Search

In this essay, we argue that gerontologists should increase their engagement with anthropologists to increase transdisciplinary collaboration, fulfill the interdisciplinary promise of gerontology as a field, and to ensure the work of anthropologists is formed by, and employed in, situations where meaningful engagement with practitioners and policymakers can lead to social change. Anthropology is the study of human societies in historical, biological, and sociocultural context, comprising a holistic field of study that can contribute unique methods, approaches, and theories to the field of gerontology. Although increasing amounts of anthropological scholarship have focused on older adulthood, this critical work of anthropologists still needs to be utilized by those in positions of power to enact change. Furthermore, the work conducted by anthropologists of aging has not consistently been recognized as anthropological scholarship. Therefore, a notable gap exists between the promise of the anthropology of aging and the utilization of the field, its findings, and engagement with the broader gerontological academy. As such, the contributions of anthropology to aging scholarship and the resulting reduction in inequities in the aging experience are not always adequately recognized. By examining the history of anthropology's engagement with aging and the lifecourse, we argue for a more applied anthropological gerontology. We conclude with a call to action to ensure that anthropological gerontology is seen as a fundamental branch of scholarship, both within anthropology and gerontology, which can be used to improve the lived experiences of older adults globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interdisciplinary perspective, between history and anthropology, of our contribution has as its subject the pilgrimage at Kisha e Shna Ndout (Sanctuary of St. Anthony of Padua) in Laç, northern Albania, which is one of the most visited religious sites in southeastern Europe. The church, built there and ministered by Franciscans, is now an impressive place of worship frequented throughout the year by thousands of pilgrims. On the 12th and 13th of June of each year, an official pilgrimage is held, which reaches its climax on the night of the 12th, when thousands of Albanians sleep in the shrine seeking blessings and healing. The pilgrimage practices show how materiality is a privileged means of reaching out to a religious place. This materiality is grounded in the multilayered built environment, which has been built and rebuilt and especially reconstructed after the collapse of the socialist regime—a process that reveals the pivotal function of secular infrastructures in the case of religious places. Virtuality is also an important aspect of the pilgrimage, and so materiality and virtuality form a single milieu that reshapes perceptions. Through participation in this pilgrimage, virtuality is sacralized and promotes sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief review article aims to recapitulate the history of osteoporosis from the most ancient observations to the current clinical definition, by offering a perspective on trabecular bone health and degeneration, which has become of paramount important both in clinical, radiological and biological anthropological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The encounter of professors with cultural diversity has become a common experience in higher education institutions based on the policies of democratization of access to universities in Brazil in the first decades of the 21st century. This article presents "points of contact" with diversity in the context of an institution created under the guidelines of international South-South academic cooperation. Through the description of situations experienced in teaching activities, a reflection is sought on the processes of identity construction promoted by agencies associated with the formation of ethnic and national boundaries. Anthropology emerges as a mediator to this encounter in the record of the experience that articulates theory to the post-colonial situations found in teaching relationships, locating interdisciplinary problem-spaces, common values in the context of the administrative structures and a sensitive approach to the history shared by the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction I try to bring together the commonalities of articles which are about many different topics, including food, nationalism, rituals, the creation of icons, the importance of tourism, language, and celebrations that give meaning to the lives of very diverse people. Perhaps the Middle East as the crescent of civilisation can be comprehended in a nutshell in this collection of articles, which are written mostly by anthropologists but also by a political scientist and sociologists, to show the viability of methodology of anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Benedict (1938–2006) is an underrecognized figure in the history of anthropology in Turkey even though his Ula research, published in 1974, has been one of the most meticulous studies on the Anatolian countryside. This article unveils a biographical portrait of Benedict by utilizing the archival resources that consist of personal correspondences from the 1960s and 70s as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author. In addition, by analyzing his publications, it demonstrates Benedict’s authentic contributions to the literature and emphasizes the originality of his approach to the post-World War II transformations through the point of view of the townsmen. Designed