Managing alterity from within: the ontological turn in anthropology and indigenous efforts to shape shamanism

The ontological turn is gaining momentum among many anthropologists today, evidenced by multiple debates and symposia in recent years addressing the role of ontological approaches within the discipline. Equal to the force of the ontological turn are the growing number of passionate critiques that question everything from the ethnographic and historical integrity of this body of work to its intellectual motivations and political effects. This article commends ontologists for bringing greater attention to the crucial role of spirits in many people's lives and for their efforts to gain deeper understandings of different realities. Yet we also agree with critics in their identification of various troubling tendencies in prominent ontologists’ analyses. We highlight how many of these disturbing inclinations emerge through ontologists’ attempts to connect their ethnographic analyses to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's theory of multinaturalist perspectivism. Finally, we analyse one of the favourite research topics of those associated with the ontological turn – shamanism – in one of the regions most often heralded as an oasis of radical alterity – the Amazon – in a way that specifically aims to avoid the problematic orientations we identify. Specifically, we describe a series of historical changes in the relationships between shamans and indigenous leaders to draw attention to how relationships to shamanic power/knowledge are unevenly distributed, actively debated, and co‐constructed through changing historical and political contexts.     

God,Fatherland, Home: revealing the dark side of our anthropological virtue

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary current. It then goes on to consider how and why the author's research on right-wing political practice in Bolivia diverged from the disciplinary expectations of engaged anthropology. After reflecting on the implications of this shift, the article concludes by arguing for a methodological recalibration that allows anthropologists to take seriously the ideologies and cultural logics of contemporary right-wing mobilization, particularly social and political movements that are animated by what Edmund Burke described as ‘just prejudice’.     

Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials

In this article, I explore the lessons that the anthropological debates of the 1980s about writing culture might have for contemporary childhood research within anthropology and the social sciences more generally. I argue that the current rhetoric about "giving voice to children," commonplace both inside and outside the academy, poses a threat to the future of childhood research because it masks a number of important conceptual and epistemological problems. In particular, these relate to questions of representation, issues of authenticity, the diversity of children's experiences, and children's participation in research, all of which need to be addressed by anthropologists in their own research practices with children. Unless anthropologists do so, childhood research risks becoming marginalized once more and will fail to provide an arena within which children are seen as social actors who can provide a unique perspective on the social world about matters that concern them as children.     

Knowledge from the Margins: W. Montague Cobb's Pioneering Research in Biocultural Anthropology

W. Montague Cobb became the first African American to receive a doctorate in physical anthropology in the United States (1932). He was also among the first U.S. physical anthropologists to demonstrate a commitment to biocultural integration and racial equality in his research. Nonetheless, very few European American physical anthropologists responded to or utilized Cobb's work. This continued after bioanthropology took on a more biocultural focus in the 1980s, some 50 years after Cobb's first studies of this kind. In this essay, I highlight Cobb's research and writing from the first decades of his career to illustrate his contribution to developing biocultural perspectives in physical anthropology. As a result, I hope to move Cobb from the margins to the center of discussions about methodological and theoretical developments in bioanthropology over the past 30 years.     

Felsbilder im Lang‐Shan

In a recent polemic, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby offer new proposals to bridge the gulf between biological and cultural explanations of human behaviour. By focussing on the evolved architecture of the human mind, they seek specific psychological mechanisms by which genes may influence human social institutions. A major challenge for this approach is how to trace precisely which psychological endowments, formed by the Pleistocene age, have shaped which aspect of our contemporary cultures. Here it is suggested that the temporal framework of individual human lives may provide one means of establishing clearer connections between brain structure and social institutions. For biologists this will involve extending conventional views of human ontogeny to include the phases of aging and death, which have been so important for the genesis of culture. This image of the lifespan may in turn help anthropologists come to terms with the physical bases of intergenerational transfers on which the perpetuation of culture depends.     

