Folk biology: A frontier of cognitive anthropology

Brent Berlin, Dennis E. Breedlove, and Peter H. Raven. Principles of Tzeltal Plant Classification: An Introduction to the Botanical Ethnography of a Mayan‐Speaking People of Highland Chiapas. New York and London: Academic Press, 1974. xxii + 660 pp. Tables, figures, maps, illustrations, appendixes, references, and indexes. $39.50 (cloth).     

Assembling an Anthropological Actor: Anthropological Assemblage and Colonial Government in Papua

This paper traces the networks through which particular practices of collecting cultures became imbricated in new relations governing colonial populations. It investigates the socio-technical arrangements associated with “practical anthropology” as they were enrolled in the Australian administered territory of Papua. The paper follows the assemblage of a new kind of anthropological actor: one which is framed in relation to new articulations of the administrative, academic and museum networks associated with a programme of “scientific administration” and the doctrine of “humanitarian colonialism”. In particular, it focuses on the office of the Government Anthropologist and the ways in which “native culture” emerged as an administrative surface.     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.     

去墨西哥国家人类学博物馆解析2012玛雅预言

<正>对于美洲大陆古印第安人所曾经拥有的辉煌国度和璀璨文明历史一直非常向往,尤其是神乎其神的玛雅文明以及传说已久的2012年预言。如今有机会在"世界毁灭"之前来到墨西哥旅游,并有机会在墨西哥城的国家人类学博物馆泡上一天,     

Historical and Anthropological Archaeology: Forging Alliances

Historical and anthropological archaeology have had a somewhat disjointed relationship. Differences in theoretical perspectives, methodological concerns, and material records have led to a lack of cross talk between these branches of Americanist archaeology. This paper presents recent issues in historical archaeology, points out areas of common concern, and argues that both archaeologies would benefit from informed discussions about the materiality and history of the pre- and post-Columbian world.     

Shifting Sands: Towards an Anthropological Praxis

This paper reflects on some of the dilemmas within my shifting roles over the last twenty years as helper/friend/member of the Katherine Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia and then, as anthropologist. During this period, indigenous calls for land rights have been increasingly interpreted in the terms of ‘bourgeois law’ (Collier et al. 1995). Indigenous identities have become the focus of intense public scrutiny as they define eligibility for scarce resources. Fighting over the scraps of what was once a wholistic indigenous landscape, some of Australia's indigenous peoples have begun to turn upon each other, in the struggle for recognition. Anthropologists as the scribes of indigenous identities are placed in invidious positions, and are easily accused of participating in (neo)colonial endeavours. This paper takes some small steps towards locating an anthropological praxis in this land rights/native title arena of power.     

Northumbria's southern frontier: a review

Northumbria's southern frontier was arguably the most important political boundary inside pre‐Viking England. It has, however, attracted little scholarly attention since Peter Hunter Blair's seminal article in Archaeo‐logia Aeliana in 1948, which later commentators have generally followed rather uncritically. This essay reviews his arguments in the light of more recent research and casts doubt on several key aspects of his case: firstly, it contests his view that this boundary was fundamental to the naming of both southern and northern England and its kingdoms; secondly, it queries the supposition that the Roman Ridge dyke system is likely to have been a Northumbrian defensive work; thirdly, it critiques the view that the Grey Ditch, at Bradwell, formed part of the frontier; and, finally, it argues against the boundary in the west being along the River Ribble. Rather, pre‐Viking Northumbria more probably included those parts of the eleventh‐century West Riding of Yorkshire which lie south of the River Don, with a frontier perhaps often identical to that at Domesday, and it arguably met western Mercia not on the Ribble but on the Mersey. It was probably political developments in the tenth century, and particularly under Edward the Elder and his son Athelstan, that led to the Mercian acquisition of southern Lancashire and the development of a new ecclesiastical frontier between the sees of Lichfield and York on the Ribble, in a period that also saw the York archdiocese acquire northern Nottinghamshire.     

