bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Homo Sacer
Authors: Rajaram Prem Kumar
Published: September 2018

Homo sacer
is a term of Roman law used by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to denote a distinction between politicized and bare life. Agamben argues that this distinction is central to the current political condition. This political condition is marked by the regularization of states of exception, where the normal law of sovereign authority does not apply, and where
homo sacer
is actively produced. This production shores up the borders of the political norm, distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate forms of life. Illegitimate and bare life is outside of the scope of the norm but is at the same time the central constitutive component of modern sovereignty. This entry explores Agamben's thinking on
homo sacer
and assesses its strength and limits against historicized accounts of politics, refugees, and the camp (the state of exception par excellence).
Political Discourse
Authors: Riskedahl Diane
Published: September 2018

The study of discourse directs our attention to how the words we use are central to both our perception of social reality and to the actual formation of that reality. The anthropological approach to political discourse anchors texts and talk within contexts of use in which control, persuasion, and domination occur. This allows for the study of the dialogic emergence of politics as well the integration of such issues as audience reception and circulation of discourses. Struggles for power are evident at the levels of language structure, patterns of interaction, and broader discursive formations. Recent work attends to agency, multimodality, ideology, political economy, and materiality.
Charity and Philanthropy
Authors: Alexander Catherine
Published: September 2018

Anthropological analyses of charity are often based on Maussian theories of gift exchange and inequalities between donor and recipient, sometimes compounded by spectacular displays of giving or by aid, both humanitarian and faith‐based, from the global North to the South. Other accounts complicate this understanding, variously showing the charitable gift as the recipient's right or considering charitable work as a technology of self care. The context and nature of the donation also affect both donor and recipient; money and blood have very different connotations and effects as charitable gifts. Ethnographies of charitable action suggest it is a total social fact, entangling economics, politics, religion, and notions of relatedness.
Biopower
Authors: Yang Jie
Published: September 2018

This entry concerns the concept of biopower and its historical development and recent application in contemporary societies, including biopower's intersection with affect, imagination, potentiality, and molecule technology. The analysis focuses on the contested perspectives on the continued relevance of this notion today. While some scholars argue that biopower, which Foucault developed to explain a mode of power emerging at the threshold of modernity, fails to capture the contemporary development, particularly of life sciences, others continue to relate to and find inspiration in Foucault's original writings on the subject.
Agroforestry
Authors: Aumeeruddy‐Thomas Yildiz , Michon Geneviève
Published: September 2018

Research in agroforestry in the 1970s was inspired by a large body of agroforestry practice that had developed historically through farmers' knowledge. Trees, crops, and/or livestock associations follow patterns that differ according to biocultural, social, economic, and political contexts. Interactions between wild and cultivated components is a key feature in agroforestry. Trees represent opportunities for producing food and a diversity of products for local livelihoods and market demands within management systems that are based on local ecological dynamics. Trees also serve as symbols linking agroforests strongly to collective identity, territory, and external political forces. Farmer agroforestry practices represent the major driver for tree domestication across the planet. Different forms of tree domestication are a result of the trees' direct morphological response to farmers' actions and interconnected social, economic, and political drivers affecting forests, territories, and livelihoods. New perspectives in agroforestry relate to environmental issues, resilience, and new social networks.
Heritage
Authors: MacDonald Sharon
Published: September 2018

Heritage has emerged as a key area of contemporary anthropological concern, with debates previously framed in terms of culture and tradition now being discussed as heritage. The rise of anthropological interest in heritage is a response to the configuration of culture and cultural debate in terms of heritage and to an anthropological turn within heritage practice itself. While anthropological studies have shown heritage being used instrumentally for ideological or commercial reasons, a major contribution of anthropological study has been to challenge reductive interpretations and to highlight local and indigenous complexities and understandings. Anthropology has also shown how heritage is used reflexively, for culture making as well as for provoking reflection upon relationships between past, present, and future. An expanded anthropology of heritage also needs to address ways of bringing the past into the present that are not explicitly defined as heritage.
Creationism
Authors: Lebner Ashley
Published: September 2018

This entry gives a snapshot of the history of creationism, a phenomenon that mostly refers to the Protestant antievolutionist movement that began in the United States during the 1960s. It also addresses how certain proponents, who have sought to have a more scientific creationism included in US public school curricula, have ultimately faced US court rulings declaring scientific creationism to be biblically founded and thus unconstitutional for teaching in public schools. It then discusses how, despite setbacks, creationism of all kinds is nevertheless expanding globally and through other religious traditions.
Quality‐of‐Life Issues in Development
Authors: Thin Neil
Published: September 2018

