Search

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literature review that discusses the importance of American Indian linguistics. It also presents a summary of the state of description and comparative work for each linguistics family. It presents a classification of American Indian linguistics as well as the role of various language families and the interrelationships among postulated families. Though space limitations have dictated a narrowly linguistic concern in this literature and the ethnographic semantics are omitted, possible wider relationships of the families and classifications were still discussed.

Archaeology has been linked to colonialist attitudes and scientific imperialism. But what are the perspectives of Indigenous groups concerning the practice of archaeology? Numerous organizations recognize the distinctive needs of Indigenous communities throughout the world and have adopted agreements and definitions that govern their relationships with those populations. The specific name by which Indigenous groups are known varies from country to country, as local governments are involved in determining the appropriateness of particular definitions to populations within their borders. This paper begins with an examination of the various aspects that have been used to determine whether or not a group of people might be considered "indigenous" under various definitions, and then uses the history of the relationships between North American archaeologists and Indigenous populations as a background for the examination of some of the political aspects of archaeology that have impacted Indigenous populations. It then proceeds to discuss perspectives on archaeology offered by members of various Indigenous populations throughout the World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys sociological approaches to the study of markets. After considering the economic approach, I delineate the wide range of theoretical schools, including alternative schools in economics, economic anthropology, cultural sociology, the embeddedness approach, and the new political economy. I also briefly discuss recent debates on the transition from planned economy to market and on globalization. I conclude by noting the difficulties of theorizing about the historical and institutional complexity of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on anthropological writings on Chicano studies between 1970 to 1984. Anthropologist Octavio Romano, and a sociologist, published a series of papers on the characteristics of Chicano studies which appeared in "El Grito," the Chicano journal they founded. The stance that has become prevalent in anthropological works on Chicanos faces two directions: looking inward toward the academic discipline itself, and looking out outward toward Anglo American society. Researchers have developed broad sketches of the characteristics and boundaries of regions and subregions within the area inhabited by people of Mexican ancestry.

Multimodality offers anthropologists an inflection on the way we do research, produce scholarship, teach students, and relate to diverse publics. Advancing an expanding array of tools, practices, and concepts, multimodality signals a change in the way we pay attention and attend to the diverse possibilities for understanding the human experience. Multimodality recognizes the way smartphones, social media, and digital software transform research dynamics in unprecedented ways, while also drawing upon long-standing practices of recording and presenting research through images, sounds, objects, and text. Rather than flatten out ethnographic participant observation into logocentric practices of people-writing, multimodal ethnographies diversify their modes of inquiry to produce more-than-textual mediations of sensorial research experiences. By emphasizing kaleidoscopic qualities that give shape to an emergent, multidimensional, and diversifying anthropology, multimodality proposes alternatives to enduring and delimiting dichotomies, particularly text/image. These new configurations invite unrealized disciplinary constellations and research collaborations to emerge, but also require overhauling the infrastructures that support training, dissemination, and assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses historical and anthropological approaches to the life of social science. After presenting the thematic of social science concepts that figure as found object in cultural anthropology, this review briefly introduces the domain of history of social science (HSS). It then examines HSS studies that could enrich anthropological encounters with social science concepts, both methodologically and through the vivid social histories of relevant concepts, categories, and methods. I complement my review of these approaches in HSS with a discussion of anthropological studies of social science concepts. I review both the historical and the anthropological literature with the same key questions, focused on the analytical tools that each approach brings to the study of social science: what conditions of emergence of these social imaginaries are incorporated in the analyses, what contexts and processes relevant to their appropriation and travel are presented, and how these enquiries examine the effects on the worlds in which they circulate. In my conclusion, I point out how cultural anthropology can uniquely contribute to the domain of HSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review provides an overview of the anthropology of love and some of the main bodies of ethnographic work and theoretical debates around studies of love. It surveys specific studies that make the politics of intimacy and love central to their analysis and that seek to make theoretical sense of its meaning and broader significance. This discussion is