Mobility,Land Use,and Leadership in Small-Scale and Middle-Range Societies

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.     

Intersections, Networks and the Genesis of Social Complexity on the Nyali Coast of East Africa

This paper examines intersections between different societies occupying the Nyali Coast region of southern Kenya from the late first millennium ad to the mid-second millennium ad. We explore interaction between societies at three scales: between hunter-gatherers and farmers in the coastal hinterland, between the hinterland and the coast and between the coast and the wider Indian Ocean. The patterns indicate that local intersections in the hinterland between hunter-gatherers and farmers went hand-in-hand with both the emergence of larger settlements in the hinterland and on the coast, and participation in a pan-Indian Ocean trade network.     

Northwest Mexico: The Prehistory of Sonora,Chihuahua, and Neighboring Areas

This article surveys research in Northwest Mexico (Sonora and Chihuahua), with an emphasis on the Early Agricultural period to the Late Prehistoric period. Middle range societies that are diverse in scale and organization characterize this region. Significant advancements in our understanding of these societies have been made in recent years, but substantial challenges remain in building interpretative frameworks that account for both regional diversity and incorporate macroscale interactions. Topics covered in this review include the adoption of agriculture, population movements, bases of social differentiation, and interactions between organizationally disparate groups. These issues demonstrate the relevance of the Northwest to research on the organization of middle range societies.     

Teaching critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses: practices and problems

This study critiques the use of critical reflexivity in short-term international field courses. Critical reflexivity’s benefits include preparing students for professional research, deepening their learning, and giving the chance to see how student perspectives on fieldwork sites are influenced by their own identity and positionality. I use an inter-disciplinary review of reflexivity to describe four challenges faculty must address if they wish to train students to use reflexive practices in the field. I then describe student observations from a short-term field course to Southeast Asia that incorporated reflexivity and argue that faculty should include reflexivity cautiously on short-term field courses.     

Exploring Adaptive Variation among Hunter-gatherers with Binford’s Frames of Reference

The most significant change in hunter-gatherer studies has been the shift from expecting hunter-gatherers to have similar properties wherever they are found to recognizing that hunter-gatherer adaptations should vary along many different dimensions. Although archaeologists approach research with different goals, there is remarkable convergence in our knowledge about hunter-gatherers past and present. The ethnographic record of recent hunter-gatherers reveals enormous variation along several dimensions. The specific combinations of characteristics displayed among hunter-gatherers are not infinitely variable but cluster as distinctive “system states” (following Binford, Constructing frames of reference: an analytical method for archaeological theory building using ethnographic and environmental data sets, 2001) that pattern with both environmental and demographic variables at a global scale. Frames of reference based on these generalizations have implications for what archaeologists should expect for hunter-gatherers in different environmental settings, and also for how they should change over time if regional population density generally increases. Recognizing that patterns of variation at the regional scale are different from those at the global scale, I propose a hierarchical strategy for developing expectations for variation among prehistoric hunter-gatherers that can both situate the research locale with respect to global patterns of variation and acknowledge important dimensions of variation in habitat structure that are likely to condition regional variation in hunter-gatherer mobility, subsistence, and social organization.     

The Strange Situation of Attachment Research: A Review of Three Books

Attachment theory currently plays an important role in both research and practice concerned with children's healthy development, yet there is mounting criticism of its core assumptions and methods of investigation. Three recent books bring together a number of these criticisms, based on cross-cultural studies of children in diverse environments as well as an historical analysis of how attachment theory was created and sustained over time. The two cross-cultural books (Attachment Reconsidered, edited by Naomi Quinn and Jeannette Mageo, and Different Faces of Attachment, edited by Hiltrud Otto and Heidi Keller) include ethnographic observations of how infants and young children are cared for in many non-Western societies, as well as research on children's behavior in attachment-related situations. Common themes include multiple caregiving, maternal responsiveness, and autonomy versus relatedness, viewed from evolutionary, cross-cultural, and developmental perspectives. Marga Vicedo's historical study (The Nature and Nurture of Love) offers a scholarly account of the creators of attachment theory and the social-historical context of its development. Based on detailed documentation of the intellectual careers of these people, those who influenced them and those who criticized them, Vicedo builds an argument that attachment theory is not as scientifically solid as has been claimed, and that its core ideas are ultimately damaging to mothers. Taken as a whole, these books suggest seven observations on the current “strange situation” of attachment theory, which are summarized at the conclusion of the review.     

What Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Variation in the Archaeological Record of Eastern and Southern Africa

This article reviews the recent history of the archaeology of African hunter-gatherers, focusing on debates around the origins of modern humans and the destiny of hunter-gatherers with the advent of food production. African archaeologists are developing an increasing appreciation for the diversity of African hunter-gatherer societies. Understandings of hunter-gatherers based primarily on ethnography are being successfully challenged and extended.     

