bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Integrative taxonomy of the genus Pseudostegana (Diptera, Drosophilidae) from China, with descriptions of eleven new species
Authors: Lu Jinming , Zhang Yuan , Chen Hongwei
Published: September 2018

The genus Pseudostegana (Okada, 1978) currently contains thirty-nine described species. A number of Pseudostegana were collected from the fieldwork in southwestern China from 2010 to 2017. Eleven new species were discovered and are described from southwestern China: Pseudostegana alpina Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana amnicola Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana amoena Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana mailangang Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana meiduo Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana meiji Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana mystica Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana stictiptrata Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana stigmatptera Zhang & Chen, sp. nov.; Pseudostegana ximalaya Zhang & Chen, sp. nov. and Pseudostegana zhuoma Zhang & Chen, sp. nov. A key to all Chinese Pseudostegana species based on morphological characters is provided. Two mitochondrial loci (COI and ND2) and one nuclear locus (28S rRNA) were sequenced for the Pseudostegana specimens, and Bayesian and RAxML concatenated analyses were run. Molecular species delimitation is performed using the distance-based automatic barcode gap discovery (ABGD) method. Molecular data support the morphological characteristics observed among these Chinese species and confirm the new species as being distinctly different.
Changes in metabolic profiling of sugarcane leaves induced by endophytic diazotrophic bacteria and humic acids
Authors: Aguiar Natalia O. , Olivares Fabio L. , Novotny Etelvino H. , Canellas Luciano P.
Published: September 2018

Plant growth-promoting bacteria (PGPB) and humic acids (HA) have been used as biostimulants in field conditions. The complete genomic and proteomic transcription of Herbaspirillum seropedicae and Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus is available but interpreting and utilizing this information in the field to increase crop performance is challenging. The identification and characterization of metabolites that are induced by genomic changes may be used to improve plant responses to inoculation. The objective of this study was to describe changes in sugarcane metabolic profile that occur when HA and PGPB are used as biostimulants. Inoculum was applied to soil containing 45-day old sugarcane stalks. One week after inoculation, the methanolic extracts from leaves were obtained and analyzed by gas chromatography coupled to time-of-flight mass spectrometry; a total of 1,880 compounds were observed and 280 were identified in all samples. The application of HA significantly decreased the concentration of 15 metabolites, which generally included amino acids. HA increased the levels of 40 compounds, and these included metabolites linked to the stress response (shikimic, caffeic, hydroxycinnamic acids, putrescine, behenic acid, quinoline xylulose, galactose, lactose proline, oxyproline and valeric acid) and cellular growth (adenine and adenosine derivatives, ribose, ribonic acid and citric acid). Similarly, PGPB enhanced the level of metabolites identified in HA-treated soils; e.g., 48 metabolites were elevated and included amino acids, nucleic acids, organic acids, and lipids. Co-inoculation (HA+PGPB) boosted the level of 110 metabolites with respect to non-inoculated controls; these included amino acids, lipids and nitrogenous compounds. Changes in the metabolic profile induced by HA+PGPB influenced both glucose and pentose pathways and resulted in the accumulation of heptuloses and riboses, which are substrates in the nucleoside biosynthesis and shikimic acid pathways. The mevalonate pathway was also activated, thus increasing phytosterol synthesis. The improvement in cellular metabolism observed with PGPB+HA was compatible with high levels of vitamins. Glucuronate and amino sugars were stimulated in addition to the products and intermediary compounds of tricarboxylic acid metabolism. Lipids and amino acids were the main compounds induced by co-inoculation in addition to antioxidants, stress-related metabolites, and compounds involved in cellular redox. The primary compounds observed in each treatment were identified, and the effect of co-inoculation (HA+PGPB) on metabolite levels was discussed.
Medical Pluralism
Authors: Baer Hans A.
Published: September 2018

Medical pluralism constitutes the coexistence of multiple medical subsystems, particularly in state or complex societies. Although biomedicine is often dominant in all modern societies today, indigenous and professionalized heterodox medical systems of many sorts persist for a variety of reasons. The examination of medical pluralism in its numerous manifestations has been for some time a prominent concern of medical anthropology.
S
tocking,
G
eorge
W
. (1928–2013)
Authors: Handler Richard
Published: September 2018

George W. Stocking Jr. was an intellectual historian whose work on the history of North American and British anthropology gave anthropologists new ways to understand the theoretical foundations of their discipline during the last third of the twentieth century, a time of crisis (conceptual, methodological, and political) in the discipline.
Nutritional Anthropology
Authors: Ulijaszek Stanley
Published: September 2018

