Death,Grief, and Cross-World Longing

Death has enduringly offered anthropologists a unique theoretical conundrum in that it concerns humans and human personhood, and yet unlike most aspects of social life, it involves an absent interlocutor. A terrifying rupture into mundane existence, death demands a response on the part of individuals and communities. The four books I review here offer varied contributions to this rich anthropological tradition but are united by a concern with grief and the ways in which death both erupts into and transcends social life.     

The descent of nations: social evolutionary theory,modernism and ethno‐symbolism

This article explores the use of a revised conception of social evolutionary theory towards an understanding of nationalism. First, I review the debate between ethno‐symbolism and modernism, through the lens of the Warwick Debate between Gellner and Smith, arguing that both are partly right. Secondly, I outline what the revised conception of social evolution is looking first at its traditional conception before outlining a Darwinian view of social evolutionary theory. Finally, I examine how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can help fruitfully bring the ethno‐symbolic and modernist perspectives together. This is done by a sustained engagement primarily with the theories of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner pointing to how Darwinian social evolutionary theory can provide a link between the two theories that makes them mutually supportive rather than opposed.     

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

Anthropological theory and engagement: A zero‐sum game? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Engagement with pressing social and political issues is often presented as a threat to the elaboration of sophisticated anthropological theory that needs to be protected from such concerns in order to flourish. However the history of anthropological theory demonstrates that some of the discipline's most important contributions have tended to arise as a result of its proponents' desire to engage in such debates. Although we cannot reproduce the cultural models of a previous generation of anthropologists, the future elaboration of ground‐breaking anthropological theory depends upon a rediscovery of such engaged work that does not posit engagement versus theoretical development as a zero‐sum game.     

Studying Human Responses to Environmental Change: Trends and Trajectories of Archaeological Research

ABSTRACT

Environmental archaeological enquiry has a long and vibrant history. Many of the same questions have persisted in archaeological dialogues over the past century. In particular, the effects of environmental change on demographic patterns, health, and societal stability are among the most pervasive questions being addressed by anthropological research. These studies have limitations, however. For example, evaluations of the complex relationships between environmental variables and human responses are only just beginning to emerge in anthropological literature. This goal requires high-resolution paleoclimate datasets and the use of quantitative modelling rooted in evolutionary and complex systems theory. This paper serves as a broad review of advances in environmental archaeological enquiry associated with environmental change and human response. I argue that the future of archaeological questions concerning human-environmental connection requires a re-evaluation of causality and the incorporation of complex systems approaches to address human responses to external pressures.     

Death as a Window to Life: Anthropological Approaches to Early Medieval Mortuary Ritual

Identity, personhood, ritual, religion, landscape, and the materiality of social practice have inspired anthropologists to advance exiting new agendas. Many of these issues coalesce in mortuary archaeology. This article reviews the dialogue between anthropological questions and the mortuary record through examining three books on early medieval archaeology. It focuses on theoretical developments rather than methodology, discussing key issues relating both to the study of early medieval mortuary remains and to broader anthropological agendas, such as modern political ideology and cultural identity.     

旅游研究中的三种社会心理学视角之比较

旅游是一个新兴的研究领域,需要从其他学科引入相关的理论和方法来推动自身的成熟与发展。旅游感知、态度和行为是旅游研究的重要领域之一,直接关系到旅游业的健康持续发展。在过去数十年间,社会心理学的社会交换理论和社会表征理论为这一领域的研究提供了有力的理论支撑。相对剥夺理论是一种二战以后逐渐发展起来的社会心理学理论,在社会弱势群体的心理失衡和疏导机制研究方面有较强的解释能力。本文通过对旅游研究中的既有社会心理学视角剖析的基础上,分析了相对剥夺的内涵和旅游发展中的相对剥夺现象,进而比较了相对剥夺理论与既有社会心理学理论视角的独特性和互补性。作为一种新的社会心理学视角,相对剥夺理论在旅游地相对剥夺感的表现形式、成因、疏导机制和定量测量等方面有较大的应用价值和潜力。     

Into the Great Beyond: Ontology and the Non-Human

In the following essay I review three recent additions to the burgeoning ontology literature: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, and Istvan Praet's Animism and the Question of Life. United by their shared goal of making anthropological inquiry less ethnocentric by avoiding the imposition of Western ontologies on non-Western societies, these works simultaneously exhibit considerable variation in theory and method, ranging from traditional structuralism to ethnographically-informed Peircean semiotics. I emerged from my engagement with these ambitious books unclear about how anthropologists should conduct ethnographic research that goes “beyond the human” and convinced that units of analysis that might seem anachronistic to certain people (such as language, culture, and collectives) remain key constituents of the foundation of anthropological inquiry.     

