The effect of terrorist events on media portrayals of Islam and Muslims: evidence from New York Times headlines, 1985–2013

This article examines whether media portrayals of Islam and Muslims are overwhelmingly negative, whether they have evolved over time, and what factors most consistently affect their tone. We analyse every fourth New York Times headline about Islam or Muslims between 1985 and 2013. We find that headlines have not been predominantly negative. In addition, New York Times headlines about Islam and Muslims have become more positive over the long term, even after the 9/11 attacks. Most counter-intuitively, we find that terrorist attacks have had a systematic positive effect on headline tone. During the first four weeks after each Islamist terrorist attack on an American target, the tone of New York Times headlines became significantly more positive compared to the four weeks prior to the attack. However, over the subsequent few months, coverage reverted back toward the tone that prevailed during the weeks before the event.     

The Life and Work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin,an Early Visual Anthropologist

This article traces the life and work of Marquis Robert de Wavrin de Villers au Tertre (1888–1971), a Belgian explorer and ethnographer. While fragments of his oeuvre are familiar to scholars of South America, he is almost completely unknown in historical studies, and largely forgotten within anthropology too. Here we will explore his filmic work as well as its contribution to the history of visual anthropology. While de Wavrin’s work cannot be divorced from the discipline’s colonial and Eurocentric heritage, we show that his visual record provides notable historic insights and merits further scholarly attention.     

N.W. Thomas and colonial anthropology in British West Africa: reappraising a cautionary tale

As the first government anthropologist to be appointed by the British Colonial Office, Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868‐1936) has earned a place in the footnotes of anthropological history. Historians of the discipline have discussed his career in West Africa in their wider explorations of the relationship between anthropology and colonial administration in the early twentieth century. Through this work, an orthodox account of Thomas has emerged as an eccentric dilettante who damaged the reputation of the discipline, setting back its adoption as a practical science of value to colonial governance by a generation or more. Adopting a micro‐historical approach, closer scrutiny of the archival evidence challenges this orthodoxy, and places Thomas more centrally within the professional networks and practices of British anthropology in the period 1900 to 1915. As well as correcting the record concerning Thomas's professional reputation, a more complex picture emerges regarding the colonial authorities’ attitudes towards anthropology and the reason why this early experiment in colonial anthropology failed.     

Twenty Years of Visual Anthropology

I recently invited my colleague Gareth Davey to do a content analysis of the first 20 volumes of Visual Anthropology, to mark a milestone that we reached at the end of last year. Dr. Davey is a British psychologist who was also trained in biology and holds a Ph.D. from Bolton University in Environmental Psychology. It seemed to me—to avoid bias—that it was important not to have the survey done by an anthropologist, and especially not by an American one, as 48 percent of all contributed articles originated in the United States.

I am particularly grateful to Dr. Davey for the heavy work he has put into this report. Occasional content analyses have been done before in the field of communication studies for journals in other fields, but so far as I know this is the first thorough attempt to evaluate what went into an anthropology journal that we are justified today in considering as a mainstream one. Your discussion of Davey's findings is invited.

—Paul Hockings

Editor-in-Chief

During the past 20 years, visual anthropology has been transformed from its neglected and marginalized presence to an established and respected subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology. As one of only two peer-reviewed journals in the field, Visual Anthropology has played an important role in this development. The present study analyzed the original articles published in Visual Anthropology (since its inaugural issue in 1987 to the end of 2007) in order to understand their characteristics. The findings showed that a diverse range of topics had been reported, classified into five main areas. Public presentation and specialized applications were the most salient areas, which seems to reflect their increasing popularity in the discipline. The articles published in the journal covered more than 80 countries, authored by scholars in 25 countries. Book and film reviews came from dozens more countries; altogether, 475 authors have contributed to the journal so far. This confirms that the journal has met its goal to serve the global community of visual anthropologists. However, the United States received the most attention, indicative perhaps of renewed interest there by the academic community. The contributors were based in a wide range of occupations; not surprisingly, the majority was university faculty in anthropology and media studies departments, although others were spread across a wide range of disciplines, representative of the field's interdisciplinary nature. The findings discussed in this study are important as the journal represents a large proportion of the discipline's research output.     

