bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Labor Systems
Authors: Reese Ty M.
Published: February 2012

For the vast majority of peoples of the Atlantic world, their place within it was defined by their toil. The most studied labor system of the Atlantic world is that of African slavery, yet African slavery was but one of many labor systems that operated within the Atlantic world. Traditionally, labor within the Atlantic world was divided between free and slave labor, but, more recently, scholars have argued that these old distinctions are not really clear and that people beyond slaves labored within obligations to someone else. The more recent arguments involve a spectrum of labor systems within the Atlantic world that ranged from slave to free. Studies of laborers and labor systems are important to our understanding of the Atlantic world in that they demonstrate larger changes taking place in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. A relationship existed between the early modern agricultural revolution that occurred within Europe and the rise of indentured servitude in the Americas. Beyond this, the rise of slavery not only related to the economic decision to find the cheapest sources of labor to make the appropriated lands of the Americas productive within a European framework but also related to important cultural and intellectual changes occurring in this period. The rise of wage labor within the late eighteenth century is often explored within the context of the decline of contracted labor and the developing abolitionist movement that would slowly dismantle the transatlantic slave trade and transatlantic slavery.
Migrations and Diasporas
Authors: Lachenicht Susanne
Published: February 2012

Between 1492 and 1866 millions of people crossed the Atlantic—from Africa’s west coast (from 1500 to 1866, an estimated 12 million people) and from western and central Europe (from 1500 to 1783, an estimated 1.4 million people)—in order to resettle (or be resettled) in the so-called New World. The age of mass migrations of Europeans only started in the 18th century, followed by the immigration of Asians and eastern Europeans, mostly from the 19th century onward. The literature on Atlantic migrations and diasporas is vast. This bibliography is and has to be selective and will provide more recently published materials on Atlantic migrations and diasporas for the early modern period and for the northern Atlantic. More recent research on so-called religious diasporas or the migrations of specific ethnic groups makes evident that attributions such as “religious diaspora” or “German” or “French” can be problematic, as most of these migrating groups were more heterogenous than previous scholarship might have suggested. Nonetheless, this bibliography includes specific sections on various “religious diasporas” in the Atlantic world, German migrations (even if they included Swiss or French people), and the “Black Atlantic” (despite the many creoles among slaves being deported from Africa to the Americas).
Sugar in the Atlantic World
Authors: Roberts Justin
Published: February 2012

Sugar drove the expansion of European empires in the Atlantic world. From its cultivation in the Atlantic Islands in the 15th century to its production in Cuba and Louisiana after British and French emancipation in the 19th century, sugar was always the dominant crop in the Atlantic. Wherever sugar was grown, the crop brought with it the same significant transformations, including a majority population of enslaved peoples of African descent, higher rates of mortality, lower rates of fertility, the concentration of capital on large plantations, and sweeping ecological changes such as the elimination of timber and the erosion of soils. Sugar profits made the circum-Caribbean world, in particular, a site of intense imperial rivalry. The sugar-growing regions of the Americas always imported more African slaves than did any other regions in the Americas. Cultivating sugar was deadly work. The decline of the slave population was the norm in the sugar-producing regions of the Americas. It was also a particularly lucrative crop. Sugar planters were among the wealthiest producers in the New World. The 19th-century abolitions of the slave trade destroyed the sugar industry in the Atlantic world by choking the industry’s labor supply. After abolition, East Indian and Chinese laborers were imported to try to sustain the sugar industry; but without enslaved African labor, it was no longer lucrative enough to compete with beet sugar production. The consumption of sugar expanded rapidly throughout the early modern era. The escalating demand drove the expansion of the sugar-producing regions. The sugar producers of the Caribbean struggled to find sufficient labor in the era of abolition and emancipation and shifted to various forms of coerced labor to continue producing the crop. This involved an ethnic shift as well: African slaves were replaced by Asian indentured laborers. The abolition of slavery and the rise of beet sugar finally halted the expansion of the sugar plantation complex in the Atlantic. This bibliography will address some of the major works on sugar in the Atlantic world. It will examine both the production and consumption of sugar and examine some of the most significant debates in the historiography on sugar slavery. It will contrast and compare sugar production and consumption by the various national and imperial groups, but it will focus largely on Anglo-American sugar production, reflecting a bias in the scholarly literature.
Bicameralism in Stable Democracies
Authors: Fisk David
Published: February 2012

