bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Detailed Analysis and Estimation of Therapy Net Benefit through Multi Regression Analysis
Authors: Kundu Ananya , Kundu Aditya , Kundu Goutam Kumar
Published: November 2024

Introduction: Effectiveness, adverse drug reaction, tolerability and quality of life are few parameters by which a therapy is evaluated. No method exists to measure net benefit or loss of any therapeutic option from patient or health professionals’ point of view. This paper aims to measure net benefit of a single therapy or compare relative benefits of different therapeutic options.
Objectives: To develop a mathematical equation to measure net benefit of a treatment option.
Methods: Focus group studies conducted to identify list of variables that can measure benefits of any treatment process. Large scale sample survey conducted to develop a mathematical equation and validate it.
Results: Cost, degree of cure, time required to cure, ease of accessibility, adverse effect, ease to use, tolerability, cure rate, improvement in quality of life, degree of pain during application are the factors that determines the net benefits of a treatment option.
Conclusions: Degree of cure, cost of treatment and time required to cure are the most important factors towards evaluation of net benefit due to a treatment. The model can be used by health policy makers to prioritise their policies and health care professionals and researchers to measure the net benefit of any treatment options.
Impact of Live Mulch, Brown Manuring and Herbicides on Growth and Yield of Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) in Southern Midland Zone of Kerala, India
Authors: Raphael Gloria , B. Renjan , B. Bindu , M. Ameena , P. Shalini Pillai
Published: November 2024

A field experiment was conducted during the rabi season of 2023 at the Farming System Research Station, Sadanandapuram, Kerala, to evaluate the effects of live mulch, brown manuring and herbicides effect as weed management method on growth and yield of sorghum. The experiment was conducted in a randomized block design with ten treatments, replicated thrice. The treatments included: Broadcasting cowpea seeds @ 15 kg ha -1 fb live mulch at 25 DAS, Broadcasting cowpea seeds @ 30 kg ha -1 fb live mulch at 25 DAS, Broadcasting cowpea seeds @ 15 kg ha -1 fb brown manuring with 2,4-D 1 kg ha-1 at 20 DAS, Broadcasting cowpea seeds @ 30 kg ha -1 fb brown manuring with 2,4-D 1 kg ha-1 at 20 DAS, PE pretilachlor 0.75 kg ha-1fb one HW at 25 DAS, fenoxaprop-p-ethyl 0.06 kg ha-1 at 20 DAS, T7:PoE 2,4-D 1 kg ha-1 at 20 DAS, HW at 20 DAS, Weed free control and Weedy check. Among the treatments, broadcasting cowpea seeds at 30 kg ha⁻¹ followed by live mulch at 25 DAS (T2) resulted the higher growth parameters, including plant height, number of leaves per plant, and dry matter production at 45 DAS and harvest. Leaf area per plant and leaf area index were also significantly higher in T2 at 30 and 45 DAS. Yield attributes, such as panicle length, number of grains per panicle, grain weight per panicle, grain yield, stover yield and harvest index were higher in T2. Broadcasting cowpea seeds @ 30 kg ha -1fb brown manuring with 2,4-D 1 kg ha-1 at 20 DAS, pre-emergence pretilachlor 0.75 kg ha⁻¹ fb hand weeding at 25 DAS, post-emergence fenoxaprop-p-ethyl 0.06 kg ha⁻¹ at 20 DAS and weed free control performed statistically comparable with T2 in terms of growth and yield attributes.
Drone Technology in Agricultural Practices: A SWOC Analysis
Authors: C Dhivya , R Arunkumar , PP Murugan , Senthilkumar M.
Published: November 2024

Drone technology, also known as Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), is transforming modern agriculture by introducing precision farming techniques that enhance crop monitoring, resource management, and sustainability. By providing real-time data on plant health, soil conditions, and irrigation needs, drones enable farmers to make informed decisions that optimize yields while reducing input costs. In India, the rapid growth of the drone sector highlights its increasing importance in addressing challenges such as labor shortages, water scarcity, and the need for more sustainable farming practices. This case study explores the adoption and impacts of drone technology in agricultural practices within Coimbatore District, Tamil Nadu, India. The purposive sampling method was used to chosen the farmers. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and interviews with farmers who had adopted in drone technology. The study investigates the profile characteristics of farmers and evaluates the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Challenges (SWOC) related to the adoption of drones in agriculture. Findings revealed that drone usage significantly improved farm efficiency, reduced labor dependency, and optimized the application of fertilizers and pesticides, resulting in lower input costs and more sustainable practices. However, challenges such as high upfront costs, fragmented land holdings, technical expertise gaps, and limited drone availability constrained wider adoption. This research concludes that while drones offer substantial potential to modernize agriculture and address labor and environmental challenges, further government support and farmer training are crucial to overcome adoption barriers. The study underscores the role of drones in promoting climate-resilient and sustainable farming practices.
EFEK MEDIA FLASCHARD TERHADAP KEMAMPUAN PENGENALAN HURUF MURID
Authors: Mbau Lofrinda Feronika , Purba Romirio Torang
Published: November 2024

