bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
D
enmark, Anthropology in
Authors: Hastrup Kirsten
Published: September 2018

In the opening years of the twenty‐first century, anthropology in Denmark has become a widely recognized field of scholarship both at home and internationally. While being increasingly internationalized in terms of research interests as well as of recruitment, it has remained distinct not least in terms of its public position in Danish society. This has deep roots in an earlier “preprofessional” anthropology that took off in the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century. This entry traces this development from the Enlightenment through romanticism to the present, and shows how the discipline's trajectory was related to expeditions, to publications, and to a close relationship first with the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, later with the National Museum, and eventually with the Danish universities, when, in the 1960s, specific departments were first created.
Caste
Authors: Guru Gopal
Published: September 2018

Caste in contemporary India is not a static social reality. It has been expanding beyond endogamy but with ideology of purity pollution. It has expanded into ecology, urban cities, sports, and rental markets. Hence, textual production of caste through its thick description in various anthropological accounts does not fully inform us about the expansive dimension of caste. Similarly, it is not simply the thought of the Hindu law giver Manu that gives us the idea of caste as truth. In fact, it is very much the practice of caste that helps us comprehend caste as social reality. In contemporary India caste is shifting its spheres and occupying those spheres that have not been accounted for in the available anthropological literature.
Health Care Systems
Authors: Samuelsen Helle
Published: September 2018

A health care system is a conglomeration of institutions, organizations, ideas, practices, and social relationships that aims at improving human health. Initially, anthropological studies of health care systems focused on descriptions of medical traditions and ethnomedicine. Later, the division between personalistic and naturalistic systems and the coexistence of various medical traditions (medical pluralism) were studied. Arthur Kleinman's approach, emphasizing that health care systems are both social and cultural systems, has had an enormous impact in medical anthropology (and beyond). Since the beginning of the twenty‐first century, notions of biological citizenship and therapeutic citizenship have been important in analyses of health care systems, where links between individual citizens and the state are examined. In contemporary studies of global health, critical and engaged questions about access to health care, inequality, the impact of new medical technologies, and the quality of public and private health care services are included in anthropological analyses of health care systems.
Academic Literacies, Ethnographic Perspectives on
Authors: Robinson‐Pant Anna
Published: September 2018

Ethnographic research has investigated academic institutions as sites where meaning making can be contested and/or collaborative and can lead to transformation in social relationships. Such perspectives contrast with dominant deficit discourses positioning academic literacy as a discrete set of neutral skills to be imparted to students. An ideological commitment to transforming unequal power relations distinguishes academic literacies from related fields such as English for academic purposes. Theory and methodology in academic literacies have responded to the changes influencing knowledge construction in educational institutions, particularly the spread of marketization, globalization, and electronic communication. The challenge for future researchers will be to address the perceived methodological limitations of small‐scale ethnographic studies in terms of policy influence, to diversify from Western university contexts, and to find ways of conceptualizing “academic” to take account of knowledge construction outside formal institutions.
Embodied Learning
Authors: Marchand Trevor H. J.
Published: September 2018

Social and cultural anthropology have, historically, relegated questions about human biology, physiology, bodily practice, and embodied learning to physical anthropology and the natural sciences. Marcel Mauss's essay on techniques of the body, however, presents a notable early exception that, along with challenges in philosophy to the mind/body dichotomy during the first half of the twentieth century, gradually generated dedicated interest in the “whole person” acting, interacting, and learning in everyday contexts. Growing curiosity in embodied learning has been motivated by a number of factors including renewed appreciation for Marxist materialism in the 1970s; concerns in feminist and gender studies with the body; phenomenology of the senses; research on apprenticeship, work, dance, and sport; and the efflorescence of the cognitive and brain sciences and the insights they offer into the nature of being human.
Intuitive and Reflective Cognition
Authors: Greenway Tyler S. , Barrett Justin L.
Published: September 2018

Cognitive science has distinguished between two types of thinking: intuitive and reflective. Intuitive cognition is fast and automatic, whereas reflective cognition is slow and deliberate. These two types of cognitive systems mutually influence each other. Together, intuitive and reflective cognition may determine how cognitively natural or unnatural certain thoughts may be, thereby influencing the likelihood that particular ideas and practices may become shared enough to be recognized as cultural. The distinction between intuitive and reflective cognition also has theoretical and methodological implications for the study of human thought and behavior, including cultural expression.
Modern Humans, Origins of
Authors: Wilshaw Alex
Published: September 2018

