bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Secularization and Secularism
Authors: Wilson Erin K.
Published: September 2018

Secularization and secularism are closely related concepts that attempt to explain processes and phenomena in politics and public life in the modern era relating, in part, to the differentiation of religion from other aspects of human activity. They are not, however, simply concerned with the distinction between the religious and the secular. Rather, secularization and secularism possess their own particular formations of power, endeavoring to construct specific kinds of ethics, political institutions, and political subjects. They can convey a variety of meanings. However, these may be broadly grouped into two main categories. For secularization, these categories are secularization as a process and secularization as a theory. For secularism, these may be conceptualized as secularism as a form of statecraft or policy and secularism as an ideology. The entry explores various aspects of these approaches to the concepts of secularization and secularism.
Migrant Laborers
Authors: Eades J. S.
Published: September 2018

While research on labor migration dates back to the nineteenth century in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, it has become an issue of major importance since World War II both within anthropology and to policy makers, following an increase in mobility both within countries and internationally. The entry begins with a brief history of the development of labor migration and of theories that have been proposed to explain its causes and patterns. The second half of the entry deals with factors driving current changes in global movements of labor, including information technology, economic growth and inequality, the fallout from the end of the Cold War, differential birthrates and life expectancy, the global market in higher education, and the political consequences of the war on terror since 2001.
Life History: Evolution of Infancy, Childhood, and Adolescence
Authors: Smith B. Holly
Published: September 2018

The human life cycle shows several novelties in comparison to our close primate relatives. Despite a prolonged juvenile period, humans abbreviate infancy and crowd interbirth intervals. “Childhood” is an extended period of postweaning dependence, depressed skeletal growth, and active brain maturation characterized by intense play and skills practice. In adolescence, skeletal growth rebounds sharply in a characteristic spurt not seen in other mammals. With age, reproducing females accrue multiple dependents but food sharing spreads energy costs over age groups, kin, and allies. In evolutionary perspective, juvenile life functions to promote survival, harvest energy for growth and development, and make the best possible adult. Much of the human life course can be interpreted as support for the latter—the production of offspring with complex cognitive skills. The fossil record demonstrates that distinctive features of our life cycle are to be found within the evolution of the genus
Homo
and not in antecedents.
Matriarchy
Authors: Sanday Peggy Reeves
Published: September 2018

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the definition of matriarchy referred to the status and role of women in early human history as “rule by the mothers” and “female dominance.” In the nineteenth century this concept of matriarchy was cast either in terms of presumed stages in the evolution of society from “primitive” female to more advanced male rule or matriarchy was conflated with matrilineal descent. In the twentieth century some anthropologists subscribed to the notion of “universal male dominance” on the grounds that there was no ethnographic evidence of female rule. The only evidence that existed of female rule, they claimed, consisted of male fantasies and stories called “myths of matriarchy,” which functioned to explain why male rule was necessary. Late in the twentieth century a group of international feminists redefined the concept of matriarchy on the grounds that the Greek suffix
arche
has two meanings: sovereignty and beginning, origin, or first cause.
Social–Ecological Systems
Authors: Lansing J. Stephen , de Vet Thérese
Published: September 2018

Anthropology's engagement with ecology, unique in the social sciences, has a long history. In 1903, Durkheim and Mauss argued that the relationship between nature (macrocosm) and culture (microcosm) is the primordial foundation for both human cognition and social organization. Cultural ecologists later added an ecological dimension to this perspective, linking sociological theory to community ecology. More recently, the concept of an “Anthropocene” era has intensified interest in humanity's relationship to the natural world. The concept of social–ecological systems implicitly suggests that the relationship between them is more complex than simple exploitation of the earth's resources. But there is as yet no consensus as to how this relationship should be approached as a scientific question.
House Societies
Authors: Ewart Elizabeth
Published: September 2018

A house is a physical structure as well as a social concept. As such, the study of the house invites explorations of materiality, aesthetics and design, symbolism and meaning, and the interrelations between spatial layout and social relations, as well as understandings of belonging and home and of ideas about property and ownership.
Anthropology, Careers in
Authors: Fera Nafisa
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists can be found in careers ranging from pop culture to politics. Their essential contributions to our understanding of who we are, how we came to be, and what our future may hold can be attributed to their shared personal traits, rigorous education and training, and application of unique knowledge and skills. In today's rapidly changing and interconnected world, gaining a deep appreciation of cultural and ethnic differences and learning how people's beliefs and practices fit into larger socioeconomic, environmental, and political processes are crucial for a twenty‐first‐century career. Whether working in a museum or an international health organization, anthropologists bring to the forefront our multifaceted and interdependent realities. In so doing, the impact of their work helps to diminish actions based on prejudice, ignorance, and bigotry and helps us to reimagine a shared vision for humanity.
Collecting
Authors: Isaac Gwyneira
Published: September 2018

