bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Religion, Symbolist versus Intellectualist Approaches to
Authors: Hunt Stephen
Published: September 2018

The contestation between symbolist and intellectualist approaches has proved to be one of the most enduring rivalries in the history of the anthropology of religion. However, drawing comparisons between these approaches is a complex endeavor given the theoretical divergence to be discerned within symbolist perspectives, one of which focuses upon the connectivity between symbols and collective sentiments while the other stresses how human action is guided by interpretation, from which may flow symbolic meanings. Intellectualist approaches to religion, by contrast, prioritize the capability of the human mind to make deductions from observation and experience, which underpin the attempt to comprehend and explain the world, frequently via belief systems. These contrasts between symbolist and intellectualist approaches should, however, not distract from overlapping theoretical concerns.
Transparency
Authors: Ballestero Andrea
Published: September 2018

Transparency is a quality that renders an actor, object, or social relation knowable, revealing the process by which it comes into being without affecting its character. For anthropologists, the idea of transparency is in constant tension with obscurity and secrecy. Across the corporate, governmental, and nongovernmental contexts where it is promoted, transparency unleashes unexpected social effects, often occluding more than it discloses. Transparency is not neutral; it can create new power relations and transform the social situations it claims to merely reveal. This unexpected potential has turned anthropology's attention toward the quantitative, narrative, and documentary instruments used to promote transparency. Knowledge of these instruments and the capacity to interpret them orders new hierarchies of subject positions and transforms the politics of collective life.
Hybridity
Authors: Shakow Miriam
Published: September 2018

Hybridity refers to the process by which people combine elements from different cultural groups or arenas of human experience to create a new cultural practice. Scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the term “hybridity” to denote the mingling of “races” or of cultural groups; more recently, anthropologists have used the term to describe a mixture of “traditional” and “modern” practices or the borrowing of elements from diverse political ideologies. Contemporary anthropologists use three principal approaches to hybridity as a theoretical tool: networks, articulation, and
bricolage
. All of these approaches have in common the acknowledgment that cultural and social groups are never pure, isolated, or unchanging; that people continually borrow from and exchange ideas and practices with each other; and that “race” is a social fact rather than a biological one.
Environmental Toxicology
Authors: Schell Lawrence M.
Published: September 2018

Since the industrial age, humans have added new compounds and elements (toxicants) to the environment in far greater concentrations than ever before and they are changing our biology (reproduction, growth, development, disease, and health profile) and our social structure. Heavy metals (e.g., lead and mercury) are neurotoxicants. Lead can delay sexual maturation in girls. Polychlorinated biphenyl burden is associated with girls' faster sexual maturation and with lower testosterone levels in adolescent males as well as with deficits in cognitive performance. Obesity and diabetes are associated with toxicant burdens also. Many toxicants have not been studied and the full range and depth of their effects is not known. Toxicant burdens are far greater among the disadvantaged in society and are transferred across generations; effects of toxicants hinder cognitive, economic, and social development from birth. Multigenerational toxicant effects are one pathway that sustains social distinction. Social distinctions reinforce pathways of toxicant exposure.
Endogamy
Authors: Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

Endogamy, sometimes also called “inbreeding” and literally meaning “marrying in” or “within,” is the sociocultural prescription or practice according to which people (must) find their marriage partner within a certain group. The notion of endogamy, unfrequently used, needs to be understood as the counterpart of the concept and practice of exogamy, that is, the obligation to marry outside a social group.
C
argo
C
ults
Authors: Dalton Doug
Published: September 2018

The term “cargo cult” originally embodied a colonial stereotype of irrational native behavior which anthropologists endeavored to explain in non‐ethnocentric ways, producing several classical accounts before anthropologists then sought to distance themselves from and to eliminate the phrase as derogatory and distorting of indigenous understandings and cultural means of innovation. Yet “cargo cult” continues to be widely employed as an analytical or critical term in relation to cultural changes observed in the islands of Inner Oceania and anthropological understandings of them, making it both a very productive and a problematic concept that has yet to be resolved or replaced.
Positivism
Authors: Roscoe Paul
Published: September 2018

In the early 1970s, “positivism” began to morph from a term referring to a long‐standing social philosophy into a pejorative identifying an epistemology and practice that, by advocating and executing a “scientific” approach to the study of society, had led cultural anthropology catastrophically astray. This antipositivist critique was useful in correcting excesses in this “scientific” approach. At the same time, it helped broker the introduction of interpretative, reflexive, dialogical, and postmodern approaches to the study of culture, the importance of which is still debated in the wider anthropological discipline.
Risk and Uncertainty
Authors: Chibnik Michael
Published: September 2018

