bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empiricism
Authors: Rutherford Danilyn
Published: September 2018

Empiricism is not a word that cultural anthropologists have used with great frequency. Yet a distinctive form of empiricism has characterized their scholarship since the subfield's earliest days. Using David Hume's version of empiricism as a point of comparison, the entry considers the empirical approaches taken at three moments in the subfield's history: one marked by Franz Boas's invention of the scientific concept of culture; another heralded by the publication of James Clifford and George Marcus's edited collectionWriting Culture(1986); and the last inaugurated by the rise of science studies, a branch of scholarship within the social sciences and humanities that shows how facts can be both constructed and empirically real.
Research Bodies in Development
Authors: Kassam Amir
Published: September 2018

Research bodies in development form part of the global knowledge system and comprise public, private, and civil society organizations operating at multiple levels. Research is considered to be a necessary condition for development and must deal with a wide range of economic, sociocultural, and environmental issues that confront all societies. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is an example of an international research system that paved the way for the intensive tillage‐based Green Revolution agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s. The current research trend is to seek participatory agro‐ecological solutions to meet agricultural development needs. “Conservation agriculture” and the “system of rice intensification” are two such solutions that are spreading internationally.
Indigenous Media
Authors: Hinkson Melinda
Published: September 2018

Indigenous media refers to diverse audiovisual production activities involving indigenous people. Indigenous people's experience of media technologies date to their earliest contacts with European explorers and scientists. Since the 1970s a growing number of indigenous communities have adopted recording and broadcast technologies for their own purposes. Throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century, indigenous media activity evolved to engage national and international audiences. The emergence of computer networks and digital media has enabled further innovations. Indigenous media productions reveal distinctive cultural imperatives and ways of seeing. Anthropologists' attention to indigenous media has contributed to new conceptualizations of culture and cultural process.
Gender and Ethnographic Film
Authors: Hamilton Annette
Published: September 2018

Ethnographic film emerged in the first part of the twentieth century in parallel with social/cultural anthropology. Like documentary cinema, it was understood to offer an objective representation in a scientific frame. Ethnographic film reflected the same masculinist sensibility as did anthropology more generally, and its representation of gender was unquestioned until the 1970s. Thereafter ethnographic films began to appear with women as their central subject, in some cases being directed by women filmmakers. The objectivity of anthropology began to be questioned along with the legitimacy of ethnographic film. Today, subjective approaches often by indigenous and local filmmakers have largely replaced the masculine authority of the traditional ethnographic film form.
Sahlins,Marshall (b. 1930)
Authors: Golub Alex
Published: September 2018

Marshall Sahlins is a US cultural anthropologist and one of the most influential anthropologists of the second half of the twentieth century, in fields including economic anthropology, historical anthropology, and kinship studies. Sahlins is known as an expert on Pacific Island cultures, especially Hawai‘i and Fiji. Theoretically, he has championed the explanatory potential of the culture concept.
Contemporary Art
Authors: Rutten Kris
Published: September 2018

There is increasing interest in the confrontation between contemporary art and anthropology. This confrontation has been referred to as the “ethnographic turn” in contemporary art. The past few decades have seen a growing number of contemporary art projects that address questions about the study and theorization of cultural difference and the practice of representation. At the same time, there has been a growing interest in contemporary art among anthropologists to communicate about ethnographic research, which starts from a problematization of the different possible genres, media, and formats. This entry discusses some of the criticisms of the ethnographic turn in art and of the role of the artist as an ethnographer. It elaborates on the sensory turn in ethnography/anthropology and ends by discussing some of the current trends at the intersection between contemporary art and anthropology.
Cognition, Comparative
Authors: Haun Daniel B. M. , van Leeuwen Edwin J. C.
Published: September 2018

Comparative cognition is a field of enquiry that aims to research cognition by comparing its characteristics across animal species. Cross‐species comparisons can separate cognitive skills that are widely shared across species from those that are rare or even unique to any particular species. Comparisons across species can also help researchers to understand which factors drive the evolution of cognition. If humans are included in the list of compared species, the field of comparative cognition is positioned to address such fundamental questions as: Which aspects of human cognition are unique and which are shared with other species? How does human cognition evolve? And, is any variance in the cognitive capacity of a species due to species‐typical genetic variance?
Political Economy
Authors: Kalb Don
Published: September 2018

