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- Volume 44, 2015
Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 44, 2015
Volume 44, 2015
- Preface
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Some Things I Hope You Will Find Useful Even if Statistics Isn't Your Thing
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 1–14More LessI emphasize some common misuses of statistics that everyone, whether you do statistics or just read what others write, should be on the lookout for. I next discuss somewhat more complicated issues in archaeological method and theory and then conclude with a qualitative explanation of Bayesian methods and why they are often preferable to the frequentist methods advocated in many introductory statistics texts.
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Virtuality*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 15–31More LessThis review examines studies of the affordances of digital technologies that produce virtuality. What we can call a “technological turn” in the literature considers technology a first-order analytical object rather than blackboxing it or subsuming it under social process. J.J. Gibson's original concept of affordance is explained, as well as its evolution to a concept consonant with anthropology's concerns. The review probes studies of political activism, work, and play. It comments on how virtuality affects anthropology as a discipline.
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Pleistocene Overkill and North American Mammalian Extinctions*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 33–53More LessClovis groups in Late Pleistocene North America occasionally hunted several now extinct large mammals. But whether their hunting drove 37 genera of animals to extinction has been disputed, largely for want of kill sites. Overkill proponents argue that there is more archaeological evidence than we ought to expect, that humans had the wherewithal to decimate what may have been millions of animals, and that the appearance of humans and the disappearance of the fauna is too striking to be a mere coincidence. Yet, there is less to these claims than meets the eye. Moreover, extinctions took place amid sweeping climatic and environmental changes as the Pleistocene came to an end. It has long been difficult to link those changes to mammalian extinctions, but the advent of ancient DNA, coupled with high-resolution paleoecological, radiocarbon, and archeological records, should help disentangle the relative role of changing climates and people in mammalian extinctions.
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The Evolution of Difficult Childbirth and Helpless Hominin Infants
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 55–69More LessBecause of the implications for behavioral, social, and cultural evolution, reconstructions of the evolutionary history of human parturition are driven by two main questions: First, when did childbirth become difficult? And second, does difficult childbirth have something to do with infant helplessness? Here we review the available evidence and consider answers to these questions. Although the definitive timeframe remains unclear, childbirth may not have reached our present state of difficulty until fairly recently (<500,000 years ago) when body and brain sizes approximated what we have now, or perhaps not until even more recently because of agriculture's direct and indirect effects on the growth and development of both mother and fetus. At present, there is little evidence to indicate that difficult childbirth has affected the evolution of gestation length or fetal growth, selecting for infants that are born in a supposed underdeveloped state, although these phenomena likely share causes.
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Anthropology and Heritage Regimes
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 71–85More LessThis review unpacks some of the assumptions that underpin contemporary national heritage regimes. The genealogy of modern heritage exposes the entanglement of heritage, entitlement, resources, and property and underpins the frame of the modern nation-state. The article also highlights the implications of this genealogy for the processes of objectification, recognition, and new, expanded, ethical subject positions.
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How Postindustrial Families Talk
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 87–103More LessThe nuclear family is both crucible and product of capitalism and modernity, carried forth and modified across generations through ordinary communicative and other social practices. Focusing on postindustrial middle-class families, this review analyzes key discursive practices that promote “the entrepreneurial child” who can display creative language and problem-solving skills requisite to enter the globalized knowledge class as adults. It also considers how the entrepreneurial thrust, including the democratization of the parent–child relationship and exercise of individual desire, complicates family cooperation. Family quality time, heightened child-centeredness, children's social involvement as parental endeavor, children's autonomy and freedom, and postindustrial intimacies organize how family members communicate from morning to night.
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Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 105–116More LessRecent developments in the study of language in society have moved the field increasingly away from linear models toward complex models. The complexity of timespace as an aspect of what is called context is of key importance in this development, and this article engages with two possibly useful concepts in view of this: chronotope and scale. Chronotope can be seen as invokable chunks of history that organize the indexical order of discourse; scale, in turn, can be seen as the scope of communicability of such invocations. Thus, whenever we see chronotopes, we see them mediated by scales. The cultural stuff of chronotopes is conditioned by the sociolinguistic conditions of scale. This nuanced approach to timescale contextualization offers new directions for complexity-oriented research in our fields.
