Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 2002"

Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This article strives to meet two challenges. As a review, it provides a critical discussion of the scholarship concerning undocumented migration, with a special emphasis on ethnographically informed works that foreground significant aspects of the everyday life of undocumented migrants. But another key concern here is to formulate more precisely the theoretical status of migrant “illegality” and deportability in order that further research related to undocumented migration may be conceptualized more rigorously. This review considers the study of migrant “illegality” as an epistemological, methodological, and political problem, in order to then formulate it as a theoretical problem. The article argues that it is insufficient to examine the “illegality” of undocumented migration only in terms of its consequences and that it is necessary also to produce historically informed accounts of the sociopolitical processes of “illegalization” themselves, which can be characterized as the legal production ...

The Anthropology of Food and Eating

Abstract: ▪ Abstract The study of food and eating has a long history in anthropology, beginning in the nineteenth century with Garrick Mallery and William Robertson Smith. This review notes landmark studies prior to the 1980s, sketching the history of the subfield. We concentrate primarily, however, on works published after 1984. We contend that the study of food and eating is important both for its own sake since food is utterly essential to human existence (and often insufficiently available) and because the subfield has proved valuable for debating and advancing anthropological theory and research methods. Food studies have illuminated broad societal processes such as political-economic value-creation, symbolic value-creation, and the social construction of memory. Such studies have also proved an important arena for debating the relative merits of cultural and historical materialism vs. structuralist or symbolic explanations for human behavior, and for refining our understanding of variation in informants' resp...

LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION: Reproduction and Continuity, Transformation and Change

Abstract: ▪ Abstract While continuing to uphold the major aims set out in the first generation of language socialization studies, recent research examines the particularities of language socialization processes as they unfold in institutional contexts and in a wide variety of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous settings characterized by bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, language shift, syncretism, and other phenomena associated with contact between languages and cultures. Meanwhile new areas of analytic focus such as morality, narrative, and ideologies of language have proven highly productive. In the two decades since its earliest formulation, the language socialization paradigm has proven coherent and flexible enough not merely to endure, but to adapt, to rise to these new theoretical and methodological challenges, and to grow. The sources and directions of that growth are the focus of this review.

The Anthropology of Online Communities

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Information and communication technologies based on the Internet have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices—phenomena worthy of the attention of anthropological researchers. Despite early assessments of the revolutionary nature of the Internet and the enormous transformations it would bring about, the changes have been less dramatic and more embedded in existing practices and power relations of everyday life. This review explores researchers' questions, approaches, and insights within anthropology and some relevant related fields, and it seeks to identify promising new directions for study. The general conclusion is that the technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media that exist within it, are in themselves cultural products. Anthropology is thus well suited to the further investigation of these new, and not so new, phenomena.

Youth and Cultural Practice

Abstract: ▪ Abstract The study of youth played a central role in anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century, giving rise to a still-thriving cross-cultural approach to adolescence as a life stage. Yet the emphasis on adolescence as a staging ground for integration into the adult community often obscures young people's own cultural agency or frames it solely in relation to adult concerns. By contrast, sociology has long considered youth cultures as central objects of study, whether as deviant subcultures or as class-based sites of resistance. More recently, a third approach—an anthropology of youth—has begun to take shape, sparked by the stimuli of modernity and globalization and the ambivalent engagement of youth in local contexts. This broad and interdisciplinary approach revisits questions first raised in earlier sociological and anthropological frameworks, while introducing new issues that arise under current economic, political, and cultural conditions. The anthropology of youth is characterized by...

The Upper Paleolithic Revolution

Abstract: ▪ Abstract The transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is considered one of the major revolutions in the prehistory of humankind. Explanations of the observable archaeological phenomena in Eurasia, or the lack of such evidence in other regions, include biological arguments (the role of Cro-Magnons and the demise of the Neanderthals), as well as cultural-technological, and environmental arguments. The paper discusses issues of terminological ambiguities, chronological and geographical aspects of change, the emergence of what is viewed as the arch-types of modern forager societies, and the hotly debated and loaded issue of modern behavior. Finally, the various causes for the Upper Paleolithic revolution are enumerated, from the biological through the technocultural that relies on the analogy with the Neolithic revolution.