Anthropology's ‘impact’: a comment on audit and the unmeasurable nature of critique

The UK government has recently made higher education funding of anthropological research partially dependent on its social ‘impact’. Based on work in higher education and fifty interviews with anthropologists trained in Britain, this article analyses the implications of these impact requirements. It shows that anthropologists generally share government desires for their work to have a societal effect, but that impact, as understood in the United Kingdom's dominant research measurement exercise known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), is marked by a series of important practical and conceptual limitations. On a practical level, it underestimates the social effects of teaching, relies on an overly limiting notion of evidence, and significantly restricts the scope of permissible research. On a conceptual level, impact measurement cannot fully grasp the nature or effect of anthropology, insofar as the latter is a critical science that contributes to the constant renewal of audit's own politico‐epistemic foundations. This exposes an important limitation of audit practices more widely, which has so far received little scholarly attention: audits are in several ways incapable of grasping sociocultural critique.     

The Anthropology of Power and Maoism

The legacies of Maoist rule made reflecting on power almost unavoidable for U.S. anthropologists who conducted research in the People's Republic of China (PRC) just after Mao's death. In this article, I examine the theorization of power in the works of five such anthropologists. Although their approaches are diverse, they share an historical awareness of the unexpected dynamics and paradoxical outcomes of Mao's attempts to enact a revolutionary transformation of the social organization of power in the PRC. I conclude this article by enumerating lessons from these authors' analyses for the anthropological study of power in general. [Keywords: power, Maoism, governance, China, postsocialism]     

The adaptive nature of culture

Some have argued that the major contribution of anthropology to science is the concept of culture. Until very recently, however, evolutionary anthropologists have largely ignored culture as a topic of study. This is perhaps because of the strange bedfellows they would have to maintain. Historically, anthropologists who claimed the focus of cultural anthropology tended to be anti‐science, anti‐biology, or both. Paradoxically, a segment of current mainstream cultural anthropology has more or less abandoned culture as a topic. It is particularly ironic that in spite of a growing awareness among evolutionary anthropologists that culture is critical for understanding the human condition, the topic of culture has fallen out of favor among many “cultural” anthropologists. ^1,2     

In search of certainty in revolutionary India

In this article, I focus on the dilemmas of a friend in Jharkhand who might have joined the revolutionary armed squads of the Maoist insurgency in India. I show how the question of why one supports a revolutionary movement, as well as the nature of that support, can change over time. In particular, I stress the importance of the dialectics between epistemological and ontological uncertainty and certainty, which may be central to the making of a revolutionary in a particular phase of a revolutionary movement. These dialectics are not just the result of an ontological uncertainty of ideological commitment to the movement, but are crucially also about the search for epistemological clarity in social relations imagined to be less opaque and hence more trustworthy. Doubt, an uncertainty about what one knows about one’s social relationships is characteristic of the epistemic murk that accompanies the breakdown of the normative order in the revolutionary situation analysed here. In this context, Maoist terror arises from the creation of epistemic clarity—the possibility that on the other side norms and relationships will be more certain. This is a certainty that is carved out of uncertainty and ambivalence, a certainty that denies or projects away uncertainty. Its weapon is paranoia, an ability to make enemies where there would be doubt, betrayal where there would be benefit of the doubt. The potential revolutionary is therefore not only unsure about his/her ideological commitments, but moreover, a crucial component of their predicament might be an uncertainty about the social relations in which they find themselves and the hope that revolutionary engagement might come with more guarantees. Becoming a revolutionary is also about being in search of certainty.     

