Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1986"

The Anthropology of Emotions

Abstract: Interest in "the emotional" has burgeoned in the last decade, not only in anthropology, but in psychology (e.g. 5, 77,113, 141), sociology (e.g. 72, 81), philosophy (e.g. 153, 177), history (e.g. 180), and feminist studies (e.g. 176). A concern to understand the role of the emotional in personal and social life has developed in response to a number of factors, including dissatisfaction with the dominant cognitive view of humans as mechanical "information processors," renewed concern with understanding sociocultural experience from the perspective of the persons who live it, and the rise of interpretive approaches to social science that are more apt to examine what has previously been considered an inchoate phenomenon. The past relegation of emotions to the sidt:unes of culture theory is an artifact of the view that they occupy the more natural and biological provinces of human experience, and hence are seen as relatively uniform, uninteresting, and inaccessible to the methods of cultural analysis. In going beyond its original psychobiological framework to include concern with emotion's social relational, communicative, and cultural aspects, emotion theory has taken on new importance for sociocultural theory proper. These cultural approaches have made it possible for a broad range of anthropologists, including those traditionally hostile to "the psychological," to sustain an interest in emotion so construed.

FROM THE INVISIBLE HAND TO VISIBLE FEET: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development

Abstract: This is a review of the literature on the relationship between migration and development. Development-related topics considered include urbanization industrialization agricultural family structure gender roles and ideology. These topics are examined from an ethnographic perspective with a focus on theoretical advances and their applications. Theoretical concepts considered include modernization dependence and articulation. (ANNOTATION)

The Neandertals and Modern Human Origins

Abstract: In 1856 workmen unearthed a human fossil in the Neandertal in western Germany and started, inadvertently, the longest ongoing controversy in paleoanthropology. Who were the Neandertals? Do they deserve a place in our direct ancestry? What can they tell us about the nature of human evolution during the Pleistocene? More than a century and a quarter later, with abundant remains of the Neandertals and their neighbors, we are beginning to fill in the answers to these questions. In recent decades, there has been increased interest in these Upper Pleistocene humans. This has resulted in new attempts to comprehend their place in hominid phylogeny, the significance of their morphological pattern, and the evolutionary origins of anatomically modern humans. This new focus on the Neandertals has been aided by discoveries of additional fossil specimens of them and of their temporal and geographical neighbors, by an improved chronological framework for the later Pleistocene, by increased knowledge of non-European sequences, and by a continuously improving command of the Upper Pleistocene Paleolithic archeological record. Yet the majority of the new insights concerning these humans has come from asking novel questions and taking different approaches to the prehistoric record. Consequently, the study of the Neandertals has taken on a new life. It is one that has produced as many questions as answers. It is also one that tells us much about the

Prehistoric Archaeology in the Southeastern United States, 1970-1985

Abstract: The first Europeans who ventured into the forests of southeastern North America found them inhabited by a dense and diverse native population. It is clear from the sixteenth-century Spanish accounts that many of these pop­ ulations consisted of village farmers who were organized into complex, hierarchical polities of the sort that anthropologists call chiefdoms. The surviving descriptions of these explorations are replete with mentions of powerful leaders who lived in elaborate residences situated on mounds, collected tribute from distant vassals, and were capable of mobilizing large contingents of warriors to deploy against their enemies. Although these polities were not as centralized or vast as those of the Aztecs or Incas, they nevertheless were the most complex societies to be found north of Mexico. A major preoccupation of southeastern archaeologists over the last half century has been to trace the historical trajectories by which these societies developed. In recent years, there has also been a self-conscious effort to explain these trajectories in material-ecological terms. Although such un­ derstanding still remains elusive, the Southeast continues to be viewed by many as an ideal place for studying the development of tribal and chiefly societies in temperate environments. For present purposes, the southeastern United States is defined as that part of the country east of (and including) the Mississippi Valley and south of the Tennessee-Kentucky line . It includes the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as the eastern portions of Arkansas and Louisiana. Physiographically, the area

The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution

Abstract: Imagine three anthropologists: A primatologist observes a female chimpanzee fashioning several crude tools from grass stems, which she will use to fish termites from an un­ derground nest over many hours, in the presence of her sometimes intrigued, sometimes impatient offspring. An ethnographer lives with a group of human foragers at one of their campsites on the edge of a waterhole, recording in detail the daily patterns of adult women and men as they go about their lives, obtaining and preparing food, caring for their children, enjoying their leisure, interacting with their neighbors. An archaeologist and a team of bone hunters fan out across an escarpment slowly descending the years, squatting every now and then to peer and scratch carefully at the surface; they walk and look and listen for the call that will signal a "find." Probably the primatologist and ethnographer would quite properly deny that the objective of their research was the reconstruction of the lives of our earliest human ancestors. The latter is there first and foremost to understand the lives of these contemporary human beings before their way of living disappears entirely, and the former works to explicate the animal species for itself, another life form in danger of disappearing before we can understand it. Nonetheless, the information obtained from all these studies will be gathered up, if not by the original researchers, then by others, and woven into a scientific story of the origins and evolution of early human behavior. For we have a powerful urge to know our origins-scientists and public alike-allied

