bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Corporeal Vision
Authors: Hughes‐Freeland Felicia
Published: September 2018

“Corporeal vision” refers to the anthropological approach that recognizes the centrality of visual images and media to understanding social relationships and practices. For most of the twentieth century, anthropology followed natural science precepts about truth, fact, and certainty that were expressed in words, and visual data were considered inferior and illustrative at best. Developments in mobile visual technologies and anthropological interests in materiality, performativity, embodiment, and the sensorium have made it possible to imagine and understand the world through the body and its senses instead of through a disembodied mind. Ethnographic filmmaker and writer DavidMacDougallhas made important arguments for the value of visual imagination and knowledge within and beyond anthropology. Some thinkers still uphold positivist principles, but the social roles of visual technologies are challenging the prevalence of detached analyses expressed only in words.
Anthropology Southern Africa
Authors: van der Waal Kees (C. S.) , de Jongh Mike
Published: September 2018

Anthropology Southern Africa is the single association of anthropologists in southern Africa, following a century (1903–2001) of disparate organizing, deeply entangled with political conflicts. Anthropology became a highly successful academic field in South Africa in the 1920s. The study of the former British colony's industrialization process made it a vibrant resource for anthropology in the United Kingdom. However, anthropologists were soon split along ethnic lines into two ideologically competing associations, characterized by support or rejection of apartheid. After 1994, these were the last social science associations to unify with each other in South Africa. Racial inequality and white‐dominated academic politics also prevented the growth of a strong African professional cadre—a major challenge now.
Domestic Mode of Production
Authors: Tocheva Detelina
Published: September 2018

The principles and processes of the production of material goods within domestic groups are termed the “domestic mode of production.” This mode is dominant in economies in which an overwhelming majority of the material goods are produced by the domestic groups. The concept came under debate in the 1970s and the 1980s with the development of Marxist approaches in anthropology. Anthropologists interrogated the shift from the domestic to other modes of production, the interaction between different modes, and the productive and reproductive roles of the household. Marshall Sahlins's interest in domestic “underproduction” led him to emphasize the relations between the domestic economy and the political order in preagricultural and agricultural economies. Claude Meillassoux, who conceived his contribution as a modest addition to the theory of Marx and Engels, showed that domestic human reproduction is linked to global capitalism. The study of the domestic economy has implications for research on capitalism, feminism, and migration.
Animal Communication: The Handicap Principle
Authors: Zahavi Amotz
Published: September 2018

Animals communicate using nonverbal analog signals. Such signals are analogs of the messages encoded in them. They evolve by a selection mechanism that is distinct from that of other traits. In order to become a reliable signal, a trait has to evolve handicaps that reduce its efficiency. Whenever information is received via signals rather than from direct observation, it is important to test its reliability. The handicap functions as a test of the reliability of the information encoded in the signal, including signals within the organism, to prevent mistakes as well as cheating. The properties of the test (the handicap) provide clues regarding the information included in the signal. Complex behaviors, such as altruism and suicidal tendencies, can be interpreted as handicaps. Unlike all other traits, signals lose their function when all can signal alike. Handicaps are essential components in the communication within social systems.
Corruption
Authors: Torsello Davide
Published: September 2018

Corruption has been a rather problematic topic in the anthropological investigation; this is explained by the comparatively small number of works that expressly deal with this phenomenon in the discipline. This silence in the anthropological literature (in spite of a growing interest detectable since the early 2000s) is justified by looking at epistemological, deontological, and methodological concerns. This entry proposes three approaches through which anthropology has introduced new and extremely timely perspectives to the phenomenon: the normative, the hermeneutical, and the transactional approaches. In particular, the transactional approach has produced a number of interesting insights in the economic–anthropological sphere, as related to social exchange theory.
G
odelier,
M
aurice (
b
. 1934)
Authors: Tocheva Detelina
Published: September 2018

Maurice Godelier greatly contributed to the institutionalization of the subdiscipline of economic anthropology in France. After promoting an original synthesis of neo‐Marxist and structuralist approaches, he went on to develop a comprehensive critique of Marxist theory, as well as of notions of gift and exchange. His influential book
The Mental and the Material
presents a theory of the relations between ideology and economic practice.
Dams
Authors: Cabalion Joël
Published: September 2018

