Central issues in anthropology : a journal of the Central States Anthropological Society最新文献

Bioanthropological methods and quantitative skills provided the tools needed to design and implement a large-scale national survey of infant food consumption and dietary status. This article considers dietary iron intake of 847 American infants ranging in age from 6.5 months to 13.4 months. Iron intake was evaluated according to demographic characteristics and for different foods (cow's milk, iron-fortified formula, non-ironfortified formula, infant ceral, commercial baby food, and homeprepared table food) . Results indicated that, across all demographic characteristics considered, a large proportion of infants who were fed a diet that included either cow's milk or non-iron-fortified formula received amounts of iron below the RDA. In contrast, infants who were fed a diet that contained an ironfortified formula had median intakes of iron above the RDA. The results also underscore the importance of the WIC program (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children) in meeting the iron needs of high-risk infants. The implications of low iron intake during infancy are considered in relation to aspects of growth and development.

As new computer technology moves into more and more workplaces, the study of its potential impacts on workers and their work is becoming increasingly common. However, such research is often weakened by a too-narrow conception of technology and technological change as primarily a technical issue. In fact, it is impossible to abstract the “impacts” of technology from the dense web of social relations and the complex milieu surrounding technology's design and use.

this article describes a different approach to studying technological change as a social and cultural process. Using ethnographic principles and methods, it reports on the key social and organizational issues surrounding the implementation of a complex computer system at a small manufacturing plant. It also argues that this ethnographic approach has special promise for helping work organizations analyze and understand their experiences with technological change.

Employment patterns in anthropology have shifted markedly over the past 25 years, with increasing numbers of professionals working full-time in a wide range of non-academic settings. Recent survey results show that more than one-half (51%) of employed, newly graduating Ph.D's now work as non-academic practitioners. As part of an overall effort to learn more about the work of practitioners, and to increase understanding and communication between the academic and practitioner arms of the discipline, the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) recently sponsored an invited symposium entitled “Anthropological Research in Major Corporations” (held at the 1985 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C.) The specific objectives of the symposium were to explore the application of anthropological methods and concepts in modern industrial research, to generate interest in business and industrial anthropology, and to demonstrate the relevance of such work to important organizational and social problems.

The current volume of Central Issues in Antrhopology features four papers that initially were presented as part of the NAPA symposium. These papers reflect anthropological practice in several major industries (e.g., automobile manufacture, computer technology, health care) and represent the work of practioners across a range of subdisciplines (e.g., cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology.) This introductory overview by the symposium organizer provides background information and a rationale for the symposium, and considers the four papers as products of contemporary anthropological research in industry. Special attention is given to several differences between academic and industrial research (i.e. differences in research objects, locus of authority, and system of peer evaluation), especially as such differences are reflected in the present collections. Differences in university and corporate environments account for much of the variance in research products emerging from these two domains, however it is concluded that anthropologists across domains share the mission of inductive discovery through unique approaches to the conceptualization of problems, the elicitation of data, and the interpretation of social phenomena.

The practice of anthropology is a potentially useful one in the information technology field because the problems of that field are problems of description and definition of complex social practices (both material and cognitive). The application of other disciplinary approaches to the problems of task and organization description often yield too “thin” or too focused a rendition, and sometimes an inappropriate or suboptimal system or product. Yet the anthropologist working in the corporate cotext is just as subject to the political pressures and the battle of ideas as anyone else. The usefulness of anthropology has to be assessed in terms of actions taken and people convinced as the result of anthropological applications.

Culture is not external to the life of self but constitutive of it. This theme is elaborated by use of 3 examples. (1) Montaigne's Essays record 18 years of a self “consubstantial” with its writings. The example raises the question: Is self-inscription a major element in many types of cultural activity? (2) The lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, the “Original Siamese Twins,” unseparated for 63 years, are used to ask the question: To what extent can biography be understood apart from biology, or one life understood apart from the lives around it? (3) In Inoue Yasushi's Chronicle of My Mother, a woman's self-understanding of her biography differs radically from her personal history as construed by her children and grandchildren. Here the question is: To what extent is selfunderstanding “consubstantial” with the interpretations made by others. The general suggestion is that selfhood has to be examined, in cultural analysis, as a temporal phenomenon and not as a “structure” individuated and spaced-out from the rest of culture. Culture then becomes a window-of-opportunity for the completing of self-projects.

Materialists have delineated technological and environmental factors that constrain human choices. This article suggests a known and tested mental factor, information processing, that serves a similar purpose and consequently also plays a role in organizing behavior. The limitations and the methods used for circumventing those limitations provide a framework for human interaction. Combining the interplay of mental and technoenvironmental constraints increases our ability to explain human behavior.

This article is a preliminary attempt to address an imperative. We begin with case materials describing past conservation impacts on local peoples and a review of the literature dealing with Man and the Biosphere (MAB) and other conservation programs worldwide. We conclude our discussion with a suggestion that recent developments in ecological anthropology, particularly, the advent of processual models, can provide the basis for an important rapprochement among the imperatives underlying natural resource policies, the rights of local populations to traditional resources, and the potential for continued voluntary cultural diversity. These approaches along with the anthropological outreach to environmentalists, whether in agencies or among traditional resource users, will benefit local peoples, anthropology, and the continued efforts to protect the world biome.