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Volume 53, 2024
- Perspectives
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A Bioarchaeological Perspective: What's in a Name?
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 1–19More LessThis article explores the history of bioarchaeology from the beginning of the twentieth century, proxied by representation in publications as reported annually by the editors-in-chief of the American Journal of Physical/Biological Anthropology. Embedded within this history is the career trajectory of Jane E. Buikstra, who coined the term in relationship to the study of archaeologically recovered human remains in 1976.
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- Biological Anthropology
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Early Hominin Paleoenvironments and Habitat Heterogeneity
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 21–35More LessEnvironmental changes are often cited as the main driver of hominin evolutionary events, including major adaptive events such as bipedalism. Thus, researchers are particularly interested in the paleoenvironment of early hominins. The previous prevailing idea that hominins originated in expanding savannas is contradicted by the association of the earliest hominins with more closed and mesic (i.e., moderately wet) habitats. The Pliocene homi-nins that followed lived in a variety of habitats characterized by high levels of heterogeneity and permanent sources of water. This article reviews what we know of Mio-Pliocene hominin paleoenvironments, discusses the nature of the observed habitat heterogeneity associated with early hominins and implications for hominin paleoecology, and considers the challenges we face in showing a causative relationship between environmental change and major evolutionary events.
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Bridging the Gap: Integrating Knowledge from the Study of Social Network Analysis and Infectious Disease Dynamics in Human and Nonhuman Primates
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 37–53More LessPrimates live in complex social systems, and social contact and disease interact to shape the evolution of animal (including human) sociality. Researchers use social network analysis (SNA), a method of mapping and measuring contact patterns within a network of individuals, to understand the role that social interactions play in disease transmission. Here, we review lessons learned from SNA of humans and nonhuman primates (NHPs) and explore how they can inform health and wildlife conservation. Utilizing the breadth of knowledge in human systems and outlining how we can integrate that knowledge into our understanding of NHP sociality will add to our comprehension of disease transmission in NHP social networks and, in turn, will reveal more about human disease and well-being.
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Health Disparities Among Indigenous Peoples: Exploring the Roles of Evolutionary and Developmental Mismatch on Cardiometabolic Health
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 55–73More LessThe health of Indigenous populations suffers compared with that of non-Indigenous neighbors in every country. Although health deficits have long been recognized, remedies are confounded by multifactorial causes, stemming from persistent social and epidemiological circumstances, including inequality, racism, and marginalization. In light of the global morbidity and mortality burden from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, cardiometabolic health needs to be a target for building scientific understanding and designing health outreach and interventions among Indigenous populations. We first describe health disparities in cardiometabolic diseases and risk factors, focusing on Indigenous populations outside of high-income contexts that are experiencing rapid but heterogeneous lifestyle change. We then evaluate two evolutionary frameworks that can help improve our understanding of health disparities in these populations: (a) evolutionary mismatch, which emphasizes the role of recent lifestyle changes in light of past genetic adaptations, and (b) developmental mismatch, which emphasizes the long-term contribution of early-life environments to adult health and the role of within-lifetime environmental change.
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- Archaeology
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Lidar, Space, and Time in Archaeology: Promises and Challenges
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 75–92More LessAirborne lidar (light detection and ranging), which produces three-dimensional models of ground surfaces under the forest canopy, has become an important tool in archaeological research. On a microscale, lidar can lead to a new understanding of building shapes and orientations that were not recognized previously. On a medium scale, it can provide comprehensive views of settlements, cities, and polities and their relationships to the topography. It also facilitates studies of diverse land use practices, such as agricultural fields, roads, and canals. On a macroscale, lidar provides a means to comprehend broad spatial patterns beyond individual sites, including the implications of vacant spaces. A significant challenge for archaeologists is the integration of historical and temporal information in order to contextualize lidar data in the framework of landscape archaeology. In addition, a rapid increase in lidar data presents ethical issues, including the question of data ownership.
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- Sociocultural Anthropology
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Refusal (and Repair)
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 93–109More LessThis article focuses on the concept of refusal, particularly as it has been developed within critical Black studies and critical Indigenous studies within anthropology and beyond. It argues that while both Foucauldian and Gramscian frames have generated often exquisite analyses of the animations and counter-animations of power, they have not, in a general sense, sufficiently attended to the foundational processes that charted the possibilities of modern personhood and political life not only in the West but globally. Nor did they tend to acknowledge the genealogies of Black and Indigenous radical thought that were informing approaches to political life within these communities, locally and transnationally. I contend that any significant reformulation of the discipline of anthropology must deliberate anew about the logics and mechanisms of political struggle in a way that recognizes and foregrounds—in nuanced and dynamic ways—the ongoing coloniality and racism that constitute the afterlives (and still lives) of conquest. Refusal provides inroads to this project.
