Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1989"

Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility

Abstract: Travel seems to generate consistently ambivalent or contradictory representa­ tions. Why is it that Levi-Strauss opens his travel autobiography Tristes Tropiques, which brought him such fame, by declaring that he hates traveling and travelers ( 1 1 1 : 15)? Why do so many tourists claim that they are not tourists themselves and that they dislike and avoid other tourists ( 1 1 5 : 1 0): Is this some modem cultural form of self-loathing? In The Innocents Abroad Mark Twain asserts that "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and nar­ rowmindedness . . . " ( 198 , Vol. 2:407) and yet goes on, page after page, about the daily torture and anxiety involved in foreign travel . Fatigue, and the constant annoyance of beggars and guides "fill one with bitter prejudice" ( 198 , Vol . 1 :253), he comments. "Another beggar approaches. I will go out and destroy him and then come back and write another chapter of vitupera­ tion" ( 198 , Vol. 1 :269). Unlike Malinowski' s mythologizing record of par­ ticipant observation in his professional works , with embarrassing confessions, ambivalence, and hostility confined to his diary ( 1 1 8) , Twain serves up the negative, positive, and contradictory in a single work. Twain traveled and wrote at a time when the foundations of the modem travel industry were being laid; and if in 1 9th-century creative literature we have images of "travel ," in that of the 20th we find portrayed its contemporary degenerate offspring-mass tourism. "Degeneracy" is an image that keeps surfacing, and so not surprisingly representations of tourism are frequently even more hostile than those of travel. As MacCannell puts it, "The term 'tourist' is increasingly used as a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences" ( 1 1 5 :94). John Fowles

A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain

Abstract: and to disclose their meaning for the political and economic dimensions of social organiz ation . Over this same period the discipline has grappled with a wide range of theoretical and methodological problems. Political changes have redrawn boundaries be­ tween many of its traditional culture areas and the populations within them, while international economic interdepend encies have raised questions about the appropriate scale for analytic uni ts. Many investigators began to recognize that the typological boundaries they had drawn around populatio ns, and the types of social organization so outl ined obscured as much as they revealed about social processes within and between these popUlati ons. As schol ars debated the analytic merit of the boundar ies they had established between such conceptual domains as kinship , politi cs, econom ics, and religion, the discipline was fragmenting into numerous topical subdisciplines, such as economic anthr opology, political anthrop ology, and symbolic anthr opol­ ogy--each struggling to define its units, scale, and context of analysis , and the implications of different topical analyses for the overall objectives of the discipline.

The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality

Abstract: Why did people give up living in egalitarian societies for life in state-ordered, stratified society? Under the neoevolutionist paradigm of the New Archaeology, one seeks the origin of social inequality by asking what separated "the late Pleistocene world of independent, internally homogenous human societies from the modern world of interdependent, internally heterogeneous industrial nations" (186:91). The answer is social complexity. Simple societies characterized the Pleistocene, while societies of increasing complexity began to arise after the introduction of agriculture. Social inequality is but one dimension of this increasing complexity. Flannery's (79) study of the evolution of civilization concisely presents the influential neoevolutionist approach to the archaeology of equality and inequality. Since then, empirical studies based on the neoevolutionary program coupled with new theoretical perspectives have led increasing numbers of archaeologists away from a concern with complexity and towards considerations of social equality and inequality (see 20, 41, 68, 126, 150, 151, 190, 217, 263, 274, 288, 305 for assessments of the state of the art).

Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World

Abstract: In 1987 I brought a copy of my newly published ethnography to the family that had hosted me during my fieldwork, from 1978 to 1980, in an Egyptian Bedouin community. No one in the community knew English; not many were literate even in Arabic . Yet it was important to me to offer them the book . They enjoyed the photographs, which I had carefully selected with an eye to the way people in the community would "read" them, making certain that at least one member from each of the families I knew was included. We discussed the book and its purpose . My host thought it a pity I had published it in English since his interest was in persuading non-Bedouin Egyptians of the validity of his way of life. He wanted to know who in America was in­ terested-who would read it? Not many people in America were interested, I said, but I hoped it would be read by people who wanted to understand the Arabs-mostly students and scholars who specialized in understanding the different ways human beings around the world live. This description of anthropology's avowed purpose sounded odd in that context. "Yes," my host remarked, "knowledge is power (l-mi'rifa guwwa). The Americans and the British know everything. They want to know every­ thing about people , about us. Then if they come to a country, or come to rule it, they know what people need and they know how to rule." I laughed. "Exactly!" I said , and told him that a well-known book written by a Palestin­ ian professor in America had said just that. My Bedouin host had brought up an issue about the politics of scholarship that we as Western-oriented scholars