followed by work that draws together an example of the politicization of love in the shape of a claim around "love jihad," which has dominated recent discussions of love in India and has begun to receive anthropological attention. In conclusion, the review argues that the politics of love will need to account for the meanings, constraints, and everyday vulnerabilities through which intimate lives become entangled with and illuminate political projects of every scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventions ethnographers follow to gather, write about, and store their data are increasingly out of sync with contemporary research expectations and social life. Despite technological advancements that allow ethnographers to observe their subjects digitally and record interactions, few follow subjects online and many still reconstruct quotes from memory. Amid calls for data transparency, ethnographers continue to conceal subjects' identities and keep fieldnotes private. But things are changing. We review debates, dilemmas, and innovations in ethnography that have arisen over the past two decades in response to new technologies and calls for transparency. We focus on emerging conversations around how ethnographers record, collect, anonymize, verify, and share data. Considering the replication crisis in the social sciences, we ask how ethnographers can enable others to reanalyze their findings. We address ethical implications and offer suggestions for how ethnographers can develop standards for transparency that are consistent with their commitment to their subjects and interpretive scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cannibalism, defined as intraspecific predation, is a behavioral trait found in a wide variety of animals, although most references to this behavior are anecdotal or based on casual laboratory observations. The role of cannibalism in the dynamics of natural populations has been largely neglected; the most elegant and detailed analyses of the population consequences of cannibalism are still provided by laboratory studies of flour beetles (Tribulium) that describe the process, examine its interactions with other population processes, and attempt to derive generalities about its effects. Therefore, some authors have suggested that cannibalism is an artifact of laboratory systems or that it occurs only in cases of severe stress, especially when alternatives, such as dispersal, are not possible. My purpose in this review is to show that cannibalism is a normal phenomenon in many natural populations, to evaluate its possible roles in influencing demographic structure and population processes, and to suggest conditions for, and constraints on, its occurrence. Cannibalism may be an interaction that reduces population size before acute resource shortage causes severe physiological stress, and in this sense its effects may be analogous to those of spacing behavior or dominance hierarchies in some social animals. I also discuss cannibalism as a limiting case of predator-prey interactions among potential competitors. This review is based mainly on field experiments and direct estimates of rates of cannibalism, but I use papers describing laboratory experiments to supplement the discussion of behavioral triggers and genetic components and to fill gaps in the field evidence. I have excluded numerous references with only casual mention of cannibalistic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the participants and outsiders alike. The review is based on the study of programmatic statements, the character of references in sociological writings, and available biographical information on their authors. All of these help to locate Soviet sociology within the intellectual enterprise in general and to establish whether it is actually a counterpart of what is called "sociology" in the West, or a different branch of intellectual activity which for some reason uses its name. Most of the findings are derived from an analysis of Sotsiogicheskie Issledovania (Sociological Research), the only specifically sociological journal in the USSR, published since 1974. These findings are compared with parallel observations on representative samples of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The conclusion is that Soviet sociology, although it uses some of the methods of Western sociology, is an activity of a different nature on the whole. It is a branch of social technology, a managerial science oriented towards the promotion of the goals and the increase of the ideological and administrative efficiency of the Soviet government. At the same time, the review draws attention to sociologically significant work in other areas of Soviet scholarship, particularly ethnography. It suggests that under the conditions of ideological control of social sciences obtaining in the USSR, sociology is more likely to develop in areas which, like ethnography, are regarded by the authorities as esoteric and inoffensive, rather than in the discipline called "sociology" there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the comparative study of language use in various islands of the Pacific Ocean collectively known as Oceania. The study was made to clarify the relationship between language variations and social processes, the nature of language differences, the nature and extent of multilingualism, and the role of language in social classification and political power. The study of language use in South Pacific made use of speech activities and events within the framework of communication ethnography . A study of speech systems in the islands of Samoa, Tonga and Ponape revealed that they have three levels of politeness or respect. Oratorical skills are found to be critical in politics and leadership in the islands of Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji.