Economists, cognitive psychologists, and anthropologists have analyzed many situations where decision makers must consider the chances of future events occurring. Such probabilities are often called “risks” and “uncertainties.” Some anthropologists have attempted to use the theoretical models of economists and the findings of the laboratory experiments of cognitive psychologists in their efforts to understand the effects of risk and uncertainty on decision making in fieldwork settings. Most anthropologists, however, regard the approaches of economists and psychologists as providing insufficient descriptions of how people think about risk and uncertainty when making most choices. The real situations in which people make decisions related to risk and uncertainty are more complex than the formal models that are sometimes used to analyze them. Anthropologists can provide the ethnographic context necessary for a full understanding of cultural behavior related to risk and uncertainty.
N
orway, Anthropology in
Authors: Eriksen Thomas Hylland
Published: September 2018

Norwegian anthropology has two distinct origins: the largely descriptive German tradition of
Volkskunde
/
Völkerkunde
, which flourished in the country from 1850 to World War II; and twentieth‐century Anglophone social anthropology, which came to dominate after the war, largely but not exclusively through the influence of Fredrik Barth. Contemporary Norwegian social anthropology is a relatively large subject with fieldwork in all parts of the world and a broad range of theoretical orientations; it publishes mostly in English. In addition, anthropological research in Norway itself is common, which has given the subject a strong public presence in society. There are many publications in Norwegian on issues that have considerable appeal outside of the academy, such as national identity, indigenous questions, and immigration.
Social and Environmental Impact Analysis
Authors: Goldman Laurence Richard
Published: September 2018

With the ascendancy of project‐financing institutions and greater emphasis on social auditing by multinational resource developers, social and environmental impact analysis (S&EA) has moved squarely away from a peripheral discretionary activity to an almost universal regulatory compliance process for medium‐to‐large‐scale interventions. This entry explores the nature and scope of S&EA in respect to who undertakes such research, how it is carried out, what kinds of impact assessment are required, and what purposes are fulfilled and uses made by the products of such study. While, then, there is increasing consensus about such matters among academics and practitioners, the concept of S&EA is not without controversy and is often seen as an analytical tool invented by and serving the goals of Western‐inspired ideologies of development.
Hunting and Gathering as Techniques
Authors: Ichikawa Mitsuo
Published: September 2018

Hunting and gathering are activities for procuring nondomesticated animal and plant resources. Descriptions are provided in the entry of three aspects of hunting and gathering techniques: tools, methods, and strategies. First, tools are classified into different types and their complexity compared in terms of the number of constituent parts. Hunting and gathering methods in various parts of the world are described, with a focus on the processes of searching, approaching, shooting or holding, pursuing, and recovering the target, some of which are shortened, omitted, or substituted in practice. Strategies for effective and efficient hunting and gathering are examined with reference to the theory of optimal foraging.
Social Capital
Authors: Smart Alan
Published: September 2018

Social capital has extensive roots in anthropology and sociology, but the term itself came into wide usage in the 1980s. It is associated primarily with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, James S. Coleman, and Robert Putnam, whose conceptualizations of social capital varied substantially. The formulation by Putnam, which sees social capital as a property of collectivities as well as individuals (or as embedded in the relationships between individuals) has been particularly successful in applied and policy work because of its greater ease of operationalization and measurement.
Personhood, Self, and Individual
Authors: Mcintosh Janet
Published: September 2018

In every society, beliefs and ideologies circulate about the qualifications necessary to be classified or treated as a full person in the world. Personhood is often (though not always) thought to be constituted throughout the life course and many societies have distinct ontological and ethnopsychological ideas about the constitution of persons, including persons' articulation with others, their interpenetration with the world around them, their moral or jural capacities, and the qualities of their agency. If personhood is socially imputed, anthropologists often understand the term “self” to refer to the subjective and experiential sense that one is or has a locus of awareness—a private consciousness that, while it may be a universal human trait, is also socioculturally mediated. Ethnographic literature often remarks on the contrast between individualistic and sociocentric ideologies in the constitution of personhood and selfhood. The distinction furnishes a useful starting point but requires qualification and complication.
Applied Anthropology
Authors: Nolan Riall W.
Published: September 2018

