Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 41, 2012

The ongoing enculturation of stem cells with culturally specific meaning in different global locales is receiving critical anthropological attention. As an anthropological subject and cultural object, stem cells continually rearrange practices that range from scientific discourse to political governance. As a unique and dynamic area of research, stem cell science straddles political, economic, and technological as well as ethical and religious dimensions around the globe. The article examines how cross-cultural differentials in research, development, and clinical application have produced hitherto unseen ethical and moral complexities. The examples range from highly restrictive regimes of control and governance of stem cell research in certain locales to global clinical contexts offering experimental stem cell therapies. The article examines these complex sites of political contestation, ethical variation, knowledge production, and economic calculation under four main conceptual sections: intersections and boundaries, substance and science, local and global, and panics and ethics.

Despite almost a century of research, the Chinese Paleolithic chronocultural sequence still remains incomplete, although the number of well-dated sites is rapidly increasing. The Chinese Paleolithic is marked by the long persistence of core-and-flake and cobble-tool industries, so interpretation of cultural and social behavior of humans in East Asia based solely on comparison with the African and western Eurasian prehistoric sequences becomes problematic, such as in assessing cognitive evolutionary stages. For the Chinese Paleolithic, wood and bamboo likely served as raw materials for the production of daily objects since the arrival of the earliest migrants from western Asia, although poor preservation is a problem. Contrary to the notion of a “Movius Line” with handaxes not present on the China side, China does have a limited distribution of Acheulian bifaces and unifaces. Similarly, Middle Paleolithic assemblages are present in the Chinese sequence. Although the available raw materials have been assumed to have limited applicable knapping techniques in China, this notion is challenged by the appearance of microblade industries in the north in the Upper Paleolithic. In the south, early pottery making by foragers emerged 20,000 years ago, thus preceding the emergence of farming but heralding the long tradition of cooking in China.

This review outlines the conceptual foundations of collective memory research from social scientific and semiotic perspectives. It locates collective memories in publicly circulating signs, merging a semiotic orientation with Nora's (1989) notion of memory sites. It elucidates how collective memories are made, remade, and contested through circulation enabled by semiotic processes of entextualization and erasure that produce cartographies of communicability. It shows how recent analytic work in linguistic anthropology focused on temporality can be mobilized to understand the concrete semiotic and discursive mechanisms by which the past is selectively brought into the present for strategic ends. It concludes by highlighting two promising directions for further inquiry in collective memory research: the role of expert knowledge and the importance of embodied performance. Overall, the review suggests that a semiotic perspective offers an analytically precise way of mapping the processes by which representations of past events are transformed, transmitted, and contested in charged present contexts.

Language and materiality have long been considered separate phenomena, but an increasing interest in their convergence suggests the productive potential of considering the linguistic and the material within the same analytic frame. Linguistic anthropologists and scholars in allied disciplines have ethnographically investigated how the linguistic and the material are intertwined, focusing on various ways in which this occurs. In order to highlight what is shared across these endeavors, we discuss a range of scholarship, including how words and objects may cosignify meaning and value; practices of embodiment, aesthetics, and style; linguistic objectification and the circulatory possibilities of linguistic forms; and language commodification in global capitalism. We see these efforts as contributing to an emerging field of scholarship we call “language materiality” that captures both the materiality of language as well as how the linguistic and material may interact to create meaning and value. We illustrate how such an approach may address current exigencies of neoliberal projects, global capitalism, and new forms of circulation.

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in human ecodynamics—the relationship among climate, environment, and culture. Most published research concentrates on the potential causal role of climate and environment in culture change. We approach the issue from the other side: The archaeological record often incorporates important, sometimes unique, proxy records of climate, of environment, and of change in both. We detail four case studies, from South America, Southwest Asia, North America, and the Shetland Islands. In each case, the paleoclimatic and/or paleoenvironmental data resulted from multidisciplinary archaeological projects whose major objective was to understand past human behavior. Nevertheless, in each case, the projects generated important information about the natural world in the past. Often, these data play a role in modeling future climatic and environmental change of potential significance to humans. We note a growing use of archaeological proxy data by climate scientists and predict an increase in this trend on the basis of recent history.