Nutritional anthropology is the study of human subsistence, diet, and nutrition in comparative social and evolutionary perspective. In nutritional terms, humans are the sum total of their evolutionary history and more recent epigenetic and social past, as well as their present‐day social, cultural, and biological life histories. Many factors influence food preferences, dietary choice, and nutritional health of populations, including evolutionary, ecological, social, cultural, and historical ones. Therefore, the methods employed by nutritional anthropology are diverse and range from ethnographic, historical, and archaeological ones to nutritional, epidemiological, and anatomical ones. Current concerns in nutritional anthropology include the study of: contemporary problems of undernutrition and food insecurity; food in relation to the body and personhood; food systems from social, biological, and biocultural perspectives; and understandings of social and political drivers of dietary change and nutritional health.
Medical Science and Technological Studies
Authors: Hoeyer Klaus
Published: September 2018

Medical science and technology studies (STS) can be understood as a forum for scholars with backgrounds in many different disciplines who study how social, political, and cultural practices shape medical research, technological innovation, clinical routines, and understandings of health and illness—and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture. It is also a field where scholars often seek to transgress the implicit bifurcation between “medicine” and “society” implied in the previous sentence. This entry outlines key sources of inspiration for the field and describes different ways in which medical STS scholars construe their objects of study, before reflecting on the exchanges and mutual influences of anthropology and STS in relation to the study of medicine, health, and health care.
Informed Consent
Authors: Radice Martha
Published: September 2018

The principle of informed consent specifies that individuals' consent to participate in research should be based on as full an understanding as possible of the purpose, parameters, risks, benefits, and outcomes of the study. Anthropological approaches to research, however, raise questions about both the “informed” and “consent” elements of the concept. Pragmatically, anthropologists often work to broaden bureaucratic understandings of informed consent in order to think about what ethical implications arise for diverse interlocutors who participate in their studies, to different degrees, and at various moments in the research process.
Gumperz,JohnJ. (1922–2013)
Authors: Green Judith L.
Published: September 2018

John J. Gumperz was a central figure in research at the intersection of anthropology, language, and education, who developed a systematic and replicable ethnographic approach known as interactional sociolinguistics. Interactional sociolinguistics provided a conceptual basis for Gumperz's research on the impact of differences in discourse processes in and across social contexts (e.g., home, business, legal, classroom). In education, his research provided empirical evidence of the linguistic difference thesis, which challenged psychological arguments that low‐income children entered school without a fully developed language—what was called the “linguistic deficit thesis.” In collaboration with Jenny Cook‐Gumperz, he developed conceptual and empirical understandings about literacy skills as social constructions, further challenging views of low‐income and linguistically diverse students as deficient in the core skills necessary for academic achievement in schools. His research also made visible the impact of such differences in the achievement of a speaker's goals in communicative events of everyday life.
Governance Issues in Development
Authors: Gledhill John
Published: September 2018

The end of the Cold War produced a new focus on the importance of “good governance” on the part of international development organizations. However, by adopting a managerial approach to supporting macroeconomic policies that furthered a neoliberal model of capitalist globalization, the Bretton Woods institutions turned their backs on alternative paradigms favored by some UN agencies. Anthropologists have not only highlighted the ethnocentrism of the paradigms that are dominant in the global North but also, through historically contextualized ethnographic research, explored the contradictions that they have provoked in practice. Increasingly rejecting the idea of an all‐powerful development apparatus, anthropologists have provided insights of practical relevance into the local and global forces and social and political relations that promote, and inhibit, the kinds of improvements in governance that the citizens of different societies actually want.
Biopolitics
Authors: Samsky Ari
Published: September 2018

This entry defines Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics. Biopolitics refers to state‐governing practices aimed at monitoring, counting, and controlling human populations. It represents an important historical shift away from classical European modes of governance, which focused on territory and sovereign right. The idea of biopolitics has profound historical and philosophical significance, and has been taken up by scholars from many disciplines. The entry explores the concept's roots in Foucault's work and analyzes recent scholarship that has contested prior interpretations of the idea and suggested new ways to employ biopolitics in research.
Social Memory
Authors: Uehling Greta Lynn
Published: September 2018

Social memory refers to the set of representations, practices, and performances that constitute a collective interpretation of the past. Social memory, whether it is being used discursively in the construction of reality or strategically to gain access to resources, is at the core of being human. Studies of social memory describe the connection of memory to power and its use by the nation‐state; the role of trauma and nostalgia in recollecting or forgetting; and the embodiment or commodification of experiences from the past. Scholars are beginning to take into account the interactions between minds, machines, and various forms of material culture.
Postdevelopment
Authors: Bodley John H.
Published: September 2018

