bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
B
astian,
A
dolf (1826–1905)
Authors: Chevron Marie‐France
Published: September 2018

Adolf Bastian played a key role in establishing ethnology in Germany. He is remembered because of his multifaceted organizational and scientific activities: as director of a renowned ethnological museum and as the founder and chairman of several scholarly and scientific societies. The scientific position and life history of Adolf Bastian are singular in many aspects. He introduced the concepts of “elementary ideas” and “folk ideas” in order to trace invariant regularities and universal thinking patterns found all over the world within the apparent complexity of cultural forms. Among Bastian's most significant contributions was his call for a multifactored approach in cooperation with other disciplines, thus participating in multidisciplinary research on humankind's collective thought. Bastian's essential reflections have remained valid to this day and still contribute, above all, to the promotion of both the field and the tasks of ethnology in its comprehension as cultural and social anthropology.
Modularity and Domain Specificity
Authors: Barrett H. Clark
Published: September 2018

Modularity refers to the degree to which brain processes can be decomposed into semiautonomous parts or units. Domain specificity refers to the degree to which a particular process is modified as a function of what it is operating on. The history of these concepts in thinking about the mind and implications for the study of cognition and culture in anthropology are discussed.
Behavioral Ecology, Primate
Authors: Strier Karen B.
Published: September 2018

Primate behavioral ecology is a subfield of primatology that employs evolutionary and ecological approaches to investigate the behavior of living primates. The approach is predicated on the assumption that behavioral traits, similar to morphological and physiological traits, are shaped by evolutionary selection pressures because of the differential fitness benefits they confer on individuals. Many features of primate social organization can be explained by the resulting behavioral strategies, which differ for females and males because of the sex differences in reproductive potential. New challenges include identifying facultative responses to the altered ecological and demographic conditions under which many primates now live and incorporating intraspecific behavioral variation into predictive, phylogenetically controlled models of social evolution.
Environmental Anthropology
Authors: Cortesi Luisa , Lennon Myles , Hebdon Chris , Stoike Jeffrey , Dove Michael R.
Published: September 2018

Environmental anthropologists have refined, challenged, and reconfigured the conceptual divide between human culture and nonhuman nature through multidisciplinary, cross‐cultural ethnographic inquiry. Problematizing the assumption that society is fundamentally separate from the biospheric realm, scholars have called attention to the various ways in which the physical environment shapes human culture and vice versa. This entry explores environmental anthropology's engagement with the nature/culture dichotomy, focusing on five prominent themes in the subfield's literature: equilibrium versus postequilibrium approaches, power and politics, environmentalism, the nature/culture divide, and biocultural diversity.
Masculinities
Authors: Dvorak Greg
Published: September 2018

Masculinities are mannerisms, discourses, or customs that are associated with maleness in a certain context, place, or cultural framework. Though neither biologically determined nor the exclusive domain of boys and men, masculinity is often defined in contrast to femininity. Yet, as with all gender expression and embodiment, there is a broad spectrum within which one can embody and enact masculinity. Indeed, in the social sciences, the plurality of masculinities is usually emphasized to acknowledge how certain ideologies of ideal manhood have historically dominated or marginalized others. Masculinity, most scholars would agree, is a highly inconsistent topic, fraught with the seemingly boundless multiplicity of masculinities, the fact that masculinity is not limited to men, and the fundamental disparity between what it means to be masculine versus what it means to be male.
French Association of Anthropologists / Association Française des Anthropologues (AFA)
Authors: Quiminal Catherine
Published: September 2018

This entry discusses the French Association of Anthropologists (Association Française des Anthropologues). It first describes the association's creation, aims, ambitions, and actions, and the public positions it has assumed since its creation in 1979. The entry also explains the association's structure and organization. The French Association of Anthropologists is the editor of theJournal des anthropologues, to which the latter half of the entry is devoted. The journal's contents, themes, and sections are detailed.
Biocultural Diversity
Authors: Maffi Luisa
Published: September 2018

The concept of biocultural diversity expresses a holistic idea of the diversity of life in nature and culture. It sees biodiversity, cultural diversity, and linguistic diversity as interrelated and interdependent manifestations of the web of life. The concept has spurred an integrative field of research that, drawing from social, linguistic, and natural sciences, seeks to identify correlations and possible causal connections among these diversities, examines the social, economic, and ecological dynamics that threaten them, and explores the implications of biocultural diversity loss for sustainability. Applications of the concept include the development of biocultural approaches to conservation, policy instruments to protect biocultural rights, and on‐the‐ground tools and initiatives to sustain and revitalize biocultural heritage.
Social Movements
Authors: Hebdon Chris , Lennon Myles , Dove Michael R.
Published: September 2018