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Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 111–126More LessWhat does it mean to envision or dream a world into existence? Dreams and visions are often deeply personal and private experiences, but they also open up social spaces for worldmaking. From Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime” to the ethnographic dreams of anthropologists and their research partners, many dreams and visions are entangled with the historical and analytical trajectories of anthropology. I set out in this article to stretch further the anthropological imagination about the kinds of dreams and visions that may emerge from any dreamscape. To this end, I show that the anthropology of dreams and visions is built on more than the interpenetration of dreaming and waking life, metaphysical questions, problems of communication and interpretation, active or passive dreaming, the powerful idioms that dreams afford for collective visions, or nightmares and metaphorical dreaming. Myriad dreams and visions also unfold as what I call cosmological visions that shape anthropology and vice versa.
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- Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
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Sexuality Discourses: Indexical Misrecognition and the Politics of Sex
Rusty Barrett, and Kira HallVol. 53 (2024), pp. 127–146More LessThis review of research on sexuality discourses directs attention to the patterns of indexical disalignment that have facilitated the global rise of transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist discourses. Over the last two decades, scholarship in the area of language and sexuality has focused primarily on patterns of alignment in the community-based indexical production of social personae, a necessary move for establishing the discursive agency, and indeed humanity, of LGBTQ+ groups. The focus of this review, however, is not alignment but disalignment, for it is in the clash of indexical systems that sexual ideologies take root. Specifically, the article focuses on acts of misrecognition that arise at the boundaries of indexical meaning, identifying practices such as indexical inoculation, indexical presumption, and indexical denial. The review is designed to provoke future research on misrecognition as contextualized social practice, a turn we believe imperative for uncovering the power-laden infrastructure of sexuality discourses.
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- Archaeology
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Cultural-Environmental Systems and the Archaeology of Climate Change and Social Complexity: Midwest and Southeast United States
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 147–163More LessThe investigation of dynamic fully integrated cultural-environmental systems is one grand challenge facing archaeologists in this century. In the Midwest and Southeast United States, archaeologists recently increased their study of Mississippian social systems (ca. AD 1000–1600) in relationship to paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental data. Significant differences in chronological control between archaeological chronologies and paleoenvironmental records pose challenges to the study of cultural-environmental systems in this region and often result in equifinal results. Three major lines of paleoenvironmental records are reviewed: bald cypress tree-ring records, the Living Blended Drought Atlas (LBDA), and lake-bottom sediment cores. The strongest approaches include local and regional multiproxy environmental records from the same location as a well-investigated archaeological site(s) or region(s). In the rare case where the cores also encode a regional population history, it may be possible to develop stronger inferences that consider variation within and between communities and their vulnerability to climate change and environmental catastrophes.
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- Sociocultural Anthropology
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Anthropology of and from the Ocean
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 165–181More LessThe ocean has a key, though often unremarked, role in shaping everyday life, from impacting weather patterns and food supplies to facilitating, and contesting, systems of capitalism, including contemporary logistics, empires, mobility, and migration. Beginning with early debates on maritime anthropology, this review traces the shift from maritime anthropology to an anthropology of and from the ocean. It notes the ways that the ocean appears and disappears as metaphor or material space of encounter and engagement within the past, present, and possible futures of anthropology. It shows how absence and presence as well as metaphor and materiality are the modes through which oceans are imagined and inhabited. While there is no distinct oceanic turn in anthropology in contrast with a number of other disciplines, the anthropology of and from the ocean holds the possibility to reenergize anthropology's interdisciplinary encounters, including with history and geography, as well as modes of engaging scale and specificity.
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- Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
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Language and Education: Ideologies of Correctness
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 183–197More LessThis review illustrates how language ideologies about correctness, in speaking and writing, have been discussed in research on the role of language in education. Research illustrates a give-and-take between the interests of multilingual speakers and advocates of language diversity on the one hand and, on the other, the correctness ideologies embedded in institutional demands for correctness and standardization (in schools and language policies) and commodification (in the global educational marketplace). More subtle than ideologies of correctness, language ideologies about “appropriate” language emerge as related to race, ethnicity, gender, and other embodied biases, and the nuanced mechanisms of language socialization illuminate the persistent dynamics of these appropriateness ideologies. Finally, we discuss the relevance of postcolonial epistemologies, the collaborative participatory research methods that are reframing what counts as correct and appropriate for the study of language and education, and the emerging role of generative artificial intelligence for language in education.