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengevaluasi efektivitas penggunaan media flaschard dalam meningkatkan kemampuan mengenal huruf pada siswa kelas 1 sekolah dasar. Metode yang digunakan adalah eksperimen Single Subject Research (SSR) dengan desain A-B-A. Subjek penelitian adalah siswa kelas 1 yang diuji menggunakan instrumen tes kemampuan mengenal huruf yang terdiri dari 32 butir soal. Analisis data dilakukan dengan mengamati panjang kondisi, kecenderungan arah data (naik, turun, atau mendatar), stabilitas data, jejak data, rentang skor, dan perubahan level. Selain itu, analisis tumpang tindih data antar kondisi juga dilakukan untuk mengevaluasi efektivitas intervensi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa penggunaan media flaschard dapat meningkatkan kemampuan mengenal huruf pada siswa kelas 1 sekolah dasar.
NAD+ promotes assembly of the active tetramer of aldehyde dehydrogenase 7A1
Authors: Korasick David A. , White Tommi A. , Chakravarthy Srinivas , Tanner John J.
Published: September 2018

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is the redox cofactor of many enzymes, including the vast aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) superfamily. Although the function of NAD(H) in hydride transfer is established, its influence on protein structure is less understood. Herein, we show that NAD+‐binding promotes assembly of the ALDH7A1 tetramer. Multiangle light scattering, small‐angle X‐ray scattering, and sedimentation velocity all show a pronounced shift of the dimer–tetramer equilibrium toward the tetramer when NAD+ is present. Furthermore, electron microscopy shows that cofactor binding enhances tetramer formation even at the low enzyme concentration used in activity assays, suggesting the tetramer is the active species. Altogether, our results suggest that the catalytically active oligomer of ALDH7A1 is assembled on demand in response to cofactor availability.
Cooperatives
Authors: Vargas‐Cetina Gabriela
Published: September 2018

Cooperatives are collaborative enterprises that tread a middle path between private businesses and collectively managed goods and resources. Anthropologists have approached them using a mix of classic anthropological concepts, such as the corporation, and concepts derived from other disciplines, including economics and political sciences. Marxism and especially political economy led anthropologists to focus on the global processes that caused cooperatives to emerge and on the commonalities among them across cultures. Institutional economics made anthropologists pay attention to collective ways to manage resources. New approaches are making apparent the importance of other businesses, including those in private ownership, in the contextual environment and cultural nature of each and all cooperatives.
Family Planning and Fertility Control in Development
Authors: Cleland John
Published: September 2018

In response to rapid population growth in developing countries after World War II, programs to reduce fertility were initiated. Since 1960, fertility rates have declined steeply in Asia and Latin America but less so in sub‐Saharan Africa. Government family‐planning programs were partly responsible. A shift from focused population‐control efforts to broader goals of women's empowerment, health, and rights occurred in 1994 but, as a result, family planning became marginalized. In the early twenty‐first century, a revival of interest has occurred, with a focus on Africa.
Breastfeeding
Authors: Faircloth Charlotte
Published: September 2018

While it is traditionally approached within the anthropological discipline as a question of kinship and relatedness, breastfeeding is increasingly being understood as an important locus for debates around gender, embodiment, and the politics of reproduction more widely. Indeed, with anthropology's unique cross‐cultural perspective, ethnographic findings are ever more tied to global debates around infant feeding, health, social mobility, and inequality.
Austria, Anthropology in
Authors: Gingrich Andre
Published: September 2018

Anthropology in Austria was institutionally established at Vienna's Museum for Natural History as a department in 1889 and as a professorship at the University of Vienna in 1912. Early ethnographers of that period (primarily in Bosnia, Arabia, and Central Europe) contributed to the intellectual environment that inspired Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski. Research in German and Austrian prisoner‐of‐war camps during World War I shifted the balance toward biological anthropology. The period between the wars saw the rise of culture circle theory, a Catholic version of diffusionism led by Wilhelm Schmidt. Except for Hermann Baumann's tenure during the Nazi period, Schmidt's school dominated the field until the 1950s. Since the mid‐1970s, the local field has completely repositioned itself as a major cluster in Continental Europe, pursuing anthropology both at home and in most parts of the world, doing research in contemporary as well as historical themes, and including methodological elaborations such as comparison.
Ghost Marriage
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie
Published: September 2018

