Author
J. Philippe Rushton is a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. Rushton holds two doctorates from the University of London Ph.D. and D.Sc and is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations. He is also a member of the Behavior Genetics Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the Society for...
The Argument
Human reproduction is routinely ''assisted'' in infertility clinics, using many of the same techniques of modern biology that inform dominant systems of Western kinship reckoning, such as genetics and evolutionary biology. Paradoxically, in reproductive technology clinics there are both more explicit biological definitions of relatedness, on the one hand, and more precise social definitions of parenthood, on the other, but these are not always complementary. One might expect to find the...
Ideological and Socioeconomic Contexts of Reproductive Labor
Childcare workers' and employers' differential experiences of stratified reproduction are con-textualized, in part, in the complex, shifting, and conflicting ideologies and behaviors surrounding reproductive labor in dominant North American culture since the 1950s. A central strand of 1950s gender ideology, which masked women's waged work KesslerHarris and Sacks 1987 72-4, Ryan 1983 278-80 , continued to be influential in the 1970s and 1980s. It assigned reproductive labor to women, held...
Evidence Recovery
Proper recovery of human remains constitutes an increasingly important aspect of forensic analysis. Most discoveries of human remains that lead to forensic investigation are not made by professionals. Construction workers, hikers, hunters, berry pickers, and family dogs usually are the first to notice human remains in these contexts. Most cases studied by forensic anthropologists are skeletonized and unidentified. Usually this means that they originate in areas not frequently traveled by...
What is development
Development is an unstable term.2 Is it an ideal, an imagined future towards which institutions and individuals strive Or is it a destructive myth, an insidious, failed chapter in the history of Western modernity Escobar 1995 Conventionally development may connote improvements in well-being, living standards, and opportunities. It may also refer to historical processes of commodification, industrialization, modernization, or globalization. It can be a legitimizing strategy for states, and its...
Selfassessment Specific Cultural Competency
Select one group with which you have important work interactions but for which you lack cultural proficiency. Plan a learning program based on library research, interviews, or both, that will enhance your level of competency. Answer the following questions What do you think are important aspects of this group's culture How does their culture affect their behavior in ways different from your culture What are significant areas of social interaction rules you need to learn to be more effective in...
The Complex Nature of Work Culture
In this article, I take the position, following the work of Nina Shapiro-Perl,10 that although a work situation may generate resistance, it may also generate adaptation and consent. The formation of a work culture involves a complex set of relationships between cultural meanings or ideology on the one hand, and behavioral strategies or practice on the other. It also involves both management policies and worker responses to those tactics and strategies. Susan P. Benson and Barbara Melosh have...
Personality and Indigenous Psychology
Personality involves the overall organization and dynamics of psychological processes that provide stability to behavior. Personality encompasses symbolic, mental, emotional, behavioral, and social capacities of a person as well as dispositions, drives, and memory. Understanding a person's personality and the cultural concepts of the nature of the internal organization and dynamics of the person allows us to make inferences about the meaning of that person's behavior. All cultures have a...
From Research to Writing
When I returned to the United States to write about this research, I faced new challenges of navigating scholarly constituencies. One divide of particular concern for my research trajectory was the separation between African studies and African American studies. Historically these have been different worlds.36 Until recently, African American students and scholars of African American studies have been actively discouraged from contributing to African studies. Researchers of European background...
Mortuary Programs And The Archaeological Record
If you learn skeletal biology in a climate-controlled laboratory populated by well-preserved, complete skeletons, each found in a discrete grave feature with the normative gender-specific grave goods, then the need to understand ancient mortuary practice can seem far removed. But most assemblages of human remains are not complete skeletons from discrete graves, and biological sex assigned to the skeleton does not always match the gender associated with the grave goods. The link between the...
Parti Humanity
3. The evolution of early hominids 4. Human evolution the last one million years 5. The origins and evolution of language 7. Niche construction, evolution and culture 8. Modes of subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture and pastoralism 9. The diet and nutrition of human populations 10. Demographic expansion causes and consequences 11. Disease and the destruction of indigenous populations
altricial AND PRECOCIAL STRATEGIES
Among mammals as a whole, a key dichotomy exists in developmental strategy that has important implications for life-history measures the altricial precocial dichotomy. Altricial species produce extremely immature young that are unable to feed or care for themselves. The young of pre-cocial species, on the other hand, are relatively mature and can fend for themselves to a certain degree. Life-history factors critically associated with altriciality and precociality include gestation length. In...
Anthropology and Archaeology
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of Taylor amp Francis This edition published in the Taylor amp Francis e-Library, 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission...
Cultural Expropriation and Indigenous Property Rights
As science turns its attention to alternative therapies, the social dominance of biomedi-cine and its leading role in the scientific study of healing have created a possibility for biomedicine to usurp significant aspects of traditional ethnomedical practices. As the empirical bases for the effectiveness of ethnomedical practices are understood such as acupuncture , the practices may be incorporated into biomedical practice, but the traditional practitioners of these healing arts are not...