Quality of life (QoL), synonymous with wellbeing, has grown in importance in planning and learning worldwide. It is associated with systematic learning strategies that use indicators from several domains, including mind, body, society, and environment. Normally, subjective experiences are considered, as well as objective observations, hence QoL research can be involved in the development of empathic planning and should emphasize qualitative and narrative methods. In principle, QoL assessment emphasizes outcomes, but the value of QoL is often compromised by confusion of means and ends. QoL assessment can involve attention shifts from remedial work to more aspirational planning. It requires realistic attention to cultural relativity and to contextual variety in reference standards, without necessarily compromising on aspirations toward universal standards. The developmental value of QoL learning strategies may derive as much from the learning processes as from the functional uses of the information generated.
Peacekeeping
Authors: Rubinstein Robert A.
Published: September 2018

Peacekeeping is a conflict intervention technique typically using military units and civilians from many nations. Mostly these interventions take place under the auspices of the United Nations, though some are sponsored by regional organizations. Originally a way of managing conflicts by monitoring ceasefires or armistice agreements made between warring states, peacekeeping has come to be used for a variety of other purposes. These uses include preventive diplomacy, expeditionary intervention in “failed states,” postconflict state building, and election monitoring and transitional administration. Anthropological contributions to the analysis and practice of peacekeeping include analyzing the role of cultural factors in the development, design, and deployment of peacekeeping missions, and the relation of peacekeepers to local populations. Anthropological studies also take a critical perspective on peacekeeping, examining the ways in which missions reproduce and extend Western neoliberal ideas of governance or support the political status quo and institute neocolonial practices.
Peace
Authors: Rubinstein Robert A.
Published: September 2018

Peace is studied in biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology. Explored are the ways in which human societies have managed to live in relative harmony among themselves, how they have interacted constructively with others, and what are the conditions that lead to violence and war. Enduring issues in this area of research include the extent to which violence and war are part of the human biological heritage, how violence and war occurred in prehistory, the effects of inequalities within societies on peace, collective mobilization to achieve social justice, alternatives to war, and anthropological contributions to shaping international security policies and actions. The anthropology of peace embraces studies and activism that range from the close examination of individual experiences to the broadest macrolevel analyses and policies.
Lines
Authors: Ossman Susan
Published: September 2018

While “lines” have always played a role in anthropology, both literally and metaphorically, new connections between art and anthropology and increased attention to the sensory and extratextual aspects of fieldwork and to the presentation of findings have led anthropologists to become more cognizant of how thinking in lines and drawing can be fundamental to the research process and conceptualization. This entry presents an account of these changes from the perspective of a no. 2 pencil.
Self and Selfhood
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: September 2018

Debates about the concept of self have a long history in philosophy and anthropology and continue today in interdisciplinary discussions. The current range of theories about self include the idea that there is no such thing as selfhood, that there is a minimal self, that the self is constituted in narrative, that the self is socially constructed, and that the self is more than one thing.
Medical Anthropology
Authors: Singer Merrill
Published: September 2018

As an applied social science, medical anthropology not only examines specific health issues in biosocial context but also seeks to build a broad, theoretically based understanding of what health is, how culture/society and health interact, the role of social relations in shaping disease, the importance of the health/environment interface, and a range of other issues. This subdiscipline of anthropology has long had a broad mandate to understand and interpret human beings—their behavior, their diseases and illnesses, their medical systems, and the relationship of each to the encompassing, but changing, sociocultural system. Medical anthropology builds theory by integrating biological, cultural, and social factors into understandings of the origin and nature of ill‐health and human responses to it, while seeking to contribute to building effective and equitable local and national health care systems. In this way, medical anthropologists pursue the creation of a healthier world for both humanity and the biosphere.
Social Network Analysis
Authors: Lehmann Julia
Published: September 2018

Social network analysis is a powerful tool for investigating a wide variety of research questions relating to the structuring and dynamics of groups. A social network is a graphical representation of individuals (or other entities) and their interactions. The systematic analysis of these interaction patterns provides new insights into the causes and consequences of sociality beyond those gained by investigating dyadic relationships. This exciting analytical approach is now used in many scientific disciplines and is under constant development as the questions being addressed using social network analysis are changing.
Migration History
Authors: Oppenheimer Stephen
Published: September 2018

