Pub Date : 2016-09-08DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1210962
C. Isendahl
ABSTRACT Historical ecology is a research program that in earnest has emerged within anthropology since the turn of the millennium. This essay offers a short outline of historical ecology and, on the basis of a review of four volumes published over the last decade, discusses several key issues in the historical ecological analyses of socio-environmental relations. It is argued that historical ecology (1) emerged as a concept in different, but related, discursive contexts, (2) coalesced in North American anthropology and anthropological archaeology, and (3) subsequently cross-fertilized and diversified in new academic milieus successfully addressing previously unconsidered research questions in novel ways.
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Pub Date : 2016-04-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1179521
Rhett T. Epler, S. Dewey
ABSTRACT The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state’s everyday operations in individual women’s lives, while raising profound theoretical and practical questions about gender and governance. We engage with these texts from unique situated standpoints as insider-outsiders with intimate knowledge of the U.S. criminal justice system gleaned from our respective lived experiences, services provision work, and research with currently and formerly incarcerated Wyoming women.
{"title":"Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state","authors":"Rhett T. Epler, S. Dewey","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2016.1179521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2016.1179521","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The criminal justice system is increasingly becoming the subject of national dialogue throughout the United States due to the sheer number of people it impacts: according to the Department of Justice, nearly 7 million, or 1 in 35, U.S. residents are under some form of correctional control. The four books reviewed in this essay derive their findings from ethnographic methods that offer deep insights into the carceral state’s everyday operations in individual women’s lives, while raising profound theoretical and practical questions about gender and governance. We engage with these texts from unique situated standpoints as insider-outsiders with intimate knowledge of the U.S. criminal justice system gleaned from our respective lived experiences, services provision work, and research with currently and formerly incarcerated Wyoming women.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"45 1","pages":"71 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2016.1179521","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-04-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1182828
M. Harkin
The United States is a carceral society. This is a well-known fact, which has received renewed currency in light of the 2016 presidential election, and debate over the impact of the Clinton-era crime bill. Most of the scholarly writing on this issue is in areas such as criminology, employing quantitative and aggregative methods. Here, Susan Dewey and Rhett Epler undertake a survey of recent ethnographic literature on incarcerated women, including work by such women themselves. Ethnography, including auto-ethnography, makes the lives of these women legible to those of us on the outside, shedding light on the cultures that arise in these extraordinary circumstances. One thing that we see quite clearly is the intersectionality of different subaltern and minority statuses: race and sexual orientation, as well as femininity itself. One thing that is clear in most of these cases is that prison was a nearly pre-ordained outcome of lives lived in uncertain, impoverished, and violent circumstances. One female inmate stated simply that prison was the safest place she had ever lived. Also under consideration are carceral institutions other than prisons, especially clinics and “halfway houses.” These represent an attempt to provide women a means of re-entering society successfully. Notably, both of the essay’s authors have experience working in such a setting. The literature under consideration offers a range of perspectives on such institutions, including quite critical ones. Of course, we do not expect ethnographies to offer readymade policy recommendations. Nonetheless, with such a large portion of the U.S. population experiencing some form of incarceration or supervision, ethnography is the best tool to understand what is happening from various perspectives, most importantly that of the inmates themselves.
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Pub Date : 2016-04-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1179522
Saul Schwartz, L. Dobrin
ABSTRACT The reviewed books comprise an emerging ethnographic literature on endangered language documentation and revitalization in Native North America. Language loss and preservation are pressing concerns for tribal communities, galvanizing activists and researchers to develop classroom curricula and literacy traditions in hopes of producing new speakers. While the reviewed books show that this goal often goes unrealized, we nevertheless read them as grounds for optimism. Even if language revitalization rarely increases the everyday use of particular lexical and grammatical codes, it may succeed in accomplishing another important goal: facilitating indigenous communities’ efforts to create for themselves more meaningful contemporary cultures.
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Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1142294
Jamin Pelkey
ABSTRACT Reflexive observations and observations of reflexivity: such agendas are by now standard practice in anthropology. Dynamic feedback loops between self and other, cause and effect, represented and representamen may no longer seem surprising; but, in spite of our enhanced awareness, little deliberate attention is devoted to modeling or grounding such phenomena. Attending to both linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of chiasmus (the X figure), a group of anthropologists has recently embraced this challenge. Applied to contemporary problems in linguistic anthropology, chiasmus functions to highlight and enhance relationships of interdependence or symbiosis between contraries, including anthropology’s four fields, the nature of human being and facets of being human.
