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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-02 Subhadra Mitra Channa, Marcelo González Gálvez
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Selected Writings of Anil Gharai: Dalit Literature from Bangla Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-31 Abhijit Guha
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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A testimony of the threat to Indian democracy: A review of Alpa Shah’s book “The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the search for democracy in India” Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Sootrisa Basak
In the annals of democratic governance, India’s narrative unfolds a paradoxical tale of promise and peril, where ideals of equality and freedom often intersect with realities of power and oppressio...
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Disability Worlds Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-14 Danilyn Rutherford
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Is technological/institutional diversity primarily the outcome of the quest after freedom and identity? Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-13 Elias L. Khalil
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow (G–W) demonstrate the diversity of social structures, coined here “technological/institutional regimes” (TIRs), of the past 14 millennia. While G–W re...
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-12 Subhadra Mitra Channa, Marcelo González Gálvez
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 52, No. 3-4, 2023)
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Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-06-07 Astrea Nikolovska
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 52, No. 3-4, 2023)
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-03-22 Subhadra Mitra Channa, Marcelo González Gálvez
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 52, No. 1-2, 2023)
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A hubristic windmill off Harvard Yard: Historically situating the Department of Social Relations Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-12-25 David H. Price
This essay reviews Patrick L. Schmidt’s book chronicling the rise and fall of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations (Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science) and contrasts Schmidt’s history ...
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Reinventing death in the twenty-first century Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Sergei Kan
This paper reviews two recent works on the modern-day American death ways American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-first Century by Shannon Dawdy and The New Death: Mortality and Death ...
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-10-20 Michael E. Harkin
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 51, No. 3-4, 2022)
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-11 Michael E. Harkin
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 51, No. 1-2, 2022)
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Interview with Raymond D. Fogelson (1933–2020) Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Sergei Kan
Published in Reviews in Anthropology (Vol. 51, No. 1-2, 2022)
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Boas and Boasians, once again Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-27 Sergei Kan
Abstract The present review discusses two recent works dealing with Franz Boas: a biography by Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt and a book on Boas and several members of his school by Charles King. The information presented in Zumwalt’s biography is compared with the one found in an earlier one by Douglas Cole as well as in various books and articles on the specific aspects of Boas’s life and career. King’s book
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How war came home: From 9/11 to the storming of the U.S. Capitol Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-04-01 Jeff Bennett
Abstract This article reviews three recent books, each of which help establish connections between the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021. The review highlights the ways the 9/11 attacks amplified latent nativist and xenophobic currents in U.S. society. It also shows how the prosecution of the Global War on Terror militarized new sectors of American
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-06 Michael E. Harkin
(2022). Editor’s introduction. Reviews in Anthropology. Ahead of Print.
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Editor’s Introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael E. Harkin
(2022). Editor’s Introduction. Reviews in Anthropology. Ahead of Print.
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The dawn of everything: A new history? Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Brian Fagan, Nadia Durrani
Abstract This 526-page discourse is a reasoned argument for rejecting the notion of steady progress in the human past that challenges our assumptions about the origins of many aspects of modern human behavior, including farming, property, cities, democracy, and slavery. The authors take an anarchic position. They conclude that since we have organized ourselves in many ways in the past, so there are
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Michael E. Harkin
(2021). Editor’s introduction. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 50, No. 3-4, pp. 57-59.
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A single narrative will not do: Capitalism in the digital age Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-12-03 Jenny Huberman
Abstract In recent years, scholars working across a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in exploring the contours and machinations of digital capitalism. Celebrants extoll the way digital technologies are enhancing processes of capital accumulation, rendering employment more flexible, democractizing innovation, and making new forms of economic co-operation possible. By contrast
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Interview with Regna Darnell, March 26, 2021 Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-11-22 Michael E. Harkin, Regna Darnell
(2021). Interview with Regna Darnell, March 26, 2021. Reviews in Anthropology. Ahead of Print.
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Curators, objects and the indigenous agency Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-17
Abstract The article deals with specific field within the history of science: the institutional as well as biographical history of anthropological and archaeological museums. Through several case studies, more general questions are explored, those that inquire into the role of museums in delineating the agenda of anthropology and archaeology; the role of leading personalities of this discipline in
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Race and rage: Mourning loss in right-wing populism and ethnonationalism Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-09
Abstract Four recent books—two edited volumes and two monographs—applying anthropological and ethnographic methods to contemporary right-wing populism and illiberalism, around the world but with a special interest in the United States, are reviewed. While the authors discover great diversity in conservative, populist, and ethnonationalist movements and agendas based on local circumstances (for instance
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Different paths toward identity in Africa Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-05-14 Pavel Miškařík
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
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Explaining essentialism and slavery in highland Madagascar Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-03-09 Raymond Scupin
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
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-10-13 Michael E. Harkin
(2020). Editor’s introduction. Reviews in Anthropology: Vol. 49, No. 1-2, pp. 1-3.
