bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wellbeing
Authors: Mathews Gordon
Published: September 2018

Wellbeing has had two different foci in contemporary anthropology. Medical anthropologists have tended to think of wellbeing in terms of physical and mental health, while sociocultural anthropologists at large, who have largely neglected the topic until recently, have tended to think of wellbeing as a correlate of happiness. These two groups of anthropologists, despite some crossover, have tended to ignore each other. This entry considers how medical anthropologists have investigated wellbeing, and then turns to sociocultural anthropologists' analyses of wellbeing, before considering what these two approaches have to learn and gain from one another.
Interculturality
Authors: Dietz Gunther
Published: September 2018

The term “interculturality,” understood as the relations that exist between culturally diverse human groups in a given society, is a complex one currently used to refer to the relations that exist within society between diverse majority and minority constellations defined in terms not only of culture but also of ethnicity, language, religious denomination, and/or nationality. This entry defines interculturality and classifies it according to its descriptive versus prescriptive usage and its underlying, implicit assumption of a static versus a dynamic notion of culture. It then typologically analyzes interculturality with regard to the main underlying social scientific paradigms of inequality, difference, and diversity. The three main Anglo‐Saxon, Continental European, and Latin American sources of the contemporary debate on interculturality, as well as its applications both in anthropology and in related disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, are detailed before the latest trends in Northern and Southern debates on interculturality, intersectionality, and decoloniality are briefly sketched.
B
razil, Anthropology in
Authors: Peirano Mariza
Published: September 2018

The development of anthropology in Brazil tells of a constant movement of both differentiation between neighboring disciplines and expansion into new fields of interest. When the social sciences were institutionalized in the 1930s, sociology was an encompassing subject that included what we today distinguish as anthropology, sociology, and political science. Over the years, a process of differentiation has taken place between the disciplines but the major institutional links between them have been maintained. By the late 1960s, social anthropology had become the dominant, hegemonic orientation within anthropology, and the following decades saw a steady movement of inclusion of other topics besides anthropology's traditional definition as the study of indigenous peoples. Today, anthropology embraces a broad array of interests, both in a sizable Portuguese‐speaking community at home, and in significant international contacts abroad.
Diffusionism
Authors: Rohatynskyj Marta
Published: September 2018

Diffusionism arose in the formulation of the discipline of anthropology as an explanation of cultural similarity across geographical regions. It posited that elements of culture, often termed “culture traits,” were invented once and spread out to neighboring groups undergoing adaptation in their progress. Early diffusionists are referred to as “extreme diffusionists” in the present because their accounts of historical movements of traits around the globe were simplistic and largely unprovable. Diffusionism, in the present, serves as a yet‐to‐be‐disproven assumption about the nature of human interaction across cultural boundaries in that the tendency to culture borrowing and sharing appears a universal. It also serves as the basis of a methodology which underlies all four subfields in anthropology, as well as geography and history, in tracing cultural elements geographically and through time. The diffusionist premise of the historical unity of humankind remains critical in the contemporary globalized world.
Theme Parks, Anthropological Study of
Authors: Hoffstaedter Gerhard
Published: September 2018

Anthropological studies of theme parks engage and produce cultural critique and social theory to better understand the way culture, history, and religion are produced, represented, and consumed in what at first glance appear to be leisure spaces. Theme park studies encompass entertainment parks; cultural, folklore, and historical parks; and increasingly themed mixed everyday spaces, such as shopping malls and residential developments.
Shamanism and Possession
Authors: Winkelman Michael
Published: September 2018

Shamanism and possession are central concepts in the religious practices of many “premodern” societies, with substantial similarities manifested across cultures and time that reflect their basis in human nature. Shamans and possession both involve ritual alteration of consciousness but differences between them are illustrated by cross‐cultural studies and the distinctive experiential features associated with their respective activities. Shamans' characteristic alterations of consciousness involve soul flight, what modern psychology recognizes as out‐of‐body experiences that involve a separation of one's visual perspectives from self and body. Possession episodes differ in the experience of control by spirits and amnesia of the event, reflecting psychosocial features that produce dissociation. Shamanism and possession nonetheless share biological features in their elicitation of ancient brain systems to modify the consciousness in relation to healing and spiritual experiences.
Bazaar
Authors: Endres Kirsten W.
Published: September 2018

In economic anthropology, the term “bazaar” is most commonly associated with the works of Clifford Geertz who used the notion of the bazaar economy to study the peculiarities of peasant market systems. Geertz conceived of the bazaar as an overcomplicated and underorganized economic institution that lacked the capacity to contribute to economic progress.
Intelligence, Evolution of
Authors: Emery Nathan J.
Published: September 2018