The study of social movements has tended to focus on how collective political action on the part of marginalized groups may have systematic structural effects. At the most general level, it asks how sociopolitical change occurs. Historically these inquiries have clustered around four theoretical strands: collective behavior, resource mobilization, new social movements, and political process theory. More recently social movements literature has been extended “up” to ask how elite movements also work to maintain and strategically shift structures of control in their favor. It has also begun to reassess how, in an era of ecological crisis, nonhuman beings might in some cases be importantly active participants in the rapid changes of the contemporary world. In all cases, ethnography has been central to these anthropological approaches.
Nutritional Ecology
Authors: Bogin Barry , Dickinson Federico , Azcorra Hugo , Jiménez‐Balam Deira , Richardson Simon , Castillo‐Burguete María Teresa , Avila‐Escalante María Luisa , Varela‐Silva Maria Inês
Published: September 2018

Human nutritional ecology encompasses the biocultural relationships between people and their food. From a biological perspective, food is central to life because of the essential nutrients it provides, which are needed for growth, repair, and maintenance of the body. From a medical perspective, food is central because of the consequences of diet and food behavior for human health. Food also illuminates some social, economic, political, and psychological aspects of an individual, the individual within society, or society at large. The possession and availability of food, its preparation, and indeed its consumption—as well as the absence of it—all have indirect and direct biological, behavioral, and affective consequences. Human nutritional ecology is a potent, transformational agent in human activity.
Energy Flow and Management
Authors: Burger Oskar , Delong John P.
Published: September 2018

Energetics is the study of how energy use, including harvest, distribution, and management, is a transforming and limiting feature of living systems. Energy must be burned to do work. As such, all work done by a society or an individual requires energy. Hence a great deal of anthropological subject matter can be understood through a lens of energetics. Although energetics is not generally considered a core anthropological topic, many prominent anthropologists have used energetics to study human systems, notably in differentiating socioeconomies by work capacity, describing ecological constraints on foraging and agricultural societies from an optimal foraging or a systems perspective, and developing general theory for the causes of collapse by complex societies.
Ethics and Morality, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Daswani Girish
Published: September 2018

An anthropological approach to the study of ethics and morality is concerned with the ethical dimensions of human life more broadly and not limited to the study of religion. While some anthropologists find that marking a difference between morality and ethics is useful, many see these concepts as interconnected and interchangeable in practice. The study of morality and ethics brings together principles governing action that are other regarding, such as legality, rules, and obligations, with convictions that are self‐regarding, such as personal dispositions, feelings, and preferences. An anthropological approach to ethics involves taking into account the fact that religious life is never fully consistent with any one theological or philosophical logic, that it does not provide a complete answer to the complexities of life and its nonhuman elements, and that people regularly ask questions pertaining to the application of specific values, rules, and content.
Modernization Theories of Development
Authors: Power Marcus
Published: September 2018

Modernization approaches have been one of the most influential theoretical perspectives on development since their emergence in the 1950s. Primarily attention has been focused on the ways in which past and present premodern societies become modern (i.e., westernized) through processes of economic growth and social, cultural, and political change. Although there is no single theory of modernization (but, rather, an assortment of related theories and perspectives), collectively this body of work refers to a description and explanation of the processes of transformation from traditional or underdeveloped societies to modern societies and envisages a process of change toward those types of social, economic, and political systems that have developed in Western Europe and North America.
F
rance, Anthropology in
Authors: Bazin Laurent
Published: September 2018

Anthropology developed late in France, though the country had cradled its premises during the Enlightenment and the first elaborations of the social sciences happened after the French Revolution of 1789. Dominated by racial and natural history paradigms during the nineteenth century, ethnology got new recognition with the advent of sociology but remained in the framework of museums. After World War II, social anthropology eventually experienced a rapid expansion with the development of research institutions. Conventional readings of the history of French anthropology usually have an emphasis on structuralism and Marxism but they miss the importance of dynamic anthropology and the contribution of many other critical currents of thought that contributed to the reconsideration of the epistemological and methodological bases of the discipline. The reevaluation of ethnological inquiry, in particular since the 1980s, engendered the detraditionalization and de‐exoticization of social anthropology and a growing diversification of its fields of research.
Cognition and Emotion
Authors: Beller Sieghard , Bender Andrea
Published: September 2018