Bicameralism refers to legislative systems that include two chambers. In presidential systems, both chambers are typically directly elected. In parliamentary systems, the first (or lower) chamber is directly elected while the second (or upper) chamber can be appointed, elected directly, or elected indirectly. Historically, bicameral legislatures intended to represent the interest of the aristocracy in the second chamber and the interests of landowners in the first chamber, ensuring that aristocratic interests were dominant by granting the second chamber strong veto authority (i.e., the power to defeat bills) over all legislation. As universal suffrage spread, however, the ability of unelected second chambers to dictate policy to popularly elected governments in the first chamber became untenable. To address this anomaly, governments responded by either (1) abolishing the second chamber, (2) utilizing the second chamber as a venue to represent the subunits within federal states (e.g., states, provinces, etc.), or (3) granting the second chamber a role in policy refinement (i.e., improving legislation). In many cases, this emphasis on policy refinement was also associated with replacing the power to defeat legislation outright with the power to delay legislation (suspensory veto authority). Although most second chambers play a role in refining legislation, the legislative studies literature has historically focused on second chambers within federal systems (which typically possess strong veto authority) and have ignored the policy influence of second chambers that lack strong veto authority. This “conventional wisdom” is being challenged, as governments have become increasingly reliant on second chambers as venues to introduce and debate legislation and have had to become more adept at negotiating with second chambers, as the latter have become increasingly more willing to defeat government legislation in many legislative systems. This debate has also found its way into political discourse as several governments debate reform, which would balance the ability of elected government majorities in the first chamber to pass their legislative agenda while protecting crucial policy refinement functions and expertise found in the second chamber. While the idea of abolishing the second chamber is sometimes raised by political parties that are underrepresented in the second chamber, in most advanced industrial democracies, modern institutional debates focus on reform rather than abolition of the second chamber.
Discrimination
Authors: Kohler-Hausmann Issa
Published: February 2012

Discrimination is an action or practice that excludes, disadvantages, or merely differentiates between individuals or groups of individuals on the basis of some ascribed or perceived trait, although the definition itself is subject to substantial debate. The sociological study of discrimination could be divided into two types of inquiries: discrimination as a social phenomenon to be explained and discrimination as an explanation for other observed social phenomenon. Discrimination has been addressed by a wide range of disciplines as an explanatory object—including sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, economics, and law—all seeking to shed light on why discrimination occurs and what conditions give rise to and reproduce its practice. What distinguishes a sociological approach to discrimination as an explanatory object from that in other disciplines, namely psychology or economics, is its insistence on looking at the macro level of analysis, explaining the phenomenon as a result of social processes not necessarily reducible to individual-level preferences or cognitive processes. Sociologists have also addressed discrimination as an explanation for an observed phenomenon of interest, namely social stratification: the unequal distribution of status, material benefits, and political rights.
Feminist Theory
Authors: Carlson Jennifer , Ray Raka
Published: February 2012

Feminist theory explores both inequality in gender relations and the constitution of gender. It is best understood as both an intellectual and a normative project. What is commonly understood as feminist theory accompanied the feminist movement in the mid-seventies, though there are key texts from the 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries that represent early feminist thought. Whereas feminist theories first began as an attempt to explain women’s oppression globally, following a grand theoretical approach akin to Marxism, the questions and emphases in the field have undergone some major shifts. Two primary shifts have been (1) from universalizing to particularizing and contextualizing women’s experiences and (2) from conceptualizing men and women as categories and focusing on the category “women” to questioning the content of that category, and moving to the exploration of gendered practices. Thus, while many theorists do focus on the question of how gender inequality manifests in institutions such as the workplace, home, armed forces, economy, or public sphere, others explore the range of practices that have come to be defined as masculine or feminine and how gender is constituted in relation to other social relations. Feminist theories can thus be used to explain how institutions operate with normative gendered assumptions and selectively reward or punish gendered practices. Many contemporary feminists look beyond the United States to focus on the effects of transnational economic, political, and cultural linkages on shaping gender.
Nationalism
Authors: Miller-Idriss Cynthia , Bracho Christian
Published: February 2012

