China has revived, and anthropology as a discipline has revived in China. Chinese anthropologists have become part of the world community of anthropologists. Anthropology in and about China has described a society occupied both with recovery from the cultural devastation of High Socialism and with progress toward an uncertain modernity. These narratives of recovery and progress can be followed through the anthropological study of communities—rural, urban, and in between—of individuals' lives, including gender and sexuality, family and marriage, childhood and education, consumption and leisure, and of the nation and its constituent ethnic and regional parts.

This article examines the development of anthropological research in response to AIDS. During the first decade of the epidemic, most social science research focused on the behavioral correlates of HIV infection among individuals and failed to examine broader social and cultural factors. By the late 1980s, however, pioneering work by anthropologists began to raise the importance of cultural systems in shaping sexual practices relevant to HIV transmission and prevention. Since the start of the 1990s, this emphasis on cultural analysis has taken shape alongside a growing anthropological research focus on structural factors shaping vulnerability to HIV infection. Work on social inequality and the political economy of HIV and AIDS has been especially important. Much current research seeks to integrate both cultural and structural concerns in providing an alternative to more individualistic behavioral research paradigms.

The consequences of early agricultural development in several regions of the Old and New Worlds included population growth, the spread of new material cultures and of food-producing economies, the expansions of language families, and in many cases the geographical expansions of the early farming populations themselves into territories previously occupied by hunters and gatherers. This chapter discusses some of the different outcomes that can be expected according to the differing perspectives of archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. I argue that agriculturalist expansion lies at the root of many of the world's major language families, although this need not imply that farmers always replaced hunter-gatherers in the biological sense. History, enviromental variations, and prior cultural configurations dictated many of the outcomes, some of which played a fundamental role in the large-scale genesis of human cultural and biological patterning from Neolithic/Formative times into the world of today.

Archaeological textile studies are now recognized as a robust source of information for anthropological inquiry. Over the past two decades several important developments have taken place, enabling a more integrated approach to their study than in the past. Topics addressed range from the development of methods for analyzing degraded fibers to the comparative study of specific histories of textile and clothing traditions. Archaeological textile studies address relevant issues ranging from aesthetics and style to gender; from technological development to production and exchange economics. This chapter presents an overview of current research in the growing field of archaeological textile studies.

The contributions of a number of First and Third World scholars to the development of the anthropology of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean have been elided from the core of the discipline as practiced in North America and Europe. As such, the anthropology of the African diaspora in the Americas can be traced to the paradigmatic debate on the origins of New World black cultures between Euro-American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits and African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. The former argued for the existence of African cultural continuities, the latter for New World culture creations in the context of discrimination and deprivation characteristic of the experiences of peoples of African descent, in light of slavery, colonialism, and postcolonial contexts. As a result, subsequent positions have been defined by oppositions in every subdisciplinary specialization and area of interest. Creolization models try to obviate this bifurcation, and newer dialogical theoretical perspectives build upon such models by attempting to combine revisionist historiography with social/cultural constructionist approaches to identity, especially around the concept of blackness understood in the context of cultural identity politics.

Tourism is relevant to many theoretical and real-world issues in anthropology. The major themes anthropologists have covered in the study of tourism may be divided conceptually into two halves: One half seeks to understand the origins of tourism, and the other reveals tourism's impacts. Even when taken together, these two approaches seem to produce only a partial analysis of tourism. The problem is that most studies aimed at understanding the origins of tourism tend to focus on tourists, and most research concerning the impacts of tourism tend to focus on locals. The goal of future research should be to explore incentives and impacts for both tourists and locals throughout all stages of tourism. This more holistic perspective will be important as we explore the ways in which ecotourism and other alternative forms of tourism can generate social, economic, and environmental benefits for local communities while also creating truly transformative experiences for tourists.

Tourism has some aspects of showbiz, some of international trade in commodities; it is part innocent fun, part a devastating modernizing force. Being all these things simultaneously, it tends to induce partial analysis only.

     Victor Turner, 1974

Theories of collective action have undergone a number of paradigm shifts, from “mass behavior” to “resource mobilization,” “political process,” and “new social movements.” Debates have centered on the applicability of these frameworks in diverse settings, on the periodization of collective action, on the divisive or unifying impact of identity politics, and on the appropriateness of political engagement by researchers. Transnational activist networks are developing new protest repertoires that challenge anthropologists and other scholars to rethink conventional approaches to social movements.

This essay seeks to provide an overview of the anthropology of radical alterity and social commensuration. I begin with critical theoretical discussions of incommensurability and undecidability in the context of radical interpretation. I then resituate these theoretical debates in liberal ideologies of language-use and public reason in order to suggest the delicate and dramatic ways in which institutionalized conventions of risk and pleasure commensurate social worlds. How do incommensurate worlds emerge and how are they sustained? In other words, how is the inconceivable conceived? How are these new ethical and epistemological horizons aligned or not in the complicated space and time of global capital and liberal democratic regionalisms and nationalisms? How do publics interpret and decide between competing social visions and practices in the shadow of the seemingly incompatible frameworks of post-foundationalist and fundamentalist enlightenments?

Anthropological literature on AIDS in the international arena from the 1990s shows researchers' increasing attention to linkages between local sociocultural processes that create risk of infection and the lifeworlds of sufferers to the global political economy. Focus on Africa, where the heterosexual epidemic has attained catastrophic proportions, reveals some cultural particularisms but many more regularities in the social production of disease. Global inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity are revealed, as poverty, powerlessness, and stigma propel the spread of HIV. Anthropologists' witness to suffering, their concern and engagement, are potent elements in the research process and in advocacy in national and international arenas. The combined strength of theory and practice in the field of international research on AIDS is a significant contribution to anthropology in the twenty-first century.

The study of epidemics provides a unique point of entry for examining the relationships among cultural assumptions, institutional forms, and states of mind. The Black Death is said to have contributed to the emergence of nation states, the rise of mercantile economies, and the religious movements that led to the Reformation. It may also have brought about new ways of understanding God, the meaning of death, and the role of authority in religious and social life. Cholera induced a public health approach that stressed quarantine, and venereal diseases led to contact tracing. Western medicine, however, failed to cure the epidemics that resulted from imperial expansion into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The focus of this essay is on the impact of two contemporary epidemics considered to be caused by prions, a newly recognized infectious agent: kuru in Papua New Guinea and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in Europe. A close look at epidemics constitutes a sampling device for illuminating relationships among illness, social forms, and social thought. Theories of disease causation provide ways of thinking about the world and sets of directions for acting in it.

The results of over 70 years of African Diasporic bioarchaeology are discussed and explained as emerging from distinct interests and traditions of African Diasporan studies, sociocultural anthropology, history, physical anthropology, and archaeology, in that chronological order. Physical anthropology is the core discipline of African-American bioarchaeology, yet it has been the least informed by cultural and historical literatures. Forensic approaches to bioarchaeology construct a past that fails to be either cultural or historical, while biocultural approaches are emerging that construct a more human history of African Diasporic communities. The involvement of African Americans, both as clients and as sources of scholarship, has begun to transform bioarchaeology as in the example of the New York African Burial Ground. The social history of the field examined here emphasizes the scholarship of diasporans themselves, and critiques a bioarchaeology that, until recently, has had little relevance to the people whose history bioarchaeologists construct.