The “ghost marriage” is a practice similar to the levirate, whereby a woman marries a man in the name of his deceased brother. This rare form of alliance is found in very few cultures and aims at ensuring the legacy of a lineage. For rich women among the Nuer of South Sudan, it is a means of preserving their own wealth; a woman can thus take on the role of a man and marry another woman, who will bear children in the name of the “ghost pater.” Sometimes, as in China, this type of marriage can erase the shame of being an unwed woman and can appease the spirit of the dead man. Posthumous marriage has been legal and not uncommon in France since the 1920s. The scarcity of data around this practice prevents a longitudinal approach and an in‐depth analysis of patterns of change through time.
Cognitive Development
Authors: Rybanska Veronika
Published: September 2018

Although cognitive development is a complex process involving many different mechanisms and domains, children start to acquire and use relevant information from the world around them as soon as they are born. Among other competencies, cognitive development involves the development of theory of mind and executive function abilities, understanding of self and other equivalence and causal relations, and language acquisition. During cognitive development children undergo crucial changes directly associated with the comprehension of causality and how minds work. They form intuitive theories about the world (including the psychological, biological, and physical realms), as well as learn how to act on the world to influence it and to reach their own goals.
Observational Cinema
Authors: MacDougall David
Published: September 2018

Observational cinema is one of several closely related approaches to documentary filmmaking that emerged in the 1960s, encouraged by the introduction of new, lightweight cameras and sound recorders. Since then it has had a significant influence on ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology. While initially perceived by some critics as aspiring to detachment and scientific objectivity, it is now more often understood as a highly authored form of cinema involving close relations between filmmaker and subject and representing the perspectives of individual observers. It marked a shift away from documentary films as authoritative pronouncements toward an approach that gave the audience a sense of the filmmaker's presence in the situations filmed, paralleling the participant observer's role in anthropological fieldwork. It has proven increasingly relevant to many of the newly developing interests of anthropology in material and visual culture, aesthetics, performance, individual agency, and the role of the senses and emotions in social life.
Bateson,Gregory (1904–80)
Authors: Harries‐Jones Peter
Published: September 2018

Gregory Bateson's early approach objected to mechanistic theoretical abstractions replacing informants' own appraisals of their culture. Cybernetics increased his opposition to linear appraisal of evidence, for all social and biological organization is nonlinear. Outcomes feed back recursively to beginning points, a process that changes initial conditions. This recursive (looplike) interaction triggers a multilevel field of perceptual and communicative difference in living systems, permitting learning to occur, an epistemological stance that accords with current complexity theory. Later, Bateson defined a living unit as “organism‐plus‐environment,” an interactive totality that transforms dualist epistemology of “mind” separated from nature, and fosters their transdisciplinary study.
Dravidian Systems of Kinship
Authors: Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

The Dravidian system of kinship is a relationship terminology with implications for the way in which people are classified into kinship categories. It has consequences on prescriptions or preferences for marriage partners and is based on the genealogically unlimited application of the bifurcate‐merging principle.
Commodity
Authors: Carrier James G.
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists often write about commodities in somewhat different ways and contrast commodities to different things. Underlying these differences is a common conception of commodities as things that are relatively impersonal, but different approaches define that impersonality differently and focus on different bases for it. These differences reflect three approaches. The first, and oldest, focuses on production and sees commodities as relatively impersonal with regard to the maker. The second approach focuses on circulation and sees commodities as relatively impersonal with regard to those who transact them. The third approach is different, for it is concerned with commodity as a cultural category and is concerned with what it is that people see as impersonal commodities.
Gift
Authors: Carrier James G.
Published: September 2018

The gift has long interested anthropologists, who have defined and interpreted it in various ways. The predominant approach to the gift draws on the work of Mauss, which describes the gift, gift relations, and societies of the gift. In such relations, people are obliged to give gifts, to receive them, and to reciprocate with a return gift. Anthropological work on the gift has addressed a variety of topics. These include the basis of social groups and structures, the nature of personal relationships, and the relationships between people and different aspects of their world. Much of this work draws on a contrast between gift relationships and the commodity relationships that are common in socioeconomic systems with developed capitalist markets.
Family and Household in Development
Authors: Randall Sara
Published: September 2018

Household and family are overlapping concepts used to describe the most fundamental social units. There is much confusion over the degree to which they are the same or different, and considerable disciplinary differences in how they should be defined. Households are usually conceptualized as co‐residential units of consumption and production but they take many forms, which often incorporate nuclear families or larger related groups of people, and some individuals may have rights and obligations to more than one household. A key conceptual characteristic of households is their developmental cycle.
Consumption
Authors: Eriksen Thomas Hylland
Published: September 2018