Applied anthropology is the use of anthropology to solve real‐world problems. Applied anthropologists are of two kinds: academically based anthropologists and anthropologists based outside the academy, or “practitioners.” Application and practice have always been a fundamental aspect of the discipline but were marginalized by the academy in the mid‐twentieth century. In the past several decades application has seen a resurgence of interest, as graduates increasingly sought nonacademic careers and began to gain influence in previously unexplored domains of practice. These changes will have profound implications for the character and focus of the discipline, while at the same time providing opportunities for extending anthropology along both theoretical and practical lines.
Selfish‐Gene Theory and Levels of Selection
Authors: Dickins Thomas E.
Published: September 2018

The generic nature of Darwinian evolution is discussed. A distinction between a special theory of evolution, embodied by selfish‐gene theory and inclusive fitness theory, and a general theory of evolution is introduced. The latter has no particular commitment to a level of selection and incorporates both classic group selection and more modern models of multilevel selection. These two positions are detailed and key literature reviewed.
Divorce
Authors: Simpson Bob
Published: September 2018

The preponderance of interest in association, belonging, and the formation of conjugal and family relationships has tended to obscure the ways in which these relationships are ended. Divorce is the catch‐all term for these endings. It marks both the formal and informal rearrangement of property, rights, and people and the emergence of new patterns of dependency and obligation. With the rise of divorce rates across the globe, the study of divorce as an expression of kinship rather than as the breakdown of the family represents an important area of future research.
Structuralism (Linguistic Anthropology)
Authors: Reynolds Jennifer F.
Published: September 2018

Linguistic anthropologists approach language as a complex, variable system that must be understood in relation to and through sociohistorical and ideological context(s) of use. This perspective is distinct from disciplinary trends in the related field of linguistics, which tend to delimit “language” as an abstract system that has its own internal logic, exhibiting universal, formal properties that are most effectively studied in isolation. This entry tracks the contemporaneous and parallel formation of Saussurean linguistic structuralism in linguistics and anthropology. It then examines how and when concepts from linguistic structuralism were taken up and reworked by linguistic anthropologists in order to adapt this theoretical perspective to the pursuit of understanding the nexus of language–culture–society. Overall, it underscores the dialectic of linguistic practices and language ideologies.
Anthropological Knowledge and Styles of Publication
Authors: Mathews Gordon
Published: September 2018

This entry discusses how anthropological knowledge has been contested throughout the discipline's history, in terms of theory and ethnography, and the different characterizations of anthropology as a science or as a discipline more akin to history. It then turns to who speaks in anthropology and the shift over half a century from European and American men investigating their countries' reservations and colonies to a discipline where women and men from across the globe are ethnographically investigating societies across the globe. It then turns to publication, considering the types of publications that are required of academic anthropologists for tenure and advancement and how the situation has changed in the past half‐century. Finally, it considers the role of English in academic anthropological publication, particularly in light of the growing emphasis on the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) ranked journals, and speculates as to how the growth of the internet may transform the world of publication.
Addiction
Authors: Zaluar Alba Maria
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have been part of a long debate on the social and individual processes of drug use, arguing that community and culture matter more than pathologies. Historically, the consumption of alcohol and other drugs was restricted to festivals that enhanced sociability, increased solidarity, and lessened social conflict in ritual contexts. Taking drugs is a learned activity; socialization about what to use, how, when, and with whom was the best way to control consumption and abuse. Globalization provoked changes in traditional societies, affecting hierarchies, markets, and the production and use of drugs. Critical anthropologists call attention to a political economy approach in which addiction becomes a political issue. Nowadays, an interdisciplinary perspective joins anthropologists, psychologists, epidemiologists, and neuroscientists in the debate about the best policies for dealing with abuse and with discrimination against drug addicts.
Bells
Authors: Panopoulos Panayotis
Published: September 2018

The bell is a generic term for different kinds of percussion, idiophone, instruments, struck with either a clapper or a stick. Bells are used in religious, secular, ritual, or everyday contexts to summon people, control activities, make urgent announcements, commemorate important events, celebrate and create all kinds of collectivities. Historians and anthropologists have studied the significance that various societies and cultures accord to the sounding of bells in their pursuit of a sense of place and belonging in symbolic communities.
Adaptability
Authors: Mcelroy Ann
Published: September 2018