Postdevelopment anthropological thought is both an important critique of institutionalized development ideology and practice and a search for sustainable alternatives to development. Some postdevelopment anthropologists focus on development since 1949, treating it as an ethnocentric and colonialist discourse and practice that fails to deliver on its promises. Other postdevelopment anthropologists take a longer view and explore alternatives to development by envisioning possible future worlds. According to scale and power theory, development has failed because it is an elite‐directed, runaway growth process that concentrates power and distributes unsustainable costs to global society at large. In a democratically organized future small nations world, decision making would be at the lowest possible level, cultural diversity would be emphasized, and citizens would reach a consensus on how best to meet human needs. This may be the most promising way to achieve social justice and limit environmentally destructive growth discourse and practice.
Rights
Authors: Weston Gavin
Published: September 2018

Philosophical and legal rights take many forms, articulating freedoms and entitlements within particular political contexts. This entry explores the historic emergence of legal rights, the emergence of philosophical ideas of natural rights, and the establishment of universal human rights legislation and anthropological engagement with these ideas. Following strong cultural relativist objections to human rights, the post‐Cold War embrace of rights as a domain of anthropological engagement is examined in relation to new research trajectories in the anthropology of rights.
Kinship Terminology
Authors: Dousset Laurent
Published: September 2018

Kinship terminologies, a set of words of a language that reflects genealogical connections in culturally specific ways, were among the first cultural elements that held early anthropologists' attention and remained central to the discipline until the 1970s. Like language in general, terminologies are thought to be structured and to reflect peoples' ways of classifying kin. Despite the numerous variations human cultures have developed, the many different terminologies can be grouped into five basic types, labeled Hawaiian, Dravidian, Iroquois, Sudanese, and Eskimo. The terms that constitute a terminology are distinguished or characterized according to a number of criteria, such as whether a term is a reference or an address, consanguineal or affinal, classificatory or descriptive. After thirty years of neglect, the study of kinship and kinship terminology has regained importance in anthropology in recent years, particularly in the context of applied research.
Economy, Cultural Approaches to
Authors: Gudeman Stephen
Published: September 2018

Cultural approaches to economy explore the local models that people make about and for material life. These models are limited or contextual. They are ways of seeing, acting, and understanding that are pieced together by the anthropologist through observation and conversations. Often they are implicit and draw on figurative reason, such as metaphor and other representations. Local models spread into or are drawn from different aspects of social life from the house as an economic institution to the family, to religious beliefs, to gender, and to other social assumptions and orders. The same can be said of most “Western” models from Aristotle to Adam Smith, to Marx, to standard economics. The last model is abstract, linear, and calculative, and it tends to colonize everyday life, but the anthropologist can analyze Western models as cultural constructions as well.
Customary Law
Authors: Griffiths Anne
Published: September 2018

Customary law has often been used in juxtaposition against state or national law, as representing a form of “local,” “indigenous,” “informal,” or “traditional” law that is different from state law. This perception is based on a historical, Western paradigm of law associated with lawyers' views of law. These endorse classic legal pluralism, based on dual systems of law theory, where the state or national law defines what counts as customary law in terms of its own narrowly defined sources and institutions. This form of pluralism has been challenged by anthropologists and social scientists, who have highlighted other, alternative forms of legal ordering through a rich and diverse ethnography based on empirical research. Under this new, social–scientific pluralism that acknowledges the transnational dimensions of law, customary law has come to represent a regulatory power that exists both within and beyond states but that need not be tied to states' territorial jurisdiction.
Redistribution
Authors: Rössler Martin
Published: September 2018

Redistribution is an economic arrangement whereby goods are transferred to a political center in order to be redistributed among the population later. Pooled goods may either be redistributed among parts of the population that are not directly involved in their production or given back to the actual producers. Redistribution requires economic specialization and surplus production as well as political centricity; it contributes to the maintenance of central political institutions in stratified societies. The emergence of complex socioeconomic systems, such as chiefdoms and states, has therefore been linked to the impact of redistributive economies, which are also associated with issues of tax, tribute, and exploitation.
Crime
Authors: Garriott William
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists have a long‐standing interest in crime. Anthropology's unique history encourages a critical approach that questions surface definitions, particularly by the state and other powerful actors. This has enabled nuanced understandings of crime's role in shaping social life, including the production of collectives and the work of governance across gradations of power. Studies of criminalization and crime talk have shed light on the criminal imaginary and the production of criminal figures. Recent work showcases continued efforts to move beyond the crime category, through a focus on illegality and the (il)legal.
Suicide
Authors: Hjelmeland Heidi
Published: September 2018