Nationalism has been defined in a variety of ways, but definitions are always rooted in the nation, which most scholars agree emerged during the transition to the modern industrial age, supplanting monarchies and other kinds of prior communities and groups based on kinship or tribal ties. Initially, scholars saw nations as based on primordial attachments that were understood to exist as “given” through birth into a particular geographic community or ethnic group. This understanding has evolved into a view of “imagined communities” in which nations are based on a sense of attachment to one another among individuals dispersed across space and time and likely never to meet each other but who share customs, language, traditions, culture, or residence within a set of borders. Because these attachments are imagined by individuals and groups of individuals, neither nations nor the identities attached to them can be understood as essentialized, stable, or static. Instead, nations today are thought to be imagined, constructed, and negotiated. Nationalism exists in these moments of imagination and construction of the nation, which take many forms. The simple expression of national identity, efforts to make political and national units congruent, or xenophobic treatment of outsiders in favor of those deemed to belong to the nation are all examples of nationalist forms. Nationalism can be official and ceremonial (as in the singing of national anthems at presidential inaugurations) or banal (as in the quotidian nationalist symbols people encounter in their everyday lives, from national flags in school buildings to postage stamps displaying national heroes). Over the last several decades—particularly since a resurgence of interest in nationhood in the 1980s and 1990s—the focus of research has been on elite perspectives—that is, how the nation is mediated and constructed through parliamentary speeches, presidential speeches, or public school textbooks and curricula. More recently there has been a movement toward the study of everyday nationhood, which is discussed in greater detail in this article.
Interpersonal Communication
Authors: Roloff Michael E.
Published: February 2012

Communication scholars have a long history of studying public discourse. Researchers have investigated public address and oratory as well as messages communicated to the public through print and electronic forms. However, in the late 1960s there was a realization that relatively little was known about the interaction processes that are more private and personal. In response to this void, the study of interpersonal communication began. Interpersonal communication scholars found that few of the models associated with public discourse informed about conversations, and they turned to allied fields and disciplines for theory. Hence, perspectives such as symbolic interactionism, social exchange theory, and relational pragmatics were imported from other social sciences. As research on interpersonal communication flourished in the 1980s, social psychological perspectives associated with social cognition were adopted, as were linguistic perspectives on discourse production and processing. However, a focus on relational processes also emerged and remains dominant as researchers examine how communication is used to initiate, define, maintain, and terminate relationships. Traditionally, interpersonal communication was heavily focused on face-to-face interaction, and, with the growth of information technology and social networking, many interpersonal scholars have concentrated on computer-mediated communication.
Small-Group Communication
Authors: Frey Lawrence R.
Published: February 2012

The study of small-group communication investigates: (a) the nature and effects of members of small collectives (a minimum of three people) using verbal and nonverbal messages to share and create meaning (referred to as a symbolic-management focus) and (b) how groups and their processes and products result from message activity (referred to as a symbolic-constitutive focus). Scholarship on small-group communication emerges from the general study of group dynamics and, thus, has important grounding in, and ties to, research conducted in social psychology. However, in contrast to a psychological focus on members’ traits and cognitive processes, a communication approach explores what and how members communicate, how various factors (e.g., the context) affect that communication, and the resulting consequences of that communication (including members’ shared conception of being a “group”). Within the academic, disciplinary study of communication (that took place circa 1910), small-group communication was one of the earliest foci (after public speaking), but institutionally (e.g., in professional associations) such scholarship initially was connected to the study of interpersonal (dyadic) communication. Although scholarship on small-group communication has historically privileged the study of task groups (in specific, decision-making and problem-solving groups), fueled most recently by the growth of organizational communication scholarship on work groups and teams, in the early 21st century, communication is studied in a wide range of group contexts (e.g., families, peer groups, work groups/teams, support groups, political groups, and community groups).
Applied Anthropology
Authors: Johnston Barbara Rose
Published: February 2012