The characteristically high potential of humans to cope with environmental adversity through a range of genetic, physiological, morphological, and cultural responses is termed “adaptability” in human biology. This trait facilitated prehistoric migrations to diverse biomes and survival in a wide range of climates and ecosystems. Human adaptability research began with comparative regional fieldwork, including the study of responses to hypoxia in the Andes, microevolutionary differences in tropical South America, thermoregulation in East Africa, and cold adaptation among circumpolar peoples. Current emphases include research on the impacts of health disparities within societies and across geopolitical regions and genomic analysis of intergenerational trade‐offs. Four main dimensions of adaptability have been demonstrated: adaptation, accommodation, plasticity, and resilience. Future studies will increase the biocultural understanding of human health and adaptability, with important examples including the long‐term epigenetic effects of adversity and the embodiment of health inequalities.
Markets
Authors: Endres Kirsten W.
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists generally agree that markets are embedded in wider social and political institutions, albeit to differing degrees and in historically and culturally distinct ways. Their perspectives on markets thus differ from those of neoclassical economists and challenge the view that human economic behavior is guided by universal principles. Anthropological studies of markets are typically grounded in research conducted in actual marketplace settings that range from peasant marketing systems in agrarian societies to urban street markets in the global South. Recent works have also turned their attention to global capital markets. In their variegated forms and dynamics, markets and marketplaces provide an effective lens through which anthropologists have addressed a panoply of issues, including market–society–state dynamics, rural development, urban transformation, gender, morality, and neoliberal subject formation.
Friendship and Social Networks
Authors: Binder Jens F.
Published: September 2018

Friendships constitute important ties in personal communities and support networks, yet they are challenging to define and operationalize in research. Friendships vary cross‐culturally and in their similarity to kinship ties. They typically follow an implicit social contract based on the exchange of social provisions, emotional closeness, and interpersonal trust. Networks built on friendships play an important role for the development of an individual's psychosocial adjustment and for the self‐concept. Of major theoretical concern are the constraints, physical, social, and cognitive, operating on friendship formation and maintenance since these suggest limits on the number and quality of friendships an individual can maintain. Further, internet services, social media, and communication devices carry the potential to facilitate and support socializing with friends and network building.
Values
Authors: Fischer Ronald
Published: September 2018

Values are a central construct in the social sciences. This entry provides a brief history of the study of values in anthropology and related disciplines. The legacy of the work by Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck with communities in the Southwestern United States has shaped the study of values in cultural research and strongly influenced dominant value models by Geert Hofstede and Shalom Schwartz. Contemporary issues in the study of values are then reviewed, including the distinctiveness of personal versus cultural value systems, the importance of values for studying cultures, and the origins of value differences across societies.
Cooperation
Authors: Umbreş Radu , Baumard Nicolas
Published: September 2018

Cooperation is defined as any action that benefits others at a cost to the actor. Ethnographic and experimental research has shown that human cooperation is both universal and highly variable. This entry presents recent advances in the study of cooperation. It begins with a description of the experimental method used to study cooperation. It then explains the two kinds of evolutionary theories of cooperation (individual and group selection). Finally, a few anthropological topics—religion, rituals, and social trust—are discussed in the light of recent progress in cooperation research.
Classroom Ethnography
Authors: Bloome David , Beauchemin Faythe
Published: September 2018

Classroom ethnography is a principled approach to the study of classroom life grounded in cultural, social, and linguistic anthropology. It involves an iterative and responsive engagement with the dialectics of theoretical framing, logic of inquiry, empirical fieldwork and data analysis, and the construction of a representation of classroom life. Heuristically, classroom ethnographies can be categorized as ethnographies of the classroom and ethnographies in the classroom, with the former contributing to the knowledge base in the social sciences and the latter contributing to the knowledge base in the field of education and to educational policy and practice. Among the goals of classroom ethnography have been countering deficit models of students from nondominant communities and the problematizing and redefining of key constructs associated with classroom life.
Sacred Space
Authors: Rao Ursula
Published: September 2018

Sacred space has an ambivalent status. It is located in the here and now and at the same time functions as an opening to another world. Sacred spaces are thresholds to a larger universe. They allow humans to communicate with gods and spirits. To capture the ways in which spiritual power is enshrined in places, buildings or landscapes, it is necessary to consider the association of sacred spaces with material objects, collective rituals, and bodily orientations. Sacred spaces may be known, demarcated or even embellished, or they could be unknown, hidden, and secret. Identifying and appropriately treating them requires the agency of mediating personnel. Religious authorities facilitate rituals that enliven sacred spaces and maintain their holy status. The body is central to this process. It engages in a dialectical process of making space holy and absorbing the sacred energy of cosmologically significant spaces.
Deportation
Authors: De Genova Nicholas
Published: September 2018

Deportation is a term that has only recently found a place in the history of anthropological theory and is not the sort of event that can be easily subjected to ethnographic study. As the now‐ubiquitous “remedy” to illegalized migration, however, deportation has become central to the experiences of a vast array of diverse migrant communities as well as migrant‐sending communities, on a global scale, and must therefore be considered inseparable from the anthropology of migration.
Gender and
I
slam
Authors: Rozario Santi
Published: September 2018

