bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Elementary Structures of Kinship, The / Les structures Élémentaires de la Parenté
Authors: Malbrancke Anne‐Sylvie
Published: September 2018

First published in 1949,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
, by French anthropologist Claude Lévi‐Strauss, provided a new perspective on kinship systems and relationships. Lévi‐Strauss explains that humans left the state of animality to enter culture through the prohibition of incest. Instead of marrying their mother, sister, or daughter, men exchanged them to other groups, following the positive rule of exogamy. Elementary structures are characterized by both negative and positive rules of alliance, while complex structures only formulate negative rules and leave it to elements outside the realm of kinship to guide marriage. Exchange can be symmetrical and restricted (two groups in mutual‐exchange relations) or asymmetrical and generalized (in larger populations). The book created a major breakthrough in studies of kinship and was seminal for what became known as structuralism, but it also received much criticism: the ahistorical approach of a model at odds with people's experiences was deemed androcentric and formalist.
Indexicality
Authors: Perrino Sabina , Wortham Stanton
Published: September 2018

The concept of indexicality has been widely applied in the social sciences, the humanities, and other disciplines in recent decades. Many productive contemporary applications in anthropology draw on the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, who elaborated this concept at the turn of the twentieth century. For Peirce, an indexical sign and the object it represents co‐occur, such that the object appears in the context and the sign points to it.
Agriculture: Modern Farming Systems
Authors: Brush Stephen B.
Published: September 2018

Farming systems involve biophysical and sociocultural components. No farming system is unchanging, and the processes of increased energy input and output and spatial integration have resulted in changes such as shorter fallow, longer cultivation cycles, the use of nonlocal resources, and an overall decrease in the proportion of agriculturalists in a population. Modern farming systems are characterized by high energy inputs, high output, reliance on external resources, and production for nonlocal consumption. Anthropology has contributed to the analysis of modern farming systems by showing how local social and cultural factors affect farmer decision making and mediate large‐scale political–economic processes.
Lévy‐Bruhl,Lucien (1857–1939)
Authors: Saumade Frédéric
Published: September 2018

A French philosopher turned armchair anthropologist, Lévy‐Bruhl sought an alternative to Western logic in primitive cultures—in which he saw a mode of thought that strayed from the principle of noncontradiction to the extent that one thing could be conceived as something other than itself. He conceived a dualist and synchronic concept of human psychology as divided between intellect (most developed in the “modern mind”) and affect (most developed in the “primitive mind”). This dualistic and hyperrelativist system, which supposed excessively homogeneous and mutually distinct conceptions of “primitive” and “modern” peoples, has been much criticized, even by Lévy‐Bruhl himself in the later part of his life. However, his search for a radical epistemological alternative separated from Western rationality might be reconsidered now that dominant trends in anthropology seek to break from the classic paradigms.
P
urity and
D
anger
Authors: 6 Perri
Published: September 2018

Among anthropologists,
Purity and Danger
is Mary Douglas's best‐known work, yet it is widely misunderstood. Its significance was in laying out a Durkheimian program for social science, in showing why understanding anomaly is methodologically critical, and in exploring ritual order as a causal mechanism. Douglas came to appreciate that the book had not carried her program through. Much of her subsequent work should be appreciated for having recast
Purity and Danger
's core arguments in more rigorous and coherent ways, as she developed the distinctive theory of conflict amplification and containment which she recognized that
Purity and Danger
needed.
Business Anthropology
Authors: Tian Robert Guang , Sigamani Paneer , Malhotra Shweta
Published: September 2018

The recent past has witnessed the steady growth of anthropology as a discipline along with its application in various fields. One of the most talked‐about fields of applied anthropology is anthropology in business. The world has recognized that business is not just an economic endeavor but is also an activity that has a human angle. Hence, neoclassical principles have replaced classical thinking. More and more organizations are embracing research to understand the people side of their businesses. For this, anthropologists are being hired to investigate vital processes such as organization policies, product design, corporate culture, leadership, consumer behavior, and so on. This entry discusses the theoretical concepts and meanings of this recently arrived discipline of business anthropology and goes on to probe its contribution to business in the twenty‐first century. Further, it also elaborates the relevance and practical issues faced by business anthropologists in the newly emerging branches of business anthropology.
U
mesao,
T
adao (1920–2010)
Authors: Konagaya Yuki
Published: September 2018

Tadao Umesao was a Japanese anthropologist and social thinker, the founder and long‐time director general of the Japanese National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka. He conducted extensive foreign fieldwork, particularly in continental Asia, from a young age onwards, and made important and lasting theoretical contributions in the areas of pastoralism, the comparative ecological history of civilizations, and the role of information in society, including predicting the coming of an age of information. Unlike most Japanese intellectuals of his generation, Umesao was not a Marxist; instead, he introduced ideas from ecology to explain the development of cultures and civilizations.
Multiculturalism
Authors: Armstrong‐Fumero Fernando
Published: September 2018