The origin and evolution of modern humans, their anatomy and behavior, is one of the most debated topics in evolutionary anthropology today and is crucial for understanding how and why modern humans look and behave the way they do. Although it is agreed that humans emerged from Africa around 200,000 years ago, debates still surround the identification of the ancestral species of modern humans and the extent to which archaic species contributed to the modern human genome (which has implications for the Out of Africa and multiregional hypotheses), the relationship between anatomical and behavioral modernity and how this affects the categorization of fossils as “modern human,” and the exact center of evolution within Africa (eastern or southern Africa). Only by drawing on a range of evidence from archaeology, paleoanthropology, paleontology, and genetic studies of both modern human populations and ancient DNA can the origin of modern humans be illuminated.
Cultural Adaptation
Authors: Ellen Roy
Published: September 2018

Biological organisms display four types of adaptation: phylogenetic, physiological, learning, and cultural. Overall, adaptation may be a combination of these types. Cultural adaptation, combining learning and the social transmission of information or practices, is typified by its rapidity, though not by its fidelity. Drawing on the experience of others enables the trial‐and‐error stage of learning to be reduced in duration. Thus, heat loss can be avoided by wearing clothes, the conceptual and practical work of invention having taken place in preceding generations. Socially transmitted learned behavior has been demonstrated for many species, including nonhuman primates, but in humans has become the dominant means of adaptation (particularly through symbolic culture), and recent human evolution can be seen as the evolution of the increasing capacity for complex cultural adaptation. Cultural adaptation can take place through inadvertent differential survival of populations with advantageous practices, through conscious response to perceived hazards, and by chance.
Adoption and Fostering
Authors: Alber Erdmute , Martin Jeannett
Published: September 2018

This entry offers an overview and critical account of adoption and fostering. It delineates the worldwide evidence and variability of these phenomena, as well as the limits of the analytical concepts. It summarizes various theoretical approaches toward child fostering and adoption and outlines the current research. It questions the distinction drawn in the research between childfostering, mainly related to practices in “traditional,” “non‐Western” societies, andadoption, mainly related to “modern,” “Western” societies. The authors conclude that fostering and adoption as lived practices will not cease to exist, while models of parenthood are being questioned and reinterpreted all over the world.
Cults, Male and Female
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie
Published: September 2018

Male and female cults aim to promote fertility in men and women as well as of the land and, more generally, to reproduce the cosmos through a series of rituals, which may follow various stages and change children into men and women (in rites of passage or initiations), ready to reproduce the social and physical body of a given society. The practices enacted during male and female cults are intricately related to social orders and the representation of the persons and the cosmos within a society: rituals have the function of celebrating the transcendence of the whole over the part and allow society to reintegrate the individual in transition from one social status to another. Different approaches to the notion of ritual have variously interpreted such cults within anthropology, putting emphasis either on what the ritual does (its efficacy) or on what it says (its symbolism or meaning).
Demographic Transition
Authors: Snopkowski Kristin , Kaplan Hillard
Published: September 2018

The demographic transition is the change from a high‐mortality, high‐fertility population to one with low mortality and low fertility, which tends to accompany industrialization. Evolutionary anthropologists are particularly interested in studying the demographic transition because low fertility levels, as experienced around the world today, appear inconsistent with the expectation of fitness maximization and researchers seek to understand the factors influencing people's fertility behavior. The demographic transition began in Western Europe and has spread to the entire world. While demographic transition theory has the power to explain mortality and fertility change, it is as yet unable to predict the timing or duration of transition.
Museums and Source Communities
Authors: Herle Anita
Published: September 2018

Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, museums have increasingly developed more open and collaborative relationships with members of source communities, typically lineal or cultural descendants of the people from whom particular museum collections originated. Histories of encounter, colonialism, and anthropology have highlighted the numerous overlapping and often contradictory historical contexts and trajectories through which objects entered museum collections. For many source community members, reconnecting with objects and information associated with ancestors and an often fragmented past can assist with personal and community regeneration and can provide a source of inspiration for the present and the future. Working with members of source communities has both challenged and revitalized the museum, resulting in transcultural debate, extraordinary exchanges of knowledge, and innovative collaborative projects.
Speciation in Biology and the Fossil Record
Authors: Groves Colin
Published: September 2018

The nature of species has been much discussed since the closing decades of the twentieth century. There is now increasing acceptance that the essence of a species is that it is an evolutionary lineage, a concept made operational by the so‐called phylogenetic species concept. In this light, there may be over twenty distinct species represented in the human fossil record; if, as has been proposed, we define a genus as a monophyletic group of species with a time depth of at least 5 million years, then all species in the human fossil record, with the exception of the very earliest, belong to a single genus,
Homo
.
Work
Authors: Spittler Gerd
Published: September 2018