Emotions are fundamental psychological phenomena, best understood as episodes or sequences of responses. They are set off by an event that is perceived as relevant to the person. Depending on the event's cognitive appraisal along several dimensions, a subjective feeling is then elicited, often accompanied by typical expressive patterns and physiological changes, which prepare the organism for an event‐specific, actual behavior. One of the major controversies in the study of emotion has revolved around the question of whether emotions are universal or culture specific. Whereas parts of the sequence are likely to be evolutionarily contingent and shared with other species, cognitively accessible components are especially affected by a person's cultural background and individual learning history.
Theory of Mind in Primates and Humans, Comparative Evolution of
Authors: Schmelz Martin , Call Josep
Published: September 2018

Theory of mind is defined as the ability to impute mental states to one self and others. This is not a precise definition as it encompasses various aspects of mental states. This entry covers the acquisition of these different aspects to a full‐fledged theory of mind in human children and the aspects of a theory of mind that can also be found in nonhuman primates such as an understanding of others' perception, knowledge, and intentions. However, an understanding of (false) beliefs of others has so far only been shown in humans. This entry also discusses major comparative studies, open and debated questions, and future directions of theory‐of‐mind research.
Kinship: Sociocultural Approaches (Recent Approaches)
Authors: Magee Siobhan
Published: September 2018

Many recent sociocultural approaches to the anthropological study of kinship have explicitly or implicitly responded to critiques leveled by Rodney Needham, David Schneider, and Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s. Prioritizing emic, practical understandings of what it means to be related to others, these studies have questioned the extent to which kinship is primarily a matter of structure and of procreation, that is, something with which one is born, or, if it can be “made,” generated by processes of living together, sharing, and experiencing emotions toward others. Many anthropologists have been inspired by historical, feminist, or Marxist thought when exploring these topics. Research on assisted reproductive technologies, gay and lesbian kinship, and adoption has surpassed the scopes of their respective ethnographic contexts by productively problematizing received notions about gender, parenthood, “biological” families, “nature,” and the relationships between kinship and medical and legal systems.
Deforestation
Authors: von Hellermann Pauline
Published: September 2018

This entry outlines the three main contributions that anthropology has made to the understanding of deforestation since the 1980s: an appreciation of varying local perceptions of and experiences with deforestation; a revision of the understanding of the causes and extent of deforestation; and a critical engagement with deforestation narratives and their various political uses.
Burials,
P
aleolithic
Authors: Hovers Erella , Belfer‐Cohen Anna
Published: September 2018

Burial is a uniquely human behavior and can be observed in the Paleolithic archaeological record. This record allows the tracing of a worldwide evolutionary trajectory from simple caching to increasingly complex and elaborate practices. Ethnographic analogies as well as contextual and taphonomic analyses suggest that what motivated burial was first and foremost emotional and spiritual bonds between living and dead members of hunter‐gatherers groups. Through time, with the change of human economic and social foundations, burials also attained significance as markers of land use and ownership and as expressions of ritual and group memory.
Land Rights
Authors: Lavigne Delville Philippe
Published: September 2018

Land rights define socially recognized modes of access to land and natural resources within a given society. They are made up of bundles of elementary rights that differ according to the resources concerned. Shaped by the historical interplay of power, wealth, and identity, they combine variable and dynamic configurations of individual prerogatives and collective regulations. Land rights, the principles of justice that legitimize them, and the authorities responsible for their regulation are changing in response to state power, public policies, and market dynamics. In the many contexts that are characterized by a plurality of norms, and where access to land and resources depends on social status, (neo)customary regulations compete with state norms and administrative frameworks, and partially merge with them, reflecting the tensions, conflicts, and negotiations in each society and local modes of state control.
Turkey, Anthropology in
Authors: Birkalan‐Gedik Hande A.
Published: September 2018

This entry is about the development of anthropology in Turkey both inside and outside the academy. It considers the studies that precede academic developments, developments in relation to national history, and references to other disciplines, such as sociology, folklore, ethnology, and archaeology, all of which form an ethnological landscape, based primarily upon ethnographic fieldwork in the production of anthropological knowledge. The main academic institutions in the establishment of the study of anthropology had different theoretical positions, chose different anthropological areas to study, and presented diverse political and scholarly stances.
Borders
Authors: Heidbrink Lauren D.
Published: September 2018

Borders are historically understood as geopolitical boundaries that demarcate the limits between nation‐states. With globalization, the study of borders has shifted from a limited analysis of the political economy of geography to the ways in which people, goods, and information move across borders and reside in the borderlands. Anthropologists have made critical contributions to the study of borders and borderlands by examining the ways they are culturally constructed, defy dualities of interior/exterior or center/periphery, and are dynamic and permeable. Taken together, a picture of borders emerges that challenges the notion that nation‐states are complete and enduring.
Bipedalism
Authors: Kuliukas Algis Vincent
Published: September 2018

