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Annual Review of Anthropology - Volume 47, 2018
Volume 47, 2018
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The Bioarchaeology of Health Crisis: Infectious Disease in the Past
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 295–313More LessBeginning some 10,000 years ago, humans began a dramatic alteration in living conditions relating especially to the shift in lifeway from foraging to farming. In addition to the initiation of and increasing focus on the production and consumption of domesticated plant carbohydrates, this revolutionary transformation in diet occasioned a decline in mobility and an increased size and agglomeration of populations in semipermanent or permanent settlements. These changes in life conditions presented an opportunity for increased transmission of pathogenic microbes from host to host, such as those that cause major health threats affecting most of the 7.5 billion members of our species today. This article discusses the bioarchaeology of infectious disease, focusing on tuberculosis, treponematosis, dental caries, and periodontitis, all of which continue to contribute to high levels of morbidity and mortality among the world's populations today.
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The Gender of the War on Drugs
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 315–330More LessIn this review, I explore some of the lines of inquiry that have emerged in anthropology and closely related disciplines around the theme of drugs and gender. The critical research on drugs over the past few decades has tended to focus on how prohibition policies are racialized, which has been important for revealing the injustice and racism found in drug policies and in commonsense notions about drugs and drug use. Drawing from intersectional theorists who have long argued that racial categories are never experienced or imposed as singular identities separate from gender, language, class, and sexuality, I argue in this article that the literature on gender and drugs has struggled with two main interrelated problems: determining (a) how to understand gender and race together and (b) how to theorize gender in relation to power when these two factors are often conflated with each other in both popular discourse and theoretical dispositions about the war on drugs.
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Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 331–343More LessThis review examines precarity through two foci. First, I focus on related terms of the lumpenproletariat and informal economy, each of which have left their mark on the notion of precarity as a bounded historical condition, and its related notion of the precariat, a sociological category of those who find themselves subject to intermittent casual forms of labor. I explore the ways in which these terms offer pictures of politics and the state that are inherited by the term precarity, understood as the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable contract labor and a loss of state provisioning. I then turn to the second pole of precarity to chart a tension between asserting a common condition of ontological precarity and the impulse to describe the various ways in which vulnerability appears within forms of life.
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Ethics of Archaeology
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 345–360More LessEthics has abandoned its niche status to become a shared concern across archaeology. The appraisal of the sociopolitical context of archaeological practice since the 1980s has forced the discipline to take issue with the expanding array of ethical questions raised by work with living people. Thus, the original foci on the archaeological record, conservation, and scientific standards, which are behind most deontological codes, have been largely transcended and even challenged. In this line, this review emphasizes philosophical and political aspects over practical ones and examines some pressing ethical concerns that are related to archaeology's greater involvement with contemporary communities, political controversies, and social demands; discussion includes ethical responses to the indigenous critique, the benefits and risks of applied archaeology, the responsibilities of archaeologists in conflict and postconflict situations, vernacular digging and collecting practices, development-led archaeology, heritage, and the ethics of things.
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An Emerging Archaeology of the Nazi Era
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 361–376More LessThe archaeology of the Nazi era is a relatively new field of research. This review addresses motivations and ethical circumstances of such research, as well as the complex relations between archaeological evidence and a variety of other sources, including documents, oral history, and photography. Archaeologists work with two fundamentally different conceptualizations: an objectivist one concerned with recording material remains, for which scale is a prominent issue, and interpretive approaches based on the evocative power of things, in which different degrees of victims’ anonymity play a core role. Other issues involve questions about the possibility of any coherent synthesis of this period. Investigations into the Nazi past also invariably include commemorative politics whose complex development is outlined. An engagement with this time of extremes has wider consequences, posing the question of the role of suffering and desolation in human history as a whole.