The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 800,000 suicides across the globe every year; at least ten to twenty times as many engage in nonfatal suicidal behavior. Suicidal behavior is culturally patterned in that rates, risk factors, forms, scenarios, methods, and meanings vary greatly across age, gender, and cultural contexts. The dominant explanatory model links suicide to mental disorders, particularly depression, but interesting research contextualizing suicide now provides evidence for a number of different interpretations. Alternative explanatory models, for example, are of suicide as escape from unbearable circumstances or expectations, as a desperate protest or rebellion against family and/or societal oppression and abuse, as a relational rather than an individual act, as a specific way of communicating distress, and/or as a way of taking back lost control in life. Consequences of hegemonic masculinity also seem important for suicide for both men and women, albeit in different ways.
Pilgrimage
Authors: Eade John
Published: September 2018

Despite the different types of pilgrimage (internal, moral, and place pilgrimage), they all involve movement and an engagement with the sacred. Anthropological research has focused mainly on place pilgrimage and this entry begins by outlining the social and economic processes which have encouraged the growth of this form of pilgrimage since the 1960s. It then proceeds to discuss both religious and nonreligious place pilgrimage around the world and illustrates these pilgrimages through particular examples. Key changes in the anthropological study of pilgrimage since the 1970s are considered next and the entry concludes by outlining two promising avenues which researchers are exploring: (1) alternatives to the dominant constructivist approach; and (2) attempts to break down the boundaries between Anglophone and non‐Anglophone pilgrimage research.
Gender, Sexuality, and Caste
Authors: Rani K. Suneetha
Published: September 2018

Gender and sexuality are closely monitored and molded by the caste system, which is a hierarchical and vertical division of labor and laborers. Sexuality is not only a sexual choice and sexual desire in a patriarchal feudal caste system, it is politically strategized to control people in the name of religion, custom, culture, morality, and purity. Any attempt to transgress the rigid boundaries of caste could lead to excommunication, punishments, and the emergence of new castes, particularly lower castes. Multiple stratification subjects the already subjugated people to multiple jeopardy. The concept of purity and pollution colonizes bodies and lives by dividing the society into touchable and untouchable sections. Systems of marriage and family are strongly based on the institutionalization of exploitation and discrimination.
Tribe
Authors: Ould Cheikh Abdel Wedoud
Published: September 2018

The notion of tribe has been used by anthropologists to designate both a type of society and a stage of evolution in human societies. Tribal, “segmentary,” stateless societies are opposed to societies governed by a centralized state. The members of the same tribe express their internal divisions and their unity, and the process of fission and fusion that structures their relations, in the language of kinship and territorial belonging. Though competition and war seem an inherent part of tribal systems, the transformations generated by the colonial encounter have given birth to a new manifestation of the quest for identity among tribal groups: “tribalism.”
Legalism
Authors: Pirie Fernanda
Published: September 2018

Legalism is a social form. It is a style of thinking, writing, and arguing, which describes and prescribes human conduct in terms of rules, categories, and generalizations. As an anthropological subject, it provides a basis for the empirical and cross‐cultural study of law. It facilitates the exploration of distinct themes within legal anthropology, most importantly, the social significance of legal rules, texts, and argument. The focus on form rather than function helps to distinguish laws from implicit norms and adjudication according to law from general mediation, allowing for critical reflection on what law is and does.
Exploitation
Authors: Lem Winnie
Published: September 2018

“Exploitation” is a term that is used both descriptively and analytically to reflect relationships that are characterized by unjust benefit or gain. Used descriptively, it is often employed as a synonym for oppression and domination in relationships that prevail between groups of people who occupy a superordinate position in social hierarchies and derive advantage from those who occupy a subordinate position. This entry focuses largely on the use of exploitation as an analytical concept. In this sense, it is used by scholars who draw their insights from Marxist theory. In this body of thought, the term focuses on the idea of labor and value and is deployed to problematize the processes by which social groups that occupy superior positions in class‐divided societies derive benefit from the work of those who occupy inferior positions.
Barter
Authors: García Hugo Valenzuela
Published: September 2018

Barter is usually defined as the dyadic exchange of goods and services of similar kind without the intervention of money. Initially regarded as a simple bilateral transaction (equivalent to commodity exchange), it did not attract particular anthropological attention. However, a model of pure barter exists only in theory. The available ethnographic data show a wide array of barter modalities and functions conveying, beyond its pragmatic goal, social, political, and moral functions. When it takes place within the same community, barter is frequently found in coexistence with gift exchange, trade, or commodity exchange. While economists commonly regard barter as the origin of all exchange—eventually leading to the creation of money—the historical sequence could actually work in the opposite direction. Actually, barter is widely used not only in the past and traditional societies but also in contemporary societies where, to a certain extent, it can be considered a postmonetary phenomenon.
Skilled Vision
Authors: Grasseni Cristina
Published: September 2018

