Pop Anthropology,With Little Anthropology or Pop

Unlike other scientific fields, anthropology popularizations are as likely as not to be written by scientists who are not themselves experts in the subject. This is because the subject, the scientific knowledge of our origin and patterns of bio-cultural diversity—or more broadly, who we are and where we come from—is the source of our culturally authoritative origin myths, and consequently of broad general interest in and of itself. But anthropology popularizations come with the responsibility not only to get the facts and theory correct, but as well to understand the history and embedded politics in the stories themselves.     

Prehistoric Footprints in Jaguar Cave,Tennessee

Abstract

About 4500 years ago, during the Late Archaic period, nine explorers reconnoitered several passages within a large cave in north central Tennessee. Although prehistoric cave exploration was not unusual in eastern North America, this particular trip is unique because 274 footprints of these ancient cavers are preserved in the damp floor sediment of a side passage. Analyses of the route taken by the explorers, and of their footprint trail significantly enhance our knowledge of cave use in prehistoric eastern North America.     

Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

Theory,Practice, Life: Rethinking Americanist Anthropology for the Twenty- First Century

Collier, Jane Fishburne, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds. Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. xiii + 369 pp. including references. $39.50 cloth.

Lamphere, Louise. From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. xviii + 390 pp. including references and index. $45.00 cloth; $14.95 paper.

Shaver, Phillip, and Clyde Hendrick, eds. Sex and Gender. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1987. 328 pp. including references. No price.     

Anthropology,Festival, and Spectacle

This article weaves together analyses of three recent books which, despite their being compiled primarily by scholars outside of the discipline of anthropology, make theoretical and methodological contributions useful to the anthropology of festivals and ritual, both religious and secular. These works demonstrate that spectacle has been ritualized into festive practices of modernity and identity in multiple places, times, and cultural contexts. Greater attention to how this works from a general anthropological perspective is needed.     

Anthropology,revolution, and development

Green, Edward C., ed. Practicing Development Anthropology. Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1986. xi + 283 pp. including tables, figures, and acknowledgements. $26.50 paper.

Banerjee, Diptendra, ed. Marxian Theory and the Third World. New Delhi/Beverly Hills/London: Sage Publications, 1985. 325 pp. including chapter references and list of contributors. No price.