Outline of the volume
This volume includes work by writers who would not define themselves as development anthropologists or anthropologists of development - an editorial decision that signals the interdisciplinarity of development thought since the 18th century, as well as a rich cross-fertilization of anthropological subfields. Works included here thus invite the reader to rethink the history and potential of this key disciplinary specialty. These selections illustrate the vibrancy and centrality of development...
Preface To The First Edition
What's Bred in the Bone, a novel by Robertson Davies, begins with the proverb, What's bred in the bone will not out in the flesh. The story is about a man who supposedly reflects his breeding since his behavior and characteristics are direct reflections of what he has inherited from his family. Although biological determinism may work in fiction, it is anathema to the biological anthropologist. The cornerstone of biological anthropology is the interaction of culture and human biology. What is...
The Triumph Of Uniformitarianism
Even before Darwinian theory emerged, Catastrophism came under attack, principally from the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell who was following arguments made earlier by his fellow countryman James Hutton. In his Principles of Geology, published in three volumes in the 1830s, Lyell argued that the geological processes we observe today such as erosion by wind and rain, earthquakes and volcanoes, and so on are responsible for all geological changes that have occurred throughout Earth history. He...
Nonhuman Versus Human Remains
Although most forensic anthropologists can easily distinguish intact, well-preserved human remains from those of nonhumans, fragmentary or otherwise altered material can be challenging. Detailed knowledge of human skeletal anatomy is usually sufficient to recognize that evidence is consistent with a human origin. The more precise opinion that remains are of human origin could not be anything else requires some recognition of the many other materials that can mimic the human condition. With the...
Cultural Models For Health Assessment
Cultural competence requires an overall understanding of culture because health problems disrupt personal, family, and social life, intimate behavior, and self-image and place additional demands on family and friends. Medical treatment can produce further disruptions and reduce a patient's motivation and ability to comply. Providers can reduce these difficulties by understanding the impacts of maladies and treatments on patients' lives and managing these disruptions as part of the total care of...
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the interface of a culture with the physical environment it includes both a population's biological reproductive patterns that result in births and its material production system technoeconomic system that produces goods such as food and housing. Population relations with the environment provide energy and resources to sustain human life but that also create exposure to disease. Consequently, cultural-environmental relations affect many aspects of health. Basic aspects of the...
Chapter From the Natives Point of View On the
Several years ago a minor scandal erupted in anthropology one of its ancestral figures told the truth in a public place. As befits an ancestor, he did it posthumously, and through his widow's decision rather than his own, with the result that a number of the sort of right-thinking types who are with us always immediately rose to cry that she, an in-marrier anyway, had betrayed clan secrets, profaned an idol, and let down the side. What will the children think, to say nothing of the layman But...
Comparing Cultural Knowledge Across Different Settings
In addition to the general comparisons across cultural settings discussed above, a number of studies have taken a closer look at what can be learned through a comparative approach. Three different approaches are examined here. The most ambitious of these is a collaborative, multisite study using a shared methodology to study intra- and inter-cultural variation in beliefs Weller, Pachter, Trotter, amp Baer, 1993, p. 109 for four geographically separated and distinctive Latin American samples....
cultural materialism
'Cultural materialism' is a broad heading, but it usually refers to the the specific kind of materialist approach advocated by fMarvin Harris. He developed it in a number of works, the most significantly being Cannibals and Kings 1977 and Cultural Materialism 1979 . Harris maintains that the material world exhibits deterministic influence over the nonmaterial world. Thus culture is a product of relations between things. In one of his more famous examples, Harris 1966 argues that the Hindu taboo...
The birth of anthropology and Europes intellectual climate
The fact is that anthropology had its birth as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during what we might label the height of modernist thought and at the apex of Western imperialist endeavours. Modernist and imperialist ways of thinking about things go very deep, and since anthropology could but be the child of its times, the intellectual and political climate of those times is deeply implicated in its own development. This is why present-day anthropology...
The Great Depression and World War Two
The NP remained in power alone till 1933, when the effects of the Great Depression forced a coalition government with the pro-reconciliation faction under the former Boer War general Jan Smuts. This coalition ruled till the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. When the Second World War broke out, certain small factions of Afrikaners were decidedly pro-Hitler and had even formed tiny Nazi parties, none of whom received any significant electoral support. A bare majority of the South African...
Second Roman Invasion Bc
The following year, 54 BC, Caesar however launched yet another invasion of Britain. This time he landed a force several times larger than his first expedition, including some 2,000 cavalry. He hoped to land his forces and march quickly into the heart of the Celtic territory and inflict a defeat upon the scattered tribes before they could unite into one army. However, he chose his landing beaches poorly. To compound his problems, a storm forced him to spend ten days dragging all his ships onto...