In economic anthropology, consumption can be viewed as one of the three elements that constitute an economic system—production, distribution, and consumption—and is thus a universal activity in human societies. However, the anthropology of consumption has mainly focused on complex, modern societies, where consumption is so diverse and ubiquitous that it can serve as a means to study cultural values, social differentiation, power inequalities, and processes of identification. Whereas consumption is conventionally viewed by economists in a utilitarian framework, anthropologists emphasize its symbolic aspect and study its implications for social hierarchy, differentiation, and power. Consumption is also an important focal point in the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism, facilitating research on forms of cultural change, politics of identity, and intergroup relations.
Capitalist Corporation, the
Authors: Benson Peter , Kirsch Stuart
Published: September 2018

The capitalist corporation is a central institutional form in modern society. Early work in economic anthropology focused on labor and production. In the 1980s, research shifted to new questions about consumption and identity. Two distinctive aspects of the interaction between corporations and consumers are advertising and branding, which are central to corporate reputations. Anthropologists increasingly study the globalization of the capitalist corporation. They may conduct research within corporations, on behalf of corporations, or on the external relations of corporations, including the strategies through which corporations manage their relationships with critics.
Horticulturalists
Authors: Sillitoe Paul
Published: September 2018

Horticulture is the cultivation of crops intermingled on small land areas using hand tools, largely for subsistence. It is found in many parts of the world and features a range of strategies: shifting cultivation, bush fallow, and unregulated and regulated ley systems. These broadly correlate with population density and sedentariness. Horticulture is compatible with a range of sociocultural arrangements: shifting cultivators live in tribal communities, mixed ley horticulturists in chiefdoms, and market‐dependent peasants in nation‐states. A closer look belies these classifications and the widespread assumption that these regimes have limited productive scope, degrading the environment beyond a certain demographic point—their carrying capacity. Nonetheless, many horticulturalists have precarious livelihoods and are vulnerable to environmental shocks. International development programs seek to address associated concerns about food security. Although they constitute the rural poor in developing countries, horticulturalists have much to teach us about sustainability.
Wrapping
Authors: Hendry Joy
Published: September 2018

The notion of wrapping has been applied to layers of indirect communication that are used strategically by members of societies that value these nonverbal forms to express and manipulate social relations and relative positions of power. In Japan, gift wrapping offers a paradigmatic example, but the wrapping of bodies, of space (such as shrines and museum space), of time, and of people are also found elsewhere, where they play a directly comparable role, as are forms of polite, honorific, and respectful language. Contrary to the expectation in English, meaning is to be found in the wrapping itself rather than by focusing on unwrapping, as the inside may be irrelevant, or even empty.
Fiction, Anthropological Themes in
Authors: Street Brian
Published: September 2018

The ideas developed in anthropology since its nineteenth‐century founding have consistently also appeared in popular fiction and the link between these fields has been a source of fascination and research. What anthropology and popular fiction have had in common have been ideas about “other” societies, originally labeled as “primitive,” “the savage,” “exotic cultures,” and still referred to in many contexts as “developing.” This entry addresses the shifts from classic “imperialist” notions to more recent ideas but notes that the earlier ones still play a role, at least in the public domain, although a number of novelists and fiction writers did make a shift away from the traditional stereotypes and began to focus on the detail and everyday life of “other” societies. The entry concludes on a positive note and argues that if we look closely we can see that the gap between fiction and anthropology is not as large as might be assumed and that fiction can still offer social analysis.
Virchow,Rudolf (1821–1902)
Authors: Salhi Bisan A. , Brown Peter J.
Published: September 2018

Rudolf Virchow was a German pathologist, anthropologist, and political leader widely credited with pioneering the field of social medicine. He was among the first to place health and disease within a political–economic framework. He maintained that, if epidemics were indicative of social processes, disease could be eradicated only through widespread social change. Virchow argued against ideas of “pure science” and narrowly conceived causal pathways. Instead, he conceived of medicine as a social science and criticized the misappropriation of science and medical knowledge to justify rising nationalism and militarism. Through his courageous and pioneering work, Virchow refuted the ideas of social Darwinism and racial determinism. His work remains influential in contemporary medical anthropology and the political ecology of health.
Consciousness
Authors: Winkelman Michael
Published: September 2018

