Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 36, 2007

My main efforts in anthropology have sought to unite ethnographic and theoretical work by using empirical findings as provocations to critique received theory and raise unasked questions. I have used generative modeling to identify the empirical processes that, in their aggregate, shape social and cultural forms. Much of my time has been spent in ethnographic field studies in the Middle East, New Guinea, Indonesia, and the Himalayas, as well as Norway. This review traces the reflections and opportunities that connect these activities.

This review examines anthropological research on sexuality published in English since 1993, focusing on work addressing lesbian women, gay men, and transgendered persons, as well as on the use of history, linguistics, and geography in such research. Reviewing the emergence of regional literatures, it investigates how questions of globalization and the nation have moved to the forefront of anthropological research on questions of sexuality. The essay asks how questions of intersectionality, inclusion, and difference have shaped the emergence of a queer anthropology or critical anthropology of sexuality, with special reference to the relationship between sexuality and gender.

The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of power in the contemporary world, there is surprisingly little dialogue between FTS and mainstream cultural anthropology. This review begins by outlining FTS and its concepts and methods. I then turn to the anthropology of technology, which also offers useful conceptual frameworks and methods for exploring gender regimes. Then, to highlight the ideological and methodological contrasts between social and cultural analyses of technology and the implications for gender analysis, I discuss the treatment of technology in two leading theoretical fields in the cultural anthropology of modernity and globalization: the anthropology of technoscience, and material culture studies. I conclude by asking which forms of engagement might be envisaged between the fields.

Archaeologists traditionally assumed that rituals were understood best in light of religious doctrines, beliefs, and myths. Given the material focus of archaeology, archaeologists believed that ritual was a particularly unsuitable area for archaeological inquiry. In the past 25 years, archaeologists have increasingly started to address ritual in their research. Some archaeologists with access to extensive historical or ethnohistorical sources continue to see rituals as the enactment of religious principles or myths. Other archaeologists have adopted a more practice-oriented understanding of ritual, arguing that ritual is a form of human action. In emphasizing ritual practice, archaeologists reject a clear dichotomy between religious and nonreligious action or artifacts, focusing instead on the ways that the experience of ritual and ritual symbolism promotes social orders and dominant ideologies.

Anthropological research has produced a number of robust findings about organized labor. National and state policies are the chief determinates of unions' power to organize workers for concerted action to redress the imbalance between those who provide labor and those who control its use through ownership or management of capital. Unions are effective when workers do not accept management paradigms of shared interest; the organization of production promotes worker self-organization; discussion among workers is possible; unions show members how to address problems with space, ideology, and management manipulations of emotions; and unions draw on community contacts and social relations beyond the workplace. Unions are ineffective when they are corrupt, racist, and inattentive to change. Servicing and organizing functions of unions are contradictory. These and other findings leave many topics that anthropologists have not ethnographically explored and define an agenda for future research.

Investigators have recently made impressive progress in multiple areas of sociophonetics. One area is the use of increasingly sophisticated phonetic analysis, which is demonstrating that very fine phonetic detail is used for the construction of social identity. A second area is the use of ethnographic approaches, which enable researchers to break free from using traditional social categories that may not be relevant for a particular group of speakers, and to investigate in depth the social meaning of particular phonetic variants. A third area is the application of experimental techniques to probe listeners' uses of sociophonetic detail in speech perception. These research directions are currently pursued by largely disjoint research communities, and the innovations are seldom combined within the scope of a single study. We argue that it is the combination of all these approaches that holds the key to an integrated understanding of how phonetic variation is produced, performed, and perceived in its social context.

This review aims to show how the new results from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey contribute to wider theories about the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East. I argue that many of the themes found in symbolism and daily practice at Çatalhöyük occur very early in the processes of village formation and the domestication of plants and animals throughout the region. These themes include a social focus on memory construction; a symbolic focus on wild animals, violence, and death; and a central dominant role for humans in relation to the animal world. These themes occur early enough throughout the region that we can claim they are integral to the development of settled life and the domestication of plants and animals. Particularly the focus on time depth in house sequences may have been part of the suite of conditions, along with environmental and ecological factors, that “selected for” sedentism and domestication.