The anthropological study of collecting involves the use of anthropological frameworks to examine the methods and practices involved in the accumulation of objects. It encompasses the history of collecting and how this has shaped the discipline of anthropology, as well as the reinterpretation of collections as cultural, political, and ideological constructs. The conceptualization of collections as social constructs involves their reexamination according to reflexive approaches that take into account the cultural and political circumstances of their creation—such as those experienced under colonialist regimes. Contributions to the anthropological study of collecting include material culture theories, representational analyses, repatriation studies, concepts of agency, and the development of collaborative, cross‐cultural, and/or decolonizing methodologies.
Mexico, Anthropology in
Authors: Krotz Esteban
Published: September 2018

The antecedents of Mexican anthropology are found in the first encounters between Europeans and Americans, while the beginnings of scientific anthropology are outlined in the framework of indigenism of the first half of the twentieth century. First, this entry portrays the discipline's development during the second half of the twentieth century, emphasizing social anthropology/ethnology. Next it describes the panorama of institutions and academic programs, research topics and approaches, publications, and some features of actual professional anthropology. Finally, it considers some current problems and challenges for the future of Mexican anthropology as a Latin American anthropology of the global South.
B
aumann,
H
ermann (1902–72)
Authors: Geisenhainer Katja
Published: September 2018

Hermann Baumann was a German cultural anthropologist. Influenced by culture circle theory (
Kulturkreislehre
), Baumann represented a cultural–historical approach including “racial science.” His regional focus was on Africa. He worked at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin (1921–39) and later took up professorships at the University of Vienna (1940–45) and at the Institute of Ethnology in Munich (1955–68); at Munich, the institute subsequently incorporated African studies as well (1964–68). Between 1930 and 1972, Baumann undertook three research trips to Angola.
JapaneseSociety ofCulturalAnthropology (JASCA)
Authors: Koizumi Junji
Published: September 2018

The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA), or Nihon Bunkajinruigakkai, is one of the largest national associations of anthropology in the world. “Cultural anthropology” in JASCA's name has a broader meaning than usual and covers all subdisciplines and variations of anthropology including social anthropology, ethnology, folklore, medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, and so forth, only excluding biological branches of anthropology. During JASCA's long history, academic work of importance has been produced and accumulated by Japanese anthropologists but it has mostly been published in the Japanese language and thus has largely been inaccessible to anthropologists outside the country. The situation, however, started to change with the movement for world anthropologies on the global level.
Regional Systems
Authors: Ellen Roy
Published: September 2018

The anthropology of regional systems arose from the failure of village‐based studies to pay sufficient attention to wider spatial contexts and from the tendency in ecological anthropology to treat local populations as parts of self‐contained ecosystems. It was noted that energy and nutritional balance, and consequently “resilience,” could often be achieved only within more extensive and socially more complex systems. The resulting studies adopted multiscale approaches and focused particularly on trade and exchange, including the interaction between ecological and social variables that interconnect local, regional, and global networks, often from a historical perspective. In sociocultural anthropology more generally, the regional dimension was pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s, stimulated by a growing interest in markets and in peasant, industrial–capitalist, and socialist societies, where the simple boundary assumptions made by ethnographers working in small‐scale societies were untenable.
Ritual
Authors: Kreinath Jens
Published: September 2018

This entry surveys the etymology of the term and the history of the anthropological concept of ritual. After presenting the earliest anthropological approaches to ritual, it discusses ethnographic accounts of rituals that are based on insights gained through ethnographic fieldwork and traces the impact these accounts had on subsequent theories of ritual. By reviewing classical approaches along with some of the most recent developments in theorizing rituals, an attempt is made to outline the future directions in ethnographically grounded and theoretically informed research in the anthropology of ritual.
World‐Systems Theory
Authors: Castellanos Carmen Bueno
Published: September 2018

This entry analyzes the importance and contemporariness of the world‐systems approach. Anthropological studies of the world system are based mainly on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein so the entry begins by presenting the context and underlying theoretical and methodological influences of his contributions. The second section analyzes three classical anthropological studies that reevaluate critically what they consider to be a Eurocentric position in Wallerstein's legacy. These three works offer diverse systemic explanations based on the position of peripheral spaces. The third section presents anthropological works that offer multiple topologies of the world system in the twenty‐first century. The world‐systems approach is being tested by the hegemonic position of global firms and the aggressive expansion of “globalization from below” in the absence of regulations and barriers and with the strengthening of traditional economic relations and the relational practices that emerge in the virtual space.
History and Anthropology
Authors: Macfarlane Alan
Published: September 2018