Although intelligence has been deemed a uniquely human trait, there is extensive evidence that intelligence has evolved and that evidence is not restricted to our close relatives, the great apes. Many birds (such as corvids and parrots), cetaceans, and elephants display complex, flexible behaviors in the wild that can be employed when faced with unpredictable ecological challenges or used in novel laboratory experiments. This entry presents a definition of intelligence that accommodates our updated zoological knowledge and discusses why intelligence is adaptive. Ten approaches to studying the evolution of intelligence with their individual problems are suggested, and the role of brains in intelligence and the main theories for why intelligence evolved are discussed.
Expert Witnesses, Anthropologists as
Authors: Good Anthony
Published: September 2018

It has become increasingly common for anthropologists to act as expert witnesses, especially in cases involving indigenous land rights, asylum, and the “cultural defense.” Such involvement raises difficult ethical and professional issues for anthropologists, such as the tendencies of legal processes to require simple yes/no answers or to adopt overessentialized notions of “culture.” In cases involving juries, anthropological evidence may be deemed inadmissible because it addresses matters on which jurors must decide for themselves.
Nutritional Issues in Medical Anthropology
Authors: Thompson Amanda L. , Bentley Margaret E.
Published: September 2018

Nutrition is an important factor shaping human health in the past and present. Human diets are influenced by biological needs, geography and climate, social organization, and cultural beliefs and practices. Within anthropology, nutritional anthropologists have focused on understanding these factors and their health consequences. This entry provides a brief overview of the historical development of the field of nutritional anthropology, reviews the approaches taken and methods used to understand the relationship between diet and health, describes several current research areas in nutrition and health, and highlights some areas for future research within medical anthropology and beyond.
Nationalism
Authors: Riggan Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Nationalism in anthropology is considered a political ideology, an identity, and/or a structure of feeling. Nationalism can be defined as a sense of membership in a sociopolitical community attached to a national territory and state that has sovereignty over that territory and population. However, anthropological work on nationalism has often problematized the concept. Anthropologists have shown that nationalism does not always affix itself to a state or territory. It may emerge from multifaceted processes of identity formation and can produce, or be produced by, multiple, often competing, sociopolitical communities. Anthropologists have been particularly interested in processes through which nationalism is constructed or invented; questions about the relationships between nationalism, identity, and conflict; how national subjects continue to develop national solidarities in the face of increased migration; and the changing role of the national state in the face of global processes.
Stuff
Authors: Drazin Adam
Published: September 2018

The cultural consideration of the material world increasingly involves not only recognition of material things in their diversity, many different things, but also ideas and concepts which frame the material world as a whole through particular paradigms. Stuff provides us with one of these sweeping paradigmatic interpretations of material culture, both a popular discourse and a set of academic frameworks. Stuff is about proliferating consumer goods, about domesticity, about the substances things are made from, about the overwhelming artificiality and human‐made quality of the material world, and about sustainability. When using the term stuff, we are talking about those moments when the material world is important for its quantity, not only its qualities, and when we perceive the normative state of the material world as artifactual, and human‐made rather than normatively natural.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Authors: Richards Katharine , Wilson Richard Ashby
Published: September 2018

In periods of transition after political violence, a truth and reconciliation commission is one method for successor governments and international agencies to document past abuses of human rights. These temporary commissions investigate the covert activities of repressive regimes and rebel groups, document and publicize survivors' testimonies, and recommend institutional reforms and restitution for victims and their families. Most commissions pursue a form of restorative justice that prioritizes the needs of survivors without also trading truth for immunity from prosecution, as occurred at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Anthropological studies help us understand how the target audience of survivors actually responds to top‐down national policy measures such as truth telling, reparations and reconciliation, and how such transitional justice mechanisms might be designed to be more responsive to the needs and aspirations of those most affected.
Democracy
Authors: Copeland Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Commonly understood as rule of, by, and for the people, democracy is a rich and growing field of anthropological inquiry. Rather than promoting liberal democracy as a norm or viewing all democracies as essentially the same, anthropologists examine democracy as a globally circulating discourse and investigate the variety of imaginaries, projects, and lived experiences of democracy that emerge in diverse settings. Their investigations defamiliarize the concept and illuminate contestations over democracy's meanings, subjects, practices, and limits. Anthropological perspectives and methods have been used to examine liberal democracy's exclusions; the forces shaping democracy's evolution; ways in which the “the people” are constituted; the relationship between democracy and modernity; tensions between types of democracy; how democracy operates as a form of governmentality; the ways subalterns reappropriate and vernacularize democracy; the temporalities of democratic imaginaries; and the affective qualities of democratic experience.
Syndemics
Authors: Singer Merrill
Published: September 2018

