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- Volume 40, 2011
Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 40, 2011
Volume 40, 2011
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From Hominoid to Hominid Mind: What Changed and Why?*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 293–309More LessThe living great apes, and in particular members of the genus Pan, help test hypotheses regarding the cognitive skills of our extinct common ancestor. Research with chimpanzees suggests that we share some but not all of our abilities to model another's perspective in social interactions. Large-scale comparisons among human infants, bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans on both social and physical problem-solving tasks demonstrate that human infants are unique for their early emerging social cognitive skills, which facilitate participation in cultural interactions. Comparisons between bonobos and chimpanzees also reveal cognitive differences that are likely due to developmental shifts. These comparative studies suggest that our species' capabilities to assess the psychological states of others are built on those abilities that were present in our last common ape ancestor and were derived, in part, owing to shifts in cognitive ontogeny that likely account for species differences among other apes as well.
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Migrations and Schooling*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 311–328More LessMass migration is the human face of globalization. Where immigrant workers are summoned, families and children will follow. The great global migration wave of the past generation has generated a powerful demographic echo. Nearly all the high-income countries of the world are experiencing substantial growth in their immigrant-origin student populations. Concurrently, globalization is placing new demands on education systems the world over. As a consequence, schooling systems are facing something they never faced before: educating large and growing numbers of immigrant-origin youth to greater levels of competence and skill at a time of economic upheaval and cultural malaise. This article reviews the basic scholarship in anthropology and allied fields with a focus on language, transnationalism, poverty, segregation, undocumented status, and racialization as they structure the academic pathways of immigrant-origin youth in a variety of destinations.
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Tobacco
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 329–344More LessAnthropologists have long studied tobacco, what is today the world's greatest cause of preventable death. Their publications have garnered modest attention, however, even as the academy is increasingly interested in global health, transnational commoditization, pharmaceuticals, and the politics of life and death. We take stock of anthropology's tobacco literature and our discipline's broader appetites. We review how colleagues have studied health issues related to tobacco and engaged with theory and policy pertaining to the production, consumption, and regulation of drugs. We assess ways scholars working at the interface of anthropology and cigarettes have analyzed gender and ethnicity, corporate predation and industry-related harm, governmental management of disease, and the semiotics of misinformation. We discuss why anthropology has not more broadly and ardently engaged the study of tobacco. And we identify areas for further research capable of illuminating more fully tobacco's analytical potential and toxic effects.
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Transnational Migration and Global Health: The Production and Management of Risk, Illness, and Access to Care*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 345–361More LessGlobalization, including the global flows of people, is clearly linked to disease transmission and vulnerability to health risks among immigrant populations. Anthropological research on transnational migration and health documents the implications of population movements for health and well-being. Studies of immigrant health reveal the importance of the social, political, and economic production of distress and disease as well as the structures and dynamics that produce particular patterns of access to health services. This review points to underlying political, economic, and social structures that produce particular patterns of health and disease among transnational migrants. Both critical and phenomenological analyses explore ideas of alterity and community, which underlie the production and management of immigrant health. Research on immigrant health underscores the importance of further attention to policies of entitlement and exclusion, which ultimately determine health vulnerabilities and accessibility of health care.
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Archaeologists and Indigenous People: A Maturing Relationship?
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 363–378More LessOver the past 25 years the practice of archaeology has been transformed by a broader and deeper engagement with indigenous peoples around the world. Although there are real differences in the nature and consequences of such engagements in different national and local contexts, it is now more widely understood that archaeologists should recognize the significant role of archaeological heritage in the formation and maintenance of indigenous identities. This new understanding is expressed in the concept of “indigenous archaeologies,” and the bulk of the paper reviews the concerns and approaches that are encompassed by it. The concerns of indigenous archaeologies overlap with other disciplinary movements that have come into being over the same period, especially postcolonial and “engaged” archaeologies that stress the political significance of archaeological knowledge and seek to enhance its social significance. Some of the more important consequences of such engaged archaeologies are discussed, especially new developments in historical archaeology, and the potential for these next contexts of significance and meaning to transform the theory and practice of the discipline.