The question of where modern humans evolved and how they spread to where they are now is not new. Darwin suggested that humans evolved in and spread out from Africa. This insight, together with Darwin's notebook sketch of an evolutionary tree of descent, forms the conceptual basis of all attempts to map human migrations. While different species can be placed on a tree of descent using unique new morphological features, such specific, unambiguous innovations are inevitably less identifiable
within
the modern human species diaspora. Thus population trees inferred from multiple, less specific differences are less evolutionarily precise and are difficult to map or to date. By contrast, non‐recombining gene loci allow the creation of evolutionary lineage trees of descent both between and within species. Their mutation‐defined branches have been placed on the map, dated, and checked against the dated regional modern human fossil record to reconstruct ancient human migrations over the past 200,000 years.
B
ourdieu,
P
ierre (1930–2002)
Authors: Reed‐Danahay Deborah
Published: September 2018

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the leading French intellectuals of the twentieth century. Although he is most frequently referred to as a sociologist, he was also an anthropologist and ethnographer. Bourdieu's two most famous books are
Outline of a Theory of Practice
(1972) and
Distinction
(1984). He advocated a reflexive approach and a method of “participant objectivation” in order to undermine ideas positing a dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity in research. A prolific researcher and writer, Bourdieu contributed work touching upon the fields of anthropology, sociology, education, philosophy, linguistics, literary criticism, art history, economics, and politics. He conducted research in Algeria and in France. The concepts of habitus, social space, field, cultural capital, symbolic violence, and doxa are among his most well‐known contributions to social theory.
Built Environment
Authors: Marchand Trevor H. J.
Published: September 2018

The built environment can be defined as the combination of built structures and modified landscapes that support human life and livelihoods. It is made and continually remade and expanded through a dynamic mix of social interaction, competition, design and planning, physical labor, skilled craftsmanship, economic exchange, and cultural processes of place making and meaning making in the world. For all of these reasons, study of the built environment—for a long time the preserve of other disciplines—has become increasingly central to the concerns of many anthropologists. This entry reviews the history of anthropological neglect of and approaches to space, place, and architecture, and considers in turn the emergence of urban anthropology; the relation between space and power; the study of house, home, and homelessness; and phenomenological approaches to place before concluding with a discussion of heritage sites and constructions sites as fertile ground for future anthropological inquiry.
Counterinsurgency
Authors: Sluka Jeffrey A.
Published: September 2018

This entry defines counterinsurgency; identifies its basic theory, strategy, and flaws; and outlines its relationship with the discipline of anthropology through two eras—first, the Vietnam War and its aftermath and, second, the contemporary
US
‐led “war on terrorism” following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
Social Capital in Health Care
Authors: Murray Susan F.
Published: September 2018

Anthropological scholarship represents a relatively small but important strand within a large, contested multidisciplinary literature on social capital. Biocultural anthropologists have described the role of erosion of social capital in analyses examining causal chains between economic inequality and human biology. Network theorists have used social capital measures to analyze how individuals are connected within their social structures and access a range of socially valuable resources that affect their health. Other researchers have identified health care systems as sites where the interaction of social, cultural, and economic capitals are highly visible. In examining inequalities in access to health care services, these scholars see the unequal distribution of capital as a key mechanism of the social reproduction of power and privilege. While policy discussions referring to social capital have tended to ignore gender, race, class, and power relations, anthropological research has a key role to play in challenging and reframing its conceptual use.
Discourse
Authors: Prinsloo Mastin
Published: September 2018

“Discourse” refers to the idea that language is structured according to different patterns that people's situated text and talk take in different domains of social life. Discourse studies have included historical, ethnographic, political, cognitive, and linguistic directions of research and theory in the work of Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, Fairclough, Gee, and Žižek, among many others.
D
arwin,
C
harles, Influence on Anthropology of
Authors: Tuttle Russell H.
Published: September 2018

Charles Darwin provided a materialistic scientific alternative to belief(s) that human beings and other organisms are the products of creation or design by celestial being(s). His researches on organisms other than humans serve as models of what one can learn via careful observation, controlled comparisons, and experimentation. Personal ethnographic observations and biased methods that formed his opinions of the relative intellectual capacities of women and other‐than‐English, upper‐class fellow men had negative effects on social policy besides anthropology.
Sociobiology and Anthropology
Authors: Power Camilla
Published: September 2018

