Suchergebnisse

While valuable, the discourse of language rights neglects language use in cultural, social, and historical contexts. This article examines some implications of that neglect, especially vis‐a‐vis small‐scale, indigenous, "oral" societies. Drawing principally on Hopi examples, I argue that language rights discourse rests on a reflexivization of language and culture enhanced by globalism. Now reified, language becomes an allegory of ethnic identity. Preexisting sociolinguistic sensibilities get repositioned, for example, in Native Americancommunities in which language has hitherto been deployed as a technique of privacy and sovereignty, language rights ideology islogocentric and presumes a democratic, secular space of language use, conflicting with both privacy and performativity in Native linguisticvalues. And some linguistic usage reinforces social inequality, both transnationally and group‐internally: Here, language rights contradict other human rights. Language rights discourse also requires anthropology to rethink its recent antipathy to the culture concept and to treat language and culture objectively. [Keywords: language rights, sociolinguistic values, sovereignty, logocentrism, globalism]

Because humans are the product of our evolutionary past, learning how we evolved is fundamental to all anthropological investigations. We now realize that reconstructing why unique human attributes evolved requires an understanding of our starting point, but this is a relatively recent perspective. One hundred years ago, the question of human origins was identical to that of hominin origins. Accepting Australopithecus into human ancestry, coupled with the modern synthesis of evolution, led anthropologists to consider humans as products of natural selection. They realized that increased intelligence did not initially distinguish our lineage, and that early hominins were apelike in many ways. Australopithecus brought bipedalityr and brain expansion came with Homo. Because the human mind and behavior are products of evolution, we must reconstruct the selective pressures that shaped our lineage in order to understand ourselves today. Paleoanthropology, as with all anthropology, is becoming ever more question oriented, drawing on many areas of inquiry. [Keywords: human origins, human evolution, history, data, theory]

Human biology seeks to understand human variation and the biological, environmental, social, and historical influences on that variation. Views of the nature of both variation and environment have changed during the past 100 years. Typological approaches to nature and human diversity shifted to an evolutionary perspective during the first half of the 20th century. In the second half, widespread human biological variation was documented and interpreted in terms of adaptation to the environment. Environmental physiology and reproductive ecology continue to document environmental influences on human biological functioning, but with (1) an expanded concept of environment that acknowledges more fully the interactions among its physical, biotic, and social aspects and (2) an expanded theoretical basis, drawing on evolutionary ecology and life history theory, acknowledging tradeoffs and changing constraints and opportunities over the lifetime. Human biology gains from greater interaction with other fields, such as political ecology, but also contributes to them. [Keywords: biological anthropology, human ecology, adaptation, environmental physiology, reproductive ecology]

We present a review of the history of scientific inquiry into modern human origins, focusing on the role of the American Anthropologist. We begin during the mid–20th century, at the time when the problem of modern human origins was first presented in the American Anthropologist and could first be distinguished from more general questions about human and hominid origins. Next, we discuss the effects of the modern evolutionary synthesis on biological anthropology and paleoanthropology in particular, and its role in the origin of anthropological genetics. The rise of human genetics is discussed along two tracks, which have taken starkly different approaches to the historical interpretation of recent human diversity. We cover varying paleoanthropological interpretations, including paleoanthropologists' reactions to genetic interpretations. We hope to identify some of the crucial inflection points in which the debate went astray, to rectify some of the points of misunderstanding among current scientists, and to clarify the likely path ahead. [Keywords: multiregional evolution, recent African origin, bottleneck, polygenism, race]

This article deals with the topic of the open interview as a field method in Anthropology. The author explores the advantages and also the limits of the tecnique by comparing two different fieldworks: one carried out among the Spanish people who converts to Islam, between 1998 and 2001, and the other among the Argentinian exiles to Spain during the military rule in Argentina, which was carried out between 1986 and 1999. ; El artículo está dedicado a explorar el tema de la entrevista dirigida desde una perspectiva comparativa; ya que contrasta las dificultades y los problemas surgidos en el empleo de esta estrategia metodológica en un trabajo de campo realizado entre los conversos españoles al Islam (1998-2001), con un trabajo de campo anterior (1986 y 1989), con exiliados argentinos a España durante la dictadura militar en su país. El análisis comparativo permite extraer una serie de conclusiones acerca del alcance del empleo de esta metodología antropológica.

