Meeting the demand for meat?

Renewed fears expressed by the United Nations about worldwide population growth have coincided with international concerns about the increased consumption of meat. This article, which draws upon long‐term fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands and ongoing scientific research in the Netherlands, examines the ways in which global organizations are framing and responding to these concerns. Economists generally address the problem of increased meat consumption through the language of ‘demand’, while nutritionists adopt the rhetoric of nutritional ‘needs’. Not only do these approaches tend to present meat – which in practice takes many forms – as a single substance, but they also flatten the nuanced relationships that exist between the eater and the eaten, while overlooking the diverse contexts in which ‘meat’ eating takes place. This article addresses the question how anthropologists might approach the topic of increased meat consumption, suggesting that an analysis of the ways in which global actors approach this topic can help the discipline of anthropology to re‐engage with historic debates about the role of ‘the material’ and ‘the symbolic’ in relation to eating practices and to move these debates in new and productive directions.     

Using historically informed archaeology: Seventeenth and eighteenth century Hueda/European interaction on the coast of Bénin

The period of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and European colonies is relatively well documented compared with the historic records of many regions of precolonial Africa. However, this documentation necessarily presents a perspective distilled through European eyes. This paper suggests a methodology influenced byAnnales history for critically analyzing documentary sources in conjunction with a critical interpretation of archaeological remains. Archaeological evidence from recent excavations at the site of Savi, capital of the Hueda kingdom, is contrasted with documentary evidence, facilitating an interpretation of motivations guiding Hueda interaction with European traders and structuring their spatial relationship.     

On the Supernatural and Extraordinary Experience: Multiple Views and a Call for Synthesis

This review describes four disparate books that relate to the anthropology of religion. Each has a distinctive approach, ranges over a wide subject matter, and makes provocative claims. In summarizing and critiquing them most attention is paid to their perspectives on the natural and the supernatural. This leads to consideration of related work in the anthropology of extraordinary experience. It is argued that while our different approaches to the supernatural may reflect deep epistemological divisions within anthropology and, more broadly, in society, a form of semiotics that takes emergent complexity into consideration does provide opportunities for consensus.     

Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

Culture,Information, and Inheritance: New Perspectives on Old Questions

Two books under review investigate the relationship between biological and cultural transmission of information. This perspective offers a promising basis for a definition of culture with broad applicability in contemporary anthropology. Lamb and Jablonka stress the complexity of biological transmission and the importance of behavioral and symbolic variation to evolutionary biology. Richerson and Boyd present a rigorous model-based approach to the analysis of cultural transmission. The approach reduces cultural phenomena to simple models for methodological purposes. Modeling cultural transmission has value for anthropology but cannot replace approaches drawn from social theory and from detailed contextual studies.     

Evidentiary truths? The evidence of anthropology through the anthropology of medical evidence

Anthropologists have become increasingly concerned about the discipline's lack of 'public engagement' with contemporary issues of late, but a key underlying problem - anthropology's unwillingness to address the nature and evidentiary status of anthropological knowledge itself - has remained largely unacknowledged. Here I approach this problem initially through an analysis of the rise of 'evidence' as a central concept in public policy and practice. Using the exemplar of 'evidence-based' medicine, I analyse anthropological responses to these evidentiary requirements, arguing that this turn to evidence can be seen in many other arenas of research and public policy and presents a fundamental challenge for the credibility and legitimacy of anthropology as a discipline. In the second part of the article comparison with anthropological work on legal issues provides a reflexive opening through which to begin to consider the nature of anthropological 'evidence' itself.     

An Ethnoarchaeological Study on Anthropic Markers from a Shell-midden in Tierra del Fuego (Southern Argentina): Lanashuaia II

ABSTRACT

For many years the identification of activity areas has been carried out through the spatial distribution of lithics, zooarchaeological remains and specific features such as fireplaces. However, these data are rarely combined and integrated with results from specific analytical techniques such as phytoliths, organic matter, carbonates and multielemental analysis. This research presents the first results of an intrasite spatial analysis on a layer from the site Lanashuaia II, a shell-midden located on the Beagle Channel coast (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina). Ethnoarchaeology is used as a methodological tool to give content to the concept of anthropic markers by means of formulating archaeological hypothesis on the basis of ethnological information. This paper presents the application of specific anthropic markers, which have been designed and applied to identify ashy remains and waste areas through different combinations of proxies. The results show how an approach that integrates different techniques enhances data interpretation and allows to give visibility to activities that may not leave visible evidences.     