Electromyography of pongid shoulder muscles II. Deltoid, rhomboid and "rotator cuff"

Red cell antigen, serum protein and red cell enzyme groups were determined for a series of 1,821 individuals belonging to six language families in Western New Guinea. Three of the language families represent groupings of languages spoken by people in the swampy coastal plain of south central Western New Guinea, two belong to the Central Highlands and one to the Lake Plain area near the confluence of the Idenburg and Rouffaer Rivers. The distribution of genetic markers reveals similarities with other parts of New Guinea. The A₂ allele is absent in the ABO system, the frequency of Ns in the MNS system is very high as is the R₁ (CDe) allele in the Rh system. Hp¹ frequencies are high, and the transferrin allele Tf^D 1 is present as in other parts of New Guinea. In the red cell enzyme systems several alleles were detected which are characteristic of Papuan, and in some cases other Melanesian populations: these include MDH³, PGK⁴, PGK², PGM⁹₂, PGM¹⁰₂, as well as some very restricted alleles such as Peptidase B⁶ and Pep B². Three indices of genetic distance were computed. The most striking results are the genetic closeness of the Dani and Moni populations from the Central Highlands to the Asmat on the southern coastal plain, and the relative remoteness of the Awyu from the other south coastal populations. The results are discussed in terms of recent theories on the origin and dispersal of Papuan languages.     

The Anthropologist as Geologist: Howitt in Colonial Gippsland

The paper discusses A.W. Howitt's position as an amateur of science in colonial Gippsland, and explores connections between his geological and anthropological endeavours. Two contexts contributed to the kind of anthropology he did. and the kinds of works he wrote. One is the point on the trajectory of the colonial history of Victoria when Howitt joined it and began his researches. The other is the moment in the development of anthropology when he and his sister Anna Mary Howitt began to read and correspond about the discipline, and he began to correspond with other practitioners. Geology was linked to Howitt's anthropology in two ways: through his working life in Gippsland, and in models that informed the evolutionary paradigm within which his anthropological research and writing were situated.     

Mipela Makim Gavman: Unofficial Village Courts and Local Perceptions of Order in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

In remote villages of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where official village courts and other state institutions are absent, local leaders routinely hold unofficial village courts to maintain law and order. They base their decisions on local perceptions of order and justice, all the while emulating elements of state justice and constantly referring to the state as the source of their legitimacy. As these unofficial judicial institutions historically emerged as a convergence of local patterns of leadership with colonial concepts of order, they neither form a completely new nor completely autochthonous method of conflict settlement, but are an example of para-statehood, in which local leaders take on state functions in the absence of the state.     

Money in Colonial Transition: Cowries and Francs in West Africa

For about five decades, the French colonial government in the Volta region of West Africa failed in its repeated attempts to replace the local monetary form of cowry shells with its own monetary system of francs, largely because of local opposition. This article provides an account of these events and explores the reasons for the opposition and why the opposition was successful. Despite government prohibition, the cowries even acquired increased vitality as they became the main money in the emerging urban market. Government measures were partly motivated by practical difficulties that stemmed from the conflicts that the colonial system and monetary policy generated. The article ends with a critical discussion of how money and the colonial transition are treated in anthropology.     

Agricultural intensification in a Philippine frontier community: Impact on labor efficiency and farm diversity

There continues to be much debate in anthropology concerning the mechanism by which agricultural intensification takes place and its impact on labor efficiency, farm diversity, and quality of diet. A major reason for this lack of consensus is the paucity of data from case studies that focus on specific agricultural systems at the point of transition from extensive to intensive methods of cultivation. Research in a frontier community in the Philippines, where farmers are making the shift from swidden cultivation to small-scale irrigated rice production, indicates that intensification does not necessarily result in lower efficiency or a decline in dietary standards. Rather, farmers faced with growing population pressure and an unproductive short fallow swidden system have been motivated to adopt irrigation because it increases the efficiency of their labor while maintaining a reliable and diverse farming system.     