Syndemics are adversely interacting diseases and other health conditions that increase the illness burden of a population, commonly as a consequence of harmful social conditions that produce multiple disease clusters and vulnerable physical bodies. Rather than individual diseases being the primary drivers of poor health in populations, often it is syndemically interacting diseases that produce the greatest health disparities.
Montage
Authors: Suhr Christian , Willerslev Rane
Published: September 2018

Montage refers to the production of new amalgamated wholes by joining different elements in a variety of combinations, repetitions, and overlaps. It is often associated with film editing but the basic principles of montage are also found in a broad range of artistic, cultural, and academic practices. In anthropology, montage has been used as a disruptive principle of analysis and representation in experiments with ethnographic writing, film, photography, and exhibition making. The concept of montage is originally derived from the French verb
monter
, meaning to mount or to bring something up. In the early years of the twentieth century, it was developed as a cinematic program by early Soviet filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.
Vocal Tract Evolution and Speech Production
Authors: de Boer Bart
Published: September 2018

The human vocal tract is very different from those of other apes, and it has been proposed that this is due to evolutionary pressures related to speech. There are a number of indications that this is indeed the case, and fossil evidence shows that, for all indications that have been studied so far, Neanderthals are similar to modern humans. This indicates that the latest common ancestor, approximately 500,000 years ago, already had adaptations to using complex vocalizations.
Security
Authors: Zacka Bernardo
Published: September 2018

Security may be defined as the absence of threat, real or perceived, to what we value. Any discussion of security presupposes a referent—a specification of what it is that must be secured—and a threat—an indication of what the referent must be protected from. For much of the twentieth century, the study of security was the purview of scholars of international relations, who put the accent on the state as a referent of security and on threats that were military in nature. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the study of security has expanded in new directions.
Memory
Authors: Billingsley Doc M. , Wertsch James V.
Published: September 2018

Memory has been an important topic in social science, including the concept of collective memory that originates in the Durkheimian tradition. Psychological research has contributed valuable knowledge about individual remembering, highlighting the fallibility of memory and the impacts of social factors. For ethnographers, memory is an integral part of their toolkit as well as the topic of many interviews. Many anthropological approaches are focused on collective memory, however, including topics such as the politics of memory and history, commemorative rituals and landscapes, and the transgenerational communication of knowledge and practices. In these types of research, the accuracy of memory is typically viewed as less important than the cultural meanings that memory provides. The diverse interpretations and methodologies used by different memory researchers calls for several important conceptual and methodological considerations—particularly regarding the concept of collective remembering. Memory continues to serve as a topic for interdisciplinary cross‐fertilization and collaborative research.
Anatomy and Climate‐Related Variation in Hominins
Authors: Weinstein Karen J.
Published: September 2018

Body size and proportions in modern humans and fossil
Homo
vary according to ecogeographic patterns as outlined by Bergmann's and Allen's rules. Body mass, intralimb proportions, and body width tend to vary by climate and latitude in many living and ancient modern human groups, including Neanderthals and
Homo erectus
fossils. Individuals with short and robust bodies tend to dwell in colder climates while individuals with longer and leaner bodies tend to dwell in warmer regions. Robust skeletons with short limbs in Neanderthals also indicate adaptations to high activity levels in addition to cold climates. Variation in facial anatomy in some hominins shows limited adherence to ecogeographic patterns but also likely the work of genetic drift. Recent scholarship identifies other evolutionary forces, including mutation, genetic drift, migration, and epigenetic and ontogenetic processes, as also shaping variation in body size and proportions in modern humans and fossil hominins.
States: Transnationalism
Authors: Abélès Marc
Published: September 2018

Contemporary international relations have entered a new era characterized by the rise of global governance. With powerful transnational institutions involved in the process of globalization, the sovereignty of the nation‐state is challenged by the rise of supraterritorial forms of governance. The weakening of the nation‐state and the complexification of the international spheres of power reflect the transformations of the contemporary world. The transnationality that increasingly characterizes the globalized world requires new networks of solidarity and more labile modes of action. Today global governance extends to domains as different as economy, environment, and human rights. Global institutions have long been subjects of research by political scientists and jurists but anthropology proposes new ways of approaching the dynamics of global politics, deconstructing the practices and the representations that have characterized transnational governance.
India, Indigenous Languages of
Authors: Annamalai E.
Published: September 2018

