Showing papers in "Annual Review of Anthropology in 2011"
TL;DR: The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies as discussed by the authors, highlighting the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism.
Abstract: The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.
476 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology are explored, along with their historical dimensions and precursors, and the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology.
Abstract: This review explores the most significant dimensions and findings of phenomenological approaches in anthropology. We spell out the motives and implications inherent in such approaches, chronicle their historical dimensions and precursors, and address the ways in which they have contributed to analytic perspectives employed in anthropology. This article canvasses phenomenologically oriented research in anthropology on a number of topics, including political relations and violence; language and discourse; neurophenomenology; emotion; embodiment and bodiliness; illness and healing; pain and suffering; aging, dying, and death; sensory perception and experience; subjectivity; intersubjectivity and sociality; empathy; morality; religious experience; art, aesthetics, and creativity; narrative and storytelling; time and temporality; and senses of place. We examine, and propose salient responses to, the main critiques of phenomenological approaches in anthropology, and we also take note of some of the most pressin...
321 citations
TL;DR: The authors provide an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology and track developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change, arguing that anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice.
Abstract: This review provides an overview of foundational climate and culture studies in anthropology; it then tracks developments in this area to date to include anthropological engagements with contemporary global climate change. Although early climate and culture studies were mainly founded in archaeology and environmental anthropology, with the advent of climate change, anthropology's roles have expanded to engage local to global contexts. Considering both the unprecedented urgency and the new level of reflexivity that climate change ushers in, anthropologists need to adopt cross-scale, multistakeholder, and interdisciplinary approaches in research and practice. I argue for one mode that anthropologists should pursue—the development of critical collaborative, multisited ethnography, which I term “climate ethnography.”
225 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology's reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems.
Abstract: This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.
160 citations
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TL;DR: This paper surveys the literature on publics: political subjects that know themselves and act by means of mass-mediated communication and examines classic accounts of how publics form through interlocking modes of social interaction, as well as the forms of social interactions that publics have been defined against.
Abstract: This review surveys the literature on publics: political subjects that know themselves and act by means of mass-mediated communication. It examines classic accounts of how publics form through interlocking modes of social interaction, as well as the forms of social interaction that publics have been defined against. It also addresses recent work that has sought to account for contradictions within theories of the public sphere and to develop alternative understandings of public culture. Historical and ethnographic research on this topic reveals that some concept of publicity is foundational for a number of theories of self-determination, but that the subject of publicity is irrevocably enmeshed in the very technological, linguistic, and conceptual means of its own self-production. Research on publics is valuable because it has focused on this paradox of mediation at the center of modern political life.
143 citations
TL;DR: This chapter proposes that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory "theories" that people construct to explain, interpret, and intervene on the world around them, including theories of mind, of biology, or of physics.
Abstract: Human cognition is characterized by enormous variability and structured by universal psychological constraints. The focus of this article is on the development of knowledge acquisition because it provides important insight into how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding. We propose that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory “theories” that people construct to explain, interpret, and intervene in the world around them, including theories of mind, biology, or physics. A substantial amount of research in cognitive developmental psychology supports the integral role of intuitive theories in human learning and provides evidence that they structure, constrain, and guide the development of human cognition.
139 citations
TL;DR: Particular understandings of immigrant and national cultures underlie cultural politics as mentioned in this paper, which are mutually constituted in policies, state institutions, the media, and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law.
Abstract: Immigrant cultures are routinely posed as threats to national culture. Particular understandings of immigrant and national cultures underlie cultural politics. Culturalism—conceiving cultures as reified, static, and homogeneous across bounded groups—imbues these understandings. Representations of immigrant and national culture are mutually constituted in policies, state institutions, the media, and everyday perceptions surrounding key categories such as borders, illegality, and the law. Furthermore, coupled with a popular or commonsense structural-functionalism that sees all cultural values and practices as inherently interlinked, many modes of cultural politics are contextually stimulated by anxieties about cultural loss. At critical junctures, certain representations gain powerful roles in cultural politics through synecdoche, when specific symbols stand for an integrated set of cultural attributes. Examples include Muslim head scarves in France and the “ground zero mosque” in the United States. Anthrop...
120 citations
TL;DR: The study of feasting has gradually emerged from early descriptions and bewilderment to more sophisticated attempts to understand the logic and reasons behind the often lavish displays as discussed by the authors, and various models have been, and still are, used by anthropologists and archaeologists to explain this unique human behavior.
