Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 35, 2006

I have now lived through eras when anthropological archaeology was (a) mainly culture history; (b) part of four-field anthropology; (c) hypothetico-deductive science; (d) under attack from postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism; and (e) saved from extinction by its own resilience. In this never-before-published interview, I reveal its likely future direction. (Drum roll, please.)

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money's social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money's distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reification. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money's fictions continue to surprise.

This review takes two key approaches for exploring the theme of food and globalization: first, how food has been mobilized as a commodity in global production and trade systems and governed through global institutions; and second, how the idea of globalization has been nourished through food, particularly with the mobility of people and of ideas about cuisine and nutrition. Stark global inequalities are also noted, and the review calls for attention to policy-based research and to the analytical connections between governance, food politics, and food citizenship in future studies.

The literature on sustainability and the human future emphasizes the belief that population and/or mass consumption caused resource degradation and collapse in earlier societies. Archaeological literature proposing overshoot and collapse appears in current debates over resource conservation versus continued economic growth. The prominence of this debate, with its national and international dimensions, makes it important to assess whether there is evidence in the archaeological literature for overshoot and collapse brought on by Malthusian overpopulation and/or mass consumption.

Historical ecology is a new interdisciplinary research program concerned with comprehending temporal and spatial dimensions in the relationships of human societies to local environments and the cumulative global effects of these relationships. Historical ecology contains core postulates that concern qualitative types of human-mediated disturbance of natural environments and the effect of these on species diversity, among other parameters. A central term used in historical ecology to situate human behavior and agency in the environment is the landscape, as derived from historical geography, instead of the ecosystem, which is from systems ecology. Historical ecology is similar to nonequilibrium dynamic theory, but differs in its postulate of human-mediated disturbance as a principle of landscape transformation. Such disturbances counterintuitively may involve anthropogenic primary and secondary succession that result in net increases of alpha and even beta diversity. Applied historical ecology can supply the reference conditions of time depth and traditional knowledge to restore past landscapes.

International law, including human rights law, has expanded enormously in the past century. A growing body of anthropological research is investigating its principles and practices. Contemporary international law covers war and the treatment of combatants and noncombatants in wartime; international peace and security; the peaceful settlement of disputes; economic arrangements and trade agreements; the regulation of the global commons such as space, polar regions, and the oceans; environmental issues; the law of the sea; and human rights. This review demonstrates how anthropological theory helps social scientists, activists, and lawyers understand how international law is produced and how it works. It also shows the value of ethnographic studies of specific sites within the complex array of norms, principles, and institutions that constitute international law and legal regulation. These range from high-level commercial dispute settlement systems to grassroots human rights organizations around the world.

Many of the world's natural resources are in a state of crisis. The solution to this crisis is to develop effective management institutions, but there is no consensus on what those institutions are. Some economists favor solving resource-management problems through the institution of private property; others advocate central government control; and many anthropologists see local-level management as the solution. In this review, I argue that all these governance structures fail under certain conditions. However, the factors contributing to failure in each of these institutional forms differ radically, and the causes of that failure are not always predicted on the basis of existing theory. This chapter contains a review of the literature on the factors identified as causing the failure of private-property regimes, government-controlled resources, and local-level management. We will have to learn to match the resource problems with governance institutions and specific management techniques if we are to manage resources effectively. We also will have to understand the complex biosocial factors influencing sustainability.

An overview of the relationship between archaeology and history is presented as the context in which to situate the argument that a rapprochement between the disciplines can be achieved only if we begin to think of texts and objects as having had efficacy in the past rather than just as evidence about it. Discussions of the meaning of material culture and the power of texts conclude with the suggestion that historical archaeologists need to be more cognizant of the latter. A case-study from the Roman world is used to illustrate the fact that texts can be both instruments of oppression and vehicles for enlightenment and liberation.

Different national traditions define disciplines in different ways, and ethnology, folklore, and anthropology are separated in the Finnish university system. The great divide between the more universally oriented anthropological research and the local, especially Eastern and Northern European ethnological traditions is sometimes conceptualized by defining the latter as nationalist. The emergence of Finnish and Finno-Ugric studies in Finland complicates the difference in a way that is relevant to urgent questions of globalization and its relationship to cultural diversity. At the same time this emergence raises important questions about the significance of ethnographic knowledge. Historically oriented ethnological and folkloristic studies in Finland have formulated a multidisciplinary approach analogical to the four anthropological fields for research into the history of Finnish and Finno-Ugric cultures and languages. Researchers have used the accumulated data in new and novel ways, which has opened up perspectives instead of limiting them to the field of area studies. The development of Finnish ethnographic studies clearly demonstrates the necessity of comparison and the comparative perspective.