in life history format, thanks to the help of details about his personal life, this article aims to present Benedict as a human being with his successes and anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the integration of anthropology in Slovenian history over the last decade. It is based on an analysis of 1,707 papers published between 2009 and 2021 in four representative history journals, Studia Historica Slovenica, Zgodovinski časopis, Acta Histriae and Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia. A content analysis of papers reveals the integration of the field of history and analyzes the embedding of anthropological content in Slovenian history. The results show (1) that there are 18 distinctive thematic areas in Slovenian history research in the sample under consideration, (2) that the topics can be categorized into 4 groups: (a) National topics (b) Military topics, (c) Local topics and (d) Church-biographical themes, (3) that the presence and relationships between the central themes appears to be uniform from 2009, (4) that the field appears to be strongly masculinized, (5) that history has a strong basis in the humanities, (6) that the themes show a relatively limited range, and (7) that anthropology comprises an integral part of the study of Slovenian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how African rituals and festivals have been kept alive in the Rosário dos Homens Pretos da Penha’s Brotherhood, in the east of São Paulo, since the 18th century. Based on participant observation, it uses Harry Pross’s concept of the body as primary media to discuss how customs, gestures and the environment itself supports the memory’s preservation and the resistance against the confrontations imposed to the brotherhood for your faith’s manifestation. The text also has the theoretical contribution of Peruzzo, Paiva, Baitello Jr. and Downing, as well as from authors in history and anthropology such as Cezerillo, Quintão, Toledo, Eliade and Bâ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of language as culture in U.S. anthropology is a set of distinct and often not fully compatible practices that can be made sense of through the identification of three historically related paradigms. Whereas the first paradigm, initiated by Boas, was mostly devoted to documentation, grammatical description, and classification (especially of North American indigenous languages) and focused on linguistic relativity, the second paradigm, developed in the 1960s, took advantage of new recording technology and new theoretical insights to examine language use in con- text, introducing new units of analysis such as the speech event. Although it was meant to be part of anthropology at large, it marked an intellectual separation from the rest of anthropology. The third paradigm, with its focus on identity formation, narrativity, and ideology, constitutes a new attempt to connect with the rest of anthropology by extending linguistic methods to the study of issues previously identified in other (sub)fields. Al- though each new paradigm has reduced the influence and appeal of the preceding one, all three paradigms persist today, and confrontation of their differences is in the best interest of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism supplied anthropologists with 'global' visions. Anthropologists have always been involved with all-encompassing cosmopolitan notions such as humankind and culture. Many have thus endeavoured to explain the world as a whole, and how humans have developed in different historical moments. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the new label 'globalization' generated a field of scholarly preoccupations, anthropologists started to contribute to this growing body of literature. Their most valuable contributions are related to the tensions between local and global forces, and between forces of heterogeneity and homogeneity, as well as to the use of ethnography as a methodological tool. Anthropologists have borrowed notions from other related disciplines such as sociology, history, and geography. This paper situates the anthropological production on 'the global' within this diverse history of borrowings, internal disciplinary debates, and wider historical junctures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses advances in the anthropology of women in Chiapas and Central America, an area in which the pioneers in this field helped to denounce androcentrism, elucidated gender relations, and chose the subordination of women as an anthropological research problem. Their actions increasingly helped shape a feminist gender perspective within the discipline. This article registers, documents, and analyzes the life and work of women and feminists who have made scientific-social contributions with respect to cultural diversity, social spaces and inequality, covering the "golden age" (1940-1964) up to the second decade of the 20th century, focusing on the contributions of June Nash and Mercedes Olivera Bustamante, two anthropologists whose work has been key to the discipline in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets into light the context of ideas and relevant biographical circumstances at the time when the Romanian sociologist Henri H. Stahl issued the leaflet Cultura satelor. Cum trebue înțeleasă [The Village Culture. How It Should Be Understood] (1934), in a period of crisis of the Sociological School of Bucharest, when the project of its founder, Dimitrie Gusti, to employ the results of the monographic research campaigns in order to initiate a social reform, seemed to have reached