Variation in Human Body Size and Shape

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Evolutionary trends in human body form provide important context for interpreting variation among modern populations. Average body mass in living humans is smaller than it was during most of the Pleistocene, possibly owing to technological improvements during the past 50,000 years that no longer favored large body size. Sexual dimorphism in body size reached modern levels at least 150,000 years ago and probably earlier. Geographic variation in both body size and shape in earlier humans paralleled latitudinal clines observed today. Climatic adaptation is the most likely primary cause for these gradients, overlain in more recent populations by nutritional effects on growth. Thus, to distinguish growth disturbances, it is necessary to partition out the (presumably genetic) long-term differences in body form between populations that have resulted from climatic selection. An example is given from a study of Inupiat children, using a new index of body shape to assess relative body mass.

Street Children, Human Rights, and Public Health: A Critique and Future Directions

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This review presents a critique of the academic and welfare literature on street children in developing countries, with supporting evidence from studies of homelessness in industrialized nations. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sea change of perspective in studies concerning street youth. This review examines five stark criticisms of the category “street child” and of research that focuses on the identifying characteristics of a street lifestyle rather than on the children themselves and the depth or diversity of their actual experiences. Second, it relates the change of approach to a powerful human rights discourse—the legal and conceptual framework provided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child—which emphasizes children's rights as citizens and recognizes their capabilities to enact change in their own lives. Finally, this article examines literature focusing specifically on the risks to health associated with street or homeless lifestyles. Risk assessmen...

Energetics and the evolution of the genus homo

Abstract: ▪ Abstract The genus Homo as represented by Homo ergaster (= early African Homo erectus) is characterized by a pattern of features that is more similar to modern humans than to the earlier and contemporaneous australopithecines and paranthropines. These features include larger relative brain sizes, larger bodies, slower rates of growth and maturation, dedicated bipedal locomotion, and smaller teeth and jaws. These features are phenotypic expressions of a very different lifestyle for the earliest members of the genus Homo. This paper considers the energetic correlates of the emergence of the genus Homo and suggests that there were three major changes in maintenance energy requirements. First, there was an absolute increase in energy requirements due to greater body size. Second, there was a shift in the relative requirements of the different organs, with increased energy diverted to brain metabolism at the expense of gut tissue, possibly mediated by changes in the proportion of weight comprised of fat. And...

The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This paper traces the conjunction of two interrelated epistemic phenomena that have begun to shape the discipline since the early 1990s. The first entails theorizing social identity in past societies: specifically, how social lives are inscribed by the experiences of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. The other constitutes the rise of a politicized and ethical archaeology that now recognizes its active role in contemporary culture and is enunciated through the discourses of nationalism, sociopolitics, postcolonialism, diaspora, and globalism. Both trends have been tacitly shaped by anthropological and social theory, but they are fundamentally driven by the powerful voices of once marginalized groups and their newfound place in the circles of academic legitimacy. I argue that our disciplinary reticence to embrace the politics of identity, both in our investigations of the past and our imbrications in the present, has much to do with archaeology's lack of reflexivity, both personal and disc...

Toward an Anthropology of Democracy

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Anthropologists, through their ethnographic method, relationships with people outside of formal and elite political institutions, and attention to alternative worldviews, bring to the study of democracy an examination of local meanings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power that is rare in the scholarly literature on democratic transitions, which has largely focused on political institutions and formal regime shifts. This review brings together the writings of ethnographers working in a wide variety of settings to generate lines of inquiry and analysis for developing an anthropology of democracy.

SIGNS OF THEIR TIMES: Deaf Communities and the Culture of Language

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Because of their deafness, deaf people have been marked as different and treated problematically by their hearing societies. Until 25 years ago, academic literature addressing deafness typically described deafness as pathology, focusing on cures or mitigation of the perceived handicap. In ethnographic accounts, interactions involving deaf people are sometimes presented as examples of how communities treat atypical members. Recently, studies of deafness have adopted more complex sociocultural perspectives, raising issues of community identity, formation and maintenance, and language ideology. Anthropological researchers have approached the study of d/Deaf communities from at least three useful angles. The first, focusing on the history of these communities, demonstrates that the current issues have roots in the past, including the central role of education in the creation and maintenance of communities. A second approach centers on emic perspectives, drawing on the voices of community members th...