Abstract: The study of feasting has gradually emerged from early descriptions and bewilderment to more sophisticated attempts to understand the logic and reasons behind the often lavish displays. We chart the various models that have been, and still are, used by anthropologists and archaeologists to explain this unique human behavior. Acquiring prestige is a popular explanation used by ethnographers, while coping with social conflicts is commonly invoked by archaeologists. However, more practical benefits behind feasts have also been proposed, as well as experiential motivations. Whichever explanation is endorsed, there is widespread agreement that feasts play important roles in establishing social identities and memories, creating political power and inequalities, gender identities, accomplishing work, and developing prestige technologies, possibly including domesticates.
115 citations
TL;DR: Archaeological ethnography as discussed by the authors is defined as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations, and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality.
Abstract: Archaeology and anthropology, despite their commonalities, have had a rather asymmetrical relationship, and the periodic attempts at closer collaboration resulted in mutual frustration. As both disciplines have recently undergone significant changes, however, with anthropology embracing more fully materiality and historicity, and archaeology engaging in contemporary research, often involving ethnography, the time is ripe for a new rapprochement. Archaeological ethnography, an emerging transdisciplinary field, offers such an opportunity. Archaeological ethnography is defined here as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations, and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality. It is multitemporal rather than presentist, and although many of its concerns to date are about clashes over heritage, this article argues that its potential is far greater because it can dislodge the certainties of conventional arch...
115 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship, and connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart, using analogies of money and ghosts.
Abstract: This article examines the way bodily substance has been deployed in the anthropology of kinship. Analytically important in linking kinship with understandings of the body and person, substance has highlighted processes of change and transferability in kinship. Studies of organ donation and reproductive technologies in the West considered here challenge any simple dichotomy between idioms of a bounded individual body/person and immutable kinship relations in Euro-American contexts and more fluid, mutable bodies and relations elsewhere. Focusing on blood as a bodily substance of everyday significance with a peculiarly extensive symbolic repertoire, this article connects material properties of blood to the ways it flows between domains that are often kept apart. The analogies of money and ghosts illuminate blood's capacity to participate in, and move between, multiple symbolic and practical spheres—capacities that carry important implications for ideas and practices of relationality.
114 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the meaning, place, and role of remittances for migrants and for their sending households and communities, and define remittance as more than economic.
Abstract: In this review, I examine the meaning, place, and role of remittances for migrants (movers) and for their sending households and communities. I define remittances as more than economic and explore the cultural and social value of remittances as well as the ways in which transnational space is created as movers and nonmovers interact. Although remittances are often critical to the well-being and survival of migrant sending households, this review also defines the costs that movers face as they remit and the positive as well as negative impacts remittances can hold for sending households.
TL;DR: It is argued that Oldowan tool making corresponds to simple imitation and ape gestural communication and Acheulean toolMaking corresponds to complex imitation and protolanguage, whereas the explosion of innovations in tool making and social organization of the past 100,000 years correlates with the emergence of language.
Abstract: The mirror system hypothesis suggests that evolution expanded a basic mirror system for grasping, in concert with other brain regions first to support simple imitation (shared with the common ancestor of humans and great apes) and thence to complex imitation (unique to the hominin line), which includes overimitation, the apparent drawbacks of which are in fact essential to human skill transmission. These advances in praxis supported the emergence of pantomime and thence protosign and protospeech. This capacity, we claim, was adequate for cultural evolution to then yield language. We argue that Oldowan tool making corresponds to simple imitation and ape gestural communication and Acheulean tool making corresponds to complex imitation and protolanguage, whereas the explosion of innovations in tool making and social organization of the past 100,000 years correlates with the emergence of language. Care is taken, however, to distinguish brain mechanisms for praxis from those supporting language.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research.
Abstract: Archaeology has long sublimated an account of the political into a series of proxy concepts such as cities, civilizations, chiefdoms, and states. Recently, however, the archaeology of political association has been revitalized by efforts to forward a systematic account of the political, attentive to the creation and maintenance of sovereignty in practical negotiations between variously formalized authorities and a publically specified community of subjects. This new, and largely inchoate, archaeology of sovereignty has pushed the field to attend to the practical production of political regimes and the material mediations that articulate authorities and subjects. This review is intended to highlight the latent principles that draw this dispersed literature into a shared archaeological concern with sovereignty by sketching the intellectual crises that created the space for its emergence and the key concepts that orient current research. Taken together, the works discussed here point to a new concern with th...
TL;DR: Theories of migration hold a pervasive position in prehistoric archaeology of Central Eurasia as discussed by the authors, and migration has resurfaced as an important, yet polemical, explanation in both academic arenas.
