Suchergebnisse

AbstractFeminist anthropology offers conceptual and methodological clarity to the study of backlash, a phenomenon made salient once more by the global conservative turn of the 2010s. As contemporary crises of social reproduction have, once again, focused majoritarian angst and anger on women, queer people, immigrants, and people of color, scholars have returned (again) to discuss backlash. Critically, feminist anthropology can move past media narratives of backlash, which often emphasize the emotional habits of backlash perpetrators, to understand how backlash operates as a specific mode of power through the experiences of its targets. This keyword entry joins recent retheorizations in conceiving backlash not as a reactive event but rather as an elaboration of the ongoing logics of structural oppression. Critically examining media and scholarly analyses of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's election and rise of the extreme right in Brazil as its case study, this entry examines how fieldwork‐based approaches offer expanded theoretical purchase on the backlash concept.

Political anthropologists and ethnographers often address the limits to citizen power, in terms of the material and symbolic barriers ordinary people encounter in their attempts to have a say in the rule of the state. Victor Albert's recent book, The Limits of Citizen Power: Participatory Entanglements and the State (Pluto Press) invites readers to consider the question from a different perspective. The limits of citizen power suggest not opposition or suppression of the people from an external force, but rather an internal limit of citizenship, one that may be immanent to citizenship itself as a social form.

The Trouble with Twin Studies questions popular genetic explanations of human behavioral differences based upon the existing body of twin research. Psychologist Jay Joseph outlines the fallacies of twin studies in the context of the ongoing decades-long failure to discover genes for human behavioral differences, including IQ, personality, and the major psychiatric disorders. This volume critically examines twin research, with a special emphasis on reared-apart twin studies, and incorporates new and updated perspectives, analyses, arguments, and evidence.

In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. and colleagues published the widely cited 1990 "Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart" (MISTRA) Science IQ study. To arrive at the conclusion that "IQ is strongly affected by genetic factors," Bouchard and colleagues omitted their control group reared-apart dizygotic twin (DZA) IQ score correlations. Near-full-sample correlations published after the study's 2000 end point show that the reared-apart monozygotic twin (MZA) and DZA group IQ correlations did not differ at a statistically significant level, suggesting that the study failed the first step in determining that IQ scores are influenced by heredity. After bypassing the model-fitting technique they used in most non-IQ MISTRA studies, the researchers assumed that the MZA group IQ score correlation alone "directly estimates heritability." This method was based on unsupported assumptions by the researchers, and they largely overlooked the confounding influence of cohort effects. Bouchard and colleagues then decided to count most environmental influences they did recognize as genetic influences. I conclude that the MISTRA IQ study failed to discover genetic influences on IQ scores and cognitive ability across the studied population, and that the study should be evaluated in the context of psychology's replication problem.

Mental health textbooks sometimes provide inaccurate information, typically supporting common beliefs in the field. Psychiatry and psychology textbooks' discussion of the schizophrenia adoption studies is examined. Particular attention is paid to the earlier studies, which helped pave the way for the current widespread acceptance of the importance of genetic factors influencing psychological trait differences. This article compares the accounts of 30 textbooks to the original studies they reviewed. Generally, problems with these textbooks' accounts include (1) the failure to critically assess the original researchers' methods and conclusions, (2) some textbooks' reliance on secondary sources, (3) the failure to discuss published critiques of the schizophrenia adoption studies, (4) inaccuracy in reporting the original findings, (5) the claim that studies finding nonsignificant results support the genetic position, and (6) a failure to discuss the potentially invalidating environmental confounds in the schizophrenia adoption studies (through the selective placement of adoptees). It is concluded that, in general, these textbooks have served to rubber-stamp mainstream psychiatry's questionable claims about the schizophrenia adoption studies at the expense of a thorough critical analysis.