Introduction: Biographies of Anthropologists as Anthropological Data

Biographies of anthropologists are widely recognized as useful for the history of science and the discipline. Introducing this special issue “Biographies of Anthropologists,” I argue that they not only provide information about anthropology, but also data for anthropology because they are studies of human agents enmeshed in social and cultural contexts, comparable to life histories of ethnographic informants. Biographies of anthropologists are of similar importance for empirical and theoretical anthropology as ethnographies, grammars, and monographs in archaeology and biological anthropology. They depict cultural dynamics from a person-centered, intimate, experience-near, and diachronic perspective on anthropology's cluster of sodalities.     

Mobile Humanity: The Delocalization of Anthropological Research

Anthropological research in recent decades has become increasingly multi-sited, envisioning the local as an iteration of world-systemic processes, and following the movement of people, things and ideas across the typical boundaries of sites. This review essay examines four edited volumes concerned with such mobility and dislocation. The cultural anthropological volumes engage with the strengths and perceived weaknesses of multi-sited ethnography, the advantages of following people and themes across space, and the definition of sites by topic rather than by place. The archaeological collections move beyond typologies that have constrained archaeological investigations of movement through the study of the material practices that constituted social landscapes of mobile and settled peoples. Although the reviewed volumes offer important methodological distinctions and theoretical engagements, all four provide numerous ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological views of the delocalization of anthropological research, including claims for the utility of collaborative partnerships, the following of paths across space and time, and the reconsideration of the fixity and centrality of contemporary, historic and prehistoric places.     

Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-as-Usual

Gregg, Susan Ailing. Foragers and Farmers: Population Interaction and Agricultural Expansion in Prehistoric Europe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. xx + 275 pp. including index and bibliography. $24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Hastorf, Christine A., and Virginia S. Popper. Current Paleoethnobotany: Analytical Methods and Cultural Interpretations of Archaeological Plant Remains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xii + 236 pp. including chapter references and index. $24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper.

Pearsall, Deborah M. Paleoethnobotany: a Handbook of Procedures. San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. xii + 470 pp. including chapter references and index. $59.95.     

A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space

The attempted extirpation of Indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the ‘idyllic proceedings’ of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such ‘annal of mankind’ written in ‘letters of blood and fire’. More pointedly, by contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, it is argued that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in the novel. The latter include the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.     

Terms in place and time: A case study from the Anthropological Index Online*

An analysis of terms, and keywords that have appeared over the last 50 years in the Anthropological Index (now AIO) challenges anthropology's purported universal coverage of regions and topics. Anthropological article production published in specialized periodicals leaves many areas uncovered, some topics marginalized, or absent. The article takes the presence or absence of keywords in articles in anthropological literature from all world regions to ask what may have generated these gaps. We argue that keyword use can reveal the role that geographical positioning, languages spoken, and national histories may have had in anthropological production. Shamanism and cognate concepts such as animism and spirit possession are taken to guide an analysis of the anthropological production in different languages through the use of keywords that appear in the coverage of AIO. The research demonstrates how far keywords use is shaped by contingent adjustments to predicaments and theoretical concerns with complex historical roots.     

花厅墓地的人类学考察

把花厅墓地随葬的陶器划分为大汶口式、良渚式、薛家岗式和大汶口-良渚式、大汶口-薛家岗式,把玉器划分为良渚式、花厅式和融合式。根据随葬品的文化属性推测该花厅居民有大汶口人、良渚人和薛家岗人,大汶口人接受了良渚人的玉文化,良渚人和薛家岗人接受了大汶口的重要丧葬习俗。随着良渚人进入花厅,花厅由原来的富人和平民两个阶层分裂为贵族、富人和平民三个阶层,并使花厅由简单社会向复杂社会变化。三个不同考古学文化的先民在花厅共生共存,创造了面貌较为复杂和多样的考古学文化。     

Anthropological Hermeneutics and Indian Religion

Burghart, Richard, and Audrey Cantlie, eds. Indian Religion. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. xi + 258 pp. including chapter references. $27.50 cloth.

Marglin, Frédérique Apffel. Wives of the God‐King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. xv + 388 pp. including plates, bibliography, glossary, and index. $29.95 cloth.