Groups that don't want in: gypsies and other artisan, trader, and entertainer minorities

Abstract: Small, endogamous populations of artisans, traders, and entertainers have existed for centuries within complex societies, competing successfully with permanently established businesses. Their organizational flexibility and willingness to move and to switch occupations enables them to fill gaps in the host economy and exploit "marginal" opportunities. Other attributes that make them successful include their minimal overhead, use of wage-free household labor, lack of interest in material accumulation and capital expansion, willingness to accept a narrow profit margin from multiple sources, and ability to focus on a narrowly defined market. Gypsies are undoubtedly the most familiar of these groups, but they are one of many similar populations with similar adaptations: "Tinkers," "Tater," "Luri," "Jats," and "Ghorbat" are some of the common names other groups are known by (104). Relegated to the status of unintegrated social and economic marginals, or else dismissed as mere "exotics," such populations long have been ignored or regarded as barely legitimate subjects for serious study. Anthropologists and other social scientists, with a few exceptions, have only recently begun work with them despite the contact many have had with them in the course of their research on other groups. Scholarly research on artisan, trader, and entertainer minorities began appearing in the 1950s; Etudes Tsiganes, a French journal devoted to Gypsy

Amazon Ecology and Adaptation

Abstract: Amazonia is awesome in the complexity, diversity, and richness of its ecosystems and cultures. Research in Amazonia has made impressive advances since the early 1970s, yet it remains in its infancy. Simultaneously, in this region at every level old and new processes of change are intensifying, often with destructive results. Consequently, this period in the history of the region and research on it is not only exciting but also increasingly challenging and urgent. This particular context provided the basis for the orientation, scope, and aims of this review. For more than a decade the animal protein hypothesis (see p. 76) and related concerns tended to dominate anthropological studies of human ecology and adaptation in Amazonia. While these concerns are important and not ignored, this review attempts to transcend them by surveying the literature within a framework that is more holistic, penetrating, contemporary, and applied. Although it focuses on cultural adaptations of indigenous populations, the latter are not treated as pristine, stable isolates, but instead are viewed as dynamic systems that are part of larger systems. Cultural and ecological change, especially that stimulated by nonindigenous societies, is a major concern here. For convenience the review is organized around the following domains: ecosystem, cultural system, change, and research trends and needs. An ecosystem is composed of abiotic and biotic components which interact through the flow of energy, matter, and information, and all of this varies in space and time. Adaptation refers to phenomena that influence the survival, maintenance, and reproduction of a biological population, including nutrition and health (cf 1, 8). In the case of human populations, these phenomena

The Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia

Abstract: The Arabian experience has been unique from its beginning. Of all hyper­ arid regions across the world, this is the only one where in few millennia a population of hunter-gatherers has developed peculiar forms of social com­ plexity, extracted an accumulative wealth of subsistence resources organized around a few local domesticates, and greatly influenced nearby centers of urban civilization. The economic and social preadaptive conditions developed in the Early and Middle Holocene made possible the colonization of desert and maritime habitats expanding the resource basis of Near Eastern economy (286). To establish how this was accomplished may represent an important new issue for archaeology in the Middle East, to complement its traditional focus on agricultural origins and early urbanism. Curiously enough, the potential of Arabian archaeology for the development of anthropological disciplines seems to be almost equivalent to the disregard with which it has

Indigenous States of Southeast Asia

Abstract: Compared with the precocious empires of East and South Asia, Southeast Asia has traditionally been considered a cultural and political backwater and its people as receptors rather than creators of their own histories (21). Several reasons for this emphasis can be discerned. Diffusion theories which attributed Southeast Asian "civilization" to exogenous forces helped European colonial regimes justify their imperial tutelage in the region.' Moreover, the monumental relics of, for instance, Yasodharapura (Angkor) in Cambodia, Pagan in Burma, and Borobudur in Java, all incorporated religious motifs from South Asia; Vietnamese rulers had meticulously copied Chinese administrative forms, and ancient Sanskritic and Chinese textual references naturally emphasized Chinese and Indian features in the region (51, 77). Discussion centered on whether Southeast Asian states were creations of Indian or Chinese imperial conquests, settler colonies, or political processes initiated by foreigners amid culturally stagnant Southeast Asian populations. Unfortunately, while literary, epigraphic, and iconographic sources were used to reconstruct early Southeast Asian beliefs and rituals, the more mundane material and organizational domains drew much less attention, leaving these conjectures unsupported by data (24, 82, 98, 194).