Anthropology's engagement with multiculturalism has deep roots in the discipline's history and continues to be an important focus of contemporary empirical research. Modern anthropologists have tended to stress the particular histories of specific cultural groups over universal theories of human nature. This emphasis on cultural particularism has often placed anthropology at odds with theories of mind and politics that focus on human universals. This tension between universalism and particularism in anthropological theory is mirrored by the complex relationship between contemporary multicultural politics and the universal ideas of rights and citizenship in political ideologies ranging from liberalism to Marxism. Despite their historical commitment to cultural particularism, anthropologists have also found that state‐sanctioned multiculturalism has often played a paradoxical role in reproducing social inequality and legitimating liberal states. In these contexts, the discipline's traditional emphasis on documenting particular local experiences of political phenomena continues to be its greatest contribution to debates about multiculturalism.
S
aberwal,
S
atish (1933–2010)
Authors: Jayaram N.
Published: September 2018

Satish Saberwal, an American‐trained Indian anthropologist, worked on the intersections between social anthropology and historical sociology. Influenced by his mentor, Victor Turner, Saberwal used the comparative method to examine long‐term trajectories of institutions, ideas, and processes in India and Europe. Among his important works are
Mobile Men: Limits to Social Change in Urban Punjab
(1976),
Wages of Segmentation: Comparative Historical Studies on Europe and India
(1995),
Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Contemporary Indian Society
(1996), and
Spirals of Contention: Why India Was Partitioned in 1947
(2008).
Milk Kinship
Authors: Guindi Fadwa El
Published: September 2018

Milk kinship is a designation that refers to social practices sharing the feature in which infants are breastfed by lactating women who are not their birth mothers. Historically these practices were widespread in the Mediterranean, Arabian and Balkan regions, and among contemporary Shia and Sunni Muslim groups. While the practice pre‐dates Islam, Islamic sources legitimized and regulated it. Recent field research has sought to define the parameters that might empirically establish the admissibility or inadmissibility of milk kinship practices within the anthropological category of kinship.
Mead–Freeman Controversy on Samoa
Authors: Shankman Paul
Published: September 2018

In 1983, Derek Freeman published a scathing critique of Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa
(1928), setting off a controversy that has lasted into the second decade of the twenty‐first century. Freeman argued that Mead was wrong about Samoan sexual permissiveness and adolescence, stating that she had been fooled by the innocent jokes of two young Samoan women. Freeman also argued that Mead ignored the role of biology in human life. However, Freeman's critique of Mead was deeply flawed. While Samoa did have a sexually restrictive public morality, privately many Samoan adolescents became sexually active as they grew older. There also is no evidence that Mead was fooled by Samoan women or that she neglected biology. Freeman's scholarship relied on misrepresentation of Mead's work, selective use of evidence, and personal questioning of Mead's credibility. In summary, the controversy yielded some new information about Samoan culture but no new theoretical insights.
Tsuboi Shōgorō (1863–1913)
Authors: Omoto Keiichi
Published: September 2018

Tsuboi Shōgorō was the founder of anthropology in Japan. He was well grounded in natural history and established the Anthropological Society of Japan in 1884. He taught anthropology at the Science University and published papers and books on diverse topics ranging across both physical and cultural aspects of humans. After his death at the age of 50, the diversity of topics that featured in anthropological journals was gone. A group of young anthropologists, prehistory researchers, and ethnologists set up a workshop named APE in 1936 in an attempt to restore the multidisciplinary nature of anthropology, but it did not last long. Since then the separation of the disciplines within the anthropological sciences has become increasingly apparent in Japan.
Ethnographic Engagement
Authors: Lassiter Luke Eric
Published: September 2018

Modern forms of ethnographic engagement (such as participant action research, feminist anthropology, and activist ethnography) have roots in nineteenth and early and mid‐twentieth‐century anthropology. This brief entry highlights one of the earliest impulses for collaborative and engaged research (emanating from American ethnologist Paul Radin) to frame what is then a brief description of current developments, including collaborative ethnography.
Postsocialisms
Authors: Dunn Elizabeth Cullen , Rogers Douglas , Verdery Katherine
Published: September 2018

Following the collapse of Communist Party rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989–91, a new field of scholarship emerged: the anthropology of postsocialism. Initially it treated the regional and global changes accompanying this collapse but it soon found a focus in “transitology”—challenging its assumptions of a quick transition to democracy, markets, and private property. From that critical project, the anthropology of postsocialism developed into a broader analytical stance while continuing to research the impact of socialism's structures of expectation, charting their combination and recombination with newer structures of expectation characteristic of twenty‐first‐century global orders.
Bride‐Price
Authors: Silva Kelly
Published: September 2018