Edward O. Wilson'sSociobiology, published in 1975, proposed a program for unifying the natural and social sciences, with the humanities reduced to subdisciplines of biology. This provoked a huge controversy among academics, including scientists and social theorists, as well as political activists who denounced the project as biological–determinist. The American Anthropological Association debated whether to admit sessions on human sociobiology to their annual conference, while leading social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins critiqued the new “science” as an ideological projection of free‐market capitalism. Yet the special focus of sociobiology from its inception was to understand the evolution of cooperation.
Birthing Practices
Authors: Davis‐Floyd Robbie
Published: September 2018

This entry begins with an evolutionary perspective, summarizing anthropological findings that cultures that evolved midwifery traditions would likely have had a survival advantage. It describes the cultural overlays on the physiological processes of labor and birth as ritualized in ways that reflect the core values and beliefs of a given society and also reflect women's status in that society. Rich and nurturant birth traditions and practices tend to develop where women's status is high, and vice versa. The entry stresses the importance of place and practitioner. At home and in birth centers where midwives are the primary attendants, the physiological process is generally allowed to unfold at its own rhythm, whereas in hospitals, ritualized interventions that reflect cultural values on high technologies and the control of nature predominate, often leading to obstetric violence against women—which birth activists around the world are currently identifying as a major violation of women's human rights.
Protest
Authors: Juris Jeffrey S. , Khasnabish Alex
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have long been interested in exploring protest as a phenomenon rich in social, cultural, and political meaning. Distinguished by its cross‐cultural focus and ethnographic sensibility, anthropological research on protest movements has been grounded in people's lived realities rather than in the search for universalist laws or explanatory paradigms. Anthropologists have been at the forefront of “cultural–political” approaches to protest, viewing social movements as struggles at once symbolic and material. While anthropologists have been interested in various forms of contentious collective action since the discipline's academic consolidation at the turn of the twentieth century, practitioners have made particularly robust contributions to the study of protest and social movement activity since the mid‐1990s. Especially since the early 2000s, anthropologists have produced a rich body of work about protest, resistance, and alternative building, much of which has been carried out in an explicitly politically engaged mode, generating rich insights while raising important ethical considerations.
Informed Consent in Clinical and Clinical Research Settings
Authors: Townsend Anne
Published: September 2018

Obtaining informed consent is considered the cornerstone of ethical oversight in clinical practice and clinical research. It refers to how patients or research participants agree to receive particular treatments or procedures in the full knowledge and understanding of possible consequences in terms of risks and benefits. Anthropology helps us to understand the complexity of informed consent in illustrating how clinical and research encounters are embedded in cultural settings and conducted in diverse contexts. It provides a lens through which to examine communication between clinicians/researchers and patients/participants who bring different cultural understandings, experiences, perspectives, and knowledge to the consent process.
Conceptualism, Ethnographic
Authors: Ssorin‐Chaikov Nikolai
Published: September 2018

Ethnographic conceptualism (EC) is conceptual art conducted as ethnography and, conversely, ethnography conducted as conceptual art. EC originated in anthropological exhibition practices in Russia and echoes Moscow conceptualism's critical engagement with the ideology and aesthetics of state socialism. In contrast to ethnography as participant observation of what exists, EC explicitly constructs reality that it studies. EC's artistic aim is to remediate anthropological concepts, such as those of power, gift, relatedness, materiality, while its anthropological aim is to advance this discipline's methodology by using art projects as tools of ethnographic research and to contribute to performativity theory and symmetrical anthropology from this angle.
Violence and Warfare
Authors: Tate Winifred
Published: September 2018

Warfare increasingly has come under anthropological scrutiny since the 1960s. Anthropological study of war has been transformed as the discipline has expanded from the study of small‐scale societies to explore the state and oppositional political movements. The traditional anthropological attention to daily life, cultural meaning, and lived practice has contributed to the vast literature on the communal legacies of war, memory work, and accountability. The more recent turn to complex transnational bureaucracies has contributed to the small but growing scholarship examining military institutions, their ideologies, practices, and role in identity formation. Anthropology of war is particularly concerned with the impact of warfare on the social worlds of civilians as well as soldiers and as such is well suited for the study of guerrilla warfare and terrorist movements. Ethnographic study of war presents particular methodological challenges, including issues of access, safety, and the ethical uses of anthropological data during wartime.
Material Culture
Authors: Hahn Hans Peter
Published: September 2018

