Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1978"

Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology

Abstract: +9619 Quite suddenly, with little comment or cere mony, ethnicity is an ubiquitous presence. Even a brief glance through titles of books and monographs over the past few years indicates a steadily accelerating acceptance and applica­ tion of the terms "ethnicity" and "ethnic" to refer to what was before often subsumed under "culture," "cultural," or "tribal." New journals have ap­ peared using the terms in their titles, and special programs of ethnic studies are showing up in university catalogs. Almost any cultural-social unit, indeed any term describing particular

The retreat from migrationism

Abstract: One of the most persistent, though least acknowledged, explanatory para­ digms in culture history is that which attributes the growth and spread of culture to the movement of peoples. We are not here referring to diffusion, but to theories which specifically envision the movements and displace­ ments of populations. As will be shown presently, migration and diffusion theories have quite different intellectual pedigrees, and their relationship in practice has often been antithetical. But while diffusionism (like evolution­ ism) has had and continues to have its avowed champions, migration has never been formally articulated as a general principle of historical explana­ tion. It has nevertheless been invoked as an ad hoc explanation for cultural, linguistic, and racial change in such an extraordinary number of individual cases that to speak of a migrationist school of explanation seems wholly appropriate ( 13 1 , p. 169; 133, pp. 1 5, 30). Migration theory in a sense is as old as tribal mythology; indeed, it is a rare corpus of myth that does not include at least one migration episode. In this primeval form migrationism may be recognized as the handmaiden

The Social Organization of Behavior: Interactional Approaches

Abstract: This review deals with a more principled and powerful formulation of the social organization of behavior. It calls for a description of the ways people organize concerted activities in each other's presence. We review research that adopts methods which assume that a person's behavior is best described in terms of the behavior of those immediately about that person, those with whom the person is doing interactional work in the construction of recognizable social scenes or events. Not all human behavior occurs in settings in which people are immediately available to each other's senses, but a great range of it does, and we are concerned to describe the ethnographic victories which can be won with a careful attention to immediately concerted behavior. Interactional approaches to the social organization of behavior have proceeded under several subdisciplinary banners: cognitive anthropology, conversational analysis, ethology, ethnomethodology, exchange theory, kinesics, network analysis, sociolinguistics, and even symbolic analysis. No

African Religious Movements

Abstract: The following figures are a measure of the importance of religious move­ ments in Africa. The independent African churches in South Africa alone from 1913 to 1948 increased from 30 to 880 (83). By 1960 they had already exceeded 2000 (84). By 1967 independent church movements were esti­ mated at 6000, of which 5000 were truly independent movements and 1000 were movements within the established mission-derived churches (5). In that year Barrett estimated the adherents of these movements to number about 6,800,000. Despite fluctuation and the disappearance of many churches, the appearance of new movements and the increasing attraction of established movements was adding 300,000 to 400,000 members a year (5, pp. 78-79). Projecting this rate to the present, African religious move­ ments would number at least 10 and perhaps 12 million. Since Barrett, a missionary scholar, was interested only in movements with significant Christian influence, termed Cristocentric, these figures ignore nativistic and other type movements such as regional cults of affliction or periodic resur­ gence of cults within the fortune-misfortune complex. From 6 to 10 million could here be added to Barrett's figures, giving more than 20 million as the number of Africans directly involved in religious movements of one kind or another. Many more Africans, perhaps twice that number, in more casual search for healing, fortune, satisfying worship, or diversion are indi­ rectly involved with religious movements. These numbers alert us to the importance of the topic and animate our inquiry. But they also suggest a vast subject. We sh�ll neither attempt a comprehensive review of all that has been written on these movements [students here enjoy a first-rate bibliography which is constantly updated

