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Community forestry refers to forest management that has ecological sustainability and local community benefits as central goals, with some degree of responsibility and authority for forest management formally vested in the community. This review provides an overview of where the field of community forestry is today. We describe four case examples from the Americas: Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Bolivia. We also identify five hypotheses embedded in the concept of community forestry and examine the evidence supporting them. We conclude that community forestry holds promise as a viable approach to forest conservation and community development. Major gaps remain, however, between community forestry in theory and in practice. For example, devolution of forest management authority from states to communities has been partial and disappointing, and local control over forest management appears to have more ecological than socioeconomic benefits. We suggest ways that anthropologists can contribute to the field.

Much of the literature on the integration of science and archaeology has tended to focus on mistakes, tensions, and problems. Many scholars have also been obsessed with definitions and delineating the boundaries between varieties of archaeologist. In this article we aim to move away from this by discussing the pragmatic ways that progress has been achieved in applying scientific solutions to interpreting the past. Progress has not been dependent on overcoming supposed fundamental differences between the humanities and sciences; instead it has been based around cooperation on the vast tracts of common ground. This article highlights key arenas that encourage this process of information flow and discussion: interdisciplinary field work, new scientific techniques, new archaeological questions, and education. What is increasingly important in archaeology is how we can encourage researchers to contribute to group solutions of problems and cross outdated disciplinary boundaries.

The modern American West is one of the most contested landscapes in the world, yet anthropologists are just beginning to grapple with its dynamic political ecology. Since World War II, the West has been transformed from an overwhelmingly rural landscape dominated by extractive industries to an overwhelmingly urban landscape characterized by explosive urban, suburban, and ex-urban growth. This review surveys the literature to explore a number of interrelated topics, including (a) the changing economies of the rural West and the production and destruction of space across Western landscapes; (b) the institutional contexts of resource control on public lands; (c) ideological clashes and political maneuvering among interest groups who claim access to those lands; and (d) the struggle to move beyond polemics and dualities and mobilize, in the words of the Quivira Coalition, a "radical center" committed to "foster ecological, economic, and social health on western landscapes."

This review explores recent research within the territory of the modern Sudan and Nubia. One special interest of this region's history and archaeology lies in its role as a zone of interaction between diverse cultural traditions linking sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, the Mediterranean world, and beyond. The exceptionally early development of large-scale polities in the Middle Nile also offers remarkable opportunities for exploring the archaeology of the development of political power as well as for exploring research topics of a wide significance, both within and beyond African archaeology, such as the development of agriculture, urbanism, and metallurgy. The unique opportunities offered by the Nile corridor for trans-Saharan contacts have also ensured that the region's archaeology provides an extraordinary scope for exploring the interplay and interaction of indigenous and external cultural traditions, often very obviously manifested in the material worlds of the region: from their encounters with Pharaonic Egypt to the incorporation of Nubian kingdoms into medieval Christendom and the creation of new Arab and Muslim identities in the postmedieval world.

The genome consists of the entire DNA present in the nucleus of the fertilized embryo, which is then duplicated in every cell in the body. A draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome is now available, providing opportunities to better understand genetic contributions to human evolution, development, and disease. Sequence differences from the human genome were confirmed to be ∼1% in areas that can be precisely aligned, representing ∼35 million single base-pair differences. Some 45 million nucleotides of insertions and deletions unique to each lineage were also discovered, making the actual difference between the two genomes ∼4%. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise from this information and the need for comparison with additional species, as well as population genetic studies. Finally, we present a few examples of interesting findings resulting from genome-wide analyses, candidate gene studies, and combined approaches, emphasizing the pros and cons of each approach.

This review aims to show how the new results from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey contribute to wider theories about the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East. I argue that many of the themes found in symbolism and daily practice at Çatalhöyük occur very early in the processes of village formation and the domestication of plants and animals throughout the region. These themes include a social focus on memory construction; a symbolic focus on wild animals, violence, and death; and a central dominant role for humans in relation to the animal world. These themes occur early enough throughout the region that we can claim they are integral to the development of settled life and the domestication of plants and animals. Particularly the focus on time depth in house sequences may have been part of the suite of conditions, along with environmental and ecological factors, that "selected for" sedentism and domestication.