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- Sociocultural Anthropology
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Toward an Anthropology of Self-Care
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 199–214More LessThis article posits self-care as a powerful analytic in contemporary anthropology, one that provides insight into both long-standing anthropological concerns about the person, power, and inequality and more contemporary questions about relationality, futurity, and anthropology itself. The cascade of crises that defines the now results in a collective preoccupation with care, the self, and self-care. In this moment, the work of scholars who have long theorized systemic abandonment and the unequal distribution of care is crucial not just to understanding the present but to imagining a new way forward. Proposing what an anthropology of self-care might look like, we start with the term's emergence in Black feminist thought and Foucault's late writing. We then explore how it moves through anthropology and how it has been defined by Indigenous, disability, queer, and Black feminist epistemologies. We end with sections on what we term literatures of refusal and self-care's relation to these. We thus argue that self-care provides a unique angle through which to grapple with the discipline's legacy and to imagine a new anthropology.
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Well-Being Within and Beyond the Body: Toward Careful Planetary Engagements
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 215–229More LessDiscourses of well-being can direct attention beyond individual bodies, toward mental health and wider social relationships. Paradoxically, these discourses are also applied in contexts where living well is understood in terms of individual responsibility and agency, entangled with the neoliberal optimization of health. Anthropologists have recently argued that it is now crucial to move beyond the conceptualization of well-being as pertaining primarily to individuals. Such a conceptualization, though welcome, can have undesirable practical and political consequences. In this review, I show how well-being intersects with recent work in the anthropology of ethics, how it is embodied and emplaced, and how it is closely intertwined with (rather than simply opposed to) suffering. Furthermore, while experienced as embodied, well-being is deeply affected by the suffering of others—and not only human others. As such, it could fruitfully be understood as a form of affective common. In contexts of complex environmental challenges and changes, inequality, and conflict, I suggest that studies of well-being call for a focus on experience beyond the individual: an affective enlargement entwining forms of care, maintenance, and repair.
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- Archaeology
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The Archaeology of Early Cities: “What Is the City but the People?”
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 231–247More LessThe archaeology of early urbanism is a growing and dynamic field of research, which has benefited in recent years from numerous advances at both a theoretical and a methodological level. Scholars are increasingly acknowledging that premodern urbanization was a much more diverse phenomenon than traditionally thought, with alternative forms of urbanism now identified in numerous parts of the world. In this article, we review recent developments, focusing on the following main themes: (a) what cities are (including questions of definitions); (b) what cities do (with an emphasis on the concentration of people, institutions, and activities in space); (c) methodological advances (from LiDAR to bioarchaeology); (d) the rise and fall of cities (through a focus on persistence); and (e) challenges and opportunities for urban archaeology moving forward. Our approach places people—with their activities and networks—at the center of analysis, as epitomized by the quotation from Shakespeare used as the subtitle of our article.
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- Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
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Native American and Indigenous Language Practices and Politics
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 249–260More LessThe United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated the years between 2022 and 2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages in an attempt to promote language “preservation, revitalization and promotion.” Such statements convey more than advocacy; they also convey complex politics and histories surrounding settler-colonial and Indigenous encounters through, with, and for Indigenous languages and community practices. What will those encounters look and sound like at the end of the decade? This review traces trajectories toward possible outcomes and political configurations.
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Conspiracy Theories as Productive Practices: Toward a Theory of Conspiratorial Style, Agency, and Politics
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 261–275More LessThis article reviews anthropological explorations of conspiracy theories—in dialogue with insights from other disciplines, primarily political science, philosophy, and social psychology—to frame conspiracy theories as productive social practices. While conspiracy theories are often depicted through their epistemological shortcomings and associated with social and political margins, this article traces the nascent threads across anthropological scholarship to reach an emic understanding of those narratives and their sociopolitical reverberations and proposes approaching conspiracy theories through their style, agentive implications, and political effects. Conspiratorial style, the article argues, pertains not to the content of the narrative but to its incessant seeking of covert operations beyond readily visible forms as well as a growing flexibility regarding the narrator's belief in the narrative's veracity. The agentivizing dynamic generated through conspiracism differentiates contemporary conspiracism from its predecessors and involves an empowering current. Finally, the article focuses on how contemporary conspiracism is intricately linked to political contestations.
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- Sociocultural Anthropology
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Locating the State: Between Region and History
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 277–292More LessIf anthropology once concerned itself with politics in stateless societies outside Euro-America over and against prevailing Euro-American political theory, today anthropologists see the state at work everywhere. Anthropologists have sought to trouble spatial metaphors of state power that assumed, among other things, its centralization and the unitary character of sovereignty. Locating the state through an attendant question of region, we explore recent literatures on everyday state practices in Central and Eastern Europe and South Asia to show how different regional histories and configurations of knowledge continue to structure our assumptions about the state and its functions as well as the grammar of our descriptions. We suggest that the state could prove to be a useful optic for the study of region, which provides an alternative to an overly rigid local/global dichotomy that continues to shadow our theorizations.
