Biological anthropology

About: Biological anthropology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1126 publications have been published within this topic receiving 12757 citations. The topic is also known as: biological anthropology & somatology.

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.

What Is Science in Anthropology

Abstract: The governing documents of the American Anthropological Association repeatedly refer to anthropology as a “science.” What does science mean in this context? And is it true that anthropology is a “science”? These are questions with which anthropologists have wrestled for generations, yet no clear answer has emerged. That these questions are still important was demonstrated following the 2010 AAA annual meeting. The executive board removed the word science from the association’s long-range plan and sparked a brief, though widely publicized, controversy. The important point is that if members of the AAA did not find “science” in anthropology important, the changes to the long-range plan would not have been controversial. Earlier discussions of science in anthropology suggest that anthropologists have always been confused about what science means in the context of anthropology. Leslie White (1949:3–7), for example, defined anthropological science as “sciencing”; that is, what people who call themselves anthropological scientists do. Although this idea seems almost prophetic of contemporary understandings of science, it is not a particularly useful definition. Eric Wolf (1964:13) provided a similarly ineffectual definition: “Anthropology is both a natural science, concerned with the organization and function of matter, and a humanistic discipline, concerned with the organization and function of mind.” Psychologists might argue that the organization and function of mind is a scientific concern, and there are certainly those in fields such as environmental ethics who would see a concern with the organization and function of matter as an obviously humanistic one. Marvin Harris (1979:27) defined science in anthropology as “an epistemology which seeks to restrict fields of inquiry to events, entities, and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logicoempirical,