Consciousness involves the integrative functioning of awareness, sensations, perceptions, memory, cognitions, sense of self, and worldviews. Anthropology studies cross‐cultural differences in these basic elements of consciousness to illustrate the interaction of biological and cultural factors in the development of human consciousness. These interactions produce cross‐cultural variation in consciousness in the imprinting of cultural influences into biological development and brain structures. Cognitive approaches place culture at the focus of consciousness research by showing how the conceptual categorization provided by cultural schemas play determinant roles in experiences. Anthropology expands understanding of the variation in manifestations of consciousness in shamanistic phenomena such as soul flight, mystical states, and possession. The anthropology of consciousness includes the evolution of consciousness; the role of language in consciousness; the manifestations of class‐based, social, ethnic, and other forms of consciousness; and the application of ethnographic findings and models of consciousness to archaeological interpretation and modern concerns of healing.
Kinship (Human), Evolutionary and Biosocial Approaches to
Authors: Mace Ruth
Published: September 2018

In evolutionary anthropology, kinship studies generally address how human families and social organization arose, in response to natural selection. Inclusive fitness is a measure of number of offspring (direct fitness) and the number of relatives born, weighted by relatedness (indirect fitness). Models that maximize the benefits of any interaction, where costs and benefits are measured in terms of inclusive fitness, can be used to predict patterns of cooperation and conflict within families in any given environment. Fitness is thus fundamental to understanding human kinship. Marriage, descent, and wealth inheritance are all influenced by our ecology and our subsistence system, and also coevolve with each other. Evolutionary methods have also been used to help infer the ancestral pathways that kinship patterns have followed. New methods and theories in evolutionary anthropology have reignited an interest in kinship studies.
Bellah,Robert (1927–2013)
Authors: Bortolini Matteo
Published: September 2018

This entry presents a summary of the life and work of the US sociologist, public intellectual, and educator Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013), globally known for his work on Japanese culture and religion, US civil religion, the cultures of individualism, and the evolution of religion.
Brain Evolution and Energetics of Encephalization
Authors: Barrickman Nancy L.
Published: September 2018

Many researchers investigating the evolution of brain enlargement in humans, as well as other primates and mammals, have focused on the benefits. However, researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of the energetic costs of encephalization and how these constraints must be overcome during the selection for increased brain size. There are many adaptive pathways, including prolonged life history, increased metabolic rates, reduction of other expensive tissues, changes in the sociality of reproduction such as cooperative breeding, and improvements in dietary quality. The specific combination of factors varies from taxon to taxon and evidence suggests that the members of the human lineage relied primarily on decreases in muscle and gut mass, higher dietary quality, and cooperative breeding.
Engels,Friedrich (1820–95)
Authors: Knight Chris
Published: September 2018

Friedrich Engels was a German political theorist, philosopher, activist, journalist, and cofounder with Karl Marx of dialectical materialism or “scientific socialism.” In many ways, he was an anthropologist before the discipline was established. His most widely read publication wasThe Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which argued that all human social life had once been communistic, based as it was on cooperative childcare and domestic life within the matrilineal clan.
Urbanization and Urban Environments
Authors: Antweiler Christoph
Published: September 2018

Urbanization refers to an increase in the number of people living in urban areas, the worldwide development and spatial expansion of urban ways of life, and the physical growth of individual cities. Physically, urbanization results in a horizontal and vertical growth of built environments. Cities are large, dense, and permanent settlements where people of different cultural and social backgrounds interact. By the end of 2008 half of the world's population lived in settlements designated as cities. Cities are the centers of change, innovation, and creativity. World development is largely urban development these days. As a result of inequality combined with density, environmental problems and natural disasters are often extreme in cities. Anthropology can make visible aspects and dynamics of everyday urban life. Applied urban anthropologists help to develop sensitivity for local environments and to foster participatory development and a more realist and humanized city planning.
Moral Economy
Authors: Gregory Chris
Published: September 2018

Moral economy is concerned with the question of the just price and its political implications. Disputation is the essence of moral economy because the fairness of a price reflects the point of view of an interested transactor or dispassionate observer. The actual term “moral economy” was popularized by E. P. Thompson in the 1970s but disputes about theories of the just price are of great antiquity and are found in many disciplines. Thompson, the historian, took the perspective of the rioting crowds in eighteenth‐century England. Malinowski, the ethnographer, was concerned with the “native point of view” on right conduct in the nonmarket economy of the Trobriand Islands. While many subsequent ethnographers have continued to conduct fieldwork in the Malinowskian tradition, some anthropologists have joined scholars in other disciplines in developing the philosophical perspective of an abstract observer.
Modes of Communication in Cross‐Cultural Contexts
Authors: Pahl Kate , Rowsell Jennifer
Published: September 2018

Building on a longer history of intellectual work that combines a grounded, contextual perspective on people's meaning making with an account of design and multimodality, the entry presents past and current scholarship that merges ethnography with multimodal meaning making. It also takes account of aesthetics and work in the field of the new materialism and participatory research methodologies. Moving from major developments in the field to turns in literacy studies, the entry offers a sense of the evolution of a theory of culturally sensitive interpretations of multimodality and concludes with a look ahead to future trends in the cultural shaping of modes.
Sacred Scriptures
Authors: Bielo James S.
Published: September 2018