The skilled vision approach is inspired by the edited volumeSkilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards, edited by Cristina Grasseni and published in 2007, which gathered research in anthropology, history of science, and the visual arts on visual apprenticeship. A skilled vision approach considers vision as a realm of social expertise that depends on trained perception within a structured environment. Looking is a culturally inculcated and socially performed technique of the body, in the Maussian sense. Learning how to look at the world is a complex form of apprenticeship. Learning how to decipher objects, events, and environments is a social and relational as well as a cognitive form of apprenticeship. Different communities of practice engage differently with seeing and knowing. Any schooling of the eye thus results in a sensibility that is developed and confirmed through repeated acts of looking, and is at once aesthetic, moral, functional, and normative.
Tobacco
Authors: Russell Andrew
Published: September 2018

The study of the relationship between people and tobacco is of more than ethnobotanical interest; it spans many fundamental issues of current concern for anthropologists in general and for medical anthropologists in particular. These include topics such as globalization, transnational and state‐sponsored corporate capitalism, and the use and abuse of narcotic substances, as well as key scholarly themes such as material culture, agency, semiotics, intersubjectivity, and identity. Anthropologists offer fresh and engaging perspectives on tobacco in historical, contemporary, and future contexts. A useful heuristic for considering how anthropologists study tobacco is to consider research in this field across four overlapping domains. Anthropologies of (and in some cases for) tobacco as a product counterpoint effectively with anthropologies that facilitate and critique tobacco control as an exemplar of public health strategies that are structural as much as behavioral.
Culture, Nonhuman
Authors: Vale Gillian L. , Dean Lewis G. , Whiten Andrew
Published: September 2018

Culture has had immeasurable consequences for our species. Whether nonhuman animals display culture that is in some ways homologous to our own remains a contentious issue. This entry examines the extent to which animals meet a range of cultural criteria proposed in recent literature, from social learning, through multiple‐tradition repertoires, to cumulative culture and cultural norms. Moving beyond the mere presence/absence debate to conceptualize culture as comprising a number of different components allows researchers to establish which features are shared with other animals and which make us culturally distinctive.
Partible Paternity
Authors: Blell Mwenza
Published: September 2018

Partible paternity is the idea that humans can have more than one biological father. Common in lowland South American societies, this understanding of the process of conception is one in which multiple inseminations are required to make a successful pregnancy and that multiple males can take part in this process. In some cases, social fatherhood is also assigned to multiple males. While many have suggested these beliefs must provide some evolutionary advantage to mothers, fathers or offspring in order to overcome evolved tendencies to prefer female fidelity, evidence of these impacts on fitness has not been found consistently across groups.
Experimental Method
Authors: Barrett Justin L. , Hornbeck Ryan G.
Published: September 2018

Experimental methods are the only valid tool for drawing causal conclusions in the study of human thought and behavior. An experiment is a comparison of at least two conditions: the control condition (the baseline situation) and an experimental condition (what happens when a new factor is added to the baseline situation). The dependent variable in an experiment is the phenomenon being investigated, and the independent variable or variables are factor(s) that may causally account for changes in the dependent variable. Experimental methods are limited by practical and ethical challenges and offer partial, probabilistic answers to anthropological questions.
Contraception and Family Planning
Authors: Whittaker Andrea
Published: September 2018

A range of technologies can be used to prevent conception in many societies, including physical barriers, ingested substances, pharmaceutical products, surgical procedures, and practices such as prolonged lactation and abstinence. Anthropologists have studied contraception through ethnomedical studies, demographic studies, critiques of the implementation of population control programs, considerations of biopolitics, and studies of the introduction, dissemination, and use of new technologies. Work on contraception prefigured debates over choice and agency and new reproductive technologies more generally and has provided important theoretical insights into reproduction, kinship, gender relations, sexuality, and family formation as well as the governance of individuals and populations by state institutions.
Homo
: Evolution of the Genus
Authors: Potts Richard
Published: September 2018

