Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 37, 2008

Minor controversies notwithstanding, the evolution of the human brain has been an intermingled composite of allometric and nonallometric increases of brain volume and reorganizational events such as the reduction of primary visual cortex and a relative increase in both posterior association and (most probably) prefrontal cortex, as well as increased cerebral asymmetries, including Broca's and Wernicke's regions, with some of these changes already occurring in australopithecine times. As outlined in Holloway (1967), positive feedback (amplification-deviation) has been a major mechanism in size increases. Exactly how this mélange of organs evolved will require many more paleontological discoveries with relatively intact crania, an unraveling of the genetic bases for both brain structures and their relationship to behaviors, and a far more complete picture of how the brain varies between male and female and among different populations throughout the world. After all, the human brain is still evolving, but for how long is quite uncertain.

Advances in our understanding of primate life histories and dispersal patterns provide insights into the ways in which facultative responses to local ecological and demographic conditions are mediated by phylogenetic constraints. The long life spans characteristic of primates provide the necessary conditions for overlapping generations of related individuals to maintain extended kin bonds. Dispersal regimes dictate the opportunities for biological kin to interact with one another and define the range of potential reproductive and social partners within and beyond their natal groups. Dispersal patterns also affect variation in components of life histories such as female age at first reproduction, reproductive rates, and trade-offs between investment in current vs. future offspring and extended kin. Understanding these dynamics has important implications for assessing the viability of small populations and the ability of different primates to adapt.

Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists—including the production of differentially valued identities, the circulation and transformation of cultural models, and nation states’ establishment of official peoples—linguistic anthropological research on education also contributes to cultural and linguistic anthropology more generally. This article defines linguistic anthropology through its focus on language form, use, ideology, and domain, and it reviews linguistic anthropological research that focuses on these four aspects of educational language use.

Life history theory posits that natural selection leads to the evolution of mechanisms that tend to allocate resources to the competing demands of growth, reproduction, and survival such that fitness is locally maximized. (That is, among alternative allocation patterns exhibited in a population, those having the highest inclusive fitness will become more common over generational time.) Strategic modulation of reproductive effort is potentially adaptive because investment in a new conception may risk one's own survival, future reproductive opportunities, and/or current offspring survival. Several physiological and behavioral mechanisms modulate reproductive effort in human females. This review focuses on the hormonal changes that vary the probability of ovulation, conception, and/or continuing pregnancy and discusses evolutionary models that predict how and why these hormonal changes occur. Anthropological field studies have yielded important insights into the environmental correlates of variation in ovarian steroids, but much remains to be learned about the evolutionary determinants, proximate mechanisms, and demographic significance of variation in women's reproductive functioning.

This review begins with a brief outline of the key concepts of Darwinian archaeology. Its history is then summarized, beginning with its emergence as a significant theoretical focus within the discipline in the early 1980s; its main present-day currents are then presented, citing examples of recent work. The developments in archaeology are part of broader trends in anthropology and psychology and are characterized by the same theoretical disagreements. There are two distinct research traditions: one centered on cultural transmission and dual inheritance theory and the other on human behavioral ecology. The development of specifically archaeological methodologies within these two traditions for testing evolutionary hypotheses relating to diachronic questions using archaeological data is discussed. Finally, this review suggests that the greatest challenge for the future lies in finding ways of using archaeological data to address current major debates in evolutionary social science as a whole concerning, for example, the emergence of large-scale cooperation.

Clicks are often considered an exotic feature of languages, and the fact that certain African “Khoisan” groups share the use of clicks as consonants and exhibit deep genetic divergences has been argued to indicate that clicks trace back to an early common ancestral language (Knight et al. 2003). Here, we review the linguistic evidence concerning the use of click sounds in languages and the genetic evidence concerning the relationships of African click-speaking groups. The linguistic evidence suggests that genealogical inheritance and contact-induced transmission are equally relevant for the distribution of clicks in African languages. The genetic evidence indicates that there has been substantial genetic drift in some groups, obscuring their genetic relationships. Overall, the presence of clicks in human languages may in fact not trace back to the dawn of human language, but instead reflect a much later episode in the diversification of human speech.