For the anthropology of religion, the historical and ethnographic study of sacred scriptures is a robust field of inquiry. The approach emphasized here focuses on the social life of scriptures; that is, how communities of practice use scriptures strategically to accomplish important cultural work. This entry outlines a theoretical grounding for this approach, reviews a sampling of major research findings and promising research directions, and presents two significant themes: materiality and transmedial performance. The former explores how communities engage with the material and sensual properties of scriptures, and the latter explores how scriptures are performed across different human and technological media.
States
Authors: Jonsson Hjorleifur
Published: September 2018

States are generally associated with regulation and a monopoly on the use of force, and anthropologists commonly use kinship or territoriality to distinguish states from nonstate societies. Alternative perspectives emphasize common features of human sociality and play that enable no such distinctions. Many theories rest on specific causal links between cities and countryside and between modernity and tradition. There is no agreement on the thingness of states, but some ethnological characterizations support a view of the state as a unique agent of oppression and violence. The binary of states and the people or of state versus society lend concreteness to state; however, triangulations require social and historical contextualization that undermines such categorical convictions.
Alliance Theory (Marriage Systems)
Authors: Fox James J.
Published: September 2018

Alliance theory refers to a body of theoretical investigations on fundamental issues relating to marriage and exchange that date from the beginnings of anthropology. The present designation of these issues as “alliance theory” is a development of the 1960s, when “alliance theory” was conceived as a complement to “descent theory.” An understanding of the earliest development of ideas of alliance and their significance is essential to an appreciation of later developments in this field. These developments occurred in a succession of distinguishable efforts by key figures in anthropology over a period of almost a hundred years.
Green Revolution
Authors: Harwood Jonathan
Published: September 2018

The “Green Revolution” (GR) was a set of agricultural development programs in the global South after 1945. Devised by US foundations and Western governments, their aim was to alleviate poverty and hunger by increasing food production. Although welcomed by many Southern governments, by 1970 it had become apparent that although the GR had raised production substantially, its impact on poverty was modest. From the 1970s, accordingly, both GR policy and GR research paid more attention to the social consequences of the programs, attempting to tailor them more closely to the needs of the rural poor. Since the mid‐2000s, numerous figures in the development community have called for a “new GR” whose improved crop varieties will need to be bred using biotechnology. Only in this way, they argue, can food production keep up with projected population growth in the South.
Menstruation, Biosocial Perspectives on
Authors: Power Camilla
Published: September 2018

Menstruation refers to the discharge of blood from the uterus of reproductive‐age females at approximately monthly intervals. Found in anthropoid primates, it is most conspicuous in women. While the evolutionary function of menstruation is not certain, that menstruation offers a reliable cue to the female reproductive state may have become significant during human evolution. This factor could underlie the widespread cross‐cultural beliefs, taboos, and practices linked to menstruation on every continent.
Israel, Anthropology in
Authors: Goldberg Harvey E. , Abuhav Orit
Published: September 2018

The first professional work in social and cultural anthropology in Israel began in the 1920s. There were studies of both Palestinian society and Jewish groups, mainly with the purpose of recording lifeways that were disappearing. The idea of including anthropology within the developing Hebrew University of Jerusalem was raised in the 1930s and 1940s but did not materialize at the time. The first formal appearance of anthropology in higher education was in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University in 1963. Its anthropology instructors had trained in anthropology at the University of Manchester. The pattern of joint departments spread to other universities in the 1970s, while some anthropology was introduced into a variety of departmental frameworks in undergraduate colleges. The range of topics explored in research and in teaching has since expanded, in parallel with developments abroad, while the total number of fully employed anthropologists is still small.
L
évi‐Strauss: Exchange of Women (Theory and Critiques)
Authors: Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

The concept of the exchange of women is a pivot of the French structuralist approach to the anthropology of kinship. A consequence of the incest prohibition, it denotes the idea that marriage, in particular through the circulation of women, is the elementary means by which social groups are bound to each other in order to constitute lasting societies. Lévi‐Strauss suggested the existence of two general forms of exchange of women: prescriptive marriages within “elementary structures” of kinship and free marriages within “complex structures” of kinship. The former is itself subdivided into two types: restricted exchange and generalized exchange. The exchange‐of‐women concept and alliance theory have been heavily criticized for at least three reasons: the lack of ethnographic material to support the thesis; an overemphasis on purely logical categories rather than empirical facts; and the androcentric approach that reduces women to being objects of exchange.
Stress
Authors: Dressler William W.
Published: September 2018