Bride‐price is a social technology by means of which people negotiate rights in persons, identities, obligations, belonging, property transmission, power, and alliance relations. Bride‐price engages people in a complex debt chain. Bride‐price has been characterized as the offering of particular valuables and/or money from wife takers to wife givers in order to seal genetricial rights and access to a woman's productive potential. Among various peoples, a condition for a person to be considered a complete, free, and full adult is the performance of bride‐price in her/his marriage. However, this institution is also the source of many controversies due to its potential association with commodity exchange. Aware of this risk, people resort to social techniques to inscribe bride‐price in the gift regime. The current debate about bride‐price is closely articulated with issues around gender, child custody, Christianity and other global religions, polygamy, and divorce.
Governmentality
Authors: Baptista João Afonso
Published: September 2018

Governmentality is a neologism developed by Michel Foucault. It involves constituting rationality and the subjects of government in a way that the power of governing is seen as rational. Governmentality can be defined as a noncentralized attempt to regulate human conduct through multiform techniques and procedures. It dismantles the idea of government as singular by illuminating the interconnected and heterogeneous agents involved in the government of the conditions, possibilities, and limits under which one lives and self‐regulates. Besides state agencies, these agents may consist of scientific experts, nongovernmental organizations, activists, the media, corporations, courts, labor unions, as well as natural processes that constrain governance, such as pandemics, earthquakes, or tsunamis.
Medical Anthropology Methods: Discourse Analysis
Authors: Wutich Amber
Published: September 2018

Discourse analysis is a methodological approach for analyzing qualitative data, whether written or spoken. Drawing on linguistics, discourse analysis examines grammar beyond the sentence, including the unwritten rules governing conversations and how language in use helps people get things done. Critical discourse analysis is a specialized method used for studying power and ideology and for motivating social change through critique. In medical anthropology, discourse analysis is used to study interactions between patients and medical practitioners, everyday talk about health, and technical medical language in clinical settings.
Legal Pluralism
Authors: Timmer Jaap
Published: September 2018

We all live with some idea of justice that shapes in profound ways the ways we relate to each other and what we regard as right and wrong. Legal pluralism focuses on the rules governing this and recognizes that, even if such rules are formally instituted, social organization, jobs, projects, nation building, and so on also proceed through effective informal understandings and improvisations. Following a checkered history since the colonial period, the concept of legal pluralism currently makes reference to the whole aggregate of norms of social life and control, using the distinctions people make even as they acknowledge an analytical distinction between the state and nonstate as different sites from which norms and rules emanate. Unlike its past focus on the law, anthropologists working in this field now focus less on special court cases, professional rationalizations, and contested forms of regulation than on everyday understandings.
Culture, Concept of
Authors: Launay Robert
Published: September 2018

The anthropological concept of culture refers generally to the corpus of shared knowledge, attitudes, and learned behaviors of a given population. Its multiple meanings are best revealed in the context of controversies in anthropology where culture, as an explanatory framework, has been contrasted either to “nature” or to “society.” Franz Boas and his students used the concept to call ideas of European racial and intellectual superiority into question. At the same time, the reliance on culture as an explanatory framework privileged the quest for meanings and expressions of style, as opposed to the sociological emphasis on norms and behavior. More recently, the work of Claude Lévi‐Strauss, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins, among others, continues to stress such an emphasis on underlying meaning.
Polygamy (Polygyny, Polyandry)
Authors: Zeitzen Miriam Koktvedgaard
Published: September 2018

Anthropologically, polygamy is defined as marriage between one person and two or more spouses simultaneously. It exists in two main forms: polygyny, where one man is married to several women, and polyandry, where one woman is married to several men. A third form, group marriage between several men and women, is rare; same‐sex polygamy is very rare. Polygyny is the most common form, including de facto forms, where a person is formally monogamous but socially polygamous, maintaining additional relationships. Contemporary anthropologists explore polygamous kinship and gender relations and the law and politics of polygamy. Focal points include managing love, emotions, and sexuality in polygamy and polygamy's impact on women's and children's health and rights. Polygamy becomes political when minorities such as fundamentalist Mormons claim the practice as a religious or cultural right in majority monogamous societies.
Colombia,Anthropology in
Authors: Jimeno Myriam
Published: September 2018

