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In contemporary society, global population movements, global conflict and ensuing migration have resulted in the presence of bicultural children in many nations, with multiple possibilities for musical engagement emerging within their home and host cultures. For these children, issues of social integration, identity construction, and cultural maintenance and change must be negotiated on a continual basis. This paper explores some of the ways in which music participation, and more specifically, participation in musical play, contributes to the well-being of bicultural children. In particular, the paper addresses the contribution of musical activities to the well-being of newly arrived refugee and voluntary migrant children and the ways in which these musical activities provide new musical and social beginnings for these children and young people. Drawing on research from the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology, anthropology, psychology and refugee studies, this paper focuses on my current research involving newly arrived forced and voluntary migrant children in Australia, but also on my previous cross-cultural study of musical play in a number of countries. Specific reference is made to Iraqi, South Sudanese and Sierra Leonean refugee children and young people in Australia, Punjabi children in the UK and newly arrived Central and South American immigrants in the USA.

This paper explores a case example of qualitative research that applied productive hermeneutics and the central concept, fusion of horizons. Interpretation of meaning is a fusing of the researchers' and subjects' perspectives and serves to expand understanding. The purpose is to illustrate an exemplar of qualitative research without establishing a rigid recipe of methodology. The illustration is based on in-depth observational and textual data from an applied anthropological study conducted in western Alaska with Yup'ik hunters and fishers and government agency employees as they worked towards collaborative management. The metaphor of the hermeneutical circle is showcased to help the reader understand the philosophical underpinnings and the analytical processes used to realize a meaningful interpretation. A series of organizing systems for the interpretation is described, culminating in a final organizing system to communicate a fully realized understanding of collaborative management at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global rise of populism and concomitant polarizations across disenfranchised and marginalized groups has been magnified by so-called echo chambers, and a major public health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has only served to fuel these intergroup tensions. Media institutions disseminating information on ways to prevent the propagation of the virus have reactivated a specific discursive phenomenon previously observed in many epidemics: the construction of a defiled 'Other'. With anthropological lenses, discourse on defilement is an interesting path to understand the continuous emergence of pseudo-scientific forms of racism. In this paper, the authors focus on 'borderline racism', that is the use of an institutionally 'impartial' discourse to reaffirm the inferiority of another race. The authors employed inductive thematic analysis of 1200 social media comments reacting to articles and videos published by six media in three different countries (France, United States and India). Results delineate four major themes structuring defilement discourses: food (and the relationship to animals), religion, nationalism and gender. Media articles and videos portrayed Western and Eastern countries through contrasting images and elicited a range of reaction in readers and viewers. The discussion reflects on how borderline racism can be an appropriate concept to understand the appearance of hygienic othering of specific subgroups on social media. Theoretical implications and recommendations on a more culturally sensitive approach of media coverage of epidemics and pandemics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the ideological and material reproduction of "effective schooling" in the Age of Capital functions to normalize and perpetuate the unequal social relations and oppressive dynamics that characterize free market economies and their accompanying political and cultural practices in the historical and educational context of the United States of America. I argue that the intersection of three perspectives furthers the work of scholars grounded in the various disciplines--advocacy anthropology, the anthropology of education, and the mutual engagement of anthropology and critical disability studies--and demonstrates that a multi-intertransdisciplinary lens is essential for deepening an understanding of the discourses as well as the concrete practices that push 'disorderly' student subjects into precarious circumstances that threaten their physical, emotional, and psychological integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a conference paper read at a session sponsored by the General Anthropology Division at the American Anthropological Association meeting held in 2014 that focused on general anthropology and its future. Topics of the papers include teaching general anthropology; cross-disciplinary research in the anthropology of science, technology and medicine; and the relationship between archaeology, anthropology and the public sector in the U.S. in the 21st century.