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Health of Indigenous Peoples
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 117–135More LessIndigenous populations worldwide are experiencing social, cultural, demographic, nutritional, and psychoemotional changes that have a profound impact on health. Regardless of their geographical location or sociopolitical situation, health indicators are always poorer for indigenous populations than for nonindigenous ones. The determinants of this gap are multiple and interactive, and their analysis requires a biocultural framework. Indigenous populations suffer from lower life expectancy, high infant and child mortality, high maternal morbidity and mortality, heavy infectious disease loads, malnutrition, stunted growth, increasing levels of cardiovascular and other chronic diseases, substance abuse, and depression. The devastating effects of colonization, the loss of ancestral land, and language and cultural barriers for access to health care are among the most salient themes characterizing the poor health situation of indigenous people. Anthropology is extremely well suited to address the interplay among social, economic, and political forces that shape the local experiences of illness.
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Urban Political Ecology*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 137–152More LessAs urban environments transform across the globe, debates over urban nature and its future forms have introduced important critical questions. How, for instance, do we study emergent, dynamic configurations of nature and culture in cities? How do we conceptualize the city as a field site when urbanization encompasses the full spatial continuum from city to countryside? How do we understand the place of history in an environmental era often categorized as unprecedented? This article traces political ecology from its noncity origins to its present engagements with urban life and forms. It argues that ethnographic work both enriches and complicates recent debates about the urban past, present, and future, and it calls for more vigorous and refined anthropological engagement with the biophysical sciences, the theoretical and methodological challenges of scale, and the work of historical contextualization in the history-evasive era now widely known as the Anthropocene.
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Environmental Anthropology: Systemic Perspectives*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 153–168More LessOur brief overview of developments in environmental anthropology since 1980 and their antecedents is organized around three themes: systems ecology, political ecology, and cognitive science. In some areas, the context is familiar. As Latour recently observed, the intellectual themes captured by the emergent concept of the Anthropocene have long been familiar to anthropologists. After decades of research on human–environmental interactions, anthropology, and more particularly environmental anthropology, suddenly finds itself pushed into prominence. A vibrant and kaleidoscopic research agenda has ensued and borrows extensively from other disciplines. This agenda coincides with increased interest in coupled human and natural systems from both the social and the natural sciences. Such attention is not solely the product of academic integration or the analytical reflection of empirical realities; it also stems from growing concern over the role of humans in the global transformation of the environment.
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Energy Expenditure in Humans and Other Primates: A New Synthesis*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 169–187More LessThis review examines the proximate, ecological, and evolutionary determinants of energy expenditure in humans and primates, with an emphasis on empirical measurements of total energy expenditure (TEE). Body size is the main proximate determinant of TEE, both within and between species; physical activity, genetic variation, and endocrine regulation explain substantially less of the variation in TEE. Basal metabolism is the single largest component of TEE, far exceeding the cost of physical activity, digestion, growth and reproduction, and thermoregulation in most instances. Notably, differences in physical activity do not generally result in corresponding differences in TEE, undermining the utility of activity-based factorial estimates of TEE. Instead, empirical measurements of energy expenditure in humans and other primates suggest that the body adapts dynamically to long-term changes in physical activity, maintaining TEE within an evolved, and relatively narrow, physiological range.
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An Evolutionary and Life-History Perspective on Osteoporosis
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 189–206More LessOsteoporosis is a systemic disease characterized by bone mass reductions and heightened fracture risk; its global prevalence rates are projected to increase precipitously over the next few decades. Evolutionary and life-history perspectives have proven valuable for offering a different lens with which to consider the etiologies of common chronic diseases, and in this review, these approaches are applied to osteoporosis. Although there are many perspectives on human susceptibility to bone loss, this article explores the most prominent and empirically studied theories. Osteoporosis is considered within the context of theories on aging (e.g., antagonistic pleiotropy, disposable soma) and mismatch theory. Female vulnerability is considered within a separate evolutionary framework and has been articulated as a trade-off between reproduction and skeletal health. Recent advancements in bone imaging techniques for skeletal and living human and nonhuman primate populations (i.e., CT scans, ultrasonometry) have facilitated huge strides in contextualizing osteoporosis within evolutionary theory.