Imagining the Real: The Photographic Image and Imagination in Knowledge Production

The exploratory discussion in this article starts from the fact that it is the realism of photographic representations which enables them, in an indexical sense, to point back to a reality beyond themselves as images. In the same vein, it is as a metonymic space-time fragment that the photograph can indicate a continuation of reality beyond its own framing of the visible. Or, putting it differently, rather than constituting transparent representations, presence in photographs is evoked through absence of the real. What is not problematized in photographic theory and visual anthropology is that photographs thus depend on imagination for their interpretative connection to reality. My argument sees photographic practice as interference, which pushes the medium past the implicit positivist premise for visual knowledge production in anthropology. Furthermore, when understanding the ability to imagine as movements in reason, the separation between imagination and reason, presumed necessary for the scientific production of knowledge, is also challenged. Concerned with rethinking photography in visual anthropology, imagination’s role in knowledge production will be explored through my photographic art project, Houses/Homes.     

Alternative statistical approaches to the use of data as evidence for hypotheses in human behavioral ecology

In their ambitious Evolutionary Anthropology paper, Winterhalder and Smith 1 review the history, theory, and methods of human behavioral ecology (HBE). In establishing how HBE differs from traditional approaches within sociocultural anthropology, they and others laud its hypothetical‐deductive research method. 1 - 3 Our aim is to critically examine how human behavioral ecologists conduct their research, specifically how they analyze and interpret data as evidence for scientific hypotheses. Through computer simulations and a review of empirical studies of human sex ratios, we consider some limitations of the status quo and present alternatives that could strengthen the field. In particular, we suggest that because human behavioral ecologists often consider multiple hypotheses, they should use statistical approaches that can quantify the evidence in empirical data for competing hypotheses. Although we focus on HBE, the principles of this paper apply broadly within biological anthropology.     

The arboreal vegetation of the Central Negev Highlands, Israel, at the end of the Pleistocene: Evidence from archaeological charred wood remains

Charcoal assemblages from five Terminal Pleistocene sites in the Central Negev Highlands, Israel, have been analyzed. Eleven taxa have been identified, two of which, juniper andPaliurus, no longer grow in this district, and one,Pinus (of which only a single occurrence was encountered), is considered intrusive, and the rest are taxa which still characterize the region today. Among these latter,Pistacia atlantica (which is the dominant tree in this area today) was the most common. Association of juniper andPaliurus is found today only in the northern Near East. It can not be ascertained that such an association characterized the Central Negev Highlands throughout the entire period spanned by the charcoal assemblages, since it is possible thatPistacia atlantica may have become temporarily extinct. In any case the former occurrence of juniper and particularlyPaliurus in the Central Negev Highlands clearly point to higher humidity in this region during the final stages of the Pleistocene. This conclusion is corroborated by a variety of proxy climatic indicators throughout the southern Levant.     

Emotion (or Life,the Universe,Everything)

Emotions are fundamental to human life; they define its quality and motivate action. In the past, social scientists who have studied emotions have treated them as biological, cultural or social phenomena. These approaches have tended to fall on either side of the culturally recognised division between nature and culture, and so have failed to recognise that emotions bridge this division, that they are thought of as both biological and cultural, as consisting of both physical feeling and cultural meaning. In this article, an alternative approach is presented in which emotions are treated as ecological mechanisms that operate in the relationship between an individual human being and their environment. In this approach, which draws on models of emotion proposed by William James and Antonio Damasio, emotions connect individual human beings to their surroundings and play an important role in learning. A focus on the individual as the centre of analytical attention—often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’—is a logical consequence of the ecological approach to emotion, which also has significant implications for the relationships between ecological anthropology and other branches of the discipline, and between anthropology and other disciplines. In the face of an ecological understanding of emotion, all relations, including social relations, become ecological and social anthropology melts into and is subsumed by ecological anthropology. At the same time, anthropology tends to lose its distinctiveness from biology, psychology and other disciplines by focusing on a phenomenon that is of common interest to all the human sciences.     