As a term and a subject area, applied anthropology refers to that broad array of research, methods, and outcomes developed and used for the explicit purpose of recognizing, understanding, and addressing human problems. It has been described both as the fifth field of anthropology and as the bridging discipline since the application of research and knowledge to social problems cross-cuts all fields of anthropology. Some view applied anthropology narrowly, in terms of work conducted outside of university settings that is typically defined and produced under some form of contractual relationship, with services and resulting products used in some sort of problem-solving way. In this usage, applied anthropologists work to resolve problems, often in technocratic contexts, with theoretically informed praxis that generates and refines methodologies though rarely contributes toward the production of theory. For others, applied anthropology has broader meaning and refers to the varied uses of anthropology in public and private settings, including academia, where the primary objective involves problem-focused concerns. In this usage all forms of anthropological endeavor have social meaning and an applied dimension. Both the varied meanings of term and the varied outcomes of endeavor reflect the political economic conditions, social contexts, and identity politics within the discipline as it has been practiced over the past century, especially in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Classification and restricted access agreements imposed by research sponsors (governments, other international institutions, and corporations), limited peer review, publication and distribution of grey literature reports, and the membership-restricted publication of flagship journals historically reinforced the boundaries between university-based anthropologists and applied practitioners. With the advent of the web, library scanning projects, changes in information disclosure laws, the ease of uploading the collected works of various journals, newsletters, and magazines to the web, and the increased sophistication and use of web-based translation, access to the collective works in applied anthropology has never been greater. Increasingly, the distinction between applied and four-field anthropology has relatively less meaning as anthropologists are engaged as disciplinary and public actors in a wide array of scholarly, practical, and advocacy endeavors. Globally, anthropological work involves and is celebrated for its combined theoretical, applied, and practical contributions to society.
Ethnoarchaeology
Authors: Gavua Kodzo
Published: February 2012

Ethnoarchaeology is the strategic gathering and studying of ethnographic data on human behavior and its ramifications by archaeologists, who train as ethnographers in order to address issues of concern to archaeological inquiry. It is a dynamic subfield of archaeology, whose practitioners seek, among other things, to deepen knowledge and understanding of the archaeological record, how this record can be better researched and interpreted, and how research results can be adequately explained. Archaeologists made attempts to explore prehistoric human behavior on the basis of ethnographic information during the 19th century, but ethnoarchaeology, properly so-called, developed into a subfield during the early 20th century. It gained prominence from the 1960s onward with the emergence of “new archaeology,” also referred to as “processual archaeology,” which stimulated the search by archaeologists for strategies by which they could scientifically study and explain the archaeological record objectively. Its scope broadened when “postprocessual” archaeologists, in their reaction processual archaeology, sought to explain material culture and its variability on the basis of intangible realms of behavior within changing historical and environmental contexts. A wide range of theoretical perspectives, hinging on the relationship between ethnographic data and the archaeological record, have influenced the interests, foci, goals, and methods of ethnoarchaeological research. Research activities vary, however, in relation to the local and regional cultural and environmental contexts of behavior and include actualistic studies of processes by which material culture is produced, distributed, consumed, and discarded; a combination of these studies with experimentation; reenactments of production processes; studies of site formation processes; and studies of material cultural variability. Today, the approach to research in the subfield is multifaceted, and practitioners continue to explore new ideas that may render it coherent. The subfield is, nonetheless, contributing immensely to the development and refinement of archaeological method and theory.
Feminist Anthropology
Authors: Anderson-Levy Lisa
Published: February 2012