Political anthropology: manipulative strategies

Abstract: -:.9612 The approach to the study of politics to be reviewed in this essay is charac­ terized essentially by a focus upon individual actors and their strategies within political arenas. In its earlier formative phase, the approach which, following Cohen (41) we shall call action theory, was associated with a range of theoretical frameworks, among them those built around transac­ tions, symbolic interaction, systems analysis, methodological individualism, game theory, interaction theory, and political clientelism. Today action theory relates most closely to dialectical theory and the general sociology of Marx and Weber (24, 35, 51, 98, 130). Action theory in political anthropology differs from behavioralism in social psychology and from the behavioral approach in political science, although it has sometimes been confused with both. In these disciplines, analysis begins with the individual and his motives, proceeds to emphasize choice, and concludes by inferring structural limitations from behavior. Action theory in anthropology begins by locating the individual within the framework of both formal and interstitial social organization and then proceeds to the analysis of political action and interaction. Within political anthropology itself, the approach differs from evolutionary and structural anthropology by virtue of its attention to processes, to political formations other than categories and corporate groups and, above all, by its underpin­ ning in a particular mode of fieldwork (50, 80, 85) that resulted in a distinctive form of finely grained political ethnography (25, 43, 46, 71, 76, 80, 118). Deriving explicitly from social anthropology, the action approach within political anthropology developed largely in conjunction with the analysis of

Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise

Abstract: Ethnographic films cannot be said to constitute a genre, nor is ethnographic film-making a discipline with unified origins and an established methodol­ ogy. Since the first conference on ethnographic film was held at the Musee de l'Homme 30 years ago, the term has served a largely emblematic func­ tion, giving a semblance of unity to extremely diverse efforts in the cinema and social sciences. A canon of ethnographic films has gradually emerged, and in the past dozen years a movement has grown up nourished by founda­ tion grants, further international conferences, theoretical publications, and training programs. Faced with defining ethnographic film, some writers (7, 14) have con­ cluded that one can only say some films are more ethnographic than others, or that films become ethnographic by virtue of their use (37, 38). Since all films are cultural artifacts, many can tell us as much about the societies that produced them as about those they purport to describe. Films can thus serve as a source of data for social science in the manner of myths, rock paintings, and government papers. From World War II onwards, fiction as well as documentary films have been studied sporadically for their ethnographic content (2, 5, 16, 35). In practice, most discussions of ethnographic film set aside films useful to anthropologists as naive cultural documents and narrow the field to those made with some discernible intention of recording and revealing cultural patterns. Some writers, induding Rouch (27) and de Heusch (8), have refused to pursue further distinctions, arguing that to do so is to inhibit the cross-fertilization of varied approaches. Others (1, 12, 14, 18-20, 25, 31)

Context in Child Language

Abstract: It has been 5 years since the last review on child language appeared in this series (120). During that period, the field witnessed such rapid growth that it became increasingly difficult to keep abreast of the many new areas of research. Recognition of this led, among other things, to establishing a journal for developmental psycholinguistics (Journal of Child Language). When Roeper and McNeill composed the last review, they concentrated on the study of semantics in children'S speech. Attention to semantics in children's speech was symptomatic of the growing awareness that the breadth and depth of the child's knowledge of his native language encom­ passed considerably more than approaches relying on form would have suggested. Indeed nearly a decade has led us to increasing sensitivity to the broad range of competencies that children acquire as they become fluent speakers of a language. It is out of this awareness that the subject matter for the present chapter was selected. I believe that the current period in, child language study has been characterized by attempts to identify the wide range of factors that children seem to use in understanding and producing speech. The evidence suggests that these factors, often referred to as context, must be taken into account in the investigation of language acquisition. Yet

