Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 34, 2005

In the twentieth century, many anthropological comparisons were mounted on the base of the synchronic societal ethnographies being produced at the time. That work produced a valuable inventory of the range of variations and differences. Now, following quite a different track, and defining the task anew, a remarkable number of ethnographies consist of observations of processes of change as they go along. The considerable obstacles to comparing such temporally oriented, processual case histories distinguishes them from earlier studies of tradition and custom. In this review, five abbreviated case histories of ongoing development projects illustrate the difference of approach. The process by which plans to control particular aspects of a social field are designed, implemented, altered, and diverted are the object of these ethnographic studies. The cultures of control employed by the planners are noted, but the dynamic of the societal context into which projects are introduced is shown to be equally important to the outcome. No less than a redefinition of the anthropological field of observation is involved in this approach.

Scholarly interest in body size has increased in concert with recent efforts to shape and assess bodies in particular ways within industrialized social contexts. Attending to both overt and covert references to Eurocentric body projects, this chapter reviews literature in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies that addresses the cultural politics of body size in various parts of the world. It begins with a discussion of biocultural paradigms, which accept certain biomedical categories even when challenging or reconfiguring their hegemonic power. Next is a survey of works analyzing body size within “non-Western” groups as well as European and North American subgroups. These studies often employ culturally powerful “Western” constructs as foils, an approach that risks cultural othering. The analysis then turns to the extensive literature that unpacks dominant Euro-American body practices and discourses. Here, diverse perspectives on several key concerns in sociocultural anthropology are considered; concepts of culture and power, theories of the body and embodiment, and understandings of human agency vary in instructive ways. The chapter concludes with a review of scholarship on postcolonial processes and representations that incorporates a critical perspective on Eurocentric preoccupations with body size.

This chapter introduces the reader to the areas of previous investigation in creole studies, while outlining new directions the field is taking. The first section shows that, although the chief areas of interest have essentially remained the same for the past few decades, methodologies have changed toward a more comprehensive multilayered approach aimed at a better understanding of how individual creole languages emerge, evolve and function. The second section focuses particularly on cognitive processes involved in creole formation, such as restructuring, relexification, reanalysis, and dialectal leveling. In the third and last section, I critically evaluate the current state of affairs and point out potential obstacles and promising interdisciplinary trends.

Ecologists have increasingly turned to history, including human history, to explain and manage modern ecosystems and landscapes. The imprint of past land use can persist even in seemingly pristine areas. Archaeology provides a long-term perspective on human actions and their environmental consequences that can contribute to conservation and restoration efforts. Case studies illustrate examples of the human history of seemingly pristine landscapes, forest loss and recovery, and the creation or maintenance of places that today are valued habitats. Finally, as archaeologists become more involved in research directed at contemporary environmental issues, they need to consider the potential uses and abuses of their findings in management and policy debates.

This paper synthesizes research on linguistic practice and critically examines the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu from the perspective of linguistic anthropology. Bourdieu wrote widely about language and linguistics, but his most far reaching engagement with the topic is in his use of linguistic reasoning to elaborate broader sociological concepts including habitus, field, standardization, legitimacy, censorship, and symbolic power. The paper examines and relates habitus and field in detail, tracing the former to the work of Erwin Panofsky and the latter to structuralist discourse semantics. The principles of relative autonomy, boundedness, homology, and embedding apply to fields and their linkage to habitus. Authority, censorship, and euphemism are traced to the field, and symbolic power is related to misrecognition. And last, this chapter relates recent work in linguistic anthropology to practice and indicates lines for future research.

In a number of countries in Latin America, recent changes in the constitutional and legislative environment under which indigenous people hold or claim land and natural resource rights have triggered a number of processes and projects to demarcate, legalize, or otherwise consolidate indigenous lands. This review begins with a look at Nicaragua and goes on to examine five of the South American processes, allegedly with the most favorable legal and policy environments, and concludes that they suffer from common problems related to (a) the amount of land and resources being claimed by relatively small numbers of people, (b) the contestation of the claims by non-indigenous sectors, and (c) the nature of indigenous organizations and the NGOs that support them. The confrontation between policy and reality yields some lessons for the future.