Women and children,war and peace: political agency in time of conflict

The four books under review focus on different aspects of war and conflict, but they all make it clear that women and children are more than their victims. They can be, and often are, active participants in all dimensions of conflict, from taking up arms to working for peace. While all four books paint an appropriately grim picture of war and its impact, there is also some optimism to be found in the resilience shown by women and children as they face the brutality of war and often actively seek to work for peace. Three of the books examine women's involvement in conflict, war, peace and peacemaking, and the aftermath of these events, albeit in very different ways—although all view women as active participants in the process rather than as victims. The fourth book included in this article, Children and global conflict, is not only relevant to the discussion, but also provides another important lens through which we can examine issues of conflict, war and peace. This review article provides insight into the contrition made to the field by these recent books individually, as well as when considered as parts of a whole.     

Intellectual Property and Cultural Appropriation

Many recent works on intellectual property have been published that come from outside anthropology but offer context for a set of ethical and legal questions central to the discipline, subsumed by the term cultural appropriation. These questions include concern for the circulation of ethnographic knowledge beyond source communities. Four recent works address the relationship between intellectual property and cultural appropriation. These books do not deal with iconic anthropological source communities. Rather, they offer anthropologists points of entry into debates on cultural appropriation that are of urgent interest both within and beyond anthropology.     

The Cultural Complexities of Learning and Development in A Post-Modern World

The books under review focus on the role culture plays in studies of childhood socialization, learning, schooling in global contexts, and educational change. Key chapters highlight schooling practices not well known in Western culture. Both books advocate understanding and respecting cultural differences while emphasizing that cultures are dialectally reshaping and reorganizing in response to rapidly changing economic, political, and social forces. The challenge facing societies in the age of global communication is to preserve unique cultural heritages while acknowledging shared human values that may transcend the boundaries of a given world.     

基于后人类思想的国际城市研究：理论溯源与概念辨析

进入二十一世纪以来,以赛博格城市、混合城市、城市政治生态学、集合城市主义为代表的后人类城市研究思想成为揭示当代城市中人类与非人类复杂交织关系的前沿性理论视角。本文在深入探讨上述概念的理论渊源、主要思想观点及其应用进展的基础上,指出后人类城市思想在我国城市研究中的可能方法论意义,即城市分析不能将人类与非人类绝对割裂地看待,而需要将城市中的主体或客体重新定义为人类与非人类的“混杂体”,整合以往分散在自然、工程、社科与人文等不同领域中的观察与分析,拓展人们对城市过程的认知,开创更多的城市研究可能性。     

Innovations,food storage and the origins of agriculture

Abstract

The global phenomenon of the birth of agriculture remains an enigma and challenges the role of food storage. Much has been written about their invention. A general explanation is needed for its progression in various parts of the world, which is both sociologically based and founded on the archaeological data. This task led Alain Testart to claim that it was by developing their existing skill sets (foraging, pottery, food storage and small-scale agriculture) that nomadic hunter-gatherers, burdened by an increasingly diverse set of tools and equipment, became sedentary. This sedentarism in turn allowed them to specialise in those activities, which had (literally) weighed them down: notably, breeding the first plant cultivars and, often, storing food.     

ARID-LAND FORAGING AS SEEN FROM AUSTRALIA: ADAPTIVE MODELS AND BEHAVIORAL REALITIES

This paper reviews assumptions guiding earlier models of social and economic behavior among arid land hunter-gatherers, especially those models that argued for the ‘original affluent society’ and concepts requiring groups of fixed size and composition operating within stable, bounded territories. A close look at socioeconomic behavior among ethnographic Ngatatjara Aborigines of the Western Desert challenges these assumptions and introduces an adaptive model based on ‘strategy switching’. In order to minimize risks imposed by droughts, the Ngatatjara responded in their movements and group composition by means of two alternative strategies: drought escape and drought evasion. Drought escape involved temporary abandonment of entire areas by individual households or by individuals to distant, better-favored areas. Drought evasion involved retreat by small family groups into areas within their ‘home’ country where relatively dependable water resources were available. Drought escape and drought evasion strategies are briefly considered as factors in early plant domestication in the context of prehistoric arid-land foraging societies in places like the Tehuacan Valley on the Mexican Plateau.     

Culture and Politics,Behavior and Biology: Seeking Synthesis among Fragmentary Anthropological Perspectives on Hunter-Gatherers

Hunter-gatherers define humanity's Pleistocene evolutionary past. Yet, hunter-gatherer societies in the 20th–21st centuries are examples par excellence of cultural marginalization, domination, and resilience. This review of six recent works on hunter-gatherers—spanning Paleolithic archaeology, bioarchaeology, behavioral ecology, and cultural anthropology—underscores that human forager diversity can be explained neither by culturally embedded political processes nor by ecologically situated evolutionary factors alone. Yet, theoretical bridging frameworks remain elusive, with a narrowing but persistent culture-biology divide. Recent developments in evolutionary life-history theory provide a robust biocultural foundation for understanding human sociality and the symbolic constitution of embodied cultural practice.     

