Afterword to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key": The Social Life of Human Rights

In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early-20th-century "legal realists" and look closely at the underlying assumptions and hidden practices of political and legal processes. Studying the "social life of human rights" would involve focusing on, inter alia, the performative dimensions of human rights, the dynamics of social mobilization, and the attitudinal changes of elite and nonelite social actors towards formulations of "rights" and "justice," both inside and outside the legal process. I conclude with a review of recent anthropological research on human rights epistemology and evaluate its implications for human rights policy.     

Medical Anthropology: Toward a Third Moment in Social Science?

This article about medical anthropology was inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, specifically, his efforts to reconcile the antinomy of a "social structuralist" and a "cultural constructivist" perspective. These perspectives are often opposed in the literature, but, in Bourdieu's view, human life cannot be studied without taking into account both how individuals are situated within and constrained by social structures and how those individuals construct an understanding of and impose meaning on the world around them. I argue that the special subject matter of medical anthropology--human health--demands that a synthetic approach be taken in our theory and research. I illustrate this argument with examples from my own research on social and cultural factors associated with blood pressure, and I point to other examples of this synthesis in medical anthropology. The results of this research hold promise for the continuing refinement of culture theory.     

The Place of "Others" in Hunter-Gatherer Intensification

Archaeologists are interested in understanding the conditions under which hunter-gatherer intensification occurs. Typically, most models assign primacy to population pressure or social relations and address intensification as it occurs among foragers inhabiting arid or temperate environments. In this article, I explore episodes of resource intensification and "deintensification" on the subarctic island of Newfoundland. Correlating periods of resource intensification and "deintensification" with changes in the social landscape, I argue that the presence or absence of "Others" played a significant role in informing hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies and settlement patterns.     

Transnationalism reloaded: the historical trajectory of a concept

In this commentary, I discuss the importance of Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt’s article, focusing on three specific points. First, I argue that this 1999 article represented a turning point in transnational migration studies, in that it made it possible to address important weaknesses in this field of study. Second, I reflect on the article’s lack of reference to the nation-state and its power to shape transnational fields. Third, I argue that the cumulative knowledge gained over the last two decades – triggered in part by the claims of this 1999 article – have been steadily integrated into this field of investigation, rendering possible important theoretical alterations. These insights have made possible a shift towards a new stance, a transnational perspective whose specific epistemology makes it possible to develop explanatory frameworks for current transformation processes and to revise social theory more generally.     

Of Trees and People: The Changing Entanglement in the Israeli Desert

This article portrays the shift experienced in the role of acacia trees during environmental–political struggles as the entanglement of trees and people. Drawing on a four-year ethnographic study around Israel’s Arava desert valley, the article narrates human interactions with these trees amid an environmental conflict fraught with personal and political conflict, opposing perspectives on natural preservation and scientific debate, as well as disputes among environmental organisations. Contrary to current approaches in anthropology that –theoretically at least – confer agency on the non-human, I refocus on the human practices that weave the non-human into the social fabric. In this article, I argue that the trees – not actors in their own right, yet inhabiting a tapestry of people and other elements – are essential to understanding a variety of social processes.     

It's Not All Sex and Violence: Integrated Anthropology and the Role of Cooperation and Social Complexity in Human Evolution

Social scientists, especially anthropologists, have long endeavored to understand the evolution of "human nature." This investigation frequently focuses on the relative importance of competition versus cooperation in human evolutionary trajectories and usually results in a primary emphasis on competition, aggression, and even war in attempting to understand humanity. This perspective conflicts with long-standing perspectives in anthropology and some emerging trends and theory in evolutionary biology and ecology. Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive in an evolutionary context. As anthropologists, we have demonstrated that humans can–and usually do–get along. Evolution is complex with multiple processes and patterns, not all of which involve competition and conflict. In this article, I summarize elements of modern ecological and evolutionary theory in the context of human cooperative patterns in an attempt to illustrate the valuable role of evolutionary theory and cooperative patterns in integrative anthropological approaches to the human condition.     

Bridging the bonding gap: the transition from primates to humans

Primate societies are characterized by bonded social relationships of a kind that are rare in other mammal taxa. These bonded relationships, which provide the basis for coalitions, are underpinned by an endorphin mechanism mediated by social grooming. However, bonded relationships of this kind impose constraints on the size of social groups that are possible. When ecological pressures have demanded larger groups, primates have had to evolve new mechanisms to facilitate bonding. This has involved increasing the size of vocal and visual communication repertoires, increasing the time devoted to social interaction and developing a capacity to manage two-tier social relationships (strong and weak ties). I consider the implications of these constraints for the evolution of human social communities and argue that laughter was an early evolutionary innovation that helped bridge the bonding gap between the group sizes characteristic of chimpanzees and australopithecines and those in later hominins.     