People and their material culture have moved across the Mediterranean since early prehistory. By the early first millennium BC, a crucial change occurred when people began to establish permanent settlements overseas and migrated in substantial numbers. This review focuses on the critical centuries of the Iron Age to examine how thinking about colonialism and migration in the Mediterranean has changed in recent decades. Because Mediterranean and Classical archaeology have always paid more attention to the colonial settlements founded than to the people who migrated, this review begins with an examination of colonial terminology to assess its conceptual roots and the influences of modern colonialism and nationalism. This leads to a discussion of approaches to migration and colonialism in recent decades and consideration of present postcolonial views of colonial situations and (material) culture. The review concludes with a brief survey of potential connections between migration studies and Mediterranean colonialism.

Diabetes and its many manifestations articulate well with the four-field approach in anthropology, providing an almost seamless example of the relationship between human biology, behavior, society, and culture in both the past and the present tense. In general, publications on diabetes and culture echo Enlightenment philosophies on change and progress that posit the increasing prevalence of diabetes as a “crisis in human relations” (Bendix 1967, p. 302) for which culture plays a significant role. The undermining of racial approaches due to what now appears to be diabetes-without-borders has also directed anthropological research into the contingent temporal frameworks of history. The recent attention to society and the social production of the disease may portend the end of culture in research on diabetes and culture.

Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in (a) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, (b) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and (c) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time.

Over the past three decades, the important role that anthropological theory has bestowed on the body, modernity, nationalism, the state, citizenship, transnationalism, globalization, gender, and sexuality has placed sports at the center of questions central to the discipline. New approaches to the body, based on practice theory, view the sporting body as more than just a biological entity, allowing us to observe sports as they “travel” transnationally and illuminating issues relevant to such dynamics as colonialism, globalization, sport mega-events, and labor migration. A distinctly anthropological approach, with its unique research methods, approaches to theory, and holistic thinking, can utilize insights from the constitution of sport as human action to illuminate important social issues in a way that no other discipline can. On this foundation, the anthropology of sport is now poised to make significant contributions to our understanding of central problems in anthropology.

Derrida and Foucault provide key starting points to understanding archives. They see archives as hegemonic, characterizing ways of thought, modes of colonization, and the control of citizens. However, they also make clear that archives can be read subversively. With patience, counter-readings allow the excavation of the voices (sometimes names) of subaltern and otherwise suppressed others from the archive. By reading along and across the archival grain, researchers can follow the development of ideas and processes across historical periods. Archives can be seen as orphanages, containing surrogates of performances. Archives (paper and digital) also provide access to the results of anthropological research in ways mandated by ethics codes, but these are subject to controversy. What sorts of consent and what sorts of anonymization should be provided? Archives run by the groups traditionally studied by anthropologists provide models of radical archives that are very different from those conceived of by traditional archivists.

Read a French translation of this article.

In recent decades, ethnographic research in Brazil has been influenced by a model termed perspectivism that inverts the equation between nature (as a given) and culture (as variable). Focusing on the interaction between humans and animals, this model attempts to generalize about thought processes across indigenous Amazonia, resulting in the proposition that nature is the variable whereas culture remains the same. The model's generality has resulted in a remarkable similarity of ethnographic interpretations, giving the false impression that the Amazon is a homogeneous culture area. This critique of perspectivism highlights its theoretical and empirical flaws and points out that the recurrent use of certain laden expressions can have adverse consequences for indigenous peoples.

Most of the ancestors of today's human and animal populations reached Madagascar over the last 65 million years, by a variety of routes at a variety of times. Settlers encountered a big, isolated island with an unpredictable climate and a wide array of landscapes. Although patterns of diversification were driven by different mechanisms in humans and animals, the complex interplay between historical contingency and responsiveness to local conditions is evident in both.

