Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1990"

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

Abstract: Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

The Built Environment and Spatial Form

Abstract: which we live and work, but the appeal is not limited to examples from our own familiar surroundings. During the last several decades anthropologists have been increasingly joined by others in taking a more careful look at the built environments of nonl iterate societies, and especially the shelters they construct and occupy. The questions posed are broad: Why are there differences in built forms? What is the nature of these differences and what kinds of social and cultural factors might be responsible for the variation? Design practitioners, including architects, land­ scape architects, and planners, have become involved in debating these questions, as have behavioral and social scientists concerned with human interactions with the environment. At the same time, recent social theory has begun to focus anew on spatial as well as temporal dimensions of human behavior. These developments suggest that attention to the topic of this review is timely. Our purposes in reviewing the relevant literature include defining the major areas of research in the field in terms of issues and

Language and Affect

Abstract: In a seminal overview of semantics, Lyons (294) breaks down the notion of "linguistic meaning" into three components: descriptive meaning (frequently termed "referential," "propositional," "notional,�' or "denotative")-i.e. the mapping of linguistic signs onto the entities and processes they describe; social meaning, consisting of the social categories (gender, social class, ethnicity, situation, etc) represented in language; and expressive (or "affec­ tive" or "emotive") meaning, representing the speaker's or writer's feelings, moods, dispositions, an4 attitudes toward the propositional content of the message and the communicative context. Variants of this model have been proposed by such authors as Malinowski (296), Sapir (364), Jesperson (242), Buhler (81), Bally (19), Ullman (426), Firth (138), and members of the Prague School (155, 362, 433, 434), although details of conceptualization can diverge significantly from author to author. For example, what other writers call "affect" is subsumed in Halliday's funCtional model (182, 183) in part by the interpersonal (i.e. that through which "social groups are delimited, and the individual is identified and reinforced," 182: 143) and in part by the textual (that which gives coherence to discourse). Similarly, affect straddles several categories in Jakobson's model of language functions (235; cf 91). In addi­ tion, not all writers agree that "meaning" and "semantic" are appropriate labels for affective components of language (e.g. 275, 445). A strict distinction among referential, social, and affective meanings rests

The Anthropology of Infectious Disease

Abstract: Diseases caused by infectious agents have profoundly affected both human history and biology. In demographic terms, infectious diseases-including both great epidemics, such as plague and smallpox, which have devastated human populations from ancient to modem times, and less dramatic, un­ named viral and bacterial infections causing high infant mortality-have likely claimed more lives than all wars, noninfectious diseases , and natural disasters taken together. In the face of such attack by microscopic invaders , human populations have been forced to adapt to infectious agents on the levels of both genes and culture. As agents of natural selection, infectious diseases have played a major role in the evolution of the human species . Infectious diseases have also been a prime mover in cultural transformation, as societies have responded to the social, economic, political, and psychological disrup­ tion engendered by acute epidemics (e.g. measles , influenza) and chronic, debilitating infectious diseases (e.g. malaria, schistosomiasis) . Today, the global epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) provides a salient example of the processes underlying infectious-disease-related cultural transformations. As many of the examples cited in this review illustrate, human groups have often unwittingly facilitated the spread of infectious

History, Structure, and Ritual

Abstract: Fonnal similarities sometimes clarify substantive differences. Consider the difference between Ruth Benedict' s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword (25) and David Lan's Guns and Rain (161), or the difference between E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (85), and Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (243). No one could fairly accuse Benedict of neglect of the historical terrain in her ethnography. She begins her study of Japan with historical inquiry and throughout her text is concerned with change as well as continuity. But as her subtitle indicates, her project was to investigate "Patterns of Japanese Cul­ ture," to describe what anthropological structuralists would later call a syn­ chronic structure or system in Japanese culture . On the other hand, Lan focuses explicitly on a specific historical situation. His Guns are not Bene­ dict' s Sword, a cultural archetype, but rather the means of destruction in a particular moment of Zimbabwe history. His subtitle, "Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe," declares his intention to investigate historically specific connections. While his study is clearly rooted in structural­ functionalism, his project is different, and inherently historical. Evans-