Anthropological political economy emerged as a self‐conscious field of research in the United States in the 1970s, but its roots date back to eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century classical political economy. Key categories are value, production, social reproduction, division of labor, class, gender, race, ethnicity, capitalism, exploitation, contradiction, and contestation. Anthropological political economy emerged in close conversation with Marxism and world‐ systems theory. It relaunched long‐term historical perspectives in anthropology and elaborated a spatiotemporal method of local/global research that distinguished it sharply from twentieth‐century localized and synchronic ethnography. Major early contributors were Eleanor Leacock, Sidney Mintz, June Nash, and Eric Wolf.
Poland, Anthropology in
Authors: Buchowski Michał
Published: September 2018

Since the late eighteenth century, anthropological interests have always been closely related to Poland's national history and political situation and to Western ideas and anthropological theories worldwide. Two myths about Polish anthropology are explored: that it embodies aVolkskunde‐like science focused solely on its own society and that it exemplified vulgar Marxism during more than four decades under a communist political regime (1945–89). By the 1970s and 1980s, the discipline in the country was already theoretically plural and thematically varied and featured studies on all continents. The post‐1989 political democratization of Poland and its opening up to the world led to further diversification in terms of topics and theories. While it has preserved its specific national character and continues to cultivate anthropological traditions related to hermeneutic and phenomenological anthropology and social–critical thought, Polish anthropology today mirrors the global currents in anthropological concerns and contributes insights to studies on various subjects and areas.
Marketing
Authors: De Waal Malefyt Timothy
Published: September 2018

Marketing is the communication, management, and distribution of value (of a product, brand, or service) for the purpose of persuading consumers to act in some way. Views of marketing and its effect on consumer culture and consumption range from dystopic to utopian. Anthropologists examine marketing from both economic and cultural views. They explore the various ways in which marketing is perceived as a social force: as a widespread form of coercion and manipulation in society that creates false needs and desires in consumers, as a utopia for expressing consumer freedoms and wishes and for enacting relationships, or even as a way to inspire forms of resistance and offer alternative roles for cultural reformation.
Judaism
Authors: Buckser Andrew
Published: September 2018

This entry discusses Judaism as an anthropological subject, reviewing its basic beliefs and rituals and its place in the anthropological literature. Judaism is a monotheistic religion with about 14 million adherents worldwide, the great majority in North America, Israel, and Western Europe. Between the destruction of Jerusalem in the first centuryceand the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, Judaism existed primarily as a diaspora religion, and its elaborate system of law and ritual practice was the foundation of Jewish community life. Anthropological literature has explored the origins and meaning of Jewish belief and myth, the structure and consequences of Jewish ritual practice, and the relationship of Jewish religiosity to personal and community identities.
Sweden, Anthropology in
Authors: Hannerz Ulf
Published: September 2018

The academic field of anthropology in Sweden is divided into two disciplines: sociocultural anthropology and European ethnology. The historical division between these disciplines was based on a territorial division of labor, as the former concentrated on non‐European societies and cultures, and the latter on Swedish cultural traditions. This division is currently out of date, and so the border between the disciplines is now rather blurred. The entry summarizes the early history of the disciplines in their Swedish forms, considers the 1960s (in particular) as a period of transformation and growth, and proceeds to outline current characteristics. The emphasis is on social and cultural anthropology, which is the discipline that is the most integrated into international anthropology. Major current thematic interests are identified, the distribution of field studies in world regions is exemplified, and there is a brief overview of major academic institutions and organizations. Publication forms are also sketched, with some attention to the issue of language.
Kant,Immanuel (1724–1804): Influence on the Origins and Development of Anthropology
Authors: Frierson Patrick R.
Published: September 2018

This entry lays out Kant's contributions to the development of anthropology, focusing on four key areas: his concept of “pragmatic anthropology,” his race theory, his moral philosophy (with particular emphasis on his notion of a “universal” ethics), and his claim that the world one inhabits is partly constituted by the cognitive structures through which one situates oneself within that world.
Rites of Passage
Authors: Forth Gregory
Published: September 2018

Rites of passage are inextricably associated with Arnold van Gennep. Such rites are most closely associated with initiations of various kinds and with major changes in the life cycle. As Van Gennep showed, changes of social status typically comprise ritual acts distinguishable as “rites of separation,” “rites of transition,” and “rites of incorporation.” During the second half of the twentieth century, several anthropologists built on Van Gennep's insights. Focusing particularly on the liminal stage of transition rituals, Turner developed a concept of “communitas,” a social condition in which actors temporarily or permanently stand apart from the dominant institutions of society, sometimes challenging or facilitating change in these. In contrast, other writers (e.g., Bloch, La Fontaine) have shown how rites of passage can be used by dominant groups to maintain or reinforce established political orders.
Trade, Long‐Distance
Authors: High Holly
Published: September 2018