Stress in the social environment as a threat to individual wellbeing has been extensively investigated. Cross‐cultural studies of health and disease have contributed importantly to this literature. In the 1960s and 1970s research focused on the stressful effects of migration and culture change. In the 1970s anthropologists adapted social–psychological models of the stress process to settings outside North America and Europe, showing how the definitions of stressful circumstances and coping resources change in different cultural settings and how the interactions between these elements are modified by culture. More recently, research has focused on how individuals incorporate cultural models into their own beliefs and behaviors—referred to as “cultural consonance”—and how low cultural consonance can be a stressful experience. Research on the stress process in anthropology has been fruitful both for increasing understanding of the causes of poor health and for insights into the dynamics of culture.
Gender and Economics
Authors: Waring Marilyn
Published: September 2018

Anthropological critiques of the use of the concept of “household” in the economics discipline are well established. Economics has imposed a bounded geographical area and a nuclear family as the basis of a household to exclude household activities from what is counted as work. But households are not fixed; people come and go regularly, with changes in gender and generation. Many household members live apart, whether in an African context of different groups in different places drawing on different networks, in situations of seasonal separations, or the households that have an international configuration sending remittances from different continents. Households do not necessarily coincide with biological families or kinship. In our world today there are millions of households reconstituted by war and refugee displacement, by environmental and geological disasters, by epidemics such as Ebola and HIV and AIDS, by the increasing numbers of the elderly needing help, and by the growing numbers of those homeless and destitute.
Home
Authors: Cieraad Irene
Published: September 2018

Home is one of the core concepts of Western culture. The concept of home defies easy definitions because it also holds a strong personal meaning, which changes through the course of a lifetime. In general, it refers to a personal bonding with a place and an emotional attachment to living beings in that location. Western culture and society thrive on the emotional, social, and spatial opposition between the domains of home and work. This opposition is the outcome of a historic development of the progressive separation of the two domains that accelerated in the nineteenth century in response to industrialization and subsequent urbanization but was only completed in twentieth century.
Economic Psychology
Authors: Efferson Charles
Published: September 2018

Economic psychology refers to the psychological processes that affect economic decision making. The study of economic psychology has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent years, with growing influence in economics, anthropology, and other social sciences. A rise in the use of behavioral experiments, in particular, has led researchers to revise the economic model of choice extensively by incorporating empirically grounded insights about the psychology of decision making. Specific research topics include choice under risk, intertemporal choice, how the brain encodes value, altruism and cooperation, the effects of norms and identity on decision making, and the evolution of social behavior in humans and other animals.
Skeletal Aging and Sexing Techniques
Authors: Clegg Margaret
Published: September 2018

Two of the most important and interesting questions asked when human remains are examined are whether they were male or female, and how old they were in life. There are a number of markers that can be used to indicate both the sex of the individual and their age at death. In adults, the skull and pelvis are often used to both sex and age skeletal remains, while in children the developmental stage of teeth and bones gives a good indicator of age at death. Children's skeletons are very difficult to sex, although new techniques are showing limited success.
Social
D
arwinism
Authors: Rohatynskyj Marta
Published: September 2018

The major proponent of social Darwinism is the British sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) who held that the upper classes are more fit, physically and morally, than lower classes in society. His thinking developed in an intellectual milieu shared with Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution in the natural world and demonstrates a reduction of social explanations of human variability to biology. As an academic position, social Darwinism has been largely discredited although it survives as a folk model to the present. Associated with eugenics, the social Darwinist position, as the basis of policy, has largely lost the acceptance it enjoyed prior to World War II.
Transport, Communications, and Infrastructure in International Development Contexts
Authors: Porter Gina
Published: September 2018

The study of mobility, in its various manifestations—from the corporeal mobility associated with walking to the virtual mobility of the mobile phone—offers valuable insights into the power relations that shape social practices and social change. This review of mobility‐related themes in the global South (with particular reference to infrastructure, transport, and communications in sub‐Saharan Africa) covers diverse recent developments, from Chinese infrastructure investments and bus rapid transit to the massive expansion of motorcycle taxi services and mobile phones. Increasingly complex interactions between physical mobility and information and communications technologies suggest the potential for the emergence of new forms of sociality and new possibilities of encounter.
Bureau of
I
ndian Affairs
Authors: Neuman Lisa K.
Published: September 2018

