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This paper examines the controversy that followed the 1987 publication of Joseph Greenberg's book, Language in the Americas, attending to the role of language and linguistic research within overlapping disciplinary traditions. With this text, Greenberg presented a macro‐level tripartite classification that opposed then dominant fine‐grained analyses recognizing anywhere from 150 to 200 distinct language families. His proposal was the subject of a landmark conference, examining strengths and weaknesses, the unpublished proceedings of which are presented here for the first time. For specialists in the anthropological and comparative‐historical study of Indigenous American languages, Greenberg's intervention highlighted the tension between language, conceived as an abstract object of study, and languages, understood to be carriers of specific cultural knowledge. For physical anthropologists and archaeologists, his theory was initially fortuitous on programmatic, substantive, and methodological grounds. The essay will show how interdisciplinary appeals were figured by supporters as a virtue, and by critics as a vice. The essay further highlights ethical reasons for integrating historical narratives of science and the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the invitation of "Polar" magazine for anthropologists to submit articles and essays regarding issues of state administration and bureaucracies. It explores the important roles of the anthropologists and social scientists in investigating the implications of a bureaucratic administration and its effects of to the state. Moreover, the magazine invites scholars to express their views on how citizens should represent the state and about the functions of states agencies.

The article presents the discussion on bioarcheologists and forensic anthropologists. Topics include relating to bioarcheology education and training and research on archeological human remains in university, museum, and commercial contexts; and no ethics committee in place at the home institution or museum where the remains being curated.

This paper deals with the anthropological conception of the first modern Italian anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910). We will begin by contextualizing the status of anthropology in Italy during the second half of the 19th century. Subsequently, we will delve into some of the inspirations that led the Italians to have such a multifaceted conception of the discipline. Next, we will outline the content of this approach and clarify the meaning of "omnicomprehensive science." From there, we will come to understand the reason for the variety of interests of the anthropologist, who aimed to study the human being in all aspects of life. We will then mention the moral objective present in his professional journey: through an understanding of the complexity of human life, the anthropologist wanted to contribute to the progress and well‐being of society; in other words, to "living well." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anscombe distinguishes two notions of "self‐conscious": the philosophical notion, which refers to the special form of awareness one has of oneself as oneself, and the ordinary notion, which we employ when we speak of "feeling self‐conscious before another". My aim in this paper is to show that ordinary self‐consciousness cannot be understood in terms of either of the forms of intersubjective relation standardly acknowledged in the philosophical literature. It cannot be understood reductively, in terms of the psychological states of each subject nor can it be understood in terms of an irreducible second personal relation. Instead, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenological structure of ordinary self‐consciousness, we must rehabilitate Sartre's thought that when I am conscious of myself as being the object of another's gaze, I experience myself as being acted upon by them, in such a way that what I experience them as doing to me and what I experience myself as thereby undergoing are two aspects of an irreducible interpersonal transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue suggests that the need to examine the entangled lives of species, selves and other beings through a multisensory perspective is crucial and timely. Developing on a sensory analysis, one that emerges through what Anna Tsing refers to as the 'arts of noticing' (2015), this introductory paper explores how both nonhuman and human lives are intertwined, and how their close examination can guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of more‐than‐human engagement, connection and relatedness. Through articles within this issue from Australian anthropology and beyond, we ask how becoming‐with more‐than‐humans helps us to construct a post‐humanist analysis in the combination of sensory anthropology and multispecies anthropology. Through a combination of these two fields, the paper suggests, anthropology can take up the opportunity to think about animals as subjects, through our ability to communicate beyond language and to engage in a more meaningful way through interspecies knowledge‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have extensively examined the material politics of bureaucratic rule and technical expertise. But ethnographic analysis must also attend to the politics of mathematical abstractions that cannot be reduced to any specific kind of materiality. A key site to appreciate such politics is the georeferentiation of Indigenous property polygons in Peru's Amazonian region of Loreto. In the context of climate change and biodiversity loss, both the Peruvian state and Indigenous communities have pinned their hopes on mathematically stabilizing Indigenous property polygons. But these hopes are haunted by the confusing accumulations of informal attempts to make sense of these territories over time. To appreciate these accumulations, the state engineer (ingeniero) can serve as a privileged prism. Thinking through polygons provides an opportunity to interrogate emerging forms of Indigenous territoriality in Amazonia, as well as the contentious politics of mathematical abstractions in contemporary global environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several conferences schedule from March 25-31, 2014 related to Human Biology Association, Paleopathology Association, and American Association of Physical Anthropologists including Business Meeting, Podium Sessions, and Executive Committee Meeting.