The linguistic research on the indigenous languages of India in general is self‐referential and is tied to the Indian government's policy goals of promoting the development of indigenous communities and preserving their culture, including their languages. Both developmental and cultural goals are pursued through education itself and through the use of community languages in it. The former research includes writing of grammars and making of dictionaries as well as examining linguistic questions of theoretical interest. The latter research (relating to indigenous education) has been academically vibrant, but its implantation in schools remains experimental and it faces political resistance.
Pregnancy, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Han Sallie
Published: September 2018

Defining pregnancy as a cultural and social experience, anthropologists have had a long‐standing interest in the topic but their aims and approaches have shifted over the years. While there had been a concern with comparing the customs, taboos, and rituals of reproduction across cultures during the early and mid‐twentieth century, scholarship by and about women since the 1970s called attention to the significance of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood in women's lives. The anthropology of reproduction gained momentum during the 1990s and 2000s with the publication of a number of works on childbirth, technologies used in assisted conception and in prenatal diagnosis, and previously neglected subjects such infertility, abortion, and pregnancy loss. More recently, the approach to pregnancy has shifted from critiques of the medicalization of reproduction and of reproductive technologies to the embodied everyday experiences of pregnant women, which includes consideration of gender, race, and class.
Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Werbner Pnina
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have made significant contributions to contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism. In particular, anthropologists have developed notions ofrooted,vernacular,working‐class,activist, andsituatedcosmopolitanisms. Against the slur that cosmopolitans are rootless, with no commitments to place or nation, the new post‐1990s cosmopolitan anthropology attempts to theorize the complex ways in which cosmopolitans beyond the West juggle particular and transcendent loyalties—morally and, inevitably, also politically. Much depends on context. Some environments are more cosmopolitan than others. If we take vernacular cosmopolitanism to refer to a multicentered world, it is particularly in cosmopolitan cities that distinctive vernacular cosmopolitanisms are created.
Magic
Authors: Sørensen Jesper
Published: September 2018

Magic is a contested concept in anthropology and related disciplines. No consensus exists as to its exact definition but prototypical usage centers on procedures aimed at changing the state or essence of persons, acts, and events through certain special and nontrivial kinds of actions with opaque causal mediation. Magic is a central concept in early theories in anthropology, including intellectualist, symbolic, and pragmatic approaches. Since then, theories have focused on the role of mental processes, symbolic meaning, and psychological functions when addressing the role of magic in human society and how it differs from religion and science. Recent approaches incorporate results from the cognitive sciences focusing on intuitive thought processes activated in particular social and pragmatic circumstances. Magic is thus understood as a broad concept that comprises a multitude of panhuman mental processes and modes of behavior.
Disasters, Anthropology of
Authors: García‐Acosta Virginia
Published: September 2018

Research in anthropology of disasters began in the middle of the twentieth century. It has been growing since, first in the Americas and later in Europe and Asia. This entry reviews its evolution, the contributions of anthropology to the field, and the current state of the art in order to show how the holistic, evolutionistic, and comparative approaches of anthropology of disasters have nourished this field of research.
Sense of Place
Authors: Hirsch Eric
Published: September 2018

Some argue that a sense of place is a matter of unmediated dwelling while others suggest it is mediated by exchange and power relations. Drawing on a range of ethnographic examples it is argued in this entry that a sense of place is as much about movement, travel, and displacement as it is about rootedness. Through their social relations and capacities, people create a sense of place regardless of where they are located.
Intergroup Cognition
Authors: Dunham Yarrow
Published: September 2018

Intergroup cognition has been among the central topics of social psychology since its inception and research has recently surged in allied fields such as developmental and cognitive psychology. Cognitive anthropology has also offered unique contributions, especially by drawing attention to commonalities as well as differences across cultural settings. This review places the study of intergroup cognition within a broader categorization framework, asking how categorical thinking about people affects social judgment and interaction. The ease with which intergroup bias emerges, its close connection to intergroup status hierarchies, the many dimensions along which intergroup bias varies (between individuals, groups, and cultures), and the connection between groups and norms are highlighted.
World Council of Anthropological Associations (
WCAA
)
Authors: Reuter Thomas A.
Published: September 2018