This entry outlines some of the debates and positions that have characterized anthropology in Colombia since it was established as a disciplinary and professional field in the mid‐1940s. It focuses on sociocultural anthropology, which, in the evolution of anthropology, can be understood in terms of the tensions between the global orientations of the discipline and the way in which these are put into practice within the Colombian context. In the anthropological practice of countries like Colombia, there is a constant tension between adopting the dominant anthropological concepts and orientations, on the one hand, and modifying, adjusting, or rejecting them in favor of alternatives, on the other. This need to adapt the practice stems from the specific social condition of anthropologists in Colombia, who are positioned both as researchers and as fellow citizens of the subjects of their study, as a result of which they are continually torn between their duty as scientists and their role as citizens.
Market Research, Anthropology in
Authors: Schwegler Tara
Published: September 2018

Anthropological research methods have been successfully leveraged to observe and interpret consumer behavior in order to inform the design, positioning, and messaging of products and services in the private, nonprofit, and governmental sectors. Anthropology is a vital complement to the mainstay of market research, quantitative surveys, because it connects disparate insights and weaves them into robust, coherent narratives that explain why consumers behave the way they do. Although the use of anthropological inquiry in the service of commercial interests has raised ethical objections, anthropologists in market research have made important methodological advances that attest to the continued relevance and value of anthropological inquiry in the evolving global economy.
R
ibeiro,
D
arcy (1922–97)
Authors: Mattos André Borges De
Published: September 2018

Darcy Ribeiro was one of Brazil's most prominent anthropologists. A combative and politically active intellectual, he produced a vast and diverse body of work in various fields, including anthropology, education, politics, and literature. He conducted fieldwork in ethnology, heavily influenced by his engagement with Brazilian indigenous peoples' affairs in the 1940s and 1950s. Though he was not a founder of an institutionalized academic school, his research would form a legacy for more than a generation of Brazilian anthropologists. His later work, expressing a wider interest in the development of Latin American peoples, proved to be of enormous impact, making him one of the best known and most respected social scientists within Brazil and beyond.
Microcredit
Authors: Morvant‐Roux Solène , Servet Jean‐Michel
Published: September 2018

In a new institutional environment, microcredit raises the question of the role of debt in society, which is often discussed by anthropologists. The marketization of debt via microcredit may well have been promoted as a powerful tool for poverty alleviation in the global South, but microcredit has actually been a powerful tool for bringing the poor within the market's bounds while increasing their debt burden.
Literacy
Authors: Robinson‐Pant Anna
Published: September 2018

The cognitive skills of reading and writing are referred to as literacy. But meanings of literacy can also include the processes of interpreting gestures or emotions and even learning to read the world. Literacy has long been a contested term, shaped by research investigation from many different disciplines, including economics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and linguistics. By focusing on literacy in different cultural contexts, anthropologists have contributed a broader conceptualization that connects literacy with social and cultural change. Rather than looking only at formal literacy acquisition in educational institutions and its impact on individual cognitive development, ethnographers have taken the starting point of researching literacy in everyday life. Within anthropology, a shift can be traced from conceptualizing literacy as a neutral technical skill to understanding literacy as embedded in social practices.
M
ead,
M
argaret (1901–78)
Authors: Losche Diane
Published: September 2018

Margaret Mead (1901–78) was an American anthropologist who became a public figure early in her career because of her contributions to debates about the nature of sexuality and gender. Her field studies were conducted in many parts of the world but particularly in Oceania, and one of her most significant studies was published early in her career,
Coming of Age in Samoa
(1928). After her death this work was attacked by Derek Freeman, an Australian anthropologist. A debate about Mead's fieldwork in Samoa followed.
Illness
Authors: Chandler Clare I. R.
Published: September 2018

Illness is a concept that infers subjective experiences of ill‐health, and has been a central anthropological concern. Classic ethnographies often discussed illness as a lens through which to understand different societies. Medical anthropologists then focused on illness itself, drawing distinctions with disease—the latter being seen as natural rather than social and to be known objectively rather than subjectively. Illness, as a sociocultural construction, may therefore not map onto a biomedically defined disease category. This observation gave rise to analyses of exchanges between doctors and patients in explanatory models of sickness. Subsequent foci turned to the political and economic contexts through which illness is created and more recently to the biomedical and broader social constructions of what we have come to know as ill‐health.
Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practice Surveys
Authors: Chandler Clare I. R.
Published: September 2018

Knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) surveys intend to investigate the health behavior of particular populations, often for program planning or evaluation purposes. Arising in the field of demography in the 1950s, KAP surveys continue to be popular in public health despite substantial anthropological critiques levied in past decades. Anthropologists have attended to the context in which such surveys are envisioned, carried out, and analyzed and have drawn comparisons with the methods and findings of anthropological work. Emerging critiques have questioned whether these surveys are able to capture what they intend to collect; whether they are fit for purpose; and, if not, whether populations should continue to be burdened with such research methods. Ethnography offers an alternative approach to generate a richer understanding of health and practice that can account for the wider dynamics that shape lived realities.
Smith,Adam (1723–90)
Authors: Lázaro Raquel
Published: September 2018