a dead point. At the same time, we pay attention to the cultural distinctions and relations (rural and urban culture, popular/ folk and literate culture) that Stahl debates in his text on village culture. Taking into account the fact that each new reading of a scientific work implicitly updates its content, we also find in the pages written by Henri H. Stahl in 1934 an interesting material for revisiting engaged anthropology, a direction of study developed in the U.S.A. in the late 1970s but rooted in an older model of addressing anthropological research which was created during the Second World War and anticipated as early as the end of the nineteenth century. Beyond different labels applied to research tendencies in social sciences or ethnological/ anthropological approaches in various epochs, we argue that the manner in which researchers influence (more or less intentional) their targetcommunities not only challenges professional ethics but also provokes a meaningful reflection on the values which are 'at stake' in any intercultural encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s, blood group researchers promised to put racial science on a more scientific footing. Nevertheless, women scientists had to contend with sexist attitudes in all stages of their careers as exemplified most clearly in Tildesley's case. The history of physical anthropology has most often been situated and studied in the context of specific colonial powers and nation states. [Extracted from the article]

Brazil was a new political nation ( I nação i ) that had to contend with a variety of African and Indigenous "nations" ( I nações i ) within its borders - whether Congo, Nagô, Benguela, or Botocudo, Tupi, Guaykuru - who were considered to exist outside of "good society" consisting of propertied white citizens. From the eve of independence in 1822 until the years following the end of monarchical rule in 1889, Brazil's Atlantic frontier, where the provinces of Bahia, Espírito Santo, and Minas Gerais met, became a theater of staggering anti-Indigenous violence and the entrenchment of African-based slavery. Black and Indigenous Histories of Brazil's Race Mixture: An excerpt from Yuko Miki's Frontiers of Citizenship challenges dominant racial narratives about Latin America, illuminating the exclusionary making of the "Brazilian people". [Extracted from the article]

Taking tuber sciences and their histories as a case study, this essay hinges on materiality, both as a condition shaping thing–human relations and as a vector for producing knowledge and generating theory. It explores how people have made knowledge about some very earthy, solid, rooted, underground things: namely, tuber crops—yams, sweet or white potatoes, manioc, and taro. Unlike the waving seas of wheat and other grand global crops that sustained the rise of our modern world, tubers were almost invisible in history of science and technology until very recently. Anthropologists, however, have been thinking with tubers, recording how humans understand and work with them, and building theories about materiality and society from these observations for over a century—and they continue to be a vibrant source of inspiration to anthropologists of materiality today. The essay discusses the contexts in which different ways of knowing-through-tubers, vernacular and academic, have been formulated and asks what inspiration these tuber tales might offer to historians of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review and reflection on the beginnings of Anthropology in Spain in the mid-twentieth century. In this reflexive analysis it is carried out in a review of a work by anthropologist Joan Prat Carós, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona (Spain). In this essay, the Spanish historical context of the time and the first authors who did anthropological work in Spain, as well as the germ of the consolidation of the discipline academically in that country, are specially addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines the multifaceted phenomenon of death in the early modern Low Countries. When war, revolt, and disease ravaged the Netherlands, the experience of death came to be increasingly materialised in vanitas art, funeral sermons, ars moriendi prints, mourning poetry, deathbed psalms, memento mori pendants, grave monuments, épitaphiers, and commemoration masses. This collection of interdisciplinary essays brings historical, art historical, and literary perspectives to bear on the complex cultural and anthropological dimensions of death in past societies. It argues that the sensing and staging of mortality reconfigured confessional and political repertoires, alternately making and breaking communities in the delta of Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt. As such, death's 'omnipresence' within the context of ongoing war and religious polarization contributed to the confessional and political reconfiguration of the early modern Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial part of the conservative or reactionary backlash that occurs around the world is based on a double movement with regard to the social sciences. On the one hand, a denial of the perspectives of social construction and cultural and historical relativization; on the other hand, an appropriation of approaches abandoned by the social sciences, or of the mechanisms used by them to explain the social as a constructed reality. Perhaps the most striking example is that of "gender ideology". But I will also consider nationalism, the naturalization of ethnocentrism and racism, the notions of war of