Text and textuality

Abstract: In recent years, the study of discourse has grown dramatically in anthropology and linguistics, generating a plethora of terms, concepts, and issues. A wide array of disciplinary orientations lies behind labels such as "text," "textuality," "discourse," "rhetoric," "narrative," and "poetic" (198). Here I focus on a limited range of issues in the organization and interpretation of text, working primarily with selected linguistic (34, 36, 54, 92, 118, 202), anthropological (17-20, 63a, 182, 188, 211), sociological (39, 76, 89, 90, 134), and critical (48, 73, 111, 123, 155, 161, 162, 205, 206) approaches. General overviews of these approaches, or collections of articles representative of them, can be found in the works just cited. Although research on text unavoidably touches on literacy and writing (38), language acquisition, education, and socialization (47, 89, 90, 153, 165), and political discourse and dispute (23, 29, 30), I do not address these topics directly in the following discussion. Rather, I concentrate on the status of text as sociocultural product and process, voicing in text, elements of textual organization, the relation of text to power in social contexts, some recent ethnographic studies of text, and certain further implications of this literature for social science. It is helpful by way of introduction to consider the relation between the two terms conjoined in the title. When used as a mass noun, as in "text is composed of interconnected sentences," text can be taken (heuristically) to designate any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users. As vague as such a definition is, already it commits us to a certain line of inquiry. The term "sign" raises issues of textual typology [iconic, indexical, and symbolic (59, 157, 170); dense, replete (77, 155)],

Hierarchy in Simple "Egalitarian" Societies

Abstract: "If the broad problem in political anthropology is to understand the origin and variety of inequality, that in legal anthropology is to understand the maintenance of inequality" (3: 40). Both the Outline of Cultural Materials(1 14: 7478) and Notes and Queries (133: 93-97) devote considerable attention to the nature and types of social stratification and social mobility, but there is no corresponding treatment of equality and egalitarianism. This neglect of the structure of egalitarian systems is due, at least in part, to the acceptance of a general evolutionary model that postulates a primeval egalitarian community. Inequalities develop through evolutionary differentiation. Fried places the concept of equality at the very foundation of the transition from precultural hominid society (58: 106). The "reduction in the significance of individual dominance" (58: 106) became, not a cultural characteristic subject to variation, but rather a condition of humanity itself. Having naturalized equality, social science faced the problem of explaining the origin and maintenance of inequality (16, 55). The distinction between state and stateless societies (57, 109) has long provided the point of departure for anthropologists addressing the problem of egalitarianism (e.g. 56). Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, for example, divide African political systems into three types (57: 6) of which they describe only two. The first consists of societies that are unequivocally hierarchical and fall outside our present purview. However, they provide the negative case by which the concept of egalitarian society was defined (57, 109). The second consists of "societies which lack centralized authority," in which there are "no sharp divisions of rank, status, and wealth" (57: 5), and in which "distinctions

PRIMATE LOCOMOTION: Utilization and Control of Symmetrical Gaits

Abstract: In a recent review on locomotor behavior and control in primates, Vilensky (86) suggested that locomotor control mechanisms differ between primates and other cursorial mammals. The current chapter to some extent argues that hypothesis further. Additionally, it reviews symmetrical gait utilization in primates and compares primates and nonprimates in the activity of certain muscles, especially forelimb muscles, during quadrupedal locomotion. Here we will demonstrate that these three topics are not unrelated.

Small Facts and Large Issues: The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society

Abstract: If anthropology is truly to become a comparative study of society and culture, modem Europe and the United States must become an integral part of the subject matter. It is necessary to overcome the now often inevitable opposition between "us" and "them," between anthropology "at home" and "abroad." We have not only to look at "us" in the same way as we look at "them," but also to see "us" through "their" eyes. Many anthropologists therefore now recognize that it is an important anthropological task to identify and portray the many versions of "us," as well as modestly to keep in mind that the polar opposition between "us" and "them" masks the fact that all the different versions of "us" constitute only a small fraction of the total social and cultural variation of the world. This is, I think, one useful perspective from which to look at the anthropological studies of contemporary Scandinavian society. Scandinavia is not quite "us" in the sense of being the home of anthropology, yet it is close to home. It is firmly a part of Western Europe, as well as being on one of its fringes. It is close to the anthropologist, but marginal in the discipline of anthropology. Together these ambiguities make it possible to play creatively with the categories and thereby to contribute to deconstructing and breaking down the oppositions between "us" and "them," between on the one hand

