Pub Date : 2014-07-01DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.937668
M. Harkin
Few disciplines are as self-conscious of their own origins and history as is anthropology. Richard Pace describes how many of us are recruited into becoming historians of anthropology: invitations to write entries or essays for projects such as encyclopedias, Festschrifts, and edited volumes. As a practitioner in a ‘‘classic’’ culture area, the Northwest Coast, I was obliged early on to reckon with the legacy of Franz Boas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frederica De Laguna, and other seminal figures, beyond their engagements with Northwest Coast cultures (e.g., Harkin 2009, 2014). Surely one figure responsible more than most for this ‘‘historical turn’’ in anthropology was the great historian George Stocking. I was privileged to have known George for over three decades, receiving advice early on that pushed me in the direction of anthropological history and historical anthropology. George was certainly the first professional historian of the discipline and, as such, was unique. However, it is easy to think that scholarly consideration of the history of anthropology began in 1968 with Race, Culture, and Evolution. It did not. Anthropologists had long been interested in the history of their discipline. I mean ‘‘interested’’ here in both main senses of the term. Anthropologists had a stake in constructing a certain narrative of the field. According to the Boasians, the break with evolutionary anthropology was revolutionary and complete. But this ignores very important subcurrents— such as that of Durkheim interpreted by Radcliffe-Brown, who then brought functionalism into the American heartland via students such as Fred Eggan at the University of Chicago. Much was made of constructing genealogies and claiming ancestors. Thus Leslie White, Marvin Harris, and Eleanor Leacock, among others, sought to rehabilitate Lewis Henry Morgan, claiming him for the materialist-Marxist anthropology developing in the 1950s. Of course, as any anthropologist knows, genealogy is always a construct. At the very least, one has to make choices. Am I Irish or German? A descendant of Boas, Hallowell, or White? Of course, at different times and in different places, different genealogical identities may be stressed. In addition to staking a claim to intellectual ancestors, who may not be as close or obvious as a graduate school mentor (as in Pace’s case), we tend to argue for, or against, the importance of individual anthropologists: what Pace calls ‘‘lobbying.’’ This is undeniable. A Festschrift is considered a standard retirement gift to anthropologists who mentor many Ph.D. students. (I am as guilty of this as Reviews in Anthropology, 43:177–179, 2014 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.937668
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Pub Date : 2014-07-01DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.937665
Richard Pace
The notion of lobbying for a place in the history of anthropological theory is used to frame the importance of the autobiography, collected works, Festschrift essays, and biography reviewed here. Ranging from bottom-up historicism, behavioral paleoanthropology, and French structural Marxism to historical particularism, the books by or about Stocking, Freeman, Godelier, and Mead emphasize the contributions of each while staking out a new or extended intellectual territory or status in the fluid (re)writing of the theoretical history of the discipline.
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Pub Date : 2014-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.903151
D. Read
In most, if not all, societies, incest taboos—perhaps the most universal of cultural taboos—include prohibitions on marriage between parent and child or between siblings. This universality suggests a biological origin, yet the considerable variation across societies in the full range of prohibited marriage relations implies a cultural origin. Correspondingly, theories regarding the origin of incest taboos vary from those that focus on the biological consequences (were marriage-based procreation allowed to include inbred matings) to those that focus on social consequences such as confounding social roles, especially within the family, or restricting networks of interfamily alliances, were marriages to take place between close relatives. For those focusing on the biological consequences, the sexual aversion hypothesis of the anthropologist Edvard Westermarck has played a central role through seemingly providing an empirically grounded, causal link from the phenomenal level of behavior to the ideational level of culture. Yet the matter is not so simple and requires rethinking of what we mean by kinship and how our ideas about kinship relate to the widespread occurrence of incest taboos and the extensive variability in their content.
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Pub Date : 2014-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.903150
Alexander N. Golub
Three recent ethnographies of the well-known massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft demonstrate the health and vitality of the study of virtual worlds. In particular, they emphasize the importance of anthropologists reading ethnographic work done by researchers in other disciplines, and by connoisseurs and cultural practitioners of video games who deserve to be taken as intellectual interlocutors. It may be, however, that less and less work will be done on virtual worlds in the future as scholarly attention focuses on other, more novel forms of technology.
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Pub Date : 2014-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.903148
S. Jackson
This article explores the anthropological goals of domesticating (through naming, categorizing, organizing) and liberating (through engagement with dynamism, process, complexity, contradiction) our data and the ways we consider culture. These complementary themes emerge in three volumes that explore Maya culture, past and present. The first theme offers powerful results by making named things real and valued. The second theme recognizes the multiple, contingent processes connected to people and cultures, with important ramifications for the use of cultural analogy over time. The two perspectives differ in how we relate to our data, and result in different ways of envisioning the Maya.