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Crop Foraging, Crop Losses, and Crop Raiding
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 377–394More LessCrop foraging or crop raiding concerns wildlife foraging and farmers’ reactions and responses to it. To understand crop foraging and its value to wildlife or its implications for humans requires a cross-disciplinary approach that considers the behavior and ecology of wild animals engaging in this behavior; the types and levels of competition for resources between people and wildlife; people's perceptions of and attitudes toward wildlife, including animals that forage on crops; and discourse about animals and their behaviors and how these discourses can be used for expressing dissent and distress about other social conflicts. So, to understand and respond to conflicts about crop damage, we need to look beyond what people lose, i.e., crop loss and economic equivalence, and focus more on what people say about wildlife and why they say it.
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Emerging and Enduring Issues in Primate Conservation Genetics
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 395–415More LessConservation genetics is a branch of conservation biology that uses molecular data to assist in the conservation and management of imperiled populations, subspecies, and species. In this review, I examine conservation action plans (CAPs)—instrumental documents designed to influence conservation policy—for selected primate species. I use the information contained in CAPs as a means to guide this review. The primary genetics-based topics that are mentioned in CAPs are genetic connectivity, inbreeding, and subspecies/species delimitation. I discuss these topics as well as historical demographic inference and hybridization using examples from wild primate species to illustrate the myriad ways in which genetics can assist in conservation efforts. I also discuss some recent technological advances such as genomic capture techniques and the potential to do molecular work in remote locations.
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Effects of Environmental Stress on Primate Populations
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 417–434More LessEnvironmental stress on primate populations can take many forms. Abiotic factors, such as temperature and precipitation, may directly influence the behavior of primates owing to physiological demands of thermoregulation or through indirect influences on vegetation that primates rely on for food. These effects can also scale up to the macro scale, impacting primate distributions and evolution. Primates also encounter stress during interactions within and between species (i.e., biotic interactions). For example, selective pressure from male-perpetrated infanticide can drive the development of female counterstrategies and can impact life-history traits. Predation on primates can modify group size, ranging behavior, and habitat use. Finally, humans have influenced primate populations for millennia. More recently, hunting, habitat disturbance, disease, and climate change have increased in frequency and severity with detrimental impacts on primate populations worldwide. These effects and recent evidence from camera traps emphasize the importance of maintaining protected areas for conserving primate populations.
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Bayesian Statistics in Archaeology
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 435–453More LessNull hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is the most common statistical framework used by scientists, including archaeologists. Owing to increasing dissatisfaction, however, Bayesian inference has become an alternative to these methods. In this article, we review the application of Bayesian statistics to archaeology. We begin with a simple example to demonstrate the differences in applying NHST and Bayesian inference to an archaeological problem. Next, we formally define NHST and Bayesian inference, provide a brief historical overview of their development, and discuss the advantages and limitations of each method. A review of Bayesian inference and archaeology follows, highlighting the applications of Bayesian methods to chronological, bioarchaeological, zooarchaeological, ceramic, lithic, and spatial analyses. We close by considering the future applications of Bayesian statistics to archaeological research.
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Looting, the Antiquities Trade, and Competing Valuations of the Past
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 455–474More LessLooting and spoliation of archaeological sites represent a known crisis in many parts of the world, and it is widely acknowledged that despite what we know about the scale of site destruction, the reality is worse. Available evidence suggests that the scale and severity of looting are increasing. Legal and ethical remedies exist but have not proven adequate to reduce the impact of looting and antiquities trafficking. This reflects, in part, inadequate resources and uneven enforcement, and also the pressures of rising prices for antiquities, growing market demand, severe economic depression, and lawlessness, particularly in conflict zones. But it also reflects expanding ideological causes for site destruction by others, as well as competing epistemologies and deontological expectations within the discipline itself challenging the site preservation imperative in archaeology. More than ten years ago, a previous review of these topics found the response inadequate; a decade later, matters are worse.