Feminist anthropology is simultaneously a critique of male as well as Euro-centered and biased anthropology; a historical moment that marks the development of theoretical frames through which different ways of knowing are produced; and a vast body of literature through which dynamic conversations are situated that engage questions around gender, race, sexuality, ability, and class among much more. Discussions of the sort that follow are necessarily partial and thus perspectival; consequently, the genealogy presented, with few exceptions, focuses primarily on the work of U.S. or U.S.-based feminist theorists/anthropologists, with an emphasis on cultural anthropologists. Feminist anthropology emerged in response to the recognition that across the subdisciplines, anthropology operated within andocentric paradigms. Early questions ranged from identifying women in the anthropological record to explaining universal female subordination. Although many of the questions that fuel research interests have changed, underlying concerns with understanding the operation of power in various contexts continue to animate feminist anthropological research. Different understandings of the relationships between gender and sex, or between race and culture, for instance, alter more questions that can even be imagined. Thinking about the ways each of us is positioned in relation to various privileges and penalties centers the importance of intersectionality both as theoretical frame and as methodology. Concern with the difference that difference makes; how it is constructed, performed, and reproduced; and the role of heteronormativity in the framing of questions as well as in our analyses are a few examples of questions that continue to invigorate discussions among feminist anthropologists. Feminist anthropology has had and continues to have productive theoretical exchanges with a variety of feminist theories, such as Third World and postcolonial feminisms. Critiques by feminists of color and lesbians have also been crucial to grounding theories that are used by feminist anthropologists. Although the specifics of the questions have changed as feminist anthropology has evolved, at the core several key elements remain: What is the role of power in the construction of a variety of gendered/raced/sexed/classed identities? What do these mean for how people (re)produce meanings in their daily lives? How can we, as anthropologists, and specifically as feminist anthropologists, begin to understand these constructions and our role in their production? Feminist anthropology is often seen as the domain of cultural anthropologists, yet important work has also been done by feminist archeologists and biological anthropologists.
Franz Boas
Authors: Williams Vernon J.
Published: February 2012

Franz Boas was a scholar, professional, and activist who almost single-handedly transformed American anthropology from a field dominated by amateurs to a full-fledged professional, academic discipline. A German-born Jewish immigrant who had experienced anti-Semitism in his native land and in the United States, Boas was especially effective in dismantling hierarchical theories of race, language, and culture. As a consequence, most of his works centered on Native Indians, African Americans, and southern and eastern European immigrants in the United States and on the themes of race, language, and culture. As an activist, he expressed his revulsion against immigration restriction and anti-black prejudice and discrimination, the erasure of Native Indian cultures, and anti-Semitism. Boas suffered a fatal heart attack while vociferously protesting the exterminations by the Nazis during World War II.
Gender
Authors: Upton Rebecca L.
Published: February 2012

Gender is a key concept in the discipline of anthropology. Sex and gender are defined differently in anthropology, the former as grounded in perceived biological differences and the latter as the cultural constructions observed, performed, and understood in any given society, often based on those perceived biological differences. Throughout the 20th century and the rise of sociocultural anthropology, the meaning and significance of gender to the discipline has shifted. In early ethnographic studies, gender was often synonymous with kinship or family, and a monograph might include just a single chapter on women or family issues. Despite early female pioneers in the field, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s and the real rise of feminist anthropology that gender as a distinct area of theoretical and methodological interest took hold within the discipline. Women were no longer seen as a category of culture and society outside of the realm of the everyday. While some focused on divisions between the domestic and the public, feminist anthropologists and those interested in the study of gender began to challenge the simple “add women and stir” model of ethnography and sought to bring attention to structural inequalities, the role of economic disparities, global dimensions to gender politics, the role of language, sexuality and masculinity studies, and health and human rights. Gradually the most recent works in gender and anthropology came to encompass a wide range of perspectives that challenge Western or monolithic assumptions about women and the experience of gender. For example, non-Western writing on gender illustrates how varied the experience of feminism can be in contemporary contexts where religious beliefs, development experiences, and the very role of language can influence understandings of gender. The study of women, men, and the intersections of gender across cultures has become a key aspect of any holistic study or methodological approach in anthropology today.
Globalization
Authors: Gullette Gregory S.
Published: February 2012

In effect, globalization is the development and proliferation of complex, interdependent international connections created through the movement of capital, natural resources, information, culture, and people across national borders. This includes the social and cultural resistances and receptions to these varied movements. The marked increase in anthropological and allied disciplines research that either specifically examines and unpacks the idea of globalization, or uses the structural and theoretical components to examine particular case studies, has largely transformed globalization into a ubiquitous framework or concept. As a result, globalization is naturalized for many—something that inevitably exists and does so in particular forms. Much of the work that anthropologists conduct within globalization studies informs, and is informed by, research in fields such as economics, sociology, and human geography, to name a few. Extensive intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary networks are characteristic of anthropological research in globalization. As this bibliographic source demonstrates, the actual areas of study and the processes that constitute globalization (e.g., migration, tourism, neoliberalism, identity formation, urban planning and development) are not clearly demarcated from other research areas, nor are they taken up unproblematically by anthropologists. Debate often centers on how to define the field of study and determine what (transnational) processes form the foundation of globalization. Additionally, anthropologists debate globalization’s heuristic relevance in research and the value of particular theoretical frameworks when determining its contours and effects on social, political, economic, and environmental systems.
Language Ideology
Authors: Irvine Judith T.
Published: February 2012