civilizations and religions, sexism and homophobia, reactions to the "politically correct", among others (namely, at more sophisticated levels, new theorizations with political implications, coming from genomics, evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, etc.). I will explore the hypothesis that this backlash is organized on the basis of an apparently contradictory alliance between neoliberalism and traditionalism, in a new and specific phenomenon of our time and not as an atavism of the past. In this sense, it is a "revolutionary" movement and the progressive fields (on which the social sciences are largely based) are sent to an uncomfortable place of "conservatism". How can anthropological discourse and ethnographic practice produce knowledge (and its dissemination) against this reality -- in a political gesture -- but also about it, in an attempt to make it intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In societies living at the margins of the State, interpersonal relationships and the use of power, as well as competition dynamics, are often similar among different groups in spite of preexisting differences in access to economic resources, moral authority and personal prestige. From this point of departure the present article undertakes an ethno historic analysis which attempts to illuminate changes affecting the Alto Marañon (Peru) Awajun people, between the years 1950 and 1970. The socio-cultural transformation this indigenous group was forced to undergo in order to attain membership in the wider national society, is described. Using the tools which ethno history and the anthropology of affectivity provide, and paying particular attention to the topic of the building of the "heroic body", the present text focuses on how Awajun society suffered significant changes regarding the of the use of force and of the symbolic management of violence, leading to the assimilation of new styles of indigenous leadership. All this occurs as a result of experiences resulting from close contact with the earliest agents of government authority to show up in their native homelands: evangelical missionaries and the army. This process led the Awajun to the development of unprecedented forms of "indigenous leadership", resulting from the assimilation, convergence and reworking of cultural material incorporated during their contacts with religious and military personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the history of Andalusian anthropology from the second half of the 19th century to the present. We also address the connections of this anthropological tradition with others in the Mediterranean area as well as with others in the Spanish sphere to achieve a greater appreciation of those traditions of thought outside of hegemonic scopes. From the time of folklore studies, we go on to the ethnological stage and to the consolidation of anthropological studies. In so doing, we observe the different stages and topics of investigation, from popular culture to community studies, identity and the relationship between global and local scopes in the present world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic relativity, rightly understood, implies that the presence or absence of certain grammatical categories and discursive styles can influence how we perceive and experience the world around us. In this study, monolingual speakers of Chol Mayan, a tenseless language, were shown a series of visual stimuli portraying different sequences of events, and were asked to describe what they saw to an interviewer. Participants were shown a long silent story composed of many sequential images, and a set of shorter stories composed of a minimum of two sequential images and a maximum of five sequential images. None of the stories that the Chol speakers told in response to the stimulus followed a sequential-chronological order, and all sequential images were described in non-sequential terms. In line with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it is argued that this interesting discursive effect may be the result of the tenselessness of the Chol language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

explores different perspectives on the archives of repression and, adopting the approach to archive as a process constructed by the archival discipline, history and anthropology, studies the Archive of the Department of Police Information of the Argentine province of Santiago del Estero as a power device. This allows illuminating the legal figures, scientific discourses, practical knowledge used in the environmental reports that supported their files. The article contributes to the discussion about the militarization of the police and their role in the repression in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is centred on the Survey of Portuguese Popular Architecture, organized between 1955 and 1961 by the Portuguese Union of Architects. Based on testimonies and interviews with some architects who conducted the Survey, the paper aims at recovering the memory of the fieldwork on which the Survey was based. The paper is mostly based on the transcription of the interviews. These not only vividly recover the routines, adventures and incidents of the fieldwork, but also provide a very realistic portrait of rural Portugal in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnological, anthropological, philosophical and philological studies, along with contributions of Religious Studies, have long ago identified a set of myths and rites which seem to defy history and cultural bars, that is, which go far beyond the time and space framework