Egypt: origins of complex societies

Abstract: When Pharaoh Pepy II died at c. 2230 BC, Egypt was nearing the end of what can be considered its first dynastic cycle. Pepy II's empire was in disarray; yet the people bearing his body to his tomb at Saqqara would have seen all around them pyramids, temples, towns, and other reflections of a great civilization then already many centuries old. The dynastic cycle Pepy II's reign completed-which constitutes the primary subject of this review-began at about 4500 BC. At that time the Nile Valley and Delta appear to have been occupied by people living in small, functionally similar agricultural communities that were only weakly interconnected politically and economically. By 2500 BC, however, Egypt had become an integrated empire whose ruler's power, as expressed through a complex hierarchical bureaucracy, touched every citizen, and whose economic and military force was felt throughout the eastern Mediterranean and North African world. From this pinnacle Egypt devolved, shortly after Pepy II's death, to a much contracted polity, where, in the words of one who lived at that time, "grief walk[ed] the land" in the ancient specters of starvation and civilian revolt (4: 102). Egypt's history is a complex cumulative pattern of evolutionary change, but in some ways its basic themes and dynamics had been established by the time of Pepy II's demise; and the 20 centuries that followed, until the Ptolemies transformed Egypt, saw many repetitions of these cultural themes, punctuated by the baroque variations of an Akhenaten and the traumas of foreign invasions. Egypt's past has profoundly affected Western arts and sciences, from Herodotus to Thomas Mann, from Thales to Verdi. Its influence was particu-

An overview of peruvian archaeology (1976-1986)

Abstract: Peruvian archaeology is an international field in which divergent schools of research coexist. The following is an overview of the various currents and accomplishments of research in Peruvian archaeology over the last decade (see also 138, 199, 279, 320, 336). Because of the different national traditions of archaeological practice in Peru, the situation is particularly complex. Most projects authorized by Peru's Instituto Nacional de Cultura are initiated by investigators from the United States, but the archaeology carried out in Peru has remained resistant to many of the theoretical trends in processual Anglo-American archaeology. Nomothetic laws and ecological and evolutionary "explanations" of culture change never generated the enthusiasm in Peru that they did in the United States. The alleged dichotomy between "scientific archaeology" and historical inquiry championed by Binford and others likewise found little support among archaeologists working in Peru. As currently practiced, much of Peruvian archaeology has a distinctive character derived from its unique subject matter, particular intellectual history, political context, and the dominant figures who have shaped it. In his classification of regional archaeological traditions, Bruce Trigger (358) distinguished between the imperialist type of archaeology, characteristic of the contemporary United States and Britain, and the nationalistic type, widespread in the Third World. In Peru, as in Mexico, the foundations of autochthonous archaeology were nationalist, and this tradition continues to shape much of the archaeological research. Ever since the pioneering work of Julio C. Tello and Luis Valcarcel, Peruvian archaeology has been linked to history and sociocultural anthropology and, though rarely stated, one of its goals has been the forging of a shared national identity and the strengthening of patriotic

The Demise of Antiquity: Europe and the Mediterranean in the First Millennium AD

Abstract: Three major social processes took place in Europe and the Mediterranean in the first millennium AD: the decline of classical antiquity, the rise of Western Europe, and the integration of the barbarian world with mainstream developments (79). Each of these processes has been illuminated by both written historical sources and the material remains of the past as studied by archaeology; but the investigation of the first millennium AD is still far from being an integrated one. Opposing schools of research, in particular scripthistory and general archaeology, but also art history, the history of religion, philosophy and literature, the history of law, linguistics, etc, strive to come to terms with the period. Even within archaeology, for example, the problems dealt with and the scientific language spoken in classical archaeology are very different from those of general archaeology. Research traditions-be they rooted in different data, regions of study, or approaches-are paramount in the investigation of the first millennium AD. Furthermore, as this period constitutes the rise of the pre-modern world in Europe, these differences among researchers also have strong overtones of moral philosophy, ideology, Eurocentrism, chauvinism, etc. In short, we are dealing with an academic