Historical Archaeology: An Outlook from the Argentinean Pampas

This paper ponders a number of theoretical and methodological aspects concerning historical archaeology and resulting from an analysis of their development and integration with disciplines such as history, ethnohistory, and anthropology. Special attention is paid to how these are involved in the research of documentary evidence and how the different approaches have an influence on a given case. The authors' viewpoint in the matter is explained and reported on the basis of the fleldwork they conducted at an archaeological site: a midnineteenth-century fortlet located in the center of Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina.     

USER REACTIONS TO A VISITOR DISTRIBUTION PROGRAMME IN KILLARNEY PROVINCIAL PARK, ONTARIO: A REPLY

Rothacker expresses concern about an apparent methodological error that could lead to the possible adoption of inappropriate management policies. Rothacker fears we have neglected the possibility of user displacement, an interpretation that stems largely from our observation that 'interviewing was focused on those areas of the park where recreational use was concentrated.' We trust that the following explanation will clarify the situation and alleviate his concerns.     

BEYOND COMPARISON: HISTOIRE CROISÉE AND THE CHALLENGE OF REFLEXIVITY1

This article presents, in a programmatic way, the histoire croisée approach, its methodological implications and its empirical developments. Histoire croisée draws on the debates about comparative history, transfer studies, and connected or shared history that have been carried out in the social sciences in recent years. It invites us to reconsider the interactions between different societies or cultures, erudite disciplines or traditions (more generally, between social and cultural productions). Histoire croisée focuses on empirical intercrossings consubstantial with the object of study, as well as on the operations by which researchers themselves cross scales, categories, and viewpoints. The article first shows how this approach differs from purely comparative or transfer studies. It then develops the principles of pragmatic and reflexive induction as a major methodological principle of histoire croisée. While underlining the need and the methods of a historicization of both the objects and categories of analysis, it calls for a reconsideration of the way history can combine empirical and reflexive concerns into a dynamic and flexible approach.     

Multiple Histories: Three Journeys through Academic Records,Medieval Yemen,and Current Anthropology's Encounters with the Past

This chapter sets out to reconsider the interrelation and non-identity between tribal and kinship relations in South-Western Arabia's history through three cumulative methodological steps that are in part inspired by renewed debates on kinship in anthropology, but also by the École des Annales and other historians such as David Sabaean. A first step identifies different legacies of interactions between history and anthropology in the Euro-American academic record after 1945, and specifies their relevance for today. In a next step, prevailing relations between tribal structures and kinship relations will be assessed through a long-distance comparison between the medieval constellations in the Zaydi highlands of Yemen and elsewhere in Asia for an eleventh century time horizon. Thirdly, the outcome of this comparative analysis should then provide some indicators for a fresh assessment of existing source materials through anthropological perspectives, with special emphasis on gender, kinship and hierarchies. The argument concludes with a discussion of “multiple histories”, and how to approach and write them.     

Arrival: Anthropology in Hollywood

The recent Hollywood science fiction film Arrival features as its main character a linguist who explicitly references the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativism. Unusually for a mainstream film, Arrival presents the insights of linguistic anthropology as a key to the human‐alien encounter and combines these concerns with other key anthropological insights, particularly in relation to notions of time and the embodied nature of writing/drawing. In this article, the author argues that the film can be useful in thinking about anthropological debates on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of Sapir‐Whorf and suggests that a careful parsing of the anthropological concepts drawn on in the film provides food for thought about the possible usefulness of popular fictional concoctions for thinking through contemporary issues in anthropology and conveying them to a wider audience.     

History of Political Thought as Detective-Work

This paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice—and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us—ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’.     

