Cultural anthropology and evolutionary biology arose around the same time, and both adopted the same evolutionist framework. Their paths soon diverged, however, largely because anthropology rejected the notion of evolutionary progress—and thus the notion of the existence of primitive versus advanced races—before evolutionary biology did. Most anthropologists subsequently rejected all evolutionary interpretations of ethnographic patterns and thus all biological influences on human behavior. Most evolutionary biologists until recently ignored the massive role of culture in guiding human behavior. Promising recent work suggests that important new insights emerge when evolutionary and cultural influences on behavior and society are integrated. The success of these new approaches indicates that the presence of a similar mental substrate everywhere produces a non-trivial level of predictability and thus convergence in cultural evolution. Future work along these lines should therefore yield novel insights in how humans respond to changing subsistence or institutional arrangements.
{"title":"Cultural anthropology’s love-hate relationship with evolution: what will the future bring?","authors":"Van Schaik, P. Carel","doi":"10.5167/UZH-192455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-192455","url":null,"abstract":"Cultural anthropology and evolutionary biology arose around the same time, and both adopted the same evolutionist framework. Their paths soon diverged, however, largely because anthropology rejected the notion of evolutionary progress—and thus the notion of the existence of primitive versus advanced races—before evolutionary biology did. Most anthropologists subsequently rejected all evolutionary interpretations of ethnographic patterns and thus all biological influences on human behavior. Most evolutionary biologists until recently ignored the massive role of culture in guiding human behavior. Promising recent work suggests that important new insights emerge when evolutionary and cultural influences on behavior and society are integrated. The success of these new approaches indicates that the presence of a similar mental substrate everywhere produces a non-trivial level of predictability and thus convergence in cultural evolution. Future work along these lines should therefore yield novel insights in how humans respond to changing subsistence or institutional arrangements.","PeriodicalId":29951,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie","volume":"42 1","pages":"77-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77257466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
More than 30 years after the “Wende” [the “Turn”], a review of the social anthropology and eth-nographic museums of the GRD and FRG as parallel, contemporaneous, closely entangled and yet equally “system competing” disciplines and research groups is long overdue. For, after the “post-Wende-era” – as a still rather blurred transition period of relative curiosity about each other and emerging opportunities – the current acute ignorance about the GDR is all too obvious. It has resulted in a new sovereignty of interpretation about the discipline having become commonplace, one which knows very little about the institutions, publications and achievements, and which ignores witnesses from the time. Cold War figures of speech of times about “the east” are reproduced without thought, whereas archival research, knowledge about the GDR and FRG’s scientific landscapes, of the science policies and the actors and actresses at in-stitutes and museums, and therewith competences of understanding publications and exhibitions and the remaining academic potentials, would shed new light on social anthropology’s theory and research lines. The authors aim – along the counterfactual question of which social anthropologies could have encoun-tered each other in 1989 – to undertake a positioning of the ethnographic institutes and museums in their contemporaneous parallelisms, which acknowledges today’s simultaneity of disciplinary and museum competences, and which keeps it visible for future researchers, as well as for projects and debates today.
{"title":"Museum, materielle Kultur und Universität. Überlegungen zur Parallelität und Zeitgenossenschaft der DDR / BRD-Ethnologien im Hinblick auf eine Standortbestimmung mit Zukunftsaussichten","authors":"Mareile Flitsch, K. Noack","doi":"10.5167/UZH-194130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5167/UZH-194130","url":null,"abstract":"More than 30 years after the “Wende” [the “Turn”], a review of the social anthropology and eth-nographic museums of the GRD and FRG as parallel, contemporaneous, closely entangled and yet equally “system competing” disciplines and research groups is long overdue. For, after the “post-Wende-era” – as a still rather blurred transition period of relative curiosity about each other and emerging opportunities – the current acute ignorance about the GDR is all too obvious. It has resulted in a new sovereignty of interpretation about the discipline having become commonplace, one which knows very little about the institutions, publications and achievements, and which ignores witnesses from the time. Cold War figures of speech of times about “the east” are reproduced without thought, whereas archival research, knowledge about the GDR and FRG’s scientific landscapes, of the science policies and the actors and actresses at in-stitutes and museums, and therewith competences of understanding publications and exhibitions and the remaining academic potentials, would shed new light on social anthropology’s theory and research lines. The authors aim – along the counterfactual question of which social anthropologies could have encoun-tered each other in 1989 – to undertake a positioning of the ethnographic institutes and museums in their contemporaneous parallelisms, which acknowledges today’s simultaneity of disciplinary and museum competences, and which keeps it visible for future researchers, as well as for projects and debates today.","PeriodicalId":29951,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie","volume":"4 1","pages":"163-198"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78729444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"„Ground work“ und „paper work“ : Feldzugang bei Polizeiorganisationen in Westafrika","authors":"M. Göpfert, J. Beek","doi":"10.2307/41941013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/41941013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29951,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie","volume":"164 1","pages":"189-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77507662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Ouldeme and the Platha are two traditional farming communities of northern Cameroon. During the A.'s field work between 1990 and 1991, both groups in this semi-arid zone faced an environmental crisis and food shortages which cannot be explained by neo-Malthusian theory. He offers explanations that are influenced by the new institutional economics and anthropology and focuses on the various changes during colonial and post-colonial times. These include the monetarisation of social relationships as well as changes in traditional institutions of land use, traditional management of the harvest, and restricted beer production. There are also changes in rules concerning land use. Neglecting to maintain terraced fields under rent for one year and terraced fields in mortgage because of insecure land tenure seems to be one of the major changes leading to soil erosion. The A. explains how different gender and age-specific individual strategies of adaptation to monetarisation, that give short-term pay-offs, lead to environmental degradation and food insecurity in the long run, and change traditional institutions that once helped people to use the resources in a more sustainable way.
{"title":"Bodendegradierung und Ernährungskrise bei den Ouldeme und Platha. Umwelt- und Ernährungsprobleme bei zwei Feldbauerngruppen in den Mandarabergen Nord- Kameruns: Eine Folge der Adaptation an Monetarisierung und Wandel traditioneller institutioneller Rahmenbedingungen","authors":"T. Haller","doi":"10.7892/BORIS.52830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7892/BORIS.52830","url":null,"abstract":"The Ouldeme and the Platha are two traditional farming communities of northern Cameroon. During the A.'s field work between 1990 and 1991, both groups in this semi-arid zone faced an environmental crisis and food shortages which cannot be explained by neo-Malthusian theory. He offers explanations that are influenced by the new institutional economics and anthropology and focuses on the various changes during colonial and post-colonial times. These include the monetarisation of social relationships as well as changes in traditional institutions of land use, traditional management of the harvest, and restricted beer production. There are also changes in rules concerning land use. Neglecting to maintain terraced fields under rent for one year and terraced fields in mortgage because of insecure land tenure seems to be one of the major changes leading to soil erosion. The A. explains how different gender and age-specific individual strategies of adaptation to monetarisation, that give short-term pay-offs, lead to environmental degradation and food insecurity in the long run, and change traditional institutions that once helped people to use the resources in a more sustainable way.","PeriodicalId":29951,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie","volume":"7 1","pages":"335-354"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"1999-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85477158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"[The highest age among peoples of all continents according to material from the Human Relations Area Files].","authors":"T Weinert","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29951,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift Fur Ethnologie","volume":"106 1-2","pages":"51-91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"1981-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"22024723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}