Abstract: Theories of migration hold a pervasive position in prehistoric archaeology of Central Eurasia. International research on Eurasia today reflects the juxtaposition of archaeological theory and practice from distinct epistemological traditions, and migration is at the crux of current debates. Migration was employed paradigmatically during the Soviet era to explain the geography and materiality of prehistoric ethnogenesis, whereas in the west it was harshly criticized in prehistoric applications, especially in the 1970s. Since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), migration has resurfaced as an important, yet polemical, explanation in both academic arenas. Short- and long-distance population movements are seen as fundamental mechanisms for the formation and distribution of regional archaeological cultures from the Paleolithic to historical periods and as a primary social response to environmental, demographic, and political pressures. Critics view the archaeological record of Eura...
TL;DR: In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods' dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A vast range of archaeological studies could be construed as studies of consumption, so it is perhaps surprising that relatively few archaeologists have defined their scholarly focus as consumption. This review examines how archaeology can produce a distinctive picture of consumption that remains largely unaddressed in the rich interdisciplinary consumer scholarship. Archaeological research provides concrete evidence of everyday materiality that is not available in most documentary records or ethnographic resources, thus offering an exceptionally powerful mechanism to examine complicated consumption tactics. In a broad archaeological and anthropological context, consumption studies reflect the ways consumers negotiate, accept, and resist goods' dominant meanings within rich social, global, historical, and cultural contexts.
TL;DR: Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint as mentioned in this paper, which can affect even perception.
Abstract: Hallucinations are a vivid illustration of the way culture affects our most fundamental mental experience and the way that mind is shaped both by cultural invitation and by biological constraint. The anthropological evidence suggests that there are three patterns of hallucinations: experiences in which hallucinations are rare, brief, and not distressing; hallucinations that are frequent, extended, and distressing; and hallucinations that are frequent but not distressing. The ethnographic evidence also suggests that hallucinations are shaped by learning in at least two ways. People acquire specific representations about mind from their local social world, and people (particularly in spiritual pursuits) are encouraged to train their minds (or focus their attention) in specific ways. These two kinds of learning can affect even perception, this most basic domain of mental experience. This learning-centered approach may eventually have something to teach us about the pathways and trajectories of psychotic illness.
TL;DR: A survey of work on how ritual and oratory involve coordination of action across multiple semiotic media can be found in this article, with a focus on the "poetic density" theory.
Abstract: Scholars have converged on a theory that ritual involves poetically dense figuration of macrocosmic order in microcosmic action. I illustrate this by surveying work on how ritual and oratory involve coordination of action across multiple semiotic media. I review at greater length the “poetic density” theory's interest in how ritual and oratory causally shape people's worlds, and the theory's interest in the edginess of ritual as a site of articulation between actors with disparate political positionalities. Much scholarship now examines norms of the pragmatics of sign use (not just signification's semantics, so to speak) as being of a piece with the poetic, figurational organization of ritual and oratorical processes. This turn of attention is important for understanding what it means that ritual seems to be action about the organization of action itself. A final element in ritual and oratory's poetic density surveyed here is their nesting in culturally variable ideologies of ritual and oratorical genres ...
TL;DR: This article reviewed the basic scholarship in anthropology and allied fields with a focus on language, transnationalism, poverty, segregation, undocumented status, and racialization as they structure the academic pathways of immigrant-origin youth in a variety of destinations.
Abstract: Mass migration is the human face of globalization. Where immigrant workers are summoned, families and children will follow. The great global migration wave of the past generation has generated a powerful demographic echo. Nearly all the high-income countries of the world are experiencing substantial growth in their immigrant-origin student populations. Concurrently, globalization is placing new demands on education systems the world over. As a consequence, schooling systems are facing something they never faced before: educating large and growing numbers of immigrant-origin youth to greater levels of competence and skill at a time of economic upheaval and cultural malaise. This article reviews the basic scholarship in anthropology and allied fields with a focus on language, transnationalism, poverty, segregation, undocumented status, and racialization as they structure the academic pathways of immigrant-origin youth in a variety of destinations.
TL;DR: Comparisons among human infants, bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans on both social and physical problem-solving tasks demonstrate that human infants are unique for their early emerging social cognitive skills, which facilitate participation in cultural interactions.
Abstract: The living great apes, and in particular members of the genus Pan, help test hypotheses regarding the cognitive skills of our extinct common ancestor. Research with chimpanzees suggests that we share some but not all of our abilities to model another's perspective in social interactions. Large-scale comparisons among human infants, bonobos, chimpanzees, and orangutans on both social and physical problem-solving tasks demonstrate that human infants are unique for their early emerging social cognitive skills, which facilitate participation in cultural interactions. Comparisons between bonobos and chimpanzees also reveal cognitive differences that are likely due to developmental shifts. These comparative studies suggest that our species' capabilities to assess the psychological states of others are built on those abilities that were present in our last common ape ancestor and were derived, in part, owing to shifts in cognitive ontogeny that likely account for species differences among other apes as well.