A dam is an infrastructure resulting from technological development that impounds or diverts water. While earth dams are the most common type worldwide (63 percent), rockfill dams and gravity dams are the second and third most common structures (each at 13 percent), followed by arch dams (4 percent), buttress dams (less than 1 percent), and other types of structures (less than 6 percent). Whether small, large, or major, dams are found almost everywhere and across epochs. To evaluate and elucidate the magnitude of their anthropological impacts on societies and habitats, this entry examines large and major dams in the modern era that have resulted in river‐basin development and population displacement.
Gender and Health
Authors: Annandale Ellen
Published: September 2018

The relationship between gender and health is complex and multifaceted. Sex‐specific biological vulnerabilities can interact with global and locally shaped social relations of gender to produce a variety of differences in health status and the experience of illness and healthcare, not only between men and women but also within men as a group and women as a group. In some instances, biology appears to play no known role and the health vulnerabilities of men, women, boys, and girls result directly from social and political disadvantages. This complex relationship is illustrated though the diverse examples of HIV/AIDS, the outbreak in 2014–16 of Ebola virus disease, the male “mortality crisis” in Russia, and the global market in reproduction.
Wolf,Eric (1923–99)
Authors: Prins Harald E. L.
Published: September 2018

A pioneer in peasant studies, Eric Wolf was raised in an Austrian Russian Jewish family. Forced to flee the Nazi German dictatorship, he came to New York in 1940. He was seriously wounded in combat in Italy. He studied anthropology under Ruth Benedict and Julian Steward at Columbia University, obtaining his doctorate (1951) based on fieldwork in Puerto Rico. Later he conducted fieldwork in Mexico and South Tyrol. Conjoining cultural ecology and political economy, he was among the first anthropologists to take a Marxian turn. His probe into power directed his ethnographic and comparative research on dominance, resistance, and governance. He served as full professor at the University of Michigan and was then appointed distinguished professor at the City University of New York. The author of numerous publications, includingPeasant Wars of the Twentieth Century,Europe and the People without History, andEnvisioning Power, Wolf received many honors and became a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Water Rights
Authors: Strang Veronica
Published: September 2018

There is a lengthy continuum of human rights to water, ranging from those concerned with meeting people's most fundamental needs for potable water and sanitation, to multifarious forms of rights to control, redirect, and make use of streams and groundwater, and to have access to aquatic (freshwater and marine) resources. Anthropology's major contributions to this complex field have been to make visible the wide cultural diversity in how rights to water are conceptualized and enacted and to demonstrate that such rights are invariably embedded in—and illustrative of—particular social, political, and economic relations. Historically, anthropological understandings of water rights issues have informed debates on social justice, development, law, and water governance. More recently, building on long‐term research on human–environment relations, the focus of anthropological research in this area has broadened to encompass nonhuman rights and ecological justice.
Marxism
Authors: Heyman Josiah
Published: September 2018

Marxism, the intellectual and political tradition based on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has been an important source of ideas and political practices in anthropology. It is key to the study of cultural evolution, particularly the rise of inequality, and the effects of global capitalism on peoples around the world. It has also inspired anthropological engagement in struggles against inequality and oppression along with other radical visions. Anthropology, in turn, challenges narrow assumptions in Marxism, bringing to the fore complex interactions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship and immigration status. Marxist concepts of power and ideology combine in insightful ways with the anthropological approach to culture and communication. Marxist political ecology provides a compelling perspective on major environmental issues. Marxism in anthropology thus remains a vital tradition, appropriate to a world of migrant workers, factory laborers, and wrenching economic crisis.
Cooperation, Evolution of
Authors: Atkisson Curtis
Published: September 2018

Cooperation is a fundamental aspect of human behavior but is evolutionarily rare and cannot be explained easily. Humans cooperate in a way that is difficult to explain using standard models from evolutionary biology. The methods used in the study of the evolution of cooperation allow for the examination of complex systems through simplification. Four broad classes of models have received an enormous amount of attention in the study of the evolution of cooperation: inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, and group/multilevel selection. Future directions in the study of the evolution of cooperation include considering multiple simple models in the same framework—including the study of linked games and the evolution of cooperation on multiplex networks.
Liberalism
Authors: Weiss Erica
Published: September 2018

Liberalism is one of the dominant political doctrines of the modern era. This entry describes its defining values, specifically individual freedoms, market freedom, secular governance, equality of citizens, and multicultural tolerance. Following anthropological insights, liberalism is discussed as a political doctrine, a model of governance, a type of subjectivity, and a set of norms and values. The entry discusses the emergence of liberal thought as well as anthropological research on this political formation. Though less widely known than political science writings on liberalism, anthropological research has contributed to knowledge of liberalism in a number of ways. Anthropology has explored the everyday lives and experiences of people in liberal states, revealing the informal content of liberal governance and its unintended effects. It has contributed to the critique of the liberal subject posited by liberal theory, and it has also explored the limitations of liberal tolerance and multiculturalism.
States: Police Powers
Authors: Jauregui Beatrice
Published: September 2018