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures-- economics and anthropology--enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callón), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question--important to environmental expertise and politics--of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many ways, grief is thought to be outside the realm of bioethics and clinical ethics, and grieving patients or family members may be passed off to grief counselors or therapists. Yet grief can play a particularly poignant role in the ethical encounter, especially in cases of brain death, where the line between life and death has been blurred. Although brain death is legally and medically recognized as death in the United States and elsewhere, the concept has been contentious since its inception in 1968. Yet in most cases, families are not allowed to reject the determination of brain death. Apart from religious exemptions, families have no recourse to reject this controversial determination of death. This paper explores the role of grief in brain death determinations and argues that bioethics has failed to address the complexity of grief in determinations of brain death. Grief ought to have epistemological weight in brain death determinations because of the contested nature of the diagnosis and the unique ways in which grief informs the situation. Thus, I argue that, in some rare cases, reasonable accommodation policies should be expanded to allow for refusals of brain death determinations based on the emotional and moral force of grief. By drawing on ethnographic accounts of grief in other cultures, I problematize the current procedural and linear understandings of grief in brain death determinations, and I conclude by offering a new way in which to understand the case of Jahi McMath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a corresponding bias in favor of the poor when they handle casework, essentially giving policy to the rich and services to the poor. In this paper, we test this casework prediction using four experiments in which confederates sent simple requests to state or local officials. In each, our confederates’ reported social classes were randomly assigned and signaled with a brief introductory statement mentioning the sender’s occupation or economic situation. Across our samples, we find precisely-estimated null effects of social class biases: the officials we studied were equally likely to respond regardless of the constituent’s class. These findings raise doubts about whether casework is really a class-biased process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical anthropology has long appreciated the clinical encounter as a rich source of data and a key site for critical inquiry. It is no surprise, then, that a number of physician-anthropologists have used their clinical insights to make important contributions to the field. How does this duality challenge and enhance the moral practice and ethics of care inherent both to ethnography and to medicine? How do bureaucratic and professional obligations of HIPAA and the IRB intersect with aspirations of anthropology to understand human experience and of medicine to heal with compassion? In this paper, I describe my simultaneous fieldwork and clinical practice at an urban women's jail in the United States. In this setting, being a physician facilitates privileged access to people and spaces within, garners easy trust, and enables an insider perspective more akin to observant participation than participant observation. Through experiences of delivering the infants of incarcerated pregnant women and of being with the mothers as they navigate drug addiction, child custody battles, and re-incarceration, the roles of doctor and anthropologist become mutually constitutive and transformative. Moreover, the dual practice reveals congruities and cracks in each discipline's ethics of care. Being an anthropologist among informants who may have been patients reworks expectations of care and necessitates ethical practice informed by the dual roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Routledge) is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sensory science is a scientific discipline that measures human responses to the sensory qualities of food products. In order for study subjects to reflect on their tasting experience, the products under study have to be put into the mouth: chewed, sucked, savored, and (possibly) swallowed. The mouth and its actions are key areas of interest for sensory science: the movements of the mouth can potentially affect how subjects perceive sensory qualities and thus determine the reliability of data. To control the actions of the mouth, sensory tests may include strict instructions on chewing behavior. This paper explores the concept of the mouth in sensory science: how is the mouth controlled, imagined, and organized in an experimental modality? It draws on the analogy of work to elucidate the mouth as a regulated and productive instrument in sensory tests. As a correlate to the productive mouth, it also shows how the consumer's mouth is conceptualized either in contrast to, or as emanating from, standardized behaviors. Based on ethnographic research with US sensory scientists and on sensory science literature, it examines how a focus on work and its excesses can illuminate the mouth as the intimate site that scales up to mass markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "decolonizing generation" is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today's moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo‐Marxism, and