For most of the past five hundred years, the goals and methods of the historical and social sciences were not separated. Then, between about 1890 and 1940, there was a separation as anthropologists did their pioneering work among remote hunter‐gatherer and tribal groups without written records. Since the 1950s, the disciplines have come together again. The philosophical bases of the disciplines, including their ideas about universal laws, the nature of causation, and the role of the individual and the social structure, are not different. Though they use somewhat different methods in gathering data, their use of the imagination and reflexivity is very similar. Without anthropology, history is superficial, dry, and ethnocentric; without history, anthropology is unconvincing and implausible.
Enlightenment, The
Authors: Latif Nadia
Published: September 2018

Enlightenment thinkers attempted to formulate a systematic theory and method for the study of human beings and their societies. However, the paradigms and conceptual categories underlying Enlightenment formulations were very different from subsequent anthropological conceptions of nature, culture, and society. Enlightenment theorists vigorously debated their understandings of human similarity and difference in terms of reason, race, climate, and slavery. These debates took place in the broader context of European discussions of the differential progress attained by various European societies. Enlightenment thinkers used European and non‐European others as figures of comparison in their attempts to define the Enlightened subject.
Environmental Justice
Authors: Johnston Barbara Rose
Published: September 2018

Environmental justice refers to the social and political struggle to expose that which has been historically denied—the existence of life‐threatening conditions that are the unjust, inequitable result of corrupt and dysfunctional governance. It is a catch‐all phrase used by those who study as well as those who fight for transformative change. Environmental justice struggles seek acknowledgment by culpable parties that injustice has occurred, apologies, remedial actions to repair human and environmental harm, and the adoption of measures to insure “never again.”
Evidence‐Based Medicine
Authors: Samsky Ari
Published: September 2018

This entry defines evidence‐based medicine (EBM) in the context of anthropology. Evidence‐based medicine is a quantitative medical research method that emphasizes patient outcome and accountability. It uses analysis of large statistical samples (and often meta‐analysis of multiple independent studies) to persuade physicians that a particular clinical practice is superior to all others—for instance, that it is more cost effective or that it produces better outcomes for patients. EBM's use of large bodies of statistics gives it remarkable persuasive power—in the language of social science, EBM is able to make very strong “truth claims.” Anthropologists analyze EBM as a social phenomenon in it own right but also engage with EBM as a particular research methodology that calls into question how different groups of scholars create and understand “evidence” and make political and scientific claims on truth.
M
ukerji,
D. P.
(1894–1961)
Authors: Madan T. N.
Published: September 2018

D. P. Mukerji's sociology was theoretical–historical rather than empirical–ethnographic. Mukerji did not generate data about social life through macro quantitative or micro qualitative studies. He concentrated on the clarification of basic concepts and the formulation of theoretical frameworks for the sociology of India. Cultural traditions and processes of social change were the principal concerns of his sociology.
Gender and Language
Authors: Jule Allyson
Published: September 2018

Gender and language are powerfully connected in the lives of all peoples. The emergence of the field developed with anthological and linguistic considerations. Feminism has greatly added to the field of gender and language study, though anthropology in particular has been a prime foundational contributor. Studies from around the world and in dramatically different contexts seem to reveal gender (i.e., performances of femininity and masculinity) as a performance that is enacted in speech. The way people talk both reflects and reinforces gender roles; hence, changing language use has the potential to change attitudes and behaviors concerning perceptions of gender.
Europe, Language Research in
Authors: Enever Janet
Published: September 2018

This entry reviews research relating to the changing roles of languages in European education over time. With reference to the climate of heightened economic, political, and cultural globalization during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries, the promotion of Europeanization is discussed with specific reference to language‐in‐education planning. Under such conditions, the conclusions of the Lisbon European Council (2000) have stimulated a series of reports, recommendations, and statistical analyses focusing on languages in European education policy aiming at encouraging diversity and an early introduction to learning additional languages from the start of primary or even preprimary schooling. Themes covered in this entry include initiatives to revitalize linguistic diversity, language choices in schools, early language learning, content and language integrated learning, literacy and migration, and multimodal language learning in informal contexts. Discussion of recent research reflecting the impact of European soft policy initiatives offers some insights on future directions in European language planning.
Australia, Aboriginal Rights in
Authors: Glaskin Katie
Published: September 2018