Anthropological inquiry in much of the twentieth century, especially during the period of European colonialism, often worked directly or indirectly in service to “the state” in general and “the police” in particular. Following a critical turn in social theory and cultural studies toward “speaking truth to power” beginning in the 1970s, the anthropological gaze turned toward states and police powers as objects of analysis. The resultant work in what, since the early twenty‐first century, may be understood as a veritable subfield of political–legal anthropology called the “anthropology of police” served to develop new conceptual frameworks and critical theories of authority, legality, legitimacy, violence, and social difference and also raised challenging questions about ethnographic methods and ethics. The anthropology of police continues to evolve and address a host of urgent theoretical and empirical questions in these areas.
Interpretative Anthropology
Authors: Glasser Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Interpretative anthropology names a major stream in disciplinary practice of the last fifty years. First articulated within the context of broader conversations about the analysis of symbols, interpretative anthropology came to be understood by many critics and supporters as a harbinger of the postmodernist turn of the 1980s. Yet on closer examination, interpretative anthropology, particularly as articulated by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), was closely connected to earlier debates regarding humanism and social science in American anthropology that reached back to the interwar period and in some respects even earlier. Attention to the roots of the interpretative program in Harvard's Department of Social Relations (founded in 1946) shows interpretative anthropology to have been a creative reformulation of a particular stream of prewar American anthropology—a reformulation whose urgency stemmed largely from the postwar successes of a variety of scientific models of anthropological inquiry.
Kinship Systems
Authors: Read Dwight W.
Published: September 2018

Kinship is a universal of human societies, built around systems of self‐centric, reciprocal social relations. In all societies, societal members are conceptually organized, to one degree or another, through structured, reciprocal systems of relations. Kinship systems are broad in their scope and interdigitate with religious, economic, political, and other social systems. A group's ideas about procreation, along with its ideas about kinship relations in general, provide for the social identity of a newborn offspring through the family social unit (ranging in form from single parent to extended family) into which it is born and to its position in an already‐existing network of kinship relations into which it is entering through kinship relations recognized at birth. Kinship relations also provide an idiom through which forms of social organization are expressed in human societies.
Sexual Conflict Theory
Authors: Gowaty Patricia Adair
Published: September 2018

When the fitness interests of potentially or actually mating individuals are opposed, the opportunity for sexual conflict exists. Sexual conflict is a type of sexual selection acting among individuals of the same sex, that is, simultaneously among females and among males. Classical evolutionary theory says that sexual conflict inevitably follows from typical anisogamy that is said to favor indiscriminate and coercive males and choosy but vulnerable females. In contrast, the CODE hypothesis says that when males create environments dangerous for females, female resistance evolves with fitness consequences for females, males, and offspring. More recently, the switch‐point theorem (SPT) proved mathematically that individuals, regardless of their sex/genders, trade off time with fitness to make adaptive reproductive decisions. A corollary of the SPT, the killing‐time hypothesis, predicts novel mechanisms of sexual coercion and resistance.
Historical Ecology
Authors: Crumley Carole L.
Published: September 2018

Historical ecology is a practical framework for studying the past and future of the human–environment relationship. Combining the biological, physical, and social sciences and the humanities, historical ecology draws on a broad spectrum of theories, concepts, and methods. Historical ecology guides the construction of an evidence‐validated, open‐ended narrative of landscape evolution and transformation and treats the totality as a complex system. Historical ecology's comprehensive approach fosters the equitable and secure future of multiple‐use landscapes (such as public lands and urban spaces) by offering place‐based solutions to contemporary problems.
Narrative and Storytelling
Authors: Boyd Brian
Published: September 2018

All societies and all developmentally normal individuals tell and respond to stories, both in serious modes (fact, legend, myth) and in play (fiction, jokes, pretend play). Fields as diverse as anthropology, business, film studies, law, linguistics, literature, media studies, medicine, and psychology investigate narrative from different angles. Among the core factors in considering narrative are its diverse forms, genres, and media, from report, gossip, history, legend, and myth to jokes, fiction, fable, parable, counterfactuals, and hypotheticals; the diffusion of narratives; the fact/fiction distinction, sometimes clear, often blurry; the costs and benefits of narrative for storytellers and audiences; the evolutionary, cognitive, and developmental bases of narrative; narrative as a cognitive default and confabulation as a narrative stopgap; cognitive biases in narrative, especially toward overreading agency and toward attention‐earning exceptionality; and the role of narrative biases in generating religious myth.
Human Rights
Authors: Archambault Caroline S.
Published: September 2018