Frontiers, settlements, and development in folklore studies, 1972-1985

Abstract: rary anthropological study of folklore with an additional consideration of others. Space considerations and intellectual saliency limit the total number of works we consider representative of these trajectories. Our title and primary focus come from our examination of the scholarly shape of the field as it has developed since the marked intervention in the early and mid 1970s of a new conceptual approach in the study of folklore. We refer to the clear emergence of performance and contextually centered understandings of folklore as social behavioral process and as situated communicative interaction (23, 122). Our essay primarily focuses on the achievements and limitations of this central trajectory in folklore studies since 1972. In his most recent formulation of the concept of performance, Bauman (15) usefully identifies three related definitions and uses of "performance" in contemporary sociocultural analysis: performance as situated, ordinary cultural practice, an approach indebted to the Marxian concept of praxis; performance as cultural displays or, to use Abrahams' term, "enactments" (3), an approach closely identified with a particular wing of symbolic anthropology (Singer, Geertz, V. Turner, and Peacock among others) which while closely allied to folklore we nonetheless exclude from this space-limited review; finally, performance as the situated interactional practice of verbal art-oral poetics. It is this third sense of performance that Bauman identifies as his own, and it is also the central concern of anthropological performance

New World Primate Field Studies: What's in it for Anthropology?

Abstract: The living New World or neotropical primates, infraorder Platyrrhini or Superfamily Ceboidea, range from about 24?N. in Tamaulipas, Mexico (spider and howler monkeys) to about 30?S. in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (howlers) (167). Fossil platyrrhines have been found near the southern tip of South America in Santa Cruz, Argentina (197), but they are not known to have ranged farther north than they do today. They moved into Central America only after establishment of the Panamanian land bridge in the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene, 5-6 million years ago (235). The platyrrhines are found primarily in forested habitats, including both dry forest and rain forest, up to 3200 m elevation (night monkeys and howler monkeys) (94). Although they do not occur on open savanna as do Old World baboons and patas monkeys, howlers and marmosets and perhaps others do occur in open scrub and sparsely wooded or low canopied dry woodlandllanos (Colombia and Venezuela), cerrado (Brazil), pampas (Argentina), or chaco (Bolivia and Paraguay). All platyrrhines are diurnal except the night monkey Aotus. They range in size from the pygmy marmoset (100-120 g adult body size) to the woolly spider monkey or muriqui which weighs up to 15 kg. There are disagreements at many levels about the taxonomy of the Platyrrhini. This is not the place to discuss these problems, but recognizing the controversies, I have adopted a distillation of two modern classifications, by Rosenberger (201) and by Ford (72), as presented in Table 1. For consistency all discussions in this chapter refer to this classification. A recent alternative

On Being a Linguistic Anthropologist

Abstract: Like those who have preceded me in writing Overviews for the Annual Review of Anthropology, I became an anthropologist through a series of accidents. It was still true during my undergraduate years at Columbia (1932-36) that anthropology programs existed only at the graduate level, and even then at only a few universities. The central figure was, of course, Franz Boas at Columbia, and anthropology programs at other universities were, to my knowledge, all founded by students of Boas. Anthropology during that period had a very important component in museums and governmental institutions such as the Bureau of American Ethnology, a role which has diminished proportionally during my life. Because of Boas' stature in the field and its chronological priority, the Columbia program during the period that I was an undergraduate there had an indisputable primacy in the country. As an undergraduate, however, I was completely unaware of all this until the summer of 1935, just before I entered my senior year. During that summer I chanced to read a volume edited by Calverton, The Making of Man (5), available in the then popular and easily affordable Modem Library series. My

The Study of Language Use in Oceania

Abstract: Malinowski contributed the concept of "language as a mode of action" to anthropology on the basis of his landmark study of Trobriand Island society and culture (77, 78). Appropriately, Oceania has become a focus for the comparative study of language use, an interest crossing the subdisciplinary boundaries of sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, performance-based folklore, and sociolinguistics. Analysts in these areas share a concern with relating text to context that stems from Malinowski's emphasis on understanding utterances within their context of situation; they are also concerned with the pragmatic relationships between language use and social change (39, 96). Modern studies in the social uses of language date to the 1960s, with the rise of ethnoand sociolinguistics. An early interest in language style in Oceania was reflected in J. L. Fischer's 1971 comprehensive review of speech associated with respect situations, gender, oratory, etc in the Pacific islands (48). In sociolinguistics, the issue of language style soon became subsumed under two rapidly growing theoretical camps, correlational/ variationist sociolinguistics (70, 108, 110), and the ethnography of communication (58). Of these two camps, the former has concentrated on the study of dialects, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, and pidgin and creole languages. Here a major concern has been to clarify the relationship between language variation and social processes, including the nature of linguistic differences and their social functions, the extent and nature of bilingualism or multilingualism in given situations, and the role of language in social

Acoustic-Phonetic Issues in Speech Perception

Abstract: A critical link in the primary form of human communication is the translation of the acoustic stream produced by a speaker into the phonetic code con­ structed by a listener. In this chapter we review a range of phenomena and theories that have been considered in attempts to understand the acoustic­ phonetic translation process. Given the breadth of the field and space limita­ tions, we necessarily focus on only selected aspects of the problem. We have chosen to concentrate on studies of basic, simple stimuli and omit the important influences of lexical, syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. Within the vast literature within our scope, we will cover only four of the most active areas of research on acoustic-phoneti c issues in speech percep­ tion. A recurring issue in our review is whether explanations of speech perception can be based on general acoustic (or psychoacoustic) properties of the signal or whether they require postulating speech-specific phonetic mech­ anisms. Section I reviews two acoustic-phoneti c phenomena--categor ical percep­