The genus
Homo
, which includes the living human species
Homo sapiens
, originated in Africa at least 2.8 million years ago and was entirely African in its distribution until shortly after 2 million years ago. Evolution of the genus was characterized by brain enlargement, dependence on manufactured tools, prolonged maturation, and eventually complex symbolic behavior, cultural diversification, and a global geographic distribution. Although different views exist regarding the number of
Homo
species and how they were related, a minimum of seven species and perhaps eleven distinct lineages are recognized by most researchers. Diversification and the coexistence of multiple species, as well as extinction, were common during the evolution of
Homo
, overturning the long‐held view of a single progressively evolving lineage over time.
Homo
evolved in settings of complex environmental variability, which highlights the role of adaptability as afforded by technology, complex sociality, and cultural diversity in the persistence and expansion of humans today.
Diaspora
Authors: Vora Neha
Published: September 2018

Diaspora within anthropology and related disciplines has become a common way to think about identity and community formation that occurs through the process of migration and the ongoing linkages (both material and affective) between a real or imagined “homeland” and the various locations of resettlement. The concept of diaspora has allowed scholars to move beyond traditional approaches to migration, which have focused mainly on economic push–pull factors and assimilation processes. Anthropologists and other scholars have shown that migrants do not simply assimilate into host societies; rather, they produce new cultural formations in diaspora. This entry introduces some of the major themes in ethnographies of diaspora (primarily within Western contexts), such as identity, hybridity, nostalgia, and nationalism. Newer approaches—which consider sending country initiatives aimed at diasporas, the impacts of temporary migration structures, and non‐Western locations of settlement—are also covered. Finally, it briefly explores the role of anthropologists as diasporic subjects.
Caregiving
Authors: Sadruddin Aalyia F. A. , Ice Gillian H.
Published: September 2018

Caregiving is an issue of rising global importance. Cross‐disciplinary research on caregiving has increased substantially since the mid‐1980s. The primary focus has been on the need for care of older persons who are prone to multiple chronic diseases, frailty, and declining functional capacity. This research has assisted our understanding of the emotional, physical, and moral dimensions of caregiving. In addition to studying the caregiving for older persons, many researchers have also examined caregiving by older persons to spouses, adult children, grandchildren, and extended family members. Caregiving may have both positive and negative effects on the health and wellbeing of the caregiver and care receiver, the balance of which depend on family and economic context, cultural norms of care, and nature of the caregiving relationship.
Popular Culture, Anthropological Perspectives on
Authors: Becker Heike
Published: September 2018

Until recently anthropologists have been ambivalent about popular culture. Reasons for this were twofold, theoretically as much as politically. Since the mid‐1980s, however, popular culture studies have become an increasingly salient arena of contemporary anthropology. Johannes Fabian introduced the term “popular culture” to anthropological inquiry, understood as contemporary cultural expressions by the masses in contrast to both modern elitist and traditional “tribal” culture. Anthropological perspectives in popular culture studies emphasize an ethnographic approach and the sense making of audiences. Currently there are three significant arenas of anthropological interest in popular culture: resistance, religion, and the politics of difference.
Religion and Cognition
Authors: Guthrie Stewart Elliott
Published: September 2018

Understanding religion and its role in human life has been important to anthropology since the beginning of the discipline. Despite advances by anthropologists and others, however, consensus on a theory and even a definition of religion has been elusive. In recent decades, research on human cognition has led to a new and quickly growing field of study, the cognitive science of religion, that is modifying and extending earlier theories.
Agricultural Intensification
Authors: Stone Glenn Davis
Published: September 2018

The process of increasing output from a given amount of land by increasing inputs is called agricultural intensification. Intensification may be labor based or capital based. In labor‐based intensification, farmers adapt to rising population density by shortening fallows and accepting lower marginal returns on their work. In capital‐based intensification, farms not only become more factory‐like but also rely increasingly on manufactured inputs. The two processes of intensification differ in many respects, including their sustainability.
Totemism
Authors: Wagner Roy
Published: September 2018

The word “totem,” which comes from the Objibway (nindotem, “my totem”) has, as its most general meaning, a species of plant, animal, or some other symbolic token that stands for or identifies an individual or a social grouping, such as a clan, moiety, or descent line. As such, it forms a baseline for a great many extensions of human–natural relations including shamanism, ritual, and mythology, all of which were grouped together by early anthropologists under the generic marker “totemism,” as though it provided a justification for their pet project of so‐called primitive cultures.
Hymes,Dell (1927–2009)
Authors: Street Brian
Published: September 2018