This article deals with the topic of the open interview as a field method in Anthropology. The author explores the advantages and also the limits of the tecnique by comparing two different fieldworks: one carried out among the Spanish people who converts to Islam, between 1998 and 2001, and the other among the Argentinian exiles to Spain during the military rule in Argentina, which was carried out between 1986 and 1999. ; El artículo está dedicado a explorar el tema de la entrevista dirigida desde una perspectiva comparativa; ya que contrasta las dificultades y los problemas surgidos en el empleo de esta estrategia metodológica en un trabajo de campo realizado entre los conversos españoles al Islam (1998-2001), con un trabajo de campo anterior (1986 y 1989), con exiliados argentinos a España durante la dictadura militar en su país. El análisis comparativo permite extraer una serie de conclusiones acerca del alcance del empleo de esta metodología antropológica.

The notion of the unconscious is central to Freudian theory, and is at the same time dependent on a network of other concepts and assumptions. The theory as a whole is best understood as a historical anthropology, in the double sense that it reflects a historical transformation of the human condition and that its frame of reference is embedded in the cultural universe of a historical epoch. A critical reconstruction of the psychoanalytical project, now urgently needed, therefore faces a double task: it must confront new experiences and developments which have changed the structures of human subjectivity and being-in-the-world, and it must involve a thoroughgoing examination of the conceptual blockages and imbalances built into Freud's successive systems. Both the 20th-century history of psychoanalysis and the new critical perspectives must be situated in the context of a long-term process of individualization; but they also reflect changing perceptions and interpretations of otherness, internal as well as external, and are, in that regard, related to the transformations of art and religion.

As anthropology turns toward the cultural issues of the 21 st century, more and more ethnographic fieldwork is and will continue to be conducted in regions fraught with conflict, instability, and terror. Despite a growing literature that seeks to develop new theories and perspectives for the study of violence, little mention is made of the practical matters of survival in perilous field sites and how the anthropologist's experience of violence in the field should be considered. What is needed is a pragmatic strategy for dealing with threats to the safety, security, and well‐being of anthropologists and informants who work amid the menace of violence. Drawing on my own fieldwork in Haiti, I suggest the adoption of new tactics for ethnographic research and survival in dangerous fields—strategies that challenge the conventional ethics of the discipline, reconfigure the relationship between anthropologist and informant, and compel innovation in negotiating the exchange of data under hazardous circumstances. [Keywords: fieldwork, violence, methodology, ethics, Haiti]

This article documents, and seeks to explain, the geographical patterning in ethnic group distributions. Some areas, chiefly equatorial regions and areas of high habitat diversity, are crowded with a large number of named groups. Elsewhere, people over a large area consider themselves members of a single group. Using three new codes for the Standard Cross‐Cultural Sample (ethnic diversity, habitat diversity, and rainfall variation), I show that regions with relatively few ethnic groups (low ethnic diversity) have unpredictable and highly variable climates and low pathogen loads. In most areas there was no relationship between ethnic diversity and ecosystem productivity, and there was little or none with the chief determinants of productivity, mean annual rainfall and temperature. Habitat diversity was also associated with ethnic diversity, particularly among nonstratified societies. Habitat diversity is correlated with degree of topographic relief, but the effect of habitat diversity on ethnic diversity is larger than, and independent of, the effect of topography. [ethnic diversity, ecological anthropology, spatial organization, cross‐cultural research]

For political scientists studying the Middle East, the invitation to
discuss the possible relevance of their work to comparative politics
in general is a welcome and rare opportunity. There is, one senses,
a gap between the Middle East political science community and the
mainstream disciplinary generalists. To the extent that they even
care about being part of the field, some Middle East political
scientists feel ghettoized—their region and their work are ignored.
Some feel as well that mainstream comparative politics theorizing
has not offered much toward better understanding to Middle East
politics. Such concerns motivated the establishment of the
Conference Group on the Middle East, which organizes sessions in
conjunction with, yet separate from, the main program at the APSA
Annual Meeting. It is noteworthy that some of the most imaginative
recent work on Middle East politics draws from anthropology,
political economy, social history, and critical cultural and
literary theory. "The Middle East political science community" is
not populated exclusively by political scientists.

A colleague of Roland Barthes at the CNRS in the 1950s and cowriter and friend of Cornelius Castoriadis until the latter's death, Edgar Morin has until recently been too little known in the English-speaking world. In an oeuvre that spans half a century, attempting to combine in ongoing dialogue the `humanities' and `sciences', Morin has written on scientific method, fundamental anthropology, politics, contemporary life and popular culture. He is an advocate of `complex' thought, thought which does not reduce, rationalize and mutilate phenomena under examination, which emphasizes the interaction between researcher and researched, and participation as a way of being in the world. This article particularly focuses on his work on death and cinema, suggesting a strong continuity between his early studies and his more recent writing on complexity and ecology. The radically democratic complexion of Morin's writings, his emphasis on a human empathy that can incorporate notions of unity and difference, make him a thinker of great relevance for today.