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- Volume 31, 2002
Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 31, 2002
Volume 31, 2002
- Preface
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- Review Articles
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An Inconstant Profession: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 1–19More Less▪ AbstractI give an overall view of anthropology and of my career within it over the past fifty years, relating them to changes in the world in general during that time. All lessons are implicit, all morals unstated, all conclusions undrawn.
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The Form and Function of Reconciliation in Primates
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 21–44More Less▪ AbstractSociality is favored by natural selection because it enhances group members' access to valued resources or reduces their vulnerability to predators, but group living also generates conflict among group members. To enjoy the benefits of sociality, group living animals must somehow overcome the costs of conflict. Nonhuman primates have developed an effective mechanism for resolving conflicts: They participate in peaceful postconflict (PC) reunions with former opponents. These peaceful PC interactions are collectively labeled reconciliation. There is a broad consensus that peaceful contacts among former opponents relieve stressful effects of conflict and permit former opponents to interact peacefully. Primates may reconcile to obtain short-term objectives, such as access to desirable resources. Alternatively, reconciliation may preserve valuable relationships damaged by conflict. Some researchers view these explanations as complementary, but they generate different predictions about the patterning of reconciliation that can be partially tested with available data. There are good reasons to question the validity of the relationship-repair model, but it remains firmly entrenched in the reconciliation literature, perhaps because it fits our own folk model of how and why we resolve conflicts ourselves. It is possible that the function of reconciliation varies within the primate order, much as other aspects of cognitive abilities do.
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Current Topics in Primate Socioendocrinology
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 45–67More Less▪ AbstractSocioendocrinology is the study of the effect of the social environment on the interactions between hormones and behavior. Individuals have evolved a physiological flexibility that enables them to respond to their social surroundings in a manner that maximizes reproductive success. We present evidence that (a) males who have evolved to participate in infant care have different endocrine profiles around offspring from males who have not evolved to regularly participate in infant care, (b) the energetic costs of reproduction in both males and females creates conditions conducive to elevated levels of both stress and sex hormones, (c) adolescent subfecundity among females evolved as a mechanism fostering mate choice, (d) some primate species are probably facultative ovulators, and (e) endocrine suppression of subordinate males probably does not contribute to delayed onset of reproduction but does contribute to reduced access to females, which hampers progeny production. Hormones and behavior are inextricably intertwined in a feedback relationship that regulates each other.
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Signs of Their Times: Deaf Communities and the Culture of Language
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 69–97More Less▪ AbstractBecause of their deafness, deaf people have been marked as different and treated problematically by their hearing societies. Until 25 years ago, academic literature addressing deafness typically described deafness as pathology, focusing on cures or mitigation of the perceived handicap. In ethnographic accounts, interactions involving deaf people are sometimes presented as examples of how communities treat atypical members. Recently, studies of deafness have adopted more complex sociocultural perspectives, raising issues of community identity, formation and maintenance, and language ideology. Anthropological researchers have approached the study of d/Deaf communities from at least three useful angles. The first, focusing on the history of these communities, demonstrates that the current issues have roots in the past, including the central role of education in the creation and maintenance of communities. A second approach centers on emic perspectives, drawing on the voices of community members themselves and accounts of ethnographers. A third perspective studies linguistic issues and how particular linguistic issues involving deaf people articulate with those of their hearing societies.
To use a cultural definition is not only to assert a new frame of reference, but to consciously reject an older one…. But the cultural definition continues to perplex many. If Deaf people are indeed a cultural group, why then don't they seem more like the Pennan of the island of Borneo, or the Huichol of Mexico?
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The Anthropology of Food and Eating
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 99–119More Less▪ AbstractThe study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' responses to ethnographic questions. Seven subsections examine classic food ethnographies: single commodities and substances; food and social change; food insecurity; eating and ritual; eating and identities; and instructional materials. The richest, most extensive anthropological work among these subtopics has focused on food insecurity, eating and ritual, and eating and identities. For topics whose anthropological coverage has not been extensive (e.g., book-length studies of single commodities, or works on the industrialization of food systems), useful publications from sister disciplines—primarily sociology and history—are discussed.
