Keeping Biological Anthropology in Anthropology, and Anthropology in Biology

Considerable tension among the subfields has existed within the discipline of anthropology. As a result, some anthropology departments have splintered, and the hallmark "holistic approach" of anthropology has been considered more myth than reality. However, as promoted by the American Anthropological Association and the American Anthropologist for over one hundred years, enhancing the holistic nature of anthropology remains an important and necessary endeavor. This article provides an introduction to this special issue of the American Anthropologist , which focuses on the subfield of biological anthropology. Hopefully, as a result, increased connections among the subfields will be fostered, for the betterment of both biological anthropology and anthropology in general. The underlying theme of this article and the subtext for the entire special issue is clear: Biological anthropology needs anthropology, and anthropology needs biological anthropology. [Keywords: biological anthropology, subfields, four-field approach, holistic]     

Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept

The culture concept has been central to anthropology since the formational period of the discipline. Yet for much of the discipline's history it was used without explicit definition. Recent attempts to define it have yielded a range of varied formulations in the subdisciplines of archaeology and sociocultural anthropology. Does this mean that the center of anthropology—shared belief in a unified culture concept—has been destroyed? Quite the opposite, the author concludes—the debate has yielded benefits.     

Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs

ABSTRACT  In this review essay, the academic merits of three anthropological blogs ("Savage Minds,""Zero Anthropology"[formerly "Open Anthropology"], and the official blog of the American Anthropological Association) are considered. The review examines differences between group-blog projects (such "Savage Minds"), single-voiced blogs (such as "Zero Anthropology"), and official blogs representing central anthropological institutions (the AAA's blog) and identifies roles and strengths of each of these blog forms.     

Exploring Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology and the World System: A Critical Perspective and Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology

Exploring Medical Anthropology. Donald Joralemon. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. xiv+ 158pp.
Medical Anthropology and the World System:. Critical Perspective. Hans A. Baer. Merrill Singer. and Ida Susser. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1997. + 276 pp.
Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology. Peter J. Brown. ed. Mountain View, CA. Mayfield, 1998. xii. 451 pp.     

Anthropology, History, and Indonesia

Book reviewed in this article:
The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period . Leonard Y. Andaya. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. 306 pp. Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia . Joel S. Kahn. Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993. 314 pp.     

Yanomamology, Missiology, and Anthropology

The Yanomami and Their Interpreters: Fierce People or Fierce Interpreters? Frank A. Salamone. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997. 117 pp.
Spirit of the Rainforest:. Yanomamö Shaman's Story. Mark Ritchie. Chicago: Island Lake Press, 1996. 271 pp.
Yanomamö Interactive: The Ax Fight. Peter Bella. Napoleon Chagnon. and Gary Seaman. Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology Multimedia Series Windows/Macintosh CDROM. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1997.     

2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference: Changing Anthropology,Changing Society

Fifty years after the founding of the field of medical anthropology, the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association held its first independent meeting on September 24-27, 2009, at Yale University.Fifty years after the founding of the field of medical anthropology, the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association held its first independent meeting on September 24-27, 2009, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The conference, Medical Anthropology at the Intersections, drew an international audience of more than 1,000 scholars.In her opening remarks, program Chair Marcia Inhorn noted that medical anthropology has been interdisciplinary since its inception. This assertion was supported at a roundtable discussion, Founding Medical Anthropology and the Society for Medical Anthropology, which featured four of the field’s founders.Asked to identify the factors that led to the development of medical anthropology, the panelists emphasized the role of changes in the practice and landscape of medicine in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States. According to Hazel Weidman, who helped spearhead the Society for Medical Anthropology, medical personnel sought social scientists’ guidance in the new clinical environments created by the increasing involvement of U.S. physicians in global development work and by the community-oriented approach to mental health encouraged by the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. The novel inclusion of lifestyle as a determinant of health at this time also played a role, according to Clifford Barnett. Norman Scotch, author of a 1963 review that had helped define medical anthropology as a field, noted that physicians at the time were very interested in the possible applications of the social sciences to medicine [1,2]. Joan Ablon recalled that this emphasis on application led some academic anthropologists to dismiss the medical anthropologist as a “handmaiden to the doctors.” Despite such resistance, interest in medical anthropology as a sub-field was clearly growing among anthropologists. When Weidman helped organize the first gathering of medical anthropologists at an anthropology conference in 1967, attendance was twice what was expected. Panel organizer Alan Harwood noted that the Society for Medical Anthropology transformed its newsletter into a professional journal, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, in 1983. According to Inhorn, the society has 1,300 members today.For the panelists, medical anthropology’s potential for application makes it a compelling scholarly pursuit. As Barnett stated in explaining his decision to work in anthropology: “If you know how a society works, you can change it.”     

"Visual Anthropology Is Dead, Long Live Visual Anthropology!"

Rethinking Visual Anthropology. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy. eds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 306 pp.
Principles of Visual Anthropology. Paul Hockings. ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. 562 pp.
Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography. Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman. eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 362 pp.     

Christians, Jews, and the Other in German Anthropology

National anthropologies, wrote George Stocking, can be seen as little "nations" that develop their own foreign policies, formulating distinctions between "us" and "them." American and German anthropological nations were both built on literary traditions of primitivism and exoticism, and both exalted the idea of culture. But they developed very different policies toward their interior others. The Indian was the romanticized precursor to American civilization, while the sophisticated, and thus more dangerous, other lay outside the borders. German Jews, because they participated in German intellectual life, were sophisticated internal savages and hence the most dangerous enemy.     

Anthropology in Disneyworld: Rapport,Gardner, and the ‘Discipline‘ of Social Anthropology

This article examines the response by Rapport to the critique made by Gardner of his book Transcendent Individual. Rapport eschews the idea of discipline in relation to anthropology. This is connected to his distaste for any hint of social determinism, and his eulogising of the essay format as the most suitable means of conveying human contrariety. His approach necessarily leads him to embellish his accounts of what the world is like with visions of what it should be like if only everyone adopted his literary and liberal stance. A contrary ‘manifesto’ is here presented: the job of social anthropology is to explain actual historical societies, and one cannot simply appropriate the subject so that it now becomes about a kind of never‐never land. Rapport's approach, far from leading to a glorification of individuality, leads only to a monochrome vision which paints all human beings as reductively ‘aesthetic’, ignoring, and rendering impossible the explanation of all institutionalised forms of belief and practice, not least those brutal forms which, says Rapport, inspire his work.