After briefly explaining why social capital (civil society) is important to democracy, Putnam devotes the bulk of this chapter to demonstrating social capital’s decline in the United States across the last quarter century. (See Putnam 1995 for a similar but more detailed argument.) While he acknowledges that the significance of a few countertrends is difficult to assess without further study, Putnam concludes that crucial factors such as social trust are eroding rapidly in the United States. He offers some possible explanations for this erosion and concludes by outlining the work needed to consider these possibilities more fully.

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“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”

Theme identification is one of the most fundamental tasks in qualitative research. It also is one of the most mysterious. Explicit descriptions of theme discovery are rarely found in articles and reports, and when they are, they are often relegated to appendices or footnotes. Techniques are shared among small groups of social scientists, but sharing is impeded by disciplinary or epistemological boundaries. The techniques described here are drawn from across epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. They include both observational and manipulative techniques and range from quick word counts to laborious, in-depth, line-by-line scrutiny. Techniques are compared on six dimensions: (1) appropriateness for data types, (2) required labor, (3) required expertise, (4) stage of analysis, (5) number and types of themes to be generated, and (6) issues of reliability and validity.

Techniques to Identify Themes

This review surveys an emergent methodological trend in anthropological research that concerns the adaptation of long-standing modes of ethnographic practices to more complex objects of study. Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contextualized by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participation that cross-cut dichotomies such as the “local” and the “global,” the “lifeworld” and the “system.” Resulting ethnographies are therefore both in and out of the world system. The anxieties to which this methodological shift gives rise are considered in terms of testing the limits of ethnography, attenuating the power of fieldwork, and losing the perspective of the subaltern. The emergence of multi-sited ethnography is located within new spheres of interdisciplinary work, including media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies broadly. Several “tracking” strategies that shape multi-site...

http://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/Course_files/anth-490-edward-h-hagen/marcus-1995-ethnography-in-of-the-world-system_the-emergence-of-multi-sited-ethnography.pdf

Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography

In the 1990s the concept of social capital defined here as the norms and networks that enable people to act collectively enjoyed a remarkable rise to prominence across all the social science disciplines. The authors trace the evolution of social capital research as it pertains to economic development and identify four distinct approaches the research has taken : communitarian, networks, institutional, and synergy. The evidence suggests that of the four, the synergy view, with its emphasis on incorporating different levels and dimensions of social capital and its recognition of the positive and negative outcomes that social capital can generate, has the greatest empirical support and lends itself best to comprehensive and coherent policy prescriptions. The authors argue that a significant virtue of the idea of and discourse on social capital is that it helps to bridge orthodox divides among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

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Social capital: implications for development theory, research, and policy

Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from 33 countries located on six continents and five islands (total N = 10,047). For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study.

/pdf/sex-differences-in-human-mate-preferences-evolutionary-227sbaq8b2.pdf

Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures

Susan Greenhalgh investigates how, faced with shrinking Western markets, the soft drink giant sought to secure sales and build its image in China

Making China safe for Coke: how Coca-Cola shaped obesity science and policy in China

For years now, the United States has faced an "obesity epidemic" that, according to the dominant narrative, is harming the nation by worsening the health burden, raising health costs, and undermining productivity. Much of the responsibility is laid at the foot of Blacks and Latinos, who have higher levels of obesity. Latinos have provoked particular concern because of their rising numbers. Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Campaign is now targeting Latinos. Like the national anti-obesity campaign, it locates the problem in ignorance and calls on the Latino community to "own" the issue and take personal responsibility by embracing healthier beliefs and behaviors. In this article, we argue that this dominant approach to obesity is misguided and damaging because it ignores the political-economic sources of Latino obesity and the political-moral dynamics of biocitizenship in which the issue is playing out. Drawing on two sets of ethnographic data on Latino immigrants and United States-born Latinos in southern Cali...

/pdf/bad-biocitizens-latinos-and-the-us-obesity-epidemic-ipclm821yp.pdf

Bad Biocitizens?: Latinos and the US "Obesity Epidemic"

IN DEMOGRAPHY, a field long defined by its quantitative methods, a move toward qualitative methods at first blush seems revolutionary. Not surprisingly, then, there has been much interest in the qualitative turn in demographic methodology, accompanied by words of caution from some anthropological quarters. I do not intend to address the question of whether this shift is productive for population studies. Instead, my aim in this commentary is to relocate the discussion of qualitative methods, to remove it from the realm of methodology and place it in the arena of disciplinarity. By disciplinarity I mean the study of academic disciplines, more specifically, study of the control of knowledge organization and production by academic disciplines and the social practices by which that control is maintained (for more, see Messer-Davidow, Shumway, and Sylvan 1995). Although, institutionally, demography is interdisciplinary, with members based in different academic departments, as an intellectual practice demography operates as a relatively distinct discipline. Focusing on disciplinarity allows us to talk about disciplinary histories and disciplinary cultures, which in turn provide entree to fresh perspectives on methods. Let me begin by backtracking a bit. In a recent essay, titled "The social construction of population science," I argued that demographic knowledges about fertility have been shaped by the discipline's distinctive history and culture (Greenhalgh 1996). More specifically, I argued that the late arrival of demography on the American social science scene and the close ties it was constrained to build with applied funding organizations had specific, identifiable effects on the types of thought that were formed. Various theories of fertility differ in many ways, but they all share three larger properties: a lack of interest in politics, a general neglect of history, and an assumption of a global distribution of values and power that is Eurocentric, in other words, that places the val-

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2137382.pdf

Methods and Meanings: Reflections on Disciplinary Difference

Historical Anthropology of the Family.

Soda industry efforts to manipulate obesity science and policy in the US are well documented, yet little is known about whether the industry has pursued similar efforts abroad. In-depth research in China-analyses of interviews with prominent Chinese obesity experts, and of trends in obesity-related activities documented in newsletters of China's lead organization on obesity, a branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a US-based, corporate-funded, global nonprofit strongly influenced by the Coca-Cola Company-showed that from 1999 to 2015, China's obesity science and policy shifted markedly toward physical activity as Coca-Cola's influence in China increased. This shift aligned with Coca-Cola's message that it is activity, not diet, that matters-a claim few public health scholars accept. These changes correlated with the growing importance of Coca-Cola's funding, ideas, and affiliated researchers via ILSI-China. In putting its massive resources behind only one side of the science, and with no other parties sufficiently resourced to champion more balanced solutions that included regulation of the food industry, the company, working through ILSI, re-directed China's chronic disease science, potentially compromising the public's health.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fs41271-018-00158-x.pdf

Susan Greenhalgh

Papers

Making China safe for Coke: how Coca-Cola shaped obesity science and policy in China

Bad Biocitizens?: Latinos and the US "Obesity Epidemic"

Methods and Meanings: Reflections on Disciplinary Difference

Historical Anthropology of the Family.

Soda industry influence on obesity science and policy in China