This review traces the development of the field of cultural primatology from its origins in Japan in the 1950s to the present. The field has experienced a number of theoretical and methodological influences from diverse fields, including comparative experimental psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, behavioral ecology, cultural anthropology, and gene-culture coevolution theory. Our understanding of cultural dynamics and the evolution of culture cannot be complete without comparative studies of (a) how socioecological variables affect cultural transmission dynamics, (b) the proximate mechanisms by which social learning is achieved, (c) developmental studies of the role of social influence in acquiring behavioral traits, and (d) the fitness consequences of engaging in social learning.

Modernity has helped to popularize, and at the same time threaten, indigeneity. Anthropologists question both the validity of the concept of indigeneity and the wisdom of employing it as a political tool, but they are reluctant to deny it to local communities, whose use of the concept has become subject to study. The concept of indigenous knowledge is similarly faulted in favor of the hybrid products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous environmental knowledge and conservation is heatedly contested. Possibilities for alternate environmentalisms, and the combining of conservation and development goals, are being debated and tested in integrated conservation and development projects and extractive reserves. Anthropological understanding of both state and community agency is being rethought, and new approaches to the study of collaboration, indigenous rights movements, and violence are being developed. These and other current topics of interest involving indigenous peoples challenge anthropological theory as well as ethics and suggest the importance of analyzing the contradictions inherent in the coevolution of science, society, and environment.

Several recent studies have stressed the role of dietary change in the origin and early evolution of our genus in Africa. Resulting models have been based on nutrition research and analogy to living peoples and nonhuman primates or on archeological and paleoenvironmental evidence. Here we evaluate these models in the context of the hominin fossil record. Inference of diet from fossils is hampered by small samples, unclear form-function relationships, taphonomic factors, and interactions between cultural and natural selection. Nevertheless, craniodental remains of Homo habilis, H. rudolfensis, and H. erectus offer some clues. For example, there appears to be no simple transition from an australopith to a Homo grade of dietary adaptation, or from closed forest plant diets to reliance on more open-country plants or animals. Early Homo species more likely had adaptations for flexible, versatile subsistence strategies that would have served them well in the variable paleoenvironments of the African Plio-Pleistocene.

Alcohol is a special form of embodied material culture and the most widely used psychoactive agent in the world. It has been a fundamentally important social, economic, political, and religious artifact for millennia. This review assesses trends in the anthropological engagement with alcohol during the past two decades since the Annual Review last covered this subject. It highlights the growing archaeological contributions to the field, as well as recent developments by sociocultural anthropologists and social historians. Increasing historicization has been a useful corrective to the earlier functionalist emphasis on the socially integrative role of drinking. Recent studies tend to employ a more strategic/agentive analytical framework and treat drinking through the lens of practice, politics, and gender. Moreover, alcohol has come to be seen as an important component of the political economy and a commodity centrally implicated in strategies of colonialism and postcolonial struggles over state power and household relations of authority.

This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

Recent years have seen rapid advancement in our understanding of the phonology and grammar of Classic Ch'olan and the distribution of Lowland Mayan languages in the Classic period. The control over the data has advanced to such an extent that Classic Ch'olan should no longer be considered chiefly a product of reconstruction, but rather a language in its own right, providing fresh input to historical reconstruction. The interpretation of writing system principles has moved into the forefront of research, and recent discussions of these and other major issues are summarized here. This review suggests that the exceptional phonological transparency of the Maya script, which is a precondition for the current advances in linguistic epigraphy, is rooted in the need of scribes to spell out regional linguistic variants, and a sociolinguistically oriented theory of the evolution of writing in general is formulated and tested on the Mayan hieroglyphic materials.

Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty—modern and premodern—are developed. We argue that although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority. The last section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.

For the past two decades, biodiversity conservation has been an area of concerted action and spirited debate. Given the centrality of biodiversity to the earth's life support system, its increasing vulnerability is being addressed in international conservation as well as in research by anthropologists and other social scientists on the cultural, economic, political, and legal aspects of human engagement with biological resources. The concepts of biodiversity as a social construct and historical discourse, of local knowledge as loaded representation and invented tradition, and of cultural memory as selective reconstruction and collective political consciousness have also been the foci of recent critical reflection.

Obesity is new in human evolutionary history, having become possible at the population level with increased food security. Across the past 60 years, social, economic, and technological changes have altered patterns of life almost everywhere on Earth. In tandem, changes in diet and physical activity patterns have been central to the emergence of obesity among many of the world's populations, including the developing world. Increasing global rates of obesity are broadly attributed to environments that are obesogenic, against an evolutionary heritage that is maladaptive in these new contexts. Obesity has been studied using genetic, physiological, psychological, behavioral, cultural, environmental, and economic frameworks. Although most obesity research is firmly embedded within disciplinary boundaries, some convergence between genetics, physiology, and eating behavior has taken place recently. This chapter reviews changing patterns and understandings of obesity from these diverse perspectives.