The way in which Islam is practiced varies from culture to culture, so ideally an understanding of gender in Islam has to be contextualized to specific cultures. This variation in gender practice across Islamic cultures was much more pronounced historically. However, in recent decades Muslims across the globe have had to come to terms with contemporary Islamic movements and new purist forms of Islam in the context of a volatile political climate and an oppositional stance between the Islamic East and the Christian and secular West. Many Muslims have felt under pressure to demonstrate their loyalty and return to the path of “authentic” Islam. The behavior of Muslim women has come to symbolize Islamic identity and the wearing of the veil has become a marker of Islamic tradition. While this new purist Islam is constraining, it also has the potential to be emancipatory for women and gender relations.
Masculinities and Militarization
Authors: Dvorak Greg
Published: September 2018

Men are not inherently prone to violence, fighting, or war, and masculinity is not, by default, militaristic. However, the military is historically a masculinist institution that imposes and reinforces gender norms in society; it is an arbiter of which masculinities serve the state, and it influences how people perceive themselves as men or women. The process of militarization is intimately associated with masculinities: armed forces select or reject candidates based on exemplary masculine ideals (even when recruiting women), and armies have long played a major role in initiating young men into manhood and citizenship. Militarization creates not only ranks within the prevailing political order between soldiers but also hierarchies between desirable and undesirable masculinities in society, between friend and enemy, and between occupier and occupied. The military also disciplines, shapes, and thus masculinizes the body.
Genocide
Authors: Gandsman Ari E. , Vanthuyne Karine
Published: September 2018

The term “genocide” was formulated by Raphael Lemkin in the aftermath of the Nazi atrocities of World War
II
and became entrenched in emerging international law in 1948 by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Questions over what constitutes genocide, however, were raised immediately and remain an important source of debate. We review these debates and then turn to anthropology's relation with both the phenomenon and study of genocide. As anthropologists became more attentive to large‐scale global processes and began focusing on the state, studies of larger‐scale violent conflict and eventually genocide became more common. A reckoning with genocide also formed part of anthropology's self‐critique in coming to terms with its past relationship to colonial projects. Anthropological involvements with genocide now include diverse engagements such as providing evidence in legal proceedings, explaining why genocide occurs, and examining everyday life in its aftermath.
Climate Change
Authors: Crate Susan
Published: September 2018

Anthropology's engagement with climate change spans the life of the field, with most of that engagement in archaeology and environmental anthropology investigating interactions of climate change and societies past. The past several decades have seen a steadily increasing development of anthropology engaging contemporary, anthropogenic climate change, using the discipline's earlier foundations with climate change in the past but also increasingly spanning the field's subdisciplines and working in interdisciplinary contexts. Anthropological skill sets and ways of knowing are critical to understanding the diversity of ways that human cultures perceive and act as unprecedented change unfolds.
Essentialism
Authors: McIntosh Janet
Published: September 2018

Essentialism is a way of conceptualizing categories as if they obtain naturally, intrinsically, or metaphysically in the world, rather than being constructed by human myths and social dynamics. Essentialist thinking is frequently applied to so‐called “natural kinds” and “social kinds,” as well as to putative human qualities and other elaborated cultural concepts. In essentialist discourse, category members are portrayed as deeply similar and naturally bound together, and as intractably, primordially, or absolutely the way they are, sometimes having some kind of essence or “stuff” (usually invisible) that determines their properties or behavior. Contemporary sociocultural anthropologists tend to be antiessentialist in their professional writings, yet many anthropologists recognize essentialism is a recurrent mode of thought and discourse in most of the communities they study and write about and one that begs for ethnographic attention. Social theorists, then, strive to avoid essentialism in themselves, while studying its vibrant existence in others.
Ethnobiology and Cognition
Authors: Ross Norbert , Hertzog Werner B.
Published: September 2018

For cognitive scientists, ethnobiology constitutes a domain that allows exploration of the developing mind in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. Anthropologists show particular concern with the development, maintenance, and change of ethnobiological knowledge and the resulting consequences for behavior. Research in this area relates work from the cognitive sciences with studies on institutions and behavior in relation to resource management and conflict over natural resources. Closely related to these questions are those that concern the acquisition, transmission, and transformation of knowledge, children's learning, transmission and transformation of knowledge across cultures and generations, and the loss of biological knowledge. These different questions link anthropology to broader work in education, political science, and research topics such as globalization, ontology, and practice theory. Addressing those issues, questions of ethnobiology and cognition connect to theoretical questions about culture and cultural processes.
M
ariátegui,
J
osé
C
arlos (1894–1930)
Authors: Rice Mark
Published: September 2018