Since the early twentieth century, countless modern anthropological studies have paid tribute to the richness of cultural diversity across societies, as well as highlighting some of the existential conditions we all share as human beings. The discipline has not been able to serve as an undistorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, because scholars from a few privileged nations have dominated the process of anthropological knowledge construction over most of this period of time. The World Council of Anthropological Associations was founded to overcome this deficit by providing a global platform for free communication and democratic participation in the spirit of a new “world anthropologies” paradigm.
Demographic Anthropology
Authors: Johnson‐Hanks Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Demography is the study of human populations, along with the processes that structure and change them. Demography thus intersects with all four subfields of anthropology, albeit in different ways. Biological anthropologists have collaborated with demographers on topics from the evolution of life span to small‐area estimation to the inclusion of biomarkers in population surveys. Archaeologists and demographers have worked together on the relationship between population size, population concentration, and sociopolitical complexity. Sociocultural anthropologists have had the most extensive, but also most conflictual, relationships with demographers. And linguistic anthropologists are only now beginning to develop collaborations with demographers. Demographic anthropology includes all of these multiple intersections.
Australia, Anthropology in
Authors: Toussaint Sandy
Published: September 2018

Influenced by scholars in Great Britain and the United States, anthropology was established in Australia in the 1920s. Like other colonized nations, an early emphasis was Indigenous Australian and Melanesian groups. Anthropology in the twenty‐first century is taught at most Australian universities, although federal government funding for the humanities and social sciences is increasingly tight. For these and reasons connected to changing conceptual, methodological, and ethical inquiry, cross‐disciplinary research and public commentary is becoming evident in teaching, practice, and publishing. Research inquiry often continues to emphasize Indigenous Australian groups, especially for collaborative projects concentrated on native title land claims. Foci today have expanded geographically and culturally to migration, refugees, and settler societies; urbanization; the media; environmental anthropology; gender and sexuality; material culture; anthropology at home; and visual anthropology. Education about what anthropology is, and is not, continues, alongside internal debate about the distinctions and commonalties between anthropology and sociology.
Art and Agency
Authors: Layton Robert
Published: September 2018

This entry starts by defining agency and provides a brief history of arguments for the attribution of agency to objects. Alfred Gell's theory of art and agency is then exemplified through short case studies, paying particular attention to his influential concept of the “art nexus.” Difficulties with Gell's approach to aesthetics and visual communication, identified by commentators on his work, are considered. Gell's use of the term “abduction” obscures the important role of culture in enabling visual communication. The conclusions draw attention to the importance of Gell's analysis of agency revealed in the artist's oeuvre as a whole.
Historical Linguistics
Authors: Ehret Christopher
Published: September 2018

Historical linguistics studies language relationships and the histories of languages and language families. Using the methods and tools of historical linguistics, anthropologists and historians are able to sketch out the broad histories of the earlier societies that spoke the ancient ancestral forms of modern‐day languages. More importantly, these techniques enable scholars to reconstruct the ancient histories of the numerous culture words of those languages and, from the word histories, to recover a great many details of culture and social relations in those long‐ago societies. This entry describes key ways in which scholars apply these methods and it presents examples of how the findings of linguistic historical reconstruction can be correlated with the discoveries of archaeology and, in consequence, be given solid calendar dates.
Modernity, Behavioral
Authors: Zilhão João
Published: September 2018

Under the twin assumptions that species are also defined by behavior and that the emergence of anatomically modern humans was a speciation event, “behavioral modernity” stands for species‐specific features that would be shared by extant humans and their fossil lineage (
Homo sapiens
) but not by coeval or ancestral anatomically archaic (and hence, by definition, behaviorally nonmodern) humans (e.g., the Neanderthals,
Homo heidelbergensis
, or
Homo erectus
). However, when using material culture proxies for language and other key manifestations of “symbolic thinking” derived from the archaeological record, a number of modern human societies fail on behavioral modernity criteria that are passed by nonmodern ones. Whether the patterns of change and variation observed in human evolution can be resolved to such categorical distinctions remains, therefore, a contentious issue in the realm of culture as much as in that of biology.
Fatherhood, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Han Sallie
Published: September 2018

Fatherhood has been considered implicitly everywhere and, until recently, explicitly almost nowhere in anthropology. Early anthropologists were concerned with kinship and social organization and the significance of both biological and social fathers in establishing and maintaining these patterns. Mid‐twentieth‐century studies on parenting assumed the importance of fathers and noted the variation in their roles and obligations. From the 1960s onward, popular and academic discourse commented on absent fathers and fatherhood in crisis. Until the 1990s and 2000s, scant attention had been given to men's roles, activities, and experiences as fathers and the importance and meaning of fatherhood in men's lives. Since then, a movement grounded in feminist scholarship has sought to study gender more inclusively and make visible the connections between fatherhood and masculinity, such as notions of the economic provider that appear under pressure currently. Changing expectations of men and fathers are a focus today.
Mimesis
Authors: Kalshoven Petra Tjitske
Published: September 2018