Global climate change will affect Madagascar, although exactly how remains unclear, and the immediate impact of human activity on the island is overtaking that of gradual global change. Three themes in this review bear on the future: the continuing impact of recent, cataclysmic events on modern communities of people, plants, and animals; Madagascar's long and dynamic environmental history; and the complicated history of how people settled and interacted with the island's landscapes. A deeper understanding of all three can contribute to wise decision making in the coming years.

This review surveys recent research on language-music: the unified expressive field comprising sounded and textual signs whose segmentation into “language” and “music” is culturally constructed. I argue that approaching language-music semiotically will promote—alongside the discipline's emergent “auditory turn”—greater holism in anthropological practice if coupled to the joint effort of attending to textuality while decentering its primacy. I discuss recent scholarship that demonstrates, if often implicitly, the merit of this approach. I organize this work into three overlapping themes of active research: scholarship on chronotopes and soundscapes exploring processes that reconfigure time and place; work on subject creation focusing on voice, emotion, intersubjectivity, and listening; and scholarship on the social dimensions of object creation, including technological mediation, authentication, and circulation. I conclude by discussing future directions in research on language-music and the promise such work offers of furthering the call to broaden anthropology's holism while loosening adherence to its text-centered practices.

This article reviews recent anthropological scholarship of Arab-majority societies in relation to geopolitical and theoretical shifts since the end of the Cold War, as well as conjunctures of research location, topic, and theory. Key contributions of the subfield to the larger discipline include interventions into feminist theorizing about agency; theories of modernity; analyses of cultural production/consumption that destabilize the culture concept; approaches to religion that integrate textual traditions with practice, experience, and institutions; and research on violence that emphasizes routinization and affect. Emerging work in the areas of race and ethnicity, secularism, law, human rights, science and technology, and queer studies has the potential to strengthen anthropology of the region as well as to contribute to the discipline more broadly.

Archaeometallurgy is an interdisciplinary and international field of study that examines all aspects of the production, use, and consumption of metals from ∼8000 BCE to the present, although this review is restricted to mining and metallurgy in preindustrial societies. Most of this literature was not written with an anthropological readership in mind, but many of its central themes are relevant to some current debates in anthropology. Since the 1970s, archaeometallurgists have been concerned explicitly with the materiality of metals and also with the highly variable value of precious metals across time and space. Exacting criteria have been developed for distinguishing past technology transfers from independent inventions. Archaeometallurgists have also done important work on the social construction of technology in precapitalist economies. In short, archaeometallurgy offers much that is of interest to anthropologists who study the growth and spread of knowledge, and of systems of value, before the capitalist era.

This review focuses on how maternal prenatal nutritional states may affect the health of grandchildren and later generations. We first summarize the limited current data in human populations relating to the potential transmission of phenotypes across multiple generations that result from the nutritional experience of a pregnant woman. We then discuss findings from other species, especially mammals, that provide important clues as to whether, and if so how, such transmission could occur in humans. Finally, we consider how studies of human populations could be best designed to detect transmission across multiple generations. We argue that just as epidemiologists embraced a life-course perspective to human health and disease in the twentieth century, we must now seek to better understand how health and disease could be shaped across multiple generations.

Although archaeological finds have long been unearthed during construction projects, true rescue excavations began in Europe only as recent as the nineteenth century and became systematic only after World War II. Design and operations then began to be systematized, culminating in 1992 with the signing of the Valletta Convention to protect archaeological heritage. This agreement was ratified by most European countries as part of the European Council, and it contributed to the strong development of rescue archaeology (or preventive archaeology). Excavations had long been organized by academic institutions, but from 1980 onward, there appeared, first in the United Kingdom then in other Western European countries, “commercial archaeology,” led by private businesses. A debate among European archaeologists is taking place concerning the most effective system to protect excavations and the study and publication of endangered sites.