What is resilience: an affiliative neuroscience approach

Resilience – a key topic in clinical science and practice – still lacks a clear conceptualization that integrates its evolutionary and human‐specific features, refrains from exclusive focus on fear physiology, incorporates a developmental approach, and, most importantly, is not based on the negation (i.e., absence of symptoms following trauma). Building on the initial condition of mammals, whose brain matures in the context of the mother's body and caregiving behavior, we argue that systems and processes that participate in tuning the brain to the social ecology and adapting to its hardships mark the construct of resilience. These include the oxytocin system, the affiliative brain, and biobehavioral synchrony, all characterized by great flexibility across phylogenesis and ontogenesis. Three core features of resilience are outlined: plasticity, sociality and meaning. Mechanisms of sociality by which coordinated action supports diversity, endurance and adaptation are described across animal evolution. Humans' biobehavioral synchrony matures from maternal attuned behavior in the postpartum to adult‐adult relationships of empathy, perspective‐taking and intimacy, and extends from the mother‐child relationship to other affiliative bonds throughout life, charting a fundamental trajectory in the development of resilience. Findings from three high‐risk cohorts, each tapping a distinct disruption to maternal‐infant bonding (prematurity, maternal depression, and early life stress/trauma), and followed from birth to adolescence/young adulthood, demonstrate how components of the neurobiology of affiliation confer resilience and uniquely shape the social brain.     

Radical masculinity: morality, sociality and relationships through recollections of Naxalite activists

In this article I argue that the concern with gender relations and the challenges female activists were facing foreclosed any discussion of the transformation activism signalled for male comrades, and thus for wider society. I am particularly interested in men’s own views of their social roles and personal predicaments as the more subtle processes of transformation in the lives of male activists are often overlooked. The article takes a closer look at relationships between men, whether friendships or kin relations, as important roles and everyday practices former activists were/are involved in—during their phase of active participation, but crucially also before they become militants and in the aftermath of their involvement in the movement.     

Translation, Value, and Space: Theorizing an Ethnographic and Engaged Environmental Anthropology

In this article, I argue for placing the politics of translation and theories of value and spatial production at the center of environmental anthropology. For the past ten years, the Gimi-speaking peoples living in Maimafu village, Papua New Guinea, have taken part in an integrated conservation and development project attempting to foster a local system of valuing "nature" by tying biological diversity to economic markets through the creation of "eco-enterprises." However, the project fails to consider how Gimi produce, theorize, transmit, and express knowledge. Using ethnographic material concerned with hunting and song composition, I show that Gimi understand their forests to be part of a series of transactive dialectical relationships that work to produce identity and space. I also demonstrate that, as part of this project, Gimi social relations with their forests have been translated in ways that fit their beliefs into generic and easily understandable categories. This has been detrimental to the conservation project and it is politically problematic for an engaged environmental anthropology.     

Family feuds: social competition and sexual conflict in complex societies

Darwin was initially puzzled by the processes that led to ornamentation in males-what he termed sexual selection-and those that led to extreme cooperation and altruism in complex animal societies-what was later termed kin selection. Here, I explore the relationships between sexual and kin selection theory by examining how social competition for reproductive opportunities-particularly in females-and sexual conflict over mating partners are inherent and critical parts of complex altruistic societies. I argue that (i) patterns of reproductive sharing within complex societies can drive levels of social competition and reproductive conflict not only in males but also in females living in social groups, and ultimately the evolution of female traits such as ornaments and armaments; (ii) mating conflict over female choice of sexual partners can influence kin structure within groups and drive the evolution of complex societies; and (iii) patterns of reproductive sharing and conflict among females may also drive the evolution of complex societies by influencing kin structure within groups. Ultimately, complex societies exhibiting altruistic behaviour appear to have only arisen in taxa where social competition over reproductive opportunities and sexual conflict over mating partners were low. Once such societies evolved, there were important selective feedbacks on traits used to regulate and mediate intra-sexual competition over reproductive opportunities, particularly in females.     

'We don't know our descent': how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past

Although Gypsies have often been described as people 'oriented towards the present', the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive as a group in the midst of non-Gypsy society. In this article I analyse how the Gitanos of Jarana (Madrid) work upon the past so as to remove certain past events and periods from the communal gaze and to ensure that others receive only limited elaboration. I also explore the links between these Gitanos' downplaying of the past in their accounts of themselves and their particular ways of organizing social relations. Therefore, my focus lies on the relationships between the past and the imagined community, and between the latter and its structural supports.     

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.     