Taking the long view: an emerging framework for translational psychiatric science

Understood in their historical context, current debates about psychiatric classification, prompted by the publication of the DSM‐5, open up new opportunities for improved translational research in psychiatry. In this paper, we draw lessons for translational research from three time slices of 20th century psychiatry. From the first time slice, 1913 and the publication of Jaspers' General Psychopathology, the lesson is that translational research in psychiatry requires a pluralistic approach encompassing equally the sciences of mind (including the social sciences) and of brain. From the second time slice, 1959 and a conference in New York from which our present symptom‐based classifications are derived, the lesson is that, while reliability remains the basis of psychiatry as an observational science, validity too is essential to effective translation. From the third time slice, 1997 and a conference on psychiatric classification in Dallas that brought together patients and carers with researchers and clinicians, the lesson is that we need to build further on collaborative models of research combining expertise‐by‐training with expertise‐by‐experience. This is important if we are to meet the specific challenges to translation presented by the complexity of the concept of mental disorder, particularly as reflected in the diversity of desired treatment outcomes. Taken together, these three lessons – a pluralistic approach, reliability and validity, and closer collaboration among relevant stakeholders – provide an emerging framework for more effective translation of research into practice in 21st century psychiatry.     

The emergence of biomedical anthropology and its implications for the future

Primarily during the past 15 years a distinct new area within physical anthropology has emerged, biomedical anthropology. Physical anthropologists have become heavily involved in studying problems of relevance to the health and illness patterns of living humans. There has been a proportionate increase in biomedically focused papers published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, in biomedically focused papers presented at annual meetings of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and in physical anthropology doctoral dissertations oriented toward modern biomedical phenomena. Proportionately more physical anthropologists are now employed in medical schools and there has been recent growth in the proportion of physical anthropologists in anthropology departments who claim some aspect of biomedical anthropology as a research interest. Increasingly, physical anthropologists are focusing their research on cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in America. These distinct trends are partially a result of the nature of physical anthropology and its unique biocultural perspective. However the growth of applied anthropology, the present academic marketplace, and the availability of research funds are probably also contributing factors. The emergency of biomedical anthropology holds promise for the future of physical anthropology and for its current employment crisis. Careers with academic and nonacademic organizations engaged in biomedical research appear to be a viable alternative to careers in departments of anthropology, for biomedical anthropologists. This will entail some reorientation of graduate training for physical anthropologists. More emphasis will have to be placed on substantive biomedical subjects, research methods, and data management and analysis.     

Elementary Forms and their Dynamics: Revisiting Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas's oeuvre furnishes the social sciences with one of the most profound and ambitious bodies of social theory ever to emerge from within anthropology. This article uses the occasion of the publication of Fardon's two volumes of her previously uncollected papers to restate her core arguments about the limited plurality of elementary forms of social organisation, about the institutional dynamics of conflict, and about conflict attenuation. In reviewing these two volumes, the article considers what those anthropologists who have been sceptical either of Douglas's importance or of the Durkheimian traditions generally, will want from these books to convince them to look afresh at her work. It concludes that the two collections will provide open-minded anthropologists with enough evidence of the creativity and significance of her achievement to encourage them to reopen her major theoretical works. An internal critique of some aspects of Douglas's handling of her arguments is offered, before the conclusion identifies the wider significance of her arguments for the social sciences.     

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.     

Engagement as co‐constructing knowledge: A moral necessity in public health research

Undertaking engagement in public health research is ethically essential. There is a growing emphasis on practicing engagement as the co‐construction of knowledge, which goes beyond other common forms of engagement in health research practice: consulting and informing. Taking such an approach means researchers jointly construct knowledge with research users and beneficiaries; all parties design and conduct research together and share decision‐making power. This article makes the normative argument that such engagement is necessary to achieve the foundational moral aims of public health research—building relations of equality and addressing the health needs of those considered disadvantaged—which reflect the field's underlying commitment to social justice. It next identifies and discusses three ways in which co‐constructing knowledge advances those moral aims: by facilitating self‐determination, supporting individuals’ right to research, and maximizing social knowledge to address cognitive and epistemic injustice. Objections to the arguments presented in the article are then articulated and defended against.     