from which they came. This paper shows how some of these archetypes are present in African cultures, notwithstanding the hermeneutical prejudices some European scholars showed about them. A particular attention will be displayed on rites. Considering the vastness and richness of African cultures, the paper will focus on just some Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewal of Eschatology has been an ecumenical process that began at the end of the 19th century and continues to the present day. It is marked by a more precise expression of what Christian revelation really demonstrates in this regard. Also, it encourages an in-depth knowledge of the history of Theology, in order to be enriched with its values and not to dwell on deficiencies already verified in the past. This article has three aims: (1) to provide an overview of the anthropological elements upon which Aquinas based his Eschatology; (2) to summarize the main features of the Eschatology he wrote in the last decade of his life; (3) in the light of Aquinas' insight, to introduce the analogy of mutilation as a tool for a better understanding of the intermediate state. The conclusion identifies the values and deficiencies of the Eschatology of the mature Thomas Aquinas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion, law, culture and gender are categories that represent dimensions of social life that act in reality in a coemergent way. The theme proposed by the present dossier, provides a contemporary discussion on various themes that contemplate these four categories. For this work, it was prioritized, without, of course, leaving out of the discussion, none of the dimensions, religiosity, culture and gender, which will be worked in the reality of the Tambor de Mina. Tambor de Mina is a religion of Afro-Brazilian origin that arises in Maranhão from the social and religious culture of black enslaved who were brought to that state, especially from the Daomé region, now Benin. The main houses of Tambor de Mina, still dating from the period of slavery, are the Casa das Minas and the Casa de Nago, of Jeje-Nago origins. Methodologically, the work is constituted as a bibliographic review on the theme, epistemologically guided by the methodological prerogatives of history and anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the issue, in which the following topics are addressed: history of the anthropology of food; food choices and prohibitions; food, cooking and identity; cooking and rituals; cooking, sexual roles and social relations; and cooking, migrations and globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contribution of Maxime Rodinson to the thematisation of food in the Social and Human Sciences (SHS), i.e. its recognition as a legitimate object. Rodinson's contribution consists in having created the conditions for the socialisation of food. The focused interest in cookery books, as a source of empirical data, has made it possible to situate food in culinary styles, that is to say not only in physical space, but also in social space. Entry through practices has provided access to what he calls "mass effects" that affect society at large. Thus, it has been possible to sociologise the issue by adding to the local, geographical, and cultural locations of food and dishes the consideration of social hierarchies and forms of diffusion, mixing linguistics, history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Beyond Rodinson's personal trajectory, which from a personal polycompetence promotes a transdisciplinary approach, the thematisation takes place in a historical and epistemological context marked by the opposition between a spiritual Islamology and evolutionary Marxism. This characterises the period preceding the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The studies on the history of religions in Turkey are fairly new. During the foundation years of the Republic, religion was one of the most emphasized subjects in general. The debates on religion have mostly been about the religion-state relationship and its impact on society. Although there are various opinions and evaluations on the subject, the idea that religion is a social necessity has been accepted and some studies have been done to put it on a legal basis. In this context, religious education followed a course that developed in the axis of nationalism. History of religions has also made its own path as a part of this course. In this study, the relationship between anthropology and the studies of the history of religions and their sources in Turkey are examined. The reflection of the relationship between the history of religions, which come to the fore in the field of theology, and anthropology, which is known as a secular science, on studies conducted to determine the cultural and religious phenomena in the first years of the Republic are discussed. In this context, it is important to understand the first occurrence of anthropology in Turkey and its role in building a nation-state. This study aims to reveal the reflections of the discussions and research made on religion and ethnographic data on the history of religions, obtained from Anatolia, and basic principles of the beginning of religious historiography in Turkey. This study is focused on a limited number of personalities and their works on the history of religion in the Republican period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This communication is the outcome of the discussion that took place during a round table discussion promoted by the Paraíba Democracy Memorial within the scope of the 4th National Week of Archives. The