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Linguistic Relativity from Reference to Agency
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 207–224More LessHow are language, thought, and reality related? Interdisciplinary research on this question over the past two decades has made significant progress. Most of the work has been Neo-Whorfian in two senses: One, it has been driven by research questions that were articulated most explicitly and most famously by the linguistic anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, and two, it has limited the scope of inquiry to Whorf's narrow interpretations of the key terms “language,” “thought,” and “reality.” This article first reviews some of the ideas and results of Neo-Whorfian work, concentrating on the special role of linguistic categorization in heuristic decision making. It then considers new and potential directions in work on linguistic relativity, taken broadly to mean the ways in which the perspective offered by a given language can affect thought (or mind) and reality. New lines of work must reconsider the idea of linguistic relativity by exploring the range of available interpretations of the key terms: in particular, “language” beyond reference, “thought” beyond nonsocial processing, and “reality” beyond brute, nonsocial facts.
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Politics of Translation
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 225–240More LessCurrent research finds the label “translation” an apt characterization of diverse communicative practices. This review argues that the term points to a whole family of semiotic processes. Writings on translation share a key insight: Different social worlds—including those of scholars—emerge through forms of communication in which practices, objects, genres, and texts are citable, recontextualizable. This generative process mediates among the domains of knowledge and action that the communications themselves play a role in separating. The connections and differentiations, as framed by metadiscourses, construct relations of power and politics. I seek to highlight a widening, productive conversation about translational practices among studies of science, in medical, legal, and linguistic anthropology, in research on Christianities, and in advocacy. The translation rubric gathers together practices of transduction, (in)commensuration, circulation, enactment of reference, standardizations, and various forms of boundary making. Recent work on semiotics clarifies how such practices achieve their effects.
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Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study of Human–Environment Interactions*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 241–257More LessNew approaches to human–environment interactions are beginning to move beyond a narrow focus on individuals and simple (patch-level) predatory or competitive interactions. These approaches link nonequilibrium theory from community and landscape ecology with theories of individual decision making from behavioral ecology to explore new ways of approaching complex issues of diachronic change in behavior, subsistence, and social institutions. I provide an overview of two such approaches, one to understand long-term hunting sustainability among mixed forager-horticulturalists in the wet tropics and the other to understand how foragers act as ecosystem engineers in a dry perennial grassland in Australia. I conclude by describing the implications of new approaches that incorporate anthropogenic “intermediate” disturbance (an emergent property of human–environment interaction) as a force shaping environments through time and space, and in so doing patterning the sustainability of subsistence, ways of sharing, ownership norms, and even structures of gendered production.
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The Anthropology of Life After AIDS: Epistemological Continuities in the Age of Antiretroviral Treatment
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 259–275More LessAnthropologists working on HIV are increasingly reframing their research as taking place in “the age of treatment,” marking a shift from “the age of AIDS.” The age of treatment is characterized by the increasing biomedicalization of HIV, which has come about as a result of improved pharmaceutical and surveillance technologies and the presumption by international experts in global health that HIV could be eradicated in the near future through biomedical interventions. Despite this radical transformation, I argue that there are many important epistemological continuities for anthropologists researching HIV/AIDS in the twenty-first century. This review identifies such continuities between anthropological research conducted prior to and that conducted since the availability of life-saving treatment for HIV.
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Anthropology of Aging and Care*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 277–293More LessIn concert with lengthening life spans, emerging forms of care in later life reflect complex and diverse social changes. Embracing a polysemic understanding of care as simultaneously resource and relational practice, this review works across scales of social life and theoretical approaches to care to highlight connections and fissures between global political-economic transformations and the most intimate aspects of daily life. Arguing for analyses of care that account for the kinds of projects, stakes, and obstacles that emerge as people engage in social reproduction in later life, this review traces the circulation of care across aging bodies, everyday practices, families, and nations. Care in later life never exclusively impacts the lives of the old; it is thus a critical site for understanding the diverse ways that increased longevity is shaping the meanings, experiences, and consequences of life itself.
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Breached Initiations: Sociopolitical Resources and Conflicts in Emergent Adulthood*
Vol. 44 (2015), pp. 295–310More LessWork theorizing youth subcultures, especially of the spectacular kind, has provided an influential approach for understanding the lives of young people for the past 40 years in anthropology and sociology. In this review, we frame current literature through a lens we call “breached initiations.” We motivate our organization of the literature into processes we term “delaying,” “hopscotching,” and “opting out,” referring to ways in which youth engage sociopolitical resources and chronotopes to alter the sequencing and clustering of their expected progress through milestones of adulthood. In many cases, youth delay or refuse entry into a world that is considered “normal” and demand a reconsideration of its very premises. We highlight symbolic, material, and networked resources; by considering the commonalities in the structural situations of different youth groups, we do not view them as islands, but instead assert their embeddedness in common change.
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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)