In anthropological discussions, “trade” is usually understood in the sense of an exchange where goods and services that are not available locally are obtained. Long‐distance trade may be conducted according to the market principle of a supply and demand price mechanism, but studies have shown that much trade occurs on different principles such as gifting or state treaty. Trade within a single culture often involves mores and norms that are specific to that culture, while long‐distance trade requires negotiation across such distinctions. In a wide variety of cultural contexts, trade has been disparaged or downplayed. At various stages, interconnections of people around the world have been intensified through increasingly global systems of trade.
L
évi‐
S
trauss,
C
laude (1908–2009)
Authors: Fox James J.
Published: September 2018

Claude Lévi‐Strauss was a major figure in anthropology. After a formative period in Brazil and the United States, he was appointed, in 1959, to the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, a position he held for twenty‐three years. In 1973, he was elected to the Académie Française and eventually became its dean. He propounded a form of analysis known as structuralism. The influence of his structural analysis, while centered on anthropology, extended widely to other fields of inquiry. In a lifetime of over a century, he remained remarkably productive. His publications include major works on elementary forms of kinship, systems of complex social classification, and the logic of myth.
Religion and Media
Authors: de Witte Marleen
Published: September 2018

Born from anthropologists' sense of surprise at religious media phenomena, over the past two decades “religion and media” has grown into a burgeoning field of anthropological study. This entry gives an introduction to the development of this field, distinguishing two major approaches: first, a focus on the meeting of religion and media as formerly separate domains and, second, a focus on religion as itself a practice of mediation (religion as media) that evolves over time with the coming of new media. This entry discusses key topics and questions in earlier and current work on the religion–media nexus and outlines some new directions for research.
Slums and Shanty Towns
Authors: Sen Atreyee
Published: September 2018

This entry offers an overview of conceptual complexities surrounding anthropological understandings of slums and shanty towns. It traces the historical role of slums in urban anthropology and highlights the definitional and methodological challenges that underlie ethnographic studies of urban poverty.
Conflict and Security
Authors: Lyon Stephen M.
Published: September 2018

Conflict and security, although related, imply different domains. Conflict has long been a preoccupation of anthropology. Underlying assumptions about how best to understand conflict have shifted over the years, but it is probably fair to say that anthropologists have been at the forefront of challenging accepted wisdom about meanings and practices associated with conflict since its earliest days. Security, on the other hand, is a more recent interest within anthropology. Security studies really grew as a distinct field of study in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It has been dominated by international relations and political science, but anthropology has a long history of studying social institutions that form part of the security apparatus. In many respects, anthropology, although not primarily concerned with state institutions, is ideally suited to understand the interplays between economic, political, historical, and cultural forces shaping the experiences and structures of security and conflict.
International Development, Anthropology in
Authors: Crewe Emma , Axelby Richard
Published: September 2018

The direct involvement of anthropologists in international development ebbs and flows, while ethnographic researchers consistently offer a critique of aid, especially the damage it causes. Anthropologists' navigation of the ethics, pressures, and contradictions of aid has in common with all development professionals an increasing preoccupation with managerialism and a focus on representation, funding, planning, and audit. They stand with fewer allies in their aim to amplify the diverse voices of those on the periphery. The pessimism and critical mode of anthropological research on international development is explained through ethnographic examples organized around key development themes of poverty, technology, rights, governance, security, and empowerment. Anthropologists continue to offer a distinctive perspective: wary of reductive generalization and attentive to specific context (time and place); empirical, historical, and reflexive; and interweaving attention to method with theory in their interpretations. The institutional exigencies and power hierarchies that they understand intimately, but struggle to overturn, limit their impact.
Labor, Employment, and Work
Authors: Kesküla Eeva
Published: September 2018

Work is a cultural universal that exists in all human societies. Work is a means of producing a livelihood, a system of meanings and moralities, and a principle for structuring societies. The term “employment” refers to wage labor. Anthropologists study work from preindustrial societies to contemporary high‐tech industries. The key questions when studying work are related to how industrialization shapes relations between home and work, restructuring relations of gender and kinship, and how time use is restructured. Industrialization is not manifested in the same patterns everywhere. Deindustrialization and high unemployment in the West raise new questions about the future of work. Key themes in the anthropology of work include gendered division of labor, the morality of work, the identity of professional groups, how people are made to work, and resistance in the workplace.
C
anadian
A
nthropology
S
ociety /
S
ociété
C
anadienne
d
'Anthropologie (
CASCA
)
Authors: Saillant Francine
Published: September 2018