Contemporary Trends in Infant Feeding Research

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This review examines current research in the subfields of anthropology and related disciplines on the biocultural process of breastfeeding and broader questions of infant and young-child feeding. The themes of sexuality, reproduction, embodiment, and subjective experience are then linked to the problems women who breastfeed face in bottle-feeding cultures. Anthropologists have contributed to policy-relevant debates concerning women's work and scheduling in relation to infant care and exclusive breastfeeding. The extensive ethnographic work on children's transition to consuming household foods demonstrates the need to integrate research on breastfeeding with research on complementary feeding. Current debates around HIV and chemical residues in breastmilk call for a critical examination of the effects of globalization and corporate control on infant feeding practices. The literature shows how the narrow specialty of infant feeding has broad implications for the discipline.

The Politics of Archaeology in Africa

Abstract: ▪ Abstract “Africa is various,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah in defiance of the Eurocentric myth of a unitary and unchanging continent. The politics of archaeology in Africa has been no less marked by variety. Yet, underlying this multiplicity of historical experience are a number of common themes and ideas. This review traces the engagement between archaeology and politics in Africa through an exploration of these common themes: first, as a colonial science in the context of European conquest and the subjugation of African people and territories; second, in the context of colonial administration and the growth of settler populations; third, in the context of resistance to colonialism and a developing African nationalism; and fourth, in a postcolonial context, among whose challenges have been the growing illicit trade in antiquities originating in Africa, and (in the past two decades) the decline in direct funding for departments of archaeology in universities and museums.

The form and function of reconciliation in primates

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Sociality is favored by natural selection because it enhances group members' access to valued resources or reduces their vulnerability to predators, but group living also generates conflict among group members. To enjoy the benefits of sociality, group living animals must somehow overcome the costs of conflict. Nonhuman primates have developed an effective mechanism for resolving conflicts: They participate in peaceful postconflict (PC) reunions with former opponents. These peaceful PC interactions are collectively labeled reconciliation. There is a broad consensus that peaceful contacts among former opponents relieve stressful effects of conflict and permit former opponents to interact peacefully. Primates may reconcile to obtain short-term objectives, such as access to desirable resources. Alternatively, reconciliation may preserve valuable relationships damaged by conflict. Some researchers view these explanations as complementary, but they generate different predictions about the patterning...

The Human Y Chromosome Haplogroup Tree: Nomenclature and Phylogeography of Its Major Divisions

Abstract: ▪ Abstract In this review we discuss the recent construction of a highly resolved tree of the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome (NRY), and the development of a cladistic nomenclatural system to name the resulting haplogroups. This phylogenetic gene tree comprises 18 major haplogroups that are defined by 48 binary polymorphisms. We also present results from a phylogeographic analysis of NRY haplogroups in a global sample of 2007 males, as well as from a regional study focusing on Siberia (n = 902). We use the following statistical techniques to explicate our presentation: analysis of molecular variance, multidimensional scaling, comparative measures of genetic diversity, and phylogeography-based frequency distributions. Our global results, based on the 18 major haplogroups, are similar to those from previous analyses employing additional markers and support the hypothesis of an African origin of human NRY diversity. Although Africa exhibits greater divergence among haplogroups, Asia contains the l...

Current Topics in Primate Socioendocrinology

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Socioendocrinology is the study of the effect of the social environment on the interactions between hormones and behavior. Individuals have evolved a physiological flexibility that enables them to respond to their social surroundings in a manner that maximizes reproductive success. We present evidence that (a) males who have evolved to participate in infant care have different endocrine profiles around offspring from males who have not evolved to regularly participate in infant care, (b) the energetic costs of reproduction in both males and females creates conditions conducive to elevated levels of both stress and sex hormones, (c) adolescent subfecundity among females evolved as a mechanism fostering mate choice, (d) some primate species are probably facultative ovulators, and (e) endocrine suppression of subordinate males probably does not contribute to delayed onset of reproduction but does contribute to reduced access to females, which hampers progeny production. Hormones and behavior are i...

