{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"M. Harkin","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.937668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.937668","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"177 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.937668","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027065","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}
{"title":"“Tooting One's Horn” and Lauding One's Fellow in the Construction of a History of Anthropological Theory","authors":"Richard Pace","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.937665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.937665","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"180 - 198"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.937665","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59026950","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}
{"title":"Incest Taboos and Kinship: A Biological or a Cultural Story?","authors":"D. Read","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.903151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.903151","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"150 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.903151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59026932","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}
{"title":"The Anthropology of Virtual Worlds: World of Warcraft","authors":"Alexander N. Golub","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.903150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.903150","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"135 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.903150","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027379","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}
{"title":"Domestication and Liberation: How We Relate to Our Data, and What It Means for Understanding the Maya","authors":"S. Jackson","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.903148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.903148","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"111 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.903148","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027324","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}
{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"M. Harkin","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.903149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.903149","url":null,"abstract":"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","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"107 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.903149","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027363","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}
{"title":"The Emergence of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race and Culture in Native North America","authors":"Grant Arndt","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.872466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.872466","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"105 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.872466","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027311","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}
{"title":"Keep Calm and Remain Human: How We Have Always Been Cyborgs and Theories on the Technological Present of Anthropology","authors":"Joshua J. Wells","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.872460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.872460","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"34 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.872460","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027268","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}
{"title":"Mobility, Land Use, and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies","authors":"Maria Sapignoli","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2014.872463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2014.872463","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"43 1","pages":"35 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2014.872463","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59027280","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}