Mimesis, as a force in collective memory making and in learning about otherness through processes of bodily and sensory replication, has emerged as an analytical focus in anthropological thought under the influence of an interest in incorporative, as opposed to inscriptive, practices. If sustained, mimesis becomes sedimented in the body, transforming selves in the process. Mimetic action involves empowering appropriation; in copying what came before or what is considered different, practitioners may draw on the power of previous or coexisting role models in particular in contexts of ritual and performance but also in milieux that place value on an exemplary heritage or that seek to grapple with a problematic past. The ambivalence of mimesis, informing the present while transforming the past, is both a given and a strength in social action as it allows practitioners to negotiate various temporalities and ontological categories.
Gender and Race, Intersectionality Theory of
Authors: Henne Kathryn
Published: September 2018

Despite long‐standing concerns around gender and race as distinct issues, critical commentaries on the intersections of gender and race often emerge as peripheral concerns in mainstream anthropology. This is despite the widespread recognition of intersectionality, a concept aimed at unpacking how gender, race, and other social orders come to inform oppression in distinct and varied ways. What conditions undermine a wider embrace of intersectionality in mainstream anthropology? How has the discipline engaged the intersections of gender and race? And what are the intersectional possibilities of anthropological inquiry?
Surrogacy
Authors: Unnithan Maya
Published: September 2018

The study of surrogacy has been important for the development of anthropological theory, especially on kinship and relatedness, where it has contributed to critical understanding of what is “natural” about the body, human reproduction, and the social relationships based on them. Ethnographic work on surrogacy has brought new insight into processes of assisted procreation and kinship debates within anthropology, further blurring the dichotomies of nature/culture and gift/payment. Studies on surrogacy have revealed the kinds of culture‐based reproductive “work” that accompany surrogate‐intended mother and parenting relationships in the context of gender, race, ethnic, and class inequities. Transnational surrogacy arrangements have revealed new social and political challenges to identity and citizenship, and a related diversity in legal cultures, to further understanding of global processes of reproductive stratification.
P
an‐
A
frican Anthropological Association (
PAAA
)
Authors: Nkwi Paul Nchoji
Published: September 2018

The birth of the Pan‐African Anthropological Association goes back to the Twelfth Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, which took place in August 1988 in Zagreb, in present‐day Croatia. This international congress, attended by over 1,200 anthropologists from across the world had a meager presence of just twelve Africans, coming from seven countries: Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Zambia. The president of the Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Sydel Silverman, provided both moral and financial assistance to this group of anthropologists to kick‐start a new era in the history of anthropology in Africa. Thanks to the initial funding of the Wenner‐Gren Foundation, a series of activities were initiated that has kept the association afloat.
Human Resources for Health
Authors: Maes Kenneth
Published: September 2018

The term “human resources for health” (HRH) represents a wide array of people engaged in actions intended primarily to enhance health. In the field of global health in the twenty‐first century, a primary focus is on gaps in the sufficiency and quality of doctors, nurses, midwives, and, more recently, community health workers (CHWs). Since the turn of the century, many global health experts have sought to raise awareness and understandings of geopolitical variation in ratios of these health service providers to populations, which are very low in Africa and Southeast Asia. Along with the rise of interest in HRH in the twenty‐first century, anthropologists and other critical social scientists have turned their attention to the labors and lives of health workers in various global settings, examining how they are shaped by local histories, global norms, and the interests of various actors with unequal levels of power.
Ethnoeconomics
Authors: Harris Donna
Published: September 2018

Ethnoeconomics can be broadly defined as a study of the relationships between ethnicity and economic outcomes. This entry considers two levels of analysis of ethnoeconomics: a macrolevel analysis, which focuses on the relationship between ethnic diversity and economic development, and a microlevel analysis, which examines the impacts of ethnicity as a social identity on individual economic decisions. The entry concludes with a discussion on the policy implications of ethnoeconomics.
Gossip
Authors: Ingram Gordon P. D.
Published: September 2018

