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Cultural Anthropologists (cultural + anthropologist)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

The adaptive nature of culture

EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2003
Article first published online: 19 MAY 200, Michael S. Alvard
Abstract Some have argued that the major contribution of anthropology to science is the concept of culture. Until very recently, however, evolutionary anthropologists have largely ignored culture as a topic of study. This is perhaps because of the strange bedfellows they would have to maintain. Historically, anthropologists who claimed the focus of cultural anthropology tended to be anti-science, anti-biology, or both. Paradoxically, a segment of current mainstream cultural anthropology has more or less abandoned culture as a topic. It is particularly ironic that in spite of a growing awareness among evolutionary anthropologists that culture is critical for understanding the human condition, the topic of culture has fallen out of favor among many "cultural" anthropologists. 1,2 [source]

Giving Birth to Gonolia: "Culture" and Sexually Transmitted Disease among the Huli of Papua New Guinea

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2002
Holly Wardlow
The "culture concept" has been challenged on a number of fronts, both by medical anthropologists researching AIDS and in the discipline of cultural anthropology more generally. Medical anthropologists have argued against the "etiologization" of culture, and cultural anthropologists have taken issue with the tendency to treat beliefs and practices as static and seamlessly shared. Using the narrative of one Huli woman's shifting explanation of a diagnosis of syphilis, this article argues that, rather than avoid the notion of culture, we should strive for representations that demonstrate how individuals use discourses in expedient, ad hoc, and yet deeply felt ways. This article also argues for the importance of a sociology of knowledge approach to understanding local notions of etiology. The woman's understanding of her situation was strongly influenced by her entry into a new "community" of women who had similarly been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease. [Papua New Guinea, sexually transmitted disease, gender, etiology] [source]

Resolving the Anti-Antievolutionism Dilemma: A Brief for Relational Evolutionary Thinking in Anthropology

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009
Emily Schultz
ABSTRACT Anthropologists often disagree about whether, or in what ways, anthropology is "evolutionary." Anthropologists defending accounts of primate or human biological development and evolution that conflict with mainstream "neo-Darwinian" thinking have sometimes been called "creationists" or have been accused of being "antiscience." As a result, many cultural anthropologists struggle with an "anti-antievolutionism" dilemma: they are more comfortable opposing the critics of evolutionary biology, broadly conceived, than they are defending mainstream evolutionary views with which they disagree. Evolutionary theory, however, comes in many forms. Relational evolutionary approaches such as Developmental Systems Theory, niche construction, and autopoiesis,natural drift augment mainstream evolutionary thinking in ways that should prove attractive to many anthropologists who wish to affirm evolution but are dissatisfied with current "neo-Darwinian" hegemony. Relational evolutionary thinking moves evolutionary discussion away from reductionism and sterile nature,nurture debates and promises to enable fresh approaches to a range of problems across the subfields of anthropology. [Keywords: evolutionary anthropology, Developmental Systems Theory, niche construction, autopoeisis, natural drift] [source]

A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2009
TIMOTHY K. CHOY
ABSTRACT Experiments in collaboration open new investigative possibilities for cultural anthropologists. In this report, we use our research on matsutake mushrooms to show the promise of collaborative experiments for ethnographers of scale making, global connection, and human,nonhuman relations. Anna Tsing introduces. Mogu Mogu (Timothy Choy and Shiho Satsuka) argue that the mushroomic figure of mycorrhizal life illuminates workings of capital and power, nature and culture. Lieba Faier examines contingency,through the effect of weather and bugs on matsutake production,as a form of self-positioning that emerges from local understandings of connection. Michael Hathaway uses postcolonial science studies to examine the transnational production, flow, and transformation of scientific knowledge about matsutake. Miyako Inoue discusses the anthropological subject that emerges through the kind of collaboration envisioned and practiced by the Matsutake Worlds Research Group. [collaboration, postcolonial science studies, multisited ethnography, naturecultures, contingency, knowledge production] [source]

Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational Consumer Marketing

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2000
Kalman Applbaum
In this article, I explore the strategic practices and cultural theories of marketing managers in three U.S.-based transnational corporations (TNCs) as seek to meaningfully direct their products across national borders. While cultural anthropologists have lately focused on local adaptation and appropriation of TNCs' products to local meanings, the reverse process by which TNCs co-opt local meanings to a universalizing evolutionary paradigm,in what they have come to regard as a consumption-led new global order,has not been examined. Globalization is explored as a key cultural concept driving marketing managers' practices,the myth and charter behind large TNC border crossings. [consumer marketing, globalization, transnational corporations, United States] [source]