Ariovistus
The Suebi became a threat to the Romans in the first century B.C.E., as recorded in the writings of Julius Caesar, when they invaded Gaul roughly modern France and Belgium to aid the Sequani, considered predominantly a Celtic people although perhaps part Germanic. The leader of the Suebi at the time was Ariovistus, who is referred to by the term Suebian rather than by the name of a particular tribe in historical texts. The main Suebian towns at the time were reportedly Argentorac on the Upper...
The Inalienable Gift
Godelier's fundamentally anthropological account of gift-giving and human identity makes a valuable contribution to theological considerations of relationship with the divine. Though it is ultimately inextricable from our discussion of reciprocity in Chapter 3, Godelier's major contribution has been retained until now to emphasize the key distinction between things that are 'alienable' and explicitly 'given' through reciprocal acts and 'inalienable' things that can never be 'given' in exchange....
Hominids And The Fossil Record
With these hallmarks of hominid status in mind it is possible to detect, in various early hominoid fossils, or fossil 'populations', the presence or absence of hominid features. In this enquiry, we recognize two broad stages. The first is that of hominid origins, by which we mean the first emergence of the Hominidae. The second refers to the further evolution of established hominids. Not only do these two stages follow each other in chronological sequence, but their study also requires...
The recent history of ecological anthropology
Attention to the impact of environments on human societies is longstanding in philosophy and geography, but in social and cultural anthropology, stress on the ecological dimension is relatively recent. During the first half of the twentieth century, social and cultural anthropology, whether in the British versions of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown or the American version of Boas, examined relationships within the social and cultural realm, with little direct attention to relations with the...
Are science and religion contrastive in nature
Besides the missing moral component in a scientific world-view, how different an engagement with the world is represented by the evolution from religion to science Are science and religion contrastive in nature On this point, anthropologists seem divided, as is nicely represented by a debate between John Beattie 1966 and Robin Horton 1967 . For Beattie, religion should be understood as essentially expressive and dramatic behaviour more akin to art than science. Religion concerns symbolic...
Development Three historical phases
Any periodization of economic or intellectual history is useful primarily as a heuristic tool. Thus we sketch here three historical phases simply to signal some benchmarks in thinking about development.11 In addressing both historical trends and theories - broad global changes and paradigm shifts - we emphasize the latter, with brief suggestions about how historical trends and theories influence one another. Notions of development can be traced back at least to the late-18th-century rise of...
After Alexander
After Alexander's death his generals carved up his empire and founded their own states. Among them were two dynasties that held power through much of the eastern Mediterranean world the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in Syria until the ascendancy of the Romans. With this continuing spread of Hellenism Greek culture , Koine Greek common Greek became an international language. Macedon, one of the divisions of the new order, with Greece as a dependency, went through a series of power...
Active Demand Passive ACCEPTANCE
Apart from structural barriers, health belief studies also aim at identifying and finding solutions to cultural barriers to vaccination acceptance. Acceptance of vaccinations can, according to Nichter 1995 , be differentiated into active demand and passive acceptance. Active demand entails adherence to vaccination programs by an informed public which perceives the benefits of and need for specific vaccinations. Passive acceptance denotes compliance passive acceptance of vaccinations by a public...
Dutch anthropology
Dutch anthropology has a distinguished and unique history, and there is no shortage of English-language publications aimed at explaining it to the outside world e.g., Kloos and Claessen 1975, 1981, 1991 . Essentially, there are two main distinctive anthropological traditions in the Netherlands, which in that country are commonly labelled 'cultural anthropology' including structural anthropology and 'sociology of non-Western societies'. Arguably, Dutch cultural anthropology began in colonial...
A Starting Point
This volume represents the collective construction of a specifically anthropological approach to a question at the heart of all social science. How should we simultaneously account for both society and for individuals Unlike most social science books about the individual, this volume is not concerned with individualism nor with the way different societies conceptualize individuals. Because, irrespective of whether people live within a highly individualizing or a highly socialized environment,...
Animals
Taxonomically, animals belong to the kingdom Animalia, which is one of several kingdoms of living beings. Although there is disagreement on how to best classify the various forms of life on Earth, other major groups of living beings include the bacteria, protists, fungi, and plants. The traits that define the kingdom Animalia are Mobility. With few exceptions, such as the sea lily class Crinoidea , animals are able to freely move about their habitats and are not attached to a substrate....
Special Featur
Areas of Medical Anthropology 12 Anthropological Approaches to AIDS Prevention 72 Eliciting an Explanatory Model 77 Cultural Defense as Advocacy in the Courtroom 104 Guidelines for Working in Clinical Settings 110 Integrating Folk Healers and Biomedicine 190 Culture in Human Development and Clinical Assessment 222 Using Indigenous Contagion Theory in Public Health Education 244 Changing the Micropolitics of Medicine 316 Developing Community Involvement and Practitioner Cultural Competence 328...