Gossip is a universal feature of all human societies but has not been systematically investigated in all of them: ethnographies that have focused on gossip largely concern semidispersed groups at the margins of modern European and North American societies. The anthropological study of gossip can be divided into four historical phases: pre‐1960s work, which tended to discuss gossip only in passing; a debate in the 1960s between proponents of social–functionalist and social‐process approaches to gossip; the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, when ethnographers either advocated one of these two theoretical positions or tried to synthesize them; and recent work based on the recognition that gossip is universal. Current theoretical innovations include regional surveys of similarities and differences in patterns of gossip and the resurgence of a neofunctionalist model based on evolutionary science, in which gossip has adaptive value in promoting group cooperation.
Elites, Anthropological Study of
Authors: Wedel Janine R.
Published: September 2018

This entry highlights salient perspectives and contributions from anthropology to the study of elites and situates the study within the wider spectrum of scholarship, which has been dominated by sociologists, historians, and political scientists. While elite studies fell out of fashion beginning in the 1970s, they have made a comeback, notably with regard to elites' role in widening social and economic inequalities. This entry pays particular attention to today's influence elites, also known as strategic elites. Understanding who these elites are, how they interact with institutions and organizations, and how they shape policies and debates that impact the public is a pressing challenge of our time, in anthropology and beyond.
UnitedStates, Anthropology in
Authors: Kan Sergei
Published: September 2018

The entry outlines the history of the development of anthropology in the United States from its beginning in the late eighteenth century to the present. Particular attention is paid to American anthropology's distinct characteristics (e.g., its four‐fields tradition), its main theoretical paradigms, and its relationship to some major economic, political, and cultural developments in the wider American society.
I
nternational
A
ssociation for
S
outheast
E
uropean
A
nthropology (
InASEA
)
Authors: Nešković Vesna Vučinić , Roth Klaus
Published: September 2018

The International Association for Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA), founded in 1999, is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars who study social and cultural processes manifested in the practices and beliefs of the people of Southeast Europe. Its members deal with Southeast European ethnology, cultural and social anthropology, folklore, ethnography, historical anthropology, and cognate disciplines. They come from the region as well as from other parts of the world, and share the conviction that anthropologically informed research is an essential element in understanding the current and past problems of Southeast Europe. The InASEA supports the development of anthropology in Southeast Europe and facilitates communication between scholars from the region and scholars elsewhere. It also aims at increasing the presence of Southeast European anthropology in the international anthropological discourse, which has been done in various ways but particularly through engagement with the World Council of Anthropological Associations. The InASEA organizes biennial conferences and publishes the annual journal
Ethnologia Balkanica
.
Design, Anthropology of
Authors: Drazin Adam
Published: September 2018

Design is an expanding and emerging topic for anthropological study. Its evasiveness as a cultural phenomenon, which some see as ubiquitous and some see as very limited and specific, necessitates careful handling but is also one of the reasons why it is an interesting cultural phenomenon. The study of design in anthropology originated in the study of graphical representation and graphical ways of thinking and developed into studies of the design of everyday materialities. Recent work has focused on professional and institutional design practices and developed collaborative ways of doing anthropological work through design anthropology.
Kinship: Sociocultural Approaches (The Nineteenth Century)
Authors: Knight Chris
Published: September 2018

Modern kinship theory dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when figures such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine, John F. McLennan, and Lewis H. Morgan debated whether the principles of early kinship and marriage were individual or collective, endogamous or exogamous, patriarchal or matriarchal. A related topic was whether early humans restricted their notions of kinship exclusively to one another or extended them to embrace animals and plants—an idea known as totemism, initially proposed by McLennan before being elaborated by James Frazer and Émile Durkheim.
Sovereignty
Authors: Bryant Rebecca
Published: September 2018

In political philosophy and in general use, “sovereignty” refers to supreme political authority within a territory. This meaning is limited to state sovereignty, a usage that emerged with the modern state. Anthropology, however, has historically taken a wider view of sovereignty, in line with the discipline's more expansive understanding of the political. In line with constructivist political theory that views sovereignty as an everyday performance, ethnography since the early 2000s has examined the practice and discourse of authority in the making of “stateness.” Ethnographies of sovereignty have, moreover, analyzed sovereignty over food, energy, science, and cultural production. In anthropology, then, we may understand sovereignty to refer to the exercise of authority within regimes of power.
MacDougall,David (b. 1939) andJudith (b. 1938)
Authors: Ferrarini Lorenzo
Published: September 2018

David and Judith MacDougall have directed numerous important ethnographic films and David is considered one of the most prominent theorists in visual anthropology. Their filmic and written works are characterized by a dialectic between observation and participation and the development of audiovisual ways of knowing that can bring anthropology beyond text.
Apes, Origins of
Authors: Begun David R.
Published: September 2018