Material culture was among the first empirical fields of anthropology but rapidly lost its appeal with the arrival of new research methods at the beginning of the twentieth century. Inspired by semiotic theories, it received new interest from the 1970s onwards. More recently, the field of material culture has generated a substantial contribution to the development of anthropology in general. This claim is substantiated by explaining new methods like symmetrical anthropology and phenomenological approaches in ethnography and also through innovative fields of research like laboratory studies and consumption. Furthermore, in recent years material culture has proven fertile in providing new ways to overcome the crisis of representation by describing the complexity of different ontologies.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Authors: Dolan Catherine , Gilberthorpe Emma , Rajak Dinah
Published: September 2018

Corporate social responsibility (
CSR
) came into focus in the 1990s in response to mounting pressure from global‐, national‐, and local‐level institutions for corporations to be held accountable for moral failings—from financial scandals and environmental devastation to human rights abuses. It emerged as a platform to deliver sustainable development and address environmental and community development issues vis‐á‐vis commercial enterprise.
CSR
is now established within a web of standards that make up a burgeoning ethical industry. Building on the much longer history of anthropology of development, a growing field of ethnographic enquiry has emerged which asks how we begin to make sense of new
CSR
regimes, the practices they give rise to, both locally and globally, and the ways in which those practices reconfigure social and economic relations. An anthropology of
CSR
thus explores both the apparatus and architecture of
CSR
, as well as its local effects, contestations, interpretations, and responses.
Language, Social Origins of
Authors: Knight Chris
Published: September 2018

Language is utterly different from any known system of animal communication. Whether it evolved gradually or in a sudden leap remains a matter of debate. While the capacity for language is biological, its communicative use is social and its elaboration and historical diversification essentially cultural. The evolutionary origins of language are currently unknown.
State Formation
Authors: Nugent David , Suhail Adeem
Published: September 2018

Anthropological debates about state formation take two broad forms. One considers state formation as a set of organizational processes that culminate in a coercive institution called the state. The other approach considers state formation as a cultural process that creates the illusion that such an institution exists. It is by means of this illusion, or mask, that the intolerability of political subjection is made to appear as an inevitable and unremarkable feature of everyday life.
Intersubjectivity and Joint Attention
Authors: Baldwin Dare A. , Kosie Jessica E.
Published: September 2018

Psychological connection with others gives body and shape to human experience. Intersubjectivity—a mutuality of conscious connection between two or more individuals—lies at the heart of such psychological linkage. Intersubjectivity is central to human mental and emotional wellbeing. At the same time, it is a complex phenomenon, taking a diversity of forms, emerging developmentally, experienced to varying degrees across individuals and situations, and entwined with culture. This entry reviews what is currently understood about intersubjectivity and its close cousin, joint attention, offers some conjectures about these phenomena, and outlines new frontiers for investigation.
Religion and Science
Authors: Bafford Douglas
Published: September 2018

Anthropological study of the intersection of religion and science can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when “armchair” anthropologists were concerned with situating religion and science (along with magic) as developmental phases along a universal evolutionary scheme. Later scholars reacted against these models by placing greater emphasis on the simultaneous operation of religion and science within dynamic cultural systems. Attempts at a “science of religion” by approaching religion as a product of evolutionary influences on cognition characterize part of an emerging interdisciplinary field, while other researchers focus on the religious foundations and elements within scientific communities themselves. Through these studies, ethnographers have documented the creative ways in which people draw from both religious and scientific modes of thought and practice to construct unique cosmologies. Although the absolute separation of religion and science remains unclear, their integration in social life appears around the globe.
Fatherhood, Biosocial Perspectives on
Authors: Sheppard Paula
Published: September 2018

Paternal investment is a defining feature of human reproductive behavior; it is substantial compared with other primates and ubiquitous across cultures. However, given the trade‐offs that men face between mating and parenting effort, paternal investment is also a highly facultative trait both across and within cultures—and even within individuals. Ecological variability, between and within cultures, influences fathers' parental decision making and results in a complex collection of human fathering traits. Applying an evolutionary ecological perspective to human parenting sheds light on the facultative nature of human fatherhood.
Global Mental Health
Authors: Kohrt Brandon A. , Mendenhall Emily , Brown Peter J.
Published: September 2018

The global mental health movement has the mission to reduce the gap between the burden of mental illness and the availability of effective mental health services. This mission entails advocating for increased funding for mental health services and personnel, expanding research to develop evidence‐based practices for low‐resource settings. It has been proposed that this can be accomplished by advocating for increased funding for mental health services and personnel, expanding research to determine evidence‐based mental health treatments, development of government mental health policies, and advancing the human rights of persons with mental illness. Key topics from medical anthropology related to global mental health include universalism versus cultural relativism in psychopathology; culture‐bound syndromes and cultural concepts of distress; healing, belief, and meaning in ethnomedical traditions; critique of psychiatry and social–political–economic construction of labels; social suffering and structural violence; humanitarian disasters, complex emergencies, and the mental health and psychosocial support movement; and definitions of culture.
Evolutionary Psychology
Authors: Barrett Louise , Stulp Gert
Published: September 2018