Work is an enduring human activity that is usually separated temporally and spatially from other activities. It includes interaction with objects (humans and nonhumans). Work is located in different sectoral contexts (agriculture, industry, services), institutional contexts (e.g. domestic or capitalistic mode of production), and technological contexts (tool, machine, high tech) which can be analyzed from a structural or a cultural perspective. Today, capitalistic work exists in a global context. It includes permanently employed wage laborers with a separation between work and life but also precarious workers where the boundary between work and life becomes blurred, as it was in many preindustrial, noncapitalist forms of work.
SouthAfrica, Anthropology in
Authors: Spiegel Andrew D. , Becker Heike
Published: September 2018

Anthropology in South Africa has always been politically implicated, albeit in diverse ways. The entry describes anthropology's formal establishment in response to early twentieth‐century concerns about “the native question” and how that fashioned a discipline focused on black South Africans, which was split between two perspectives on segregationism and apartheid policy:volkekunde, a racist‐inspired anthropology that underpinned apartheid's conception, and social anthropology, which, in general, opposed that regime's policies, using ethnography for exposé in later years. It explains how the 1990s collapse of apartheid and the institution of a democratic order challenged both schools; the former effectively disappeared, while the latter struggled to find an appositeraison d'êtreeven as the profession's numbers grew and its demographic profile changed. Summarizing the fields now researched by anthropologists in the country, the entry outlines challenges raised by a new generation of professionals, particularly those arising from contemporary demands to decolonize South African universities.
F
oucault,
M
ichel (1926–84)
Authors: Stavrianakis Anthony
Published: September 2018

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and historian. His work consisted in the pursuit of original and powerful approaches to the historical analysis of forms and practices through which human beings have sought to know, manage, and work on themselves and others. His critical historical inquiry into the politics and ethics of truth practices operated in heterogeneous domains, ranging from psychiatry to sexuality. He also worked at a range of scales, from categories of people such as the “mad” to “populations” understood as biosocial objects of intervention, through to the “subject” as a site of ethical care. His work has had a profound and lasting impact on contemporary anthropology.
Educational Issues in Development
Authors: Nichol Raymond
Published: September 2018

Forces of imperialism and colonial conquest, along with the destruction of traditional land rights and customary systems, have led to much of what ails the world today. Alienated and angry youth abound, from Port Moresby to Paris. However, the spread of science, development, democracy, and enlightenment has resulted in many hundreds of millions of people being delivered from poverty and living rich, technologically and globally influenced lives. What forms of educational policy and practice lead to community and national social, economic, and political development that engenders empathy and pluralism and counters alienation and anger? What works and how can we close the gaps between rich and poor, dominant and minority cultures? Such educational questions and issues are of worldwide interest, significance, and urgency. This entry explores some theoretical and pedagogical issues affecting educational anthropology and recommends forms of best practice for pedagogy and development.
Conception Beliefs
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie
Published: September 2018

Conception beliefs, or procreation beliefs, are the various ways in which people in different societies represent, conceive of, or phrase the process of making a child. Conception beliefs vary from society to society and assign a specific part or place to the genitors and entities surrounding the coming into being of a new individual: mother, father, and their respective bodily substances; ancestors; and “suprahuman” entities, and so on. These beliefs may also help position this new individual in a preexisting relational network within society and can reflect, though not always, the local kinship system and the ideologies surrounding the places attributed to both sexes within society.
BonfilBatalla,Guillermo (1935–91)
Authors: Aréyzaga Eréndira Muñoz
Published: September 2018

Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's critical way of thinking radically influenced his criticism of the existing objectives of the Mexican anthropological field of studies. In the 1950s the aim of such objectives had mainly been to fulfill the indigenous policies of the state, whose goal was to incorporate indigenous groups into the national culture. He helped others to understand that indigenous groups were suffering from a specific type of domination, that is, colonialism, and he encouraged discussions to seek recognition of indigenous rights, and possibly self‐determination, as well as the need to recognize cultural diversity as part of the nation's project.
FeiXiaotong (1910–2005)
Authors: Peng Yin
Published: September 2018

This entry reviews the life of Fei Xiaotong and introduces two of his most important academic contributions. Fei was a Chinese scholar who was highly regarded by Western academics for his analysis of the economy and society in rural China. He was also a statesman who used his knowledge to promote development in China's village areas. Among his academic contributions, two of the most influential ones are the concept of the “differential mode of association,” describing Chinese social structure, and his Tanner lecture “Plurality and Unity in the Configuration of the Chinese People,” which focused on nationality and ethnic groups on the path to creating a unified China.
Migration
Authors: Abranches Maria , Hasselberg Inês
Published: September 2018