Dell Hymes has been one of the key figures in the anthropology of language and his work continues to be cited as a marker for work in this field. In particular, he helped, with others such as Gumperz, the move away from a Chomskyan formal view of language toward a more social practice perspective, making the case for ethnographic investigation into contrasting patterns of language use in speech communities. Other central concepts with which he is associated include communicative competence and ethnopoetics, He was involved not only in central theoretical and methodological frames but also in the application of this work to practice in education via the development of communicative language teaching (CLT) and he was deeply committed to helping overcome inequality.
Sex Work
Authors: Sandy Larissa
Published: September 2018

Sex work is a highly contested, deeply moral, and politicized terrain. This entry examines the nature of anthropological knowledge about sex work and the ways of knowing, seeing, and communicating about sexual commerce. It discusses the sex work and feminism debates, focusing on abolitionist feminism and sex‐work feminism and some major criticisms of these perspectives, and considers emotions in sex‐work research as well as the more practical aspects of doing fieldwork on sex work.
Gender
Authors: Dundon Alison
Published: September 2018

This entry outlines processes whereby gender has become a key concept in the analysis of relations between men and women in anthropology. It explores the disciplinary development of the study of gender, initially under the auspices of the “anthropology of women” and feminist anthropology, but also encompassing a wide set of intersections with other categories, concepts, and issues. It charts the early definition and analysis of gender in terms of the sex/gender model, in which gender was considered a cultural construct overlaid on a biological “sex.” The entry traces subsequent propositions that sex is also socially constituted, and the ways in which anthropologists have sought to ethnographically demonstrate the generation of gender through actions, practices, and performances that give rise to sexed and gendered bodies. The entry also discusses intersections of sex and gender in terms of anthropological studies on masculinities, sexualities, religion, colonialism, and nation‐states.
Inheritance
Authors: Magee Siobhan
Published: September 2018

Inheritance is the transferal of property from its owner to one or more heirs, usually related persons of subsequent generations. A person's assets might be passed on to their children, or to those with, according to some estimations, “weaker” ties such as more distant kin or friends. The nature of what is passed on is as variable as what can be considered to be property in any given cultural context. Depending on where and between whom inheritance is taking place, it might be framed primarily as a matter of kinship, a mourning practice, a process codified by a legal system, a facet of economic life, or a combination of several of these frameworks. Inheritances can be tangible or intangible and emphasis may be placed upon assets as partible or as impartible. Within the discipline, inheritance is a meeting place between kinship, economics, and politics. Ethnographic and theoretical accounts alike show inheritance as a key instrument in social reproduction.
Primate Social Evolution
Authors: Lindenfors Patrik
Published: September 2018

Primates display a remarkable diversity of types of social organization—a diversity that, according to the socioecological model of social evolution, is ultimately determined by ecological factors limiting female fitness and the number of matings limiting male fitness. The foremost ecological determinants of female sociality are the degree to which food resources are defendable, either alone or in a group, and the level of protection from predators gained from being part of a group. Further factors that have been proposed are the presence of infanticide, coalitions, and dominance hierarchies; general population density and habitat saturation; whether competition is mainly intra‐ or intergroup; and which sex disperses. Male sociality is instead mainly determined by the spatiotemporal spacing of mating opportunities with females. Some researchers have also proposed that cognitive abilities impose a limit on group size, since primate sociality demands competent navigation of social networks.
Animism
Authors: Costa Luiz , Fausto Carlos
Published: September 2018

Drawing on the work of the physician G. E. Stahl, Edward Burnett Tylor provided his famously terse definition of animism as “the belief in spiritual beings,” a definition which later authors, among them James G. Frazer, redefined in terms of its originary place in the evolution of religion. The subsumption of animism to unilineal evolution proved to be its death sentence, since it vanished along with the paradigm that had claimed it in the early twentieth century. The term was only recovered in the late twentieth century by anthropologists studying Amazonia and the subarctic region, feeding an interest in “indigenous ontologies” and “ecological phenomenology.” Today animism has largely broken free from its anthropological and ethnographic moorings, coming to be an important player in interdisciplinary discussions of “posthumanism” and anti‐Cartesian philosophies.
Surrealism
Authors: Richardson Michael
Published: September 2018

This entry details the various engagements of surrealists with anthropological issues, both in a theoretical and practical sense. It looks at their involvement with the College of Sociology in Paris and the Mass Observation movement in England in the 1930s and briefly at some of the ethnographic work carried out by Michel Leiris, Benjamin Péret, and others. It also considers various surrealist contributions to ethnographic film in a broad sense.
Chile, Anthropology in
Authors: Márquez Francisca , Skewes Juan Carlos
Published: September 2018