Recent work in biology, cognitive psychology, and archaeology has renewed evolutionary perspectives on the role of natural selection in the emergence and recurrent forms of religious thought and behavior, i.e., mental representations of supernatural agents, as well as artifacts, ritual practices, moral systems, ethnic markers, and specific experiences associated with these representations. One perspective, inspired from behavioral ecology, attempts to measure the fitness effects of religious practices. Another set of models, representative of evolutionary psychology, explain religious thought and behavior as the output of cognitive systems (e.g., animacy detection, social cognition, precautionary reasoning) that are not exclusive to the religious domain. In both perpectives, the question remains open, whether religious thought and behavior constitute an adaptation or a by-product of adaptive cognitive function.

The Caucasus is characterized by a relatively high level of linguistic diversity, whether measured in terms of number of languages, number of language families, or structural properties. This is in stark contrast to low levels of linguistic diversity in neighboring areas (Europe, the Middle East), although the Caucasus does not reach such high levels of linguistic diversity as are found in New Guinea. There is even a variation between greater diversity in the North Caucasus and less diversity in the South Caucasus. Illustrative structural properties show not only idiosyncratic properties of individual languages and families but also features that have spread across the boundaries separating languages and families, sometimes with variation across languages with regard to finer points of detail, although few features characterize the Caucasus as a single linguistic area. Social factors have probably played at least as important a role as has geography in the development of linguistic diversity in the Caucasus.

According to Jack Goody, in a body of work that dates back to the 1950s, differences in the mode of inheritance between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa have multiple connections to domestic groups, kin terminology, politics and stratification, and above all, productive systems. Goody's theory is built on evolutionist assumptions and draws in part on statistical analysis of the Ethnographic Atlas. Theoretically and methodologically unfashionable among sociocultural anthropologists, his work has been largely ignored in recent decades. This article considers the standard criticisms and reviews pertinent recent work on kinship and property in rural Europe and in legal anthropology. Inheritance was supposed to lose its fundamental social significance in socialist societies, and it also came to play a smaller role in the social reproduction of advanced capitalist societies. However, this eclipse may prove to be temporary, and a reengagement with the topic on the part of anthropologists is overdue.

The archaeology of childhood has grown over the past decade and a half as a vibrant field of specialized interest within archaeology as a whole. A thematic treatment of the literature highlights a variety of approaches to how and why archaeologists should study children using the archaeological record. These themes are organized chronologically and begin with critiques of archaeological approaches that do not include children and an exploration of the relationship between childhood studies and studies of gender, identity, and agency in the archaeological record. Theoretical and methodological developments that draw attention to new ways of looking at the archaeological record to identify cultural constructions of childhood and lived experiences of children are presented. Finally, current tensions and pluralities in the literature are explored as the archaeology of childhood reaches a new stage in its own maturity as a field of inquiry.

In 1978, the world's first “test-tube” baby was born via in vitro fertilization (IVF). The past 30 years have seen the rapid evolution of many other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)—some are simple variants of IVF, whereas others bridge the fields of assisted reproduction and human genomics. As ARTs have evolved over time, so have social, cultural, legal, and ethical responses to them. Indeed, ARTs are a key symbol of our times, representing the growing prominence of biotechnologies in the configuration of individual, familial, and collective identities around the globe. This review highlights the scholarship of more than 50 anthropologists who are studying the effects of ARTs in many areas of social life, including the traditional anthropological domains of kinship, marriage, and the family, gender, religion, and biomedicine. Their research bespeaks both the destabilizing and the generative impacts of ARTs at the interface between science and society.

Patterns of DNA sequence variation in the genome contain a record of past selective events. The ability to collect increasingly large data sets of polymorphisms has allowed investigators to perform hypothesis-driven studies of candidate genes as well as genome-wide scans for signatures of adaptations. This genetic approach to the study of natural selection has identified many signals consistent with predictions from anthropological studies. Selective pressures related to variation in climate, diet, and pathogen exposure have left strong marks on patterns of human variation. Additional signals of adaptations are observed in genes involved in chemosensory perception and reproduction. Several ongoing projects aim to sequence the complete genome of 1000 individuals from different human populations. These large-scale projects will provide data for more complete genome scans of selection, but more focused studies aimed at testing specific hypotheses will continue to hold an important place in elucidating the history of adaptations in humans.