The moral philosopher Adam Smith was a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He argued for sociability in the face of those who framed human relationships in terms of atomized individuality. He endeavored to address two concerns: what principles governing human action are to be found in human nature and, on the basis of such principles, how society may function in a harmonious way. Smith's approach to these issues is to apply the Newtonian experimental method. He holds that self‐interest is the primary motive of action, although it does not preclude the possibility of some degree of propriety or social harmony. Commercial society is offered as a model in this regard. Smith presents a moral system in accordance with a set of anthropological assumptions: man is an imperfect creature, who acts on his passions and finds within himself sensible inclinations that can be realized only in society.
Cultural Politics
Authors: Johnson Jessica
Published: September 2018

The entry begins with an overview of cultural politics as a site of social struggle that emphasizes identity, marginalization, and empowerment, offering examples of the activist projects and academic debates that this configuration of its meaning and practice has yielded. The discussion addresses how anthropologists have analyzed cultural politics in relation to the concept of hegemony, the dynamics of globalization and the transnational economy, and performances of cultural citizenship. Next, the entry focuses on the particular challenges and opportunities for anthropologists conducting ethnographic research on cultural politics. It concludes by referencing theory on the ethical dimensions of fieldwork to examine how anthropologists also engage cultural politics as an everyday activity and intersubjective process. Methodological approaches to ethnography that value embodiment and emplacement over identity and difference suggest new stakes and potential for cultural politics as an instrument of social justice.
Precarity
Authors: Liston Noelle Molé
Published: September 2018

Precarity describes a condition or subject experiencing risk and uncertainty wrought by unpredictable, rapidly changing, and sometimes volatile socioeconomic and political conditions. With its etymological roots in European labor movements in the 1990s, precarity also characterizes contingent and intermittent employment and/or high unemployment typical of the neoliberal economic conditions from the late twentieth century onward.
Sex/Gender Distinction
Authors: Helliwell Christine
Published: September 2018

The sex/gender distinction is a distinction between the physical “biological” structure of one's body and particularly the kind of genitalia one has (sex), and the social roles and cultural representations associated with that body in any social setting (gender). It was central to feminist anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s but has since been subject to trenchant criticism on a number of fronts. It remains in common use within anthropology but needs to be treated with care.
Artisan
Authors: Chibnik Michael
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists often use the term “artisan” to describe skilled makers of crafts. The work of artisans is ordinarily distinguished from both the creations of “artists” and the production of objects in factories. Archaeologists have conducted detailed studies of the evolution of craft specialization and the techniques associated with the creation of diverse material objects used in daily activities and rituals. Before the mid‐1970s, most anthropological research on artisans examined their techniques, their organization of work, and the role of crafts in economic and ceremonial life. Since the 1970s, many anthropologists have also looked at the ways in which local crafts have been transformed or invented in order to be sold in regional, national, and international markets.
Tactility
Authors: Seremetakis C. Nadia
Published: September 2018

Tactility, in the sense of haptics, refers to the sense of touch/affect. As both material and affective, touch encodes a multiplicity of meanings, literal and metaphorical. The term haptics derives from the Greek
aptesthae
(noun:
aphe
). For Aristotle, all sensory materiality and affect, though hierarchically ordered, fell under the rubric of haptics. Aristotle's ideas on the senses and sense perception have shaped and continue to influence the conceptualization of the senses in general, and touch in particular, in the Western world, though they followed different trajectories within and between the human sciences and the humanities. Critical responses to Aristotelian ideas on the senses have developed in anthropology since the 1980s, setting the ground for alternative understandings of the underexamined yet crucial experience of touch.
Vigilantism
Authors: French Brigittine M.
Published: September 2018

This entry defines vigilantism, situates its study in a broader field of anthropological inquiry, and discusses how vigilantism is conceptually and politically linked to notions of state formation, law, and violence. It highlights the performative aspects of displaying violent justice on social bodies as an increasingly common practice in the context of globalization.
Museum Conservation
Authors: Clavir Miriam , Pearlstein Ellen
Published: September 2018