Although the movement of people—both regionally and globally—is not a new phenomenon, in recent decades we have witnessed new migration patterns that include an incredible increase in the volume and diversity of destinations, as well as controversial policy debates around the topic. These new movements and debates have challenged anthropology's past concern with a social and cultural order that migration would only disturb and eventually break, which kept migration‐related issues away from anthropological analysis until the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, nowadays, the contribution of migration to processes of local and global social change are part of anthropologists' research interests, to which ethnographic methods, sometimes creatively reworked, can offer valuable insights.
Ethnographic Spectacle
Authors: Bouquet Mary
Published: September 2018

While the term “ethnographic” refers to the scientific description of the culture of a society by someone who has lived in it, “spectacle” denotes a public event or show that is exciting to watch and experience. The contradictions that arise when these terms are combined create the unease that is at the heart of ethnographic spectacle. The European practice of creating ethnographic spectacle goes back many centuries to when it was the prerogative of kings and rulers. Generalized public ethnographic spectacle is more recent: early nineteenth‐century panoramas, dioramas, world's fairs, and museums often included an ethnographic dimension ranging from painted depictions to inhabited villages. This genre, which was clearly based in colonial relations, persisted into the twentieth century through new media and form such as adventure expedition films and interactive museum displays. It is also found in the contextualizing performances associated with global art, in postcolonial forms, and in theme parks.
F
irth,
R
aymond (1901–2002)
Authors: Ellen Roy
Published: September 2018

Raymond Firth studied under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. His outstanding contributions were in the field of economic anthropology, in the revision and refinement of social theory in the functionalist tradition, and as an ethnographer of Polynesia and Southeast Asia. In economic anthropology, his impact has been mainly as a writer of substantial empirical studies and through innovatory work on peasant economies. With Malinowski, Firth took the view that economic behavior must be understood in its social context but was approachable via essentially Western economic concepts. He transformed the study of nonmarket economies from the description of technology to the analysis of behavior, using “middle‐range” analysis. Firth also fashioned many of Malinowski's ideas into productive social theory, stressing that, while social structure must be understood as an abstract normative system, social organization is the sum of day‐to‐day relations.
Portugal, Anthropology in
Authors: Bastos Cristiana , Sobral José Manuel
Published: September 2018

Portuguese anthropology had its beginnings with the work of late nineteenth‐century folklorists, ethnographers, linguists, archaeologists, and physical anthropologists, in tune with international debates and in parallel with their European counterparts. In the twentieth century, physical anthropology had modest yet uninterrupted development whereas the social and cultural components of the discipline had a fragmented history, mostly for political reasons. There were ethnographic works conducted in Portugal and its colonies but researchers could not expand the analysis into some of the social issues and political contexts directly related to the subject of study. After the end of the authoritarian regime in 1974, social and cultural anthropology made up for lost time and dozens of works on Portugal were conducted in the 1980s and beyond. By the end of the twentieth century, the field was vibrant, diverse, and international, with hundreds of graduates and a large number of research projects, books, and journals.
Conformity
Authors: van Leeuwen Edwin J. C. , Haun Daniel B. M.
Published: September 2018

Conformity refers to individuals adjusting their opinion and/or behavior to match the majority of group members. As a psychological phenomenon, conformity has been studied in the context of social influence theories, where it is typically equated with persuasion by a majority of confederates expressing an erroneous opinion. In terms of adaptive learning strategies, in models exploring processes of cultural evolution, “conformity” has been operationalized as disproportionate majority copying, under the term “conformist transmission.” Due to its ability to tap into the wisdom of the crowd, conformist transmission is predicted to be part of social animals' learning repertoires under a wide range of conditions. Humans have indeed been found to (sometimes) follow predictions based on conformity and conformist transmission, contingent on age and one's own cultural background. A comparative study of conformity would allow for an evolutionarily grounded approach to the study of conformity‐eliciting circumstances.
Reflexivity
Authors: Dominy Michèle D.
Published: September 2018

Anthropological reflexivity is an influential and coherent ethnographic practice that critiques descriptive and realist modes of ethnographic representation and marks a response to the perceived crisis in anthropology of the 1980s. At this time, anthropology's engagement with postmodernism fused politics and poetics as inseparable and was influenced by the social and intellectual currents in textual criticism, cultural theory, and feminism. Anthropologists approached culture as an assemblage of texts using dialogic, discursive, interpretive, and polyphonic devices to establish authority. In this mode of ethnographic representation, the account constituted rather than described reality. By situating the self within the process of fieldwork, the reflexive goal was to transcend the self by theorizing the self. By reimagining anthropology, a postmillennial engaged, public anthropology acknowledges the reflexive interlocutor and includes new domains of research—the media, science and technology, and the dynamics and consequences of global capitalism from the archive to multisited arenas.
Nature/Culture Distinction
Authors: Morgain Rachel
Published: September 2018

