Showing papers on "Biological anthropology published in 1990"

Skeletal biological distance studies in American Physical Anthropology: Recent trends

Abstract: Biological distance analysis, the dominant type of skeletal biological research during the 19th century, has become less visible in recent years. Although the proportion of American Journal of Physical Anthropology articles and published abstracts focusing on biodistance has remained fairly constant over the three decades between 1955 and 1985, the proportion of biodistance contributions relative to other skeletal biology studies has decreased. Emphasis in skeletal biology has shifted from the analysis of biological variation to investigations of health and diet, and within biodistance studies methodological issues have assumed prominence over purely analytical approaches. This paper investigates trends in biological distance analysis through a survey of articles and meetings abstracts published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology from 1955 to 1985. The survey provides the historical context for five symposium papers on skeletal biological distance presented at the 1986 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Bones, bodies, behavior : essays on biological anthropology

Abstract: "History of Anthropology" is a series of annual volumes, inaugurated in 1983, each broadly unified around a theme of major importance to both the history and the present practice of anthropological inquiry. "Bones, Bodies, Behavior," the fifth in the series, treats a number of issues relating to the history of biological or physical anthropology: the application of the "race" idea to humankind, the comparison of animals minds to those of humans, the evolution of humans from primate forms, and the relation of science to racial ideology. Following an introductory overview of biological anthropology in Western tradition, the seven essays focus on a series of particular historical episodes from 1830 to 1980: the emergence of the race idea in restoration France, the comparative psychological thought of the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, the archeological background of the forgery of the remains "discovered" at Piltdown in 1912, their impact on paleoanthropology in the interwar period, the background and development of physical anthropology in Nazi Germany, and the attempts of Franx Boas and others to organize a consensus against racialism among British and American scientists in the late 1930s. The volume concludes with a provocative essay on physical anthropology and primate studies in the United States in the years since such a consensus was established by the UNESCO "Statements on Race" of 1950 and 1951. Bringing together the contributions of a physical anthropologist (Frank Spencer), a historical sociologist (Michael Hammond), and a number of historians of science (Elazar Barkan, Claude Blanckaert, Donna Haraway, Robert Proctor, and Marc Swetlitz), this volume will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers interested in the place of biological assumptions in the modern anthropological tradition, in the biological bases of human behavior, in racial ideologies, and in the development of the modern human sciences.

Anthropological Issues in Biological Gerontology

Abstract: Biological anthropologists have contributed substantially to the development of growth standards and measures of biological age. They have also examined morphological and physiological variation and change during adulthood. Nevertheless, relatively little research has focused on the later stages of human life.

Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture

Abstract: DURING THE FIRST THIRD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AMERICAN anthropology was dominated by the work and ideas of Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students. Trained in Germany as a physicist, Boas developed an interest in the relationship between human perception and the natural world, an interest that led him to geography and finally to ethnology. After geographical and ethnological research in Baffinland (1883) and British Columbia (1886), Boas emigrated to America. An outsider to professional ethnology, Boas mounted a devastating critique of the discipline's racialistic and evolutionary assumptions, culminating in 1911 with major publications in physical anthropology, linguistics, and ethnology. Boas's scholarship was shaped by nineteenth-century German historicism and materialism, romanticism and liberalism; the thrust of his anthropological critique led towards twentieth-century cultural relativism.' Boas established himself in American anthropology at a time when the discipline was moving out of museums and into the academy. From his base at Columbia University, Boas trained most of the important anthropologists of the next two generations, many of whom found

Japanese anthropological research on Africa

Abstract: Contemporary scholarship on Africa by Japanese anthropologists is vital, diverse, and expanding. This brief review surveys the development of anthropological research on Africa by Japanese scholars and is followed by a compilation of Japanese publications on Africa in English and French. Although some observations about Japanese anthropological research in Africa will be offered, the goal is primarily to inform American Africanists of this Japanese scholarship and the contexts within which it has developed rather than to attempt a critical appraisal. It is not commonly known among western scholars that anthropology was formally established in Japan over one hundred years ago. The Anthropological Society of Tokyo (now the Anthropological Society of Japan) was established in 1884 by Shogoro Tsuboi, and two years later its journal Zinruigaku Zassi was first published. In 1893 Tsuboi was appointed the first professor of anthropology at the University of Tokyo. The Linguistic Society of Japan was formed in 1896 (although linguistics had been taught at the University of Tokyo for a decade), the same year that the Archaeology Society of Japan was established. As Takao Sofue notes, because anthropology at the University of Tokyo developed primarily as physical anthropology, ethnology (only termed cultural anthropology after World War II) emerged later and with the influence of Japanese folklorists (1962: 173-75; see also Yamaguchi and Nagashima, 1987). An informal group of scholars began meeting in 1928. Their name, the APE Circle (standing for Anthropology, Prehistory, and Ethnology), represented their desire to pursue a broader study of humans. In 1934 they formally created the Japanese Society of Ethnology and their journal Minzokugaku kenkyu appeared in the following year. The Folklore Society of Japan also was established in 1935.