Much of the burgeoning literature on food in anthropology and related fields implicitly engages with issues of memory. Although only a relatively small but growing number of food-centered studies frame themselves as directly concerned with memory—for instance, in regard to embodied forms of memory—many more engage with its varying forms and manifestations, such as in a diverse range of studies in which food becomes a significant site implicated in social change, the now-voluminous body relating food to ethnic or other forms of identity, and invented food traditions in nationalism and consumer capitalism. Such studies are of interest not only because of what they may tell us about food, but moreover because particular facets of food and food-centered memory offer more general insights into the phenomenon of memory and approaches to its study in anthropology and related fields.

The human brain is one of the most intricate, complicated, and impressive organs ever to have evolved. Understanding its evolution requires integrating knowledge from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences. Four areas of research are particularly important to this endeavor. First, we need to understand basic principles of brain evolution that appear to operate across broad classes of organisms. Second, we need to understand the ways in which human brains differ from the brains of our closest living relatives. Third, clues from the fossil record may allow us to outline the manner in which these differences evolved. Finally, studies of brain structure/function relationships are critical for us to make behavioral sense of the evolutionary changes that occurred. This review highlights important questions and work in each of these areas.

Southeast Asia's earliest states emerged during the first millennium A.D. from the Irawaddy River of Myanmar to the Red River delta of northern Vietnam. Developments during this time laid the groundwork for the florescence of the region's later and better-known civilizations such as Angkor and Pagan. Yet disciplinary and language barriers have thus far precluded an anthropological synthesis of cultural developments during this time. This review uses a landscape focus to synthesize current knowledge of mainland Southeast Asia's earliest states, which emerged in the first millennium A.D. Research from archaeology and history illuminates articulations between physical and social factors in several kinds of Early Southeast Asian landscapes: economic, urban, and political. Social and ideological forces that shaped these first-millennium-A.D. landscapes are discussed as integral aspects of early state formation.

In the past two decades, analogies drawn from supposedly Caribbean processes of creolization have begun to command increasing interest in anthropology. Examining historical as well as contemporary social uses of this terminology in its region of origin, as well as linguistic, sociocultural, and archaeological extrapolations from such usages, this review argues that although, as an analytical metaphor, “creolization” may appear to remedy certain deficits in long-standing anthropological agendas, the current unreflexive use of it is neither defensible on empirical grounds nor theoretically well advised. Yet while this review argues against further uncritical extensions of such metaphorics, it analyzes their current proliferation as a social phenomenon worthy of anthropological analysis in its own right.

Discourses concerned with the perceived global environmental crisis have increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. This review consists of an ethnographic analysis of the principal components of environmental discourses as well as a discussion of the approaches employed to analyze them. These include linguistic discourses (ecolinguistics, ecocritical linguistics, discourse analysis) as well as approaches developed within other disciplines (anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and psychology).

Over the years, the structural properties of environmental discourses have developed into a distinct discourse category. It remains unclear to what extent the numerous environmental discourses and metadiscourses significantly contribute to improving the health of the natural environment.

The interests of anthropologists, focused on using the “meaning” of words and expressions as an entrée into understanding cultures, and of linguists, focused on the grammatically relevant sense components of abstract lexical forms, can be differentiated. A multicomponential lexicography is outlined for investigating various oinoglossic (“wine-talk”) registers of language, adequate to exploring this sociologically complex field of discourse spanning wine production, marketing, consumption, and connoisseurship. This approach builds on developments of the past 30 years in linguistic anthropology and related areas that have clarified the relations of structural sense, stereotypy (cultural concepts), and indexicality in language, and how and where to investigate these very different semiotic partials of language use.

Research over the past decade has significantly advanced our understanding of the prehispanic Maya codices, both in terms of their content (i.e., hieroglyphic texts, calendrical structure, and iconography) as well as the physical documents themselves (where and when they were painted, and by whom). Recent avenues of exploration include a new emphasis on linguistic and textual analyses; novel methodologies for interpreting calendrical structure; and comparisons with other manuscript traditions, in particular those from highland central Mexico. As a result of these studies, researchers have found that some codical almanacs functioned as real-time instruments to document important astronomical events; others were used to schedule rituals as part of the 52-year calendar that guided civic and religious life in Mesoamerica during the Late Postclassic period (circa A.D. 1250 to 1520). Evidence of connections with central Mexico, documented in terms of interchange among codical scribes, suggests the need for a more thorough exploration of Maya–highland Mexican interaction during this time period.

This review examines the persistence of chronic hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century and reviews dominant famine theories, concepts of vulnerability, and household livelihood security and responses to recent food crises in the region. The authors argue that famine occurrences are linked to historical and contemporary socioeconomic processes that have increased over time the vulnerability of African households to hunger and reduced their resilience to environmental and economic shocks, political conflict, and the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. Approaches to famine need to move away from the “emergency relief” framework to better address the underlying conditions that make food shortages endemic. Future food security for Africa requires an integrated long-term response to household vulnerability on the part of African governments, civil society, and international partners by incorporating new technologies, local expertise, and active involvement of African communities living with the realities of recurrent famine.