Depending on care: recognition of vulnerability and the social contribution of care provision

People who are paid to provide basic care for others are frequently undervalued, exploited and expected to reach often unrealistic standards of care. I argue that appropriate social recognition, support and fair pay for people who provide care for those who are disabled, frail and aged, or suffering ill health that impedes their capacity to negotiate daily activities without support, depends on a reconsideration of the paradigm of the citizen or and moral agent. I argue that by drawing on the ideas of human vulnerability and dependency as central to our personhood, a more realistic conception of selves, citizens and persons can be developed that better recognises the inevitability of human dependency and the social value of care work. I also indicate the significance of this vulnerability-focussed view for ethical evaluation of the emotional aspects of care relationships.     

Gene mobility and the concept of relatedness

Cooperation is rife in the microbial world, yet our best current theories of the evolution of cooperation were developed with multicellular animals in mind. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is an important case in point: applying the theory in a microbial setting is far from straightforward, as social evolution in microbes has a number of distinctive features that the theory was never intended to capture. In this article, I focus on the conceptual challenges posed by the project of extending Hamilton’s theory to accommodate the effects of gene mobility. I begin by outlining the basics of the theory of inclusive fitness, emphasizing the role that the concept of relatedness is intended to play. I then provide a brief history of this concept, showing how, over the past fifty years, it has departed from the intuitive notion of genealogical kinship to encompass a range of generalized measures of genetic similarity. I proceed to argue that gene mobility forces a further revision of the concept. The reason in short is that, when the genes implicated in producing social behaviour are mobile, we cannot talk of an organism’s genotype simpliciter; we can talk only of an organism’s genotype at a particular stage in its life cycle. We must therefore ask: with respect to which stage(s) in the life cycle should relatedness be evaluated? For instance: is it genetic similarity at the time of social interaction that matters to the evolution of social behaviour, or is it genetic similarity at the time of reproduction? I argue that, strictly speaking, it is neither of these: what really matters to the evolution of social behaviour is diachronic genetic similarity between the producers of fitness benefits at the time they produce them and the recipients of those benefits at the end of their life-cycle. I close by discussing the implications of this result. The main payoff is that it makes room for a possible new mechanism for the evolution of altruism in microbes that does not require correlated interaction among bearers of the genes for altruism. The importance of this mechanism in nature remains an open empirical question.     

Contestation or Collaboration? A Comparative Study of Home–School Relations

In this article we focus on two public elementary schools that are known to have a great deal of parental participation, examining the relationships parents and school personnel build, and how these relationships unfold. We found that accommodation and community typified parent–teacher interactions at one school, while interactions at the other could be characterized as ambivalent and fraught with competing demands. We argue that social class and school culture interact to shape what is possible for parents and teachers to accomplish in the way of forming strong and meaningful relationships, ultimately leading to quite different outcomes.     

Can there be a "cultural epidemiology"?

A brief excursion through the history of social medicine suggests that, at least in principle, epidemiology and anthropology are natural allies in the study of disease in human populations. In practice, however, this alliance has been limited and remains problematic. This article examines the possibilities for interdisciplinary research, taking cancer epidemiology as a case in point. I argue, on the basis of participant-observation over a period of nearly two years in the epidemiology department of a medical research institute in Catalonia (Spain), that bioscientific uses of the concept of culture have led, disappointingly, to its reification as "beliefs" and its incorporation into the naturalist epistemology of Western institutional medicine. The unfortunate consequence is the medicalization of culture understood as "difference," which often stands in for social class.     

Two escape routes from the paradigm of monistic authenticity: post-imperialist and federal perspectives on plural and complex identities

Despite a recent explosion of works emphasizing the increasingly plural and complex character of identity, political and social elites' interpretations of identities have continued to be dominated by the paradigm of monistic authenticity. In the face of this resilience, theorists must say more about the formation, meaning and implications of plural and complex identities. They must provide social and political actors with a credible alternative language to make sense of the actual or potential plurality of their allegiances. This article aims at contributing to the task by relying on the complementary merits of two traditions that used to ignore each other: post-imperialism and federalism. First, we suggest that post-imperialism may provide a language for redefining communities and individual-community relationships in a pluralist way. Second, we argue that the language of federalism has a high – and neglected – potential to answer the political and normative questions raised by post-imperialism.     

Sex ratio dynamics and fluctuating selection on personality

Fluctuating selection has often been proposed as an explanation for the maintenance of genetic variation in personality. Here I argue that the temporal dynamics of the sex ratio can be a powerful source of fluctuating selection on personality traits, and develop this hypothesis with respect to humans. First, I review evidence that sex ratios modulate a wide range of social processes related to mating and parenting. Since most personality traits affect mating and parenting behavior, changes in the sex ratio can be expected to result in variable selection on personality. I then show that the temporal dynamics of the sex ratio are intrinsically characterized by fluctuations at various timescales. Finally, I address a number of evolutionary genetic challenges to the hypothesis. I conclude that the sex ratio hypothesis is a plausible explanation of genetic variation in human personality, and may be fruitfully applied to other species as well.