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Cultural Anthropology (cultural + anthropology)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences77%

Selected Abstracts

Losing Lévi-Strauss: The 2009 Year in Cultural Anthropology

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010
Jessaca Leinaweaver
ABSTRACT, In 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the age of 100. In this article, I draw on frameworks that were central to his work to structure my discussion of the key themes in cultural anthropology publications over the past year. The four subjects I consider in this review are kinship, taxonomy, bricolage, and traveling. [source]

From the Editors of Cultural Anthropology

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009
Kim Fortun
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Biological and Cultural Anthropology of a Changing Tropical Forest: A Fruitful Collaboration across Subfields

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2006
REBECCA HARDIN
In this article, we integrate approaches from biological and cultural anthropology to describe changing relationships between humans and animals in the Dzanga-Ndoki Park and Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic (CAR). Recent decades have seen a rapid proliferation of human activities, with striking tensions between logging and conservation economies. Our data suggest that certain animals and humans initially adapted successfully to these forest uses, and that local residents have crafted culturally rich new ways of living in the forest. However, our longitudinal data indicate animal declines and expanding frontiers of increasingly intensive human use. These trends are altering previous territorial arrangements and coming to undermine today's remarkably rich spectrum of human,animal encounters there. Our combined approach offers an alternative to increasingly distinct method and theory between anthropology's subfields. We sketch a research agenda for integrated anthropological attention to environmental change, especially to transformations in human,animal interactions and entanglements. [source]

Fluid Labor and Blood Money: The Economy of HIV/AIDS in Rural Central China

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 4 2006
SHAO Jing
This ethnographically grounded "epidemiology" implicates China's liberalized economy in the HIV epidemic among commercial plasma donors in rural central China. It uncovers the pathological confluence of spheres of economic circulations that have created the conditions for value to be extracted not through labor but from human plasma harvested from agricultural producers. This critique has emerged out of, and in turn informed, efforts to forestall the secondary epidemic of AIDS among donors already infected by HIV. The specific history of the production and consumption of blood products in China shows how biotechnology broadly defined can be powerfully refracted by local configurations of economy, technology, and social relations. The ideologically sustained second-order "reality" of benevolent economic imperatives needs to be brought into the critical focus of cultural anthropology. [source]

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]

Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany: The Costume Book of Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1496,1564

GENDER & HISTORY, Issue 3 2002
Gabriele MentgesArticle first published online: 11 FEB 200
This article uses the perspective of cultural anthropology to consider the construction of an early modern perception of time and its relation to the dress and personal consumption of a male subject. It focuses on a costume book from the Renaissance compiled by Matthäus Schwarz, a member of the bourgeoisie, who lived in Augsburg from 1496 to 1574. The book contains a collection of 137 drawings, portraying Schwarz's personal choice of dress. It is also an account of Schwarz's life, beginning with his parents, then covering his life,stages from birth to old age. The relationships between body and dress and between the male subject and the world run as a major thread through the book. This article shows how closely connected Schwarz's body is with the life of commodities (dress) and consumption. The life,story of this Renaissance man is expressed in terms of changing fashions, which act as his subjective measure of time. [source]

Deconstructing ,gender and development' for ,identities of women'

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 2 2007
Shweta Singh
In this article, the gender and development paradigm is critically reviewed and an alternative framework of research ,identities of women, is proposed. This article contends that the gender and development paradigm is primarily guided by the tenets of Western feminisms and economic development. The article also highlights other limitations of the paradigm, including its preoccupation with male,female inequalities, macro generalisations and symbolic representation of women and a limited inclusion of local contexts. The identities of women framework proposes to address the limitations of the gender and development paradigm by studying women's conception of their environment and women's understanding of their relationship with these environments. The identities of women framework is informed by poststructuralist critique of feminism, cultural anthropology and a socio-psychological approach to identity. [source]

Child Maltreatment in Diverse Households: Challenges to Law, Theory, and Practice

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2008
Julia Brophy
In the United Kingdom relatively little attention has been paid to ,race' and racism and the role of cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity in care proceedings. This paper will look at the background, law, and guidance on diversity in this field and explore the impact of notions of diversity in evidence before the courts. It will look at their relevance in allegations of 'significant harm' to children and failures of parenting, and the coverage of diverse backgrounds in expert reports and parents' statements. It will argue that while there is no evidence that the threshold criteria for a care order require reassessing, there is room for considerable improvement in attention to issues of diversity in evidence and in the experiences of parents attending court. The paper will explore the implications of the studies for theorizing law and the duties of the state and look at notions such as cultural relativism and concepts imported from cultural anthropology for determining culturally acceptable parenting. It will highlight problems with these approaches and demonstrate why ,paradigms of intersectionality' is a more useful and robust approach. [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]

Biological and Cultural Anthropology of a Changing Tropical Forest: A Fruitful Collaboration across Subfields