event brought together professionals from archival science, history and anthropology to discuss the social function of human rights archives, especially those archives that compose the museum collection of the Paraíba Democracy Memorial. The reflections also count with the report of the Argentine experience of creation of the Museum of the ex-ESMA, which emphasizes the importance of the documentation of human rights for the memorial institutions, and also the education for the promotion of the human rights. Understanding the importance of documentary heritage for museums and memorials goes beyond its theoretical aspects of documentary and museum management. These collections fulfil a social function to human rights that is indispensable for democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, on August 20, 2020, Dr. Jorge A. Flores Ochoa passed away. He has been a fundamental figure in Cuzco and Peruvian anthropology due to his multiple merits as a researcher, professor, engaged intellectual and tireless cultural animator. This text reviews his main research themes and interests, in particular his notable contributions and constant study of Andean pastoralist societies and, associated with this, his studies regarding the management of Andean agro-ecological complexity. The article then moves to his research on Cuzco's colonial and republican art and material culture, his ethnography of the city's and region's religious celebrations, his broader contributions to the anthropology of the city of Cuzco and his interpretations and analysis on the history and importance of contemporary Cuzco Incanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of exotic animals of European or African origin in the New World is a classic topic of research, and the introduction, acclimatization, and use of these species among the indigenous peoples in lowland South America have been investigated from several different historical, anthropological and zoological perspectives. Yet no studies thoroughly address the material dimension of encounters between native peoples of the Americas and adventitious animals, specifically representations of exotic animals in native artifacts, objects made from raw materials derived from these exotic animals' bodies, and technologies used in relations with these beings (such as control and use). This article introduces some possibilities in investigating artifacts of this nature in European museum collections, and presents some initial impressions from a research agenda which is underway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following text presents "the myth of Claudio Becochi" from the indigenous reservation "La Laguna", in the Municipality of Caldono, Cauca, Colombia. The myth is presented as it was registered and narrated by the anthropologist Ícaro Cuervo, in the decade of 1980. Based on this narrative, this text reflects on the conditions in which the myth was told from the notes and field diaries of the same anthropologist. Finally, the article analyzes the myth in testimonies of members of the indigenous community, who accompanied Ícaro Cuervo during his fieldwork. The purpose of the article is to explore the conditions of anthropological fieldwork in the Cauca region in the 1980s. Based on the myth, the article reflects on the historical conditions of anthropological work and the political position of researchers in the interaction between indigenous struggles for territorial rights and anthropological research. The information presented was collected between 1999 and 2000, during a six-month field visit in the indigenous reservation of La Laguna, Siberia, in the Municipality of Caldono, Cauca, Colombia. Such field work was part of a research aimed at understanding the influence of anthropology on the indigenous movements and the influence of indigenous movements on anthropology. The reflection presented here was excluded in the results of that research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nicolás Gómez Dávila characterizes democratic Modernity as a gnostic age. This article pretends to reconstruct his characterization by way of an intertextual reading of Textos. Gómez Dávila's thesis is derived from a philosophy of history and a philosophical anthropology; both allow him to interpretModernity from a religious perspective. His conclusion is that democratic Modernity bestows human beings unlimited sovereignty, which for him means gnostic divinization. Thus, I intend to explain how intertextuality works in the assessment of democratic Modernity and put forward a few critical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this present brief essay, I describe the main ideas of the work "Ancient Society", published in 1871, by the anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan (1818-1881). Morgan is one of the first anthropologists in the United States. Henry Lewis Morgan is framed in classical evolutionism school and he is contemporary of other evolutionists like Tylor. The author represents a key figure in the "renaissance" of evolutionary ideas from the thirties of the twentieth century to be inspiration of cultural ecology, cultural materialism and the anthropology of kinship from the midtwentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papper seeks to situate historically and ethnographically a piece collected in the last quarter of the 18th century by the expedition of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. It is the Zoomorphic tray for the aspiration of the paricá narcotic poder collected between the Mawé around 1786, and mentioned by Ferreira also among the Mura, both