Human rights claims are pervasive and enacted in all corners of the globe. Human rights have become a thriving area of anthropological inquiry. Ethnographic explorations offer powerful insights on the life of rights, denaturalizing and politicizing the human rights project and scrutinizing its workings, mediations, and impacts. This research calls for a de‐essentialization of culture in human rights discourse to reveal multiple normative systems of social justice and to illuminate the full range of violence, from cultural to political and economic, which entrench poverty and inequality, underlie human rights violations, and account for countless instances of human suffering.
Religion, Health, and Wellbeing
Authors: Cochrane James R. , Ion Heather Wood , Gunderson Gary R.
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists characterize the relationships between religion and health as inherently social. They ask how, in everyday settings, tangible and intangible forms of religious or spiritual assets shape people's views of the world and ways of acting during their lifelong journeys of health. They examine how healthworlds are constructed and how the actions of religious people, groups, organizations, and traditions function as assets to shape wellbeing. A new body of work also examines the impact of spirituality on wellbeing and considers the “leading causes of life,” which express ways in which people search for full health in everyday life.
Threads
Authors: Hendrickson Carol
Published: September 2018

Threads and related objects, from fibers to cloth, have played a role in the history of anthropological theory and ethnographic writing. Since the mid‐nineteenth century, research on and reference to these materials by social–cultural anthropologists and anthropological ancestors have illuminated key theoretical issues. In addition, the relative abundance or scarcity of threads and cloth in the literature as well as the nature of research on these topics shed light on concerns that have motivated anthropological inquiry. A consideration of issues of key importance to social–cultural anthropologists since the latter part of the twentieth century also suggests reasons for increased interest in threads and cloth, including foci on gender, identity politics, globalization, history, and skilled activities.
Intellectual Property
Authors: Coombe Rosemary J.
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists who study intellectual property (IP) emphasize processes of commodification, relationships between IP and its others (those to whom historically it did not extend, whose creative efforts it fails to recognize, or who challenge and defy it), and the characteristic subject positions IP affords. Early scholarship emphasized IP's restriction of cultural expression, access to resources, and scientific inquiry. Later critical analysis of liberal IP discourse led to transformations in disciplinary research practice. Processes through which “traditional” goods are recognized by IP, interpretation of IP by non‐Western others, practices of translation by which traditions are recognized, and the activities of those who actively resist IP are lively areas of inquiry, as are the subjectivities that IP discourse and practice constitute. The extension of IP to genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions promises to foster the articulation of new forms of collective identity and contestation.
Fair Trade Movement
Authors: Fisher Eleanor
Published: September 2018

This entry provides an outline of how the fair trade movement has developed and its success in stimulating the production, circulation, and consumption of fair trade products. Critical debate over the core message of the fair trade movement, that buying fair trade products can transform producers' lives in the global South, is highlighted. A body of ethnographic research contributes to this debate by examining the significance of fair trade in producers' lives.
Hominins, Early
Authors: Gilbert William Henry
Published: September 2018

“Early hominins” here denotes all human ancestors on (or branching from) the human lineage after our evolutionary split with chimpanzees but before the origin of the genus
Homo
. While neither genetic nor paleontological evidence precisely provides the time of the split, most scholars suggest dates between 5 and 8 million years ago. Hominins close to the split show some signs of bipedality, and by 4.5 million our ancestors were facultative bipeds and no longer had sharpened canines. These anatomical changes suggest social behavior changes. Fully bipedal hominins exist by 3.5 million years ago, and this with climatic and faunal evidence for more open savanna environments suggests an expansion into the growing savanna ecosystem after becoming bipedal in a more closed environment. All early hominins retain essentially chimpanzee‐sized brains. The upper end of the early hominin grade is defined by the beginning of intensive tool use and the split of early
Homo
and robust
Australopithecus
.
Ethnicity, Multiculturalism, and Transnationalism
Authors: Molina José Luis , Rodríguez‐García Dan
Published: September 2018