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 2 2006
REBECCA HARDIN
In this article, we integrate approaches from biological and cultural anthropology to describe changing relationships between humans and animals in the Dzanga-Ndoki Park and Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve (RDS), Central African Republic (CAR). Recent decades have seen a rapid proliferation of human activities, with striking tensions between logging and conservation economies. Our data suggest that certain animals and humans initially adapted successfully to these forest uses, and that local residents have crafted culturally rich new ways of living in the forest. However, our longitudinal data indicate animal declines and expanding frontiers of increasingly intensive human use. These trends are altering previous territorial arrangements and coming to undermine today's remarkably rich spectrum of human,animal encounters there. Our combined approach offers an alternative to increasingly distinct method and theory between anthropology's subfields. We sketch a research agenda for integrated anthropological attention to environmental change, especially to transformations in human,animal interactions and entanglements. [source]

Suffering in a productive world: Chronic illness, visibility, and the space beyond agency

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010
M. CAMERON HAY
ABSTRACT Is coping with illness really a matter of agency? Drawing on ethnographic research among people with rheumatological and neurological chronic diseases in the United States, I argue that patients' coping strategies were informed by a cultural expectation of productivity that I call the "John Wayne Model," indexing disease as something to be worked through and controlled. People able to adopt a John Wayne,like approach experienced social approval. Yet some people found this cultural model impossible to utilize and experienced their lack of agency in the face of illness as increasing their suffering, which was made all the worse if their sickness was invisible to others. Unable to follow the culturally legitimated John Wayne model, people fell into what I call the "Cultured Response",the realm beyond the agency embedded in cultural models, in which people do not resist but embrace as ideal the cultural expectations they cannot meet and that oppress their sense of value in the world. [suffering, cultural models, agency, chronic illness, United States, cultural anthropology, medical anthropology] [source]

The Rigidity and Comfort of Habits: A Cultural and Philosophical Analysis of the Ups and Downs of Mainstreaming Evaluation

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR EVALUATION, Issue 99 2003
Nancy Grudens-Schuck
Mainstreaming evaluation requires establishing aesthetic and ethical frameworks, as well as developing knowledge and skills that make "doing evaluation" seem like the right thing. Mainstreaming, however, can pose challenges to good evaluation practice; a view from cultural anthropology suggests that evaluation can have distinct meanings in different settings. Stories from program evaluation research in Indonesia illustrate the ways comforts and rigidities associated with mainstreamed evaluation processes may hinder high-quality evaluation. [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]

Capitalism as culture, and economy1

THE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
Diane Austin-Broos
Contemporary cultural anthropology has been marked by its distance from the analysis of economy. I argue that anthropology as a discipline has suffered from this distance and suggest a form in which these interests can be reconciled for the purposes of ethnographic research. The discussion is divided into three sections. In the first, I trace the ,disappearing' of economy from cultural anthropology. In the second, I propose a schema for bringing economy back. This schema involves adopting a phenomenology of the subject that relies on notions of value drawn from Appadurai and from Heidegger and Marx. Finally, I instance two examples of this schema in my own ethnographic research. One concerns Central Australia and pertains to recent debates about remote indigenous life. The other concerns Kingston Jamaica and references debates about gender, sex and dancehall. Both milieux involve types of change and violence that can bear on modern subjects. My suggestion is that anthropology will address these issues in more interesting ways if economy becomes a part of ethnographic analysis. [source]

The objects of evidence

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2008
Matthew Engelke
By and large, anthropology's reflections on the concept of evidence have been couched within other discussions , on truth, knowledge, and related concerns. This essay, which introduces the special issue, makes the case that evidence deserves more considered attention in its own right. Drawing on the small but growing body of literature in social and cultural anthropology that does address questions of evidence, I situate the articles here in relation to several anthropological conversations, suggesting in the process how an exploration of evidence can shed light on three key issues: anthropology's standards of judgement, the potentials within interdisciplinary collaboration, and the benefits of a public anthropology. Résumé De manière générale, les réflexions de l'anthropologie sur le concept de preuve ont été imbriquées dans d'autres discussions concernant la vérité, la connaissance et d'autres questions connexes. En ouverture de ce numéro spécial, le présent essai avance que la preuve mériterait une attention plus spécifique pour elle-même. À partir d'un corpus restreint mais grandissant d'études en anthropologie culturelle et sociale consacrées à la question de la preuve, l'auteur situe les articles réunis ici par rapport à plusieurs conversations anthropologiques, en suggérant comment une exploration de la preuve peut faire la lumière sur trois grandes questions : les critères de jugement de l'anthropologie, les possibilités offertes par une collaboration interdisciplinaire et les avantages d'une anthropologie publique. [source]

Evolutionism in cultural anthropology: a critical history , Robert L. Carneiro

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2006
David Riches
[source]