Rejecting nature‐culture dualism, contemporary anthropology recognises the mutually constitutive processes that create shared human and non‐human lifeworlds. Such recognition owes much to ethnographic engagement with diverse indigenous cosmologies many of which have, for millennia, upheld ideas about indivisible worlds in which all living kinds occupy a shared ontological space and non‐human species and environments are approached respectfully, with expectations of reciprocity and partnership. As many societies confront the global chaos caused by the anthropocentric prioritisation of human interests, anthropologists and indigenous communities are therefore well placed to articulate alternative models in which the non‐human domain is dealt with more equitably and inclusively. This paper is located comparatively in long‐term ethnographic research with indigenous communities in Australia, alongside the Mitchell River in North Queensland and the Brisbane River in South Queensland. It draws more specifically on involvement in legal claims for water rights by Māori iwis in New Zealand; in land claims by the Kunjen language group in Cape York; and in a recent 'sea country' case brought against a major multi‐national by the Tiwi Islanders in Australia's Northern Territory. It also makes use of a major comparative study of water beings in diverse cultural and historical contexts, and considers the central importance of water beings such as Māori taniwha and the Australian Rainbow Serpent in such legal conflicts, and in broader debates about human and non‐human rights. Like other water deities around the world, these beings personify the generative (and potentially punitive) powers of water and its co‐creative role in shaping human and non‐human lives. They are resurfacing today with an important representational role in contemporary conflicts over land and water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the use of naming and portraiture together in the Black artivism–such as that protesting the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor–this paper reflects on the use of portrait drawing as a practice of genealogy. While working on a project to raise the visibility of scholars and their works in the African Diaspora, specifically Francophone women anthropologists, I felt compelled to draw their portraits. Drawing African Diasporic women into dialogue from the archive attends to temporality, vision, and listening, elements centered within anthropological practice, but also implicated in the attachment of the discipline to colonial logics, particularly of allochronism, objectification and silencing. The multisensory, embodied and slow practice of drawing alongside reading scholars' works allows for diasporic time‐travel, shifting the gaze, and constructing a decolonizing "listening genre". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do anthropologists do with all the data (both primary and secondary) they accumulate while doing fieldwork? Most continue to draw on it for many years, but there is increasing pressure (e.g. from the ESRC) to place much of it in archives, usually in electronic form. What kind of material could be deposited? What use may be made of such material by others? What are the ethical dilemmas which face anthropologists in depositing confidential data? Are there differences between paper and electronic archives and between textual and other forms of material, such as photos and sound recordings? How can anthropologists best protect their sources? Does anthropology become a form of historiography when its raw data are archived? What forms of ‘knowledge’ are created by archiving? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental anthropology is an expanding field in Australia. Extensive research on Aboriginal relationships to land and natural resources has provided the foundation for growing anthropological interest in the interactions of other Australians with the biophysical environments they inhabit. Australian-based anthropologists also continue to contribute to research on environmental beliefs and practices in other parts of the world. This paper provides a brief overview of previously explored themes in this field as a precursor to introducing new research and proposing additional areas of research. It is suggested that these could be usefully developed to enhance anthropological contributions to debates about environmental change in Australia and surrounding regions. We argue that there are roles for anthropologists as 'cultural translators' in cross-disciplinary engagements with environmental scientists and natural resource managers; as cultural theorists skilled at documenting and interpreting changing environmental attitudes; and as environmental advocates pursuing the knowledge needed to create more ecologically sustainable human communities. We also suggest that Australian anthropologies of the environment can make valuable theoretical and ethnographic contributions to this important international field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once "unmistakably remote even by Papua New Guinea standards" (Weiner 2002:33), Jimmy described how Chevron Niugini's discovery of oil west of Lake Kutubu in 1989 had occasioned a significant change for the Foi and their southwest neighbours, the Fasu: 'everything suddenly became defined in terms of whether a local clan was or was not a "landowner" within the