The nature/culture distinction, whereby culture is depicted as what humans create out of nature, is one of several conceptual oppositions that are important in anthropology and broader Western knowledge. It is rooted in an idea of nature existing outside of and preceding social life. It has been significant in gender studies, particularly through the common distinction drawn between natural sex and cultural gender. Many anthropologists now critique the nature/culture distinction, arguing that it is not found universally and that imposing it onto non‐Western contexts occludes different ways of ordering the world and erases what for many people is the social character of entities such as animals, plants, and environment. Some argue that Western understandings of nature are culturally conditioned and that the concept of nature preexisting human culture enables culturally contingent power structures to be made to seem natural. Some anthropologists now seek theories that move beyond the nature/culture distinction.
Transnationalism
Authors: Knörr Jacqueline
Published: September 2018

Transnationalism as a concept serves as an analytical tool to grasp and differentiate a wide range of phenomena classified as transnational—that is, social, economic, political, and cultural processes that extend beyond the boundaries of nation‐states. Transnationalism understood as a descriptive term refers to those same processes (i.e., conceptualizes as transnationalism the social, economic, political, and cultural processes) that transnationalism as a conceptual term seeks to understand and differentiate. In this entry, transnationalism is understood as a conceptual construct to refer to and account for transnational phenomena such as transnational interactions, identities, communities, and the like.
E
thiopia, Anthropology in
Authors: Gebre Yntiso
Published: September 2018

This entry focuses on the development, scientific and political importance, and practical application of anthropology in Ethiopia. Ethiopia has been recognized as the cradle of humankind and technology due to the discovery of hominin fossils and the oldest stone tools, respectively. Scientists have yet to account for the emergence of anatomically modern humans and their behaviors. Ethiopia is the best location for paleontologists and archaeologists to complete these puzzles. Meanwhile, cultural anthropologists have studied cultural diversity, ecological adaptations, population movement, age systems, ethnic identity, intergroup conflict, minority groups, ethnic federalism, social transformation, and other topics in Ethiopia. Foreign institutions and foreign scholars have contributed to Ethiopian studies and to the development of anthropology in the country. The country offers a favorable environment for scholars interested in scientific inquiry and practitioners committed to the application of knowledge.
Demography
Authors: Kreager Philip
Published: September 2018

Population as an object of scientific study, public policy, and civil society has a long and contentious history. Demographic methods remain fundamental to a wide range of human sciences and government, yet practitioners remain divided in their views of its scientific status. This history, the several ways in which demography has been defined, and several major controversies are reviewed in this entry, together with principal methodological and substantive developments.
Brands
Authors: De Waal Malefyt Timothy
Published: September 2018

A brand is a complex entity that generates surplus value for a commodity in exchanges between consumers and producers. In its simplest form, a brand is a mode of commodity interaction between producers and consumers; yet, elaborated as a sign–object, a brand possesses semiotic, material, and sensual qualities that continually shift and adapt to contingencies, which makes the process by which it assumes meaning theoretically debatable. The anthropology of brand ranges from a semiotic, material culture perspective to that of networking. It reveals that brands are deeply embedded in identity formation and social relations, and are constantly negotiated and contested to achieve specific ends.
Culture, Cumulative
Authors: Tennie Claudio , Caldwell Christine , Dean Lewis G.
Published: September 2018

Cumulative culture can refer to cumulative cultural evolution as well as to the products of this evolution. Cumulative culture simultaneously increases the efficiency of the trait as well as preserving changes to the form of the trait itself. It is often intergenerational and can lead to traits that are no longer inventable by a naive individual. The exact necessary and sufficient mechanisms of cumulative culture are still debated. While modern humans clearly exhibit cumulative culture, it is unclear both when this started in the human lineage and whether any nonhuman animals exhibit cumulative culture.
Acoustemology
Authors: Rice Tom
Published: September 2018

“Acoustemology” conjoins the words “acoustic” and “epistemology” to refer to a sonic way of knowing and being in the world. The term was introduced by anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld following his fieldwork among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. He sought to describe the highly developed practices of listening, hearing, and sounding that characterized Kaluli engagement with their rainforest environment. Feld also used the term “acoustemology” to expand upon existing vocabulary for the anthropological discussion of human engagement with sound. The term has been taken up by other anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds whose work contributes to what has become known as “sound studies,” and the term “acoustemology” has become a key word in the conceptual lexicon of contemporary research on auditory culture.
Display, Anthropological Approaches to
Authors: Wehner Kirsten
Published: September 2018