The article discusses the physical anthropology of Aborigines in Australia which is divided into two areas of inquiry which includes the origin of the Aborigines and the operation of microevolutionary processes in the very special environment of the country. This literature presents an anthropometric research on the living Aborigine Australians. Furthermore, it discusses the increase in the number of professional workers interested in the Australian Aborigines as models for human evolution as well as the areas of inquiry involved in the pursuit of biological anthropology in Aboriginal Australia.

The article provides an overview of the articles and topics contained in the October 1977 issue of the journal "Annual Review of Anthropology." Twenty other chapters follow this brief essay. They cover a wide range of subjects, including applied anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and social anthropology. Of the total chapters, only four are devoted to specific subjects, while the others are broad surveys and exercises in theory. The articles faithfully reflect two of the three major issues that beset the American and related Western people at the present.

The article presents a literature review that discusses the linguistic theory in relation to syntax, semantics and pragmatics. It provides a definition of linguistic theory, the details of issues of theory in syntax and semantics and some of the problems in accountability. Furthermore, the literature includes a discussion of the criteria which involve category and rule types, rule applicability, naturalness of linguistic generalizations, and diachrony versus synchrony. This provides a discussion of the more restricted area which is based principally on the linguistic theory as defined by the transformational generative point of view.

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented proliferation of ethnographies of policing in many parts of the world. Implicit in the body of this new work is the continuation of an old and perhaps irresolvable debate on what policing is: the extralegal subjugation of subordinate populations or an agency whose authority is highly restricted by the norms of civilian populations. I argue that the best way to tackle this debate is to further develop the incipient practices of global ethnography, that is, to understand local practices via their global histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article positions types at the center of anthropological knowledge production, considering them both from the abstract, analytical perspective of expert typologies and from the tacit, phenomenological perspective of everyday practices of typification. Proposing what an "anthropology of types," broadly construed and across these two scales, might look like, I examine the histories and uses of types and typological thinking in anthropology, highlighting the empirical, analytical, methodological, ethical, and political questions they have raised. I then describe the phenomenological foundations of typification, how sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists have approached it, and the accompanying challenges related to translation and representation. Finally, I review ethnographies of expert practices of type production, tracing the circuit of typification–typology–type and back again to show how forms of expertise institutionalize lay knowledge in ways that further solidify the misrecognition of types as natural, and examine visual and arts-based interventions that draw attention to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As complex institutions extend into and govern greater spheres of social life, ethnographers contend with policy in an ever-widening range of fieldsites. This review examines anthropology of policy as an emerging subfield of political anthropology, focusing on policy making as central to contemporary governance in English-language ethnographies. Broadening the analytical field in the study of policy to include the targets of policy and their allies is one of the central contributions of an anthropological approach to policy making. Anthropological studies of policy production, implementation, and effects face significant methodological and ethical challenges. Scholarly debates in the United States and Europe continue to erupt over the production of scholarship intended to inform policy making, including the co-option of ethnography. While turning the anthropological gaze on powerful political actors could contribute to decolonization efforts within the discipline, ethically adopting ethnographic research into policy making requires complex alliances with communities targeted by policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines anthropological approaches to fiction reading. It asks why the field of literary anthropology remains largely disinvested of ethnographic work on literary cultures and how that field might approach the study of literature and reading ethnographically. The issue of the creative agency of fiction readers is explored in the context of what it means to ask anthropological questions of literature, which includes the challenge of speaking back to dominant approaches grounded in forms of critical analysis. Finally, the article looks to recent work in the anthropology of Christianity on Bible reading and engagements with biblical characters to open up new questions about the relationship between fiction reading and temporal regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews recent ethnographies of war that shed light on interconnected states of security at home, international military interventions, and hybrid or rhizomic warfare doctrines. I suggest the notion of hybrid peace to explore global implications of these ethnographic perspectives and to ask what it means to inhabit spaces that are constituted by such hybrid warfare. I argue for the usefulness of Schmitt's "nomos