petroleum development license area (PDL-2)' ( I ibid i .:34). This love of language was Jimmy's intellectual passion too, developing an "anthropology of language" (in preference to "linguistic anthropology" [Weiner 1995:33]), beginning with highly original ethnographic expositions of Foi poetry in I The Empty Place i (1991; see also Weiner and Niles 2015). Jimmy's avowed objective in this I oeuvre i was to build "social literacy" in his readership and in a manner that reflected the primacy of anthropology as a clarifying lens (see Hitchcock and Weiner 2014; Weiner 2000, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008, 2011; Weiner and Goldman 2009). Weiner's emotional engagement with the Foi is apparent in his description of their sung poetry and the paths and places (Weiner 1991), flows and deliberate interruptions (Weiner 1988:9), that their myth and sung poetry reflect. A CONJUNCTURAL FIELD In a 2002 paper, Jimmy discussed how his position in relation to his long-term Papua New Guinea fieldwork had begun to change, noting that 'external changes in the world of one's host configures one's perceptions and forces one into these different subject and analytic positions' (Weiner 2002:33). [Extracted from the article]

The article presents the author's comments as an anthropologist of tourism based in Japan on three papers addressing the anthropologies of tourism including a paper on the possibility of Ibero-American anthropologies of tourism, the Mexican way of studying tourism, and a paper on the anthropology of tourism in China.

Summary: Only a minority among our colleagues enjoy the opportunity to revisit their earlier fieldwork sites, reviewing their initial observations and research conclusions. This paper presents the researcher's experience witnessing the dramatic social transformations that have taken place owing to internal and external processes, in three fieldwork sites over twenty to thirty years. The subjects of his ethnographic monographs: Moroccan Jewish immigrants in an Israeli farming community; Israeli emigrants in the Borough of Queens; the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York City. These evolutionary changes, unconceivable during the studied period but inevitable aftereffects of most ethnographic projects, present a reality that anthropologists rarely consider in their work and teaching. Expanding ethnographic perspective involves a more sensitive assessment of fieldwork records considering the mutability of ethnographic observations and conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the contributions of anthropologists in the improvement of road construction in Yunnan Province of Southwest China. It argues that the involvement of social scientists in road planning can make important contributions to a people‐centred approach, advocate for cultural embeddedness and meet local needs, all of which help to avoid local conflict while promoting local ethnic culture. The policy implication drawn from this research calls for placing social sustainability at the forefront of the institutionalizing of multi‐stakeholder involvement in infrastructure development. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a survey of the anthropological literature pertaining to the term 'supernatural'. It considers a number of questions: Is the distinction between natural and supernatural universal? Can the distinction be applied to non-western cultures? What does the term mean as a cultural construction and as a response to reality? Finally, it examines the use of the term supernatural in the contemporary cognitive science of religion. The inspiration for the paper arose from the way that anthropologists often fail to problematise the uses and cross-cultural applicability of the term supernatural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new definition of the term 'subculture', as a way of better understanding hybrid identities specific to East- Central Europe, before applying this definition to a case study from the now- Ukrainian city of L'viv from around 1900. The first section outlines the theory, arguing that the continued focus on the nation state - either from the 'top down', or else the 'bottom up' as a source of contestation, by historians and anthropologists, has limited the ability to study groups in the interstices of the national projects that typically remain defined in monolithic ethno-linguistic terms. It examines the theoretical term 'subcultures' to propose a new definition that accounts for such hybridity, by having particular sensitivity to context (historical, social, geographical) and cultural practice, in addition to any prevailing national narratives at a given time. The case study in the second section focuses on linguistic hybridity in the city then known more commonly as Lemberg ( German) or Lwów ( Polish). It argues that Lemberg/ Lwów/ L'viv produced an urban dialect that blended Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish and German elements. This dialect should be reassessed as a mixed, hybrid or transitional code, rather than as a linguistic variant of a titular nation. Archival evidence - in particular, court records - is quoted to show that at the lower end of L'viv society, people routinely mixed and transcended linguistic and, thereby, ethnic and religious boundaries. This offers direct evidence of a specific subsection, or subculture, in urban life where people interacted and intermingled intensely. As such, the paper offers new possibilities for investigating 'hybrid' identities, as well as proposing a counterpoint to recent research focusing on deliberate indifference or opposition to national segregation for various socio-political, economic and cultural reasons (Judson 2006: 19-65; King 2002; Zahra 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal 'Great Man' people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists' drive to document and empathise with "suffering subjects", I suggest that being 'left behind' and 'forgotten' is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of 'making great men.' Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being 'last place' (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being 'the greatest people' of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to 'be great' reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a 'suffering slot', the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For anthropologists working with young people in schools, an ambiguous and anxiety‐provoking balancing act is required; how can the researcher align with the relational sensibilities of ethnography while also adhering to the strict boundaries and risk management ethos of school and university ethics? Tracing research relationships developed with students during fieldwork, this paper calls for an ethical perspective on ethnography that is longitudinal, inclusive of a range of fieldwork relationships, and accounts for researcher vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the papers featured in the current issue is presented, with topics including anthropologists working in museums, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Guinea and obtaining consent from research participants as required by ethics review boards.

In our 2011 synthesis (Bowman et al., Journal of Biogeography, 2011, 38, 2223-2236), we argued for a holistic approach to human issues in fire science that we term 'pyrogeography'. Coughlan & Petty ( Journal of Biogeography, 2013, 40, 1010-1012) critiqued our paper on the grounds that our 'pyric phase' model was built on outdated views of cultural development, claiming we developed it to be the unifying explanatory framework for all human-fire sciences. Rather, they suggest that 'historical ecology' could provide such a framework. We used the 'pyric transition' for multiple purposes but did not offer it as an exclusive explanatory framework for pyrogeography. Although 'historical ecology' is one of many useful approaches to studying human-fire relationships, scholars should also look to political and evolutionary ecology, ecosystems and complexity theories, as well as empirical generalizations to build an interdisciplinary fire science that incorporates human, ecological and biophysical dimensions of fire regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the cusp of what is widely perceived to be seismic economic change, Fioramonti's analysis of the history and power of the GDP is a provocation to anthropologists to unpack its underlying assumptions about the human dimensions of economic life, and to imagine a different set of assumptions for the future. He depicts the presumed most basic unit for GDP analyses, the household, as a 'cage', where all the relevant economic processes go through monetization and formulaic relationships and aspirations. This paper examines the history of the 'person' who is necessarily in a 'household': from the household being tax unit, to a domestic unit, to its currently expanding position as a node for the temporary meeting of varied trajectories of life and flows of varied kinds of value. The paper concludes with the challenge to create new metrics as being a challenge to comparison and analytical acuity, drawing on the anthropological archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this final contribution in the edited volume on anthropologists working in the Veterans Health Administration within the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the authors reflect on how developments in recent years have brought us to this moment in time from the 'insider' perspective of VA anthropologists. These collected papers provide ethnographic evidence for the innovative ways in which anthropologists employed in the public sector constitute a public anthropology that is theoretically informed, actionable, and cognizant of its role in the production of authoritative knowledge. The 'afterword' makes connections between the chapters, with their varied topics, and addresses how this volume points to new destinations for engaged and ethical research in the growing field of public sector anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on papers in the special section of the journal that discuss the anthropologies of tourism. Topics discussed include tourism studies, the essays seeming primarily framed by political economic issues, and the larger discussion of tourism or research on tourism.

An essay is presented on the marginalization of consultant anthropology within the field of Australian anthropology. It talks on the democratic-political values of egalitarianism, neo-liberal conservatism and the politics of anti-politics. It mentions the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act justified by some anthropologists. It also discusses the impartial humanitarian claims of anthropological consultancy.