Language ideologies are conceptualizations about languages, speakers, and discursive practices. Like other kinds of ideologies, language ideologies are pervaded with political and moral interests and are shaped in a cultural setting. To study language ideologies, then, is to explore the nexus of language, culture, and politics. It is to examine how people construe language’s role in a social and cultural world, and how their construals are socially positioned. Those construals include the ways people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. Language ideologies are inherently plural: because they are positioned, there is always another position—another perspective from which the world of discursive practice is differently viewed. Their positioning makes language ideologies always partial, in that they can never encompass all possible views—but also partial in that they are at play in the sphere of interested human social action. Authors writing on this topic have variously called it “linguistic ideology,” “language ideology,” or “ideology of language.” The slight differences of terminology have not signaled major differences in conception. Although the anthropological approach to language ideology is distinctive, it overlaps with research in other disciplines. Approaches rooted in disciplinary linguistics, such as Critical Discourse Analysis, are anthropology’s close kin, while political and social theorists writing on “ideology” are of obvious relevance. Because the concept of language ideology is so fertile, it connects to more disciplines and issues than can be reviewed here. However, those interdisciplinary links also entail some tensions, for example, concerning whether linguistic form or social issues take priority as subject matter, or whether analysis should focus more on texts or more on practices, or what is included in “language” itself. Works by anthropologists of differing intellectual commitments show traces of some similar debates, but within a general consensus on the value of joining ethnographic and linguistic research.
Political Anthropology
Authors: Subramanian Ajantha
Published: February 2012

Political anthropology emphasizes context, process, and scale. The field has been most concerned with the contextual specificity of political processes and the mechanisms through which localities are differentially incorporated into larger scales of social, economic, and political life. Whereas political anthropology inhabits much of the same analytical ground as political science in considering phenomena such as state formation, democracy, citizenship, rights, and development, political anthropologists challenge normative assumptions of what counts as “politics” by illuminating connections between formal and informal political arenas, and among cultural, social, and political processes. There is a key internal distinction that has marked political anthropology virtually from the outset: that between a structuralist approach emphasizing the systemic nature of power and the role of political behavior and institutions in social reproduction, and a processual approach that highlights conflict, contradiction, and change. Significantly, political anthropology has been distinguished from other fields of anthropology by its relative lack of preoccupation with “culture” as an analytical category; most political anthropologists focus instead on social inequality, institutional dynamics, and political transformation. To put it differently, political anthropologists typically think of their research sites relationally and dynamically, and not in terms of enduring difference from a purported mainstream.
Public Sociocultural Anthropologies
Authors: Sanday Peggy Reeves
Published: February 2012

In its early history as a distinct social science discipline, anthropology’s public outreach consisted of informing the public regarding the “natural history of man,” as anthropology was defined by the Anthropological Society of Washington in l879, which in 1902 became the American Anthropological Association (AAA). The natural history of man was represented in museum exhibitions on human evolution and the material culture of societies past and present. Beginning in the 20th century, anthropology’s public engagement included a humanitarian effort on the part of Franz Boas and his students to inform the public regarding the social meaning of human adaptability, thereby placing more importance on human equity than on cultural evolutionary hierarchies. In the holistic approach of Boas and his students to the study of the societies of the world, they identified a specifically cultural dimension of human life along with its linguistic, evolutionary, archaeological, and biocultural components. The Boasian concept of cultural relativism challenged Western ethnocentrism, and Boasian science sought to demolish racist doctrines. Boasian anthropology informed the public through museums and public commentary. Boas gave radio addresses and wrote for broad audiences. Ruth Benedict, one of his students, published books that garnered a wide public audience, as did Margaret Mead, another student, who also wrote a column in a popular magazine. With the expansion of anthropology into the academy, an unfortunate dichotomy developed, representing anthropological research as either “pure” or “applied.” As the 20th century progressed, the humanism of the Boasian tradition was continued inside and outside of the academy by sociocultural anthropologists, who did not see themselves as falling either within the tradition of pure or applied science but as partly in both. They described their work using a variety of labels conveying commitment to public engagement. Examples include “applied anthropology,” organized as a separate association in 1941; “action anthropology,” named in the 1950s; “critical, feminist, public interest, and practicing anthropology,” named in the 1970s; “militant anthropology,” named in 1992; “engaged anthropology,” named in 1995; and “public anthropology,” named in 2000. These developments are considered here under the more general label “public sociocultural anthropologies,” with reference also to the overlapping fields of applied and practicing anthropology. In the early 21st century, public anthropology is a multisited field operating from the many different perspectives that have proliferated beyond the original five-field approach of anthropology. Many of these perspectives are covered in various other Oxford Bibliographies anthropology articles. This bibliography focuses primarily on the public outreach of sociocultural anthropology, as it developed in the academy with roots in the public engagement of the Boasian era.
Public Archaeology
Authors: Sabloff Jeremy A.
Published: February 2012