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Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America: An Areal-Typological Perspective
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 121–145More Less▪ AbstractIn indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland South American discourse.
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Street Children, Human Rights, and Public Health: A Critique and Future Directions
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 147–171More Less▪ AbstractThis review presents a critique of the academic and welfare literature on street children in developing countries, with supporting evidence from studies of homelessness in industrialized nations. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sea change of perspective in studies concerning street youth. This review examines five stark criticisms of the category “street child” and of research that focuses on the identifying characteristics of a street lifestyle rather than on the children themselves and the depth or diversity of their actual experiences. Second, it relates the change of approach to a powerful human rights discourse—the legal and conceptual framework provided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—which emphasizes children's rights as citizens and recognizes their capabilities to enact change in their own lives. Finally, this article examines literature focusing specifically on the risks to health associated with street or homeless lifestyles. Risk assessment that assigns street children to a category “at risk” should not overshadow helpful analytical approaches focusing on children's resiliency and long-term career life prospects. This review thus highlights some of the challenging academic and practical questions that have been raised regarding current understandings of street children.
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Religion in South Asia
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 173–187More Less▪ AbstractThis article examines the study of religions of South Asia, in particular of India, from the angle of postcolonial criticism. It argues that the study of state formation provides a crucial perspective for the unraveling of the multiple transformations of religion in the colonial and postcolonial public sphere. The colonial state cannot be studied in isolation from the global framework of imperial interactions between metropole and colony, in which colonial and national modernity is produced. Such a study depends on a postcolonial critique of the very category of “religion” while acknowledging the centrality of that category in colonial and postcolonial politics. The transformation of the public sphere in South Asia shows the increasing importance of religious movements and of the political use of religious images in new communication technologies. One of the most important trends in the present era is the attempt to create a homogenous religious community, not only within the national territorial space, but also in a transnational space. Such attempts offer a violent confrontation with “the Other,” however defined.
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The Politics of Archaeology in Africa
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 189–209More Less▪ Abstract“Africa is various,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah in defiance of the Eurocentric myth of a unitary and unchanging continent. The politics of archaeology in Africa has been no less marked by variety. Yet, underlying this multiplicity of historical experience are a number of common themes and ideas. This review traces the engagement between archaeology and politics in Africa through an exploration of these common themes: first, as a colonial science in the context of European conquest and the subjugation of African people and territories; second, in the context of colonial administration and the growth of settler populations; third, in the context of resistance to colonialism and a developing African nationalism; and fourth, in a postcolonial context, among whose challenges have been the growing illicit trade in antiquities originating in Africa, and (in the past two decades) the decline in direct funding for departments of archaeology in universities and museums.
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Variation in Human Body Size and Shape
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 211–232More Less▪ AbstractEvolutionary trends in human body form provide important context for interpreting variation among modern populations. Average body mass in living humans is smaller than it was during most of the Pleistocene, possibly owing to technological improvements during the past 50,000 years that no longer favored large body size. Sexual dimorphism in body size reached modern levels at least 150,000 years ago and probably earlier. Geographic variation in both body size and shape in earlier humans paralleled latitudinal clines observed today. Climatic adaptation is the most likely primary cause for these gradients, overlain in more recent populations by nutritional effects on growth. Thus, to distinguish growth disturbances, it is necessary to partition out the (presumably genetic) long-term differences in body form between populations that have resulted from climatic selection. An example is given from a study of Inupiat children, using a new index of body shape to assess relative body mass.
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Weber and Anthropology
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 233–255More Less▪ AbstractThis article is about the influence of the work of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) on English-speaking anthropologists. Although Weber does not figure prominently in the history of anthropology, his work has, nonetheless, had a profound influence on anthropological methodology and theoretical thinking on the relationship between religion and political economy. The “interpretive anthropology” first developed by Geertz has roots in Weber's “interpretive sociology.” Bourdieu's “theory of practice” is also strongly Weberian in character. The anthropological study of religion, and particularly the debate over the foundations of this field between Geertz and Asad, is reconsidered in light of Weber's sociology of religion. His comparative study of the ethics of the world's religions and particularly the “Weber thesis” about the relationship between religion and the development of bourgeois capitalism are shown to have been the foundation for a large body of anthropological research on religion and political economy in societies in which the major world religions have been long established. The essay ends with a suggestion that Weber's work on politics and meaning merits reexamination in light of contemporary anthropological interest, derived from Foucault, in power and knowledge.