Critics have debated for the past decade or more whether race is dead or alive in "the new genetics": Is genomics opening up novel terrains for social identities or is it reauthorizing race? I explore the relationship between race and the new genetics by considering whether this "race" is the same scientific object as that produced by race science and whether these race-making practices are animated by similar social and political logics. I consider the styles of reasoning characteristic of the scientific work together with the economic and political rationalities of neo-liberalism, including identity politics as it meets biological citizenship. I seek to understand why and how group-based diversity emerges as an object of value—something to be studied and specified, something to be fought for and embraced, and something that is profitable—in the networks that sustain the world of (post)genomics today.

Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and communities. These studies allow for a new comparative perspective, which attends to the consequences of linguistic and social differences for the organization of social interaction. A framework for such a comparative analysis focusing on a series of generic interactional issues or "problems" (e.g., how turns are to be distributed among participants) and the way they are solved through the mobilization of local resources (grammar, social categories, etc.) is sketched. Comparative studies in conversation analysis encourage us to think of interaction in terms of generic organizations of interaction, which are inflected or torqued by the local circumstances within which they operate ( Schegloff 2006 ).

Research over the past decade has significantly advanced our understanding of the prehispanic Maya codices, both in terms of their content (i.e., hieroglyphic texts, calendrical structure, and iconography) as well as the physical documents themselves (where and when they were painted, and by whom). Recent avenues of exploration include a new emphasis on linguistic and textual analyses; novel methodologies for interpreting calendrical structure; and comparisons with other manuscript traditions, in particular those from highland central Mexico. As a result of these studies, researchers have found that some codical almanacs functioned as real-time instruments to document important astronomical events; others were used to schedule rituals as part of the 52-year calendar that guided civic and religious life in Mesoamerica during the Late Postclassic period (circa A.D. 1250 to 1520). Evidence of connections with central Mexico, documented in terms of interchange among codical scribes, suggests the need for a more thorough exploration of Maya–highland Mexican interaction during this time period.

Historical ecology is a new interdisciplinary research program concerned with comprehending temporal and spatial dimensions in the relationships of human societies to local environments and the cumulative global effects of these relationships. Historical ecology contains core postulates that concern qualitative types of human-mediated disturbance of natural environments and the effect of these on species diversity, among other parameters. A central term used in historical ecology to situate human behavior and agency in the environment is the landscape, as derived from historical geography, instead of the ecosystem, which is from systems ecology. Historical ecology is similar to nonequilibrium dynamic theory, but differs in its postulate of human-mediated disturbance as a principle of landscape transformation. Such disturbances counterintuitively may involve anthropogenic primary and secondary succession that result in net increases of alpha and even beta diversity. Applied historical ecology can supply the reference conditions of time depth and traditional knowledge to restore past landscapes.

Many of the world's natural resources are in a state of crisis. The solution to this crisis is to develop effective management institutions, but there is no consensus on what those institutions are. Some economists favor solving resource-management problems through the institution of private property; others advocate central government control; and many anthropologists see local-level management as the solution. In this review, I argue that all these governance structures fail under certain conditions. However, the factors contributing to failure in each of these institutional forms differ radically, and the causes of that failure are not always predicted on the basis of existing theory. This chapter contains a review of the literature on the factors identified as causing the failure of private-property regimes, government-controlled resources, and local-level management. We will have to learn to match the resource problems with governance institutions and specific management techniques if we are to manage resources effectively. We also will have to understand the complex biosocial factors influencing sustainability.

This review examines the persistence of chronic hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century and reviews dominant famine theories, concepts of vulnerability, and household livelihood security and responses to recent food crises in the region. The authors argue that famine occurrences are linked to historical and contemporary socioeconomic processes that have increased over time the vulnerability of African households to hunger and reduced their resilience to environmental and economic shocks, political conflict, and the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS. Approaches to famine need to move away from the "emergency relief" framework to better address the underlying conditions that make food shortages endemic. Future food security for Africa requires an integrated long-term response to household vulnerability on the part of African governments, civil society, and international partners by incorporating new technologies, local expertise, and active involvement of African communities living with the realities of recurrent famine.

This review takes two key approaches for exploring the theme of food and globalization: first, how food has been mobilized as a commodity in global production and trade systems and governed through global institutions; and second, how the idea of globalization has been nourished through food, particularly with the mobility of people and of ideas about cuisine and nutrition. Stark global inequalities are also noted, and the review calls for attention to policy-based research and to the analytical connections between governance, food politics, and food citizenship in future studies.