Public archaeology refers to those aspects of the broad field of archaeology that relate to the public interest. It has a number of key aspects, but perhaps the most significant in the United States are cultural resource management and communication with various community groups and public audiences about the practice of archaeology. Cultural Resource Management (CRM) is the set of practices that derive from fulfilling the mandates of heritage protection laws. In the United States, a number of statutes could be cited, but the principal statutes in this regard are the National Historic Preservation Act (and particularly Section 106 of the law) and the National Environmental Protection Act, as well as the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act. In regard to communication, there are a wide variety of communication avenues. One form of outreach involves the active engagement among archaeologists and various publics. This kind of engaged outreach has been labeled “Community Archaeology” or “action archaeology.” Elsewhere, I have defined the latter, for instance, as “involvement or engagement with the problems facing the modern world through archaeology.” This means that archaeologists are “working for living communities, not just in or near them.” Other forms of outreach are not as engaged but nevertheless are quite important. Such outreach includes communication through lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, television, movies, museum exhibits, and Internet blogs, among others.
Tourism
Authors: Guerrón Montero Carla
Published: February 2012

Anthropology has expanded and changed radically by including within its purview the study of tourism. In spite of the ubiquitous nature of traveling in anthropology, tourism and travel became subjects worthy of discussion in anthropology relatively recently, in Europe in the 1930s and in the United States in the 1960s (see Introductory Works). Two main reasons explain this paucity of attention. First, anthropologists argued that their experience and motivations for being in a distant location could not be compared to that of tourists, and they believed that, in many instances, they were being unfairly associated with the tourists they encountered in these faraway places. Second, anthropologists considered tourism a subject not serious enough to discuss intellectually and ethnographically. Although in practically every ethnographic field site anthropologists encountered at least occasional tourists, they were perceived to be an undesired nuisance and given scant or no attention. In spite of this inauspicious beginning, the anthropological scholarship on tourism has contributed greatly to tourism studies. Anthropologists have made important contributions to the understanding of tourism’s impact on host communities; the impact of travel on an individual; the power relationships in tourism developments; heritage and culture commodification; types of tourism and tourists; and the relationships between tourism and ethnicity, identity, material culture, nationalism, and the environment, among others.
Visual Anthropology
Authors: El Khachab Chihab , Banks Marcus
Published: February 2012

Visual anthropology can be broadly understood as the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological. However, for much of its history, the term has been associated almost exclusively with ethnographic film (see Ethnographic Film) and it is only in more recent decades that a broader consideration of other visual forms and visuality itself have come under the subdiscipline’s purview. Since the early twenty-first century, the boundaries have expanded further, partly through changes in technology (expensive celluloid film technology giving way to cheap high-quality video and digital processes, the rise of the Internet) but more through changes in theory and the opening up of new lines of intellectual inquiry. As with many other subdisciplines within the field of anthropology, many visual anthropologists would claim that they are simply anthropologists—with the same interests in kinship, politics, the economy, aesthetics, materiality, religion, and so forth as their colleagues—but with special attention paid to the visual and visible manifestations of those areas of human activity and creativity. The subdiscipline overlaps strongly with the anthropology of art and with the anthropology of material culture as well as with other disciplines such as media studies, film studies, and photographic history; in recent years, the field has also overlapped with action anthropology and other applied work coming out of development studies, and the rise of the Internet has given a new forum for the storage, study, and dissemination of images. There is no equivalent subdiscipline in the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology and primatology, though scholars in these fields do of course use photography and film or video for purposes of documentation (archaeology, forensic anthropology) and recording observations (primatology); interpretative approaches in archaeology, for example in the study of rock art, may draw upon approaches from visual anthropology as well as from the anthropology of art and the anthropology of material culture.
Business Anthropology
Authors: Baba Marietta L. , Heyes LaBond Christine , Altimare Emily
Published: February 2012

