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In 1986 Jonathan Parry's 'The Gift, the Indian Gift and the "Indian Gift"' claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry's essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short 'revisionist' note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists have long attended to the relationship between people and their natural surroundings. This paper introduces a set of studies concerned with that relationship as they appear in environmental management and protection. It begins by sketching how anthropologists approached that relationship in the second half of the twentieth century. Their approach changed from seeing the natural surroundings as a systemic, external constraint on society, to seeing them as part of the ways that people identify and give meaning to themselves and others. This paper then identifies two threads in contemporary environmental anthropology. One is concerned with that meaning and identity. The other, and somewhat more recent, thread is political ecology, concerned with the political economy of the environment. The paper concludes by describing the different studies presented in this issue. They link meaning and identity on the one hand, and political economy on the other, in the context of concern for and efforts to protect the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among those who study education systems there has been a general concern with schooling outcomes, which has encouraged a focus on the main classroom and general education. This deflects attention from another important issue, the ways that schools understand differences in pupil performance and identify pupils in terms of that understanding. Concern with this issue encourages a focus on educational psychology and special education, where such understandings are developed overtly and such identifications are made explicitly. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the work in the sociology of special education that bears on this neglected issue. It does so by describing three main themes within the field. These are: cultural understandings of ability and disability, the soda! processes by which children are identified as disabled, and extra-school influences affecting the development and operation of special education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates certain aspects of the debate about the causes of unequal educational performance By analyzing two illustrative explanations of performance. It shows that the debate appears to be shaped by a fundamental theme in modern Western culture, the nature-culture opposition. This suggests that the knowledge that we have concerning educational performance is influenced not only by the social and political interests and positions of educators and researchers, but also by more basic cultural concerns, and if we want to understand both educational performance and the debate surrounding it, we need to be aware of this broad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines political support for brain dysfunction which is culminating in the Children With Learning Disabilities Act of 1969 in the U.S. The act among other things, added learning disability to the list of educational abnormalities recognized by the federal government and authorize federal expenditures for research and pilot school programmes. There were two broad interpretations of the basic brain dysfunction model. The first of these was learning disability, which de-emphasized neuropathology and provided a relatively optimistic prognosis. Special educators and some researches urging this orientation used it to press for a less physiological and more educational approach to educational abnormality, intended to give them more independent control over the operation of special education categories and programmes and through this strengthen the power of educators to define normality and abnormality, as well as increase the demand for learning disability specialists. The other interpretation of the model, sociogenic brain damage, pointed to social and especially family factors as significant causes and its attention to neurostructural damage and non-development carried a distinctly pessimistic prognosis.

Explanation and knowledge have traditionally been guided by and judged in terms of the ideal of the neutral reflection of reality. Kuhn's work on the sciences, and Bourdieu's and Kenneth Burke's discussions of knowledge and society, suggest that this ideal and the implicit epistemology that goes with it are in error. Their writings suggest instead that such an ideal masks the inadequacy of its own implicit epistemology by misrecognizing the effects of that inadequacy. That is, their writings suggest a sort of collective self‐deception by members of the knowledge community. The knowledge of brain damage among culturally deprived children is used to illustrate how this misrecognition and masking take place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]