Anthropological research in Chile has a long tradition, even though its institutionalization took place only in the second half of the twentieth century. The historical context surrounding the incorporation of anthropology into the universities placed limitations on the discipline's clear identity. Both military rule and the transition to democracy challenged the progress that had been finally made through congresses and state funding for research, which increased significantly after 1990. However, anthropology gained notoriety through its main achievements in the study of indigenous peoples and its contribution to the promotion of human and indigenous rights. Contemporary anthropology in Chile is an established discipline in the universities, in national research, and as a profession, and there is a growing scholarship in social anthropology.
Gender and Human Rights
Authors: Merlan Francesca
Published: September 2018

This entry considers human rights as a central category of international modernity and the elevation of gender and gender equality to the center of that global agenda. It reviews a series of world conferences central to that elevation; feminist contestation of the public/private distinction as potentially dangerous in preserving a sphere of nonintervention by the state; the diffusion of human and gender‐related rights; and the intersection of human rights with nonnormative sexual identities. Its position is that human rights can be very different from existing structures and practices and that the diffusion of human rights is highly political and not easily manageable. Human rights should not be taken as ethical transcendence of other forms of politics but as ideals that need to be critically understood and negotiated in contexts. Fundamental inequalities of gender and material and other dynamic and entwined aspects of being will not be resolved by legalism but by myriad changes and interventions.
Homebases in Paleolithic Archaeology
Authors: Rolland Nicolas
Published: September 2018

The term “homebase” is defined as a residential site where local hunter‐gatherer group members reside, as a component of settlement and land use. Its characteristics can be identified archaeologically from the reconstruction of past occupation sites, by observations derived from nonhuman primates ecology and social life, and by the comparative observation of the lifeways of historical hunter‐gatherers. The role of homebases and their long‐term biocultural evolutionary significance is reviewed with reference to direct evidence informing us about daily and year‐round subsistence activities, social life, ideology, and group safety strategies. Prehistoric homebases could reflect sociocultural intensification through time with trends to growing complexity, as indicated by settlement sizes, and the richness, densities, and properties of their material contents.
Malnutrition
Authors: Hadley Craig , Stevenson Edward G. J.
Published: September 2018

Malnutrition, the excess or insufficiency of macro or micronutrients, has long been studied by both cultural and biological anthropologists. Anthropologists treat malnutrition as one indicator of the wellbeing of individuals, communities, and of all humanity. Common themes in the anthropology of malnutrition are the sociocultural determinants of malnutrition, the relationship between body shape and health, the relationship between subsistence mode and nutritional status, and the role of undernutrition in utero as a determinant of later‐life disease. Current areas of interest include assessment of micronutrient deficiencies, the dual burden of under‐ and overnutrition, and the impact of globalization on nutritional wellbeing.
Iconography and Style
Authors: Fortis Paolo
Published: September 2018

Iconography deals with the study of meaning in art objects, and style deals with formal resemblances and variations. The relationship between iconography and style has prompted lively debates in anthropology on issues of continuity and change and on the relations between form and meaning. Over the years, anthropologists have explored the perspectives of style and iconography to study social forms and social change, relations between technical skills and materiality, and problems of signification and representation. They have also begun to exploit the capacity of style to inform historical analysis.
Global Governance
Authors: Hodžić Saida
Published: September 2018

Anthropologists treat global governance not as an explanatory concept but as an ethnographic object of inquiry. Global governance describes forms of rule that are not primarily anchored in or confined to states (although they may include them), that recognize or construct problems as having transnational or global dimensions, and that craft desires, knowledge frameworks, technologies, and infrastructures for policies and interventions that cross borders and scales. Anthropology of global governance includes studies of intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, networks, and treaties; corporate governance; public–private partnerships; foundations, research institutions, and activist and advocacy groups. Theoretical conceptualizations have moved from negative framings that describe what global governance is not (nonstate actors who operate outside state institutions) to concepts that capture various arrangements, assemblages, and institutional configurations such as para‐statal formations, para‐infrastructures, regulatory regimes, and intermediary power formations, all of which may include disaggregated state actors. Transnational governmentality is an approach to studying global governance.
Religion and Embodiment
Authors: Mitchell Jon P.
Published: September 2018

While the anthropology of religion has for some time been concerned with the body, it has only relatively recently turned toward the concept of embodiment. Embodiment shifts the focus from cognitive, linguistic, or language‐like phenomena toward forms of bodily practice and performance that are themselves seen as the substance of religion. Embodiment figures the body as both locus and conduit of embodied religion; the subject, rather than object, of religious process. The concern is therefore less with religious regulation of the body, or the body as symbolic representation of religious meaning, than with the various ways in which religion is enacted, performed, embodied. The approach gives us a new perspective on religious action, conceived as meaningful in and of itself.