The concept of display directs attention to the diverse ways in which people select, assemble, position, and contextualize objects so that they express, to others, certain understandings of knowledge, culture, and social relationships. This entry focuses particularly on museums as significant sites for display. It traces the emergence of anthropology as a discipline centered on explaining cultural variation through organizing ethnographic artifacts, and explores how exhibitionary frameworks have shifted over time from evolutionary schemas to cross‐cultural understanding. Discussion considers how anthropologists have developed particular display techniques in response to changing understandings of objects and transformations in their relationships with scholarly colleagues, nonspecialist audiences, and the originating communities for collections. This entry also outlines the rise of anthropological analyses of museum displays as narratives of social power and the emergence of new studies conceptualizing exhibitions, in concert with other forms of display, as spaces in which diverse actors negotiate cultural meanings.
Gender and
B
uddhism
Authors: Tannenbaum Nicola
Published: September 2018

Gender roles in Buddhism are debated across the religion. The emphasis of this entry is on Theravada Buddhism and the ways in which anthropologists use their understanding of Buddhism to analyze gender roles. Their analysis is traced back to earlier constructions of Buddhism as a text‐based religion that plays down Buddhism and gender as an aspect of lived religions. Most writing about gender and Theravada Buddhism is about Thailand and that is the geographic focus of this entry.
Photo‐Ethnography
Authors: Wright Christopher
Published: September 2018

Photo‐ethnography—the use of still photography as a means of gathering and presenting ethnographic information and insight—has always been a feature of many anthropologists' fieldwork, although to a greater or lesser degree. Through considering the history of photo‐ethnography within the discipline, this entry tackles several central questions around the differences between photography's use as an ethnographic methodology and publishing photography as ethnography.
Idioms of Distress
Authors: Nichter Mark
Published: September 2018

The term “idioms of distress,” as used in medical anthropology, directs attention to socially and culturally mediated ways of experiencing and expressing distress. In any given culture, a variety of ways exist to communicate distress. These range from forms of behavior such as shifts in food consumption to somatic complaints that have cultural significance, health care seeking and medicine taking, and spirit possession and fear of sorcery. Idioms of distress are culturally constituted in the sense that they initiate particular types of interaction associated with culturally pervasive norms, values, and health concerns. The study of idioms of distress demands consideration of the semantic meaning of “cultural syndromes” and their distribution among different strata of a population, the pragmatics and micropolitics of articulating and responding to distress in particular ways, and the impact of feedback on the experience of distress. Idioms of distress are dynamic and subject to contingencies.
Disaster Relief and Management
Authors: Perera Jayantha
Published: September 2018

Disasters caused by natural hazards and human actions are destructive in their impacts on peoples' lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing, particularly in the case of the poor. Each disaster is unique in its characteristics, degree of devastation, and implications. The immediate challenge of a disaster is how to respond quickly to relief and rehabilitation needs in ways that will help to improve future responses. Unless disaster relief is managed to ensure transparency, speedy delivery of relief, and recovery, disaster‐affected communities will continue to suffer. International and domestic disaster laws and administrative procedures are not robust enough to tackle many facets of disaster management. Disaster action frameworks and guidelines created by the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations have tried to fill this lacuna. Donor coordination, damage assessment, information sharing, local participation, good governance, and monitoring and evaluation of disaster distribution are areas where more improvement is needed.
Media Anthropology
Authors: Ardèvol Elisenda
Published: September 2018

Media anthropology situates media in cultural and social processes and, specifically, in the dialectic between cultural production and social communication systems. Media anthropology also refers to the fertile terrain of inquiry where anthropology and media studies meet. While media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media, media anthropology focuses its attention on the role of media in people's lives. In order to do so, anthropology provides three fundamental aspects to the study of media: a theoretical orientation that places culture at the core of media production; a relativistic and comparative view that destabilizes the central position of Western societies in developing knowledge and understanding of media work; and an empirical approach based on ethnographic methods that takes into account the experience of people in the context of social interaction and how people give meaning to their media practices.
Violence, Structural and Interpersonal
Authors: McLean Kristen E. , Panter‐Brick Catherine
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have made forceful contributions to knowledge on violence and its impact on human wellbeing. They have widened the World Health Organization's threefold typology of violence, with analyses that highlight structural and political violence, insidious forms of everyday violence that engender suffering, and the machinery of war. They have focused attention on visible and invisible forms of violence—the ramifications of power in armed conflict and the manifestations of suffering in everyday life. Recent anthropological work has examined the individual and social dimensions of agency and resilience and the political and structural dimensions of humanitarian intervention, to go beyond critical analyses of social suffering. This work makes a significant impact on understanding the social backdrop of violence and its interpersonal, structural, economic, and political dimensions. It examines how layers of violence intersect and are perpetuated or resisted, bringing nuance to the often made point that violence has nefarious consequences on health.
T
orii
R
yz (1870–1953)
Authors: Katsuhiko Yamaji
Published: September 2018