TL;DR: This paper pointed out the importance of social, political, and economic production of distress and disease as well as the structures and dynamics that produce particular patterns of access to health services among transnational migrants.
Abstract: Globalization, including the global flows of people, is clearly linked to disease transmission and vulnerability to health risks among immigrant populations. Anthropological research on transnational migration and health documents the implications of population movements for health and well-being. Studies of immigrant health reveal the importance of the social, political, and economic production of distress and disease as well as the structures and dynamics that produce particular patterns of access to health services. This review points to underlying political, economic, and social structures that produce particular patterns of health and disease among transnational migrants. Both critical and phenomenological analyses explore ideas of alterity and community, which underlie the production and management of immigrant health. Research on immigrant health underscores the importance of further attention to policies of entitlement and exclusion, which ultimately determine health vulnerabilities and accessibil...
TL;DR: Evidence that the microbes that constitute the human microbiota coevolved with humans and maintain complex community and host interactions is discussed and whether a wider approach to the study of human ancestry based on the human microbiome is now possible is examined.
Abstract: In this review, we discuss evidence that the microbes that constitute the human microbiota coevolved with humans and maintain complex community and host interactions. Because these microbes are mostly vertically transmitted, they have evolved within each human group and provide a view of human ancestry. In particular, we discuss using Helicobacter pylori as a marker of ancestry and migrations. Other organisms with more mixed vertical and horizontal transmission are not suitable to trace migrations with any fidelity. Human mixing affects microbial phylogeographic signals, and lifestyles impact the human microbiome population structure. A decade after the human genome was sequenced, we are gaining insights into the population structure of the human microbiome. We also examine whether, rather than focus on the genetics of single microbial populations, a wider approach to the study of human ancestry based on the human microbiome is now possible.
TL;DR: The concept of "indigenous archaeology" has been introduced by as mentioned in this paper, and the bulk of the paper reviews the concerns and approaches that are encompassed by it, and some of the more important consequences of such engaged archaeologies are discussed.
Abstract: Over the past 25 years the practice of archaeology has been transformed by a broader and deeper engagement with indigenous peoples around the world. Although there are real differences in the nature and consequences of such engagements in different national and local contexts, it is now more widely understood that archaeologists should recognize the significant role of archaeological heritage in the formation and maintenance of indigenous identities. This new understanding is expressed in the concept of “indigenous archaeologies,” and the bulk of the paper reviews the concerns and approaches that are encompassed by it. The concerns of indigenous archaeologies overlap with other disciplinary movements that have come into being over the same period, especially postcolonial and “engaged” archaeologies that stress the political significance of archaeological knowledge and seek to enhance its social significance. Some of the more important consequences of such engaged archaeologies are discussed, especially ne...
TL;DR: The authors explored the influential role language ideologies and practices play in transnational people-making, concentrating on orders of indexicality: the ways language creates and stratifies personae (images of people associated with patterned ways of using language).
Abstract: The ethnographic study of migration into the United States has shown that the culturally specific ways people are made into distinct and hierarchically ranked kinds are a key force organizing human movement. Among migrants, such people-making is transnational, unfolding across nation-state borders and involving encounters with regimes of social difference produced at multiple scales of interaction. This article explores the influential role language ideologies and practices play in transnational people-making, concentrating on orders of indexicality: the ways language creates and stratifies personae (images of people associated with patterned ways of using language). Orders of indexicality offer a useful way to conceptualize how regimes of social difference are generated and challenged. I examine, first, the indexical orders that erect nation-state borders, focusing on U.S. linguistic nationalism and covert racializing discourses. I then consider the scholarship on the indexical orders generated by migran...
TL;DR: The authors identified four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, oriental, absent, and poststructural, focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded.
Abstract: This essay identifies four different modes of ethnographic engagement with Palestine since the nineteenth century: biblical, Oriental, absent, and poststructural. Focusing on the epistemic and political dynamics in which the recent admissibility of Palestine as a legitimate ethnographic subject is embedded, we highlight two conditions. One is the demystification of states and hegemonic groups that control them, and the concomitant legitimacy of groups with counterclaims. The other is the “crisis of representation” in the social sciences and the humanities. Combined with the rupture in Israel's sanctity in the West since the 1980s, these developments were conducive to Palestine's admission. We conclude by considering Palestine as a problem space that could reinvigorate the critical abilities of postcolonial language and the anthropology that it engenders.