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Concepts and Folk Theories*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 379–398More LessHuman cognition is characterized by enormous variability and structured by universal psychological constraints. The focus of this article is on the development of knowledge acquisition because it provides important insight into how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding. We propose that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory “theories” that people construct to explain, interpret, and intervene in the world around them, including theories of mind, biology, or physics. A substantial amount of research in cognitive developmental psychology supports the integral role of intuitive theories in human learning and provides evidence that they structure, constrain, and guide the development of human cognition.
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Archaeological Ethnography: A Multitemporal Meeting Ground for Archaeology and Anthropology
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 399–414More LessArchaeology and anthropology, despite their commonalities, have had a rather asymmetrical relationship, and the periodic attempts at closer collaboration resulted in mutual frustration. As both disciplines have recently undergone significant changes, however, with anthropology embracing more fully materiality and historicity, and archaeology engaging in contemporary research, often involving ethnography, the time is ripe for a new rapprochement. Archaeological ethnography, an emerging transdisciplinary field, offers such an opportunity. Archaeological ethnography is defined here as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations, and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality. It is multitemporal rather than presentist, and although many of its concerns to date are about clashes over heritage, this article argues that its potential is far greater because it can dislodge the certainties of conventional archaeology and question its ontological principles, such as those founded on modernist, linear, and successive temporality.
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Archaeologies of Sovereignty
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 415–432More LessArchaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in practical negotiations between variously formalized authorities and a publically specified community of subjects. This new, and largely inchoate, archaeology of sovereignty has pushed the field to attend to the practical production of political regimes and the material mediations that articulate authorities and subjects. This review is intended to highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research. Taken together, the works discussed here point to a new concern with the dynamics of authorization and subjection across a wide range of political practices.
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A Century of Feasting Studies
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 433–449More LessThe study of feasting has gradually emerged from early descriptions and bewilderment to more sophisticated attempts to understand the logic and reasons behind the often lavish displays. We chart the various models that have been, and still are, used by anthropologists and archaeologists to explain this unique human behavior. Acquiring prestige is a popular explanation used by ethnographers, while coping with social conflicts is commonly invoked by archaeologists. However, more practical benefits behind feasts have also been proposed, as well as experiential motivations. Whichever explanation is endorsed, there is widespread agreement that feasts play important roles in establishing social identities and memories, creating political power and inequalities, gender identities, accomplishing work, and developing prestige technologies, possibly including domesticates.
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The Human Microbiota as a Marker for Migrations of Individuals and Populations*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 451–474More LessIn this review, we discuss evidence that the microbes that constitute the human microbiota coevolved with humans and maintain complex community and host interactions. Because these microbes are mostly vertically transmitted, they have evolved within each human group and provide a view of human ancestry. In particular, we discuss using Helicobacter pylori as a marker of ancestry and migrations. Other organisms with more mixed vertical and horizontal transmission are not suitable to trace migrations with any fidelity. Human mixing affects microbial phylogeographic signals, and lifestyles impact the human microbiome population structure. A decade after the human genome was sequenced, we are gaining insights into the population structure of the human microbiome. We also examine whether, rather than focus on the genetics of single microbial populations, a wider approach to the study of human ancestry based on the human microbiome is now possible.
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The Ethnographic Arriving of Palestine
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 475–491More LessThis essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of groups with counterclaims. The other is the “crisis of representation” in the social sciences and the humanities. Combined with the rupture in Israel's sanctity in the West since the 1980s, these developments were conducive to Palestine's admission. We conclude by considering Palestine as a problem space that could reinvigorate the critical abilities of postcolonial language and the anthropology that it engenders.
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Migration-Religion Studies in France: Evolving Toward a Religious Anthropology of Movement*
Vol. 40 (2011), pp. 493–507More LessThe emergence and visibility of the religious on the African and European migratory scenes are generating much debate; thus this article explores how scientific thought and analysis of the subject of “religion-migration” has gradually been built up in France. Over three decades, the developing academic debate about issues of migration, identity, then religion within migration, and migrants' religion has revealed many tensions, especially about the question of Islam and/or religious minorities within migration.
Through selective review of these debates, I attempt to comprehend perceptions and research about the religion-migration scene since the 1980s. From an anthropologist's viewpoint, I also explore whether studies of African migration in France have opened the door to a new research field in terms of method and inquiry. Thus, as we observe, anthropologists studying African migrations have enabled us to reexamine the object of religion within migration and to remove it from an ethnicizing, identity-based approach.
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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)