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By reading the works of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Jameela Siddiqi, and M. G. Vassanji, this article sets to show how and why food mediates the experience of displacement in literary enactments of Indian East African migrations. It examines what the symbolism of food conveys about the contests that characterize the lives of the African Indians and how food enables writers to imagine possible worlds beyond social antagonisms. Food in the literature acts as an index of the changing social status of Indian East Africans in the journeys that take them through Africa, and their eventual migrations to Europe and the Americas. It encodes histories of resistance, accommodation, and cultural exchange in contexts marked by racialism, violence, expulsions and inequality. It is thus, for the writers, a useful tool for mediating personal and communal stories, and an important focus of feelings of nostalgia, loss, and longing., What people eat or drink provides in Indian East African literature what may be called, following Arjun Appadurai, 'a peculiarly powerful semiotic device' ('Gastro-politics' 494). Not only do food and [...]

In the 1930s Paul Radin argued that Franz Boas refrained from generalizing, claimed that the time was not ripe because all the data were not yet available, and believed that once all the data were available they would speak for themselves. This characterization was applied in the 1940s by Clyde Kluckhohn and his student Walter Taylor to the work of culture historian A. V. Kidder. Processual archaeologists obtained the idea that culture historians in general used the unripe time argument based on philosopher of science Carl Hempel's description of the first step of inductive reasoning as 'gathering all the facts,' and they used Kluckhohn's and Taylor's characterizations as substantiating evidence. Processualists likely reasoned that because culture historians operated inductively and thus sought to gather all the facts before they interpreted the archaeological record, culture historians also called upon the unripe time argument to warrant their hesitancy to draw conclusions. Evidence that culture historians in fact said they needed more data before drawing conclusions is rare, and in many cases possible evidence is readily interpreted as an unrigorously developed concern for sample sufficiency in the modern sense of a statistically representative sample. The unripe time characterization of pre-1960 archaeology served as one of several warrants for abandonment of the culture history approach in favor of processual archaeology and facilitated the rapid adoption of processualism. key words: American archaeology, Culture history, Data, Processualism, Unripe time

It is believed that sincerity and humor are linked ways of politicizing the interactions that support all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with traditional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity. Several anthropologists now call for a renewed guildwide investment in the political implications of their efforts.

Significant differences in views on race (once a core anthropological concept) occur between scientists from different countries. In light of the ongoing race debate, we present the concept's current status in Europe. On three occasions in 2002-03, we surveyed European anthropologists' opinions toward the biological race concept. The participants were asked whether they agreed that there are biological races within the species Homo sapiens. A dependence was sought between the type of response and several factors. Three of these factors--country of academic education, discipline, and age--were found to be significant in differentiating the replies. Respondents educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons reject race more frequently than respondents educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations. The survey shows that the views of anthropologists on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education. [Keywords: human races, race concept, physical anthropology, Europe]

Abstract: This article argues a case against the theory of the sacred put forward by the French anthropologist Rene Girard. in particular, Girard seems to have obliterated one of the [...]

I The peculiarity of culture is that you know it only by doing it. You know what culture is only by knowing what it is for. In this sense, culture [...]

Recognized as a principal figure in ecological anthropology, Roy Rappaport is best known for his study Pigs for the Ancestors (1968). His work in the anthropology of religion has received Less attention. Least acknowledged is Rappaport's role in defining an 'engaged' anthropology. Drawn from interviews Tom Fricke conducted with Rappaport in the year before his death in October 1997, this article gives insight into these three facets of his professional life. Beginning with an account of Rappaport's fieldwork with the Tsembaga Mating, the discussion takes up his core themes, ideas that evolved out of his early field experience and with which he was 'engaged as he worked to finish his final book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999). [Roy Rappaport, interview, biography, Maring fieldwork, ecological anthropology, anthropology of religion, engaged anthropology]

As one of the first women to embark on a career in anthropology, Matilda Coxe Stevenson was, and still is, "famous and infamous" (Parezo 1993:46). Countless colorful portrayals of her […]

Several processes of change and of human development affect the process of fieldwork over time. The concerns, issues, interests, relationships, coping strategies, motivations, and even personality of a mature adult are not the same as those of a younger adult. Consequently, fieldwork conducted on Pollap Atoll in Micronesia in 1998-1999 differed from dissertation research conducted in the same place eighteen years earlier. Changes since 1980 in the Pollapese way of life, their relationships with outsiders, and their understandings of anthropology contributed to a different experience, as did my heightened sense of confidence, decreased anxiety, and increased faith in participant observation.