Experimental Publics: Activist Culture and Political Intelligibility of Climate Change Action in the Hunter Valley,Southeast Australia

The ethnographic study of Western environmental activism opens up the prospect of studying subjectivities formed in opposition to dominant Western ideas and values, and yet encapsulated within Western societies and democratic polities. One of the directions in which it points the anthropologist, which is pursued in this article, is towards the study of the political lifeworlds of activists, their self‐identity as citizens and their embeddedness in the wider society. Environmental politics can be an emergent activity in citizens' lives, as expressed in John Dewey's concept of ‘the public’ as citizens who organise themselves to address the adverse consequences of situations that they experience in common (Dewey 1991[1927]). This paper focuses on a middle ground of social action between habitual daily practice, and the domain of institutional politics: groups of people in small voluntary organisations in the heavily coal‐mined Hunter Valley, Southeast Australia, who are moved to collective action to address the threatening aspects of anthropogenic climate change. Action group members variously articulate their reflexive understandings of the structural contradictions of environmentalism in corporate capitalist societies where values of consumerism and processes of individualization corrode collective concerns of citizenship‐based politics. These understandings inform activists' personal motivations, values and ideals for a ‘climate movement’, diverse modes of political action and striving for wider political intelligibility.     

Four middle Holocene pillar sites in West Turkana,Kenya

Abstract

Megalithic architecture is associated with spread of food production in many parts of the world, but archaeological investigations have focused mainly on megalithic sites among early agrarian societies. Africa offers the opportunity to examine megalithic construction—and related social phenomena—among mobile herders and hunter-gatherers with no access to domestic plants. In northwest Kenya, several megalithic "pillar sites" are known near Lake Turkana, but few have seen systematic research. This paper presents the results of archaeological survey and test excavations at four pillar sites in West Turkana 2007–2009, and describes the sites' spatial arrangements, depositional sequences, and material culture. Radiocarbon dates suggest that pillar sites near Lothagam were used ca. 4300 B.P. (uncalibrated), just as early herding began near Lake Turkana, while pillar sites near Kalokol may be slightly later (ca. 3800 B.P.). Comparisons of material cultural point to possible differences in use of contemporaneous pillar sites, and suggest monumental architecture had multiple forms and purposes in middle Holocene Turkana.     

The Social Dynamics of Everyday Life

The four books under review illustrate different ways of analyzing past societies through households, houses, and the conduct of everyday life. Grounded on the materiality, spatiality, and temporality of prehistoric data, spanning from the Palaeolithic through to the recent past, these books provide important archaeological contributions to the anthropological study of social organization, inviting challenge and interdisciplinary dialogue. Each book has a distinctive approach, yet all four reflect wider epistemological shifts toward a concern with context, scale, diversity, and interaction. In summarizing and critiquing them, most attention is paid to their social perspectives and definitions. This leads to consideration of related work in wider anthropology.     

Energy source,protein metabolism,and hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies

During late winter and spring, hunter-gatherers in temperate, subarctic, and arctic environments often relied on diets that provided marginal or inadequate caloric intakes. During such periods, particularly when stored food supplies dwindled or were used up entirely, lean meat became the principal source of energy. Nutritional problems associated with high-protein, low-energy diets are discussed. These problems include elevated metabolic rates, with correspondingly higher caloric requirements, and deficiencies in essential fatty acids. The relative benefits of adding fat or carbohydrate to a diet of lean meat are evaluated in light of the protein-sparing capacities of these two nutrients. Experimental data indicate that although both enhance high-protein, low-energy diets, carbohydrate is a more effective supplement than fat. Given the nutritional inadequacies of a lean-meat diet, the paper concludes with a discussion of alternative subsistence strategies that increase the availability of carbohydrate or fat at the critical time of year.     

Zooarchaeology in Complex Societies: Political Economy, Status, and Ideology

The zooarchaeology of complex societies provides insights into the interrelated social and economic relationships that people and animals created. I present a synthesis of zooarchaeological research published since the early 1990s that addresses political economy, status distinctions, and the ideological and ritual roles of animals in complex cultures. I address current approaches and applications as well as theoretical shifts in zooarchaeological practice. Research indicates there is great variability across space and time in how past peoples used animals to generate economic surplus, to establish status differentiation within societies, and to create symbolic meaning through sacrifices, offerings, and in feasts. The study of human/animal interactions in complex societies can contribute to fundamental questions of broad relevance regarding political and social life.     

Coffee,Fair Trade,and the Commodification of Morality

The goals of the fair trade movement include guaranteeing a reasonable income for rural farmers in the Global South, building democratic institutions and gender equality, and promoting environmental sustainability. Proponents claim that consumers, through their buying choices, can counter the negative externalities created by neoliberal reforms of the past three decades. The question is, whether a market-oriented solution can address market-created ills, or whether fair trade is a marketing strategy to increase the profit margin of agencies along the commodity chain? This article examines how these questions have been addressed by the books under review.