For indigenous peoples worldwide, the struggle to gain recognition of rights associated with their identities as indigenous peoples is an integral aspect of the quest for self‐determination. These struggles take place in complex legal, social, political, and economic fields, and the stakes associated with forms of recognition, such as land rights, are high. In Australia, anthropologists have been involved in Aboriginal rights issues, specifically those concerned with land rights, native title, and cultural heritage protection, over many decades. These rights issues reflect the historical and ongoing nature of the relationship between indigenous peoples and nation‐states and raise moral issues about loss, restoration, justice, and compensation. Anthropological involvement in these issues has not been uncontroversial, mirroring debates in other geographical contexts about the complexities and ambiguities of applied anthropological research.
M
alinowski,
B
ronisław (1884–1942)
Authors: Kelly William W.
Published: September 2018

Bronisław Kaspar Malinowski was a founding figure in twentieth‐century British social anthropology. Best known for his intensive research and prolific writings about the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia, his legacies are in defining a new role of the scholar‐fieldworker, in demonstrating rigorous standards of field record keeping, in interweaving the literary and the analytical in his exemplary ethnographic representations, and in reorienting the discipline toward grounded, contemporary analysis of lifeworlds. As a teacher and colleague, he was charismatic but controversial, vain and charming. Through his invigorating research seminars and dedicated institution building, he reshaped the discipline in England in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ethnozoology
Authors: Forth Gregory
Published: September 2018

Coined in 1890, the term “ethnozoology” denotes one of the main branches of ethnobiology. Addressing ways in which humans relate to animals, ethnozoologists investigate knowledge of animals revealed in systems of naming and classification as well as practical, economic, and symbolic uses of animals characteristic of particular societies. Typically, ethnozoology considers the entirety of nonhuman animals known to members of particular ethnolinguistic groups, or large subsets of these, and views humans, animals, plants, and inanimate features of natural environments as components of single ecosystems. Modern ethnozoologists are also concerned with connections between local animal knowledge and conservation efforts, on the one hand, and development initiatives, on the other.
Globalization
Authors: Reeves Madeleine
Published: September 2018

Globalization is a central topic in anthropology and allied fields, including sociology, political science, geography, cultural and media studies, education, and law. The term came to prominence in both scholarly and public discourse in the late 1980s and 1990s to denote a twofold shift: first, the intensification and deepening of supranational, transregional (and ostensibly “global”) connections in the realms of finance, trade, media, and activist organizing and, second, a qualitative shift in popular consciousness about inhabiting an interconnected, interdependent, or “global” world. While many anthropologists have positioned themselves critically with regard to more generalizing, celebratory, or technologically determinist accounts of “global flows,” their commitment to long‐term fieldwork has enabled them to make seminal contributions to understanding dynamics of connectivity and exclusion, as well as to illuminate how and why “the global” as an idea or ideology has become socially and politically resonant at a particular historical juncture.
Ethnology
Authors: Agnidakis Paul
Published: September 2018

Ethnology is a disciplinary field that is more or less interwoven with anthropology. Its main focus is the analysis of various cultures and cultural expressions, usually within a national context. In practice, ethnologists favor an approach toward culture from the individual perspective, with a key interest in how single ordinary individuals, seen as active cultural beings, think and act in their everyday lives. This implies that they are both shaped by and contributors to the shaping of cultures in their everyday lives. However, within ethnology, culture viewed as a bidirectional phenomenon is not merely regarded as an individual process. Rather, it is regarded as something that occurs in collective social contexts. When analyzing culture, ethnologists usually employ a combined focus on its ideational and folkloric aspects as well as aspects of materiality, locality, and identity. Ethnology's general methodological approaches comprise ethnographic fieldwork as well as studies of artifacts and sociocultural structures.
Worldviews
Authors: Macfarlane Alan
Published: September 2018

The highest level of thought system is the “worldview,” which encompasses paradigms and schools of thought within it. There are a number of frameworks for understanding worldviews and their components, yet little attention has been paid to how they change. This entry analyzes the shift from premodern through modern to postmodern. In the last of these, there is a set of contesting worldviews.
Global Health
Authors: Nichter Mark
Published: September 2018

Global health encompasses multiple agendas. This overview introduces some of the main approaches to global health and some of the ways in which anthropologists have contributed to their implementation and critique. Cases studies are provided that illustrate the range of research anthropologists are conducting in this emerging and contested field. An anthropology in, of, and for global health is presented along with future directions for research.
Housing and Sanitation
Authors: Furniss Jamie
Published: September 2018