José Carlos Mariátegui was a Peruvian Marxist intellectual and political leader born in 1894. In 1928, Mariátegui formed the Socialist Party of Peru, which he led until his death in 1930. Despite his relatively short career, Mariátegui wrote extensively on themes of Marxism, nationalism, and Andean indigenous culture and politics. Mariátegui argued in favor of adapting Marxist theories to Latin American social and political realities, which were fundamentally different from Europe. In particular, Mariátegui argued that Latin American Marxism needed to place indigenous and agrarian communities at the center of political change. Reevaluated as being far‐sighted for their time, Mariátegui's writings captured the interest of New Leftist movements and humanist scholars later in the twentieth century.
Ochre and Human Evolution
Authors: Watts Ian
Published: September 2018

Red ochre and hematite are the most widely used body paints and cosmetics. Their use extends back half a million years. Ethnographically, the most widespread context of use is in collective ritual. The uniformitarian principle would suggest that cosmetic usage—and possibly collective ritual—is of similar antiquity. How this intuitive insight might be placed on a firmer footing and inform understanding of the evolution of collective ritual and symbolic culture remains a fundamental challenge.
Dumont,Louis (1911–98)
Authors: Kapferer Bruce
Published: September 2018

Louis Dumont's two major contributions are discussed: his understanding of caste in India and his development of a methodology for comparison in anthropology. Stress is placed on his attempt to overcome Eurocentrism, involving the universalization of North American and European values. In the main the significance of Dumont's work rests with regard to the latter and it is this that guides the discussion. Dumont's holism is presented as an effort to free structuralism from its embeddedness in the dualism of Western value and to expose anthropology to the analytical benefits of other systems of value—hence the general significance of his analysis of caste in India. Dumont's approach to ideology is also stressed as a system of value that works at depth rather than at the surface.
Humor and Laughter
Authors: Wasilewska Ewa
Published: September 2018

Studying laughter is not a laughing matter. Humor is a serious issue for scientific enquiry. However, the origins, evolution, and functions of humor and laughter still remain a mystery to the scholarly world despite hundreds of theories of humor and observational studies of laughter. Although laughter is often a sought response to humor, it does not need humor to be triggered. Humor is a form of play but its success is not necessarily or solely appreciated by laughter. All humans are capable of producing laughter and enjoying humor but these two behaviors might not be unique to humans.
Filmmaking, Collaborative
Authors: Ferrarini Lorenzo
Published: September 2018

In visual anthropology, collaborative filmmaking designates a variety of practices that involve a widely variable degree of teamwork between filmmaker and subjects, who can share the authorship of the film in various proportions. Collaborative methodologies have been motivated by ethical, political, epistemological, and even technical reasons to produce films as different as ethnofictions or observational and reflexive documentaries. Further, they have been behind many indigenous media projects. Through devices such as feedback screenings, native forms of storytelling, dialogic editing, and reflexive autobiography, anthropologists have practiced shared authorship and acknowledged the intersubjective and negotiated character of ethnographic fieldwork.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Authors: Waldstein Anna
Published: September 2018

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) refers to a wide array of healing strategies and therapeutic techniques that are not part of (mainstream) biomedicine but may be used alongside or instead of it. CAM ranges from the use of acupuncture to help manage the symptoms of chronic illness (while reducing the need for prescription medications), to the employment of spiritual healers in hospitals that serve indigenous peoples, to reliance on home remedies and folk healers by undocumented migrants and people who live in remote areas with no rural clinics. An ever‐increasing demand for complementary and alternative medicines both challenges the global dominance of biomedicine and also provides new opportunities for improving it through the integration of other healing modalities.
Reception
Authors: Peterson Mark Allen
Published: September 2018

The concept of reception is used primarily in theories of communication to describe situations in which a person or set of persons receives information or messages from one or more other persons. In media studies, reception becomes the study of how people receive, interpret, understand, and act according to messages they have received. Reception theories that posited direct effects between messages and receivers were influential in early development studies but fell out of favor as empirical evidence undermined the central assumptions associated with them. Reception theories associated with cultural studies also enjoyed a considerable vogue among ethnographers interested in how media texts were being consumed and interpreted in local communities. In recent years, reception theories have declined in influence in anthropology because of changes in technologies—notably the rise of social media—and increasing attention to practice theories by media anthropologists.
Health Determinants
Authors: Allotey Pascale
Published: September 2018