2. ONCE AGAIN,WITH MORE FEELING

This book summarizes in a compact volume Runciman's arguments to comparative sociologists that their discipline belongs under the theoretical umbrella of neo‐Darwinian selectionism. In his view, heritable variation and competitive selection govern cultural and social as well as biological evolution. Runciman makes a strong case for the usefulness of selectionism, but two of the theory's central features are problematic: his choice of units of selection; and the notion that culture can be distinguished from society historically as well as analytically. No one friendly to the basic project would argue against the need for hypotheses about units that undergo selection, but arguments can be made, also on pragmatic grounds, that he has chosen the wrong kinds of units. Runciman's learning and wisdom show to good effect in the book's fundamental approach: in the overall human story, the biological, cultural, and social coevolve. The quickly accumulating evidence of evolutionary psychology, anthropology, sociology, and neuroscience strongly supports the hypothesis that there is a biological basis for a great deal of human behavior, and also that sociocultural evolution modifies genes. History, in this way of thinking, is like a “braided stream” of unpredictably mutating, blending, and coevolving biological, cultural, and social processes. The old Darwinian image of branching fails to capture the complexity of evolutionary processes in biology, culture, and society. Runciman outlines a unified bio‐social science relying upon information theory. If his program were carried out consistently it would relegate to a non‐scientific level the traditional historical narratives about “carriers” or “vehicles”. The scientific‐explanatory level would instead feature replicators. Gametheory strategies play a prominent role in the selectionist picture. The emphasis on units of information stored in human brains or in exosomatic brain prostheses pushes neuroscience and information theory to the fore. An argument for the analytic‐heuristic value of “memes” and “practices” should be weighed against the value of other hypothetical units undergoing selection in a sociocultural evolutionary approach.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

1. CONSTRUCTING A SELECTIONIST PARADIGM

In his latest contribution to the application of Darwinian evolutionary thinking to the social sciences, W. G. Runciman conceives of human behavior as resulting from three levels of selection—biological, cultural, and social. These give rise, respectively, to evoked, acquired, and imposed patterns of behavior. The biological level is hardly controversial, but to draw a distinction between separate cultural and social selective processes is more problematic. Runciman takes memes to be the variants competitively selected at the cultural level and the practices constituting rule‐governed roles to be the variants competitively selected at the social level—thus preserving separate spheres of research for anthropology and sociology. It is not clear, however, what drives cultural and social evolution. Nor are the three levels theoretically well integrated. The book's strength lies in the numerous examples provided of how the application of selectionist theory illuminates and enriches sociological and historical explanations and contributes to the construction of historical narrative.     

Archaeology’s quest for a seat at the high table of anthropology

Between 1900 and 1970, American archaeologists perceived themselves as second-class anthropologists because the archaeological record suggested little not already known ethnographically, archaeology served anthropology by testing ethnologically derived models of cultural evolution, the archaeological record was ethnologically incomplete as a result of poor preservation, and archaeologists used but did not write anthropological theory. Ethnologists of the period agreed with these points and regularly reminded archaeologists of their limited role in anthropology. A few archaeologists claimed in the 1950s that archaeology could contribute to anthropological theory but they were ignored. The claim was reiterated by new archaeologists of the 1960s, and by the 1970s worries about the poor preservation of the archaeological record had softened. However, most archaeologists after 1970 (and before 1990) used anthropological theory and did not write new theory on the basis of archaeological data. The root cause of American archaeology’s ninety-year absence from anthropology’s high table of theory seems to be the discipline-wide retention of the ninety-year old belief that archaeology is prehistoric ethnology and the (unnecessary and constraining) corollary that archaeologists must use anthropological theory to explain the archaeological record.     

Does Culture Evolve?

The drive to describe cultural history as an evolutionary process has two sources. One from within social theory is part of the impetus to convert social studies into "social sciences" providing them with the status accorded to the natural sciences. The other comes from within biology and biological anthropology in the belief that the theory of evolution must be universal in its application to all functions of all living organisms. The social--scientific theory of cultura evolution is pre-Darwinian, employing a developmental model of unfolding characterized by intrinsic directionality, by definable stages that succeed each other, and by some criterion of progress. It is arbitrary in its definitions of progress, and has had the political problem that a diachronic claim of cultural progress implies a synchronic differential valuation of present-day cultures. The biological scheme creates an isomorphism between the Darwinian mechanism of evolution and cultural history, postulating rules of cultural "mutation," cultural inheritance and some mechanism of natural selection among cultural alternatives. It uses simplistic ad hoc notions of individual acculturation and of the differential survival and reproduction of cultural elements. It is unclear what useful work is done by substituting the metaphor of evolution for history.     

Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology

Niche construction theory (NCT) is a relatively new development within evolutionary biology, but one that has important implications for many adjacent fields of research, including the human sciences. Here, we present a broad overview of NCT and discuss its application to archaeology. We begin by laying out the basic arguments of NCT, including a historical overview, focusing on how it affects understanding of human behavior and evolution. We then consider how NCT can be used to inform empirical research and how it might profitably be applied in archaeology, using as a case study the origins of agriculture. We suggest that the unrivaled potency of human niche construction, compared with that of other species, means that archaeologists need not be mere consumers of biological insights but can become important contributors to evolutionary theory.     

The Neolithic Macro-(R)evolution: Macroevolutionary Theory and the Study of Culture Change

The macroevolutionary approach in archaeology represents the most recent example in a long tradition of applying principles of biological evolution to the study of culture change. Archaeologists working within this paradigm see macroevolutionary theory as an effective response to the shortcomings of neo-Darwinian biological evolution for studying cultural evolution. Rather than operating at the level of individual traits, macroevolutionary archaeologists emphasize the role of hierarchical processes in culture change. While neo-Darwinian archaeologists disavow any element of human intent in culture change, to macroevolutionary archaeologists human agency is a key component of cultural evolution that allows cultures to respond to pressures more quickly and with greater degree of flexibility and directedness than found in biological evolution. Major culture change, when it happens, is likely to be rapid, even revolutionary, with periods of rapid change separated by periods of relative stasis of actively maintained stability. The emergence of Neolithic cultures has long been recognized as one of two periods of major revolutionary culture change in human prehistory. Here I examine the record for the Near East, tracing the empirical record for the origin of agriculture in this region, as well as other demographic, social, and ideological components of Neolithic emergence. While the empirical record from the Near East subscribes in a general way to basic principles of macroevolutionary theory, cultural evolution cannot be understood through appeal to principles of biological evolution alone, whether based in macroevolutionary theory or neo-Darwinianism. Instead, the key role of human agency in culture change distinguishes cultural evolution from biological evolution and requires a more pluralistic and less doctrinaire appeal to multiple models of change based in both the biological and social sciences.     

Collecting,Collections, and Practice in the Anthropologies of Health and Disease

Anthropologists studying health and disease collect data ranging from human remains to peoples’ lived experiences. Each of the books reviewed here reveals the social processes that shape how disease phenomena are observed, assessed, classified, and interpreted, both by the individuals who experience them and the researchers who study them. The classic anthropological themes of collection, exchange, circulation, social relations, and reciprocity resonate throughout. Theoretical and methodological differences aside, anthropologists remain united by a commitment to holistic and integrative approaches and the shared goal of providing historically and socially contextualized, nuanced understandings of the human condition.     

CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL METABOLISM

The emergence of culture and cultural evolution is the result of an evolutionary process, evident also in non‐human species. What is specifically human is the dominance of cultural evolution. This does not mean that cultural evolution has replaced organic evolution, but rather that both have merged into one coevolutionary complex. Through niche construction, organic modern humans are the product of cultural evolution. This cannot be explained by adaptation to natural environment or by sexual selection. Cultural evolution with its coevolved organic traits did not so much enhance competence towards the natural environment as it did competence to develop and maintain cooperation. In the process, culture became a “system” with its own imperatives and integrating forces, differentiating into several autopoietic subsystems: the symbolic‐cognitive subsystem, the economic subsystem and the political subsystem. There are however social‐metabolic constraints that put limits on their evolutionary degrees of freedom. Culture's autopoietic reach has adaptive boundaries. The concept of social metabolism attempts to capture the unity of “persons” in a physical‐biological sense and “culture” in a symbolic sense, the decisive point being that culture must be understood as an autopoietic system sui generis. The social‐metabolic system of relations and interactions between nature, human population and culture is inherently coevolutionary. The history of social metabolism is the history of the coevolution of two autopoietic systems – an open and blind non‐orthogenetic evolutionary process.     

Cultural evolution: a basic concept for human and historical geography

The concept of cultural evolution profoundly affected the objectives and methods employed in the social sciences in the earlier part of this century but it has largely been ignored by geographers. In recent years a number of American cultural anthropologists have re-examined the concept of cultural evolution, including Sahlins and Service, who consider that cultural evolution is analogous to biological evolution involving the diversification of cultural forms through adaptive modification and the progress of culture through successive levels of development. They have called these two processes specific evolution and general evolution respectively and from these two perspectives on cultural evolution they have developed the Law of Cultural Dominance. Certain operational problems exist in the application of the concept of cultural evolution, but once they have been surmounted it promises to constitute a valuable mode of explanation in the analysis of cultures and cultural change.     

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.     

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.