Capsular polysaccharides facilitate enhanced iron acquisition by the colonial cyanobacterium Microcystis sp. isolated from a freshwater lake

Microcystis sp., especially in its colonial form, is a common dominant species during cyanobacterial blooms in many iron‐deficient water bodies. It is still not entirely clear, however, how the colonial forms of Microcystis acclimate to iron‐deficient habitats, and the responses of unicellular and colonial forms to iron‐replete and iron‐deficient conditions were examined here. Growth rates and levels of photosynthetic pigments declined to a greater extent in cultures of unicellular Microcystis than in cultures of the colonial form in response to decreasing iron concentrations, resulting in the impaired photosynthetic performance of unicellular Microcystis as compared to colonial forms as measured by variable fluorescence and photosynthetic oxygen evolution. These results indicate that the light‐harvesting ability and photosynthetic capacity of colonial Microcystis was less affected by iron deficiency than the unicellular form. The carotenoid contents and nonphotochemical quenching of colonial Microcystis were less reduced than those of the unicellular form under decreasing iron concentrations, indicating that the colonial morphology enhanced photoprotection and acclimation to iron‐deficient conditions. Furthermore, large amounts of iron were detected in the capsular polysaccharides (CPS) of the colonies, and more iron was found to be attached to the colonial Microcystis CPS under decreasing iron conditions as compared to unicellular cultures. These results demonstrated that colonial Microcystis can acclimate to iron deficiencies better than the unicellular form, and that CPS plays an important role in their acclimation advantage in iron‐deficient waters.     

Anthropology at Home in Australia

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.     

Surrender to the Market: Thoughts on Anthropology,The Body Shop,and Intellectuals1

The direction of anthropology over the last century is tied to the shifts from colonialism to postcolonialism and from modernism to postmodernism. These shifts have seen the thoroughgoing incorporation of the world population into the economic, political and juridical domain established through the last throes of colonialism and the transmutations of capitalism and the State. Anthropology, a discipline whose history shows close and regular links with colonial government, also transforms in association with the world it describes and partly creates. Two dominant trends in contemporary anthropology—applied consultancy and historicist self‐reflexivity—are compared for the ways they represent the transmutation, which is characterised, following Fredric Jameson as ‘the surrender to the market’. In this way it is asserted that just as the discipline had hitherto revealed its links to colonialism, it now reveals its links to globalisation through a form of commodified self‐obsession. To illustrate this quality the paper considers the global chain of cosmetics stores, The Body Shop, as an example of ‘late capitalism’ and the moral juridical framework of globalisation. Finally, it treats these developments in anthropology as more generally affecting intellectuals and knowledge production through the promotion of intellectual ‘silence’.     

Unconventional signalling in tunicates

The zooids in colonial tunicates do not appear to be directly interconnected by nerves, but this has not prevented the evolution of coordinated behaviour in several groups. In Botryllus and other colonial styelid asci‐dians the endothelium lining the blood vessels is excitable and transmits action potentials from cell to cell via gap junctions. These signals mediate protective contractions of the zooids and synchronize contractions of the vascular ampullae. In didemnid ascidians such as Diplosoma a network of myocytes in the tunic serves to transmit excitation and to cause contractions of the cloacal apertures. Individual zooids of Pyrosoma protect themselves by closing their siphons and arresting their branchial cilia when stimulated. At the same time a flash of light is emitted. Neighbouring zooids sense the flash with their photoreceptors and respond in turn with protective responses and light emission. Protective responses thus spread by photic signalling and propagate from zooid to zooid through the colony in a saltatory manner. In chains of Salpafusifortnis, changes in the direction and/or speed of swimming are transmitted from zooid to zooid via adhesion plaques. When a zooid is stimulated, its body‐wall epithelium conducts action potentials to the plaque connecting it to the next zooid, exciting receptor neurons in that zooid. These receptors have sensory processes that bridge the gap between the two zooids. The sensory neurons so excited in the second zooid conduct impulses to the brain where they alter the motor output pattern, and at the same time generate epithelial action potentials that travel to the next zooid in line, where the same thing happens.

It is not clear why these unconventional signalling methods have evolved but the tunic may be an inhospitable environment for nerves, making conventional nervous links impossible.