Ape evolution has been the subject of numerous publications since the first fossil apes were recognized in the nineteenth century. Recent reviews of ape evolution have focused on surveying the fossil record and integrating that with the ever‐increasing evidence from molecular systematics of evolutionary relations among living hominoids, including humans. With more than 100 species of fossils apes known and many dozens of publications on molecular systematics, this entry approaches the topic from a deliberately anthropocentric perspective. What does the record of ape evolution, both fossil and molecular, tell us about how humans came to be the way we are? Through what stages did we pass on the way to acquiring our unique brains, limbs, faces, and pattern of growth?
Art and Participation
Authors: Sansi Roger
Published: September 2018

In recent decades, participatory art practices have bloomed. These practices are often site specific and experimental. This interest in particular social contexts has driven artistic practice toward anthropology. Conversely, anthropologists have engaged with these practices to question the limitations of their methods and experiment with their own forms of work. This entry will explore the relationship between art and anthropology through the question of participation.
Resistance
Authors: Halliburton Murphy
Published: September 2018

Resistance in anthropology refers to efforts by individuals and groups to protest, oppose, or undermine a system of power or a class of people that is imposing on or oppressing them in some way. From the late nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century, social analyses were dominated by models of structure and stasis, and conflicts and inequalities in society were rarely addressed. Since the mid‐1980s, however, conflict became a central focus of social analysis and studies of resistance have proliferated with anthropologists and other social scientists first looking at resistance to power in terms of revolts and revolution and later turning to more everyday and mundane forms of resistance. Anthropologists have shown how acts of resistance can improve the conditions of people's lives but can also inadvertently reinforce hegemony or result in the emergence of new forms of repression.
Jazz
Authors: Wilf Eitan
Published: September 2018

The anthropological interest in jazz can be divided to three main categories. First, because jazz is inherently an improvised form of music, it provides an opportunity to theorize the emergently creative, real‐time nature of human interaction. Second, efforts to institutionalize jazz in bureaucratic structures throughout the twentieth century provide appropriate contexts in which to analyze the dynamics and contradictions of institutionalized creativity. Third, the appropriation of jazz, which is identified in the popular imagination as a quintessentially modern American art form, by musicians from cultures outside the United States is amenable to analysis in terms of globalization, indigenization, and multiple modernities.
Sacred Time
Authors: Day Abby
Published: September 2018

Sacred time is described in this entry as time that is socially imagined, imposed, and practiced in keeping with a religion's symbols and stories. Although anthropologists may differ on definitions and theories about what constitutes sacred time, the fact that time is universally experienced has intrigued scholars. When time is examined historically and currently, there arise several common themes about how and when it becomes sacred or, indeed, if it has always been sacred. Time that is conceived in terms of its duration produces ideas about eternity and infinity; time that is regulated in order to commemorate deities and holy events structures daily, weekly, and annual activities; time that is ordered to produce individual and social transformations is known as ritual.
Hamilton,W. D.(1936–2000)
Authors: Segerstrale Ullica
Published: September 2018

British biologist William Donald (Bill) Hamilton has been called the “Darwin of the 20th century.” He showed that altruism can evolve as long as the benefit of an altruistic act falls on individuals that are likely to share the altruist's genes rather than random individuals. Individuals are seen as maximizing their “inclusive fitness,” which includes their effect on “co‐carriers” of their genes (typically kin; hence the term “kin selection”). Using mathematical population genetics and game theory, Hamilton caused a paradigm shift in the explanation of social behavior, which later triggered the sociobiology controversy.
Pollution
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie
Published: September 2018

The concept of pollution, or symbolic contamination, comes from the variable understanding that every culture has of what constitutes purity: the inner essence of a person can be either pure or defiled. The various processes of the human body are universally considered polluting and can be subject to ritual purification. Mary Douglas's groundbreaking work on pollution theory proposes that the cultural coding of a substance as a pollutant is rooted in a shared perception of this substance as anomalous: it is considered out of place. Female menstruation is particularly coded as polluting, as blood is pouring out beyond its normal boundaries; but menstrual blood is highly ambivalent and also points to fertility and life, which can be envied or imitated by men. The traditional caste system of India was safeguarded by affirming social boundaries linked to the idea of cleanliness, with a strict hierarchical order based on notions of purity and pollution.
Residence
Authors: Hamberger Klaus
Published: September 2018

This entry discusses the concept of residence, its place in the history of anthropological thought, and its importance for theories of social organization and social change. Adopting a relational perspective, the study of residence is put into the wider context of the topology of social space.