of the earth" and his theory of the partisan to conceptualize this condition and bring together different approaches to warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbatim—word for word—is assumed to be a text that faithfully captures and represents a discursive event that took place in time and space, which would otherwise be ephemeral and unrepeatable. In modern societies, verbatim stands in for durable indexicality and materializes the social epistemology of evidence, accountability, and authenticity. Today's ubiquitous presence of recording technologies amplifies the conviction that the production of verbatim as in the conversion, for example, from speech to writing is unmediated and transparently mechanical. Far from being unremarkable, however, the seemingly unmotivated commensurability between original and copy is an ideological function of social reproduction and institutional power. Building on both classic and contemporary linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic studies of verbatim texts, this review suggests how ethnographically situated studies of verbatim in its production and process open up cogent historical and political analysis of social institutions and relations and of subject formation through the labor of inscription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most persistent debates in anthropology and related disciplines has been over the relative weight of aggression and competition versus nonaggression and cooperation as drivers of human behavioral evolution. The literature on hunting and gathering societies—past and present—has played a prominent role in these debates. This review compares recent literature from both sides of the argument and evaluates how accurately various authors use or misuse the ethnographic and archaeological research on hunters and gatherers. Whereas some theories provide a very poor fit with the hunter-gatherer evidence, others build their arguments around a much fuller range of the available data. The latter make a convincing case for models of human evolution that place at their center cooperative breeding and child-rearing, as well as management of conflict, flexible land tenure, and balanced gender relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates how consumerism is perceived as an unremarkable part of quotidian existence, as a patriotic duty at various moments, as an indicator of social class, and as a means of semiotic self-fashioning. In consumerism, the tension between the sumptuary restraint on conspicuous consumption, which characterized the early Protestant ethic, and the dependence of capitalism itself on boundless commodity circulation, emerges again and again. I investigate how certain forms of consumerism, relating to excess and improper storage, are reclassified in medical terms. I also investigate modes of strategic consumerism, which try to bridge the gap between producer and consumer, and how certain forms of performative labor are themselves consumed. I close with a few reflections on sites for future study: shopping as a form of underrecognized labor, and an auto-ethnographic turn for academics, inspecting the reach of consumerism into academic practices and universities themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have long been interested in contemporary material culture, but only recently has a dedicated subfield of archaeology of the contemporary world begun to emerge. Although it is concerned mainly with the archaeology of the early to mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in its explicit acknowledgment of the contemporary archaeological record as multi-temporal, the subfield is not defined by a focus on a specific time period so much as a particular disposition toward time, material things, the archaeological process, and its politics. This article considers how the subfield might be characterized by its approaches to particular sources and its current and emerging thematic foci. A significant point of debate concerns the role of archaeology as a discipline through which to explore ongoing, contemporary sociomaterial practices-is archaeology purely concerned with the abandoned and the ruined, or can it also provide a means by which to engage with and illuminate ongoing, contemporary, and future sociomaterial practices? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review uses multilingual sources to illuminate China-Africa encounters in historical, socialist, and postsocialist contexts. It emphasizes interregional connections over time and uses nuanced ethnographic accounts to complement macrogeopolitical analyses. The article focuses on mutual stereotypes as well as on the negotiation of social and cultural barriers in everyday life. It cnallenges static, bounded conceptual categories in social science and policy research. The ethnographic studies cited highlight the complexities of human agency and historical legacies on the ground and show the contested democratization of space and opportunities that ensue both when Africans enter Chinese social fields and vice versa. In the process, these examples force us to rethink analytical assumptions about mobility, hierarchy, and political economy in ways that complicate Cold War-derived understandings of both China and Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work in the anthropology of cancer often examined causes, risks, and medical, familial, and embodied relationships created by the disease. Recent writing has expanded that focus, attending to cancer as a 'total social fact' () and dissecting the landscape of 'carcinogenic relationships' (). Cancer-driven relationships become subjectively real through individual suffering, stigma, and inequality. This article traces concepts developed from a primarily US-centered discourse to a global cancer discourse, including cancer-related issues continuing to raise concern such as stigma, narrative