Advances in evolutionary culture theory

Abstract: In this paper, I review recent attempts to formulate an evolutionary theory of cultural change. Historically, cultural evolution has had a bad name in anthropology, largely because the term has been used to describe unilineal schemes of social development and to promote the "biologicization" of the discipline. When defined and used appropriately, however, the term deserves a better fate. I argue that the conceptual systems we call cultures do evolve in the important, specific sense of "descent with modification," and that anthropology cannot afford to deny or ignore this fact. On the contrary, I suggest that there is much to be gained by adding an evolutionary perspective of this kind to cultural theory and analysis. The last decade has witnessed a number of pioneering efforts in this direction; here I review five of the leading theoretical formulations, pointing out their similarities, differences, and specific contributions to the evolving subfield of evolutionary culture theory.

African Famines and Food Security: Anthropological Perspectives

Abstract: Research on Africa is full of surprises. Much of the best cultural anthropology on famines south of the Sahara has been written by historians and geogra­ phers, while some of the best agricultural economics comes from an­ thropologists. African food problems make a mockery of northern disciplin­ ary divisions. These things should not be so surprising. Famines are hard to study in depth except from safer times and places, but the causes and effects of seasonal supplies and demands are best understood by getting dusty ankles, then muddy ones-the humble hallmarks of anthropology. Concentrating mainly on agrarian peoples (but including references on others, too), this preliminary scan reviews a few findings in the thinly bridged gap between anthropology and economics, mainly by anthropologists and other researchers who have done extended rural research south of the Sahara since 1970. I note previous summaries and survey several schools of thought on famines' interthreading causes. Then I address three questions about famines and food shortages-who suffers, what do they do about it, and what becomes of society in the process-and this means addressing some hotly debated issues of human nature. Understanding African food problems re­ quires not fixating on a particular unit of analysis (the individual, household, ethnic group, nation) but observing the changing bonds and alliances among

Fertility in Anthropological Populations

Abstract: In this review I draw upon statistical demography and to a lesser extent reproductive endocrinology to formulate a coherent strategy for investigating fertility and reproduction in anthropological populations. The object it must be emphasized is not to reduce anthropology to demography or endocrinology but rather to acquaint anthropologists with a powerful set of tools with which they can address issues of anthropological interest. The author first discusses the concept of natural fertility. Next he summarizes the most significant generalizations concerning variations in fertility among preindustrial societies using the concept of proximate determinants developed by John Bongaarts. Finally he outlines an alternative approach that might be more suited to the analysis of such fertility variations. (EXCERPT)

Agriculture and Sociopolitical Organization in New Guinea Highlands Prehistory

Abstract: By the New Guinea Highlands we mean the high valleys within the central cordillera of the island between about 1300 and 2500 m, which are the home of relatively large populations living in deforested environments at densities of up to 300 per km2. Our focus is the better-known Papua New Guinea Highlands, which are continuous across Southern Highlands, Enga, Western Highlands, Simbu, and Eastern Highlands Provinces; but from time to time we look beyond the Indonesian border to Iriani Jaya, where, separated from the above by lightly peopled mountain country, are the Baliem and Western Dani and, beyond them, the Kapauku of the Paniai lakes. In a sense, agriculture has been involved in most discussion of sociocultural development in this region. At European contact, everywhere within the last 60 years, the Indo-Pacific staples of lowland New Guinea, such as Colocasia

The Evolution of Complexity in the Valley of Oaxaca

Abstract: This article is directed toward those interested in the comparative study of how complex societies develop-urban and historical geographers, urban historians and sociologists, social and economic historians, or anthropologists in or out of Mesoamerican archaeology. It concentrates on aspects of complexity that can be most readily compared cross-culturally. Specifically the article describes formal characteristics of settlement hierarchies in the Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, from their beginnings at about 1500 BC until the Spanish Conquest 3000 years later. I omit the archaeological and analytical details and the intricate variations since a book-length review of the prehistory of the Valley and the adjacent Mixteca Alta and a technical monograph on the archaeological settlement patterns have recently been published (32, 45). Even without their details, the new archaeological studies of regions make it apparent that social science theories about state and urban evolution need to be upgraded to account for unexpected variation and unforeseen regularities. By complexity I mean the multiplicity of different parts in a social system (12; cf 52 for a formal approach to cultural complexity). To monitor complexity one must be able to identify parts, specify that they are different, be sure that one has all the parts, count them, and ascertain that they form a system. Meeting these five data requirements is not easy, with either historical or archaeological data. The realm of the social is complex in this sense with its