BSTRACT 'Researcher identity' affects global health research in profound and complex ways. Anthropologists in particular have led the way in portraying the multiple, and sometimes tension-generating, identities that researchers ascribe to themselves, or have ascribed to them, in their places of research. However, the central importance of researcher identity in the ethical conduct of global health research has yet to be fully appreciated. The capacity of researchers to respond effectively to the ethical tensions surrounding their identities is hampered by lack of conceptual clarity, as to the nature and scope of the issues involved. This paper strives to provide some clarification of these ethical tensions by considering researcher identity from the perspective of (1) Guillemin and Heggen's (2009) key distinction between procedural ethics and ethics in practice, and (2) our own distinction between perceptions of identity that are either symmetrical or asymmetrical, with the potential to shift research relationships toward greater or lesser ethical harmony. Discussion of these concepts is supported with ethnographic examples from relevant literature and from our own (United States (US) Government-funded) research in South Africa. A preliminary set of recommendations is provided in an effort to equip researchers with a greater sense of organization and control over the ethics of researcher identity. The paper concludes that the complex construction of researcher identity needs to be central among the ethical concerns of global health researchers, and that the conceptual tools discussed in the paper are a useful starting point for better organizing and acting on these ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States (U.S.) population structure is currently in a state of flux with one of the most profound changes being the increasing number of people referred to as Hispanic. In the U.S., much of the identification criteria for a biological profile are based on American Black and White individuals from anatomical collections. Using metric data from the Forensic Anthropology Data Bank (FDB), this paper will attempt to explore several issues that forensic anthropologists face when confronted with Hispanic remains. These will involve estimation of sex, height, and ancestry, the initial components of a biological profile. Discriminant function analyses indicate that American White criteria provide poor estimations of sex when applied to Hispanics and that ancestry estimation of Hispanic crania is difficult. Additionally, a new linear regression equation is presented that estimates stature for Hispanic individuals, although population specific criteria are still needed for Hispanic individuals from diverse geographical origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of anthropologists have argued that religious concepts are minimally counterintuitive and that this gives them mnemic advantages. This paper addresses the question of why people have the memory architecture that results in such concepts being more memorable than other types of concepts by pointing out the benefits of a memory structure that leads to better recall for minimally counterintuitive concepts and by showing how such benefits emerge in the real-time processing of comprehending narratives such as folk tales. This model suggests that memorability is not an inherent property of a concept; rather it is a property of the concept, the context in which the concept is presented, and the background knowledge that the comprehendor possesses about the concept. The model predicts how memorability of a concept should change if the context containing the concept were changed. The paper also presents the results of experiments carried out to test these predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses large-scale genealogical work at thee projects in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Australia and considers three questions: in what respects is genealogy intellectual property (IP) and, if so, who owns it; what were the regimes of petitions that permitted the collection of genealogical knowledge in each of the three cases; and what duty of care do collector/curators of genealogical knowledge have in respect of preservation and safeguarding against improper use? It is argued that a new form of "emergent" knowledge arises in which intellectual property rights (IPR) are unclear. What is more certain is that anthropologists owe a 'cultural heritage duty of care' towards genealogical information The key criterion is that anthropologists must he in a position, and allowed by those who employ them, to guarantee 'unbroken eyesight' of genealogical materials regardless of what media they are on or how they are stored [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several awards and fellowships related to anthropology in Great Britain. The Alfred Gell price will be given to the best paper published in the "Journal of Material Culture." The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and Anthropologists’ Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research invite offers to host the annual RAI Fellowship in Urgent Anthropology. The Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Fund for Social Anthropological Research aims to help handicapped social anthropology scholars.