The concepts “ethnicity,” “multiculturalism,” and “transnationalism” refer to different manifestations and the growing acknowledgment of cultural diversity as one of the constituent features of societies in a globalized world. Thus, the first term refers to the awareness of belonging to a group with particular characteristics (e.g., territorial, cultural, religious, linguistic, customary) and the consciousness ofusin relationship tothem. “Multiculturalism” refers to a philosophy or social thinking reactive to cultural uniformity or assimilation and to a model of public policy in which the state plays an active part in the defense of minority rights and cultural diversity. Finally, the term “transnationalism” points out the existence of a continuum of stable personal relationships between migrants across borders that affects simultaneously a wide range of phenomena (including the sense of belonging) in more than one single country.
Gender and Sexuality: Contested Relations
Authors: Besnier Niko
Published: September 2018

If one defines gender as the social, cultural, and political construction of women and men in relation to one another and sexuality as libidinal desires and other sensations, the relationship between the two is contested in a number of ways. The relationship between the subject and object of desire can be gendered in different ways across ethnographic contexts and historical times, with the modern‐day Western contrast between heterosexuality and homosexuality or straight and gay identities being only one among other models. How gender and sexuality are configured can be the object of different views within the same society. Finally, different models of the relationship exist or have existed in the past: some explain sexuality in terms of gender while others do the reverse. The relationship between gender and sexuality must be understood with reference to the social and political context in which it is located.
Ethnography, Multisited
Authors: Forte Maximilian C.
Published: September 2018

Multisited ethnography advances a transnational research method that follows peoples, objects, and ideas that are connected across a number of sites. Numerous studies of migration, media, and development have adopted this approach. Yet important shortcomings remain concerning the practicality of the method, the rationale, and the approach's relationship to theory and history.
Consciousness, Altered States of
Authors: Finnegan Ruth
Published: September 2018

Forms of “altered” consciousness are common in human life yet at the same time (apart from dreams) seldom investigated in depth by anthropologists. The main areas where such states of consciousness have been found, and up to a point studied, are dreaming, including prophetic and creative dreams; sensations of contact of various kinds with and from the dead; the experience of music, poetry and trance; and psychic communication of the kind described by such terms as “telepathy,” “extrasensory perception,” or “nonlocal awareness.”
Gender and Cinema, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Hamilton Annette
Published: September 2018

Gender is deeply embedded in filmmaking and film viewing. While national and cultural elements affect the representations of gender, common factors arise due to prevailing technologies and commercial imperatives. Hollywood cinema has been formative in the history of world cinemas and has set the parameters of common gender discourse. Other major cinemas, notably in China and India, differ in key respects from the Hollywood norm and offer culturally specific modes of construction and cinematic potential. Filmmaking is no longer confined by the commercial organization of Hollywood, and new mechanisms of production and distribution challenge the conventional deep structure of gender in cinema.
Sexuality
Authors: Alexeyeff Kalissa , Turner Karen
Published: September 2018

Sexuality is a complex amalgam of drives, desires, practices, and identities. Across the social sciences, sexuality has come to be understood first and foremost as socially constructed; even the most intimate and private acts are shaped by social norms that inform ideas about reproduction, kinship, love, and pleasure. Anthropology has been at the forefront of recording how sexuality is organized in specific locales and increasingly shaped by macrolevel and global factors. Anthropology's contribution to the study of human sexuality is through documentation of how sex is experienced and categorized differently across cultures. This is in contrast to approaches in other disciplines, such as psychology and sexology, that tend to treat sexual behaviors as psychological and physical instincts rather than as social phenomena.
Heterosexuality, Heteronormative
Authors: Alexeyeff Kalissa , Turner Karen
Published: September 2018

Heterosexuality is the expression of sexual desire and orientation toward a person of the opposite biological sex. It refers to emotional attachments, sexual acts and practices, and a sense of identity. Since the 1990s, the term “heteronormativity” has gained currency, highlighting those aspects of social life beyond heterosexual erotic practice. Heteronormativity is a concept that aims to illustrate how social institutions and policy, ranging from marriage to citizenship, reinforce and privilege heterosexuality as both normal and morally right.
Cognition
Authors: Parren Nora
Published: September 2018

Cognition refers to the information processing that occurs at a number of different levels and systems, often with the mind at the core. It is the process by which thinking of all kinds happens, in humans, animals, and artificial intelligence. Cognition covers explicit and implicit thinking as well as types of information processing that extend beyond the nervous system. Cognition is both a topic of study and a tool used to further understanding of other topics, including culture.
G
erman Anthropological Association / Deutsche Gesellschaft
für
Sozial‐
und
Kulturanthropologie (
DGSKA
)
Authors: Lentz Carola , Thomas Silja
Published: September 2018