TL;DR: This article surveys the English-language literature, focused on the ex-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, with comparative references to Xinjiang, China.
Abstract: The anthropology of Central Asia provides socially situated, ethnographically grounded analyses that complicate grand narratives of post-Soviet transformations in this understudied and undertheorized region. Coalescing as a field with the sudden outsider access since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, western anthropological research in Central Asia is only beginning to contribute to current conceptual debates in anthropology. This review surveys the English-language literature, focused on the ex-Soviet republics Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, with comparative references to Xinjiang, China. Themes revolve around economic survival strategies amid upheaval, traditionalist revivals in nationalizing states, Soviet rule's peculiar productivity of culture and imaginaries, post-9/11 Islamic modalities, the nature of state power, and the importance of Cold War epistemologies in critiquing this literature. It considers fruitful future directions of research within a post–Cold War...
TL;DR: Further exploration of women's experience of menopause, as opposed to researcher-imposed definitions; macro- and microenvironmental factors, including diet and intestinal ecology; and folk etiologies involving the autonomic nervous system may lead to a deeper understanding of this stage of life history.
Abstract: Each menopausal body is the product of decades of physiological responses to an environment composed of cultural and biological factors. Anthropologists have documented population differences in reproductive endocrinology and developmental trajectories, and ethnic differences in hormones and symptoms at menopause demonstrate that this stage of life history is not exempt from this pattern. Antagonistic pleiotropy, in the form of constraints on the reproductive system, may explain the phenomenon of menopause in humans, optimizing the hormonal environment for reproduction earlier in the life course. Some menopausal symptoms may be side effects of modernizing lifestyle changes, representing discordance between our current lifestyles and genetic heritage. Further exploration of women's experience of menopause, as opposed to researcher-imposed definitions; macro- and microenvironmental factors, including diet and intestinal ecology; and folk etiologies involving the autonomic nervous system may lead to a deeper...
TL;DR: The emergence and visibility of the religious on the African and European migratory scenes are generating much debate; thus, the authors explores how scientific thought and analysis of the subject of "religion-migration" has gradually been built up in France.
Abstract: The emergence and visibility of the religious on the African and European migratory scenes are generating much debate; thus this article explores how scientific thought and analysis of the subject of “religion-migration” has gradually been built up in France. Over three decades, the developing academic debate about issues of migration, identity, then religion within migration, and migrants' religion has revealed many tensions, especially about the question of Islam and/or religious minorities within migration. Through selective review of these debates, I attempt to comprehend perceptions and research about the religion-migration scene since the 1980s. From an anthropologist's viewpoint, I also explore whether studies of African migration in France have opened the door to a new research field in terms of method and inquiry. Thus, as we observe, anthropologists studying African migrations have enabled us to reexamine the object of religion within migration and to remove it from an ethnicizing, identity-base...
TL;DR: The Balkans were the first linguistic area (Sprachbund) to be identified as such as mentioned in this paper, originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity.
Abstract: The Balkans were the first linguistic area (sprachbund) to be identified as such. The concept was originally proposed to explain diffusion among languages that were genealogically unrelated or distantly related in terms of normal linguistic change as opposed to notions of corruption and impurity. The fact that the sprachbund cannot be as neatly bounded as the traditional language family has led to some calls for abandoning the concept, but it remains a useful heuristic referring to the results of historical and social processes of language contact. Recent conflations of areal linguistics and typology miss these processes, which are themselves grounded in speaker interaction. Issues of causation in the emergence of sprachbunds involve both language shift and language maintenance, influenced by various social factors playing roles. This review examines both the history and the current state of Balkan linguistics as a part of the study of language.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore the health implications of ethnic groups also being migrant groups and explore the ways in which the biosocial heritage of migrant groups interacts over the long term with migrants' new environments.
Abstract: Most members of minority ethnic/racial groups in affluent western societies are recent immigrants or immediate descendants thereof. The health implications of ethnic groups also being migrant groups are important but often not fully explored. Research demonstrating developmental influences on the risk of type 2 diabetes and associated conditions suggests that migrants will differ in disease risk compared with the general population. It also leads us to expect intergenerational differences in disease risk within many minority ethnic/racial groups. Differences in health behaviors between ethnic/racial groups are also expected to change over time following migration, including across generations, but do not necessarily follow a simple model of acculturation. Understanding the ways in which the biosocial heritage of migrant groups interacts over the long term with migrants' new environments is central to understanding differences in disease risk that are identified as ethnic or racial and also highlights hete...