Laboring in the factories and in the fields

Abstract: ▪ Abstract Since 1980, studies of the wage labor process have been centered mostly on three topics: the new international division of labor, control over the labor process, and “flexibilization” of production. Anthropologists have contributed rich studies about modes of control and about how these modes are linked to social relations within the work place and workers' communities of origin. They have explained how and why market segmentation can be a powerful tool of control some of the time, whereas at other times it can enhance tensions. Anthropologists have also contributed by transforming stylized models into models centered on actors with social and class identities and with ambivalent expectations and aspirations. However, they have neglected to integrate their findings with those from the literature on labor migrations and job search. They also have neglected to consistently examine contracts and hiring practices, two major tools of labor control. Although anthropologists have been attentive to par...

Weber and Anthropology

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This article is about the influence of the work of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) on English-speaking anthropologists. Although Weber does not figure prominently in the history of anthropology, his work has, nonetheless, had a profound influence on anthropological methodology and theoretical thinking on the relationship between religion and political economy. The “interpretive anthropology” first developed by Geertz has roots in Weber's “interpretive sociology.” Bourdieu's “theory of practice” is also strongly Weberian in character. The anthropological study of religion, and particularly the debate over the foundations of this field between Geertz and Asad, is reconsidered in light of Weber's sociology of religion. His comparative study of the ethics of the world's religions and particularly the “Weber thesis” about the relationship between religion and the development of bourgeois capitalism are shown to have been the foundation for a large body of anthropological research on rel...

Discourse Forms and Processes in Indigenous Lowland South America: An Areal-Typological Perspective

Abstract: ▪ Abstract In indigenous lowland South America there are several discourse forms and processes that are shared by groups of people of distinct genetic linguistic affiliations; this leads us to posit this large region, which we label greater Amazonia, as a discourse area, a concept that parallels the notion of linguistic area. The discourse forms and processes we examine are ceremonial dialogue, dialogical performance, templatic ratifying, echo speech, ceremonial greeting, ritual wailing, evidentiality, speech reporting practices, parallelism, special languages, and shamanistic language use. We hypothesize that in lowland South America, discourse is the matrix for linguistic diffusion, i.e., that linguistic areas emerge within discourse areas. What we propose then is a discourse-centered approach to language change and history, parallel to a discourse-centered approach to language structure and use. Our survey includes a plea for a careful archiving of recorded and written materials dealing with lowland So...

Religion in south asia

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This article examines the study of religions of South Asia, in particular of India, from the angle of postcolonial criticism. It argues that the study of state formation provides a crucial perspective for the unraveling of the multiple transformations of religion in the colonial and postcolonial public sphere. The colonial state cannot be studied in isolation from the global framework of imperial interactions between metropole and colony, in which colonial and national modernity is produced. Such a study depends on a postcolonial critique of the very category of “religion” while acknowledging the centrality of that category in colonial and postcolonial politics. The transformation of the public sphere in South Asia shows the increasing importance of religious movements and of the political use of religious images in new communication technologies. One of the most important trends in the present era is the attempt to create a homogenous religious community, not only within the national territori...

AN INCONSTANT PROFESSION: The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times

Abstract: ▪ Abstract I give an overall view of anthropology and of my career within it over the past fifty years, relating them to changes in the world in general during that time. All lessons are implicit, all morals unstated, all conclusions undrawn.

African presence in former Soviet spaces

Abstract: ▪ Abstract This review traces accounts of African presence in the former USSR that are available in or have been cited primarily in English; many sources on this topic published in the USSR were strategically intended for Western consumption. This review tracks repetitions of tropes that link certain kinds of “blackness” to “Africa”: It observes that treating blacks in the USSR as “displaced” confirmed Soviet humanitarianism, and produced and managed anti-Western/anticapitalist forms of Soviet nationalism and federalism. We scrutinize the ways accounts of African presence use evidence of “race remnants” that implicitly position black bodies as subjects of racial dissolution and/or cultural assimilation. This leads us to question the possibility of narrating African presence in contexts ruled by logics that wed spatial displacement/placement to racial impurity/purity. More broadly, the review addresses the utility of ideals of displaced racial communities within African diasporic criticism.