This entry concerns liquid and solid wastes, “human waste,” and “garbage” or “rubbish.” It primarily discusses the challenges they pose in the context of contemporary international development and its focus on informal housing settlements in the developing world, although some attention is paid to the historical understanding and importance of sanitation during the colonial period. It considers how certain technical and material considerations are important to understanding (and solving) sanitation problems, but it seeks to foreground political economy in its understanding of the sources of most sanitation problems and the underpinnings of contemporary debates over how to solve them.
Touch
Authors: Howes David
Published: September 2018

The anthropological record is replete with accounts of haptic and kinaesthetic techniques or “ways of touching” that often confound both commonsense and scientific understandings of the nature and scope of touch. For example, in some cultures it is counted as a distance sense, and in others it is seen as providing access to interior states. Certain aspects of touching, such as balance, movement, or temperature, may be elaborated to a high degree and imbued with moral values and cosmological significance. In addition to grounding the physical sense of being in the world, touch mediates social identities and actions. It is an open question whether the numerous extensions of touch in our increasingly technologized world have contributed to its development or underdevelopment as a medium of knowledge, communication, and action.
Science and Technology in Development
Authors: Vessuri Hebe , Cancino Ronald
Published: September 2018

This entry presents the dominant modes of thinking about science and technology in development relations, emphasizing that these categories are interlaced in complicated ways. There is no universal agreement on their synergistic value. The perspectives summarized here include the normative notion that science and technology can lead to development in Western modernity and the establishment of asymmetries in which Western science and technology prevailed over all other knowledge forms. The science and technology used in development since colonial times engendered many a debate about their legitimacy in changing geopolitical landscapes but have been central to international cooperation since World War II. Among the main ingredients were arguments and facts about building up infrastructure and the transfer of technology and institutional designs to countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development; dependence theory as a critical response from the South to development proposals in the politicized world context of the 1970s; successive understandings of poverty, the value of local endogeneity, and sustainability; and competitiveness and territorial issues.
Tools, Paleolithic
Authors: Chazan Michael
Published: September 2018

Most of what we know of the material culture of the Paleolithic is based on the study of stone tools, although in later periods bone tools also came to play an important role. This entry reviews the major approaches used in the study of stone tools from the Paleolithic and the development of Paleolithic stone tools from the first appearance of this technology over 3 million years ago to the spread of modern humans into Europe.
Hunter‐Gatherer Cosmologies
Authors: Low Chris
Published: September 2018

Cosmology is one of the three key domains used by anthropologists to define hunter‐gatherers. Although there is much variety found among hunter‐gatherers, broad continuities are typically envisaged across a range of cosmological themes including animism, shamanism, double creation, sacred geographies, tricksters, and worldview. Since the 1980s, researchers have problematized many of these categories and taken cosmology from the field of “primitive” religion and spirits to human relations with other humans, and human relations with nonhuman persons. By interrogating many of the assumptions about subject–object relations and human relationships with nature, which anthropologists have received as part of their European intellectual heritage, scholars of hunter‐gatherer cosmology are reuniting spheres of knowledge of science and philosophy that have been divorced since the nineteenth century.
B
artolomé,
L
eopoldo
J
osé (1942–2013)
Authors: Mastrangelo Andrea V. , Schamber Pablo J.
Published: September 2018

Leopoldo José Bartolomé was an Argentinian social anthropologist who earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States. He founded the graduate and postgraduate courses in social anthropology at the National University of Misiones, Argentina. His research topics included rural anthropology, development (with an emphasis on dams), and relocations.
Utopias and Dystopias, Anthropology and
Authors: Krotz Esteban
Published: September 2018

Interest in the other society, and hence in the multiplicity of forms of human life, is shared by two distinct classes of knowledge: namely, anthropology and utopia. For centuries, these two kinds of understanding of the sociocultural sphere of reality were interwoven, at times so tightly that they were virtually indistinguishable. Today, they appear not only disparate but even opposed, for it is commonly held that utopia pertains to the unscientific domains of fictional literature and political ideology. However, the intrinsic connection between these two types of knowledge is being rediscovered and is generating a reciprocal interpellation that is fruitful for both cognitive traditions. Anthropology and utopia both use the category of “alterity”; though they do not use it in the same sense, the senses mutually complement one another.
Situated Cognition
Authors: Overmann Karenleigh A. , Malafouris Lambros
Published: September 2018

Situated cognition examines how the human mind is affected by being in a physical body and a natural and sociomaterial environment, influencing how a person perceives, learns, knows, reasons, decides, and acts. Within the generic term “situated cognition” are various distinctions in which cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, distributed, dynamical, or enactive. In this entry, these views of cognition are explored through influential works in anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Shopping
Authors: Chevalier Sophie
Published: September 2018