This entry describes the history and evolution of the conservation of culturally valued materials found in museum collections. Significant steps in the evolution of museum conservation in the twentieth century include the introduction of chemists to a field previously dominated by artists and craftsmen and a redefinition to include the prevention of damage through environmental management rather than only through activities designed to restore already damaged works. Professionalization of the field coincides with the introduction of ethical standards and codes of practice, membership organizations, and scholarly publications. A description is included of the historical development of the field, including its evolution in changing cultural contexts, both historical and contemporary, and particularly in relation to postcolonial museums' relationships with indigenous communities from whom collections have originated.
Revolution
Authors: Greenberg Jessica
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists leave their mark on the study of revolution in several key ways. Anthropological studies of revolution include the ethnographic and historical study of specific revolutionary events; the study of revolutionary subject formation (how people come to understand themselves as revolutionary; the study of post‐revolutionary societies and the ways in which these societies continue to be shaped by revolutionary practices and ideals; the study of revolutionary practices and actors that have been marginalized in scholarly accounts; and the study of new revolutionary forms, which seek political transformation through new means. At the broadest level, anthropologists contribute to the study of revolution by analyzing revolutions as processes that have enduring impacts on social and political life.
Soil Knowledge
Authors: Fraser James
Published: September 2018

This entry argues for a renewed anthropological engagement with local soil knowledge against a backdrop of industrial agriculture in crisis. It discusses the idea that one example of local soil knowledge, anthropogenic dark earths (ADE), could be a potential solution to this crisis. It argues that, while there is merit in this argument, ADE should be conceived of as a form of “limited good” and so cannot be simply scaled up under our current “unlimited growth” model of development.
H
eath,
S
hirley (
b
. 1939)
Authors: Street Brian
Published: September 2018

Shirley Brice Heath has been one of the major figures in the bringing together of anthropology, ethnography, education, and community practice. In the early 1980s, she documented a ten‐year ethnography of literacy practices in the homes of children and their families living in three different communities in the Piedmont Carolinas.
Settlement Patterns
Authors: Ellen Roy
Published: September 2018

A settlement pattern comprises the physical distribution of a population, spatially and over time. It reflects the impact of basic ecological interactions as well as social and cultural factors that influence spatiotemporal order. In environmental anthropology, a settlement pattern represents the most inclusive unit required to understand the physical interactions of a given population. In archaeology and prehistory, the recovered evidence for settlement patterns is the basis for attempts to reconstruct the causes (i.e., ecological, economic, and social arrangements) that gave rise to them.
Tax,Sol (1907–95)
Authors: Smith Joshua J.
Published: September 2018

Sol Tax was an American anthropologist at the University of Chicago who was renowned for his organizational skills and ethnographic works in North and Central America. The founder of action anthropology and the journalCurrent Anthropology, he worked with prominent anthropologists such as Ralph Linton, A. R. Radcliffe‐Brown, and Robert Redfield and made innovative contributions to studies in social organization, culture change, worldview, economic anthropology, action anthropology as well as numerous professional and political endeavors throughout his illustrious career.
Therapeutic Landscapes
Authors: Gesler Wil
Published: September 2018

Therapeutic landscapes are an analytical framework for examining the process of creating health and wellbeing in places. It consists of three components: physical environments, social environments, and symbolic environments. Its origins lie in reforms in the 1980s and 1990s in cultural geography and medical geography as well as in medical anthropology. Theoretically, it is informed by ideas from cultural ecology, structuralism, and humanism. The concept has been widely used in health geography and other social sciences of health to study specific sites such as parks, marginalized populations such as the mentally ill, health care facilities such as hospitals, and imaginary geographies found in art and literature.
Radcliffe‐Brown,A. R.(1881–1955)
Authors: Warms Richard L.
Published: September 2018

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe‐Brown was an important theoretician and the founder of “structural functionalism.” Influenced by Émile Durkheim and Herbert Spencer, Radcliffe‐Brown sought to analyze social practices and institutions in terms of their contribution to social structure. His search for a scientific anthropology and his belief that general laws of social organization could be discovered through the comparative analysis of society drew many students. Although, most current‐day anthropologists see important problems in Radcliffe‐Brown's approach, he remains deeply influential.
Durkheim,Émile (1858–1917)
Authors: Weiss Raquel
Published: September 2018

Émile Durkheim was the founder of French sociology. He developed a school of investigation, gathering scholars around the famous journalL'année sociologique, which covered various aspects of social life. His work was of major relevance to anthropology and sociology and provided foundational elements to cultural studies by developing a theory that highlights the symbolic dimension of life and points out the relevance of religion to every collectivity. Among the most important concepts of his theory are ritual, belief, the sacred, effervescence, and symbols—these are the crucial elements that explain the interconnectedness of social life. Durkheim understood social life as involving a group that constantly produces and reproduces itself by means of collective performances, shared ideas, and symbols.
News
Authors: Peterson Mark Allen
Published: September 2018

News is discourse about selected contemporary events that is circulated among an audience. As a discourse, news can be characterized as timely, relevant, and true. The meanings of timeliness, relevance, and truth in news vary across cultural boundaries and also over time within societies. News is thus a global phenomenon, but newsmaking is always shaped by local social, political, economic, and cultural systems, so that the style and content of news are always locally inflected.
Environmental Issues in Development
Authors: Barrow C. J.
Published: September 2018