Torii Ryūzō was a Japanese anthropologist and archaeologist who carried out field research in China, Korea, the Kuril Islands, Siberia, and Taiwan, and aimed to compile an ethnological description of native customs, material culture, and archaeological relics in these areas. He was the first anthropologist in Japan to take photographs as field data in conducting his research.
Childbirth and Brain Size, Evolutionary Constraints of
Authors: Warrener Anna G.
Published: September 2018

Human childbirth has often been described as uniquely difficult and dangerous because the size of the fetal head is nearly the same size as the maternal bony pelvis. This tight fit between the fetal head and maternal pelvis has long been thought to be the result of two competing forces acting on the female pelvis. Efficient bipedalism is thought to require a narrow pelvis, but increasing brain size in the human lineage demands a larger birth canal to accommodate a big‐brained human neonate. The evolution of the obstetrical dilemma and the human birth process has been inferred from fossil remains. However, several key assumptions of this important anthropological model are now being questioned by new research.
Incest, Theoretical Perspectives on
Authors: Maryanski Alexandra , Turner Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Anthropology and sociology have long been fascinated with incest and the origin of the incest taboo. Incest refers to any illicit sexual act, whereas the incest taboo refers to a “thou shalt not” have sexual relations with offspring within the nuclear family, though in many traditional societies the taboo is extended to a broader kinship network. In the nineteenth century, theorizing about incest often began with the idea of a pre‐kinship “horde” followed by stage models on the evolution of the family and kinship. Since the late twentieth century, with a resurgence of interest in incest and the taboo, research models have incorporated theoretical ideas not only from anthropology and sociology but also from biology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and primatology in an effort to develop more precise and robust explanations for why incest occurs and when and why incest taboos evolved to regulate sexual activity within kinship systems.
Shimmer
Authors: Deger Jennifer
Published: September 2018

An aesthetics of shimmer calls attention to a material world profoundly flecked with light. It suggests a material poetics for anthropological reflection while generating an allure that exceeds the confines of language or culture. In the Aboriginal art, media, and ritual of east Arnhem Land in northern Australia, an aesthetics of shimmer claims the invisible as not only an indelible dimension of the visible but also its very source. This is no abstract notion. Across a variety of media—in bark paintings, videos and digital photographs, and contexts from fine art, domestic decoration, and intricate ceremonial body designs—Yolngu harness the power of scintillation to produce encompassing fields of sensation and meaning. The effects are transformative: they break open the surface of the visible, they allow ancestral forces to show themselves, and they generate an affective surge that unites the living, the ancestral, the land, and the sea.
Evolutionism
Authors: Carneiro Robert L.
Published: September 2018

Evolutionism holds that things are best understood as resulting from a long process of development. Two forms of evolution can be distinguished. Darwinian evolution, narrowly biological, is “descent with modification.” Spencerian evolution sees the process operating more broadly, manifesting itself in all domains of nature, including culture. Pioneered in anthropology by ethnologists, evolutionism today, following a half‐century of antievolutionism, is being led by archaeologists.
G
ardner,
R
obert (1925–2014)
Authors: Deger Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Robert Gardner occupies an influential and controversial place in the history of ethnographic film. As a filmmaker and founding director of the Harvard Film Study Center, he championed film as an aesthetic medium of poetic interpretation and sensuous experience, directing films in Ethiopia, India, and New Guinea working alongside regional anthropological specialists. The resulting films—
Dead Birds
(1963),
Rivers of Sand
(1974), and
Forest of Bliss
(1985)—endure as documentary classics, inspiring new generations of experimental filmmakers and enlivening contemporary discussions about art practice in anthropology.
Cross‐Cultural Aesthetics
Authors: Coleman Elizabeth Burns
Published: September 2018