This entry sets forth a vision of Canadian anthropology, especially at its beginnings. More specifically, the text presents its stages of development and its major influences, at the crossroads of US, French, and British anthropology. Canadian anthropology became established with the foundation of the Canadian Anthropology Society / Société Canadienne d'Anthropologie, which in a sense marked the final step in the discipline's establishment, in conjunction with the creation of various university departments and leading scientific journals.
Hunter‐Gatherer Models in Human Evolution
Authors: Fitzpatrick Katie , Berbesque J. Colette
Published: September 2018

Over 95 percent of human history was preagricultural, with humans subsisting through hunting and gathering. Data from contemporary hunter‐gatherers, or foragers, have long been used to draw inferences about Pleistocene foragers. There has been disagreement, however, about whether contemporary foraging data are useful and relevant for models of human evolution. This entry discusses how hunter‐gatherer data are used, including methodology (ethnography, history, archaeology, cross‐cultural studies, and other disciplines) and terminology. The entry also describes the key critiques of hunter‐gatherer data, including the Kalahari debate, the marginal habitat hypothesis, and methodological biases. The overall usefulness of hunter‐gatherer data for models of human evolution is discussed, as are the limitations of this type of data for particular research questions.
Religion and Economy
Authors: Schram Ryan
Published: September 2018

Classical social theories of society, culture, and change are, in a certain light, a debate over how to interpret the intersection of religious beliefs and values with economic behavior. In considering this question, theorists have built various frameworks for the individual and collective dimensions of social behavior and for the nature of modernity. Contemporary social theory has also been reinvigorated by the continuing vitality and diversity of religion globally and by the various ways in which religious ideas inform different conceptualizations of modernity.
Rappaport,Roy (1926–97)
Authors: Hoey Brian A.
Published: September 2018

Roy Rappaport was a US anthropologist of the late twentieth century and is recognized as an essential contributor to three distinct areas within the discipline: ecological anthropology, the study of religious ritual in the context of human evolution, and the efforts of anthropologists to lobby for the inclusion of anthropological ways of knowing in the formation of public policy.
Television, Anthropology on
Authors: Pertierra Anna Cristina
Published: September 2018

Overall, anthropology's relationship to television can be characterized as uneasy; ethnographic research has rarely featured on mainstream broadcasting schedules and few anthropologists have regularly participated in broadcast television production. Nevertheless, a number of television documentary series have made extensive use of anthropology in their explorations of cultures; theDisappearing Worldseries (1970–93) in the United Kingdom has been the most notable example, and episodes from this series remain significant long after their original airing. More recent changes to the industry and the technology of television production have seen new—but no less uneasy—attempts for anthropology and television to find mutual ground. The rise of reality television genres, multichannel environments, and the possibilities of digital documentary production have created new avenues for the documentation of diverse cultures. How closely related much of this proliferation of programming about human diversity is to the academic field of anthropology, however, remains unclear.
Joking and Avoidance Relationships
Authors: de Vienne Emmanuel
Published: September 2018

Joking relationships are characterized by an acceptable or even obligatory mutual disrespect between people in particular structural positions to one another. They are opposed to relations of avoidance, which are marked by exaggerated respect. These categories have been subject to the usual critiques directed at structural–functionalist thought, which defined and theorized them. However, they continue to be used, either because they are simply useful descriptive tools or because the accusations of naive irenicism justly leveled at functionalist thought have highlighted the productive ambivalence of joking relations, in particular for political and linguistic anthropology.
Buddhism
Authors: Cook Joanna
Published: September 2018

While Buddhism is a soteriology (a religious doctrine of salvation), the range of ritual practices, religious forms, and social organization included under the umbrella of “Buddhism” is broad and heterogeneous. In Buddhist soteriological teaching, all phenomena are characterized by impermanence, suffering, and non‐self. Buddhism is divided into Theravada and Mahayana variants and has spread globally, with reformist movements flourishing since the late nineteenth century. Effects of these movements have included increasing rationalist interpretations of teachings, mass lay meditation, practices of social engagement based on a Buddhist ethic, and changing status for women.
AustralianAnthropologicalSociety (AAS)
Authors: Acciaioli Greg
Published: September 2018

The Australian Anthropological Society emerged in 1973 as an independent association oriented toward a professional constituency and concerns after the prior establishment of Australian branches of UK‐based academic societies and a number of state‐based associations oriented toward the educated public. It has evolved in line with a mandate to professionalize the discipline in Australia. These professionalizing developments have included elaboration of its executive, publishing of a flagship journal and other media, enhancement of its web presence, and increasing internationalization through such means as participation in joint annual conferences with other national and international associations.
Quantitative Methods in Physical Anthropology
Authors: Rivera Frances
Published: September 2018