The archaeology of the norse north atlantic

Abstract: Just over a thousand years ago, Scandinavian settlers colonized the islands of the North Atlantic, spreading an initially homogeneous population and settlement/subsistence system from Norway into the western hemisphere (107). Between approximately 800 and 1000 AD the Norse settled Shetland, the Orkneys, the Faroes, parts of northern Scotland, Iceland, and portions of West Greenland (Figure 1). They also penetrated eastern arctic Canada and briefly established a foothold in temperate North America (126). The Viking age also saw major Scandinavian military and commercial impact throughout Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe that extended into the Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia. Norse settlements in northern England, the isle of Man, Ireland, and Normandy paralleled the North Atlantic colonization and may have competed successfully for potential settlers in the letter phases of the Viking Age (106). However, these processes are beyond the scope of the present review, which is restricted to the North Atlantic axis of expansion. By the end of the 10th century, a population sharing a common culture and speaking a common language stretched from Bergen's quayside to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Employing new shipbuilding skills and open-water navigation capabilities (135), pushed by competition among complex chieftainships and emergent secondary states (166), and fueled by growing wealth and population at home, this rapid expansion appeared destined to complete the cir-

REVOLUTION IN THE URBAN REVOLUTION: The Emergence of Indus Urbanization

Abstract: There is a formidable record of recent archaeological work on the Indus or Harappan Civilization (7, 15, 50, 54). This wealth of data makes it impossible fully to review ancient India's earliest cities, and perhaps its first state. I therefore focus on two themes. Following a short statement on geography and basic bibliography, I review the beginnings of the village farming tradition on which the Harappan Civilization rests. I then discuss a recent theoretical position on the rise of the ancient cities of the Indus. The Urban Phase of the Indus or Harappan Civilization (Figure 1) stands out from other complex societies of the Bronze Age of Asia in several ways. The first of these has emerged from recent work in Pakistan. The roots of sedentism and the village farming community have now been documented in the seventh millennium BC, at the site of Mehrgarh on the Kachi Plain of the central Indus Valley. The beginnings of food production and the village farming way of life, on which the Indus Civilization rests, were once thought to be relatively recent, implying a short period of gestation leading to the Harappan Civilization (6; 351). This gestation period has now been shown to have been very long and deep, but punctuated at its terminus by a very rapid transition to urbanization encompassing something on the order of 100-150 years. Thus the rise of the ancient cities of the Indus presents archaeologists

Urban Anthropology in the 1980s: A World View

Abstract: In 1980 urban anthropology sat alongside ecological , economic, applied, political , legal , medical , educational, psychological , cognitive, symbolic, and aesthetic anthropologies; those "of religion," "of development," "of women," or "of gender"; and a continuing, if unraveling, substantive focus on kinship and social organization. The theoretical "movements" of the 1 960s and 1 970s (215), and curriculum organization and specialization in large United States graduate anthropology departments had both contributed to the balkanization of cultural and social anthropology. Never contrasted with a "rural anthropology," urban anthropology in 1 980 was arguably the narrowest and theoretically least influential of all this brood. "Urban anthropology" as a self-labeled body of research emerged in the 1960s; several texts , readers, and essay collections followed in the 1970s (cf 1 1 1 ) . Urban anthropology claimed as its roots the work in the 1930s-1940s of W. Lloyd Warner and his students in Yankee City and Chicago, Robert Redfield in Yucatan , William Foote Whyte in Boston, and Godfrey Wilson in Broken Hill (Zambia) . [Much of this work needs to be reread; what is living and dead in The Living and the Dead and the rest of the Yankee City corpus , for example, calls for fresh evaluation (see 283). The less widely recognized urban work from this era--e.g . of Ellen Hellmann in Johannesburg, Edward Spicer in Tucson, Arizona, William Bascom in Ife, Nigeria, and Bengt Sundkler in South Africa-also deserves new attention . ]