anti‐racist movements? And what is meant by "decolonizing anthropology" when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists' gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land use by Indigenous people (Native Americans) and climate are primary factors affecting the dynamics of oak (Quercus) forests and woodlands in the eastern United States. Prior to Euro-American settlement, much of the eastern deciduous forest was dominated by oak species. The role of periodic surface burning, agriculture, and other forms of land management by Indigenous peoples is frequently noted by cultural anthropologists and historical ecologists. However, these points are often debated by paleoecologists and climate scientists. Here we present a literature review, synthesis, and data summary to investigate the role of altered land use, season of burning, and climate change in relation to pre– and post–Euro-American changes in forest composition. Human-based ignitions, as reflected by dormant-season fires, prevailed over the oak- and pine-dominated forests, with intermediate fire frequency during Indigenous periods. From the 18th century on, Euro-American populations rapidly expanded, impacting much of the eastern United States through extensive timber harvesting, land clearing, and severe fires. Starting in the 20th century, a variety of ecological influences, including agricultural land abandonment, chestnut blight, fire suppression, mesophication, and urbanization, resulted in dramatic vegetation changes in eastern landscapes. These trends have culminated in recruitment failures of most oak species on all but the most xeric sites and an increase in mid- to late-successional mesic hardwoods, most notably red maple (Acer rubrum), a species with very low density in our analysis of the witness tree record. We conclude that prescribed burning, agriculture, and other land uses by Indigenous peoples created a mosaicked landscape of expansive oak savannas, woodlands, and forests. A warming world over the past century should have promoted warm-adapted, fire-tolerant, xerophytic genera such as oak, hickory (Carya), and pine (Pinus) and grassland communities but instead have promoted the invasion by cool-adapted, fire-sensitive, mesophytic trees due to the absence of burning, much to the detriment of major vegetation biomes. Understanding that eastern oak and other pyrogenic ecosystems represent an Indigenous landscape strengthens our ability to best manage vegetation against the expansion of less desirable species and restore historic fire cycles through prescribed burning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social workers and anthropologists encounter different representations of mediation as a professional practice: On the one hand, Social Work is grounded in mediation as expert knowledge that helps others to resolve interpersonal disputes. For example, mediation as Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) can enable court cases to resolve without formal trials. On the other hand, Anthropology is grounded in mediation as a research field site and by past intervention experience of anthropologists. As mediation professionalized and became mandated across public institutions, anthropologists became strong ADR critics. Academic debate between mediation proponents and critics ended as critics abandoned research in the 1990s and 2000s. My initial research goal was to pick up from past empirical study. Research was conducted in Australia, Ghana, and the United States in two areas of mediation practice; resolving parenting disputes between adults who are separating or not married, and "elder mediation" cases involving older adults. Initial findings reified past debate through data that supported proponents and critics. Further insight was gained through return to fieldwork using an expanded, ethnographic case study design. This article provides a journey through a seemingly intractable divide that was ultimately resolved through prolonged time in fieldwork focused on understanding client perspectives. I show how social work and anthropology scholars of professional mediation have been positioned on opposite sides of an expert knowledge/fieldwork research boundary. This boundary can be made productive through open exchange about mediation as a practice that evolves through an interplay of expert knowledge, intervention practice, and client engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to understand how youth workers perceive their work with clients to support them in facilitating positive outcomes (e.g., gainful employment, academic achievement) for those they serve. There is a paucity of peer-reviewed research that explores youth workers' perspectives on their social service practices in the United States despite their integral role in supporting positive adolescent and emerging adult development. This article discusses a theoretical framework founded on anthropology and social work paradigms. Researchers can use this theoretical framework to examine youth worker perspectives on building relationships with adolescents and emerging adults in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about the anthropology and education. It mentions the importance of focusing on learners as active agents who differ in their selective and partial cultural learning, a corrective to the tendency in studies of "cultural transmission" to overlook variety and change in cultural communities. It discusses the narratives of social criticism had developed in the "new sociology of education" in Great Britain and in revisionist history of education in the U.S.