Physical anthropology is a discipline that studies aspects of human biology for the purpose of reaching an evolutionary understanding of our species. This puts topics of human biological diversity, heredity, and ancestry at the center of the majority of investigations. Debates in the early nineteenth century on these particular aspects furthered studies on human populations. The measurement of physical features became the means by which to do so and is now not only standard practice but is also necessary to quantify observed differences among people. Quantitative methods in physical anthropology began and developed in this context, but they obtained statistical methods from other disciplines that are fundamental to anthropological investigations today. Physical anthropology remains an interdisciplinary subject whose investigative methods are highly quantitative and whose studies continue to focus on aspects of our evolution.
Symbolic Culture, Origins of
Authors: Knight Chris
Published: September 2018

Many animals have culture, but only humans have symbolic culture. This special kind of culture, which is unique to our species, poses a theoretical challenge to evolutionary theory. Each human community has its own set of symbolic cultural entities, a realm of objective facts whose existence depends, paradoxically, on collective faith. Currency values, underworlds, and football scores are good examples. The problem is to understand how, when, and why it became adaptive for our ancestors to produce, communicate, and place faith in social illusions. Darwinism assumes that an organism's fitness depends on its success in adapting to the real world, which makes it difficult to explain why, in the human case, placing faith in invented fictions made evolutionary sense.
Behavioral Ecology, Human
Authors: Scelza Brooke A. , Koster Jeremy
Published: September 2018

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) is an adaptationist approach to the study of behavior. Its primary goal is to understand how behavior varies as a function of local socioecological context. HBE relies on a hypothetico‐deductive research strategy to test simple models using empirical data, often from small‐scale societies. Research in HBE covers a wide range of topics but mainly focuses on behaviors that are most directly related to Darwinian fitness. As the field has grown, its focus has moved from simple tests of optimization models to more nuanced studies that incorporate proximate and ultimate mechanisms and that bring together data from multiple sites to assess cross‐cultural variation in more fine‐grained detail.
Ecological Anthropology
Authors: Ellen Roy
Published: September 2018

The term “ecological anthropology” was introduced into the anthropological literature to refer to ways of understanding human–environment relations using a systems approach and the conceptual and methodological apparatus of biological ecology. It grew in reaction to the perceived difficulties of Steward's cultural ecology and simplistic notions of environmental determinism and possibilism. Its key concepts have included ecosystem, feedback, cultural adaptation, energy, and nutrient flow, and it is associated with quantitative methods such as carrying capacity, time budgeting, and measurements of energy input and output. A progressive critique of some of its foundational assumptions led from the 1970s onward to a diversification of approaches now broadly encompassed by the term “environmental anthropology.”
Wilson,Monica (1908–82)
Authors: Spiegel Andrew D.
Published: September 2018

Monica Wilson (née Hunter), South Africa's leading twentieth‐century social anthropologist, was driven to reinterpret South African history by her childhood experiences, in a multiracial Presbyterian missionary school, of colonially biased South African history. Initially in collaboration with Godfrey Wilson, until his untimely death, she developed and applied her ethnographic skills and anthropological insights in order to realize that goal. The entry shows how, in doing so, she created the foundation for a then new historiographical perspective that critically assessed the consequences of European colonial conquest of the subcontinent and reactions to that process. It also documents her persistence in ensuring that the material from her ten‐year collaboration with Godfrey Wilson reached publication; and it indicates her deep commitment to collaborative work with black African scholars whose intellectual capacities were systematically undermined by colonial and apartheid structures.
NewAge,Wicca, andPaganism
Authors: Zwissler Laurel
Published: September 2018

Related but distinct new religious movements originating in Britain and the United States—the New Age, Wicca, and Paganism—are responses to early anthropological theorizing and ethnographic engagements with both non‐Western cultures abroad and subcultures at home. They are the subject of current anthropological inquiry and sites of productive debates about the inherited colonial gaze, implicit Christian and androcentric roots of the field, methodologies of self‐reflexivity and insider–outsider boundaries, cultural appropriation, and the relationship between anthropological description and cultural creation.
Stakeholder Analysis
Authors: Eversole Robyn
Published: September 2018