Determinants of health are factors external to the individual that influence the health status and health outcomes of individuals and groups in society. These factors interact in complex ways and the effects are situationally and temporally dependent. Ultimately, however, they determine the distribution of health across populations. As a discipline with the tools to explore and theorize the nature of cultural, social, and political processes, anthropology has an important role in enhancing the understanding of the determinants of health and in the development and implementation of strategies that address these determinants. This role is critical if we are to make improvements to the equity in health outcomes.
Needs Assessment, Baseline Studies of
Authors: Altschuld James W. , (Sonya) Hung Hsin‐Ling , Lee Yi‐Fang
Published: September 2018

This entry provides definitions and sample statements of need and then presents a model for conducting assessments. Next it explores the origins of needs assessment up to the present day with a rationale for such work. Finally, it summarizes several needs‐based studies with ties to anthropological thinking and then provides a concluding note.
Relevance
Authors: Wharton Tim
Published: September 2018

The “frame” problem in logic presents the following challenge: produce a logical formula that describes the effects of a particular action without having to write corresponding formulae for the trivially obvious noneffects of that action. The problem has epistemological consequences. When processing a new fact, how do we sift through the vast amount of irrelevant information we have at our disposal and decide what is relevant? This entry addresses this question by focusing on the concept of relevance as used in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory. Relevance theory is an approach to cognition and communication that has had a huge influence not only in pragmatics but also in a range of different disciplines. The entry places the theory in its historical context, presents the central tenets of the theory, and explores a range of applications that relevance theory has in the natural and social sciences.
Population Issues in Development
Authors: Gibson Mhairi A. , Lawson David W.
Published: September 2018

Population issues have an impact on many features of society, from where we live and work to the partnerships we form and how many children we raise. Understanding why population characteristics vary and how population change influences human behavior and wellbeing is central to development planning and policy making. Major areas of interest include population dynamics, such as fertility trends, aging, and migration, and interactions between population and environment, culture and health. Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of population studies: issues in development are tackled by scholars from demography, epidemiology, sociology, economics, and anthropology. Anthropology in particular encourages a holistic and critical perspective on the interrelationship between the demographic characteristics of a society (fertility, mortality, and migration) and their economic, biological, social, and historical context. These contributions offer the possibility of predicting future population change and highlight the importance of local contingencies in determining the success or failure of development initiatives.
Communism
Authors: Martin Keir
Published: September 2018

Anthropology has had a direct influence on the development of modern communism. In particular, the concept of “primitive communism” derived from ethnographic accounts has been used to demonstrate the possibility of social life being organized on a cooperative basis. Throughout the twentieth century, such accounts have often been critiqued by anthropologists for being based on an evolutionary model of society and for a romanticizing picture of non‐Western societies. However, an interest in the possibility of communism remains important for some anthropologists today, as much as a potentiality that is ever present in all societies instead of a relic of an earlier stage of social evolution.
Energy Issues in Development
Authors: Henfrey Thomas
Published: September 2018

Although central to all aspects of social life, energy is largely a neglected area in most areas of anthropology, ecological anthropology aside. Anthropological contributions to wider debates on energy, development, and social change are also rather marginal, despite the unique insights anthropological theory and method can provide. With energy at the heart of many crucial global debates today, and in particular the urgent need to adopt trajectories toward a zero‐carbon global society in order to mitigate climate change, new perspectives that can help inform planned changes in human relationships with energy—and negotiate unplanned changes—are vital. Such perspectives can come from a range of anthropological fields. In many of these, anthropologists and other social researchers have abandoned pretensions of detachment and objectivity in order to make significant contributions to informing, shaping, and mobilizing social movements dedicated to creating low‐energy and zero‐carbon postindustrial societies.
Resilience and Complex Adaptive Systems
Authors: Henfrey Thomas
Published: September 2018

Social–ecological resilience describes the ability of complex adaptive systems to negotiate and respond creatively to change. Its origins combine understanding of the structure and dynamics of ecological systems with findings from anthropology—particularly human ecology and indigenous knowledge—and other social sciences. Key concepts are theadaptive cycle, a four‐stage pattern of change common to many complex adaptive systems, andpanarchy, the way that adaptive cycles interact across spatial and temporal scales. The newer concept of community resilience integrates social–ecological resilience with insights from previously unrelated concepts of resilience in developmental psychology, disaster response, and community development and has been operationalized in a range of practical fields. In response to rhetorical use of vernacular concepts of resilience to justify conservative agendas in mainstream political discourse, overt politicization of resilience science is becoming increasingly common.
Human–Animal Relations
Authors: Knight John
Published: September 2018