US military veterans who have histories of mild traumatic brain injury (mild TBI) are evaluated and treated in specialized clinics in the Veterans Health Administration (VA). In this ethnography of one such clinic, I explore the problem of veterans' forgetting. I focus on doctors' strategy of actively drawing attention to the ambiguous causes of forgetting to reposition past head injuries as among many possible explanations, including posttraumatic stress, pain, and everyday distractions. This leveraging of ambiguity as therapy highlights both the utility of and tensions inherent in the expansive clinical gaze of therapeutic medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Medical Anthropology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent decades the field of anthropology has been characterized as sharply divided between proscience and antiscience factions. The aim of this study is to empirically evaluate that characterization. We survey anthropologists in graduate programs in the United States regarding their views of science and advocacy, moral and epistemic relativism, and the merits of evolutionary biological explanations. We examine anthropologists' views in concert with their varying appraisals of major controversies in the discipline (Chagnon/Tierney, Mead/Freeman, and Menchú/Stoll). We find that disciplinary specialization and especially gender and political orientation are significant predictors of anthropologists' views. We interpret our findings through the lens of an intuitionist social psychology that helps explain the dynamics of such controversies as well as ongoing ideological divisions in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century, a new wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe came to the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania. A form of structural violence existed, and as a result the newcomers were underpaid, underfed, worked in treacherous conditions, and lived in substandard housing. Today, coal extraction in the region is almost non-existent, although many industrial ruins and abandoned homes can be found throughout the landscape. While these ruins can highlight the grandeur of capitalism, a more pressing need is to understand how these ruins are reminders of the long-term exploitation of the working class and the implications of this exploitation for the contemporary community's general health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Catholic imaginaries of survivors of clergy sexual abuse by focusing on soul murder, a psychoanalytic concept that the survivor movement appropriated and which has now become central to Catholic survivors' understandings of their trauma as children. Soul murder names the experience of child sexual abuse as the annihilation of a child's network of relationships and the ongoing loss as adults of basic relational skills such as intimacy and trust. In addition to losing these social networks, clergy abuse victims frequently lose their relationship with God. This article provides examples of survivors' efforts to resurrect their faith by reimagining and reconstructing their relationships with one another, God, the sacraments, and the Roman Catholic Church. Through their material culture, reform efforts, home liturgies, and protests, survivors embody a Catholic imaginary whose abundance both enabled their childhood abuse and gives meaning to their adult suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Reviews of violence against children in disaster settings focus on armed conflict. Little is understood about natural disasters which has implications in planning humanitarian response. We examined the magnitude and direction of the association between exposure to natural disasters and physical, emotional, and sexual violence against children, and assessed the quality of the evidence. Methods: We searched 15 health and social science databases from first record until May 16, 2018. Publications describing all types of quantitative study design were eligible for inclusion. We presented study characteristics and quality in a narrative form and generated pooled estimates using a three-level random effects model. We evaluated Cochrane’s Q with p-values below 0.10 and radial plots to assess heterogeneity. Planned subgroup analyses explored differential results by violence form, study design, and analysis method. Results: 11 publications met inclusion criteria. The majority were cross-sectional studies examining physical or sexual violence in the United States. We found no evidence of a consistent association or directional influence between natural disasters and violence against children. Combined categorical violence outcomes had substantial heterogeneity [Q (df = 66) = 252.83, p < 0.001]. Subgroups without evidence of heterogeneity had confidence intervals that included a possible null effect. Our findings were mainly limited by inconsistencies in operational definitions of violence, a lack of representative sampling, and unclear establishment of temporal order between natural disaster exposure and violence outcomes. Conclusions: Based on the available evidence, we cannot confidently conclude that natural disasters increase the level or severity of violence against children above non-disaster settings, however heterogeneity and study quality hamper our ability to draw firm conclusions. More nuanced and rigorous research is needed to inform practice and policy as natural disasters increasingly affect human populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

“Health psychology” is a newer sub-discipline whose research methodologies, theories, and practices were borrowed from diverse areas of psychology. It appeared later in France than in the United States or United Kingdom. In 1966, I adopted a perspective between anthropology and psycho-sociology of medicine. I never have self-identified as a “Health Psychologist”, continuing to work outside of disciplinary boundary constraints, but studied health questions moving first from psychology (and anthropology), through social psychology to sociology. By the 1980s, I adopted an even broader multi-disciplinary approach to health, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic urgently challenged health researchers/practitioners, in France and worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. These photographs have not been given much attention by historians but they are an important set of images that help expand the understanding of photography in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial era. This article discusses the circumstances surrounding the making of these images and provides a framework for interpreting their significance by applying the concept of the ‘photographic obsessions’ of Western explorers as defined and described by Willem van Schendel and his colleagues in the book The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the humanized birth movement in Mexico and analyzes how the remaking