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Lévi-Strauss's heroic anthropology facing contemporary problems of the modern world Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-09-03 Albert Doja
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
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Ritual landscape and sacred mountains in past and present Mesoamerica Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-08-20 Radoslav Hlúšek
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
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Modernization, colonialism, and the new anthropology of sport Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Samuel M. Clevenger
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
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An overview of Caribbean and Latin-American cultural heritage studies Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 Wilhelm Londoño Díaz
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
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Mississippian religious beliefs and ritual practice: Earthen monuments, rock art, and sacred shrines Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-10-02 David H. Dye
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
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Lévi-Strauss: Two lives Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-04-03 Michael E. Harkin
Abstract Two recent books about the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss have recently been published. Coming a decade after his death, they serve as an opportunity to reassess the legacy of Lévi-Strauss, as an anthropologist and a writer.
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Heritage landscapes compared/contrasted, contested/interpreted, lost/won Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-04-03 Michael C. Wilson
Abstract The landscape concept plays a growing role in anthropology and archeology, especially for discussions of “heritage landscapes.” Landscape has long been a central theme in geography, but with democratized Geographic Information Systems (GIS), that theoretical legacy can be overlooked. Critical theory based on international examples shows that heritage landscape designation is socio-politically
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Michael E. Harkin
The history of anthropology in North America is very closely intertwined with Native cultures in the United States and Canada. As Polly Strong observes, the first generation of American anthropologists were in a state of “panic” about culture loss, and thus the mad rush to collect anything and everything: word lists, texts, artifacts and art, even human remains. Through much of the 20th century, anthropology
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Hunters and gatherers past and present: Perspectives on diversity, teaching, and information transmission Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Robert K. Hitchcock
Abstract This article reviews four books on hunters and gatherers. It begins with a discussion of the debates over the concept of hunter-gatherers. Theoretical approaches to hunter-gather studies are examined briefly. The view then assesses the four books and the various subjects which they address. These subjects include the issue of ethnographic analogy, diversity, evolution, and archaeological perspectives
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Recent methodological approaches in ethnographies of human and non-human Amerindian collectives Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2019-01-02 Juan Javier Rivera Andía
AbstractI examine recent ethnographic attempts to address alterity among Amerindian worlds—attempts that produce a critique of indigenous relationships with external or foreign agents. While some o...
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In search of Derek Freeman Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-10-02 Paul Shankman
Abstract Truth’s Fool is a sympathetic biography of Derek Freeman, the anthropologist best known for his scathing critique of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Hempenstall, a historian, chronicles Freeman’s life and work, including an appraisal of the Mead–Freeman controversy. Hempenstall is interested in Freeman’s ideas, motives, and intentions as well as his personal struggles. He argues that
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Cora Du Bois, Henrietta Schmerler, and the Role of Women in Mid-Twentieth Century American Anthropology Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-09-21 Pauline Turner Strong
Abstract Cora Du Bois (1903–1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government—including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908–1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic
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Franz Boas and Friends? Not Really Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 Herbert S. Lewis
Abstract Blackhawk, Ned, and Isaiah L. Wilner. 2018. Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas. New Haven: Yale University Press. The editors of this volume proclaim their intention to demonstrate the revolutionary influence of Indigenous thinkers on the ideas of Franz Boas, but the work falls far short of their aim. Despite the inclusion of a number of interesting contributions dealing
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 Michael E. Harkin
The history of anthropology in North America is very closely intertwined with Native cultures in the United States and Canada. As Pauline Turner Strong observes, the first generation of American anthropologists were in a state of “panic” about culture loss, and thus the mad rush to collect anything and everything: word lists, texts, artifacts and art, even human remains. Through much of the 20th century
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Futures, intimacies, animisms: Unfinished anthropologies in the twenty-first century Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 Samuel Gerald Collins
Abstract This essay explores recent work in future-oriented anthropology that develops emancipatory, anticipatory, multi-modal, and participatory approaches. Through critiquing hegemonic assumptions in anthropology and in Western modernity, these works evoke both present complexity and future potentiality. Ultimately, the essay explores these works as redemptive strategies for an anthropology besieged
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The politics of expressive forms, ethnographic practice, and indigenous–state relations Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 Larry Nesper
Abstract This review examines four recently published ethnographies of North American Indian communities in both the United States and Canada, each reflecting the ways in which sovereignty and self-determination are realized and compromised. The evolving indigenous polities discussed in these works each articulate with the nation-state that encompasses them in different ways, in large part by virtue
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Origins of the first Americans: Before and after the Anzick genome Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-10-02 Stuart J. Fiedel