Shopping, a routine daily activity that is sometimes considered as a chore, can also be seen as an exceptional diversion and form of leisure. We do it alone or in company, but it is heavily gendered in practice. In any case, it is a vehicle for expressing social and cultural identity. It was traditionally restricted to a physical space, but increasingly it takes place online. Shopping is shaped by its environment—commercial buildings, forms of display, technological innovations in packaging and storage, and bureaucratic rules. With fixed pricing comes the homogenization of quality and quantity. The presence of shops and their use contribute to the life of a neighborhood and facilitate the growth of social exchange. The circulation of commodities and their buyers promotes the growth of ethnic and exotic commerce in urban centers, and even new forms of shopping tourism. The line between shopping and leisure is becoming blurred.
Psychoanalytic Anthropology
Authors: Fortis Margherita Margiotti
Published: September 2018

This entry outlines contemporary themes and approaches in psychoanalytic anthropology within the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology. Psychoanalytically inclined anthropologists incorporate psychoanalytic notions and theories in their work, particularly those relating to unconscious processes, affects, and motives that influence human activity and cultural meanings. Departing from the pioneering engagements between the two disciplines, the entry reviews classic and contemporary debates in psychoanalytic anthropology, including those on the universality and functions of the Oedipus complex, the importance of early pre‐Oedipal relations, the construction of personal meaning, and the relationships between embodiment, personal fantasies, and cultural symbols.
Queer Theory
Authors: Curtin Brian
Published: September 2018

Queer theory emerged as an academic term in the early 1990s in North America. The mantle has since splintered into queer theory, queer theories, and “queer” as a variety of scholars, critics, and activists continue to debate meanings and relevance. Broadly understood as an umbrella term for nonnormative identities, queer theory can also be read as a signal for any inquiry into the regulatory function of norms and an exploration of what lies beyond the limits or boundaries of any form of thought or representation.
Alterity
Authors: Begrich Roger
Published: September 2018

This entry examines the concept of alterity and its significance for anthropology. “Alterity” refers to otherness and is an antonym of “identity.” Beginning with a discussion of alterity (and the relationship between self and other) in philosophy and social theory, the entry then addresses alterity as a disciplinary orientation, a basic epistemological condition, and an object of investigation for anthropology. It furthermore considers the role of alterity—or rather of the dyad self/other—as a fundamental condition of modernity (which always requires an other that is not modern) and looks at how the logic of colonialism is fueled by a binary logic of imperial selves and colonized others. The entry then discusses how processes of othering can impact indigenous peoples' rights, and it ends with a reflection on the ways in which anthropology (and ethnography) engage (and are transformed by) alterity epistemologically, ontologically, ethically, and methodologically.
NAGPRA
(
N
ative
A
merican
G
raves
P
rotection and
R
epatriation
A
ct, 1990)
Authors: Graham Martha
Published: September 2018

NAGPRA is the acronym for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 43 CFR part 10), which was signed into US federal law on November 16, 1990. NAGPRA mandates the repatriation of Native American cultural items in museums and federal repositories to Indian tribes and lineal descendants, and clarifies the ownership and control of Native American cultural items that are excavated or discovered on federal or tribal lands after November 16, 1990. Repatriations under NAGPRA have contributed to the revitalization of the cultural traditions and cultural identities of many Indian tribes and Native Americans. Mandated consultations under NAGPRA have led to collaborations and increased knowledge and appreciation of the multiple histories associated with Native American material culture and the persistence of Native American cultures.
Srinivas,M. N.(1916–99)
Authors: Deshpande Satish
Published: September 2018

M. N. Srinivas was India's best‐known social anthropologist of the latter half of the twentieth century. A noted exponent of the structural–functional approach imbibed from his teachers at Oxford, A. R. Radcliffe‐Brown and E. E. Evans‐Pritchard, Srinivas helped to establish social anthropology in postcolonial India as a rigorous, fieldwork‐based discipline. He insisted on the unity of social anthropology and sociology, and was one of the pioneers of village studies. His main conceptual contributions are embodied in terms such as “sanskritization,” “dominant caste,” and “vote bank,” which sustained debate for three decades. He established university departments at Baroda and Delhi, and was associated with prominent research institutes in Bengaluru. Srinivas's major works includeMarriage and Society among the Coorgs of South India(1952),The Remembered Village(1977), and a posthumous volume ofCollected Essays(2003).
Global Women's Movement
Authors: George Nicole
Published: September 2018