Bipedalism, or locomotion on two legs, is one of several characteristics of humans that is unique among the primates. Human walking is quite different from other forms of bipedalism in the animal kingdom and is dependent on distinct anatomical traits, such as the shape of the pelvis and the lower limbs. Anthropologists have been drawn to various plausible scenarios for its evolution, including freeing the hands (e.g., for carrying food or weapons), postural feeding, vertical climbing, thermoregulation, threat displays, locomotor efficiency, and wading through water. Central to understanding this phenomenon is the need to ascertain when bipedalism began in the great ape clade: whether it preceded the last common ancestor ofPanandHomoand hence whether we uniquely gained it (or chimpanzees lost it) and how similar the earliest forms of bipedalism were to our own, today.
Militarized Anthropology, Controversy and Resistance to
Authors: Leirner Piero
Published: September 2018

This entry analyzes the connections between military agencies and anthropology. It discusses the links between these dimensions across the history of this scholarly field through the use of some pertinent examples. To this end, it considers not only how the military has directly co‐opted anthropologists but also how certain concepts were crucial for this rapprochement. Moreover, the entry analyzes oppositional and resistance movements and the connections between anthropology and war machines.
Tool Use in Nonhuman Primates
Authors: Musgrave Stephanie , Sanz Crickette
Published: September 2018

Primates manufacture and use a range of tools for a variety of purposes and exhibit some of the most complex tool use among nonhumans. Chimpanzees and some populations of orangutans, capuchins, and macaques are generally considered to be the most skilled nonhuman tool users and habitually use tools in the wild. A much larger number of primates are capable of tool use but rarely express these behaviors in natural settings. Identifying the factors that are associated with the variable expression of tool behavior across the Primate order and understanding the adaptive basis of primate tool use are ongoing areas of scientific inquiry. Studies of primate tool use provide a unique vantage point on the behavioral ecology, cognition, and culture of nonhumans while also producing critical insights into the evolutionary processes associated with the emergence and flourishing of complex technology within the hominin lineage.
Structural Functionalism
Authors: Abrahams R. G.
Published: September 2018

Structural functionalism is a variety of functionalism that came to the fore in social anthropology and sociology in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Its most direct roots lie in Durkheim's work. Its main focus is on forms of social structure and on the functions of institutions and customs for the persistence of social systems. Radcliffe‐Brown was the key figure in this development, and he attracted a following of scholars who were dissatisfied with Malinowski's more general functionalist formulations. They found that the approach provided fruitful possibilities for comparative research, especially in the fields of kinship and marriage and of politics and law, and for the examination of the ways in which even social conflicts may help systems to persist. The approach was criticized by Marxists and others, but many of their arguments appear in retrospect to be unnecessarily polarizing.
Urbanism
Authors: Purcell Bridget
Published: September 2018

Urban anthropology uses ethnography to explore the city and its relationship to culture, power, and political economy. Since the field emerged in the late twentieth century, its practitioners have sought to link the “micro” realities of local, lived experience to the “macro” structural forces of state, capitalism, and industry. In defining its core problematics, urban anthropology has looked to neighboring disciplines—notably political economy, Marxist geography, and, increasingly, planetary ecology. Research agendas have also been shaped by ethnography's traditional alignment with the socially marginalized—from the spatialization of racial and class inequalities in the West to the social costs of modernization and structural readjustment in the postcolonial world. Today, urban ethnographies are largely concerned with charting the contradictions of global capitalism: tensions between cosmopolitan flows and the retrenchment of local nationalisms, the excesses of finance and the precarity of labor, the extractive force of industry, and rising demands for conservation and sustainability.
Corporations
Authors: Sawyer Suzana
Published: September 2018

At the dawn of the twenty‐first century, the corporation appears as one of the more stable, enduring, ubiquitous, and influential institutions of modern life. This entry provides a genealogy of the corporation and a suggestive guide for considering corporate power as a problematic. Rather than the inexorable product of a capitalist logic or fated quintessence of liberal democracy, the modern corporation, as discussed here, has a singular relation with the state—an incomplete doubling, an imperfect iteration, of inclusion and excess whereby over the past centuries the one has informed the constitutive order of the other. And, in the passage through the centuries, this less‐than‐isomorphic and always interested relationality has rendered the “economy” its effect. It is this that has made the corporation the legal form and material force that acts on our world today.
Investment
Authors: Eades J. S.
Published: September 2018