ABSTRACT Recent analyses of the preserved ancient genomes of the Mal’ta boy and Anzick infant have transformed our understanding of Native Americans’ origins. The Mal’ta genome shows that about one-third of Native American genetic ancestry is derived from admixture, about fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, of East Asians with a now-vanished population of interior southern Siberia. Living Native
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Staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy: Hits and misses in the work of Michael Jackson Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-10-02 James K. A. Smith
ABSTRACT This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-10-02 Michael E. Harkin
Anthropology and philosophy intertwine like the strands of DNA, twisting and crossing paths with frequency over millennia. At the very dawn of what we consider to be Western philosophy, Socrates, as described by Plato, applies an evolutionary model to understanding political forms. In Book VIII of The Republic, Plato describes a succession of political formations that follow the overthrow of aristocracy
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Some approaches to traditional Māori knowledge Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-10-02 Jim Williams
ABSTRACT In this essay I review two books of rather different focus, but with a common thread that is oral tradition: age-old tales passed orally down the generations to maintain the histories and used to educate the young. The focus of the Metge book is traditional methods of education, while McRae’s focus is on the stories themselves.
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The show must go on: Collapse, resilience, and transformation in 21st-century archaeology Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Guy D. Middleton
ABSTRACT Collapse is a theme addressed by specialists from many disciplines, from environmental and sustainability studies to popular culture and the hard sciences, as well as by archaeologists and historians. This review focuses on three recent books about past collapses and sets them in the context of collapse studies. The new contributions build on the growing body of collapse theory and increasing
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Inequality and the return to structure in anthropology Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 N. Thomas Håkansson
ABSTRACT The four books under review are all more or less explicitly critical of the impact of post-modernism on socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. They all call for the building of anthropology by reconnecting to the earlier traditions of structural and comparative analysis. Although spanning both socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology, they set the focus clearly on the pervasive influence
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Michael E. Harkin
On the day of this writing, an otherwise normal muggy summer day, the trending news items were that the son of the president of the United States, acting on behalf of his father’s campaign, met with a Russian agent to obtain information harmful to the Clinton campaign; and that the largest chunk of ice yet had separated from the Antarctic ice sheet. As pundits are fond of saying, especially regarding
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Mass violence, trauma, and their children Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2017-07-03 Christopher C. Taylor
ABSTRACT This article concerns the social construction of collective memory particularly with regard to the social remembering of mass violence and trauma. How do individual memories of mass violence which are often idiosyncratic, nonverbal, and embodied coalesce and crystallize into coherent narratives shared by a group. The books reviewed here demonstrate that there are both discursive means of remembering
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Materiality and metaphor: Sound in circulation Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-10-01 Rodney A. Garnett
ABSTRACT Four recently published books examine sound in social contexts, including brass bands on the streets of New Orleans, Hawaiian steel guitar, the genre of Noise and its social circulation, and Aboriginal radio production in northern Australia. The authors present the material and metaphoric power of sound in social contexts through thoughtful and thorough historical research and long-term ethnographic
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Editor’s introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-10-01 Michael E. Harkin
Historical ecology as a specialization within archaeology, cultural anthropology, and related fields, has been in a process of re-articulating and extending a set of concerns with deep roots in North American and especially Americanist anthropology. The classic cultural ecology of the 1950s and 1960s assumed a feedback relationship between human groups and the environment at the landscape level and
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Found in translation Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-09-16 Richard Handler
ABSTRACT This review considers new work on translation, cultural interpretation, and cross-cultural comparison, all three terms suggesting different but related approaches to the central problem of sociocultural anthropology, that of understanding human meaning-making. Translating Worlds brings together ten authors who take language translation as a paradigmatic example of cultural translation within
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Historical ecology coming of age Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-09-08 Christian 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
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Women in prison: Ethnographic reflections on gender and the carceral state Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-04-02 Rhett Epler, Susan 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
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The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-04-02 Saul Schwartz, Lise M. 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
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Editor's introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-04-02 Michael E. 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
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Old dogs and new tricks: Recent developments in our understanding of the human–dog relationship Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-01-02 Peter W. 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
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Revisiting the Old Ones Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-01-02 Alison E. 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
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Editor's introduction Reviews in Anthropology (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2016-01-02 Michael E. 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