Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 30, 2001

This article reviews scholarship at the intersection of anthropology, criminal justice, and AIDS. Street ethnography is presented in a political and historical context, focusing on the distinctive ways that anthropologists have contributed to discussions of illegal drug and sex markets in poor urban neighborhoods. The review also considers subjects that may be explored by anthropologists in the future, including imprisonment as an institutional HIV risk factor that intensifies individual behavioral risk and the criminalization of intentional HIV transmission. This research area raises critical questions about how culture and law shape viral risk.

In France as elsewhere, anthropology developed as an autonomous discipline concerned with the study of faraway primitive or “exotic” societies, but it has shifted its purview, especially over the past several decades, to also include societies closer to home in both time and space. Consideration of the substantial literature produced over the past 30 years by French anthropologists conducting research in France illustrates the specificities of national disciplinary traditions in perceiving and meeting this challenge. Anthropology's position within the institutional framework of contemporary French academic and scholarly life, as well as the intellectual traditions that have been brought to bear on the ethnological study of France (especially the legacies of Durkheimian social thought and folklore studies) are shown to have helped shape both the production of anthropological knowledge of and in France and debates about its pertinence to the discipline's future.

Introduction of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity and the growth of biotechnology processes have recently led anthropologists into the rapidly moving, ethically and philosophically challenging field of bioprospecting or exploring biological diversity for commercially valuable genetic and biochemical resources. Is bioprospecting an innovative mechanism that will (a) help produce new therapeutics and preserve traditional medical systems, (b) conserve both biological and cultural diversity by demonstrating their medical, economic, and social values, and (c) bring biotechnology and other benefits to biodiversity-rich but technology poor countries? Or is bioprospecting yet another form of colonialism—“bioimperialism”—wherein the North rips off the South's resources and intellectual property rights? This article reviews the current literature on bioprospecting that lies somewhere between current polemics and calls for more anthropological research into the bioprospecting process.

This essay is an overview of the theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, ideological, and power-related issues of world Englishes: varieties of English used in diverse sociolinguistic contexts. The scholars in this field have critically examined theoretical and methodological frameworks of language use based on western, essentially monolingual and monocultural, frameworks of linguistic science and replaced them with frameworks that are faithful to multilingualism and language variation. This conceptual shift affords a “pluricentric” view of English, which represents diverse sociolinguistic histories, multicultural identities, multiple norms of use and acquisition, and distinct contexts of function. The implications of this shift for learning and teaching world Englishes are critically reviewed in the final sections of this essay.

This review explores the cultural consequences of migrations from the Indian subcontinent for interdisciplinary inquiries into difference and belonging. It poses the question of whether the constructed term South Asian can adequately bridge the divide between more internationalist conceptions of diaspora and nationalist accounts of racial and ethnic formation, and if so, whether it creates new epistemologies for the consideration of migration in highly globalized political and economic arrangements. In arguing that multiple formations of nationality take place in diasporic culture, this review also intervenes in debates in anthropology about the geographical and conceptual boundaries of community. Finally, in suggesting that gender, sexuality, and generation might profoundly fissure South Asian and other diasporas, the article raises the question of the implicit limits of any category of location or identity.

Traumatic injuries in ancient human skeletal remains are a direct source of evidence for testing theories of warfare and violence that are not subject to the interpretative difficulties posed by literary creations such as historical records and ethnographic reports. Bioarchaeological research shows that throughout the history of our species, interpersonal violence, especially among men, has been prevalent. Cannibalism seems to have been widespread, and mass killings, homicides, and assault injuries are also well documented in both the Old and New Worlds. No form of social organization, mode of production, or environmental setting appears to have remained free from interpersonal violence for long.