This entry reviews environmental issues in development and concepts and ethics relating to the environment and human wellbeing. It also examines environmentalism, the green movement, green politics, environmental change, threats and opportunities, and environmental determinism. The key issues outlined are neo‐Malthusians; limits to growth; the Gaia hypothesis; sustainable development; precautionary and polluter‐pays principles; the growth of popular, business, and media interest; the 1992 UN Rio Earth Summit; millennium stocktaking and resolutions; and the emergence of environmental management.
T
urner,
V
ictor (1920–83)
Authors: Di Giovine Michael A.
Published: September 2018

Victor W. Turner was a highly prolific symbolic anthropologist known for his original, multidisciplinary, and humanistic approach to anthropological theory. He remains influential in the social–scientific study of ritual, religion, pilgrimage, performance, countercultural “happenings,” sport, and contemporary social life at the margins. This entry describes his life, major influences and works, and seminal theories, such as “social dramas,” the “ritual process,” and
communitas
.
Criminalization
Authors: Henne Kathryn
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have had a long‐standing interest in crime and criminalization in different parts of the world. Although criminal anthropologists of the late nineteenth century influenced understandings of criminals and criminal behavior through an embrace of social Darwinism and positivistic methods, anthropological inquiries on criminalization have since problematized beliefs about who commits crime and what constitutes lawbreaking across societies and contexts. What then has anthropology contributed to knowledge about criminalization? How are anthropological studies of criminalization distinct from knowledge produced by criminology, the discipline whose primary object of inquiry is crime? And are there synergies between them?
Copies and Fakes
Authors: Kalshoven Petra Tjitske
Published: September 2018

In modern Western discourse, copying and imitation have generally been considered questionable, second rate, and even reprehensible activities, as exemplified by art‐historical literature on forgeries or educational and academic concerns with plagiarism and intellectual property rights. The recent ontological turn in the social sciences, however, combined with an anthropological fascination with liminality and boundaries, has led to an increase in ethnographic attention paid to copies and fakes as marginal and contested entities in material culture, understood as eminently social, that may help to shed light on questions ranging from the nature of human skill to issues of temporality, belonging, and morality. Moreover, anthropological interest in copies highlights their epistemological potential as expressions and repositories of creativity and change.
Mauss,Marcel (1872–1950)
Authors: Hart Keith
Published: September 2018

Marcel Mauss's reputation is in the ascendant, more so now than that of his uncle, Émile Durkheim. This reputation hinges on lip service paid to the greatness of one essay,The Gift, but it is not matched by close reading of his work in general, much of which belongs to ephemeral politics and is accessible only in French. Mauss's life formed a whole, which makes his biography a key to his fragmented writings. A sketch of his personal development is followed in this entry by an attempt to rescue his most famous essay from the tenacious error of supposing that Mauss wished to oppose gift and market as economic principles.
Age Systems and Kinship
Authors: Spencer Paul
Published: September 2018

Social institutions based on age have been observed in every continent and throughout recorded history. At the rudimentary end of a scale of complexity are those solely concerned with the graduated education of children or the organization of youths. This entry is concerned with a more elaborate level that persists beyond youth to more complex arrangements for adults of all ages, with implications for generational divisions and concepts of seniority within the family.
F
reyre,
G
ilberto (1900–1987)
Authors: Motta Antonio
Published: September 2018

Gilberto Freyre was a Brazilian sociologist and anthropologist. He belonged to a generation of intellectuals known as the great interpreters of Brazilian society. He was one of the most influential Brazilian scholars of the first half of the twentieth century and the one who attained the greatest international acclaim. His multiple vocations led him to pursue a wide‐ranging intellectual career, combining interests in sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and cultural criticism. While he is one of the most studied and discussed of Brazilian authors, he is also one of the most controversial. Although he has bequeathed an encyclopedic body of work, covering a broad variety of themes, Freyre is best known for his 1933 publication
Casa‐grande e senzala
, translated into English as
The Masters and the Slaves
(1946).
Ancestors
Authors: Kwon Heonik
Published: September 2018

In anthropology, the term “ancestors” denotes those forebears from the past who are remembered and whose legacies the living consider as being constitutive of their identity. Several of the subdisciplines of anthropology, such as paleoanthropology and evolutionary biology, take the discovery of the realities of distant, prehistoric human ancestry as their core ethos.
Cultural Ecology
Authors: Sutton Mark Q. , Anderson E. N.
Published: September 2018