To what extent are intellectuals artisans of nationalism? In this chapter we review past and present anthropological research that has helped to reveal the agency of intellectuals in the projects and operations of states and nations. If the intellectual has long been defined in the Marxian-Gramscian tradition as a social actor with a special praxical investment in ways and forms of knowing, then what we discuss as “intellectualism,” the social formation of knowledge, should be understood as a central dimension of the (re)production of nations and nationalism both inside and outside of states. We suggest that further drawing anthropological attention to intellectuals and their knowledge practices (ranging from the poetic-literary to the technical-administrative) will help the anthropology of nations and nationalism to (a) locate the role of human agency in the creation, circulation, and contestation of national culture, (b) capture the intellectual work involved in nationalism and bureaucracy in its full diversity, and (c) imagine a new series of ethnographic access points among educated professionals for the study of nationalism in action.

Assessing the effects of markets on the well-being of indigenous peoples and their conservation of natural resources matters to identify public policies to improve well-being and enhance conservation and to test hypotheses about sociocultural change. We review studies about how market economies affect the subsistence, health, nutritional status, social capital, and traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples and their use of renewable natural resources. Market exposure produces mixed effects on well-being and conservation. Unclear effects arise from the small sample size of observations; reliance on cross-sectional data or short panels; lack of agreement on the measure of key variables, such as integration to the market or folk knowledge, or whether to rely on perceived or objective indicators of health; and endogeneity biases. Rigorous empirical studies linking market economies with the well-being of indigenous peoples or their use of renewable natural resources have yet to take off.

Under the influence of phenomenological approaches, a semiotic perspective on the body is being replaced in archaeology by analysis of the production and experience of lived bodies in the past through the juxtaposition of traces of body practices, idealized representations, and evidence of the effects of habitual gestures, postures, and consumption practices on the corporal body. On the basis of a shared assumption that social understandings of the body were created and reproduced through associations with material culture, archaeology of the body has proceeded from two theoretical positions: the body as the scene of display and the body as artifact. Today, the body as a site of lived experience, a social body, and site of embodied agency, is replacing prior static conceptions of an archaeology of the body as a public, legible surface.

This essay provides an overview of recent anthropological work on the relationship between racial thought and the visual technologies of photography and film. I argue that anthropologists have moved away from a concern with representation per se in favor of the more complex discursive and political landscapes opened up by the concepts of media and the archive. My review of this work focuses on the affective register of suspicion that has surrounded both visual methods and the idea of race in anthropology. Whereas this suspicion has led some to dismiss visual technologies as inherently racializing or objectifying, I argue that it is possible to reclaim suspicion as a productive site for rethinking the particular forms of presence, uncertainty, and contingency that characterize both ethnographic and visual accounts of the world. I begin by discussing recent work on the photographic archive, early fieldwork photography, and the subsequent move in the 1960s and 1970s from still photography to film and video within the emergent subfield of visual anthropology. Finally, I consider how more recent work on the problem of race in favor of descriptive accounts of mediascapes.

Mainland Southeast Asia provides a dramatic demonstration of the areal phenomenon in linguistics: When languages are spoken historically in the same location they often show significant parallels in the organization of a wide range of structural domains, whether the languages descend from the same historical source. The effects of areal diffusion raise fundamental questions for the traditional essentialist vision of languages as entities with offspring that diverge, with shared innovations marking divergent branches and internal processes of evolution accounting for diversity among modern languages. Recent theoretical and empirical research on linguistic diversity, language change, and social diffusion of innovation argues for a unit-based approach to language change and relatedness, where the units of analysis are individual speakers and individual linguistic items. This review begins with discussion of the language situation in Mainland Southeast Asia, where the language “genealogies” have been dramatically permeated by socio-historical contact, then explores theoretical and methodological implications for research on language both generally and in its areal context.

Perceptions of the emergence and spread of modern humans have changed recently through the reanalysis of fossils, an improved geochronological framework, and the discovery of a few specimens. Early modern humans in various portions of the Old World exhibit complex and varying mosaics of archaic, modern, and regional morphological characteristics. On the basis of this pattern, in conjunction with the emerging chronology of the earliest modern humans, the paleontological data indicate an assimilation model for modern human origins, in which the earliest modern humans emerged in eastern Africa, dispersed briefly into southwestern Asia, and then subsequently spread into the remainder of Africa and southern Asia, eventually into higher latitude Eurasia. The earliest modern humans outside of the core area of eastern Africa can be understood only if a variable degree of admixture with regional groups of late archaic humans occurred. Current and expected fossil and molecular data are unlikely to illuminate the degree of assimilation that took place in most regions of the Old World. However, the current chronological and phylogenetic framework provides the basis for ongoing investigation of the nature of this Late Pleistocene transitional period.