Business refers to an institutional field comprised of privately and publicly owned firms, public organizational entities (e.g., regulatory bodies), and other actors (e.g., consumers) that engage in market-oriented interactions resulting in mutual influence. In the broadest sense, business anthropology encompasses inquiry or practice related to some aspect of the business domain that is grounded in anthropological epistemology, methodology, or substantive knowledge. In the early twentieth century, anthropology, as a discipline, was encouraged by American business interests to develop as an empirically based social science that could provide a scientific basis for social welfare. Partially as a result of this influence, anthropologists’ research and problem-solving interests in the business domain focused primarily on manufacturing productivity and the contexts of economic growth, and they were shaped by the traditions of other disciplines, such as industrial psychology, through the Human Relations School, a theory of organizational management. After World War II, anthropological research on industry became more independent intellectually and fragmented into several streams of literature, including neo-Marxian approaches and studies of industrialization in non-Western societies. Since the end of the Cold War, anthropological studies of business have been reinvigorated, as increasing numbers of academic anthropologists have acknowledged the marketplace and its attendant activities as worthy subjects of study. At the same time, anthropological epistemology and methods have been assimilated into corporate venues as more anthropologists engage in research or become practitioners in the private sector, stimulating self-reflection on the discipline’s relationship with business. As a result, the field has become increasingly complex, with linkages to several other disciplines and traditions. Another consequence is that anthropological perspectives gradually have shifted from the mid-twentieth century view of business as an external and potentially hostile “other” to more varied and nuanced views, including the perspective that business is a field in which anthropologists may hold engaged positions. Because of this evolving situation, the worlds of business are recognized as deserving of our understanding, interpretation, and critical assessment; yet, this dawning awareness brings its own quandaries with respect to positionality and ethics. Accordingly, items have been selected for inclusion here on the basis of three criteria: understanding the context for the historical development of business anthropology as one of the institutional anthropologies; gaining an overview and an in-depth perspective on the major dimensions of the field; and/or providing access to literature reflecting empirical research, practice, and/or theoretical and critical reflection in relation to the business domain.
Cultural Evolution
Authors: Mesoudi Alex
Published: February 2012

“Cultural evolution” is the idea that human cultural change––that is, changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge, customs, skills, attitudes, languages, and so on––can be described as a Darwinian evolutionary process that is similar in key respects (but not identical) to biological/genetic evolution. More specifically, just as Darwin described biological/genetic evolution as comprising three key components––variation, competition (or selection), and inheritance––cultural change also comprises these same phenomena. Yet while cultural evolution can be described as Darwinian in this sense, the details of the processes (e.g., how variation is generated, or how information is transmitted) are likely to be different in the cultural case compared to the details of biological/genetic evolution. Bearing these differences in mind, cultural evolution researchers have taken many of the same methods, tools, and concepts that biologists have developed to explain biological diversity and complexity and used them to explain similar diversity and complexity in cultural systems. These include phylogenetic methods to reconstruct “macroevolutionary” historical relations between cultural traits (e.g., languages or tools), ethnographic field studies to document and explain contemporary cross-cultural variation, laboratory experiments to determine the small-scale details of cultural “microevolution” (e.g., how cognitive biases favor certain ideas over others or whether we preferentially learn from certain people within a group), and mathematical models to explore the long-term and population-level consequences of those microevolutionary processes. Given this interdisciplinary breadth, it has been suggested that evolutionary theory may serve as a synthetic framework for unifying the social sciences, just as evolutionary theory synthesized the biological sciences during the early 20th century.