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Contemporary Trends in Infant Feeding Research
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 257–278More Less▪ AbstractThis review examines current research in the subfields of anthropology and related disciplines on the biocultural process of breastfeeding and broader questions of infant and young-child feeding. The themes of sexuality, reproduction, embodiment, and subjective experience are then linked to the problems women who breastfeed face in bottle-feeding cultures. Anthropologists have contributed to policy-relevant debates concerning women's work and scheduling in relation to infant care and exclusive breastfeeding. The extensive ethnographic work on children's transition to consuming household foods demonstrates the need to integrate research on breastfeeding with research on complementary feeding. Current debates around HIV and chemical residues in breastmilk call for a critical examination of the effects of globalization and corporate control on infant feeding practices. The literature shows how the narrow specialty of infant feeding has broad implications for the discipline.
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The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 279–301More Less▪ AbstractThis paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is enunciated through the discourses of nationalism, sociopolitics, postcolonialism, diaspora, and globalism. Both trends have been tacitly shaped by anthropological and social theory, but they are fundamentally driven by the powerful voices of once marginalized groups and their newfound place in the circles of academic legitimacy. I argue that our disciplinary reticence to embrace the politics of identity, both in our investigations of the past and our imbrications in the present, has much to do with archaeology's lack of reflexivity, both personal and disciplinary, concurrent with its antitheoretical tendencies. The residual force of the latter should not be underestimated, specifically in regard to field practices and the tenacity of academic boundaries.
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The Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup Tree: Nomenclature and Phylogeography of Its Major Divisions
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 303–321More Less▪ AbstractIn this review we discuss the recent construction of a highly resolved tree of the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome (NRY), and the development of a cladistic nomenclatural system to name the resulting haplogroups. This phylogenetic gene tree comprises 18 major haplogroups that are defined by 48 binary polymorphisms. We also present results from a phylogeographic analysis of NRY haplogroups in a global sample of 2007 males, as well as from a regional study focusing on Siberia (n = 902). We use the following statistical techniques to explicate our presentation: analysis of molecular variance, multidimensional scaling, comparative measures of genetic diversity, and phylogeography-based frequency distributions. Our global results, based on the 18 major haplogroups, are similar to those from previous analyses employing additional markers and support the hypothesis of an African origin of human NRY diversity. Although Africa exhibits greater divergence among haplogroups, Asia contains the largest number of major haplogroups (N = 15). The multidimensional scaling analysis plot indicates that the Americas, Africa, and East Asia are outliers, whereas the rest of the world forms a large central cluster. According to our new global-level analysis of molecular variance, 43% of the total variance of NRY haplogroups is attributable to differences among populations (i.e., ΦST = 0.43). The Siberian regional analysis of 62 binary markers exhibits nonrandom associations between geographically restricted NRY haplogroups and language families. We conclude with a list of typing recommendations for laboratories that wish to use the Y chromosome as a tool to investigate questions of anthropological interest.
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Energetics and the Evolution of the Genus HOMO
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 323–338More Less▪ AbstractThe genus Homo as represented by Homo ergaster (= early African Homo erectus) is characterized by a pattern of features that is more similar to modern humans than to the earlier and contemporaneous australopithecines and paranthropines. These features include larger relative brain sizes, larger bodies, slower rates of growth and maturation, dedicated bipedal locomotion, and smaller teeth and jaws. These features are phenotypic expressions of a very different lifestyle for the earliest members of the genus Homo. This paper considers the energetic correlates of the emergence of the genus Homo and suggests that there were three major changes in maintenance energy requirements. First, there was an absolute increase in energy requirements due to greater body size. Second, there was a shift in the relative requirements of the different organs, with increased energy diverted to brain metabolism at the expense of gut tissue, possibly mediated by changes in the proportion of weight comprised of fat. And third, there was a slower rate of childhood growth, offset by higher growth costs during infancy and adolescence. These changes, as well as energetic requirements of reproduction and bipedal locomotion, are considered in a discussion of one of the major transitions in adaptation in human evolution, the appearance of our own genus.