The description and explanation of racial and ethnic health disparities are major initiatives of the public health research establishment. Black Americans suffer on nearly every measure of health in relation to white Americans. Five theoretical models have been proposed to explain these disparities: a racial-genetic model, a health-behavior model, a socioeconomic status model, a psychosocial stress model, and a structural-constructivist model. We selectively review literature on health disparities, emphasizing research on low birth weight and high blood pressure. The psychosocial stress model and the structural-constructivist model offer greatest promise to explain disparities. In future research, theoretical elaboration and operational specificity are needed to distinguish among three distinct factors: (a) genetic variants contributing to disease risk; (b) ethnoracial or folk racial categories masquerading as biology; and (c) ethnic group membership. Such elaboration is necessary to move beyond the conflation of these three distinct constructs that characterizes much of current research.

This review article addresses the following question: Given the transformed social, political, and intellectual conditions for ethnographic research among indigenous peoples in North America, what forms has such research come to take at the turn of the twenty-first century? The review considers significant trends and innovations in research sites and topics, research methodologies, theoretical orientations, and forms of representation. It also assesses the distinctive strengths and limitations posed by ethnographic research for scholars engaging with significant dimensions of contemporary indigenous life, including struggles for rights, resources, recognition, and language vitality in both the national and international arenas; the repatriation and sovereignty movements; the development of tribal casinos, tourist complexes, cultural centers, and media outlets; continued social and economic marginalization of many indigenous peoples; and challenges posed by neoliberalism and globalization to tribal governments and economies.

This review proposes a model for analyzing the power of ideologies of communication in producing subjectivities, organizing them hierarchically, and recruiting people to occupy them. By way of illustration, it compares this productive capacity, which is herein termed communicability, with schemes of racialization and medicalization. The argument draws on critical discourse analysis, conversational analysis, post-Habermasian research on publics, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Foucault, and work on language ideologies to synthesize a framework for studying spheres of communicability. The concept is then used in exploring how constructions of race and health intersect in some of the most powerful spheres of communicability—those associated with colonial medicine, HIV/AIDS, severe accute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Alzheimer’s, genetics, clinical trials, “race-based medicine,” organ transplant, and biostatistics. The review attempts to connect linguistic anthropology and discourse analysis more productively to medical anthropology, the history of medicine and public health, medical sociology, public health, genetics, and science studies.

Much attention has been focused on the survival of Indigenous languages in recent years. Many, particularly anthropologists and linguists, anticipate the demise of the majority of Indigenous languages within this century and have called on the need to arrest the loss of languages. Opinions vary concerning the loss of language; some regard it as a hopeless cause, and others see language revitalization as a major responsibility of linguistics and kindred disciplines. To that end, this review explores efforts in language revitalization and documentation and the engagement with Indigenous peoples. It remains unclear why some attempts at language revitalization succeed, whereas others fail. What is clear is that the process is profoundly political.

This essay reviews recent anthropological attention to the “beginnings” and “endings” of life. A large literature since the 1990s highlights the analytic trends and innovations that characterize anthropological attention to the cultural production of persons, the naturalization of life, and the emergence of new life forms. Part I of this essay outlines the coming-into-being, completion and attenuation of personhood and how life and death are attributed, contested, and enacted. Dominant themes include how connections are forged or severed between the living and the dead and the socio-politics of dead, dying, and decaying bodies. The culture of medicine is examined for its role in organizing and naming life and death. Part II is organized by the turn to biopolitical analyses stimulated by the work of Foucault. It encompasses the ways in which the biosciences and biotechnologies, along with state practices, govern forms of living and dying and new forms of life such as the stem cell, embryo, comatose, and brain dead, and it emphasizes the production of value. Much of this scholarship is informed by concepts of liminality (a period and state of being between social statuses) and subjectification (in which notions of self, citizenship, life and its management are linked to the production of knowledge and political forms of regulation).

The world's archaeological heritage is under serious threat from illegal and destructive excavations that aim to recover antiquities for sale on the international market. These antiquities are sold without provenance, so that their true nature is hard to discern, and many are ultimately acquired by major museums in Europe and North America. The adoption in 1970 by UNESCO of the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property created a new ethical environment in which museums and their representative associations adopted policies that were designed to guard against the acquisition of “unprovenanced,” and therefore most probably looted, antiquities. Unfortunately, over the past decade, U.S. museum associations have been advocating a more relaxed disposition, and the broader archaeological and anthropological communities are in significant measure responsible since they have met this unwelcome development largely in silence.