Both qualitative concepts and quantitative methods from evolutionary biology have been applied to linguistics. Many linguists have noted the similarity between biological evolution and language change, but usually have employed only selective analogies or metaphors. The development of generalized theories of evolutionary change (Dawkins and Hull) has spawned models of language change on the basis of such generalized theories. These models have led to the positing of new mechanisms of language change and new types of selection that may not have biological parallels. Quantitative methods have been applied to questions of language phylogeny in the past decade. Research has focused on widely accepted families with cognates already established by the comparative method (Indo-European, Bantu, Austronesian). Increasingly sophisticated phylogeny reconstruction models have been applied to these families to resolve questions of subgrouping, contact, and migration. Little progress has been made so far in analyzing sound correspondences in the cognates themselves.

This article reviews recent ethnographic works on the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, and Mongolia that explore the experiences of people enduring drastic transformations following the collapse of socialism in 1990 and the consequent implementation of a neoliberal “shock therapy.” The anthropologists working on postsocialist societies have shown that transition theories are inherently faulty and their implementation often had damaging results. The current condition is not a period of transition or “bridge” between socialism and capitalism. Instead individuals’ activities, memory, social networks, and culturally specific values lead to uncertainty as a state of dynamic being. This article argues that uncertainty is a complex conceptual space that offers further opportunities to step away from the evolutionary mode of thinking and to develop theories of multiple ways of being.

Social evolution can be defined as the appearance of new forms of social or sociopolitical organization. In the case of the prehistoric record, such changes are perhaps most successfully studied when archaeologists collaborate with ethnologists or ethnohistorians. Although ethnologists can provide unequaled detail on agents and institutions, many evolutionary transitions took longer than any ethnologist's lifetime. The archaeological record therefore provides an important proving ground for evolutionary theory. In this review, I synthesize some of the evidence supporting social evolution from both Old World and New World archaeology. I also argue that for the study of social evolution to advance, the field of anthropology must be willing to generalize; to compare and contrast cultures from different parts of the world; and to search for common patterns in the ways human societies responded to similar challenges.

This article investigates the interplay of natural and human systems with reference to the growing global problem of antibiotic resistance. Among the diverse causes of antibiotic resistance, we focus broadly on three related causes: pharmaceutical practice and the liberal consumption of antibiotics, the use of antibiotic-containing products in the home, and the use of antibiotics in commercial animal husbandry and agriculture. We draw a parallel between pesticide and antibiotic resistance and examine whether lessons learned from one case may be applicable to the other. Although our main focus is a microecological analysis examining how humans are changing their environments, our conclusion addresses larger implications of this problem for global health. Through the theoretical lens of political ecology, we ask how we may address the “tragedy of the antibiotic commons” through public education and consumer activism as well as global health governance.

This review examines the interlocking of violence, gender, and subjectivity within the overarching framework of the sexualization of the social contract. Tracking the question of gendered belonging to the nation state, the article discusses the anthropological literature along with feminist and critical theory to shed light on the relation between reproduction and death as a way of giving life to the nation-state. Sexual and reproductive violence are closely linked to the social and cultural imaginaries of order and disorder; and violence, far from being an interruption of the ordinary, is folded into the ordinary.

Much contemporary anthropology is concerned with the origin, character, and consequences of late modernity. Surprisingly absent in this literature is the importance of population size, structure, and process. In particular, the demographic transition—or historical change from a high to a low equilibrium of birth and death rates—is an important component of modernity that deserves greater anthropological engagement. This review outlines demographic transition and transition theory, then discusses two ways in which transition intersects with literatures on modernity: through individual rationality and governmentality. Confronting both the material of population and the theories about it has the potential to significantly reconfigure anthropologies of the present.