Biocultural Models of Human Growth
Human growth is part of the biocultural nature of our species. Since the late 19th century, anthropologists such as Boas have used biocultural models of human development. By the mid-20th century, the discovery of the nature of DNA and other fundamentals of developmental biology led to a biocultural model that considered human development as, basically, a biological process which could be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the social and cultural environment. By the late 20th century,...
Hominin Relations
This unit will explore recent developments and current thinking about how early hominins were evolutionarily related to one another. This subject phylogeny has always attracted the attention of anthropologists, often overshadowing the more basic questions of hominin biology, such as subsistence strategies and behavior. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars commonly assigned a new species name to virtually each new fossil unearthed. In this splitting paradigm, each variant in...
Compostura In Context Prehispanic Agrarian Ritual In The Naco Valley
As much as the contemporary Lenca are historically constructed, the case of the compostura and its possible historical antecedents suggest that world-view and economy have been closely intertwined since at least the sixteenth century. In this section, we consider the possibility that environmental worldview was expressed in agrarian ritual in prehispanic times and that this practice had potentially significant consequences for human landscape dynamics. To do so, we examine archaeological data...
Wars of Independence
The successful war of independence against Britain in North America in 1776, and the French revolution in 1789, finally provided the spark for a series of wars of independence in South America in a series of clashes dating from 1810 to 1825, the South American continent was piecemeal broken up into independent units, ending finally in 1825, when Spain formally surrendered control of the last part of its territory on the continent. The fathers of the South American wars of independence were the...
Modernism
The term 'modernism' has its intellectual foundations in the study of literature and the visual arts. There it usually refers to a broad cultural movement characterized by a spirit of constant challenge to received forms modernism opposes itself to the figurative tradition in the visual arts and to realism and naturalism in literature. It is the source of the 'modern' in 'modern art', and its exemplars are Picasso and T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg and Le Corbusier, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein,...
Pax Romana Bc Ad
At the end of the century of civil strife 133 BC - 30 BC , Rome was finally united under one ruler. Thereafter ensued what became known as the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome, which lasted for well on 200 years, from 30 BC to 235 AD. This time was also to mark the racial undoing of the Empire, caused by the long term effects of the inclusion of foreign lands and peoples under the aegis of the Roman Empire, and significantly by the bypassing of a law set down by the first Romans prohibiting mixed...
The Reservedness of the English Ballet Style
In the essay 'Notes on the English Character', E.M. Forster 1996 1926 13 reflects on the incompleteness of national characters, especially the English character But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface - self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. Perhaps the English need foreigners to release them. This seems at least to have been one explanation to the legendary partnership between Russian Rudolf Nureyev and...
The Napoleonic Wars 1
The outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe saw Britain's land empire expand once again through a series of conquests of French or French allied territories. This expansion was linked to the great British naval victory over the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the destruction of the French fleet led to the British navy establishing its mastery of the seas, a situation which would remain unchanged until the early 20th century. A British naval fleet, operating out of the new...
Animism Spirits as Self and Other
At the basis of shamanism is animism the spirit world. These systems of meaning have structures and functions that reflect human psychological, social, and biological needs for concepts of self and socially referenced others. Spirits reflect a personality model and a theory of the fundamental aspects of consciousness. Shamanism uses spirit constructs to represent personal, intrapsychic, and social dynamics. Spirit beliefs produce psychophys-iological manipulations through their meanings and...
The Thirty Years War House Of Habsburg Defeated
The spread of the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism spread to the Austrian Empire. In 1618 a Protestant rebellion became a European wide conflict known as the Thirty Years' War. This conflict was fought mainly on German soil, after a Catholic king of Austria had been deposed by Protestant rebels. A third of all of Germany's population was killed in this battle between Catholic and Protestant. Ultimately the House of Habsburg were defeated at the end of the Thirty Years' War, and by the...
plural society
The paradox of the plural society entered anthropology with J.S. Furnivall's discussion of colonial policy and practice in Burma and Indonesia. He described a plural society as one in which racially distinct peoples met only in the market place, a feature of colonial political economy. Critiques of the concept followed in rapid succession. It was suggested by Maurice Freedman, writing about Malaya, that although ethnicity might be recognized as a preliminary to the useful fiction of a plural...
Ingush Ghalghaaj Ghalghai
The Ingush are a Caucasic-speaking people, living for the most part in the north-central caucasus region of southwestern Russia. Their North caucasic language is classified as part of the North-Central Nakh branch and related to the languages of the Chechens and the Bats of the nation of Georgia to the south in Asia. The cyrillic alphabet is used in the written form. The name Ingush was applied to them by the Russian Slavs, based on the name of the village Angusht their native name is...