Cultural ecology, a subdivision and approach in human ecology, is the anthropological study of the relationships and interactions between humans, their cultures, and their physical environments. Cultural ecologists study many aspects of culture and environment, including how and why cultures do what they do to solve their subsistence problems, how groups of people understand their environment, and how they share their knowledge of the environment.
Health, Maternal and Child
Authors: Spangler Sydney A.
Published: September 2018

Like other focal areas of medical anthropology, the study of maternal and child health includes examination of wellness and prevention, illness recognition, disease etiology, care seeking, treatment modalities, and the effectiveness of public health interventions. Common cross‐cutting topics include power, gender, and particularly inequality, as demonstrated by ethnographic works that reveal specific pathways through which uneven maternal and child health outcomes are produced and perpetuated. Finally, this entry seeks to understand the varied responses of women and children to marginalizing forces such as poverty and social exclusion—including processes of resilience that allow some to achieve health and wellbeing despite adverse circumstances.
Consultancy, Anthropology and
Authors: Strathern Andrew , Stewart Pamela J.
Published: September 2018

Consultancy work in anthropology presents both opportunities and constraints. The opportunities range from the immediate field of contexts for employment and for making an active difference in the world of practical endeavor to developing an integrated view of anthropology that embraces applied work. The constraints result from the conditions under which consultancy work is undertaken and the overall contexts of power that define these conditions. This entry discusses a number of issues that emerge from the above observations, giving examples of work that has been done.
Penal State
Authors: Brown Michelle
Published: September 2018

The massive expansion of imprisonment in the United States at the end of the twentieth century heralded the rise of a growing global penal apparatus that has impacted the lives of millions of the planet's most vulnerable peoples. In response, growing social movements seek to foreground social justice efforts at decarceration, abolition, and alternatives to imprisonment.
Cultural Survival
Authors: Corry Stephen
Published: September 2018

This entry examines some of the concepts behind cultural survival. It defines the term and gives a number of examples, ranging from styles of dress to folkloric displays. Cultural survival plays a role both when minorities assert their rights and when they see them contained or suppressed by ruling elites. How identity relates to the sharing of cultural perceptions is described and the problems inherent in popular ideas of “traditional” and “modern” are considered.
Shintoism
Authors: Nelson John
Published: September 2018

Shinto is both an invented religious tradition and one with authentic continuity linking the origins of Japanese civilization to the present day. Through the manipulations of clans and military power, a body of ritual practices focused on local deities and ancestral spirits developed into an imperial institution and, much later, into a destructive religious nationalism. Shinto is highly syncretic and interactive with a variety of Buddhist denominations that came to dominate Japanese religious cultures for over 1,000 years, although today it is separate from Buddhism and has been instrumental in fostering community identity through seasonal rituals.
Technology and Development
Authors: Trace Simon
Published: September 2018

This entry explores the role that technology can play in helping people in the developing world move out of poverty. It considers why technology is important in development, reviews common barriers to technology innovation and dissemination, and looks at the evolution of thinking around how technology dissemination can be made to work.
Sacred Ecology
Authors: Sponsel Leslie E.
Published: September 2018

Sacred ecology focuses on the religious and spiritual aspects of human–environment interactions. Here it is illustrated in general by common environmental themes that have been identified in major world religions. It is further illustrated by the ethnographic case of the Yanomami of the Amazon area between Brazil and Venezuela based on a unique account by a Yanomami shaman, Davi Kopenawa. In the process, sacred ecology is contrasted with secular ecology.
Kroeber,AlfredL. (1876–1960)
Authors: Jacknis Ira
Published: September 2018

Alfred L. Kroeber was the leading American anthropologist of his generation. Widely regarded as the successor to his mentor, Franz Boas, he dominated the discipline during the first half of the twentieth century. As the first professor and curator of anthropology at the University of California, he was the founder of the scholarly study of California Indians. Kroeber was also known for his contributions to culture theory.
Reproduction
Authors: Sobonya Sarah , Sargent Carolyn
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have definitively documented the ways in which reproduction is both biological (the production of human beings and the species‐wide physiological processes involved) and socially constituted. While early ethnographic inquiry on reproduction was primarily descriptive, numerous scholars have argued powerfully that the study of reproductive meanings and practices is central to theory in anthropology. Such research demonstrates how reproductive processes shape and reflect social, political, and moral landscapes. Much scholarship focuses on the politics of reproduction, including the medicalization of childbirth, menstruation, and menopause, as well as the significance of authoritative knowledge, or the knowledge that counts in a particular situation, for understanding the interpretation and management of reproductive health. Recent anthropological research has moved toward global studies of reproduction, engaging such issues as transnational migration, biotechnologies, body commodification, and reproductive rights and an increased focus on paternity and men's reproductive health issues.