Beyond Applied Anthropology
Some of the most well-known examples of American applied anthropology have been conducted in American Indian communities, with the University of Chicago's ''Fox Project'' among the most analyzed. This chapter squarely recognizes the limits of applied anthropology in leaving the definition of goals and methods in the hands of academics and non-Indians, and seeks to develop a framework for genuine collaboration between native communities and non-native scholars. Critical lessons of the potential...
Population Decline and Epidemic Disease
The effects of''Old World'' diseases on Native American populations of the Western Hemisphere have been important in the debate on aboriginal population size and decline, and their role has been extensively discussed. There were considerably fewer infectious diseases there than in the other hemisphere. New diseases which impacted native populations in the Western Hemisphere include smallpox, measles, the bubonic plague, cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough, malaria, and...
Martha C. Knack Women And Men
This chapter examines relations between women and men in native societies from before contact to the present, surveying the major theories on the subject. Particular attention is given to how social structure for example, matrilineal and matrilocal organization , economic organization for example, who controls the distribution of goods , politics for example, processes of group decision-making , and religion affect the degree of equality between the sexes. Also considered is the variety of...
References 1
Ames, K. M. 1991 The Archaeology of the Longue Duree Temporal and Spatial Scale in the Evolution of Social Complexity on the Southern Northwest Coast.'' Antiquity 65 935-945. --1996 Life in the Big House Household Labor and Dwelling Size on the Northwest Coast.'' In People Who Lived in Big Houses Archaeological Perspectives on Large Domestic Structures, ed. G. Coupland and E. B. Banning, pp. 131-150. Madison Prehistory Press. --2000 Kennewick Man Cultural Affiliation Report, Chapter 2 Review of...
Contemporary Globalization and Tribal Sovereignty
Much thinking about the rights to sovereignty by native peoples takes place in a conceptual vacuum reservation communities are often analyzed as localities in isolation from political and economic forces at other geographical scales. This chapter shows how attention to the global scale gives us key insights into contemporary tribal sovereignty. Political globalization for example, in international notions of human rights has both energized and enabled advances in the struggle for...
Cultural Appropriation
What may seem to non-Indians like innocent ''borrowing'' of native culture can amount to forms of taking not fundamentally different from theft in the view of Indian people. This chapter considers the appropriation of native material and intellectual culture by museums, the ''free market'' and ''public domain,'' courts, and other institutions of colonial power. Also examined and critically evaluated are a range of remedies used or considered by native peoples, including copyright, trademark,...
Subsistence and Environmental Management
The ''Pristine Myth'' posits that despite millennia of human occupation, North America was essentially a pristine wilderness. This also further implies that Native Americans had little or no impact on the environment. This, of course, is patently incorrect. Much of southern North America the southern U.S. and most of Mexico was occupied at contact by farmers, people who had been farmers for 2,000-3,000 years with varying degrees of intensity. In what is now Arizona, the Hohokam people...
Political Ecology
According to Greenberg and Park 1994 political ecology connects ''political economy, with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity , and ecological analysis with its broader vision of bioenviron-mental relationships.'' They go on to say ''Political ecology expands ecological concepts to include cultural and political activity with an analysis of ecosystems that are significantly but not always socially constructed'' Greenberg and Park, 1994 1 . While...
Population Ecology
As demography is central to a political ecology, it is equally central to historical ecology. Population ecology includes such parameters as population size, patterns of growth and decline, distribution across the landscape, and health and nutritional status. Central to the latter is understanding the long-term effects of disease and stress, including changes in diet and the consequences of poor diet. It is widely recognized and accepted that Native American populations suffered...