Introduction: The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

This collection of articles seeks to demonstrate that the concept of order – the intensive and extensive coordination of human action across space and time – is useful for answering some of the most pressing theoretical and practical questions in contemporary Papua New Guinea (PNG) today. Building on existing work in this field [Benda-Beckmann, K., and F. Pirie. 2007. “Introduction.” In Order and Disorder: Anthropological Perspectives, 1–15. New York: Berghahn Books] in this special issue we ask: How do people create enduring, stable, and routinised life in contemporary Melanesia today? We position our work as the next step in a growing movement to study contemporary institutions in PNG as order-making projects, rather than attempting to divide them into legitimate projects like ‘government’ and false or ineffective ones like ‘cargo cults’.     

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.     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

Settlement Hierarchies and Political Complexity in Nonmarket Societies: The Formative Period of the Valley of Mexico

Archaeologists have long recognized that increases in political centralization often coincide with the growth of regional settlement hierarchies. Here I develop a theoretical model which explicitly relates certain aspects of political complexity to variation in settlement size. This model applies specifically to hierarchical societies without well-developed market economies—societies which Service would classify as chiefdoms and (perhaps) simple states. Using settlement data from the Formative Period Valley of Mexico, I show how this model is useful in measuring (1) the number of levels in a regional hierarchy, (2) the degree of political centralization, and (3) the relative amount of surplus food mobilized to support the political establishment.     

Reclaiming Applied Anthropology: Its Past, Present, and Future

Growing concerns about anthropology's impact in both academia and the broader social arena have led to calls for more "public" and more relevant anthropology. In this article, we expand on these exhortations, by calling for systematic joining of critical social theory with application and pragmatic engagement with contemporary problems. We argue for the repositioning of applied anthropology as a vital component of the broader discipline and suggest that it should serve as a framework for constructing a more engaged anthropology. In revisiting disciplinary history and critiques of applied anthropology, we demonstrate the central role that application has played throughout anthropology's evolution, address common misconceptions that serve as barriers to disciplinary integration, examine the role of advocacy in relation to greater engagement as well as the relationship of theory to practice, and conclude with an assessment of the diverse work that is subsumed under the inclusive rubric of "anthropology in use."     

Relationship between transpiration and respiration in plants during the dark period

Energetic aspects of the relation between transpiration and respiration during the dark period were evaluated. One-year old seedlings of three trees, one bush and one annual plant were grown in controlled conditions. Experiments were performed under uniform environment during the day and two regimes of air relative humidity (RH) during the night, low (50 - 65 %) and high (95 %). For all investigated plant species the dark transpiration rate (E), the free energy of respiratory substrate, the entropy production and the free energy balance (FEB) of the dark respiration were higher at low than at high RH. E was linearly related to the FEBr ² ranged between 0.63 and 0.90)     

Joyeuses Tropiques: Five Encounters with Alterities in Brazil

The paper describes the predicament of Brazilian anthropology through a personal experience of teaching and living in Brasilia. Just like Brasilia, Brazil is many ways considered as “a work in progress” – and Brazilian anthropology as a lively and thriving area, although frequently overlooked by non-Brazilian scholars. The situation in which Brazilian anthropologists find themselves is put in the context of their own history, as well as the particular social conditions of the country – with special reference to Brazil as invention, taking as an example celebration of “500 years of Brazil.”     

Anthropometry and numerical taxonomy in clinical genetics: An example of applied biological anthropology