WOMEN'S VOICES: Their Critique of the Anthropology of Japan

Abstract: To focus on women may seem to run against the current trend, in anthropological studies of women, toward emphasizing gender (11, 27, 139). Gender is a relational concept, and considering it "requires that all domains be examined for the relational structures they embody" (11:284). I wholeheartedly agree that this should be done and that women do not constitute a social group but instead are present in nearly every group and class. In this review, however, I will focus on women for a strategic reason. To focus on Japanese women will help to fill gaps in the anthropological record of Japan, a record that has not paid due attention to women's voices. Giving their voices a hearing will open a Pandora's box of further questions, forcing us to reconsider the concepts, theories, and methodologies with which we have worked and to construct new ones (89). Before women's perspectives can be integrated successfully into the study of Japanese culture and history, we must listen to what women have to say about their own experiences, emotions, and thoughts. Their voices, not yet sufficiently explored, may lead to different views of Japanese culture and history. Thus, to focus on women is not to ghettoize them but to include their subjective experience in the study of Japan. It means seeing Japanese culture and history from the vantage points of women, who in recounting their

FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY: An Interpretative Essay

Abstract: Functionalism, which dominated in central parts of anthropology and sociology from the late 1930s till about the mid-1960s, has since then been discredited and seemingly discarded. In anthropology, functionalism was associated with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (64, 65), B. Malinowski (53, 54), and some of their most prominent students-among others, R. Firth (33, 34), M. Fortes (34-36), H. Kuper (46, 47), F. Eggan (20, 21), and M. Gluckman (although Gluckman was even then critical of some of functionalism's basic tenets (39-41). In sociology, functionalism, or rather structural-functionalism, was associated above all with Talcott Parsons (59, 62) and his students-e.g. K. Davis (16), Wilbert Moore (57, 58), R. Williams, Jr. (80), and many others. Robert Merton (56), one of Parsons's first and most prominent students (but not necessarily a disciple) examined critically the analytical methodological assumptions of the structural-functional approach and developed an independent "structural" mode of sociological analysis (56). The basic and simplest tenets of functionalism and structural-functionalism are two, one weak, one strong. The weak tenet, not unique to functionalism, is that there exists a close interrelation among the parts or aspects of all patterns of social interaction-above all, of groups and "societies." The strong tenet of functionalism is that such interrelations must be understood in terms of the systemic nature of social interaction and organization. Social organizations, groups, and perhaps above all "societies" constitute systems

Studies of North American Indian Languages

Abstract: The study of North American Indian languages has been shaped by several circumstances. Since its beginning, most research has been based in fieldwork: Data have come from direct contact with speakers, usually in their own cultural settings, rather than from secondary sources. Although the number of languages indigenous to North America is large, several hundred, the number of scholars working with most of them has been relatively small, often only one or two individuals per language. A center of scholarly interaction has thus been the community of those studying languages all over the Americas, languages that are quite diverse genetically and typologically. These factors, the grounding in fieldwork and the composition of the scholarly community, have affected the kinds of work undertaken, the theoretical issues addressed, the nature of the explanations sought, and the applications made. The field is in many ways highly anthropological: strongly contextualized linguistically, culturally, and typologically. The researcher who works directly with speakers of a little-documented language needs basic proficiency in all areas of linguistic structure. It is seldom possible to achieve insights about syntax, for example, without sufficient phonetic skill to hear accurately, sufficient understanding of phonology to construct a usable transcription, and sufficient knowledge of morphology to be aware of the grammatical functions signaled within words. The importance of broad competence has shaped the kinds of description and explanation that have come out of the field. Structures are usually considered in the context of other structures in the language rather than in isolation.

An Anthropological Odyssey

Abstract: My anthropological experience may be described as a long and inspiring journey across the seas of the human condition. I have always been struck by what I call the paradox of human reality: Born to live, we are destined to die; ready to enjoy life, we must struggle to avoid discomfort and disease; conscious of individuality, we are still unavoidably bound from birth to a social group; claiming to be equal, we nevertheless differ both as individuals and groups. Whenever it seemed I had a comprehensive view of human nature, I was led to a reorienting perspective. I regret none of the various phases of my long journey. Each has contributed to the evolution of my anthropological approach to reality. The reverse is also true: My anthropological perspective has often brought changes in my life’s route. Indeed, the study of anthropology, which revealed the essence of the human condition, decisively led me to change my social and professional stations. I left the Catholic priesthood and its missionary activity, d...