groups of the Madeira-Tapajós area. When sending the piece to Lisbon the naturalista illustrated it with a brief description of the ritual and a plank representative of its use. Although known, the tray and the ritual, now extinct, have not yet been placed in relation to the history and ethnology of this area. Thus, from a dialogue between Anthropology and History this article presents the piece, its ornamentation and aspects that involved the ritual described by Ferreira in relation to some themes of mythology, ethnography and ethnohistory of the group and the área they occupy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New scientific discoveries and directions have provided significant progress within the field of imaging technologies in recent years. One of the most important of these new scientific discoveries was the use of radiological imaging methods discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in anthropological research. These methods enable the examination of both internal and external properties of an object by creating accurate virtual representations of the examined sample without destroying it. These developments in information technologies have created new research opportunities for anthropological studies and a new field called virtual anthropology has developed. Therefore, this article reviews the basic uses of various non-invasive imaging methods, such as conventional radiography, computed tomography, or micro-CT, as well as magnetic resonance imaging and ultrasound. The aim of this review is to discuss the benefit of using these imaging modalities for anthropological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does integration into commercial markets lead people to work longer hours? Does this mean that people in more subsistence-oriented societies work less compared to those in more market-integrated societies? Despite their venerable status in both anthropology and economic history, these questions have been difficult to address due to a dearth of appropriate data. Here, we tackle the issue by combining high-quality time allocation datasets from 8 small-scale populations around the world (45,019 observations of 863 adults) with similar aggregate data from 14 industrialized (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Both within and across societies, we find evidence of a positive correlation between work time and market engagement for men, although not for women. Shifting to fully commercial labor is associated with an increase in men's work from around 45 h per week to 55 h, on average; women's work remains at nearly 55 h per week across the spectrum. These results inform us about the socioeconomic determinants of time allocation across a wider range of human societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of when and why societies have transitioned away from matriliny to other types of kinship systems—and when and why they transition towards matriliny—has a long history in anthropology, one that is heavily engaged with both evolutionary theory and cross-cultural research methods. This article presents tabulations from a new coding of ethnographic documents from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS), tallying claims of transitions in kinship systems both away from and to matriliny using various levels of stringency. We then use our counts as the outcome variables in a set of Bayesian analyses that simultaneously estimate the probability of a transition occurring given societal covariates alongside the conditional probability of detecting a transition given the volume of ethnographic data available to code. Our goal is to estimate the cross-cultural and comparative frequency of transitions away from and to matriliny, as well as to explore potential causes underlying these patterns. We find that transitions away from matriliny have been significantly more common than 'reverse transitions' to matriliny. Our evidence suggests that both rates may be, in part, an artefact of the colonial and globalizing period during which the data comprising much of the current ethnographic record were recorded. Analyses of the correlates of transitions away from matriliny are consistent with several of the key causal arguments made by anthropologists over the past century, especially with respect to subsistence transition (to pastoralism, intensive agriculture and market economies), social complexity and colonialism, highlighting the importance of ecological factors in such transitions. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Ramos (1903-1949) was one of the most important Brazilian anthropologists of the 20th century, not only because of his invaluable contribution to the debate about Afro-Brazilian cultures, but also for his role in the process of institutionalizing Anthropology in Brazil, with emphasis on the foundation in 1941 of the Brazilian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (BSAE). Despite the growing interest in his intellectual legacy, the efforts of revisiting his work have not been devoted to the process of routinizing his anthropological knowledge, mainly from his work at the National Faculty of Philosophy. I propose in this work to analyze the routinization of anthropological knowledge based on the work of Arthur Ramos as a teacher, starting from the examination of his course plans, orientations for students etc., available for consultation in the collection of the National Library (NL). It is an approach on the history of Brazilian anthropology that seeks to understand it from its teaching, and not simply from the results of the researches