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The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 475–492More LessAnthropologists have sustained a varied and active engagement with ethics throughout the field's history. In light of this long-standing engagement, what marks the distinctiveness of the current ethical turn? To think in Foucauldian terms, ethics/morality now looms large precisely because it has been problematized. Although there has been a recent outpouring of work on ethics, and a widely shared concern to move beyond overly collectivist accounts, much is nascent. Debates and schools of thought are still emerging. In this review article, we explore several resonate streams of disquiet or inspiration within the discipline that have generated new lines of inquiry. These include (a) emerging debates and confusion around the use of basic terms such as “ethics” and “morality” and their role in debates over ordinary ethics, (b) articulations of an anthropological virtue ethics (and the Foucault effect), (c) increasingly sophisticated treatments of moral experience informed by philosophical phenomenology, and (d) reinvigorated considerations of the political as connected to ethical life.
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Ethics of Primate Fieldwork: Toward an Ethically Engaged Primatology
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 493–512More LessField primatologists have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond study subjects to the local human communities living near primate populations and their surrounding ecosystems. In this review, we explore the history of ethical discussions within anthropological primatology and examine the best practices for an ethically engaged primatology that should be followed and role-modeled by primatologists. An increasing number of primates are showing reduced population sizes and are in imminent danger of extinction; thus, we need to carefully consider the ethics of intervening to ensure the survival of remaining populations, the impact of anthropogenic factors (e.g., climate change), and whether long-term field research results in conservation outcomes that consider local human communities. Because best practices change over time as theoretical frameworks and methodological tools advance and scientific goals change, field primatologists must continually reflect on what constitutes ethical practice and consider how research influences the overlapping dimensions of fieldwork: primates, people, and ecosystems.
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Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution: New Light on Old Debates
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 513–531More LessOne of the most persistent debates in anthropology and related disciplines has been over the relative weight of aggression and competition versus nonaggression and cooperation as drivers of human behavioral evolution. The literature on hunting and gathering societies—past and present—has played a prominent role in these debates. This review compares recent literature from both sides of the argument and evaluates how accurately various authors use or misuse the ethnographic and archaeological research on hunters and gatherers. Whereas some theories provide a very poor fit with the hunter-gatherer evidence, others build their arguments around a much fuller range of the available data. The latter make a convincing case for models of human evolution that place at their center cooperative breeding and child-rearing, as well as management of conflict, flexible land tenure, and balanced gender relations.
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Female Power in Primates and the Phenomenon of Female Dominance
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 533–551More LessSex-biased power structures are common in human and nonhuman primate societies. “Female dominance” is a term applied to a wide range of female-biased power structures. However, the full extent of this variation remains obscure because an adequate vocabulary of power has not been adopted consistently. Female power occurs throughout primates and other animals, even in male-dominant societies, but the legacy of patriarchy persists in primatologists’ use of language and implicit assumptions about intersexual power. While explanations for the occurrence of female power can be accommodated within existing ethological theory, many hypotheses seeking to explain the evolution of female power are narrowly focused on particular taxa. Theories about primate social evolution would benefit from a synthesis of the disparate literature on power, increased emphasis on intersexual social relationships, and comparative studies that include the full behavioral diversity of primates and other mammals.
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Developments in American Archaeology: Fifty Years of the National Historic Preservation Act
Vol. 47 (2018), pp. 553–574More LessSince its enactment over five decades ago, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the organizations, policies, and regulations implementing it have strongly influenced how archaeology is conducted in the United States. The NHPA created a national network of archaeologists in government agencies. This network reviews the possible impact on important archaeological resources of tens of thousands of public projects planned each year. These reviews often include investigations, of which there have been millions. The archaeological profession has shifted from one oriented mainly on academic research and teaching to one focused on field investigations, planning, resource management, public outreach, and resource protection, bundled under the term cultural resource management (CRM). Since 1966, growth has produced good outcomes as well as some troubling developments. Current and new challenges include avoiding lock-step, overly bureaucratic procedures and finding the financial, professional, and technical resources, as well as political support, to build on the achievements so far.
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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)