Introduction: Current Directions in Australian Anthropologies of the Environment

Environmental anthropology is an expanding field in Australia. Extensive research on Aboriginal relationships to land and natural resources has provided the foundation for growing anthropological interest in the interactions of other Australians with the biophysical environments they inhabit. Australian‐based anthropologists also continue to contribute to research on environmental beliefs and practices in other parts of the world. This paper provides a brief overview of previously explored themes in this field as a precursor to introducing new research and proposing additional areas of research. It is suggested that these could be usefully developed to enhance anthropological contributions to debates about environmental change in Australia and surrounding regions. We argue that there are roles for anthropologists as `cultural translators' in cross‐disciplinary engagements with environmental scientists and natural resource managers; as cultural theorists skilled at documenting and interpreting changing environmental attitudes; and as environmental advocates pursuing the knowledge needed to create more ecologically sustainable human communities. We also suggest that Australian anthropologies of the environment can make valuable theoretical and ethnographic contributions to this important international field of study.     

‘Illuminating the broader context’: anthropological and historical knowledge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Historians and anthropologists have been among the experts called to enlighten non‐Rwandan judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Given that the Tribunal's regulations provide little guidance on who qualifies as an expert and that judges are not bound by national rules of evidence, judges exercise considerable discretion on who may provide expert testimony. By considering judges' scepticism towards repetitive expert testimony and that experts have changed their opinion because of information revealed in the course of the trials, this article seeks to convey the distinct characteristics of this innovative context and re‐evaluate the assumption that anthropologists and historians are inevitably engaged in an epistemological contest with law when they act as experts in criminal trials.     

Imaging process as ethnographic inquiry

This paper considers the predicament of ethnographic photography in the current period of paradigm transition. The dominant mode of ethnographic imaging has remained severely constrained by the genre conventions of documentary, and so the practice was relegated to the poetic margins of social science discourse. But, as this paper argues, the paradox of visual representation is not inherent in the medium, rather it stems from the imaging process as formalist aesthetic. An alternative formulation involves foregrounding the process itself as a system of communication, thereby severing the photograph's ontological commitment to reality.     

A theory of human life history evolution: Diet,intelligence, and longevity

Human life histories, as compared to those of other primates and mammals, have at least four distinctive characteristics: an exceptionally long lifespan, an extended period of juvenile dependence, support of reproduction by older post‐reproductive individuals, and male support of reproduction through the provisioning of females and their offspring. Another distinctive feature of our species is a large brain, with its associated psychological attributes: increased capacities for learning, cognition, and insight. In this paper, we propose a theory that unites and organizes these observations and generates many theoretical and empirical predictions. We present some tests of those predictions and outline new predictions that can be tested in future research by comparative biologists, archeologists, paleontologists, biological anthropologists, demographers, geneticists, and cultural anthropologists.     

Male genital mutilation: an adaptation to sexual conflict

Male genital mutilation (MGM) takes several forms and occurs in about 25% of societies. This behavior has puzzled anthropologists, doctors and theologians for centuries, and presents an evolutionary challenge since it involves dangerous and costly surgery. I suggest that MGM is likely to reduce insemination efficiency, reducing a man's capacity for extra-pair fertilizations by impairing sperm competition. MGM may therefore represent a hard-to-fake signal of a man's reduced ability to challenge the paternity of older men who are already married. Men who display this signal of sexual obedience may gain social benefits if married men are selected to offer social trust and investment preferentially to peers who are less threatening to their paternity. Clitoridectomy and vaginal infibulation serve a parallel signaling function in women, increasing a husband's paternity certainty and garnering his increased investment. Especially in societies where paternity uncertainty and reproductive conflict are high, the social benefits of MGM as a signal may outweigh its costs. This ‘sexual conflict’ hypothesis predicts that MGM should be associated with polygyny, particularly when co-wives reside far apart, and that MGM should reduce the frequency of extramarital sex. MGM rituals should facilitate access to social benefits; they should be highly public, watched mainly by men, and performed by a nonrelative. I found support for these six predictions in two cross-cultural samples. I also examined an alternative hypothesis suggesting that MGM signals group commitment for collective action, particularly inter-societal warfare. Although other forms of male scarification fit this model, the distribution of MGM is not predicted by frequency of inter-societal warfare.