The modern American West is one of the most contested landscapes in the world, yet anthropologists are just beginning to grapple with its dynamic political ecology. Since World War II, the West has been transformed from an overwhelmingly rural landscape dominated by extractive industries to an overwhelmingly urban landscape characterized by explosive urban, suburban, and ex-urban growth. This review surveys the literature to explore a number of interrelated topics, including (a) the changing economies of the rural West and the production and destruction of space across Western landscapes; (b) the institutional contexts of resource control on public lands; (c) ideological clashes and political maneuvering among interest groups who claim access to those lands; and (d) the struggle to move beyond polemics and dualities and mobilize, in the words of the Quivira Coalition, a “radical center” committed to “foster ecological, economic, and social health on western landscapes.”

Biological anthropologists have been contributing to what is now referred to as evolutionary medicine for more than a half century, although the phrase itself began to be widely used only in the early 1990s. Three topics in which anthropological contributions have been especially significant include nutrition, reproductive health, and chronic disease. A major focus in nutrition and reproduction is the health consequences of evolved biology in the context of contemporary diets, lifestyles, and contraceptive practices seen in industrialized nations. Contributions from anthropology include efforts to assess and redefine the concept of “normal” in health indicators, emphasis on developmental processes in addition to proximate and ultimate forces affecting health, and enhancement of understanding of contemporary health disparities. Evolutionary medicine is a highly interdisciplinary field, and anthropologists have played important roles in directing attention not only to evolutionary processes but also to sociocultural and sociopolitical effects on human health.

Anthropologists’ selections of topics and field sites have often been shaped by militarism, but they have been slow to make militarism, especially American militarism, an object of study. In the high Cold War years concerns about human survival were refracted into debates about innate human proclivities for violence or peace. As “new wars” with high civilian casualty rates emerged in Africa, Central America, the former Eastern bloc, and South Asia, beginning in the 1980s anthropologists increasingly wrote about terror, torture, death squads, ethnic cleansing, guerilla movements, and the memory work inherent in making war and peace. Anthropologists have also begun to write about nuclear weapons and American militarism. The “war on terror” has disturbed settled norms that anthropologists should not assist counterinsurgency campaigns, and for the first time since Vietnam, anthropologists are debating the merits of military anthropology versus critical ethnography of the military.

Debate around the ecologically noble savage represents two markedly different research threads. The first addresses the issue of conservation among native peoples and narrowly focuses on case studies of resource use of ethnographic, archaeological, or historic sources. The second thread is broader and more humanistic and political in orientation and considers the concept of ecological nobility in terms of identity, ecological knowledge, ideology, and the deployment of ecological nobility as a political tool by native peoples and conservation groups.

The genome consists of the entire DNA present in the nucleus of the fertilized embryo, which is then duplicated in every cell in the body. A draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome is now available, providing opportunities to better understand genetic contributions to human evolution, development, and disease. Sequence differences from the human genome were confirmed to be ∼1% in areas that can be precisely aligned, representing ∼35 million single base-pair differences. Some 45 million nucleotides of insertions and deletions unique to each lineage were also discovered, making the actual difference between the two genomes ∼4%. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise from this information and the need for comparison with additional species, as well as population genetic studies. Finally, we present a few examples of interesting findings resulting from genome-wide analyses, candidate gene studies, and combined approaches, emphasizing the pros and cons of each approach.

This review explores recent research within the territory of the modern Sudan and Nubia. One special interest of this region's history and archaeology lies in its role as a zone of interaction between diverse cultural traditions linking sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, the Mediterranean world, and beyond. The exceptionally early development of large-scale polities in the Middle Nile also offers remarkable opportunities for exploring the archaeology of the development of political power as well as for exploring research topics of a wide significance, both within and beyond African archaeology, such as the development of agriculture, urbanism, and metallurgy. The unique opportunities offered by the Nile corridor for trans-Saharan contacts have also ensured that the region's archaeology provides an extraordinary scope for exploring the interplay and interaction of indigenous and external cultural traditions, often very obviously manifested in the material worlds of the region: from their encounters with Pharaonic Egypt to the incorporation of Nubian kingdoms into medieval Christendom and the creation of new Arab and Muslim identities in the postmedieval world.

Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and communities. These studies allow for a new comparative perspective, which attends to the consequences of linguistic and social differences for the organization of social interaction. A framework for such a comparative analysis focusing on a series of generic interactional issues or “problems” (e.g., how turns are to be distributed among participants) and the way they are solved through the mobilization of local resources (grammar, social categories, etc.) is sketched. Comparative studies in conversation analysis encourage us to think of interaction in terms of generic organizations of interaction, which are inflected or torqued by the local circumstances within which they operate (Schegloff 2006).

Much of the literature on the integration of science and archaeology has tended to focus on mistakes, tensions, and problems. Many scholars have also been obsessed with definitions and delineating the boundaries between varieties of archaeologist. In this article we aim to move away from this by discussing the pragmatic ways that progress has been achieved in applying scientific solutions to interpreting the past. Progress has not been dependent on overcoming supposed fundamental differences between the humanities and sciences; instead it has been based around cooperation on the vast tracts of common ground. This article highlights key arenas that encourage this process of information flow and discussion: interdisciplinary field work, new scientific techniques, new archaeological questions, and education. What is increasingly important in archaeology is how we can encourage researchers to contribute to group solutions of problems and cross outdated disciplinary boundaries.

Morphometrics, the field of biological shape analysis, has undergone major change in recent years. Most of this change has been due to the development and adoption of methods to analyze the Cartesian coordinates of anatomical landmarks. These geometric morphometric (GM) methods focus on the retention of geometric information throughout a study and provide efficient, statistically powerful analyses that can readily relate abstract, multivariate results to the physical structure of the original specimens. Physical anthropology has played a central role in both the development and the early adoption of these methods, just as it has done in the realm of general statistics, where it has served as a major motivating and contributing force behind much innovation. This review surveys the current state of GM, the role of anthropologists in its development, recent applications of GM in physical anthropology, and GM-based methods newly introduced to, or by, anthropology, which are likely to impact future research.

Critics have debated for the past decade or more whether race is dead or alive in “the new genetics”: Is genomics opening up novel terrains for social identities or is it reauthorizing race? I explore the relationship between race and the new genetics by considering whether this “race” is the same scientific object as that produced by race science and whether these race-making practices are animated by similar social and political logics. I consider the styles of reasoning characteristic of the scientific work together with the economic and political rationalities of neo-liberalism, including identity politics as it meets biological citizenship. I seek to understand why and how group-based diversity emerges as an object of value—something to be studied and specified, something to be fought for and embraced, and something that is profitable—in the networks that sustain the world of (post)genomics today.

Community forestry refers to forest management that has ecological sustainability and local community benefits as central goals, with some degree of responsibility and authority for forest management formally vested in the community. This review provides an overview of where the field of community forestry is today. We describe four case examples from the Americas: Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Bolivia. We also identify five hypotheses embedded in the concept of community forestry and examine the evidence supporting them. We conclude that community forestry holds promise as a viable approach to forest conservation and community development. Major gaps remain, however, between community forestry in theory and in practice. For example, devolution of forest management authority from states to communities has been partial and disappointing, and local control over forest management appears to have more ecological than socioeconomic benefits. We suggest ways that anthropologists can contribute to the field.

From the 1970s through the present, semiotic anthropology has grown in importance but also has shifted its emphasis, in the process helping to push forward a more general change in the subfields of linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. This article explores that change from the vantage of each of these key subfields, arguing that core concepts of semiotic anthropology have permitted a new rapprochement between sociocultural and linguistic analyses—one which permits each to make better use of the insights of the other. It has also aided anthropologists in overcoming stale conceptual oppositions. Five specific points of contact are explored: (a) indexicality and social context; (b) metalinguistic structuring/linguistic ideology, pragmatics, and social interaction; (c) social power, history, and linguistic interaction; (d) agency, linguistic creativity, and “real time”; and (e) shifting sites, units of analysis, and methods.