Stakeholder analysis is the process of identifying the individuals, groups, and organizations that have a particular “stake” or legitimate interest in an issue, organization, or initiative. As a practical tool, stakeholder analysis is used by public‐, private‐, and community‐sector organizations to understand who their stakeholders are and how to work effectively with them. Across sectors, stakeholder analysis is based on an understanding that all organizations work in complex social landscapes, where many different social actors can influence their work. The process of stakeholder analysis involves identifying relevant stakeholders, identifying their characteristics or attributes, assessing the nature and/or degree of influence stakeholders can wield in matters of concern to the organization, and then developing a strategy to manage and/or engage stakeholders. Stakeholder analyses by applied anthropologists tend to be rich in detail and understanding of social context but can encounter contradictions between the concerns of diverse social actors and a narrow focus on organizational outcomes.
Pair Bonds and the Evolution of Monogamy
Authors: Power Camilla
Published: September 2018

Long‐term and exclusive pair bonding has often been seen as central to the evolution of a human way of life. Its emergence may be linked to aspects of human life history such as the lengthy dependence and slow development of infants and children requiring novel levels of biparental care. A comparative phylogenetic approach allows testing of functional explanations of pair bonding across species, informing our models of hominin evolution. For slowly reproducing primate species, social monogamy imposes fitness or opportunity costs on males in particular. The evolution of such a reproductive strategy for males requires explanation.
Violence and Health
Authors: Lee Bandy X. , Lee Grace
Published: September 2018

Health sectors have been instrumental in shifting the view of human violence from being a law‐and‐order issue to a preventable health problem over the past few decades. Public health, for example, paved the way for interdisciplinary research and multisectoral collaboration, providing a critical link between research and implementation and allowing for the theoretical premise that calls for an anthropology of population‐based health. Demonstrating that violence prevention is possible, not as an article of faith but based on scientific evidence, is perhaps one of the greatest shifts to occur in our collective effort to curb violence. This drive for a scientific perspective, however, has the danger of leaving out complex human aspects of violence. Thoughtful application of health concepts in the context of active interdisciplinary dialogue with the social sciences, and particularly with anthropology, is critical for a fuller and a more appropriately nuanced approach to this multilayered topic.
Objecthood
Authors: Mohan Urmila
Published: September 2018

The anthropological study of objecthood as the sociocultural context of being and becoming an object involves attention to the materiality and agency of objects, form and meaning, and dynamic processes of objectification. Objecthood goes beyond the issue of semiotic evaluation since objects become sociocultural agents through a network of entities that range from aesthetics and the effects of their physical properties to the values and meanings invoked during transformative relationships with other objects and subjects. In the process, objects and subjects are imbricated through embodied practices, and objecthood and subjecthood cannot be separated.
Stigma
Authors: Brewis Alexandra , Wutich Amber
Published: September 2018

Stigma is the process by which people are discredited socially by being labeled with an undesirable or unacceptable characteristic. No systematic or cohesive bodies of scholarship on stigma exist within anthropology. Most anthropological studies of stigma have focused on stigmas associated with infectious and chronic disease, such as mental illness, addiction, HIV/AIDS, and infertility. Ethnographies describe the misery of stigma but also show how people cope and resist. Social analyses highlight how stigma both reflects and reinforces power differences and the broader social order. Evolutionary analyses explore possible adaptive benefits to stigmatization, such as avoiding contagion. Key challenges include lack of definitional clarity, inadequate tools to allow comparison or enable the study of co‐occurring stigmas that negatively exacerbate each other, and concerns that researchers who have not lived with severe stigmas lack the necessary insight to challenge conventional understandings.
Doctor–Patient Relationships
Authors: Locklear Sofia , Waitzkin Howard
Published: September 2018

Doctor–patient relationships often suffer from barriers that impede communication and understanding. These barriers include socioeconomic conditions such as inequality; structural racism and marginalization of minority populations; and traumatic experiences associated with war and migration. Explanatory models of disease also pose a significant barrier because of differing cultural understandings of sickness and physical symptoms that practitioners may not recognize but also because of social class differences, insufficient educational opportunities, discrimination, and other structural conditions. Refugee and indigenous patients whose cultures have not traditionally utilized mainstream Western medicine illustrate such challenges in doctor–patient relationships. Problems of the social context such as poverty, inequality, and marginalization impinge on medical encounters, partly by creating mental distress and suffering, and warrant changes in social policies that extend beyond the doctor–patient relationship itself.
Sikhism
Authors: Nesbitt Eleanor
Published: September 2018

This entry surveys Sikhism in the context of the ethnography of Sikh communities in India and other countries. Attention is paid to issues of definition, core Sikh beliefs, the evolution of Sikh communities, and the formation of Sikh identity. The complex issues of caste and gender are considered, and briefer mention is made of time and place. The internet's role in Sikh representation and transnational Sikh community formation is noted, together with orientalism's contribution to the emergence of Sikhism as a “world religion.”
Praxis
Authors: Nonini Donald M.
Published: September 2018