This discussion of the global women's movement begins with some reflections on its evolution in recent history, the political gains that have been achieved by the movement, and the sites that have emerged as points of tension among the movement's diverse membership. Next it considers the interplay between the global and local realms of women's organizing and connections between activity occurring within the global women's movement and women's groups in national and local contexts. It concludes with some deliberation on new trends within the realm of women's advocacy on the international stage and reflects on the implications these may have for the global women's movement as it further evolves in response to new international political developments.
Body Ornamentation, Evolutionary Approaches to
Authors: Power Camilla
Published: September 2018

Darwinian sexual selection models have been applied to analysis of the great variety of human cultural body ornament. Costly signal theory offers a material account of why each sex would use ornaments and cosmetics to advertise their qualities at differing stages of their reproductive lifetime. Significant levels of female ornamentation, reversing the usual direction of sexual selection, may be linked to high levels of male parental investment. A narrowly individualistic account of body decoration does not explain why the most spectacular ornamentation tends to be located in ritual contexts or why the ornamented individuals come under taboos and prohibitions.
Virgin Birth
Authors: Lepani Katherine
Published: September 2018

The term “virgin birth” represents a conceptual conundrum as the subject of recurrent debate in the genealogy of anthropological theories on kinship, gender, and reproduction and ethnographic interpretations of indigenous knowledge about conception. The notion stems from Bronisław Malinowski's ethnographic accounts of conception beliefs among Trobriand Islanders of the southwestern Pacific, specifically their purported ignorance of physiological impregnation and paternity. The debate was based presumptively on the biological “facts of life,” underpinned by the nature–culture binary, a key principle of structuralist models of social organization, without critical reflection on the ways scientific knowledge is culturally and historically produced.
Leakey,Louis (1903–72) andMary (1913–96)
Authors: Morell Virginia
Published: September 2018

Louis and Mary Leakey pioneered the study of human origins in East Africa and helped to establish the science of paleoanthropology. Beginning in the 1930s, they worked together on numerous expeditions and excavations, uncovering fossils and artifacts that proved humans evolved first in Africa. In the process, they made the Leakey name synonymous with the study of human evolution.
Literacy Programs in Development
Authors: Schwab Robert G. (Jerry)
Published: September 2018

Anthropology has played an important role in extending the understanding of literacy and its relationship to development. Early anthropologists argued that the invention of writing was the hallmark of civilization. Later, anthropologists took to the field and wrote ethnographies in which they described literacy not as an autonomous set of skills but as a set of socially situated practices. This view has been important in extending the notion of literacy beyond that of a text‐based phenomenon to include multiple forms of literacy, or multiliteracies. Anthropological insights also have challenged the means and ends of literacy programs in development contexts, showing that, while literacy can empower, it may also act as colonization in a new guise, devaluing indigenous language and identity. Future research on literacy and development will need to explore the implications of lifelong and life‐wide notions of literacy, and the emergence of multimodal and digital literacies.
Museum Experiments
Authors: Bouquet Mary
Published: September 2018

Museums, as enduring institutions, are continually transforming due to their practices of acquisition, curatorship, conservation, research, exhibition, and digitalization, and joint projects involving their shared heritage with a range of stakeholders. These dynamic and varied activities ensure that museums are the focus of intense scholarly and cross‐disciplinary interest. Since the 1980s, museums' expanding and varied activities have become increasingly visible, globalized, and diverse. Parallel with these developments, there has been a proliferation of scholarly analysis of and theories concerning their history, politics, aesthetics, networks, and civic engagement. As places for the placeless, museums today allow people to learn the civic skills required to deal with difference.
Piety
Authors: Jones Carla
Published: September 2018

Anthropological analyses of piety treat it as the principle and practice of devotion. Anthropological research takes seriously the wide diversity of pious practices around the world. Rather than assume that piety refers only to Christian practice, research underscores the complex ethical assumptions that link piety to the religious and to the political and economic. Research on piety connects forms of self‐improvement and ethical practice to social movements. These broader conditions reveal themes familiar to anthropologists, such as the sometimes tense relationship between the individual and the social.
E
vans‐
P
ritchard,
E. E.
(1902–73)
Authors: Davies Douglas J.
Published: September 2018

E. E. Evans‐Pritchard's ethnographies of African groups, notably the Azande and the Nuer, provided descriptive analyses of social organization; methods of coping with misfortune through witchcraft, oracles, magic, and sacrifice; and how these people interfaced their daily existence with perceived divinities. Such work assisted comparative studies of forms of rationality and critical analyses of sociological and psychological theories of religion, including those of Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, and Lucien Lévy‐Bruhl. Evans‐Pritchard's participant observer form of fieldwork promoted a view of social anthropology as more akin to history than to a natural science of society.
Art, Anthropology of
Authors: de Niemeyer Cesarino Pedro
Published: September 2018