developed and the resulting publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few authors of scholarly classics shy away from being acknowledged, but such is the case of the author of Mœurs et coutumes des Indiens (Mores and customs of the Indians) (1777)—the first treatise of Indology and a classic of early anthropology—whose real, Jesuit identity remained obscured for over two centuries. The author's concealment did not, however, prevent his work's regular re-editing, or its conveyance of an original methodology that helped found ethnography as a discipline and harmonized with enlightened conservatism. To date, this methodology has been read simply as a direct reply to enlightened authors, especially Voltaire, but this essay demonstrates that it derived also from the immersion of eighteenth-century Jesuits in Indian culture, and above all from the vast Indianist tradition that members of the Society of Jesus developed over two centuries of missionary work. Indeed, the story of Mœurs et coutumes discloses that, far from being limited to Europe, enlightened conservatism was a global discourse; and that beyond being invented by Europe's armchair philosophers, anthropology was a science born outside Europe from the pens of missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the results of the first operational phase (1956-1959) of a University of Chicago project that focused on the Tseltal and Tsotsil populations of Chiapas, and the documents that offered shared visions. First, we deal with the general characteristics of this intellectual endeavor. Second, we discuss the usual way anthropologists have understood the project and we present an alternative perspective. Third, we explore the contributions and contradictions offered. The last section discusses elements that validate the activities undertaken by the Chicago Project in Chiapas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three graves from the Latène period were uncovered in Schrattenberg (political district Mistelbach, Lower Austria) in 1913 and 1914. The material from the graves has been housed in the Departments of Prehistory and Anthropology at the Natural History Museum Vienna but had not been properly scientifically analysed before now. The three graves consist of two men and one woman, all older, in the age period mature-senile. They also represent a small population, all under 160 cm height. Archaeological finds include bronze jewellery, notably a bronze necklace, pottery fragments and bronze buttons. Due to typological comparison material, the archaeological finds point to a date between Lt B2 and Lt B2/C1. In a bronze anklet a textile was found, serving as stabilization. In its technical data it fits well into the textile finds of the Early La Tène Culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides comments to five articles constituting the cycle entitled "Józef Obrębski - Ethnosociology - Polesie then and now" and contextualises them in a bio-historical perspective. It presents an outline of Obrębski's scientific biography and reflects upon the causes of his absence in the mainstream history of anthropology and sociology. Although from the point of view of western principles of success Obrębski did not succeeded in his scientific career, he definitely was a remarkable actor of the scientific field. His takeaways and inspirations have started to influence this field not earlier than after his death. The articles included in the current cycle represent one of the examples of contemporary reception of Obrębski's outcome, generating a scientific discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper concentrates on the circumstances of the production of anthropological knowledge, created in a dynamic tension between its cognitive goal and the way it is used for political purposes. It provides an insight into a complex network of conditions (intelectual, institutional, financial, personal, political) which determined the production of knowledge in interwar Poland within the then emerging disciplines of ethnology and sociology, in the scope of what today we would call social anthropology. This case study takes a closer look at Polish anthropologist Józef Obrębski (1905-1967), a close student of Malinowski, whose outstanding achievements remained mostly unpublished and thus never came into existence in the master narrative of the history of our discipline. In the 1930s Obrębski conducted ethnosociological field research in the Polesie region in eastern Poland (nowadays, part of belarus and Ukraine), which was part of a large scale scientific project of the Commission for Scientific Research of the Eastern Territories. This project, financed by the Polish government and headed by a politician, general kasprzycki, was supposed to be an efficient tool in the politics of the so called state and national assimilation of the Slavic-speaking ethnic minorities. Obrębski's political views, which were democratic and liberal in character, were opposed to the official political line whereas his functionalist anthropological stance was unacceptable for the mainstream Polish ethnology of the era, still rooted in the positivist paradigm. Anthropological knowledge produced by Obrębski, which we would call today a postcolonial and constructivist approach, began to find recognition only after his death. The biography of this scholar and the story of his "unknown" work, a great example of a non-mainstream phenomenon in a provincial country, makes it easier to reveal undisclosed mechanisms of the system and the thought- collectives of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]