{"title":"Symbiotic modeling: Linguistic anthropology and the promise of chiasmus","authors":"Jamin Pelkey","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2016.1142294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2016.1142294","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Reflexive observations and observations of reflexivity: such agendas are by now standard practice in anthropology. Dynamic feedback loops between self and other, cause and effect, represented and representamen may no longer seem surprising; but, in spite of our enhanced awareness, little deliberate attention is devoted to modeling or grounding such phenomena. Attending to both linguistic and extra-linguistic modalities of chiasmus (the X figure), a group of anthropologists has recently embraced this challenge. Applied to contemporary problems in linguistic anthropology, chiasmus functions to highlight and enhance relationships of interdependence or symbiosis between contraries, including anthropology’s four fields, the nature of human being and facets of being human.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"45 1","pages":"22 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2016.1142294","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1142297
A. Rautman
ABSTRACT These volumes exemplify diverse meanings in the concept of “revisiting the past.” In his archaeological travel memoir, Roberts physically revisits archaeological sites, and also sadly re-evaluates his idea of in-situ preservation. Two edited volumes illustrate other aspects of revisiting the past. In research contexts, revisiting and re-assessing carry a more upbeat message of intellectual progress through continued evaluation of past ideas. Although research can be messy and non-linear, the act of stopping to assess existing knowledge demands continued engagement with old documents, artifacts, and models, while also looking forward to development of new ways to describe and understand the past.
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Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1142298
P. Stahl
ABSTRACT The reemergence of cognitive studies in comparative psychology and ethology, coupled with ongoing archaeological discoveries and recent advances in genomics, have contributed to the current explosion of scientific interest in dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). The long and complex evolution of a human-dog relationship is explored from the differing perspectives of ethology, cognitive sciences, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and paleoanthropology. Our understanding of dogs is again shedding light on human cognitive evolution and the complex, and at times controversial, process of domestication.
{"title":"Old dogs and new tricks: Recent developments in our understanding of the human–dog relationship","authors":"P. Stahl","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2016.1142298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2016.1142298","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The reemergence of cognitive studies in comparative psychology and ethology, coupled with ongoing archaeological discoveries and recent advances in genomics, have contributed to the current explosion of scientific interest in dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). The long and complex evolution of a human-dog relationship is explored from the differing perspectives of ethology, cognitive sciences, evolutionary anthropology, archaeology, and paleoanthropology. Our understanding of dogs is again shedding light on human cognitive evolution and the complex, and at times controversial, process of domestication.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"45 1","pages":"51 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2016.1142298","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1142301
M. Harkin
The existence of monumental archaeological sites in the American Southwest and elsewhere (primarily the mounds of the Eastern Woodlands) have long been a source of both fascination and frustration for archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. The existence of these remnants of “lost” civilizations led to ruminations, not only on the nature of those civilizations and their relation to descendent communities (an association generally denied before the rise of professional archaeology) but about time, loss, and the limits of knowledge of our past. As the most archaeological of Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote in “Ozymandias”:
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Pub Date : 2015-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2015.1116325
M. Clarke
Human-induced global threats are compelling many anthropologists to rethink roles, methods, and paradigms and engage in public debate and action on energy policies, extraction processes, commodity chains, and consumption. Laura Nader's Energy Reader embodies her decades-long engagement as a catalyst for public debate on U.S. energy issues. Tanja Winther's Impact of Electricity exemplifies ethnography informing development practice. Strauss and colleagues’ Cultures of Energy reflects diverse approaches seeking to build cultural understandings to inform energy choices. There remains a need for collaboration with anthropologists embedded in energy-related agencies—positioned where they can leverage anthropological knowledge to push policy envelopes.
{"title":"Interrogating Power: Engaged Energy Anthropology","authors":"M. Clarke","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2015.1116325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2015.1116325","url":null,"abstract":"Human-induced global threats are compelling many anthropologists to rethink roles, methods, and paradigms and engage in public debate and action on energy policies, extraction processes, commodity chains, and consumption. Laura Nader's Energy Reader embodies her decades-long engagement as a catalyst for public debate on U.S. energy issues. Tanja Winther's Impact of Electricity exemplifies ethnography informing development practice. Strauss and colleagues’ Cultures of Energy reflects diverse approaches seeking to build cultural understandings to inform energy choices. There remains a need for collaboration with anthropologists embedded in energy-related agencies—positioned where they can leverage anthropological knowledge to push policy envelopes.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"835 1","pages":"202 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2015-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2015.1116325","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2015-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2015.1113732
Marc A. Boglioli
In the following essay I review three recent additions to the burgeoning ontology literature: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, and Istvan Praet's Animism and the Question of Life. United by their shared goal of making anthropological inquiry less ethnocentric by avoiding the imposition of Western ontologies on non-Western societies, these works simultaneously exhibit considerable variation in theory and method, ranging from traditional structuralism to ethnographically-informed Peircean semiotics. I emerged from my engagement with these ambitious books unclear about how anthropologists should conduct ethnographic research that goes “beyond the human” and convinced that units of analysis that might seem anachronistic to certain people (such as language, culture, and collectives) remain key constituents of the foundation of anthropological inquiry.
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