This entry discusses patterns of investment and their role in human societies ranging from simple to complex. Investment is defined as the allocation of resources in order to achieve immediate or later gain, either in the form of more resources or, alternatively, in avoiding risk. The first section discusses underlying concepts of value, capital, and money. The second section outlines forms of investment in different types of societies with economies based on hunting and gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture. After an overview of investment patterns in developing societies, the entry ends with a discussion of the role of investment in the global banking industry and its relation to recent financial crises.
Power, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Niezen Ronald
Published: September 2018

Anthropology differs from other disciplines in the extent to which it emphasizes the indirect and concealed manifestations of power, understood in its simplest terms as the ability to influence the decisions and behavior of others. Power is also commonly understood as influence that is generative of dominant ideas and institutional structures rather than narrowly repressive. A sharp break from ethnographies that were concerned with sources of power in the absence of the state took place in the 1970s as many anthropologists took positions of postcolonial critique. Under these circumstances, anthropology then turned to such concepts as
hegemony
(Gramsci),
cultural capital
(Bourdieu), and
power–knowledge
and
governmentality
(Foucault) in efforts to come to grips with the ways that power manifests itself through knowledge and everyday practice as much as through more recognizable institutional forms. Expansion of the scope of ethnography is currently producing more refinement of the methods and concepts for identification of its forms and realms of influence.
Walking
Authors: Irving Andrew
Published: September 2018

Walking is central to human experience and to the development of the species. Without walking there would be no human society, culture, history, or life, at least not in a form we would recognize. Walking is learned and enacted in many different environments—from schools, forests, and shopping malls to factories, tourist sites, and concentration camps—for many different purposes. As such, it is simultaneously a shared phylogenetic capacity and a diverse polythetic activity that varies widely across social, cultural, and historical settings and is differentiated by class, gender, and age.
Gluckman,Max (1911–75)
Authors: Kapferer Bruce
Published: September 2018

The entry discusses Max Gluckman's role in the establishment of social anthropology in southern Africa and at the University of Manchester, focusing on his emphasis of the processes of conflict and contradiction and his methodological innovations, which anticipated many of the more recent directions of social anthropology.
Class and Identity
Authors: Dunk Thomas
Published: September 2018

Class and identity have been important concepts within anthropology since the 1960s. Both terms have been subjects of much debate within the discipline and beyond. Early theorists of class expected that experiences of specific economic situations would generate particular political identities. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Culture and Personality School within anthropology argued that cultures were largely homogeneous and coherent systems and that individuals socialized into them internalized their values, beliefs, and behavioral expectations. Under the influence of social movements, historical developments, and theoretical arguments within the social sciences, anthropologists' understanding and use of these terms has since become more complex. Anthropologists view social classes and identities as interrelated categories that are dynamic, complex, and influenced by relations of economic, political, and symbolic power.
Sexual Dimorphism in Hominin Ancestors
Authors: Plavcan J. Michael
Published: September 2018

Sexual dimorphism in hominin evolution has been a topic of continuous interest and debate ever since Darwin, not only because it offers insights into the evolution of human behavior but also because it confounds species recognition. Dimorphism is a complex phenomenon and is difficult to estimate in the fossil record. The fossil record suggests that the earliest known hominin—Ardipithecus ramidus—showed little size or canine dimorphism. Later australopithecines show modest to strong dimorphism, with dimorphism approaching modern human levels inHomo erectusandHomo heidelbergensis. Behavioral inferences based on dimorphism are uncertain, but strong dimorphism inAustralopithecussuggests polygynous mating, with strong male competition. Changes in dimorphism and body size suggest changes in female life history and associated patterns of male competition. Finally, the reevolution of dimorphism in hominins suggests that the modern human condition is derived and not inherited from the common ancestor ofHomoandPan.
Ornaments: Early Shell Jewelry
Authors: Majkić Ana , D'errico Francesco
Published: September 2018

Self‐ornamentation is an indicator of self‐perception and an effective means of communication. Recent archaeological discoveries have demonstrated that the first beadworking traditions emerged in Africa and the Near East at least 100,000 years ago. These discoveries have challenged the traditional view associating this cultural innovation with the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. This entry reviews the earliest archaeological evidence for personal ornamentation, consisting of marine shell beads from Africa, Eurasia, and Oceania and discuss the implications of these finds for the emergence of modern cognition and culture. Early shell beads from Africa and the Near East often bear ochre residues or are blackened by heating, suggesting that their color may have been intentionally modified. Shells possibly used as beads and other types of ornaments have also been found at some Neanderthal sites from Europe.
Rural Development
Authors: Eversole Robyn
Published: September 2018