Although the term “evolutionary psychology” would appear both simple and self‐explanatory, suggesting a rather straightforward application of evolutionary theory to both human and nonhuman psychology, appearances can be deceptive. The status of the discipline and its recent history are far from straightforward, and debates between various schools of thought have been rather fraught at times. This entry lays out the origins of evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, and gene–culture coevolutionary theory; explores their central tenets, and discusses the links between them. It also identifies areas of tension and discusses some of the criticisms leveled at these different approaches, from both within and outside the discipline. The need for a more pluralist, biosocial stance is considered, in which cultural explanations are not considered distinct from biological ones nor as complementary but as fully intertwined.
Interethnic Friction
Authors: De Oliveira João Pacheco
Published: September 2018

The expression interethnic friction indicates one of the primordial lines of inquiry in Brazilian ethnology. Rather than analytically treating indigenous societies as closed totalities, explicable solely in their own terms, researchers in this area emphasize the need to study the institutions and dynamics of interethnic contact. Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira set out the theoretical bases in the 1960s in dialogue with Marxist sociology, French Africanists, and theories of ethnic identity. The analytic concepts and schemas proposed were applied intensively in Brazil and spread to Mexico and, to a lesser extent, other South American countries. Subsequently, Brazilian researchers pursuing this line of investigation have focused on the importance of conflicts in the configuration of social relations, as well as the intrinsic polyphony and variability of social phenomena. More recently we can observe a significant convergence with the topics, problems, and hypotheses explored by leading authors in contemporary anthropology, especially in the area of postcolonial anthropology.
Egalitarianism, Evolution of
Authors: Townsend Cathryn
Published: September 2018

Theory on the evolution of egalitarianism and its relevance to anthropology is described in three sections. The first section carefully defines and delimits usage of the term egalitarianism in anthropology, outlines the form of social organization empirically observed in egalitarian societies, and clarifies the difference between egalitarian and acephalous societies. The second section describes multidisciplinary perspectives on the egalitarian disposition and behaviors found in humans and how these contrast with those of nonhuman primates. Theories on how these behaviors and dispositions may have evolved are summarized. Finally, the roles of gender relations, sexual reproduction strategies, and cooperative breeding are mentioned in relation to the theory on the evolution of egalitarianism.
Argentina, Anthropology in
Authors: Guber Rosana
Published: September 2018

Anthropology in Argentina evolved through a complex and multisited process in which the Central European disciplines of prehistory, Volkskunde, and Völkerkunde were replaced by modern archaeology and social/cultural anthropology, closer to British, American, and French orientations. Although this process took longer than other countries' anthropologies, Argentine scholars managed to update their intellectual formation and join the Latin American debates after harsh political persecution, suffering, and exile in the mid‐1970s. In Argentine anthropologists' historical view, political and academic compromiso (commitment) are the hallmarks of Argentine anthropological work.
Capability Approach
Authors: Klein Elise
Published: September 2018

The capability approach is a normative evaluative framework that has advanced assessments of human societies beyond economic growth. The centrality of agency, pluralism, and freedom makes the capability approach attractive for many social science disciplines and policy makers. Nonetheless, it is not a complete tool and needs to be augmented with explanatory social theories such as anthropology.
A
ustralia and
A
otearoa/
N
ew
Z
ealand, Language Research in
Authors: Kral Inge
Published: September 2018

Focusing on ethnography as one of the defining characteristics of socially oriented language research, this entry surveys the relationship between language and communication and the role played by language in the cultural and social lives of individuals and communities in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. While much language research in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand has mirrored linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics internationally, distinctively different trends have also emerged, yielding a picture of language research that is oriented around indigenous languages, migrant languages and a range of sociopolitical issues.
Immigration
Authors: Newendorp Nicole
Published: September 2018