The Empire of the Hittites

Abstract

The paper deals with six recent studies which relate to the on-going debate over the chronology of the eleventh to the ninth century B.C.E. strata in the Levant and thus to the history of the region in the Iron Age. The paper takes issue with methodological problems relating to the questions of ethnographic comparison in archaeology, interpretation of biblical sources by archaeologists, pottery typology and dating. It offers a different interpretation of the finds at Hazor, Beth-shemesh, Tel Batash, Horbat Rosh Zait, and Bethsaida.     

Anthropology in the UK: Never Mind the Biographies,Here's the Reflexive Symbols

Focusing on the concept of the intellectual biography, I explore the relational and symbolic importance of life histories for the reflexive history of anthropology. Legacies of questioning disciplinary self-awareness exist for fieldwork, data analysis, writing up, and academic social networks. The intellectual biography, as a newly developing self-conscious genre, is becoming central to the way in which the discipline writes its own history. This article situates five recent biographies of “British” anthropologists into a theoretical, methodological, and intellectual landscape that encompasses the international development of a century of social anthropology in the United Kingdom.     

‘Child sacrifice’ in Uganda? The BBC, ‘witch doctors’ and anthropologists (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article discusses both several recent BBC broadcasts on allegations of ‘child sacrifice’ in Uganda and criticisms of the programmes by a number of British anthropologists. It pursues the idea that both the broadcasts and the criticisms raise two sets of crucial questions: the first is in regard to the interpretation of alleged ritual killings in contemporary Africa and the effects of their representation on lay audiences, both non‐African and African; the second concerns media representations of Africa and public anthropology. Anthropologists (and indeed scholars from other disciplines such as history) have a lot of expertise to offer in terms of understanding the occult in many societies, including contextualising this realm in terms of historical processes and material concerns and suggesting links between apparently disparate issues. In this way, they can they can sometimes go beyond surface manifestations, offer alternative explanations and show that things are not always the way they first seem. However, in order to play an effective public role in this regard, anthropologists need to be willing to grapple pro‐actively with such matters of public concern, not least by engaging constructively with the media.     

Paleodemographic analysis of a fossil porcupine (Hystrix refossa Gervais, 1852) population from the Upper Pleistocene site of Geula Cave (Mount Carmel,Israel)

For decades zooarchaeological studies mainly focused on teeth age profiles to derive central hypotheses concerning human subsistence during the Pleistocene. Behavior was often related to hunting and/or scavenging strategies according to two models: attritional versus catastrophic. However, few studies have estimated basic demographic parameters using standard methods of population ecology, which are necessary for a more confident interpretation of animal paleopopulation structures. Thanks to a remarkably rich fossil bone assemblage from the Upper Pleistocene cave of Geula (Mount Carmel, Israel), in this paper we perform a paleodemographic analysis of Hystrix refossa, Gervais 1852 (Mammalia, Rodentia). We first consider phylogenetic and morphometric dental criteria for the comparison of Pleistocene porcupine species, followed by an examination of taphonomic conditions of the bone assemblage. We focus strongly on the age structure of the fossil population, presenting a new methodological approach that combines life tables and Leslie matrix models – one of the best-known methods in population ecology for assessing population growth and age distribution. We detail demographic parameters derived from cross-sectional life tables and past trends in the porcupine population at Geula Cave using simple matrix projection model. Finally, we were able to perform an elasticity analysis to identify which demographic component was potentially the most critical for influencing growth. We show that the population of H. refossa did not decline or shrink but was stable. Our results permit us to characterize Geula Cave as a natural shelter for porcupines, with limited evidence to scavenging and hunting by either hyenas or humans.     

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.     

Crisis and communitas: Victor Turner and social process

Victor Turner anticipated many of the new directions that distinguish contemporary sociocultural anthropology. In The Ritual Process, Turner set out the significant parameters of his approach in which ethnography plays a central role. He advocated an anthropology that is open, non-dualist, and that is concerned with the human condition in the diversity of its practices. In his introductory guest editorial to part two of the special issue on Ritual process, Bruce Kapferer focuses in particular on the structure/anti-structure dynamic in Turner’s approach to ritual process.