The flight of the self: Exploring more‐than‐human companionship in rural Pakistan

The construct of multispecies anthropology has helped explain some of the ways through which humans develop sensory and embodied connectedness with the more‐than‐human. Yet there is a need to fully comprehend how such connectedness leads to the discovery of the inner self. Through an ethnographic study carried out with rural South Punjabi pigeon flyers in Pakistan between 2008 and 2018, this paper argues that companionship with pigeons allows people to generate a meaningful relationship with their animals, explore their inner emotions and achieve a deeper understanding of the self. This paper takes inspiration from Donna Haraway's critique of Jacques Derrida's cat encounter, and philosophical thoughts of a 12th‐century Muslim mystic poet, Farid ud‐Din Attar, to examine how becoming‐with pigeons enables the flyers to structure their lifeworlds, develop entrenched companionship and shape their social choices to achieve wellbeing despite everyday social troubles and emotional anxieties.     

Rank atmospheres: The more‐than‐human scentspace and aesthetic of a pigdogging hunt

Pigdogging is a popular pastime in Australia, a form of recreational hunting whereby people collaborate with dogs to chase and catch wild pigs. This paper analyses the hunt as an interspecies event that unfolds through the sensual and sensory entanglements of human and nonhuman, with a particular focus on the perspectives of the hunters. The concept of ‘atmosphere’ will be employed to frame an ethnographic analysis of two facets of pigdogging. First, by hunting with a dog, humans augment their capacity to identify the presence of pigs through the canine's extraordinary sense of scent. Through this relationship, the world of scent is revealed as having atmospheric properties: an enveloping phenomenon which is known through the dog, yet also escapes the hunter's perceptual apprehension. Second, this paper will illustrate examples of how atmosphere develops through the sensual relations between human and nonhuman bodies during the hunt. An affectively charged interspecies encounter is composed and participated in by the hunter through this recreational practice, and affords the enactment of subjectivities central to an aesthetics of pigdogging. Hunting atmospheres in this paper emerge at the juncture of human and more‐than‐human bodies, perspectives and worlds.     

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.     

Human‐horse sensory engagement through horse archery

The Mongol horse stems from ancient stock, similar to the first horses ridden on the Central Asian grassland steppe. Mongol horses subsequently migrated with their human counterparts throughout Eurasia, as far to the east as Japan. During archery festivals in Japan, horses gallop along a narrow runway within a temple complex in the heavily populated city of Kyoto. In Mongolia, with the recent re‐emergence of the ancient practice, horse and rider still gallop across the expansive grassland steppe. The euphoria one feels in riding fast on horseback with the wind against one's face can be symbolised by the concept of khii mor’ in Mongolia, which is connected with the vitality between human and horse in the practice of horse archery. Through sensory ethnography, in combination with multi‐species ethnography, this article explores embodiment between horse and rider in two quite different socio‐ecological contexts.     

分子人类学与现代人的起源*

1953年Watson & Crick 对于DNA双螺旋结构模型的提出及对其遗传机理的解释,标志着现代分子生物学的诞生。其后短短50年的时间里,分子生物学在各个学科之间广泛渗透,相互促进,不断深入和发展。在以研究人类的起源和进化为首要任务的人类学领域,由于现代分子生物学理论和方法的应用,诞生了分子人类学这一全新的结合型分支学科,为人类学的发展提供了科学可信的研究方法和具发展前景的研究方向。系统地介绍了分子人类学的发展历史、研究方法及原理;另外,结合分子人类学在古人类学研究中的应用,讨论了关于现代人起源的“非洲起源说”和“多地区连续演化说”。Abstract: Since Watson & Crick put forward the double-helix model of DNA structure and hereditary mechanism in 1953, it is generally accepted that this event marks the birth of modern molecular biology. This new field of biology has experienced a flourishing development in the past 50 years. On one hand, the development of molecular biology has been deeply influencing many relative fields; on the other hand, its own proceeding pace has been accelerated by the reaction from the other fields. Anthropology is one of the fields most deeply impacted by the theory and method of molecular biology. Most importantly, molecular anthropology was born as a result of combination of molecular biology, anthropology as well as paleoanthropology. This new branch provides reliable method and vital direction for paleoanthropology. This paper systematically reviews the history, principle and method of molecular anthropology. Two hypotheses on the origin of modern human, which include “out-of-African theory” and “theory of multiregional evolution” are also discussed for the purpose of showing how molecular anthropology is applied in paleoanthropology.     

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows between such ‘bodies’ and things open up cosmopolitical spaces for the creation and negotiation of intergenerational wellbeing.     