Anthropological studies of immigration foreground the experiences of migrants and examine migration as a historically contextualized process linking together sending and receiving regions. This entry examines three major anthropological contributions to migration studies, including: patterns of movement that predominate in contemporary global migration flows (such as regional flows, feminization of migration, and transnationalism), practices of migration (i.e., the role of networks in initiating and sustaining flows and changes in family dynamics), and power relations inherent to these patterns and practices (through regulatory processes defining citizenship categories and possibilities of social inclusion and/or integration in the nation‐state).
Socialism,Marxist–Leninist–Maoist
Authors: Thelen Tatjana
Published: September 2018

Socialism can be studied as a set of ideas or theories, as a form of political organization or a range of economic principles. Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism constitute the main variants of socialism. Socialist theory took inspiration from early anthropological findings. In turn, its ideas influenced anthropological research on sharing practices and on societies categorized as egalitarian. Emergent socialist states sought to translate these theories into economic and political practice. Anthropological research on socialism turned its focus to the study of the former Soviet Union and its European allies and increasingly came to rely on economic analyses. This development also influenced research after the fall of socialism in the region. Socialism still constitutes an interesting field of inquiry, with regard not only to the legacies of “actually existing socialism” but also to emergent forms of identity constructions and political as well as economic practices influenced by socialist ideas and theories.
Forensic Anthropology
Authors: Black Sue
Published: September 2018

Forensic anthropology is the analysis of the human body, or what remains of the body, for the medicolegal purpose of establishing identity. It is a multidisciplinary endeavor that applies the knowledge of biological anthropology and human osteology to cases where human remains are skeletonized or where a detailed understanding of the growth and development, morphology, or norms of the human body can assist other disciplines in positive identification. Forensic anthropology is a highly specialized area of expertise that requires thorough professional education and training for a practitioner to be able to operate as an expert witness to the courts. To limit the definition of forensic anthropology to the process of identification from the skeleton is outdated and inappropriate.
Economy, Feminist Approaches to
Authors: Narotzky Susana
Published: September 2018

Feminist approaches to the economy question many taken‐for‐granted dichotomies that define what counts as economic practices. By critiquing the methodological separation between private and public realms, feminist scholars point to the political and ideological aspects of economic differentiation. The concept of social reproduction that includes biological, cultural, and systemic aspects of the continuity of a society is central to feminist understandings of the economy. These approaches have contributed new perspectives on the articulation of paid and unpaid work. They have underlined the specificities of care work and the complexity of transnational care chains. Finally a key contribution of feminism is the unsettling of methodological individualism at the heart of mainstream economic theory.
Pocock,DavidFrancis (1928–2007)
Authors: Street Brian
Published: September 2018

Pocock was a major figure in the shifts in social anthropology from a more “scientific” and functionalist approach to a more interpretative approach. In this he helped to reintroduce the potential for a more reflexive and humanistic anthropology; his own distinctive contribution was in developing the concept of “personal anthropology.” In that spirit the entry cross‐references the Mass Observation project, which Pocock directed for a while and which also involved attention to respondents' own representations and perceptions.
Deserts and Desertification
Authors: Spooner Brian
Published: September 2018

Deserts are areas that lack the natural resources to support settled human life. Besides the polar regions, they are found in the arid zones of the northern and southern hemispheres. The significance of deserts in human history is a product of the relationship between climate change and human adaptation. Since social processes extend beyond the boundaries of ecosystems, life in desert areas varies according to the historical relationship of humans with the surrounding region. For this reason, although most deserts in the New World and the southern hemisphere were inhabited by foraging populations down to modern times, the arid zone of the Old World from the Atlantic to the Pacific became the cradle of world civilization. Since around the early twentieth century, the increasing pressure of population growth has caused the intensification of desert conditions in some areas. But, despite continuing population growth, global urbanization is changing these pressures.
Genetic Screening and Medical Genetics
Authors: Shaw Alison
Published: September 2018

Medical genetics is concerned with improving human health through the diagnosis, risk assessment, and management of human genetic disease. Genetic screening refers to the protocols and technologies for ascertaining risks for medical conditions with known genetic causes or contributions. The emerging anthropology of these practices offers a commentary on processes of clinical diagnosis and expertise, on the social settings of policies and practices of genetic screening, and on the personal, social, and political meanings of being identified as “at risk” in local and national contexts. Through ethnography and cross‐cultural comparison, it contributes to the growing social science and ethics literature on geneticization and medicalization, risk perception and risk acceptability, biosociality and community genetics, disability, and stigma.
Bioarchaeology
Authors: Roberts Charlotte , Gowland Rebecca
Published: September 2018