The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is an agency of the US government with a complex relationship to Native Americans, their lands, their cultures, and their sovereignty. American Indians and Alaska Natives possess a unique government‐to‐government status vis‐à‐vis the United States, stemming from treaties which transferred indigenous land rights in return for federal promises. The BIA (now in the Department of the Interior) was designed to help fulfill these obligations. When treaty making ended in 1871, the BIA began to administer new federal policies of assimilation affecting Indians, like boarding schools and the break‐up of reservation lands. In the twentieth century, BIA Commissioner John Collier implemented an Indian New Deal, partnered with anthropologists, and reversed course on policies of assimilation. A target of American Indian Movement (AIM) protests in the 1970s, the modern BIA (under Native American leadership) continues to fulfill the federal trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives.
Cognition, Causal
Authors: Bender Andrea , Beller Sieghard
Published: September 2018

Causality is a core concept of human cognition, which is essential for our attempts to understand the world—from our physical environment to social interactions. While causal perception and most types of learning processes may be independent of cultural upbringing, other components of causal cognition appear to be saturated by culture. Cultural influences affect not only how but even whether people engage in causal explanations—by shaping the settings in which causal cognition occurs, the manner in which potential factors are pondered on, the selection of relevant factors from the causal field, or how such factors are linguistically expressed in one way or another.
Paleoecology, Evolutionary Approaches to
Authors: Bishop L. C.
Published: September 2018

Paleoecology is the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments in the past. The principal application of paleoecology in anthropology is to the study of paleoanthropology. Paleoecology provides a framework for understanding human evolution within the context of changing environments, influenced and influencing both biotic and abiotic aspects of their surroundings.
Ethno‐Fiction Film
Authors: Sjöberg Johannes
Published: September 2018

Ethno‐fiction film is an experimental ethnographic film approach where the fieldwork informants are asked to act out their experiences through projective improvisations in front of the camera. It was pioneered by visual anthropologist Jean Rouch during his ethnographic fieldwork research in West Africa during the mid‐1950s.
Ethnomathematics and Numerical Cognition
Authors: Bender Andrea , Beller Sieghard
Published: September 2018

Mathematics is concerned with logic, chance, quantity, structure, change, spatial relationships, and their combination into systems. The various ways in which these ideas and principles are interconnected with culture take center stage in the interdisciplinary field of ethnomathematics. Numerical cognition refers to one of the subfields of ethnomathematics (i.e., quantity and numbers) but, more specifically, focuses on how people represent and process numerical information when they engage in counting or calculating. Using geometry and number systems as examples, this review illustrates how mathematical concepts are essential in human life, which cognitive mechanisms and cultural tools equip people to deal with them, and how culture shapes the expression and usage of these concepts.
Technology
Authors: Batteau Allen W. , Jazayeri Mark
Published: September 2018

As a key word for both anthropology and popular usage, the term “technology” contains multiple and at times inconsistent meanings. An anthropological perspective on technology is presented in this entry, which reviews exemplary studies and identifies recurrent themes of anthropology's relationship to science and technology studies, the bounding of the term technology, critiques of technology, the relationship of technology to materiality, and the relationship of technology to magic. Six epistemes in the anthropology of technology are examined: functionalism, semiotics, power dynamics, world‐systems theory, actor‐network theory, and feminism. The requirements for an anthropology of technology are examined.
Money
Authors: Hart Keith
Published: September 2018

The history of money is its evolution as a means of human interaction in society. This is reflected in the money form which has changed from metallic coins to paper notes to electronic digits. Yet ideology persists in characterizing it as something both abstract and objectively real. Money is still driven by the impersonal engines of states and markets; but the challenge is to invent people's money. This means recognizing that money's meaning is sustained by memory and being open to the potential of the digital revolution in communications to promote democratic engagement with money and markets. Experiments with community currencies offer a flawed example of this potential.
Rainforest, Tropical
Authors: Dounias Edmond
Published: September 2018

Tropical rainforests are biodiversity‐rich ecosystems that are spread throughout the equatorial zone. These wet and hot ecosystems, in which tall broad‐leaved trees constitute both the builders and the building, are organized in successive strata stacked from soil to emergent trees above the canopy. They are home to an astounding diversity of plants, wildlife, and human societies. But rainforests are fragile and threatened mainly by human‐engendered destructions. Maintaining the integrity of forests and forest‐dependent peoples concomitantly is an absolute though challenging necessity, not only to alleviate biodiversity and linked cultural diversity losses but also to reduce emissions that are caused by deforestation and forest degradation and that insidiously contribute to global warming.
D
ouglas,
M
ary (1921–2007)
Authors: Strong Thomas
Published: September 2018

Mary Douglas was one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century. Her studies of bodily symbolism, pollution beliefs, ritual, ideas about nature, the politics of risk, and the Bible were broadly influential. Looking back on her many contributions, she claimed that her principle interest all along was to articulate an anthropological theory of the social basis of thought. She remained committed to the sociology of Émile Durkheim, believing that people discern an order in nature that both reflects and reproduces the institutions and values of their social worlds.