Anthropologies of art

This paper discusses how different conceptions of the idea of ‘anthropology’ entail different views of the ‘anthropology of art’. The prevailing notion of anthropology as the Western study of small-scale non-Western societies leads to a conception of the anthropology of art as dealing with the visual arts of these societies or cultures. Anthropology is sometimes also interpreted as referring to a particular approach that is applicable in examining sociocultural phenomena in whatever culture, including its art forms. Both conceptions of anthropology may be considered subsidiary to a more encompassing view of anthropology as the multidisciplinary study of humankind. Following this view, the anthropology of art becomes the comprehensive examination of art in human existence. As such it would coincide with World Art Studies, conceived as the global and multidisciplinary study of the visual arts.     

Applying evolutionary anthropology

Evolutionary anthropology provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how both current environments and legacies of past selection shape human behavioral diversity. This integrative and pluralistic field, combining ethnographic, demographic, and sociological methods, has provided new insights into the ultimate forces and proximate pathways that guide human adaptation and variation. Here, we present the argument that evolutionary anthropological studies of human behavior also hold great, largely untapped, potential to guide the design, implementation, and evaluation of social and public health policy. Focusing on the key anthropological themes of reproduction, production, and distribution we highlight classic and recent research demonstrating the value of an evolutionary perspective to improving human well‐being. The challenge now comes in transforming relevance into action and, for that, evolutionary behavioral anthropologists will need to forge deeper connections with other applied social scientists and policy‐makers. We are hopeful that these developments are underway and that, with the current tide of enthusiasm for evidence‐based approaches to policy, evolutionary anthropology is well positioned to make a strong contribution.     

Introduction to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key"

In this "In Focus" introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights." After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relation to this history and indicate how, when taken as a whole, they express a new key or register within which human rights can be studied, critiqued, and advanced through anthropological forms of knowledge. This "In Focus" is in part an argument for an essentially ecumenical anthropology of human rights, one that can tolerate, and indeed encourage, approaches that are both fundamentally critical of contemporary human rights regimes and politically or ethically committed to these same regimes.     

From forest fires to fisheries management: Anthropology,conservation biology,and historical ecology

Human‐environmental relationships have long been of interest to a variety of scientists, including ecologists, biologists, anthropologists, and many others. 1 , 2 In anthropology, this interest was especially prevalent among cultural ecologists of the 1970s and earlier, who tended to explain culture as the result of techno‐environmental constraints. 3 More recently researchers have used historical ecology, an approach that focuses on the long‐term dialectical relationship between humans and their environments, as well as long‐term prehuman ecological datasets. 4 - 7 An important contribution of anthropology to historical ecology is that anthropological datasets dealing with ethnohistory, traditional ecological knowledge, and human skeletal analysis, as well as archeological datasets on faunal and floral remains, artifacts, geochemistry, and stratigraphic analysis, provide a deep time perspective (across decades, centuries, and millennia) on the evolution of ecosystems and the place of people in those larger systems. Historical ecological data also have an applied component that can provide important information on the relative abundances of flora and fauna, changes in biogeography, alternations in food webs, landscape evolution, and much more.     

Beyond rupture: Christian culture in the Pacific

In its many forms, Christianity tends to focus adherents’ attention upon earlier religious traditions, compelling them to renew their faith, repent and seek redemption. This special issue takes up questions about Christianity’s temporal ‘secondarity’. Contributors move beyond increasingly futile theoretical debates about rupture and continuity by considering how Christians in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands conceptualise and enact their fraught relationships with prior religious traditions. By examining the place of culture within Christianity, contributors avoid the analytical pitfalls of assuming that Pacific culture is not already thoroughly Christian. Rather than taking up questions about initial Christian conversion, these articles focus on revival. The relentless campaigns of Christian renewal that have transformed religious landscapes more than a generation aim not only to overcome pre‐Christian powers, but also to supersede earlier versions of Christianity. In examining not only highly localised ethnotheologies, but also regional movements, this issue opens questions that should be of interest beyond the anthropology of Christianity.     

“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”

In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ( 2013 ), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV—in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.     

The Tsimane Health and Life History Project: Integrating anthropology and biomedicine

The Tsimane Health and Life History Project, an integrated bio‐behavioral study of the human life course, is designed to test competing hypotheses of human life‐history evolution. One aim is to understand the bidirectional connections between life history and social behavior in a high‐fertility, kin‐based context lacking amenities of modern urban life (e.g. sanitation, banks, electricity). Another aim is to understand how a high pathogen burden influences health and well‐being during development and adulthood. A third aim addresses how modernization shapes human life histories and sociality. Here we outline the project's goals, history, and main findings since its inception in 2002. We reflect on the implications of current findings and highlight the need for more coordinated ethnographic and biomedical study of contemporary nonindustrial populations to address broad questions that can situate evolutionary anthropology in a key position within the social and life sciences.     