moments of critical reflection on the dominance of biomedicine, and processes by which individuals and communities manage inadequate access to biomedical technologies. Beyond the medical relations and politics of cancer, this article considers the ways in which ethnography addresses local moral worlds and differences that come to matter in attending to the disease, the person, and consequent social and material relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans are an intensely social species, frequently performing costly behaviors that benefit others. Efforts to solve the evolutionary puzzle of altruism have a lengthy history, and recent years have seen many important advances across a range of disciplines. Here we bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, punishment, and morality. We highlight recent methodological advances that are stimulating research and point to some areas that either remain controversial or merit more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. The anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance, in particular, have been the focus of much research since the 1980s. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and attempts to reform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how anthropologists and other social scientists examine biosecurity as an object in the making. It suggests that scholars encountered this object in research projects concerned with questions of global health, capitalism, neoliberalism, humanitarianism, citizenship, science, medicine, technology, ecology, surveillance, and risk. This growing body of work explores emerging modes of government that are characteristic for the post-Cold War period of global capitalism. Ethnographic accounts demonstrate how actors and institutions located in the Global North and the Global South perceive the spread of dangerous biological things as a threat to the health of individuals and populations. This article aims to review this literature and supplement the current approach with a theory of security performativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mainstream narrative in the academy casts hidebound authority as the enemy of evidence and, in many cases, the truth. In this review, I argue for an ethnographic and linguistic approach to evidence and authority as communicative practices that are not inherently opposed but rather inseparably intertwined. For ethnographers, authority can usefully be viewed as authorizing acts (recognizing that the act includes the receiver), and evidence can be thus treated as a kind of authorization, an act of providing evidence. Viewed in this more dynamic framework, authority and evidence become observable practices in which actors deploy cultural forms-performances, experiments, verb tenses, quotes, narratives, pronouns-to persuade, argue, confirm, and mediate social and cultural relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines how international development has been studied by anthropologists, both as a particular form of institutional practice and as the terms of global economic and cultural integration. This review also explains a shift from an anthropological critique of the discursive power of development toward the ethnographic treatment of development as a category of practice. It reviews research into organizational and knowledge practices, and the life-worlds of 'Aidland,' before turning to anthropological approaches to neoliberal development and the new aid architecture and, finally, to three significant current issues: the importance of business in development and corporate social responsibility; the donor focus on poverty as the result of the failure of government, conflict, and insecurity; and the growing importance of new donors such as China and India. This review concludes with comments about how engagement with international development has encouraged reflection on the practice of anthropology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological interest in Romany and Gypsy populations is now intense; but for the first seven or so decades of Anthropology, the field was left entirely to amateur folklorists. Roma and Gypsies may often 'not want in' (), but they also seem not to fit into existing academic models. Examining various ways in which Romany sociality challenges existing anthropological models, this article assesses the contribution of three explanations of Romany persistence: historical, sociostructural and culturalist. Roma always live immersed within and dispersed among dominant majority populations, and yet their adaptation remains surprisingly successful in the long historical view. The enormous diversity of Romany social forms, as well as Roma evasion of the trap of nation-state/ethnic figurations, continues to provide a potent source for anthropological reflection and theorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an account of the life and work of a person who was trained as an anthropologist in the University of Calcutta and then made his career in a department of sociology in the University of Delhi, where he is now professor emeritus. The career, in both teaching and research, described here has been built on the presumption of the unity of sociology and social anthropology, whereas in the West, and particularly in the United States, the disciplines are organized on the presumption of their separation. In this article I have discussed my relations with colleagues and students from both India and overseas. The bias in favor of the unity of sociology and social anthropology present throughout my work comes naturally to someone who takes for granted the unity of India, which is a very large country encompassing the most diverse range of social formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Money is one of the most timeless, all-pervading, and arbitrary inventions in human history. Its ubiquity in time and