Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 1993"

Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge

Abstract: Since the body mediates all reflection and action upon the world, its centrality to the anthropological endeavor seems assured, but a perusal of the canon of social and cultural anthropology indicates that the body's explicit appearance has been sporadic throughout the history of the discipline. In much the same way as Munn noted that the topic of time has often been "handmaiden to other anthropological frames and issues" (178:93), the body, despite its ubiquity, has suffered a similar fate, thus remaining largely unproblematized. The ma­ jority of researchers have in effect simply "bracketed" it as a black box and set it aside. There have been recent reviews of topics that implicate the body, including the politics of reproduction (81), human sexuality (39), the emotions (164),­ and shamanisms (6). A prolegpmena to an anthropological physiology has also appeared (20), but aside from two edited collections from the 1970s (14, 201) and one position piece (159), there has been no substantial review of research in connection with an anthropology of the body per se. I believe this lacuna highlights a long-standing ambivalence on the part of many anthropologists

Anthropology and Mass Media

Abstract: There is as yet no "anthropology of mass media." Even the intersection of anthropology and mass media appears rather small considering the published literature to date. Within the last five or so years, however, as anthropologists have increasingly struggled to define what falls within the legitimate realm of the study of "a culture" and within the privileged purview of "a discipline" (48,51,75, 107, 164), there has been a dramatic rise in interest in the study of mass media. Indeed, mass media themselves have been it contributing force in these processes of cultural and disciplinary deterritorialization. Mass media-defined in the conventional sense as the electronic media of radio, television, film, and recorded music, and the print media of newspapers, magazines, and popular literature-are at once artifacts, experiences, prac­ tices, and processes. They are economically and politically driven, linked to developments in science and technology, and like most domains of human life, their existence is inextricably bound up with the use of language. Given these various modalities and spheres of operation, there are numerous angles for approaching mass media anthropologically: as institutions, as workplaces, as communicative practices, as cultural products, as social activities, as aesthetic forms, and as historical developments. But beyond approaching specific facets of mass media anthropologically, it seems that the greater challenge lies in integrating the study of mass media into our analyses of the "total social fact" of modem life. How, for example, do mass media represent and shape cultural values within a given society?

Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology

Abstract: As the Roaring Twenties drew to a close, Goldenweiser completed one of the few reviews then written of the sparse anthropological literature on sexuality. Homosexuality appeared midway through his account, in the guise of yet "another sub rosa aspect of sex" (64:61). Sub rosa means literally, under the rose; secret, clandestine, in a way that discourages disclosure. Throughout the first half of the century, most allusions by anthropologists to homosexual behavior remained as veiled in ambiguity and as couched in judgment as were references to homosexuality in the dominant discourse of the surrounding society. Not until the late 1960s did the anthropological texts destined to become classics in lesbian/gay studies begin to be published. The same sociohistorical conditions that facilitated the development of a gay movement in the United States, combined with the efforts of a hardy few who risked not only censure but their careers, allowed homosexuality to move to the center of scholarly attention. Though the field of lesbian/gay studies in anthropology has been slower to develop than its counterparts in literary studies or history, by the 1990s ethnographic analyses of homosexual behavior and identity, "gender bending," lesbian and gay male communities, transgressive sexual practices, and homosociality were flourishing. For a field that has been constituted through a set of stigmatized categories derived from Anglo-European societies, achieving legitimacy assumes an

Anthropology and Human Rights

Abstract: This essay reviews what anthropologists have contributed to the human rights framework and how they have used it for research and advocacy (117, 144, 176, 221, 258, 282, 283). Since 1948 the United Nations (UN) has aspired to create a global community, based on human rights, "a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations" (the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the substance of which is continually evolving. Anthropolo­ gists have contributed to these continuing efforts in two critical ways: first, by providing cross-cultural research on the questions of "What are rights?" and "Who is counted as a full 'person' or 'human being' eligible to enjoy them?" (117, 152, 176, 221); and second, by monitoring compliance with human rights standards and by criticizing human rights violations or abuses (282, 283). A conventional wisdom persists both inside and outside of anthropology that anthropologists have been largely uninvolved in human rights formula­ tions for five main reasons: 1. anthropologists' insistence that human rights concepts are culturally relative, in opposition to universal formulations (51, 79,208,209); 2. anthropologists' advocacy of collective and indigenous rights over and against the universal formulations framed in terms of the individual's rights (51); 3. anthropologists' commitment to applied anthropology and polit­ ical economic action over human rights approaches to overcoming oppression and inequality (268,282); 4. the political sensitivities of doing fieldwork (67, 69); and 5. anthropologists' involvement with small-scale sociocultural analy-

The anthropology of theater and spectacle

Abstract: In this essay I explore studies of theater and spectacle as distinct cultural institutions. Several kinds of cultural activity closely related to this topic have extensive literatures of their own, but I do not treat them here. These include play and games, sports and contests, verbal art and poetry, and dance and music outside the context of theater and spectacle. The distinction is arbitrary. The boundary between theater and spectacle and many other forms of enactment is difficult to determine. Theatrical activ­ ity is a component of many performance genres, and vice versa. Here I attempt to elucidate the specifically theatrical aspect of human life. I have not limited myself to works written by anthropologists. Indeed, I hope to excite anthropol­ ogists with an awareness of the work done in other fields. This essay treats 1. the study of performance in anthropology and related disciplines, 2. the institutions of theater and spectacle, 3. specific genres of theater and spectacle, and 4. the creation of cultural meaning within frame­ works of theater and spectacle.