This entry considers bioarchaeology, or the contextualized study of archaeological human remains, with an emphasis on multimethod, multidisciplinary approaches. Bioarchaeology's scope, including the methods used, is outlined, alongside the history of its study. Available training is described, as are the ethics associated with studying human remains. Current and future research areas are outlined, which cover osteobiographical versus population‐based approaches, the increasing focus on social bioarchaeology, the developmental origins of human disease, and the use of advanced scientific methods such as stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses to unlock more nuanced data about people's lives in times past.
Germany, Anthropology in
Authors: Kohl Karl‐Heinz
Published: September 2018

The beginnings of German anthropology go back to the eighteenth century. In contrast to other European countries, in Germany anthropology established itself in academia before the country's entry into the global colonial competition. Ethnographic museums have played an important role in the history of the discipline. The first chairs in physical anthropology and ethnology were installed at German universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Separated by the German faculty system, the two disciplines developed in different directions and were later ideologically abused by the Nazi regime. In ethnology, culture circle theory, cultural morphology, and ethnosociology remained the dominant schools after World War II. In the 1970s and 1980s, a process of modernization and internationalization began that led to a strong orientation toward Anglo‐Saxon anthropology. Among the “small” academic disciplines, anthropology is today one of the largest, taught at the most important universities and supported by research institutes.
Trial Processes
Authors: Offit Anna
Published: September 2018

Since the mid‐twentieth century, anthropological studies of trial processes have generated typologies of dispute practices, identified social and cultural continuities in and out of the courtroom, and examined legal actors' techniques at all stages of case preparation. Anthropologists have deployed a range of research methods (e.g., observation of court proceedings and trial preparation, participant observation in places of lawyers' everyday work, narrative and conversation analysis, and archival research) in field sites around the world. Interlocutors in these studies have included judges, prosecutors, lay decision makers, litigants, fact and expert witnesses, victims of crime, researchers tasked with producing evidence, and ordinary people whose ambivalence about
participating
in trial processes reflects cultural assumptions of their own.
Dual Inheritance Theory
Authors: Newson Lesley , Richerson Peter
Published: September 2018

Dual inheritance theory is a set of ideas, first proposed in the 1960s, based on the observation that once humans evolved the capacity for complex culture, the environments in which human genes evolved were partly the product of their culture. If both genes and culture evolve, human evolution should be seen as the result of the interaction of cultural and genetic evolution. Current research by proponents of the theory looks at how cultural information is selected and transmitted and evidence for the past influence of genes on culture and culture on genes.
Cultural Transmission
Authors: Morin Olivier
Published: September 2018

The question of how cultural competence passes from one mind to another is at the heart of any anthropological theory that seeks to accommodate human psychology. Various currents of cognitive or psychological anthropology—the main focus of this entry—have dealt with cultural transmission in their own way. The field's early emphasis on parenting and attachment, coming from psychoanalysis and popularized by the “culture and personality” movement, has given way to approaches that emphasize the child's own contribution to the collective construction of cultural skills. Social input increasingly appears to be just one ingredient in a mix that also includes evolved skills and proclivities. Studying them might allow us to uncover the roots of our species' exceptional proficiency in passing on lasting traditions.
Gender, Structuralist Theories of
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie , Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

Structuralist theories of gender or sex are generally based on, or attempt to demonstrate, a relationship that is expressed in terms of the structural formula: men are to culture what women are to nature, or men are to women what culture is to nature. In continuity with the former functionalist approaches, which saw gender difference as a consequence of the biological particularities of each sex, the structuralist approach attempts to demonstrate the universality of the relationship as a consequence of the prohibition of incest (Lévi‐Strauss's exchange theory) or the superiority of the social value of “culture” over that of “nature” (Ortner's theory). Later poststructuralist research has, however, shown that gender is largely a matter of performance and the consequence of social and cultural constructions of sex.
Sociocultural Behavior and Human Genetic Diversity
Authors: Verdu Paul
Published: September 2018

By studying human genetic diversity at the worldwide and regional geographical scales, population geneticists try to understand the origins, the past migrations, and the biological evolution of our species. Natural selection, demography, and sociocultural behaviors (in complex interaction with one another) are the main forces that have influenced human genetic‐diversity patterns. In particular, sociocultural behaviors regarding preferred or forbidden marriages, postmarital residence, polygamy, transmission of reproductive success, ways of life, and subsistence strategies have been shown to shape genetic diversity, admixture patterns, and biological adaptation among and within populations, sometimes differently for male and female lineages. These findings further demonstrate that nature and culture should not be dichotomized to understand human biological diversity and evolution.