of tradition-the return to traditional birthing arts (home birth, midwife-assisted birth, natural birth)-inadvertently reinscribes racial hierarchies. The great irony of the humanized birth movement lies in parents' perspective of themselves as critics of late capitalism. All the while, their very rejection of consumerism bolsters ongoing commodification of indigenous culture and collapses indigeneity, nature, and tradition onto one another. While the movement is quickly spreading across Mexico, indigenous women and their traditional midwives are largely excluded from the emerging humanized birth community. Through ethnographic examples, the article suggests that indigenous individuals are agentive actors who appropriate cards in decks stacked against them. Examples of resistance emerge within a context of power and political economy that often capitalizes on images of indigeneity while obscuring the lives, experiences, and opinions of indigenous people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal law in the United States values conceptual definitiveness in its quest for resolution. But the work of open-ended humanization required of sentencing mitigation advocates in American death penalty cases defies this call for definitiveness. Even as formal legal processes seek to limit the knowledge that can be brought into the courtroom, new theoretical approaches that justify more understanding and fact-finding can help attain tangible goals of defense advocacy. This article provides an ethnographic account of how capital defense practitioners in the United States engage with anthropological theories of culture as a behind-the-scenes advocacy strategy that succeeds by exploiting the anti-definitiveness inherent in culture. I develop the concept of 'subtension' as an analytical trope to help elucidate these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives examines Margaret Mead mid-career when she devoted much energy to promoting anthropology and anthropologists to government and industry and positioned herself as a prominent social commentator. By the time she returned to the field after an interlude of 14 years, something had happened to her professionally: she was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, no longer a scientific heavyweight, and much of this stems from the rather hare-brained “culture cracking” she engaged in during the war. So while honors and kudos enhanced her official image, behind the scenes, she complained of being neglected and shunted aside. Her discipline became radicalized, and her balanced and accommodating approach was rejected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as 'security assemblages.' Security assemblages move away from focusing on security formations per se, and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying and studying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As an approach to anthropological inquiry and theory, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We illustrate security assemblages through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter-extremism, in each case arriving at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of distinctions that we propose is intended as an aid to studying empirical situations, particularly of security, and, on another level, as a proposal for an approach to anthropology today.We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice in every circumstance. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary US security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's rights to legal abortion in the United States are now facing their greatest social and legislative challenges since its 1973 legalization. Legislation restricting rights and access to abortion care has been passed at state and federal levels at an unprecedented rate. Given the renewed vigor of anti-abortion movements, we call on anthropologists to engage with this shifting landscape of reproductive politics. This article examines recent legislation that has severely limited abortion access and maps possible directions for future anthropological analysis. We argue that anthropology can provide unique contributions to broader abortion research. The study of abortion politics in the United States today is not only a rich opportunity for applied and policy-oriented ethnographic research. It also provides a sharply focused lens onto broader theoretical concerns in anthropology and new social formations across moral, medical, political, and scientific fields in 21st-century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade anthropologists working the boundary of culture, medicine, and psychiatry have drawn from ethnographic and epidemiological methods to interdigitate data and provide more depth in understanding critical health problems. But rarely do these studies incorporate psychiatric inventories with ethnographic analysis. This article shows how triangulation of research methods strengthens scholars' ability (1) to draw conclusions from smaller data sets and facilitate comparisons of what suffering means across contexts; (2) to unpack the complexities of ethnographic and narrative data by way of interdigitating narratives with standardized evaluations of psychological distress; and (3) to enhance the translatability of narrative data to interventionists and to make anthropological research more accessible to policymakers. The crux of this argument is based on two discrete case studies, one community sample of Nicaraguan grandmothers in urban Nicaragua, and another clinic-based study of Mexican immigrant women in urban United States, which represent different populations, methodologies, and instruments. Yet, both authors critically examine narrative data and then use the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale to further unpack meaning of psychological suffering by analyzing symptomatology. Such integrative methodologies illustrate how incorporating results from standardized mental health assessments can corroborate meaning-making in anthropology while advancing anthropological contributions to mental health treatment and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Global climate change is contributing to a range of adverse environmental and weather shifts, including more intense and more frequent heatwaves and an intensification of the urban heat island effect. These changes are known to produce a set of significant and differentially distributed health problems, with a particularly high burden among poor and marginalized populations. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative study of community knowledge, attitudes, health and other concerns, and behavioral responses regarding mounting urban temperatures and related environmental health issues among Latinos living in the city of Hartford, CT in northeast United States. Findings suggest the need for enhanced participation in knowledge dissemination and preparedness planning based on the coproduction of knowledge about climate change and community responses to it. The special role of anthropology in such efforts is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in ecology suggests that generic indicators, referred to as early warning signals (EWS), may occur before significant transformations, both critical and non-critical, in complex systems. Up to this point, research on EWS has largely focused on simple models and controlled experiments in ecology and climate science. When humans are considered in these arenas they are invariably seen as external sources of disturbance or management. In this article we explore ways to include societal components of socio-ecological systems directly in EWS analysis. Given the growing archaeological literature on ‘collapses,’ or transformations, in social systems, we investigate whether any early warning signals are apparent in the archaeological records of the build-up to two contemporaneous cases of social transformation in the prehistoric US Southwest, Mesa Verde and Zuni. The social transformations in these two cases differ in scope and severity, thus allowing us to explore the contexts under which warning signals may (or may not) emerge. In both cases our results show increasing variance in settlement size before the transformation, but increasing variance in social institutions only before the critical transformation in Mesa Verde. In the Zuni case, social institutions appear to have managed the process of significant social change. We conclude that variance is of broad relevance in anticipating social change, and the capacity of social institutions to mitigate transformation is critical to consider in EWS research on socio-ecological systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers and policymakers do not agree about the most appropriate way to get consent for the use of donations to a biobank. The most commonly used method is blanket—or broad—consent where donors allow their donation to be used for any future research approved by the biobank. This approach does not account for the fact that some donors may have moral concerns about the uses of their biospecimens. This problem can be avoided using “real-time”—or study-by-study—consent, but this policy places a significant burden on biobanks. In order to better understand the public’s preferences regarding biobank consent policy, we surveyed a sample that was representative of the population of the United States. Respondents were presented with 5 biobank consent policies and were asked to indicate which policies were acceptable/unacceptable and to identify the best/worst policies. They were also given 7 research scenarios that could create moral concern (e.g. research intending to make abortions safer and more effective) and asked how likely they would be to provide broad consent knowing that their donation might be used in that research. Substantial minorities found both broad and study-by-study consent to be unacceptable and identified those two options as the worst policies. Furthermore, while the type of moral concern (e.g., regarding abortion, the commercial use of donations, or stem cell research) had no effect on policy preferences, an increase in the number of research scenarios generating moral concerns was related to an increased likelihood of finding broad consent to be the worst policy. The rejection of these ethically problematic and costly extremes is good news for biobanks. The challenge now is to design a policy that combines consent with access to information in a way that assures potential donors that their interests and moral concerns are being respected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern American Judaism is often characterized by complex negotiations about practices, beliefs, affiliations and identities. This article uses ethnographic research on one ritual practice-the Mi Sheberach prayer for healing-to explore these processes of meaning-making and identity construction, through the lens of lived experience. While survey data tell us which practices, beliefs and affiliations are most commonly adopted by liberal American Jews, this ethnographic research examines why these choices are made, what they represent, and how they are integrated into the broader lifeworlds of this population. I demonstrate that prayers for healing are an inherently social process, inextricably linked to relationships with other people, the community, God, and tradition. Prayer means something different to each of the participants in this study, yet for all, the Mi Sheberach becomes one site, among many, through which relationships to Judaism and Jewishness are negotiated and constructed. Study participants choose, and maintain, those Jewish practices, like the Mi Sheberach, that resonate emotionally and/or spiritually and that fit within the larger context of their lifeworld-in this case, the search for meaning, comfort, strength and connection during times of illness and healing. Yet at the same time, an essential part of this resonance is the experience of community, connection and tradition. The individual's search for meaning is synthesized with the collectivist nature of Judaism, in an ongoing and continually evolving process of interpretive interaction between text, tradition and personal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If much has been written of the forms of bodiliness reinforced by hospitals, less attention has been paid to the medicalization of the soul. The medical management of death institutionalizes divisions between body and soul, and matter and spirit, infusing end-of-life care with latent Christian theological presumptions. The invisibility of these presumptions is partly sustained by projecting religiosity on those who endorse other cosmologies, while retaining for medicine a mask of secular science. Stories of conflict with non-Christian patients force these presumptions into visibility, suggesting alternative ethics of care and mourning rooted in other understandings. In this article, I explore one such story. Considering the story as an allegory for how matter and spirit figure in contemporary postmortem disciplines, I suggest that it exposes both the operation of a taboo against mixing material and spiritual agendas, and an assumption that appropriate mourning is oriented toward symbolic homage, rather than concern for the material welfare of the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annals of the American Association of Geographers is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the intellectual milieu of philosophers John Dewey and Franz Boas to determine the ideal and idealized relationship between critical scholarship and socio-political engagement with race. It discusses Dewey's and Boas's advocacy for an increased role of anthropology for philosophical insight, the difference in views from Boas and Dewey on the problem of racism in the U.S., and the socio-cultural factors that limited Boas's and Dewey's anti-racism.

