Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1973"

Social and Political Movements

Abstract: The use of the word "movement" to refer to social and political phenomena first appeared in English in the early nineteenth century. The large-scale social changes and new forms of human distress that came with early industrialism were accom­ panied by a semantic reevaluation of such terms as "capitalism," "ideology," "masses," "culture," "revolutionary," and many more (Williams 44, pp. 16-17). "Movement" came to be used to describe group responses to the social and cultural . crises produced by the conditions of factory labor and urban life during the indus­ trial revolution. There were, of course, recognizable movements in preindustrial societies. The archetypal movements in Western cultural tradition are the great Biblical ones: the movement of the Jews out of Egypt, led by Moses, and their return to the Promised Land; and the spread of early Christianity. These ancient movements have provided persistent paradigms for movements in the West and have been made available to other cultural traditions by Christian missionaries and European colonialism, by the expansion of Islam, and by the diaspora of the Jews. Thus, many of the recurrent features of movements-patterns of prophecy and eschatology-have a common cultural origin. These constant features, however, are imbedded in a wide variety of unique ideological formulations. Each ideology expresses the unique situation of a people whose life has been unalterably changed, makes this change intelligible, and prescribes action appropriate to the changed world.

New Developments in Hominid Paleontology in South and East Africa

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in the unraveling of hominid evolution. The main advances registered-and which are now crying out for provi­ sional synthesis-may be grouped under the following broad rubrics: (a) The discovery of further hominid fossils in East Africa [Omo, East Rudolf,. Chesowanja (27) and Olduvai] and in South Africa (Sterkfontein and Swartkrans) and their demographic analysis (81. 87, 117). (b) New studies on the morphology of many specimens, with a concomitant better appreciation of the "total morphological pattern" (71) and of the ranges of variation within populations and taxa. (c) The time scale of hominid evolution in East Africa is becoming progressively clearer with new age determinations based upon the potassium-argon method (38), paleomagnetism reversals (44), fission tracking (39), and faunal correlations (8, 9, 32, 55, 82, 83). (d) The long uncertain and disputed time parameters of the South African aus­ tralopithecine sites are at last yielding to analysis by faunal correlations (31, 84, 132) and by geomorphological methods (24, 93). (e) As a result, it is becoming possible to formulate tentative synoptic models of the chronological and phylogenetic relationships between the South and East Afri­ can fossil hominids-and a single pattern of African hominid phylogeny. (I) Some special implications of the recent work are the rejection of the concept that only one hominid species has existed at any one time (based upon the so-called Principle of Competitive Exclusion); the realization that hominid evolution has been cladistic in character and not predominantly phyletic (pace Dobzhansky 37, Buett­ ner-Janusch 20, and Wolpoff 134); the illustration of mosaic evolution in the emerg­ ing pattern of hominid phylogeny; and a greater consciousness of the extent and the limitations of sexual dimorphism in higher primates, and especially the Hominoidea.

Changing Styles of Anthropological Work

Abstract: years have · seen an enormous growth of ins titutions devoted to anthropological enterprises, membership within the discipline, and students, text­ books, and paraphernalia. From a tiny scholarly group that could easily be fitted into a couple of buses, and most of whom knew each other, we have grown into a group of tremendous, anonymous milling crowds, meeting at large hotels where there are so many sess ions that people do well to find those of their colleagues who are interested in the same specialty. Today we look something like the other social science disciplines, suffering some of the same malaise, and becoming cynical about slave markets and worried when grants and jobs seem to be declining. It has been a period of excessive growth; it is astonishing, looking back, to recount . how many large enterpri ses have been undertaken. The year 1953 marked the end of the Korean war and the final exodus from Washington of almost all the remaining anthropologists who had lingered on to make the kind of contribution to national affairs that had developed in wartime. Most of the ventures that had been specifically influ enced by the immediate post-World War II world drew to a close: Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, Studies in Soviet Culture, Ameri­ can Museum of Natural History Research in Contemporary Cultures A and B, (189, 213 ), the Coordinated Investigations of Micronesian Anthropology, the period of affluence in the Foreign Service Institute, the intensive exploitation of the Human Relations Area Files, and the preparation of manuals and directives for participation in technical assistance and foreign aid (13, 191, 269). A few anthropologists stayed on for several more years, but activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee had disillusioned anthropologists with government, and as their partici­ pation in government shrank, so did the receptiveness of govern ment agencies to anthropological contributions because there was no one to inaugurate them, receive them, or interpret them. Anthropologists came out of the war years with several important new orienta­ tions. They had learned that their skills could be applied fruitfully to problems affecting modern societies and the deliberations of national governments and nation

The Impact of Human Activities on the Physical and Social Environments: New Directions in Anthropological Ecology

Abstract: The rapidly accumulating evidence of danger associated with the human use of the earth has caught most of the sciences unprepared to mount the intensive and necessarily collaborative attack on the problem. Underlying the lack of preparation is the anthropocentric viewpoint of our industrial civilization: that the earth exists for the satisfaction of human needs and wants. Anthropology is no stranger to this idea: for a century, anthropological theory has visualized technological development and the growth of civilization as a triumph of human endeavor; culture has been defined as man's chief mode of adaptation to the natural environment, but for "adaptation," one must often read "exploitation."

Recent Classifications of Genetic Relationships

Abstract: The stability in method, theory, and results of genetic relationship classification in the better known language families-as Indo-European, Uralic, and Semitic-has been generalized as characteristic of genetic classifications for most of the world in contrast to fluctuations in method and theory, and results in synchronic or noncom­ parative linguistic work. Thus Garvin (17): "What has remained constant through­ out the development of historical linguistics is a heritage of comparative method. Irrespective of many disputes about details, there is a core of incontrovertible general principles which is as valid today as it was when these principles were first introduced in the past century." But the "comparative method" that Garvin alludes to can be applied only be­ tween languages whose grammars are adequately described; when less than this is available-as in parts of Oceania and Africa, and most of South America-recourse is necessarily made to comparing presumptive cognates by the methods of lexicosta­ tistics, mass comparisons, and the like. Our impression, from having surveyed the classifications of the "Languages of the World" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (in press), is that it is useful (in order to accommodate much data in brief space) to divide the world into major regions. For the Euroasiatic world the major regions are Europe, South Asia, North Asia, Southwest Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Two major regions are linguistically as well as geographically peripheral in the Old World-sub-Saharan Africa and the parts of Oceania that are non-Austronesian. New World language families are as disconnected from the languages in the connected regions of the Old World as are languages in the regions peripheral to it. Before colonialism all language families except those in peripheral regions and those in the New World were in some sort of contact with languages in neighboring regions of the Old World-e.g. Japanese with Korean, Korean with Altaic, AItaic with Indo-European. The question of genetic relationship (or common descent from a single proto language for each language family) is not always possible to disentangle from