This paper argues for the importance of a broad sociological engagement with bioethics. It begins by considering why sociologists should be interested in bioethics and then goes on to explore the cognitive critique of bioethics developed by ethnographers. Some of these authors have also suggested that a more robust bioethics might emerge through the incorporation of the tools of ethnographic analysis. In this paper, it is argued that this is an important claim which needs to be analysed further and that Foucault's concept of discursive formations provides a useful framework for doing so. Once bioethics is redescribed as a discursive formation, the paper explores the challenges and obstacles that sociology and ethnography face in their attempt to open up a space for themselves in bioethics. The paper concludes by suggesting that sociologists and ethnographers need to reflect on the ways in which they might democratically secure legitimacy for their own claims in the field of social ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called 'Thailand controversy' divided the anthropological communities of Australia and the US in the early 1970s. In the heat of opposition to the Vietnam War, allegations were made that some anthropologists and institutions, particularly the Tribal Research Centre in Thailand, had worked hand in glove with the military/intelligence establishment and contrary to the interests of the minority peoples who lived in the hills of north Thailand, who were the subjects of research. The author was one of those so accused and the paper presents his view of the episode. It traces the genesis of the Tribal Research Centre, the publication of an inflammatory article in the US, and the subsequent escalation of the controversy there. It then details its impact on the Australian anthropological community, with particular reference to the Sydney University Department. Finally, it describes the climax of the controversy in the Australian Association of Social Anthropologists, and the American Anthropological Association. In conclusion, it argues that the confused intensity of the affair was a product of a mix of political passions, ethical considerations, and different views about the role of academics in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses data from 471 domestic and international visitors to Katherine, Northern Territory as to their levels of interest in Aboriginal tourism products. It finds that although 40% of visitors do have an interest in Aboriginal culture, for the great majority such an interest is part of a wider interest in the Northern Territory as a whole. There is little evidence that tourists might be described as ‘amateur anthropologists’—rather their interest is related to other aspects of the Territory, such as its landscape, flora and fauna, and opportunities for outback adventure. Additionally, it is argued that evidence emerges of some tourists re-evaluating natural settings from an Aboriginal perspective. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the application of quick, simple and low-cost procedures for data collection in commercial-driven 'salvage' archaeology. In large-scale cemetery contexts, the collection of a meaningful data set is often under extreme time and cost constraints. This requires the application of tailored field techniques and interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists, anthropologists and developers in order to maximise results. The authors examine procedures recently utilised to document and preserve skeletal data in three post-mediaeval cemeteries in Prague, and evaluate their efficacy. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of culture used in American anthropology has fundamentally transformed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The changing resonance of the work of Robert H. Lowie offers revealing insights into this development. Lowie was part of the first generation of students of Franz Boas that highlighted the importance of individual variation for the study of both primitive and civilized societies. Yet, its initial resonance notwithstanding, the culture concept that prevailed in the discipline went into a different direction as the result of anthropologists' involvement in the war effort. It was advanced by the second generation of Boas' students such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who stressed the homogeneity of cultures. The contrast highlights the diversity of approaches available within anthropology in the first half of the century and the crucial impact of World War II in determining which of these possibilities became institutionalized in the decades after the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for American anthropologist Harold C. Conklin is presented.

Objectives: With our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, including the communities with whom we collaborate, a more diverse population of students, researchers in other disciplines and the development sector, policymakers, and the general public. These recommendations include: (1) playing to our strength in longitudinal, place‐based research, (2) collaborating more broadly, (3) engaging in greater public communication of science, (4) aligning our work with open‐science practices to the extent possible, and (5) increasing diversity of our field and teams through intentional action, outreach, training, and mentorship. Conclusions: We EBAs need to put ourselves out there: research and engagement are complementary, not opposed to each other. With the resources and workable examples we provide here, we hope to spur more EBAs to action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Primate locomotor adaptation and evolution is a principal and thriving area of research by biological anthropologists. Research in this field generally targets hypotheses regarding locomotor kinetics and kinematics, form-function associations in both the soft and hard tissue components of the musculoskeletal system, and reconstructing locomotor behavior in fossil primates. A wide array of methodological approaches is used to address adaptive hypotheses in all of these realms. Recent advances in three-dimensional shape capture, musculoskeletal physiological measurements, and analytical processing technologies (e.g., laser and CT-scans, 3D motion analysis systems, finite element analysis) have facilitated the collection and analysis of larger and more complex locomotor datasets than previously possible. With these advances in technology, new methods of form-function analyses can be developed to produce a more thorough understanding of how form reflects an organism's mechanical requirements, how shape is influenced by external environmental factors, and how these investigations of living taxa can inform questions of primate paleobiology. The papers in this special section of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology present research that builds on that foundation, by combining new data on living primates and new methodologies and approaches to answer a range of questions on extant and extinct primates. Am J Phys Anthropol 156:495-497, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents analyses to the knowledge and understanding of the constraints and the opportunities provided by cultural diversity due to migrancy in several societies. Major contribution of anthropologists in the field of migration; Discussion on the branching out of anthropology of migration; Information on the politics of migration and race in Australia.