This article explores the linguistic repertoires and conceptual categories that are discursive workhorses in the task of informing U.S. public opinion and shaping policy on Palestine. It situates language commodification in a modern settlercolonial context as it intersects with corporate public relations. The article probes two sites of knowledge production and circulation: the media and the academy. It argues that, ultimately, the media's discursive strategies are handmaidens of violence, enabling and legitimizing colonial relations of displacement and domination. Shifting to academic discourse, particularly anthropology, the article engages with a few selected terms to explore emerging and alternative ways of conceptually framing Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nearly half a century after it unfolded, American anthropology's so-called "Thailand Controversy" remains a matter of contention, as controversial as ever. In his recent contribution to SOJOURN, "Phantom Scandal: On the National Uses of the 'Thailand Controversy'", Hjorleifur Jonsson (2014) argues that the episode is best understood as a witch hunt conducted by anthropologists and that it constitutes an unfortunate blight on the discipline of anthropology. I want to take issue both with significant aspects of the story as Jonsson recounts it and with some of the lessons that he draws from it. As one whose anthropological career has been profoundly shaped by my experiences in Southeast Asia and by the Thailand Controversy as it happened, my perspective on the matter differs distinctly from Jonsson's. Moreover, the events concerned continue to inform anthropology's ties to the military; the controversy's relevance is of more than antiquarian interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our human ancestors thrived on a diet high in fat and protein of animal or fish origin for at least 2.5 million years. Foods with a high-energy content and nutritional density were required for the development of the large, energy-expensive human brain. A reduction in human height and deterioration in our health followed the introduction of agriculture 2 000-12 000 years ago. In 1977, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) introduced novel dietary guidelines based on an untested hypothesis of Keys that dietary fat, especially of animal origin, increases the blood cholesterol concentration, "clogging" the coronary arteries and causing heart attacks, i.e. the diet-heart hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As global migration increases worldwide, nursing interventions are needed to address the effects of migration on health. The concept of liminality emerged as a pivotal concept in the situation-specific theory of well-being in refugee women experiencing cultural transition. As a relatively new concept in the discipline of nursing, liminality is explored using a method, called ID-EA, which we developed to advance a theoretical concept for application to nursing practice. Liminality in the context of cultural transition is further developed using the five steps of inquiry of the ID-EA method. The five steps are as follows: (1) inductive inquiry: qualitative research, (2) deductive inquiry: literature review, (3) synthesis of inductive and deductive inquiry, (4) evaluation inquiry, and (5) application-to-practice inquiry. The overall goal of this particular work was to develop situation-specific, theory-based interventions that facilitate cultural transitions for immigrants and refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the relationship between the anthropological thought of the German anthropologist Franz Boas and the American philosopher John Dewey, including their attitudes on human experience. The role that Dewey's philosophy of culture and nature played in the development of anthropology in the U.S. is discussed.

Visual illusions and other perceptual phenomena can be used as tools to uncover the otherwise hidden constructive processes that give rise to perception. Although many perceptual processes are assumed to be universal, variable susceptibility to certain illusions and perceptual effects across populations suggests a role for factors that vary culturally. One striking phenomenon is seen with two-tone images—photos reduced to two tones: black and white. Deficient recognition is observed in young children under conditions that trigger automatic recognition in adults. Here we show a similar lack of cue-triggered perceptual reorganization in the Pirahã, a hunter-gatherer tribe with limited exposure to modern visual media, suggesting such recognition is experience- and culture-specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]