This entry outlines the history of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial‐ und Kulturanthropogie (German Anthropological Association) in light of the specificities of German political history and the particularities of the development of the discipline in the German context. Important milestones include the National Socialist era, postwar “reconstruction,” the 1968 student movement, and German reunification. The entry also discusses the contemporary challenges faced by the association in the face of changing academic contexts in which anthropologists work, the broadening range of professional fields in which they engage, and new demands placed upon the discipline by the public and the standards of ethics in contemporary anthropology.
Africa, Language Research in
Authors: Beck Rose Marie
Published: September 2018

Most research on languages in Africa in one way or another reflects the continent's tremendous linguistic diversity. That languages have become such an important marker of difference, identity, and inequality is a result of the protracted colonial encounter and the definition of powerful linguistic ideologies. Intellectual developments in Europe produced a notion of language that essentialized it as inextricably bound up with ethnicity and territory so as to render the colonized countable and governable. The particular combination of mission, colonial administration, and linguistics resulted in the “invention” of around 2,000 African languages. The empirical confrontation with this high linguistic density has generated or contributed to the disciplines of linguistics (typology, grammaticalization), variation and contact linguistics, and sociolinguistics (critical sociolinguistics, language planning, language and education, and multilingualism). Current trends in sociolinguistics profit from ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and postcolonial theory in their recognition of multilingualism as a “new linguistic dispensation.”
Activism
Authors: Haugerud Angelique
Published: September 2018

As the core element of social movements, activism attracts attention not only from anthropologists but also from political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, performance studies scholars, and historians. The anthropology of activism—a vibrant scholarly domain—offers insights into the lived experiences of activists, including the friction or constraints that protesters encounter; the formation of discursive communities and counterpublics; experimentation with tactical repertoires and modes of recruitment; and protests as interactive performances in which participants make claims against those in positions of power or authority, build solidarity, and address internal movement conflicts. In political anthropology, activism offers a vital optic on topics such as power, the state, hegemony, historical consciousness, citizenship, identity, and the interplay of formal and informal political practices.
Mind–Body Reasoning
Authors: Roazzi Maíra Monteiro
Published: September 2018

Mind–body reasoning refers to how people reason about the relationship between the mind and the body. Cognitive approaches emerging in the late 1990s suggested people adopt a dualistic pattern when reasoning about mind and body; however, there is no consensus about whether such reasoning is intuitive or not, or whether it is cognitively driven by domain‐specific or cross‐domain reasoning. The history and development of such reasoning will be reviewed within a cognitive anthropological framework.
Demography, Prehistoric Human
Authors: Paine Richard R.
Published: September 2018

The study of prehistoric human demography expanded in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when evolutionary and ecological approaches to human behavior were at the forefront of anthropological archaeology. Prehistoric demography is usually divided into two subfields—osteological (or paleodemography) and settlement demography—based on their data sources. Paleodemography relies on morphological traits associated with age and sex, and a variety of skeletal lesions, to reconstruct ancient fertility, mortality, and community health. Settlement demography uses a series of archaeological proxies for population, including room or structure counts, roofed‐over space, and artifact densities, to reconstruct ancient population size, density, and growth. Paleodemography has faced a series of challenges including reference sample bias, hidden heterogeneity of frailty, and selective mortality. Settlement demography must use ethnographic analogies to link its proxies to human numbers. The culture‐specific nature of these proxies and issues of accurate dating of archaeological materials are central issues for settlement demography.
L
atin
A
merican
A
ssociation of
A
nthropology /
A
sociación
L
atinoamericana
de A
ntropología (
ALA
)
Authors: De La Cruz Laura R. Valladares
Published: September 2018

In the twenty‐five years since it was founded, the Latin American Association of Anthropology (Asociación Latinoamericana de Antropología) has played a significant role in bringing together anthropologists, as well as in the anthropologies that have developed throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It has been a privileged space for theoretical reflection, where particularities and the identity of a Latin American anthropology have been discussed in the face of metropolitan anthropologies; this has led to a discussion about what so‐called peripheral anthropologies and/or Southern anthropologies are and their features. Its continuity through time has been difficult because of the lack of resources, including modern technologies, to maintain communication between the states and to create networks or work groups. Nevertheless, since the mid‐2000s, the association has convened triennial conventions, which has enabled it to expand its presence.
Agricultural Systems Research
Authors: Shiel Robert S.
Published: September 2018