Praxis is an unfashionable term in anthropology because of its origins in a Marxist anthropology no longer popular in the discipline. Praxis consists of the theoretically informed, self‐reflexive efforts that a person or group makes on behalf of the liberation of working people, most commonly in collaborative relationships with the latter. The concept of praxis has been refined in the work of Marx and Gramsci. Praxis must be aligned with the contemporary conditions of the fragmentation of the working classes into multiple fractions that have emerged under the conditions of domination by neoliberal capital. Anthropological praxis is that special kind of praxis that uses anthropological theorizations and methods on behalf of the liberation of working people, is collaborative, and employs diverse methods that go beyond but include ethnography. The concept of anthropological praxis has been most clearly elaborated in the work of Johannes Fabian and Gavin A. Smith, although it remains undertheorized.
Global Environmental Change
Authors: Rayner Steve
Published: September 2018

The concept of global environmental change (GEC) is generally held to be of two types: cumulative and systemic. The idea of the global environment is largely a post‐World War II scientific and political achievement, initially launched as a unifying idea for a humanity threatened by nuclear extinction. Anthropology has been slow to engage with the idea of systemic GEC, largely due to its traditional focus on local place‐based societies. Furthermore, the “local” as understood by anthropologists is a fundamentally different mode of apprehension from that which is constructed by downscaling global models. The discipline is increasingly contributing not just to the understanding of local effects but also to wider issues of public perception, consumption, formation of scientific knowledge, and global environmental governance. Anthropology also has a responsibility to challenge the coercive potential of the idea of GEC—especially its latest formulation as the Anthropocene—to be co‐opted by particular policy agendas.
Fieldwork
Authors: Musante‐Dewalt Kathleen
Published: September 2018

The conduct of fieldwork is constitutive of the practice of ethnography. It is an observational approach that places the researcher in the same context as the phenomena under study. Fieldwork became a hallmark of ethnographic research at the end of the nineteenth century and was extended through the practice of participant observation in the early twentieth century as a method of data collection. Fieldwork has remained a constitutive element of ethnography into the twenty‐first century, even as the nature of “the field” has shifted to include multisited research and nonconventional field sites such as virtual worlds and online communities. Because of the observational nature of the approach, the practice of fieldwork is both compatible with various theoretical positions and generative of new theory.
Protected Areas
Authors: Walsh Martin
Published: September 2018

The use of legislation to protect species and habitats has a long history and was well established by the end of the nineteenth century. The rise of the conservation movement and the establishment of a global conservation regime by the United Nations have since seen protected areas proliferate. It has also stimulated the interest and engagement of anthropologists, whose most enduring concern has been the exclusion of indigenous communities from the parks and reserves that have been imposed on territories they were once able to access and use freely. While advocacy and local resistance influenced the evolution of community‐based approaches in the 1990s, the postmodern anthropologies of development and environmentalism have since inspired a growing number of critical studies of the institutions, practices, and discourses that sustain protected areas. As a result, this has become a vibrant field of anthropological inquiry and action at the heart of critiques of contemporary society.
Ethnobotany
Authors: Alexiades Miguel N.
Published: September 2018

Ethnobotany is the study of human–plant interactions in their historical and geographical totality, including how plants are perceived, named, and classified as well as the symbolic and material aspects of their management, harvesting, processing, and use. The extent to which plant‐based knowledge and interactions are socially patterned at different scales and how and why these patterns emerge and change over time are key concerns. Studies have often prioritized the cognitive, linguistically encoded aspects of knowledge, usually within such specific domains as health, nutrition, or agriculture. Multidisciplinary from the outset, ethnobotany's approach has become increasingly so since the closing decades of the twentieth century, drawing from and contributing to a growing set of disciplines in the natural and social sciences and humanities. The post‐1980s increase in academic and public interest in ethnobotany is consistent with the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of late modernity with its multiple crises—epistemic, social, political, and environmental—and closely related transformations.
Health and Inequality
Authors: Castro Arachu
Published: September 2018

Social inequality places populations who are socially disadvantaged—due to economic deprivation, social exclusion, or lack of access to goods or services—at an even greater disadvantage in terms of health status. When health inequalities stem from broader social and economic inequalities and prevent individuals and communities from achieving their best health potential, health inequalities are referred to as health inequities. Medical anthropologists have developed biosocial, biocultural, and political–economic models that elucidate the roots and mechanisms that create and reproduce health inequities and have contributed to the understanding of health inequities as products of social inequalities.
Literacy Practices across Cultures and Sectors
Authors: Kell Catherine
Published: September 2018

Anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives on literacy and culture have challenged earlier theories of literacy, which saw it as a universal, cognitive skill that was applicable across contexts. Instead they have outlined an approach in which literacy is viewed as social practice, deeply embedded in and variable across the social and cultural contexts in which is practiced. The key tenet of this approach is that different groups take hold of literacy in ways that are consistent with their backgrounds. This approach is now well established. Literacy is also explored as a multimodal practice, drawing on other modes of communication, and as changing in powerful ways as a result of the increasing importance of digital technologies.
Netherlands, Anthropology in the
Authors: Vermeulen Han F.
Published: September 2018

Anthropology in the Netherlands is a rich field of studies, with a tradition that goes back to the eighteenth century and that was established during the nineteenth century. Ethnology, orvolkenkunde, as the field was called, had multiple links to history, geography, linguistics, and biology. Attention was primarily directed to the study of peoples overseas, especially of the Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands' principal colony until 1949, and of Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles. After decolonization, the field broadened to include other regions. In 1952–53 cultural anthropology was linked to a new study, the sociology of non‐Western peoples, now known as development sociology. Many institutes in the Netherlands serve both degree programs. Dutch anthropology is a vibrant field, with hundreds of practitioners who carry out research all over the world. It has a predominantly international, extra‐European outlook, even as transnational studies of diaspora, globalization, migration, and multicultural society increasingly come to the fore.
Transitional Justice
Authors: Theidon Kimberly
Published: September 2018

Transitional justice is a field of postwar inquiry and intervention focused on addressing the legacies of past human rights violations in the hope that doing so will contribute to a more peaceful and just future. The “transitional” in transitional justice refers to times of political, social, economic, and cultural transformation—indeed, upheaval—normally arising from the breakdown of an authoritarian or violent regime and the movement to one that is considered more democratic. Transitional justice mechanisms may include tribunals, war crimes prosecutions, truth commissions, memorials, reparations, and lustration.
Ethnomusicology
Authors: Lysloff René T. A.
Published: September 2018

Scholars and travelers have been interested in the music of other cultures and regions of the world for several centuries but only since the twentieth century has such inquiry cohered into an identifiable disciplinary field of study. Ethnomusicology is a relatively new field; the term first began to be widely used in Europe and the United States with the founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1954. From its earliest iteration, “ethnomusicology” came to mean the study of human musical diversity—that is, music in its cultural context—from a variety of perspectives, including (perhaps especially) anthropology.
S
iberian Cosmologies
Authors: Funk Dmitriy
Published: September 2018

This entry presents the main features of the cosmologies of Siberian indigenous peoples. Basic beliefs about the world in general, its creation, areas and layers of the universe, beliefs about spirits and souls (or counterparts), and the impact of world religions and modern transformations are shown in their complexity at the level of ethnic and territorial groups, ritual specialists, and narrators.
Credit and Debt
Authors: Ortiz Horacio
Published: September 2018

The analysis of “credit” and “debt,” two words that designate the same social relation, is conceptually fruitful in highlighting social rules across a wide variety of social settings. First, credit and debt relations can be considered a fundamental element in the hierarchical organization of social groups that is partly constituted through a regular distribution of rights and duties to lend and borrow. Second, these relations are also often fundamental in the definition of the parties involved, which can have moral, political, and religious meanings. Finally, they make connections through time and space between local settings and global circulations, from limited spans to infinity. Credit and debt relations can be extremely varied, and these three elements, separated for analytical purposes, must be studied in their interaction with one another.
M
arx,
K
arl (1818–83)
Authors: Neveling Patrick
Published: September 2018

This entry gives an overview of the life of Karl Marx and of how his work as an academic and as public intellectual laid some of the foundations for the emergence of anthropology as a discipline. It considers Marx's collaborations with Friedrich Engels and how their individual and joint writings have lasting impact on economic, historical, and political anthropology—for example, in regard to the concepts of fetishism, modes of production, ontology, and original accumulation.
Ethnography
Authors: McGranahan Carole
Published: September 2018

Ethnography is at the heart of social and cultural anthropology as both something to know and a way of knowing. The term has its roots in the Greek wordsethnos(folk, the people) andgrapho(to write). Ethnography is to write about people, society, and/or culture, but it is also more than that: it is a method and a theory. As a method, ethnography is an embodied, empirical, and experiential field‐based way of knowing centered around participant observation. As a theory, ethnography is to start on the ground, with the concepts that ground people's lives, worldviews, actions, and words in ways particular to that community. In sum, an ethnographic approach is a detailed, up‐close investigation of both the subjective and the objective aspects of cultural life—that is, of the many ways in which humans organize, live in, and give meaning to the world.