space offers great scope for comparative archaeological research into its varying material manifestations. This article takes a broad approach, ranging from Old World prehistory to twentieth-century ethnography. First, the development of archaeological approaches to coinage and money is outlined. Subsequent sections explore research into the use of objects as currencies in prehistory; the origins of coined money; archaeological sites illustrating the adoption and functions of coinage in and around the classical Mediterranean; and the study of coins as archaeological artifacts in the more recent past and in non-European contexts. Finally, we suggest some potential ways forward, employing comparative archaeological study to enhance our understanding of the complexity of functions performed by monetary objects, both in the past and in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review covers sociocultural ethnographies of indigenous Australia from the 1970s to the present. It explores three trends: ethnographic reckonings with indigenous encapsulation within a liberal-settler state; the influence of international theoretical emphases; and movements toward an anthropology of the otherwise. The advent of land repossession, and the ethnographic and employment opportunities this created, indelibly shaped the discipline. With their immersion in land rights and native title, anthropologists were also embroiled in the state adjudication of indigeneity. Beyond the courts, the discipline struggled to shake the strictures of area studies and its ongoing, if unrecognized, imbrication in statist cultural logics. Consequently, indigenist anthropologies have not shifted, but perhaps helped affirm, the West's sense of being the apex of modernity. Emergent approaches, which refuse the ossifications of statist logics using forms of immersion and multimedia ethnography, show signs of ways forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeology and anthropology, despite their commonalities, have had a rather asymmetrical relationship, and the periodic attempts at closer collaboration resulted in mutual frustration. As both disciplines have recently undergone significant changes, however, with anthropology embracing more fully materiality and historicity, and archaeology engaging in contemporary research, often involving ethnography, the time is ripe for a new rapprochement. Archaeological ethnography, an emerging transdisciplinary field, offers such an opportunity. Archaeological ethnography is defined here as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations, and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality. It is multitemporal rather than presentist, and although many of its concerns to date are about clashes over heritage, this article argues that its potential is far greater because it can dislodge the certainties of conventional archaeology and question its ontological principles, such as those founded on modernist, linear, and successive temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every society recognizes expertise, and anthropologists have long documented the culturally and historically specific practices that constitute it. The anthropology of expertise focuses on what people do rather than what people possess, even in the many circumstances where the former is naturalized as the latter. Across its many domains, expertise is both inherently interactional, involving the participation of objects, producers, and consumers of knowledge, and inescapably ideological, implicated in the evolving hierarchies of value that legitimate particular ways of knowing as 'expert.' This review focuses on the semiotics of expertise, highlighting four constitutive processes: socialization practices through which people establish intimacy with classes of cultural objects and learn to communicate that familiarity; evaluation, or the establishment of asymmetries among people and between people and objects; institutionalization, wherein ways of knowing are organized and authorized; and naturalization, or the essentialization of expert enactments as bodies of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological studies of sensory impairment address biological conditions and cultural disablement while contributing to theoretical discussions of cultural competence, communicative practices, the role of narrative, and features of identity, ideologies, and technology. As boundary cases, impairments can disclose essential aspects of the senses in human life. Sensory impairment studies navigate the complexities of comparing dominant sensory discourses with individual sense differences, cross-linguistic incomparabilities among sense categories, and how impairment categories tend to fuse together highly diverse conditions. The category of disability, which includes sensory impairment, comprises chronic deficit relative to priority competencies. With special emphasis on blindness/visual impairment and deafness/hearing impairment, we overview sensory impairment on three levels: the social partitioning of the sensorium, differential ramifications of sensory impairments cross-culturally, and the classification of the person based on cultural priorities. We identify ten common themes in ethnographically oriented studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review examines the implications of new kinship practices for anthropological theory, with a special focus on recent research in gay and lesbian kinship and assisted reproduction. The article begins with an account of the theoretical contexts in which kinship studies have been conducted and a brief survey of some of the older literature on alternative systems of marriage and family formation in preindustrial and modern societies. The emphasis then turns to current discussions of how gay men and lesbian women are creating meaningful networks of kin and families and the ways in which these