Austronesian Historical Linguistics and Culture History

Abstract: About one sixth of the world's languages are Austronesian (AN), but it is their cultural and biological diversity and their predominantly insular distribution, and not their numbers, that have made the Austronesian-speaking peoples of great interest to anthropologists. In western Melanesia, for instance, there are many small, culturally and biologically heterogeneous communities living in sustained intensive contact with speakers of non-AN languages and with each other. In Polynesia, on the other hand, sister populations have diverged in isolation. "Islands as laboratories" has long been a popular catchcry among scholars working in Polynesia (69, 108, 113, 161, 179-181, 195, 227, 228). For those searching for principles of change or seeking to reconstruct events of culture history, each isolated Polynesian island or island group has the value of being a relatively independent witness to the effects of variables such as geography, technology, population size, and time on a common ancestral base. Although it lacks the elegant simplicity of its Polynesian part, the wider AN-speaking region provides extremely rich material for culture historians and typologists. Perhaps 5000--6000 years ago Proto Austronesian (PAN) was spoken, almost certainly somewhere in East or Southeast Asia, by a neolithic population (7, 8, 236). Some AN speakers became the world's first efficient long distance navigators (7, 153, 206) and over several millennia the family

Disease Transfer at Contact

Abstract: Disease transfer at contact between peoples is attracting increasing research and interpretive attention from anthropologists, historians, ethnohistorians, Native Americanists, and medical doctors. Historically, massive and frequent disease transfers resulted in a crash in the Native American population and "contact shock in the Americas" (81:2; 82). Mooney (69) explicitly recognized the impact of epidemic diseases on Native North Americans. Anthropologists of the 1930s ignored that aspect of Mooney's native population analysis, while arguing instead about population magnitudes. Physiologist S. F. Cook (24) began in 1937 to publish studies of the impact of Old World diseases on Native North Americans. Even though Cook collab­ orated with archeographers, 1 anthropologists of the period ignored his epide­ miological publications. Anthropologists may have been reluctant to recognize that Darwinian evolutionary theory applies to human beings (76:37), regard­ less of human culture. In 1966, I pointed out methodological flaws in anthropological analyses of Native American population magnitudes that ignored the biological reality of Old World contagious diseases during post-Columbian times (32). Ten years later, a critical bibliography on Native North American historical demography reemphasized the crucial role of Old World contagious diseases (33) in what

EXPLODING CANONS: The Anthropology of Museums

Abstract: over the treatment of non-Western art and material culture in museums. I have chosen to bypass the steady flow of solid ethnographic studies of traditional arts and popular arts, and the emergence of new theoretical concerns in these studies for two reasons. 1 First, academic anthropologists rarely consider mu­ seum anthropology as an important area for the employment of anthropolo­ gists, and thus for the training of students. The situation for anthropologists in museums is rapidly changing and aspiring curators should be advised of the directions of change. Second, museum anthropologists

The Archaeology of Colonial Settlement in Southern Africa

Abstract: When European mercantile adventurers began pushing back the outer rim of their directly-known world in the second half of the fifteenth century, they had already invented Africa...

Biological Anthropology and Human Aging: Some Current Directions in Aging Research

Abstract: systems that allow individuals to maintain homeostasis across a wide range of environments and stressors during developmental and reproductive years. Data indicated that human variation increased with age and that patterns of aging and adult survival were highly individualistic and population-envir onment specific. Today, biological anthropologists still focus on the description of cross-cul­ tural and populational variation, but they also examine the causes and conse­ quences of changes across the lifespan in adaptive physiological systems. Such changes include the physiological correlates of human aging, notably the decline of function and response, and the loss of reserve capacity to return to homeostasis after a perturbation. Today's efforts also include attempts to

History in anthropology

Abstract: ionists have ceded ground. The most doctrinaire of Marxists have given way to a legion of political economists more willing and analytically better equipped to cope with the seemingly irreducible particularity of socio­ cultural conventions and their processual consequences. The most doctrinaire of functionalists and structuralists have given way to a legion of "praxologists" more willing and analytically better equipped to cope with the seemingly irreversible temporality of strategies and their processual repercussions. An ever greater number of fieldworkers have abandoned the conceit of insularity and synchronicity. The present is no longer the anthropological writer's stan­ dard tense. Evolution is no longer an anthropological byword, even outside the sociocultural field. Human evolution has become one thing, human history quite another. The champions of history and memory have enjoyed a recent anthropological vogue: for example, Vico (cf 54) and Maurice Halbwachs (cf 27). Many of the primitives and the traditionals upon whom anthropologists 0084-6570/93/1015-0035$05.00 35

The First Twenty Years

Abstract: After twenty years as founder and editor of the Annual Review of Anthropology (ARA) I have been requested by the Editorial Committee to ponder the developments in the several subfields of anthropology over this period of time, as reflected in the topics selected for review in this enterprise. Where I feel some competence to do so, I shall offer a critique of where we have come from and where we might be going. Before entering into the fray, I will provide some history of the ARA and a brief account of my background, both of which affect the structure and the content of these volumes. I am pleased to report that the new editor is William Durham, a distinguished biological anthropologist whose research interests lie in the interface between biological and cultural evolution.