Apes and Language

Abstract: How shall anthropological linguistics assess the significance of the recent experiments with apes and language? The question is a momentous one. The answers may imply a paradigm shift, with Plato finally giving way to Darwin (Linden 1975), or perhaps “an identity crisis for Homo sapiens” (Gallup, Boren, Gagliaro, & Wallnan 1977: 303). At the very least, the issue poses the problem of other minds in a particularly compelling form. In linguistics and psychology, the question has stood the normal terms of the debate between empiricists and rationalists on their heads, with rationalists arguing that the evidence is inadequate, and empiricists arguing that the experiments do not teach, merely reveal (Premack 1976a). Ten years ago, the answer from most established scholars to the question, “Do other animals have language?” would have been an unequivocal “No.” Chomskyan rationalism dominated American linguistics and insisted on what Lenneberg (1967) called “discontinuity theory”—the claim that “it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human languages from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity” (Chomsky 1968: 59). Even continuity theorists erected formidable barriers; Hockett’s lists of design features (Hockett 1960a; Hockett & Altmann 1968; Hockett & Ascher 1964) stood as a definitive statement against which a reference to the “language” of bees, birds, or dogs could be measured and found imprecise. Now all that has changed; respected students of animal communication speak of a “linguistic model” for the analysis of communication in animals as phylogenetically remote from humans as seagulls (Beer 1976, 1977), and the New York Academy of Sciences sponsors a major symposium (Harnad, Steklis, & Lancaster 1976) at which advocates of discontinuity theory are a distinct minority.

Historical Demography as Population Ecology

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to review recent trends in historical demo­ graphic research. Because the subject is broad and involves so many avenues of study I have imposed a unifying framework-one which views demo­ graphic change in terms of population-environment interaction. First I discuss the relationship between historical demography and anthropology. In the second part of the paper some general concepts of population ecology are considered, including the elements of population analysis, the dimen­ sions of resource availability, and the nature of population interactions. In the third section I focus on historical studies with emphasis on a specific set of research questions. These questions deal with fertility, mortality, and migration as both cause and consequence of environmental stress. The fourth section summarizes the work done to date and considers additional opportunities in historical demographic research. Anthropology is but one of many disciplines practicing historical demography. Rather than review what this discipline has accomplished to date, I propose to discuss a series of research areas in which anthropology and many other fields have con­ tributed. Closed systems of approximately constant size are so intuitively and analytically appealing that the early history of population science can al­ most be characterized as a search for such systems. This is no less true in anthropology, where a tradition has long existed of attempting to discover societies of sufficient isolation and internal integration that the nature of human evolution and behavior could be grasped, closely inspected, and readily described. Enter into these pursuits the field of historical demogra­ phy, a quasi-discipline that does not reside in any one academic tradition,

'new guinea: ecology, society, and culture

Abstract: anthropology has stimulated research, the analysis of data, and commen­ tary on ideas and terms. Among the concepts to which this paper may have useful application are those of adaptation, agricultural intensity, and popu­ lation density, as they are related to group structure and cultural values. An ecological analysis begins with the land, the plants and animals, and the climate, which are the natural resources of New Guinea. New Guinea people have adapted to this environment so that they could survive, and have also introduced or accepted new plants and animals for their use. It is essential for the understanding of social and cultur al processes to see that people have created and acquired techniques, social and cultural practices, and beli efs associated with these resources and their lif e in this environment.

Anthropological economics: the question of distribution

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed an explosion of contributions within economic anthropology. In fact, the field is expanding so rapidly that a splintering into a disparate collection of topics seems imminent; nonetheless, some contemporary trends may be discerned. The formalist-substantivist debate, that piece de resistance, has not disappeared from the annals, but the old theatrics and puffed-up rhetoric have been replaced by more sober studies. For some anthropologists the two positions represent valid but distinct explanations of behavior which are to be juxtaposed (49) or joined (8). On the formalist side there has been one effort to trace out the theoretical implications of the perspective and extend its explanatory power to all behavior (93); others have attempted to fuse formalism with different theories (13, 14); and some of the younger formalist contributors have presented fresh empirical studies (79). But the substantivists have not been quiescent theoretically (18) or empirically (52). Then to complement the debate, at least one Marxist has provided an "outsider's" view on the entire battle (95). A glib and traditional division of the field into two (or three) opposing perspectives, however, scarcely exhausts the range of recent contributions. Markets and marketing, long underdeveloped areas of study, have received special theoretical and empirical notice (3, 15, 98, 99). A central theme here concerns the limitations and virtues-when applied to exotic data-of market models, whether derived from neoclassical economics or economic geography.

Archaeology of the Great Basin

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