practices both follow and challenge traditional expectations for family life. The final section surveys the ways in which the new reproductive technologies have been utilized in Euro-American societies and how cultural ideas and values concerning kin relationships have shaped the transfer of these technologies to and their utilization in other societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In responding to the globally accelerating rate at which linguistic varieties are disappearing, structural linguistics is confronted with a number of challenges for which it is ill-equipped because of limitations in its basic conceptualization of linguistic knowledge. In addition to providing a brief history of the recent promotion of language endangerment to a major concern of the discipline as a whole, this article discusses three such challenges: (a) new demands on linguistic fieldwork practices, (b) rhetorical tensions arising from the need to address a multiplicity of audiences; (c) the limits of the traditional descriptive trilogy and its replacement by the concept of language documentation. On a theoretical level, these challenges are all linked to the problem that the structuralist conception of linguistic structures lacks adequate grounding in the social realities of the speech community, a problem that has accompanied linguistic structuralism since its inception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it, the questions of language and law in Lévi-Straussian structuralism; (b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performative and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d) the rereading of Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift, and of economy more generally; and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religious and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of the field at the time when it was being infused with different forms of poststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by these discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing the convergences and divergences between Derridean deconstruction and theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main examples of works produced against and under the influence of Derrida's thought, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphometrics, the field of biological shape analysis, has undergone major change in recent years. Most of this change has been due to the development and adoption of methods to analyze the Cartesian coordinates of anatomical landmarks. These geometric morphometric (GM) methods focus on the retention of geometric information throughout a study and provide efficient, statistically powerful analyses that can readily relate abstract, multivariate results to the physical structure of the original specimens. Physical anthropology has played a central role in both the development and the early adoption of these methods, just as it has done in the realm of general statistics, where it has served as a major motivating and contributing force behind much innovation. This review surveys the current state of GM, the role of anthropologists in its development, recent applications of GM in physical anthropology, and GM-based methods newly introduced to, or by, anthropology, which are likely to impact future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigators have recently made impressive progress in multiple areas of sociophonetics. One area is the use of increasingly sophisticated phonetic analysis, which is demonstrating that very fine phonetic detail is used for the construction of social identity. A second area is the use of ethnographic approaches, which enable researchers to break free from using traditional social categories that may not be relevant for a particular group of speakers, and to investigate in depth the social meaning of particular phonetic variants. A third area is the application of experimental techniques to probe listeners' uses of sociophonetic detail in speech perception. These research directions are currently pursued by largely disjoint research communities, and the innovations are seldom combined within the scope of a single study. We argue that it is the combination of all these approaches that holds the key to an integrated understanding of how phonetic variation is produced, performed, and perceived in its social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twentieth century, many anthropological comparisons were mounted on the base of the synchronic societal ethnographies being produced at the time. That work produced a valuable inventory of the range of variations and differences. Now, following quite a different track, and defining the task anew, a remarkable number of ethnographies consist of observations of processes of change as they go along. The considerable obstacles to comparing such temporally oriented, processual case histories distinguishes them from earlier studies of tradition and custom. In this review, five abbreviated case histories of ongoing development projects illustrate the difference of approach. The process by which plans to control particular aspects of a social field are designed, implemented, altered, and diverted are the object of these ethnographic studies. The cultures of control employed by the planners are noted, but the dynamic of the societal context into which projects are introduced is shown to be equally important to the outcome. No less than a redefinition of the anthropological field of observation is involved in this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly interest in body size has increased in concert with recent efforts to shape and assess bodies in particular ways within industrialized social contexts. Attending to both overt and covert references to Eurocentric body projects, this chapter reviews literature in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies that addresses