Rural development refers to the processes of both planned and unplanned change in non‐urban areas. Anthropologists have engaged with both practical rural development initiatives and deeper theoretical questions about how rural places and communities change over time. Planned rural development initiatives can be categorized as extension projects and programs, infrastructure and service‐delivery initiatives, production and market‐development initiatives, and rural community development, with some initiatives taking an integrated approach. Research by anthropologists provides insights into rural development processes in diverse contexts around the world, often challenging outsiders' stereotypical images of rural communities and economies. Anthropological research on rural development reveals the complexity of rural social and economic organization and highlights the nature and importance of local knowledges and practices. This in‐depth understanding provides important insights into both planned and unplanned processes of rural change.
Descent
Authors: Hart Laurie Kain , Auslander Mark
Published: September 2018

Debates from the 1990s to the present over the definitions of marriage and the family have shown us that kinship is, as it has always been, a highly charged domain of modern life. In the United States, the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 was followed by its annulment as unconstitutional; in Nigeria, same‐sex marriage was banned in 2013; in France, debates over same‐sex adoption are front‐page news. Increasing class in‐marriage among the educated and wealthy globally has contributed to increasing class segregation. “Descent,” as one of the key organizing principles of kinship, is heavily freighted with political, economic, and affective meaning. It has been a central concern of anthropology since anthropologists first sought to understand how kinship functions to maintain order in nonstate societies, and, more broadly, to document and systematize the diversity of human kinship systems. This entry explores and synthesizes the variety of usages of “descent” common in anthropology.
Mindful Body
Authors: Farnell Brenda
Published: September 2018

Although the term “mindful body” appears in vernacular discourses pertaining to Western health and wellness industries, alternative medicine, and dance and movement arts, it appears to have entered the anthropological literature in the inaugural issue ofMedical Anthropology Quarterly(1987). Authors Nancy Scheper‐Hughes and Margaret Lock used “mindful body” to draw attention to initial attempts to “problematize the body” in anthropology and other social sciences in the late 1970s and 1980s. Conceptions of the body are central, they emphasize, not only to substantive work in medical anthropology but also to the philosophical underpinnings of the entire discipline of anthropology because Western assumptions about the mind and body, individual and society, affect broader theoretical perspectives and research paradigms.
Glocalization
Authors: Robertson Roland
Published: September 2018

“Glocalization” and associated terms stand in a long tradition concerning binaries and antinomies. Moreover, and more specifically, this term can be seen as having derived in large part from the very long tradition of the discourse of territory. This entry discusses the odyssey of the concept of glocalization.
Ritual and Religion, Evolution of
Authors: Ross Norbert , Kohut Michael
Published: September 2018

Anthropological approaches to religion and ritual throughout the twentieth century comprise a wide array of perspectives and insights that can nevertheless be organized into two dimensions: groups versus individuals and functionalist versus intellectualist. In recent years, accounts of religion and ritual have emerged that are based on theories of biological evolution, in stark contrast to earlier approaches. Despite these new orientations, evolutionary accounts of religion and ritual largely conform to the traditional dimensions.
Environmental Cognition
Authors: Ross Norbert , Shenton Jeffrey T.
Published: September 2018

The study of environmental cognition combines culture‐specific and universal human folkbiological understandings with studies of environments, ecologies, and landscapes. Though harking back to early anthropological concerns over “cosmology” and “worldview,” environmental cognition has recently incorporated aspects of phenomenal anthropology and the “ontological turn.” The field thus combines questions from psychology, geography, philosophy, and anthropology to address issues related to how individuals structure their thinking about the environment, how these cognitions form, whether and how these cognitions influence behavior, and to what extent channeling particular engagements with the natural world structures envirohuman “place making.” While the field remains very much divided disciplinarily and methodologically, a successful integration of these various perspectives will inform understandings both of human–environment relationships and global environmental policy making.
UNESCO
, Place of Anthropology in
Authors: Sanz Nuria
Published: September 2018

This entry looks at how the United Nations came into being and how and why UNESCO, its cultural, educational, and scientific branch, then followed. It looks into UNESCO's
raison d'être
and examines how anthropology is at the core of both UNESCO's mandate and the work the organization carries out across the world.
Determinism, Biological
Authors: Moses Yolanda T.
Published: September 2018

Though the vast majority of anthropologists and biologists reject biological determinism today, the biologically deterministic ideologies continue to influence the way many general publics think about such issues as race and behavior, gender, and sexuality, and also influences some biomedical thinking and practice. This entry explores the themes of race and behavior and of race and biomedical thinking and practice as they relate to biological determinism. It also looks at anthropological research to understand the interplay between, on the one hand, the fact that certain groups believe in biological determinism and others do not and, on the other hand, the impact that biological determinism has had in the past and continues to have on subordinated groups' lives today. The entry suggests, for example, that to eliminate those disparities in health and in other areas—such as education, the social justice system, and wealth accumulation—anthropological researchers will need to adopt a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between biology and culture.
Tourism, Travel, and Pilgrimage
Authors: Selwyn Tom
Published: September 2018