This paper derives from the research project 'The Management of Cooperative Strategies', currently being undertaken by the authors.' The authors are, respectively, a social anthropologist and an economist, who are trying to allow their different subject backgrounds to interact within the context of the research, and this paper is one result of this interaction. 'Native categories', or at least the idea of them under various other names, are an important notion within social anthropology, and this paper attempts to explore the usefulness, or otherwise, of the same idea within management research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the 15th Annual Conference of the Pan-African Anthropological Association on August 8-12, 2005 in Yaoundé, Cameroon. During the conference, professor Paul Nkwi returned as president. Almost 60 percent of the papers brought were from non-anthropologists. The whole event was a combination of discussions and intellectual argumentation.

In this paper, I explore the anthropologist, in my case a single, white North American 'girl,' often referred to as niña in Spanish, as an imagined orphan in the indigenous community of Lumbisí, Ecuador. Lumbiseños' understanding of being 'alone' propelled a long process of incorporation that slowly developed my social connections to the community through friendships, alternative fictive kin constructions, and reciprocity. This reflective piece draws on the work of Bruce Grindal, whose profound influence on humanistic anthropology shaped my approach to ethnographic research. His vision of an anthropology based on real human connections, the long-term responsibility of research, self-reflection, a critical eye, and the effective communication of human experiences we share with everyone, not just academics, inspired several generations of scholars, who carry on this tradition in his name. Using three vignettes experienced in crucial phases of this ongoing collaborative research, I attempt to illuminate the process of relationship building, the conflicts experienced, and the resolution we obtained in the spirit of Grindal's (2011) final publication, 'Confrontation, Understanding, and Friendship in a Redneck Culture.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of "scales of space and time" (Lemke 2000) has been tremendously influential in linguistic anthropology and related fields, and scalar approaches have proved useful for illuminating connections between what used to be called "micro" and "macro" phenomena. This paper disrupts "rhetorics of discontinuity" (Darnell 2001) in present‐day work, arguing that many of the ideas in contemporary work on scales were already implicit in early Americanist anthropology. Through renewed engagement with the debate among the Boasians A.L. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict on questions of individuality, culture, and social action, we can rethink "scale" and bring forth both the useful and problematic aspects of scale as a heuristic. I argue that linguistic anthropologists' reliance on scalar metaphors should be examined carefully, since the apparent scalability or nonscalability of talk and social action is, itself, a cultural phenomenon that emerges from decisions to scale our analytic vision in particular ways. Revisiting Americanist arguments about the nature of culture reveals some of the limitations of "scale," as currently conceived, but also suggests that scalar analysis might be fruitfully integrated with linguistic anthropological understandings of agency, vis‐à‐vis voice, and temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here I argue that anthropologists, whether we want it or not, affect the localities and the people at our fieldwork sites. These effects can be short, medium or long‐term, depending on the place and the circumstances. Short term help may mean helping to pick up fruit or vegetables for dinner or lend a hand during the harvest. Mid‐term engagement may mean to set up a school for local teachers wanting to learn anthropological methods or participate over the years in a single project helping with help, funds, or both. Long‐term projects may include setting up museums and helping support them through foreign donations or working with locals through the mediation of a foreign or world‐wide institution such as the World Health Organization or the United Nations. There are specialty areas, such as medical anthropology, which could seem to have the in‐built purpose of achieving long‐term effects, but most other anthropological work does not fall within these categories and anthropologists can choose when and how to commit to local welfare depending on their circumstances and those of their hosts. Here I discuss the ways in which different anthropologists have chosen to engage with locals during and after fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the December 2005 issue of "Ethos." It features a section in honor of anthropologist Robert I. Levy who has made significant contributions to the field of psychological anthropology. It discusses the entrance of the journal into the age of electronic publishing and hopes for the survival of its paper version.