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Concrete Times
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 293–308More LessOur existence has become so entangled with concrete that it would be difficult to imagine life without it, though we probably should. Anthropologists recognize the part that concrete plays in mediating social relations and in shaping political subjectivities. Thinking about concrete anthropologically involves moving across multiple scales—from large infrastructure projects to modest housebuilding projects. This review asks what we might gain from a focus on this ubiquitous material. I propose that attending ethnographically to how concrete mediates social experiences across scales brings to the fore building as an activity of political, economic, social, and ecological significance. Concrete offers a lens through which to apprehend social formations and transformations as well as to examine how built forms mediate and leverage power, how space is used and claimed, and how futures are imagined and pasts remembered. I conclude with a critical reflection on the ecological implications of these concrete times.
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- Anthropology of Language and Communicative Practices
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Music, Sound, Politics
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 309–329More LessThis article reviews literature that followed from a political turn, starting in the 1980s, when new epistemological and disciplinary norms were established for articulating music and sound with politics. In an age of impotence, when neoliberal expansion led to pervasive political exhaustion, music and sound took on added potency as political forces in and of themselves. This wager rests on the presumption of music's capacity for politicization (its entry into and effect on the sphere of normative politics) under conditions of increasing depoliticization (the constraints placed on political participation). I have organized research on the politicization of music and sound into four primary categories: resistance and dissent, identity and recognition, affect and belonging, and power and dominance. The article concludes with recent wagers on music and sound to mitigate life's perils in the present and model “otherwise” possibilities for the future.
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- Archaeology
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Resonating Between Past and Present: Long-Term History for the Island of New Guinea
Tim Denham, and John MukeVol. 53 (2024), pp. 331–352More LessThe archaeology of the island of New Guinea is ancient and surprising, yet it is highly fragmentary in space and time. Consequently, archaeology provides only local and fleeting glimpses of social life in the distant past. In this review, we consider several key themes, such as initial colonization at least 55,000 years ago, the emergence of agriculture by at least 7,000–6,400 years ago, and social diversification in the last few thousand years. We build our discussions around robust archaeological records that convey a coherent impression of what people were doing in the past. We also highlight the ways in which archaeology can be repurposed to address contemporary issues, including social and environmental problems, and flag how a distinctive New Guinean archaeology could be rooted in a vegecultural conception of social life and time.
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Current Themes in the Archaeology of East Africa
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 353–370More LessEast Africa boasts one of the longest histories of humankind. From hominid origins to the present, people have roamed, interacted with one another, and influenced the environment in innumerable ways. To teach about the archaeology of East Africa is to engage with the deepest history of humankind, from Hominin evolution to historical archaeology and the archaeology of listening. Each topic has developed its own peculiar and complex analytical methodologies that require varied resources and degrees of intensity and investment in training and mentoring. This review discusses advances made over the past two decades in the research and dissemination of archaeological knowledge about East Africa. Beyond the major issues that stimulate scientific research and debates, what debates have been settled? Which emerging threats must East African archaeologists overcome to ensure a sustained practice of archaeology in the future?
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- Biological Anthropology
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Applications of Primate Genetics for Conservation and Management
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 371–395More LessConservation genetics is the use of genetics to understand and mitigate the threats caused by anthropogenic activities, including habitat loss and fragmentation, wildlife trafficking, and emerging diseases. In this review, we discuss the role of primate conservation genetics in the development of effective conservation strategies, emphasizing the importance of maintaining genetic diversity to enhance adaptive potential and prevent extinction. First, we discuss studies of various primate species that exemplify how genetic data have been instrumental in accurately assessing threat levels, identifying trafficked animals and tracing their geographic origin, and studying how habitat loss affects primate populations. Subsequently, we describe the various molecular tools and analytical approaches employed in these studies. Lastly, we provide a bibliographic review of research in conservation genetics over the last 20 years. We conclude with a brief discussion of the limitations and challenges in this field in developing countries and recommendations for future research.
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- Sociocultural Anthropology
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Sex Work, Antitrafficking, and Mobility
Vol. 53 (2024), pp. 397–414More LessWith the HIV/AIDS epidemic gripping the world in the 1990s and the resurgence of the antitrafficking discourse in the 2000s, the sex work/abolitionist debate took center stage. Proponents of sex work uphold the labor and livelihood paradigm based on consent; the abolitionists, on the other hand, dismiss sex work as work to posit prostitution as the paradigmatic example of patriarchal violence toward women. The latter routinely conflate sex work with trafficking, and the former sharply demarcates them. Above all, this debate poses a stubborn ideological divide among feminists with serious policy implications for both the worker and the victim, nationally and globally. Therefore, to imagine a pathway beyond this divide, this review centers on mobility and migration vis-à-vis labor and livelihood. Sex work offers insights into migration broadly speaking because it highlights the intersecting issues of labor, agency, gender, sexual mores, and displacement, all embedded within the global flows of capital.
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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)