{"title":"Different paths toward identity in Africa","authors":"Pavel Miškařík","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2021.1919366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2021.1919366","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The four books under review can be considered case studies about the different aspects of identity creation and maintenance among selected groups of people in various African areas. Every one of those books inspects a similar phenomenon, but each examines it from a different perspective. The books discuss complicated and everchanging relations among individuals and their own bodies, group identity, history, institutions, ecology, and their relations toward space. What unites those books is their interest in the recent history of selected populations, and especially in practices, which helped those groups to sustain their sense of identity throughout turbulent phases of their history.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":"82 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2021.1919366","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48405752","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":"Explaining essentialism and slavery in highland Madagascar","authors":"Raymond Scupin","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2021.1890884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2021.1890884","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Denis Regnier has written an ethnography that combines a cognitive approach and ethnography among villagers in southern Betsileo in Madagascar. The major aim of his study was to investigate the treatment and conditions for slave descendants by the majority of the people within villages and hamlets in southern Betsileo. These slave descendants are perceived and classified as ‘unclean’ people by the free descent ‘clean’ peoples. He provides extensive ethnographic and historical details on the socioeconomic, social, political, and religious aspects regarding the prohibitions of marriages between clean and unclean peoples. Regnier uses cognitive field experiments to assess whether the unclean peoples are essentialized by the clean people.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":"64 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2021.1890884","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42748979","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":"Lévi-Strauss's heroic anthropology facing contemporary problems of the modern world","authors":"A. Doja","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2020.1794140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2020.1794140","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of the structural revolution in anthropology, passed in October 2009. In the decade after his death, we are presented with a significant number of successive publications that celebrate both his work and life and the ever-lasting public engagement of his heroic anthropology with problems of the modern world. This extended review article is focused to deal with these works in relation to contemporary issues, which is not already so well known for Lévi-Strauss and which can make a point to restore him to a central position of importance not merely in the history of anthropology but also in the public engagement of current anthropology.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":"4 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2020.1794140","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46905834","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":"Ritual landscape and sacred mountains in past and present Mesoamerica","authors":"Radoslav Hlúsek","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2020.1805168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2020.1805168","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The three books under review are collective monographs that consist of interdisciplinary approaches (archaeology, ethnohistory, cultural anthropology, anthropology of religion) and divided into sections according to discipline or more specific common topic. A leitmotif of all of them is ritual landscape, sacred mountains, the agricultural cycle and rainmaking rituals in Mesoamerica (mostly in its Mexican part) which have been present in this cultural area since pre-Hispanic times until the present day. The authors of particular contributions point out archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence of these religious beliefs and ritual practices across the centuries and emphasize not only their antiquity but also their uninterrupted continuity. This tradition was incorporated into Christianity, thanks to which it survived missionary activities of the Spaniards as well as pitfalls of modern era and represents the core of popular religion in native Mexican communities.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":"39 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2020.1805168","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41472817","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":"Mississippian religious beliefs and ritual practice: Earthen monuments, rock art, and sacred shrines","authors":"D. Dye","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2020.1778254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2020.1778254","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The five books under review here explicitly call for archaeologists to place greater emphasis on agency and practice in understanding the role of religion and ritual in the ancient world. Four volumes, principally investigating Mississippian polities, draw our attention to the American midcontinent and its earthen monuments, magical plants, rock art, sacra, and sacred shrines. Although spanning a diversity of approaches and perspectives, the authors demonstrate how cosmograms, exotic objects, sacred landscapes, and transcendental beings articulate with people’s daily lives and lived experiences. Each work offers an awareness of religion as expressed through materiality and the ways past belief systems were bundled, constituted, entangled, and intermeshed with agentive things, built landscapes, humans, natural environments, and other-than-human-persons. The fifth book, by Brian Hayden, contributes a significant approach to these ongoing discussions by stressing the importance of secret societies for interpreting and understanding the power of ritual in the ancient world.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"48 1","pages":"122 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2020.1778254","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45564559","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":"Modernization, colonialism, and the new anthropology of sport","authors":"Samuel M. Clevenger","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2020.1743473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2020.1743473","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Anthropologists Niko Besnier, Susan Brownell, and Thomas Carter have recently contributed a theoretically- and empirically-updated account of sport anthropology, the burgeoning, heterogenous, productive field dedicated to the myriad forms of sport and physical activity in human societies. This essay dialogically relates their contribution with previous conceptions of sport anthropology to better understand the interconnections between global and local contexts of physical culture and the relations between anthropological inquiry and important issues like social power, biopolitics, and colonialism. The essay specifically highlights the authors’ contextualization of assumptions of modernization and categorizations of “primitive” and “pre-modern” sport, arguing that a postcolonial approach to sport anthropology results in a more inclusive, nuanced framework for studying the anthropological dimensions of physical culture.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"48 1","pages":"106 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2020.1743473","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45615579","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":"An overview of Caribbean and Latin-American cultural heritage studies","authors":"Wilhelm Londoño Díaz","doi":"10.1080/00938157.2020.1791469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2020.1791469","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This review analyzes, through three recently published books that talk about cultural heritage in Latin America, how the Cultural Heritage Studies have allowed us to understand the current situation in the region characterized by the growing tendency to promote declarations of heritage as part of a plan for the use of culture as a resource for sustainable development. Likewise, those books analyze how responses from local communities are generated to hegemonic definitions of heritage, which indicates that cultural heritage in Latin America is not something given but something in constant construction and dispute.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"48 1","pages":"148 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2020.1791469","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48576453","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":"10.1080/00938157.2019.1665241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00938157.2019.1665241","url":null,"abstract":"“Heritage landscape” is a slippery concept, consisting of two terms with broad semantic content. Nevertheless, it is this very ambiguity and vagueness that make it workable from a pragmatic standpoint. I well remember hiking a trail with my son, then a teenager, in Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui Province, China. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it was overrun with tour groups of the sort seen commonly in Asia (and increasingly in places such as Yellowstone National Park), with a tour guide wielding a loudspeaker and flag, herding their groups in nearly military fashion. Compared with the experience of, say, sauntering through Wordsworth’s Lake District, the contrast could not be more dramatic. The serenity of the landscape (used as one of the main locations for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) was, for me, at odds with the sound of the guides, and the presence of large numbers of tourists. To me, that was not a “heritage landscape” moment; in part, because the landscape was not my “own” heritage. I will gladly “own” a landscape in the British Isles or even a Cycladic Island, but to me the landscape of Chinese poets and monks was a bridge too far. Even more, the reverential attitude towards the landscape, which I inherited through the Romantic tradition, as passed on via the Hudson River School, John Muir, Ansel Adams, etc., seemed, to me, utterly lacking in the selfie-taking tourists. Of course, as Michael Wilson argues, “heritage landscape” is an inherently ideological framework that is open to critical challenge by scholars, but which exists largely to bury such considerations. “We,” as world citizens, can all be welcomed under the umbrella of UNESCO’s World Heritage designation. This makes for, as Wilson notes, some awkward moments. How is a White American visitor to relate to an Aboriginal sacred site such as Uluru? I found myself in a similar situation with a good friend who is a hereditary Maori chief, visiting the Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand. Closer to (my) home, indigenous sites such as “buffalo jumps” are repurposed for a broad, North American audience who have no direct ties to the sites, which can, in fact, be used as part of a settler colonial discourse. On the other hand, in Europe, especially the British Isles, “heritage landscape” can be used to underwrite a highly fictional narrative of cultural continuity.","PeriodicalId":43734,"journal":{"name":"Reviews in Anthropology","volume":"48 1","pages":"57 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/00938157.2019.1665241","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46148574","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}