This entry places the contemporary field of anthropology of tourism, travel, and pilgrimage (ATTP) within a tradition, established for two millennia, concerned with the relation between travel and social thought. It argues that this tradition played a substantial role in the emergence of social anthropology as a discipline and that, as a subfield of the discipline, ATTP today is making significant contributions to anthropological theory.
Gender and Kinship
Authors: Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

The relationship between the anthropological study of gender and that of kinship has undergone complex transformations over time. While the comparative analysis of kinship systems was at the core of the discipline, it generally neglected the sociocultural and historical dimensions of social categories as they are defined from an emic perspective. The demise of the classic approaches to kinship in the 1970s was contemporaneous with the controversies about new forms and kinds of families in the West, as well as with the emergence of feminist anthropology and gender studies. The important shift that came with the strengthening of gender studies would refocus attention on the historical conditions and sociocultural contexts that produce social values. The renewed forms of kinship studies that emerged in the 1990s have aligned themselves with these paradigmatic changes to produce conceptual frameworks and methodologies in which kinship and gender are now generally considered to be intermingled in shared social processes and values.
Prophecy
Authors: Sarró Ramon
Published: September 2018

In anthropology, prophecy refers to the social effects of the voice and works of some individuals in times of crisis who claim to be following divine inspiration and who are perceived as being “charismatic,” exemplary, or powerful. These individuals, who have a particularly creative imagination explored by anthropologists in its several manifestations, are often successful makers of religious syntheses between old traditions and recent innovations and their work frequently shows openly political connotations. Anthropologists have explored the effects of prophecy in several cultures, most notably as reactions to colonial rule in Africa, though many other aspects of prophecy, and many other contexts, have been the object of innovative ethnographic work.
R
oyal
A
nthropological
I
nstitute (
RAI
)
Authors: Shankland David
Published: September 2018

The Royal Anthropological Institute is one of the world's oldest institutions devoted to the study of anthropology. It took its present form in 1871, when it was formed from the merger of the Ethnographical Society of London and the Anthropological Society of London. Throughout its existence it has pursued a broad definition of the subject, one that explicitly includes biological anthropology alongside social anthropology. It is known in particular for the publication of a scholarly journal, which despite undergoing various changes in name, has appeared since the foundation of the Ethnographical Society of London in 1843. The Royal Anthropological Institute has also experimented with periodicals aimed at appealing to the wider public, including
Man
,
RAIN: Royal Anthropological Institute Newsletter
, and
Anthropology Today
.
Cross‐Cousin Marriage
Authors: Clarke Morgan
Published: September 2018

Cross‐cousin marriage systems are an important theme in the anthropological literature on kinship. A “cross‐cousin” is the child of one's parent's opposite‐sex sibling: the father's sister's child or mother's brother's child (i.e., as opposed to the parallel cousin, the child of one's parent's same‐sex sibling). However, it is vital to note that this definition does not necessarily pertain to a genealogically defined individual but rather to a whole class of “classificatory” relatives.
Archaeological Approaches in Anthropology
Authors: Gowlett J. A. J.
Published: September 2018

Archaeology can be seen as part of anthropology or as a sister discipline. In anthropological studies, archaeology can provide a time dimension beyond that available from oral tradition, and usually from history. Archaeology is based primarily on the evidence of material culture, related in a contextual framework. Its theory overlaps with that of anthropology, often showing similar developments, but archaeology cannot usually study individual human relationships in the past as a basis for generalization, and consequently must base its interpretations on other patterning in the evidence. The two disciplines have sometimes tended toward fission, but many archaeologists draw on anthropology to the extent that their work becomes part of anthropology, and many anthropologists, especially those interested in an evolutionary timescale, draw extensively on archaeological evidence and interpretation.
Russia, Anthropology in
Authors: Alymov Sergei , Sokolovskiy Sergei
Published: September 2018

The entry provides a description of the main periods in the history of Russian anthropology from the early eighteenth century to the present time, with special attention to the Soviet and post‐Soviet periods, its institutional structure, current subdivisions into subdisciplines and research fields, thematic differentiation, area specializations, and current development trends.
Kinship and Marriage, Overview of
Authors: Clarke Morgan
Published: September 2018