A wide range of farming systems have been available for an extended period but only within the past 200 years has there been quantitative data to compare them for reliability and output. Improvements to husbandry and selection of plants and animals have enabled much greater production but have sometimes forced producers into a developmental pathway they may not have wished, as in the Green Revolution. Reconstituting traditional systems may avoid these problems. There may also be constraints on systems due to philosophical considerations, as in organic agriculture, environmental preferences or limits such as global warming or nitrate leaching, or wildlife conservation measures. New technologies such as precision farming and genetic modification may offer productivity and reliability advantages but their overall effect on systems may be very complex and not well understood. Intensification of systems may also create unforeseen problems such as soil erosion and salinity.
Music and Language
Authors: Black Steven P.
Published: September 2018

The anthropological study of music and language examines the cultural organization of sound in social processes of meaning making. Research on this topic, primarily through ethnographic fieldwork, is complemented by extradisciplinary scholarship in fields such as musicology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Ethnographers of music and language contribute to a long tradition of scholarship on folklore, verbal art, and ritual. Contemporary work draws from theorization of semiotics to discuss lament, ritual wailing, speech play and inequality, and the interplay of textuality and materiality in communication. This research indicates that, while sometimes considered ancillary to more pressing socioeconomic issues, play and performance are, in reality, significant aspects of the production of language ideologies and the constitution of social life. Future scholarship on music and language promises to use novel audiovisual technology to explore cultural soundscapes in ways that highlight the complexities of vocal experience.
Extractive Industries and Development
Authors: Filer Colin
Published: September 2018

Engagement of anthropologists with the subject of extractive industries and development has now lasted for three‐quarters of a century, with a primary focus on the (hard‐rock) mining industry and the various forms of “community” that it has either created or affected. The perspectives that anthropologists have adopted in their accounts of the social relationships that characterize this branch of production have not only changed in ways that reflect a growing gulf between the conditions and imperatives of large‐scale and small‐scale forms of extractive industry but also cast new forms of doubt on the existence of “mining communities” or “mine‐affected communities.”
Psychology
Authors: Swiney Lauren
Published: September 2018

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. It is both an academic and an applied discipline, marked by heterogeneity between its many branches and subdisciplines. Research psychologists draw on a range of methods to measure physiological, psychological, and behavioral variables, and they employ increasingly sophisticated statistical tools to investigate their interrelations. Since its formalization as an academic field in the late 1800s, psychology has delivered profound insights into questions about mind and the physiological basis of thought that have long occupied anthropologists.
Mind
Authors: Cassaniti Julia
Published: September 2018

The mind is considered to be the seat of an individual's cognitive and emotional functioning. The study of the mind has traditionally been relegated to philosophy and psychology, where it typically takes on universalist connotations, but work in cross‐cultural psychology and psychological anthropology has increasingly shown our minds to vary significantly in both form and function as a result of the shaping forces of culture.
Aging
Authors: Robbins Jessica C.
Published: September 2018

Aging is a rich topic of inquiry for anthropologists. However, it is only since the mid‐twentieth century that aging has gained popularity as a distinct topic of research within the discipline. The term is used in two ways: first, to refer to the phase of life known as old age and, second, to refer to the lifelong process of growing older. The robust literature on aging in anthropology considers the phenomenon in its chronological, biological, and social dimensions and documents variation across space and time in practices, meanings, and epistemological constructions of old age. Anthropological scholarship on aging addresses topical and theoretical concerns that are central to the discipline as a whole: social reproduction, temporality, nature and culture, the body, gender, and personhood. Contemporary research seeks to understand the structural, experiential, and imaginative dimensions of aging in order to gain a holistic perspective on this complex and fundamentally human life experience.
Genetics, Evolutionary
Authors: Barbujani Guido
Published: September 2018

Ideas and methods developed in evolutionary biology, and the recent wealth of data on human genome diversity, have become indispensable tools in biological anthropology. Starting from the concept of populations at equilibrium, this entry focuses on the following three broad questions. (1) How is human genome diversity structured? (2) How did early modern humans spread from Africa? (3) To what extent did modern people interbreed with archaic forms? In parallel, methods that have proved to be relevant in addressing these questions are briefly introduced and discussed. Some research priorities for the future are also outlined.
Politics of Recognition
Authors: Martig Alexis , Saillant Francine
Published: September 2018

Rooted in social, political, and moral philosophy, theories of social recognition constitute a paradigm made up of various approaches and conceptions associated with recognition. This paradigm's essential contribution to anthropology, which has been little exploited compared to its heuristic potential, is in the area of political anthropology and concerns contemporary issues related to social struggles—whether for rights, minority visibility, or social esteem.
Conversion
Authors: Hefner Robert W.
Published: September 2018