Dedicated to the study of expressive forms and artworks involved in social relations, the anthropology of art ranges from museums and collections to artistic practices and non‐Western peoples' conceptions of images and objects. This specific field of anthropology has been marked by several conceptual paradigms from evolutionism to culturalism, structuralism, and critical theory. Contemporary theoretical perspectives involve the anthropology of memory and image as well as local visual theories developed by ethnological research. The entry summarizes the main trends in the field, as well as contemporary challenges for an anthropological study of art.
Religion, Migration, and Diasporas
Authors: Garbin David
Published: September 2018

Although religious globalization is a contemporary reality, dynamics of religious mobility and religious expansion linked to trade, imperialism, or conquest originated long before the consolidation of the modern international system. In many religious traditions, mobility is also sacralized, at the center of a theological and symbolic universe. Today, migrants and diasporas are key actors in the contemporary growth of globe‐spanning religious networks. This interplay of globalization, migration, and religion has been dramatically intensified by rapid innovations in transport and electronic communications. Among migrant communities and diasporas, religion is seen as providing a moral guide and spiritual compass, operating as a sanctuary. Transnational religious networks, flows, and circulations of people, ideas, images, values, and norms also impact on sending contexts, sometimes creating new modes of cultural distinction, leading to social tensions and conflicts. These flows are multidirectional, producing polycentric geographies, a process that challenges the idea of center–periphery power dynamics often associated with the capitalist world system.
Global Health Interventions and Research
Authors: Geissler Paul Wenzel
Published: September 2018

Health interventions and research, often intertwined, are at the core of “global health,” the early twenty‐first‐century version of biomedical expansion into the “global South,” the deprived, often postcolonial zones of the planet. These scientific interventions are transnational and large scale, yet simultaneously often circumscribed to specific diseases, particular technological tools, limited sites and time spans, and bounded populations. They carry various ideas about the body and health, society, and political economy from earlier international formations of biomedicine, and they generate novel social forms: new social relations between human, institutional, and nonhuman actors and between different species and materials; new collectives and modes of association (“citizenships,” professions, and insurance schemes); and novel forms of radical exclusion and deprivation. Thus, they entail new struggles and claims, driven by both lasting and new moral and political visions. Socially generative and politically challenging, they have called forth a new wave in the anthropology of medicine.
Sacrifice
Authors: Hardenberg Roland
Published: September 2018

The word “sacrifice” is most commonly used in anthropology to denote relations between humans and the cosmic realm based on the killing and exchange of living beings or nonliving substitutes. In an extended sense, the term also refers to social actions between people based on renunciation, abnegation, and altruistic attitudes. Classical theories of sacrifice in anthropology establish either evolutionary or functional connections between these two dimensions of the concept, the religious and the social. With respect to social functions, it is argued that sacrifices create social cohesion through commensality, the experience of social forces, or the cathartic effects of violence. The search for quasi‐universal schemes has in the course of time been replaced by detailed ethnographic case studies of sacrifice in particular historical contexts and by research on the critique of sacrifice from colonial times to the present.
Cousin Marriage, Parallel
Authors: Conte Édouard
Published: September 2018

Chiefly practiced in Muslim contexts, parallel cousin marriage (PCM) is most frequent between children of brothers. Since the children of parallel cousins are bilateral cross‐cousins, PCM can neither ensure restricted or generalized exchange nor generate discrete unilineal descent groups. Transcending this “predicament” requires observing how all types of cousin marriages intermesh over generations in concert with diverse kinning processes. The combination of “sibling exchange” (badalin Arabic) with patrilateral PCM is central to marriage systems from the Maghreb to the Indus. In such contexts,nasab, an ongoing process of recreation of pedigree based on the transgenerational articulation of sibling sets through successive marriage permutations, selectively read, validates claims of origin that underpin patrilineally ascribed affiliations.
A
merican
A
nthropological
A
ssociation (
AAA
)
Authors: Liebow Edward , Baker Kimberley
Published: September 2018

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is the world's largest association for professional anthropologists, with about 10,000 members. Based in Washington, DC, the AAA was founded in 1902 and covers what in the United States are considered the four main fields of anthropology (cultural anthropology, biological and physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology). The AAA is organized into forty sections, each reflecting specialized domains of knowledge. It publishes a portfolio of twenty‐two journals, offers career planning and professional development services, supports college and university departments, awards numerous prizes and fellowships, sponsors a paid summer internship program, and stages research conferences in the spring and fall each year. The AAA also has a public education initiative that highlights the contributions made by anthropological research to important and enduring topics, such as race and migration.