The meaning of “cross‐cultural aesthetics” is ambiguous. It may mean the admiration of the artistic forms (such as performance, literature, or painting) of another culture or an area of inquiry into the nature of aesthetic appreciation across different cultures. This ambiguity has led to significant debates within anthropology concerning the suitability of the category of aesthetics as a field of inquiry. Anthropologists have argued that the category of aesthetics is required to explain the existence of ornamentation and the emergence of artistic forms, and in order to explore the qualitative features of material culture and its connection to cultural forms. However, anthropologists are divided between, on the one hand, the position that all people have aesthetic experience and that all cultures have some kind of art and, on the other, the position that art and aesthetic appreciation are specific to Western societies.
Migration and Health
Authors: Kline Nolan
Published: September 2018

Migration and health is a diverse topic that encompasses numerous definitions, theoretical approaches, and social circumstances on a global scale. The term refers to several health‐related situations involving rural‐to‐urban migrants, undocumented immigrants, refugees, political asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons, representing a range of situations rooted in a variety of historic, political, and economic contexts. Anthropologists have studied migration and health from a number of theoretical perspectives, including structural and phenomenological approaches that reveal systemic forms of inequality in accessing health services and experiences of suffering, violence, and discrimination. Future research on migration and health could consider novel methodological approaches, such as transnational multisited ethnography, and ways to concisely combine the various theoretical lenses currently used to explore the topic.
Game Theory
Authors: Mitchell Dominic , Taylor Daniel
Published: September 2018

A physical trait such as strength or speed may be of benefit to an individual and thus could become established in a population by natural selection; however, much behavior seen in humans and other species is not so easily explained in evolutionary terms. Why, for instance, when one individual encounters an aggressive display on entering the territory of another does it cede, if access to valuable resources or mating rights are at stake, and especially if the intruder in question has physical superiority? In the latter half of the twentieth century, a technique was discovered to render such behavior explicable in evolutionary terms. This was the concept of the game. Formulations that can explain such cases in games may be of corresponding use in explaining the evolution of behavior.
Endangered Cultures and Languages, Documentation of
Authors: Appell George N.
Published: September 2018

The phrase “endangered cultures and languages” refers to the threatened extinction of these in indigenous societies. The concept of endangerment first appeared in publications in 1990. Endangerment begins when society's youth no longer learn and use their traditional language and culture, or are prevented from doing so. Various factors can cause this to happen, particularly colonialization and (later) globalization. Lists of endangered languages exist to encourage research, but these lists do not include all endangered cultures. No similar lists have been made for cultures. The sources of cultural endangerment are similar to those for language endangerment, but their social impact is different. A major source of endangerment in the early twenty‐first century is computers and the internet. Several organizations have addressed cultural endangerment using arguments based on human rights, eschewing anthropological insight. The Royal Anthropological Institute and the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research are the only organizations focused on recording the oral archives of endangered cultures.
F
robenius,
L
eo (1873–1938)
Authors: Streck Bernhard
Published: September 2018

Leo Frobenius was an eccentric personality, a reading man without formal academic titles, an untiring traveler and writer, an adventurer in many respects, an irrationalist and antimodernist, a monarchist, and a (German) colonialist, who nevertheless believed in Africa's cultural sovereignty and humanity's timeless ability to express itself in elementary art, such as rock pictures, myth telling, and mask dancing.
Sport
Authors: Sherouse Perry Maxfield Waldman
Published: September 2018

Sport permeates contemporary politics, economics, and social life. Anthropological interest in sport has increased in recent decades, in contrast to earlier eras during which many scholars dismissed sport as a diversion from “serious” matters. Building from foundational literature that approached sport through the lenses of ritual and performance, recent work has focused on global sport and embodiment. Scholars often have found the meanings of sport in its relationship to something else, such as nationhood, gender, race, class, power, civilization, or modernity. Sport is a semiautonomous domain in a complex and flexible relationship with “real” life. This entry theoretically articulates sport as a subset of play in order to understand how sport projects, contests, distorts, or solidifies social worlds. Ethnographic work incorporating the semiotic, sensory, and institutional dimensions of sport can contribute valuable cross‐cultural perspectives on sport's internal workings and external stakes.
Medical Anthropology Methods: Biocultural Perspectives
Authors: Wiley Andrea S.
Published: September 2018

Biocultural perspectives have a long history in medical anthropology as a means to advance our understanding of variation in health and disease across human populations. They are used when researchers seek to understand the complex, multidirectional relationships between culture and biology as these play out in the context of health and disease. As such, biocultural perspectives are frequently employed in holistic anthropological analyses. There is no one theoretical framework that guides biocultural research, but evolutionary and/or political and economic theoretical perspectives are the most common. Methods used in biocultural research include qualitative and quantitative social and cultural data collection as well as diverse biomarkers.