Human–animal relations is a relatively new interdisciplinary field of studies. Instead of studying humans and animals in isolation from one another, the focus is on understanding the connections between them. Having long documented the importance of nonhuman animals in the lives of the people it studies, sociocultural anthropology has much to contribute to this field. But the term “human–animal relations,” while a convenient shorthand, should be treated with caution. The entry identifies and discusses a number of problems associated with the term and its framing of the animal connection.
Nongovernmental Organizations
Authors: Curtis Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Anthropological research on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) considers their proliferation since the late twentieth century and their frequent performance of statelike roles. This scholarship speaks directly to how anthropology understands political action and the production of states and subjects. Themes of this work are rooted in the discipline's history of development research and are also shaped by critical social theory, political–economic changes, and the structural position of anthropology as a profession. Anthropology makes distinctive contributions to the study of NGOs, in the form of contextualized, ethnographic studies of social actors and processes, and engages with pressing matters of public interest, such as inequality and climate change.
Gender and Migration
Authors: Dragojlovic Ana
Published: September 2018

From an anthropological perspective, migration needs to be approached not only from the economic viewpoint but also as a phenomenon that is culturally and socially situated. As one of the main organizing principles of social life, gender is an important aspect of migration. Anthropologists theorize gender and migration as mutually constituted.
M
organ,
L
ewis
H
enry (1818–81)
Authors: Feeley‐Harnik Gillian
Published: September 2018

Lewis Henry Morgan was a lawyer in western New York State who studied Native American history, geography, and culture as an avocation until the mid‐1860s, when he retired on his investments to do research full time. An idealist concerning the role of education and invention in social reform, he eventually repudiated the “property career” he posited as the basis of “modern civilization,” and the root of growing inequity, and advocated a return to the communal egalitarianism he saw in the “ancient society” of the Iroquois. Acclaimed by his contemporaries as the “father of American anthropology” for his work on kinship, social organization, and human history, he was also a pioneer in the study of animal behavior and ecology.
Participatory Development
Authors: Arce Alberto M. G. , Fisher Eleanor
Published: September 2018

Participatory development is a process of taking into account people's agency in development by involving them in decision making over planning processes that affect their lives. This permits them to exercise their right to challenge established values and institutions. Against universal and top‐down solutions put forward by development experts, participation raises the central issue of reflexivity while suggesting how different forms of knowledge, power, and agency relate to one another in actors' lives.
Indigeneity in Anthropology
Authors: Ellison Susan
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists interested in the lived experiences and politics of indigenous peoples have turned their analyses inward, interrogating how the discipline itself has influenced settler–colonial governance projects, popular conceptualizations of indigeneity, and indigenous claims to sovereignty and recognition. This review pivots around three major thematics driving twenty‐first‐century scholarship of indigeneity in anthropology. The first entails the ways indigeneity itself is construed, contested, and asserted, including the racial formations of settler colonialism and regimes of
mestizaje
. The second involves persistent dilemmas of indigenous–state relations, questions of sovereignty and citizenship, and recognition politics. The third section links demands for meaningful decolonization with ongoing debates about the politics of anthropological knowledge production and ethnographic refusal. A fourth and final section examines what anthropologists have dubbed the “ontological turn.”
Love
Authors: Lindholm Charles
Published: September 2018

Romantic love was once little studied by anthropologists, who saw it as a modern Western delusion. However, of late this has changed. Four paradigmatic approaches to the analysis of romantic love are outlined here. One sees romantic attachment as a reaction to alienation, another sees it as an evolutionary adaptation, a third sees it as a cultural construct, and a fourth combines these elements.
Indian Anthropological Association (IAA)
Authors: Patnaik Soumendra Mohan
Published: September 2018

The Indian Anthropological Association (IAA), the premier body of professional anthropologists in India, has pursued the goal of making anthropology meaningful in public life since its inception in 1964.
Indian Anthropologist
, the official journal of the association, contains anthropological insights on complex social processes with implications for development policy and practice. The IAA has five regional chapters that carry out its goals and highlight regional concerns in India. It celebrated its golden jubilee in 2014 along with Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology in Chiba, Japan, during the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences inter‐congress held in May of that year.
Censorship
Authors: Hultin Niklas
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have addressed censorship as a practice within specific communities and as an instrument of state power. Anthropologists have also examined the impact of censorship on anthropological practice. Anthropologists' engagement with censorship can be divided into three broad and overlapping areas: censorship as an external limitation on anthropological practice, censorship and its effects within specific communities, and censorship as a part of state power.