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Pub Date : 2014-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.903149
M. Harkin
Dwight W. Read tackles one of the oldest and most vexatious problems in anthropology, one that always seems on the verge of irrelevancy, but comes charging back with a vengeance: the incest taboo, the supposed problem of inbreeding, and the Westermarck Effect. This latter states that people raised together as children will, upon sexual maturity, have an aversion to one another as potential sexual partners. This has always struck me as suspect: Why then do ‘‘childhood sweethearts’’ ever grow up to marry? Indeed, Read cites evidence that age mates among kibbutzim—one of the classic examples of this—feel no sexual aversion. Other cases, such as the Taiwanese sim-pua marriage analyzed by A. P. Wolf and reanalyzed here, would seem to suggest that it is the perceived violation of cultural taboo, not the Westermarck Effect, that is the main factor. That is, as Read shows that the success or failure of these marriages is strongly correlated with the age of the boy at the time of adoption of the girl—and thus whether the boy was aware that she was not a blood relative—implying that it is not an innate aversion related to being raised together, but a culturally conditioned aversion to incest that drives this phenomenon. And what, may we ask, is incest? There is no universal definition, and it varies widely culturally. Moreover, it is not correlated with genealogical prox imity, but with culturally defined features. While the taboo on mother–child sex would appear to be universal, there exist cases of brother–sister marriage in rank societies, such as Roman Egypt. A father–daughter incest taboo depends on social recognition of paternity, which is not the case in many matrifocal societies. Among the Na of southwestern China, for instance, women are free to take multiple lovers; although there may be recognition of the role of pater, that of genitor can rarely be known with any certainty (Hua 2001). And as a human geneticist friend of mine once said, you can never rely on people’s accounts of paternity with any degree of confidence. If the idea of incest were really just a cultural reworking of the impera tive to avoid inbreeding, it has done a poor job. In matrilineal societies such as those of northern British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska, first-cousin, cross-cousin marriage was permitted and even encouraged among the nobility. However, distantly related or unrelated persons were warned against ‘‘incest’’ with someone belonging to their clan (of which there were four that crossed ethnic, linguistic, and international boundaries). Thus, to
德怀特·w·里德(Dwight W. Read)处理了人类学中最古老、最令人烦恼的问题之一，这个问题似乎总是处于无关紧要的边缘，但却以复仇的方式反击:乱伦禁忌、所谓的近亲繁殖问题，以及韦斯特马克效应。后者指出，作为孩子一起长大的人，在性成熟后，会厌恶对方作为潜在的性伴侣。这一直让我感到疑惑:为什么“青梅竹马”长大后会结婚呢?事实上，Read引用的证据表明，基布兹(kibbutzims)中的同龄伴侣——这是一个典型的例子——没有性厌恶感。其他的例子，如A. P. Wolf分析的台湾的“模拟婚姻”，在这里重新分析，似乎表明，这是对文化禁忌的侵犯，而不是威斯特马克效应，这是主要因素。也就是说，正如里德所说，这些婚姻的成功或失败与男孩收养女孩时的年龄密切相关，因此男孩是否意识到女孩不是血亲，这意味着这不是先天的厌恶与一起长大有关，而是文化条件下对乱伦的厌恶推动了这种现象。那么，我们可以问一下，乱伦是什么?没有一个通用的定义，它在不同的文化中差异很大。此外，它与宗谱接近无关，而是与文化定义的特征有关。虽然对母子性行为的禁忌似乎是普遍存在的，但在等级社会中也存在兄弟姐妹婚姻的情况，比如罗马埃及。父女乱伦的禁忌取决于社会对父权的认可，而在许多母系社会中，情况并非如此。例如，在中国西南的那族，女性可以自由地拥有多个情人;尽管人们可能会认识到父辈的作用，但祖先的作用却很少能得到确切的认识(Hua 2001)。正如我的一位人类遗传学家朋友曾经说过的那样，你永远不能完全相信人们对父亲身份的描述。如果乱伦的概念真的只是为了避免近亲繁殖而进行的一种文化改造，那么它做得很差。在母系社会，如不列颠哥伦比亚省北部和阿拉斯加东南部，近亲和跨表亲婚姻在贵族中是允许的，甚至是鼓励的。然而，远亲或无血缘关系的人被警告不要与属于他们氏族的人“乱伦”(其中有四个跨越种族、语言和国际界限)。因此,要
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Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.872466
Grant Arndt
In this essay, I review four recent publications on American Indian life in the United States, past and present, through the lens of indigeneity. While indigenous activism has been a central focus of recent work in anthropology and American Indian studies, Indigeneity is still emergent as a conceptual tool for historical and ethnographic work. This essay traces conceptual issues associated with more general discourses of indigeneity through the reviewed works in order to examine the relationship between the politics of indigeneity and the racialized structures of settler colonialism that still confront American Indian peoples in the United States.
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Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.872460
Joshua J. Wells
The cybernetic organism, or cyborg, is a recognized but often misunderstood concept in anthropology. However, the cyborg concept has the capacity to holistically cross-cut a wide swath of anthropological investigations and effectively problematize many anthropologically interesting characteristics of human subjects who, in all times and places, are dependent upon technology. The complex relationships between human beings and their technologies can be obscured with incompletely understood evolutionary forces, biased histories, mythologies, and ambiguous tensions (biological, cultural, economic, sexual, social, etc.). These can be illuminated by understanding the systems of tool use and feedback that cybernetically inform people and help guide their existence.
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Pub Date : 2014-01-01DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.872463
Maria Sapignoli
Over the past century, the fields of archaeology and anthropology have produced a number of different theoretical approaches and a substantial body of data aimed at ways to understand hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and agropastoral societies. This review considers four recent edited volumes on foraging and food-producing societies. These books deal in innovative ways with a broad array of issues, including transitions in human prehistory and history, mobility, land use, sharing, technology, social leveling strategies, leadership, and the formation of social hierarchies. Small-scale societies include hunter-gatherers or foragers, while middle-range societies may include complex hunter-gatherer (ones with storage and delayed return systems), horticultural, and agropastoral societies, some of them with institutionalized leadership, status hierarchies, and differential access to power and resources. An important set of themes in these books includes diversity in adaptations to complex social and natural environments, the significance of (1) matter, (2) energy, and (3) information in small-scale and middle-range societies on several continents, the persistence of foraging, and the development of inequality. The roles of sharing, exchange, and leadership in small-scale and middle-range societies are explored, as are explanations for social, economic, and political transformations among groups over time and across space.
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