the cultural politics of body size in various parts of the world. It begins with a discussion of biocultural paradigms, which accept certain biomedical categories even when challenging or reconfiguring their hegemonic power. Next is a survey of works analyzing body size within "non-Western" groups as well as European and North American subgroups. These studies often employ culturally powerful "Western" constructs as foils, an approach that risks cultural othering. The analysis then turns to the extensive literature that unpacks dominant Euro-American body practices and discourses. Here, diverse perspectives on several key concerns in sociocultural anthropology are considered; concepts of culture and power, theories of the body and embodiment, and understandings of human agency vary in instructive ways. The chapter concludes with a review of scholarship on postcolonial processes and representations that incorporates a critical perspective on Eurocentric preoccupations with body size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of important insights into the peopling of the New World have been gained through molecular genetic studies of Siberian and Native American populations. These data indicate that the initial migration of ancestral Amerindian originated in south-central Siberia and entered the New World between 20,000-4,000 calendar years before present (cal yr BP). These early immigrants probably followed a coastal route into the New World, where they expanded into all continental regions. A second migration that may have come from the same Siberian region entered the Americas somewhat later, possibly using an interior route, and genetically contributed to indigenous populations from North and Central America. In addition, Beringian populations moved into northern North America after the last glacial maximum (LGM) and gave rise to Aleuts, Eskimos, and Na-Dené Indians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1989, the interpretation of a complex set of disputes and exigencies settled into a conventional narrative of paradigm shift, in which the intellectual past became essentialized as "traditional area studies" and "classic anthropology." This approach obscures the processes of engagement (including dispute) by which disciplinary change occurred. The Area Studies engagement with interdisciplinary colleagues and voices from the "area" has been critically important over several decades. Necessarily, the intellectual terms for addressing other interlocutors about regional conditions and events have differed according to the experience of the area in changing universalist politics and analysis. The area/anthropology intersection is examined for Africa (where race is basic to disputes), Latin America (where the place of culture and race in political economic arguments is central), and Europe (where culture and nation are at issue). During the 1990s a collective approach to areas emerged. Anthropologists, and particularly scholars of Asia, played a major role. The varied angles from different areas are linked by a broadly shared concern with the formation of emergent political communities and with themes of governmentality. Although the wider circulation of these ideas is promising, does it risk losing the grounding and accountability that Area Studies imposed (like it or not)? The events of September 11, 2001 and those that followed have made starkly clear the poverty and the dangers of essentialism, and the importance of focusing on the loci from which terms of argumentation in relation to power arise. Middle Eastern Studies is briefly discussed as "epicenter" for defining such an approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past twenty years the human body evolved from a rather marginal social fact into a notion of central concern to current social and cultural anthropology. But recent studies question the idea of the body as a given physical entity. They focus on the experience or threat of finiteness, limitation, and vulnerability and also raise doubts regarding the individuality of the self: Instead they emphasize its fragmentary character and focus on the embodied uncertainties (such as hybridity or irony) of human existence. In three main sections (respectively, on the social body, embodiment, and subjectivity) this review eclectically explores an anthropological debate that also betrays a more generalized and rising concern in Western society with bodiliness and bodily appearance. From the discussion, the body emerges as a changing relationship that, at the same time, unfolds as an ethical horizon--and challenge--for the (un)making of self, identity, and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research to date on the relationship between new communications technologies and language emphasizes linguistic and social differences between online and off-line interactions and the impact of global English on the non-English-speaking world. These studies conclude, for the most part, that computer-mediated communication reproduces the social, political, and economic relations that exist in the real world. Related areas of research, including ethnographies of global hip hop and studies of urban hybrid language varieties, offer important models for using anthropological approaches to advance our understanding of the interconnections and situated-ness, of language, new technologies, global media, and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of narrative explanations is explored as an alternative to the better established variable-centered explanations. Narratives are conceived as digraphs where the nodes are states of the world and the arcs are actions (causes). Comparative narratives are understood as mappings between digraphs. Ethnographic and historical explanations, where the number of cases is small and causality complex, may depend upon a narrative depiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]