Biological anthropologists can contribute a unique perspective as well as technical expertise to the diagnosis and classification of genetic disorders. Anthropometry has been used with increasing frequency to characterize syndromes and to establish ranges of variation within syndromes. The specific anthropometric-radiologic technique of metacarpophalangeal pattern profile analysis has proven useful in discriminating individuals with the Prader-Labhart-Willi (PLW) syndrome from unaffected persons. Analysis of these data also indicate a negative correlation between age and Z-score transformations of individual hand bone lengths. These findings sound a cautionary note to clinical investigators who would use the Z-score transformation to standardize for age and sex. Problems encountered in the classification of genetic syndromes afford many parallels with those faced by anthropologists in the classification of living and fossil populations. The reliance on “key” traits and the necessity of focusing on pedigree analysis results in a deemphasis of the total range of variation and typological thinking. Application of numerical taxonomic techniques to the classification of the heterogeneous connective tissue disease osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) illustrates the heuristic value of this technique and points out the need to consider phenotypic overlap when defining typologies. Clinical genetics affords just one example of an area in medicine where the unique training and generalist perspective of the biological anthropologist is in demand. The decline in the availability of positions in the traditional academic habitat for biological anthropologists makes it imperative that graduate students be aware of alternatives and that they obtain training in the practical skills which such alternatives will demand.     

Not just in the past: Racist and sexist biases still permeate biology,anthropology, medicine,and education

In the past decades, it has been increasingly recognized that some areas of science, such as anthropology, have been plagued by racist, Western-centric, and/or sexist biases. Unfortunately, an acculturation process to racism and sexism has been occurring for generations leading to systemic inequities that will take a long time to disappear. Here, we highlight the existence of current examples of racism, Western-centrism and sexism within: (1) the most popular anatomical atlases used in biological, anthropological and medical education; (2) prominent natural history museums and World Heritage Sites; (3) biological and anthropological scientific research publications; and (4) popular culture and influential children's books and educational materials concerning human biology and evolution.     

Historical links between settlement,ecology, and politics in the mountains of west Nepal

The paper presents a study of settlement processes in western Nepal. It emphasizes the linkages between settlement history, cultural ecology, and political economy as these relate to resources, marginality, and territory. Regional settlement trends are examined in accordance with land occupancy and tenure arrangements. Village settlement strategies are analyzed within a micro-processual framework that incorporates political economic perspectives on village land use and resource distributions. The past, present, and future roles of settlement in the human adaptation process of west Nepal's mountain populations is critically examined in the contexts of historical land policies and current rural political and environmental systems.     

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.     

John W. Burgess,the racial state and the making of the American science of politics

This article examines the place of racial ideas in the constitution of political science as an academic discipline in the USA. For the Gilded Age generation that built the first PhD-granting departments in political science in the country, ‘race’ was the source of sovereignty, the basis of democratic legitimacy and a tool for delineating democracy's borders. It was also an important element of that cohort's aspiration to a ‘science’ of politics, distinct from what they viewed as the ‘abstract and formal’ theorizing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Moreover, while the brand of racialism that characterized this founding moment came to seem outmoded within a few decades, in the 1920s political scientists seeking once again to claim an empirical, scientific basis for their discipline – and for American democracy – turned to new accounts and sciences of race.     

The need to incorporate human variation and evolutionary theory in forensic anthropology: A call for reform

In 1992, Norm Sauer called for a language shift in which practitioners would move away from the socially loaded term “race” and replace it with the less provocative term “ancestry.” While many heeded the call and moved towards ancestry in their research and reports, the actual approach to research and analysis did not change. In response to this change, there was a large growth in ancestry estimation method development in the early decade of the 2000s. However, the practice of ancestry estimation did not adequately incorporate evolutionary theory in interpretation or trait selection and continued with little critical reflection. In the past decade, there has been an increase in ancestry validation methods with little critique of the “race” concept or discussion of modern human variation or reference samples. To advance, forensic anthropologists need to reckon with the practice of ancestry estimation as it is currently practiced. We are calling for another reform in the axiom focusing on evolutionary theory, population history, trait selection, and population-level reference samples. The practice needs to abandon the terms ancestry and race completely and recalibrate to an analysis of population affinity. Population affinity is a statistical approach based on the underlying population structure that would allow the understanding of how microevolutionary forces act in concert with historical events (e.g., colonization, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, etc.) to shape modern human variation. This is not to be confused with geographic ancestry that all too often can be perceived as interchangeable with social race and as an affirmation of the biological concept of race. It is time to critically evaluate the social and scientific implications of the current practice of ancestry estimation, and re-frame our approach to studying and analyzing modern human variation through a population structure approach.     

Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling 'Darwinian' and 'Spencerian' evolutionary approaches in anthropology

Traditional investigations of the evolution of human social and political institutions trace their ancestry back to nineteenth century social scientists such as Herbert Spencer, and have concentrated on the increase in socio-political complexity over time. More recent studies of cultural evolution have been explicitly informed by Darwinian evolutionary theory and focus on the transmission of cultural traits between individuals. These two approaches to investigating cultural change are often seen as incompatible. However, we argue that many of the defining features and assumptions of 'Spencerian' cultural evolutionary theory represent testable hypotheses that can and should be tackled within a broader 'Darwinian' framework. In this paper we apply phylogenetic comparative techniques to data from Austronesian-speaking societies of Island South-East Asia and the Pacific to test hypotheses about the mode and tempo of human socio-political evolution. We find support for three ideas often associated with Spencerian cultural evolutionary theory: (i) political organization has evolved through a regular sequence of forms, (ii) increases in hierarchical political complexity have been more common than decreases, and (iii) political organization has co-evolved with the wider presence of hereditary social stratification.     

Legitimizing the shameful: end-of-life ethics and the political economy of death

This paper explores one of the most politically sensitive and intellectually neglected issues in bioethics--the interface between the history of contemporary end-of-life ethics and the economics of life and death. It suggests that contrary to general belief, economic impulses have increasingly become part of the conditions in which contemporary end-of-life ethics continues to evolve. Although this conclusion does not refute the philosophical justifications provided by the ethics for itself, it may cast new light upon its social role.     

Comparative study of dark respiration in plants inhabiting arctic (Wrangel Island) and temperate climate zones

Comparative analysis of dark respiration was carried out for 18 plant species inhabiting arctic zone (Wrangel Island, lat. 71° N) and temperate zone (Leningrad oblast, lat. 59° N). For 15 pairs of species examined, the Stocker’s rule was proved valid; i.e., respiration rates of identical species were equal at average temperatures of their natural habitats. The concept of respiratory features in boreal and mountain plants is described in its historic development. The possible causes for controversial data are explained. It is concluded that gas exchange measurements in natural plant habitats are the only valid means for characterizing plant respiration. Only such measurements should provide the basis for the discussion of global climate changes.     

Magic: A Problem in Semantics

Anthropologists, from Tylor to the present, have so defined magic that, although it might shade into or overlap with religion, it is a separate phenomenon distinct from religion. Theorists have made different features the chief means of differentiation, but no matter how defined the distinction cannot be easily or consistently maintained. This paper suggests that the concept of magic as a distinct entity is the factitious result of ethnocentric classification, and that magic should be included within religion as one type of the practices of which religious ritual is composed.     

Recent contributions of behavioural and biomedical scientists in applied anthropology of hygiene practices and management of diarrhoea in Bangladesh

In the past few years anthropologists, sociologists and biostatisticians have made contributions on hygiene practices and management of diarrhoea in relation to young children in rural Bangladesh. The cultural practices of caregivers with regard to washing hands after cleansing the anus of young children following defectation and disposing of the stool often do not fulfil the biomedical criteria for prevention of the transmission of diarrhoea-causing pathogens. These practices, being important determinants of prevention of transmission, were studied in the rural communities of Matlab, Bangladesh. Data were collected by observing the practices of caregivers of 404 children with diarrhoea chosen from 444 community cases recruited from the neighbourhood of the 218 hospitalized index cases. Observations were made regarding the cleansing of the anus of these children, washing of the hands of the caregivers, and disposal of the stool. It was observed that all the caregivers used bare hands and most used only water in cleaning the anus of the child. Also following the cleaning, most of the caregivers used only water to wash the soiled hand. Most of them used water collected in a pot, and only a small proportion used water from the direct source. The majority of caregivers disposed of the faeces in an unhygienic way. The caregivers classified diarrhoeal illness into 5 types based on stool characteristics and perceived specific causation. Their management approach was determined by the type and cause of the diarrhoea. The oral rehydration approach to management was not considered for diarrhoeas which were believed to be caused by supernatural and certain other cultural factors.