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Language Socialization: Reproduction and Continuity, Transformation and Change
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 339–361More Less▪ AbstractWhile continuing to uphold the major aims set out in the first generation of language socialization studies, recent research examines the particularities of language socialization processes as they unfold in institutional contexts and in a wide variety of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings characterized by bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, language shift, syncretism, and other phenomena associated with contact between languages and cultures. Meanwhile new areas of analytic focus such as morality, narrative, and ideologies of language have proven highly productive. In the two decades since its earliest formulation, the language socialization paradigm has proven coherent and flexible enough not merely to endure, but to adapt, to rise to these new theoretical and methodological challenges, and to grow. The sources and directions of that growth are the focus of this review.
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The Upper Paleolithic Revolution
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 363–393More Less▪ AbstractThe transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. Explanations of the observable archaeological phenomena in Eurasia, or the lack of such evidence in other regions, include biological arguments (the role of Cro-Magnons and the demise of the Neanderthals), as well as cultural-technological, and environmental arguments. The paper discusses issues of terminological ambiguities, chronological and geographical aspects of change, the emergence of what is viewed as the arch-types of modern forager societies, and the hotly debated and loaded issue of modern behavior. Finally, the various causes for the Upper Paleolithic revolution are enumerated, from the biological through the technocultural that relies on the analogy with the Neolithic revolution.
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Laboring in the Factories and in the Fields
Vol. 31 (2002), pp. 395–417More Less▪ AbstractSince 1980, studies of the wage labor process have been centered mostly on three topics: the new international division of labor, control over the labor process, and “flexibilization” of production. Anthropologists have contributed rich studies about modes of control and about how these modes are linked to social relations within the work place and workers' communities of origin. They have explained how and why market segmentation can be a powerful tool of control some of the time, whereas at other times it can enhance tensions. Anthropologists have also contributed by transforming stylized models into models centered on actors with social and class identities and with ambivalent expectations and aspirations. However, they have neglected to integrate their findings with those from the literature on labor migrations and job search. They also have neglected to consistently examine contracts and hiring practices, two major tools of labor control. Although anthropologists have been attentive to paradigms about global restructuring of industries, they have often disregarded an intermediate level of analysis: the relationship of producers and industries to relevant actors in their respective regional labor markets, and how producers and industries structure local labor markets. A spatial portrayal of labor markets will facilitate comparative studies about the impact of industrial restructuring and correct possible biases.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 53 (2024)
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Volume 52 (2023)
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Volume 51 (2022)
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Volume 50 (2021)
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Volume 49 (2020)
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Volume 48 (2019)
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Volume 47 (2018)
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Volume 46 (2017)
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Volume 45 (2016)
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Volume 44 (2015)
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Volume 43 (2014)
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Volume 42 (2013)
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Volume 41 (2012)
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Volume 40 (2011)
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Volume 39 (2010)
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Volume 38 (2009)
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Volume 37 (2008)
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Volume 36 (2007)
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Volume 35 (2006)
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Volume 34 (2005)
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Volume 33 (2004)
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Volume 32 (2003)
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Volume 31 (2002)
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Volume 30 (2001)
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Volume 29 (2000)
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Volume 28 (1999)
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Volume 27 (1998)
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Volume 26 (1997)
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Volume 25 (1996)
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Volume 24 (1995)
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Volume 23 (1994)
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Volume 22 (1993)
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Volume 21 (1992)
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Volume 20 (1991)
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Volume 19 (1990)
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Volume 18 (1989)
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Volume 17 (1988)
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Volume 16 (1987)
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Volume 15 (1986)
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Volume 14 (1985)
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Volume 13 (1984)
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Volume 12 (1983)
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Volume 11 (1982)
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Volume 10 (1981)
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Volume 9 (1980)
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Volume 8 (1979)
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Volume 7 (1978)
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Volume 6 (1977)
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Volume 5 (1976)
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Volume 4 (1975)
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Volume 3 (1974)
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Volume 2 (1973)
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Volume 1 (1972)
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Volume 0 (1932)