Kinship and marriage are fundamental issues in the study of human social and cultural diversity. Often bracketed together in Anglophone anthropology as just “kinship,” the topics have been central to sociocultural anthropology for much of the discipline's formative history. In the 1970s and 1980s, formalistic analyses and comparative models of kinship came to be doubted, part of a wider skepticism towards grand narratives. Studies of kinship continued, but in a different vein, more concerned with ethnographic description of cultural conceptions of kinship or the vagaries of social practice. Within biological anthropology, on the other hand, interest in the diversity of human kinship systems and its causes and consequences continues to burgeon. The two traditions are not always in direct communication, symptomatic of larger tensions within anthropology, broadly conceived. But kinship is a fertile terrain upon which to bring these various approaches together, as this encyclopedia seeks to do.
Media Literacy and Pragmatism
Authors: Mason Lance E.
Published: September 2018

Among the work of classical pragmatists, that of Peirce—both his triadic theory and his classification of signs into three broad categories of icons, indexes, and symbols—has been formative in semiotics, which informs media literacy. Dewey's emphasis on lived experience and embodied perception, along with his concerns about cultivating a democratic culture, has influenced media theorists as well. Neil Postman draws upon pragmatism in his examinations of media environments, their effects on lived experience, and their consequences for democracy. Marshall McLuhan fits less neatly into the pragmatist tradition, but his media “probes” draw implicitly on pragmatism, while embodying its spirit of open‐ended, fallible inquiry. Contemporary developments in pragmatist conceptions of media literacy pedagogy, which derive most directly from Postman and McLuhan, are also discussed in this entry.
Nanospectroscopy of Infrared Phonon Resonance Enables Local Quantification of Electronic Properties in Doped SrTiO3 Ceramics
Authors: Lewin Martin , Baeumer Christoph , Gunkel Felix , Schwedt Alexander , Gaussmann Fabian , Wueppen Jochen , Meuffels Paul , Jungbluth Bernd , Mayer Joachim , Dittmann Regina , Waser Rainer , Taubner Thomas
Published: September 2018

Among the novel materials for electronic applications and novel device concepts beyond classical Si‐based CMOS technology, SrTiO3 represents a prototype role model for functional oxide materials: It enables resistive switching, but can also form a 2D electron gas at its interface and thus enables tunable transistors. However, the interplay between charge carriers and defects in SrTiO3 is still under debate. Infrared spectroscopy offers the possibility to characterize structural and electronic properties of SrTiO3 in operando, but is hampered by the diffraction‐limited resolution. To overcome this limitation and obtain nanoscale IR spectra of donor‐doped Sr1‐xLaxTiO3 ceramics, scattering‐type scanning near‐field optical microscopy is applied. By exploiting plasmon–phonon coupling, the local electronic properties of doped SrTiO3 are quantified from a detailed spectroscopic analysis in the spectral range of the near‐field ‘phonon resonance’. Single crystal‐like mobility, an increase in charge carrier density N and an increase in ε∞ at grain boundaries (µ≈ 5.7 cm2 V−1s−1, N = 7.1 × 1019 cm−3, and ε∞ = 7.7) and local defects (µ≈ 5.4 cm2 V−1s−1, N = 1.3 × 1020 cm−3, and ε∞ = 8.8) are found. In future, subsurface quantification of defects and free charge carriers at interfaces and filaments in SrTiO3 can be envisioned.
Enriching Hot Electrons via NIR‐Photon‐Excited Plasmon in WS2@Cu Hybrids for Full‐Spectrum Solar Hydrogen Evolution
Authors: Xu Xiaoyong , Luo Fengting , Tang Wenshuai , Hu Jingguo , Zeng Haibo , Zhou Yong
Published: September 2018

Full‐spectrum solar‐light‐activated photocatalysis remains a challenging pursuit for light‐chemical energy conversion, especially the involvement of near‐infrared (NIR) light. To this end, the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of Cu nanoparticles (NPs) anchored on WS2 nanosheets (NSs) is designed to expand light response over NIR region for broadband‐solar‐activated photoreduction of water to hydrogen (H2). Under the simulated 1 sun irradiation (100 mW cm−2), the optimized WS2@Cu nanohybrid exhibits a stable and remarkable H2‐evolution rate of 64 mmol g−1 h−1, which is about 40 and 2.2 times higher than that of bare WS2 and Cu, respectively. The SPR on Cu NPs enables hot electron excitation and transfer to WS2 NSs, with fast charge separation across Schottky interface, rendering enhanced photocatalytic activity with response extending to NIR region beyond λ > 750 nm. This work describes an avenue of plasmon‐mediated NIR utilization for artificial photosynthesis and solar energy conversion.