Conversion is the process whereby an individual or group reorients its self‐identification and ethico‐religious affiliation from one religious tradition to another. The process has been a focus of anthropological research for two generations and for Western social science and religious studies for more than a century. However, the concept remains deeply contested and analytically unstable. Its understandings vary according to the category of “religion” scholars bring to the analysis, and the religious tradition or traditions in which the conversion process in question takes place. To minimize theoretical complications, anthropologists would do well to emphasize that the processes by which religious reorientation unfolds are subjectively and sociologically plural and tradition‐dependent in meaning and social form.
I
ndonesia, Anthropology in
Authors: Effendi Nursyirwan
Published: September 2018

The discipline of anthropology is part of the social sciences and humanities in Indonesia. In comparison with anthropology's emergence in the United States and European countries in the nineteenth century, Indonesian anthropology is regarded as a still‐growing discipline. In Indonesia, the study of anthropology was founded at the University of Indonesia in the 1950s and has been developed there ever since.
D
alton,
G
eorge (1926–91)
Authors: Isaac Barry L.
Published: September 2018

George Dalton was an economist who rose to prominence in economic anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s. An acolyte of the economic historian Karl Polanyi, Dalton became the main exponent of the substantivist position during the formalist–substantivist debates in economic anthropology. The substantivists argued that primitive, archaic‐state, and peasant economies differed in kind from capitalist economies and required unique concepts for their analysis. Dalton's main contributions to substantivism were the clarity of his exposition of its main concepts and his demonstration of substantivism's utility for the study of modern peasant economies.
Documents as Ethnographic Objects
Authors: Greenhouse Carol J.
Published: September 2018

Documents interest anthropologists not just as platforms for recording and stabilizing information but also as ethnographic objects in themselves. The materiality of documents is central to new ethnographies of bureaucratic management, governance, rights claiming, and other aspects of citizenship. Ethnographers' attention to documents as objects has also yielded new insights regarding the production and consumption of documents, illuminating documentation and reading (for example) in novel ways. Documents in this sense are of particular interest to anthropologists interested in law, politics, media, and various forms of professional expertise.
Functionalism
Authors: Macfarlane Alan
Published: September 2018

The basic feature of functionalism lies in its assumption that the meaning of phenomena can be explained by their use or function within a society. The central role of functionalism as a method for anthropologists is in showing connections and giving confidence. The disadvantage of functionalism if taken to an extreme is the overlooking of history. This entry considers why functionalism became the dominant paradigm in the first half of the twentieth century and its connection to changes in world power.
Neoliberalism
Authors: Gledhill John
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have explored neoliberalism in terms of both the political economy of capitalism and the development of new techniques for governing people, often integrating both perspectives. Anthropological interest in neoliberalism reflects its relevance to both advanced capitalist societies and the global South, although considerable emphasis has been placed on how local historical factors and postcolonial settings produce varieties of neoliberalism and hybrid regimes. There have been disagreements on how to define what has proved a slippery concept, and some anthropologists remain skeptical about whether it is useful to think about neoliberalization as a global process. The consequences of neoliberalization for disadvantaged social groups have not always been entirely negative, but neoliberal techniques of rule tend to make dissidence more manageable. The contradictory results of neoliberalization have produced a succession of crises and countermovements, but critics who hoped for a rapid transition to a post‐neoliberal era have been disappointed.
Habitus
Authors: Reed‐Danahay Deborah
Published: September 2018

Habitus is a concept that is most closely associated with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. It refers to an embodied orientation to the world that includes dispositions, tastes, aspirations, and points of view. Habitus is acquired in childhood and involves practical knowledge about the world and how to behave within it that appears as common sense or
doxa
. It is not a unique attribute of an individual but rather it is shared by those of a similar background. Bourdieu described it as a location in social space.
Refugee Health
Authors: Carruth Lauren
Published: September 2018

The field of anthropology offers several unique contributions to the study of refugee health, most importantly in uncovering the challenges many refugees face in accessing adequate and appropriate medical care. Anthropological studies of refugee health may be divided into three broad categories: studies during humanitarian emergencies or within refugee camps; studies of the transit and asylum process; and studies of health and health care following settlement in a host country. Studies frequently theorize refugees' physical bodies and mental health diagnoses as evidence of violence, persecution, or marginality and therein posit refugees, compared to other migrants, as more “deserving” of asylum, health care, and other benefits. Anthropological research also often highlights and contextualizes refugees' experiences of violence, mental illness, reproductive health, and food insecurity as part of broader political and historical processes, and applied and clinical anthropologists frequently highlight differences in language, culture, and expectations that affect clinical encounters.