Beyond the senses: perception,the environment,and vision impairment

The ‘sensory turn’ in anthropology has generated a significant literature on sensory perception and experience. Whilst much of this literature is critical of the compartmentalization of particular ‘senses’, there has been limited exploration of how anthropologists might examine sensory perception beyond ‘the senses’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who have impaired vision walking the South Downs landscape in England, this article develops such an approach. It suggests that the experiences of seeing in blindness challenge the conceptualization of ‘vision’ (and ‘non-vision’). In place of ‘vision’ (as a sense), the article explores ‘activities of seeing’ – an approach that contextualizes the visual to examine the biographically constituted and idiosyncratic nature of perception within an environment. Through an ethnography of seeing with anatomical eyes and ‘seeing in the mind's eye’, it articulates an approach that avoids associating perception with anatomy, or compartmentalizing experience into ‘senses’.     

Understanding racism in physical (biological) anthropology

The mainstream of American physical anthropology began as racist and eugenical science that defended slavery, restricted “non-Nordic” immigration, and justified Jim Crow segregation. After World War II, the field became more anti-racial than anti-racist. It has continued as a study of natural influences on human variation and thus continues to evade the social histories of inequitable biological variation. Also reflecting its occupancy of white space, biological anthropology continues to deny its own racist history and marginalizes the contributions of Blacks. Critical disciplinary history and a shift toward biocultural studies might begin an anti-racist human biology.     

A history of forensic anthropology

Forensic anthropology represents a dynamic and rapidly evolving complex discipline within anthropology and forensic science. Academic roots extend back to early European anatomists but development coalesced in the Americas through high-profile court testimony, assemblage of documented collections and focused research. Formation of the anthropology section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1972, the American Board of Forensic Anthropology in 1977/1978 and other organizational advances provided important stimuli for progress. While early pioneers concentrated on analysis of skeletonized human remains, applications today have expanded to include complex methods of search and recovery, the biomechanics of trauma interpretation, isotopic analysis related to diet and region of origin, age estimation of the living and issues related to humanitarian and human rights investigations.     

Cultural niche construction and human evolution

Organisms frequently choose, regulate, construct and destroy important components of their environments, in the process changing the selection pressures to which they and other organisms are exposed. We refer to these processes as niche construction. In humans, culture has greatly amplified our capacity for niche construction and our ability to modify selection pressures. We use gene‐culture coevolutionary models to explore the evolutionary consequences of culturally generated niche construction through human evolution. Our analysis suggests that where cultural traits are transmitted in an unbiased fashion from parent to offspring, cultural niche construction will have a similar effect to gene‐based niche construction. However, cultural transmission biases favouring particular cultural traits may either increase or reduce the range of parameter space over which niche construction has an impact, which means that niche construction with biased transmission will either have a much smaller or a much bigger effect than gene‐based niche construction. The analysis also reveals circumstances under which cultural transmission can overwhelm natural selection, accelerate the rate at which a favoured gene spreads, initiate novel evolutionary events and trigger hominid speciation. Because cultural processes typically operate faster than natural selection, cultural niche construction probably has more profound consequences than gene‐based niche construction, and is likely to have played an important role in human evolution.     

Contemporary Comparative Anthropology – The Why We Post Project

This paper confronts the disparity between a tradition that has defined anthropology as a comparative discipline and the practices which increasingly embrace cultural relativism and the uniqueness of each fieldsite. It suggests that it is possible to resolve this dilemma, through creating a vertical structure that complements the horizontal task of comparison across fieldsites. This vertical structure is composed of different methods of dissemination which make explicit a series of steps from a baseline of popular dissemination which stresses the uniqueness of individuals, through books and journal articles with increasing degrees of generalisation and comparison. Following this structure leads us up through analysis to the creation and employment of theory. This allows us to make comparisons and generalisations without sacrificing our assertion of specificity and uniqueness. We illustrate this argument though a recent nine-field site comparison of the use and consequences of social media in a project called ‘Why We Post.’     

American Anthropology in the Middle Decades: A View from Hollywood

North American anthropology had an earlier interest in studies of the United States and in critical approaches than is often recognized. Such interests were pursued before World War II but were set aside during the war and in anthropology's postwar expansion. This perspective on anthropological history was inspired by the work of Hortense Powdermaker, specifically the disjunction between her 1930s research in segregated Mississippi and her pioneering study of Hollywood in the late 1940s. Reexamining that study highlights the theoretical framework that led to omissions in her account of Hollywood, while her explanation of movie content invites a more diachronic approach. Parallels between the history of the movies and that of cultural anthropology from the 1930s through the 1960s suggest how both were shaped by the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.