Authors of three studies (Leonard Lieberman, Blaine W. Stevenson, Larry T. Reynolds, and Matt Cartmill) agree that the concept of race has approached its lowest level of acceptance in a century. However, one of the studies (that of Cartmill) seems to show no significant change from 1965 to 1996. We analyze this paradox in terms of possible differences in the populations studied. [Keywords: race, physical anthropology, variation]

An anthropologist analyzes the conflicting discursive authority of western researchers who construct tradition and indigenous scholars who deconstruct them. The invention of the Warao tradition focuses on the political-economic constraints of metadiscursive actions associated with the subject positions in the process of inventing the nahanamu. The social power thus created defines access to and use of metadiscursive practices with authority. While native activists and invention scholars debate on discursive authority, invention literature should be valued for its vast metadiscursive practices.

'IF YOU CAN BELIEVE THAT INDIVIDUALS OF recent African ancestry are not genetically advantaged over those of European and Asian ancestry in certain athletic endeavors, then you probably could be [...]

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu admonishes military strategists to know the enemy. Twice in the 1940s, the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer tried to help the United States apply [...]

A conversation with experienced anthropologists on issues of open access, information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies is reported. The issues discussed were on the effects of open access on anthropological topics, creation of community archives and networking tools, and the use of field notes and materials in modern digital environment.

The author summarizes his 50 years as an anthropologist, relating them to worldwide changes in general during that period. This field's expansion into many global, social, and political phenomena and the consequent dispersion of moral, political, and ideological conditions are discussed.

The question of the nature of violence has been forcibly brought to my mind lately. It is not a thing I enjoy thinking about. Terrorist acts designed to hurt and [...]

ABSTRACT Criticisms of work on cargo beliefs argue it supports paternalistic colonial projections and patronizes Melanesians. But researchers continue to hear Melanesians asserting that Europeans communicate with ancestral spirits. Such [...]

Byline: DAVID COHEN Eighteen thousand years after it slumped over dead in a Southeast Asian cave, what is believed to be a tiny human has become the center of a [...]

Over the past few decades, paleoanthropologists tracing the human lineage back through time have uncovered a series of increasingly apelike ancestors that date to 4 million to 6 million years [...]

Leonard Lieberman, Rod Kirk, and Alice Littlefield report a significant decrease over the past 20 years in the percentage of physical anthropologists who support the race concept, while Matt Cartmill concludes that use of this concept did not decline during that period among anthropologists who study modern human variation. Neither study contradicts the other, since the two used different definitions and sampled different populations. More extensive sampling of the literature and more reliable survey techniques are needed to resolve the issue. [Keywords: race, history of ideas, biological anthropology]

Anthropologists Suggest Cannibalism Is a Myth WILLIAM Arens of the State University of New York at Stony Brook says he got interested in cannibalism for the most innocent of reasons. [...]

An anthropologist responds to a review of his book which is a sequel to his 1991 work 'Western Conceptions of the Individual.' Although he expressed his appreciation for the reviewer's interest in the book, he objected to the reviewer's comments which compared him to Ruth Benedict and accused him of being content with delineating cultural configurations. The author says that the book is neither ahistorical nor does it treat cultural representations as timeless entities. He also reiterates his belief in the uniqueness of an individual's self-identity and the importance of the relationship between cultural conceptions of individuals and their personal identity.

Over the past twenty-five or so years of interdisciplinary conversation between anthropology and literary studies, something like a consensus has emerged on one fundamental point: that anthropology, though working within [...]