Animal bells as symbols: sound and hearing in a Greek island village

This article deals with the cultural construction of sound and hearing in a mountain village in the Greek island of Naxos, in the Cyclades. The analysis is based on the ethnographic presentation and discussion of the cultural meanings and symbolism of animal bells. I further explore the relation of bells and their sound to the issues of social reproduction and the cultural constitution of social order. By focusing on the indigenous conceptualizations of sound and noise and the metaphoric language concerning the sense of hearing, I also consider some wider aspects of sound, sound symbolism, and hearing in this community.     

Dynamic of black-grass populations depending on the sowing time of winter wheat

Currently, economic, agronomic and environmental concerns, lead to reduce use of herbicides. This reduction can be help by cultural measures like delay of the sowing date. Four sowing dates of winter wheat from 15th of October to 26th of November were tested. Dynamic of black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides Huds.) populations and their reproduction rate were assessed as well as dynamic of winter wheat for each date. Delay of sowing could significantly reduce reproduction rate of black-grass. It was shown that the emergence rate (pl/m2), but also number of ears per plant and number of seeds per ear of black-grass decreased significantly with the sowing date. This reduction of seeds production already is from sixty per cent for a delay of two weeks sowing.     

Inferring cultural reproduction from lithic data: A critical review

The cultural reproduction of lithic technology, long an implicit assumption of archaeological theories, has garnered increasing attention over the past decades. Major debates ranging from the origins of the human culture capacity to the interpretation of spatiotemporal patterning now make explicit reference to social learning mechanisms and cultural evolutionary dynamics. This burgeoning literature has produced important insights and methodological innovations. However, this rapid growth has sometimes led to confusion and controversy due to an under-examination of underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions. The time is thus ripe for a critical assessment of progress in the study of the cultural reproduction of lithic technology. Here we review recent work addressing the evolutionary origins of human culture and the meaning of artifact variation at both intrasite and intersite levels. We propose that further progress will require a more extended and context-specific evolutionary approach to address the complexity of real-world cultural reproduction.     

Gender, Body, Biomedicine: How Some Feminist Concerns Dragged Reproduction to the Center of Social Theory

This article tracks the growth of medical anthropology in the United States in the decades since the 1970s, as it has intersected the expansion of feminist activism and scholarship. I argue that feminist attention to embodied inequalities quickly focused on reproduction as a site of investigation and intervention. Medical anthropology has benefited from feminist concern with stratified reproduction, especially its interrogation of nonnormative and stigmatized fertility and childbearing. When reproduction becomes problematic, it provides a lens through which cultural norms, struggles, and transformations can be viewed. Examples drawn from prenatal diagnosis are particularly revelatory of the diverse interests and stakes we all hold in reproduction.     

The Orphanista Manifesto: Orphan Films and the Politics of Reproduction

In this essay, I review the works of filmmakers Bill Morrison and Gregorio Rocha and contextualize their work within a growing apocalyptic cultural movement of film preservationists who identify as "orphanistas." As orphanistas they struggle to reshape and reproduce cultural memory and heritage through reviving "orphans"—films abandoned by their makers. Moving images mimic cognitive memory, yet, depending on reproductive technologies, copies of moving images may organize mass publics and influence cultural imaginaries. Traditionally considered conservative, preservation in the midst of destruction is not only a creative but also an avant-garde act of breathing new life into storytelling and the reproduction of cultural memory. In this essay, I discuss how the surrealist works of Morrison and Rocha radically confront dominant cultural imaginings of race and nation, and I argue that film preservation has the potential of being socially transformative. An interview with Gregorio Rocha follows.     

Cloning cultures: the social injustices of sameness

Cloning is widely considered only to be a biological discourse. Few, however, have paid attention to the cultural contexts that have made cloning conceivable. The relation between the biological and cultural considerations of cloning are revealed by the anxieties conjured up by the prospects of cloning human beings. By cloning we understand the reproduction of sameness which is deeply ingrained in the organization and reproduction of culture. The ease with which cloning has been taken up in contemporary thinking has been made possible by the widespread saturation of the normative assumption of socio-cultural sameness underpinning much of mainstream modern thinking around politics, law, education, management, aesthetics, the military and processes of production. We consider the cultural considerations regarding the reproduction of sameness and the implications of cloning for issues of social injustice.     

The multiplier effect: how the accumulation of cultural and social capital explains steep upward social mobility of children of low-educated immigrants

ABSTRACT

We introduce what we have coined the multiplier effect. We explain the steep upward mobility of children of low-educated immigrants by studying how they overcome obstacles on their regular pathway, via alternative routes or through loopholes in the education and labour market system. The idea of the multiplier effect is that they virtually propel themselves forward in their careers. Essential is that each successful step forward offers new possibilities on which they build, thereby accumulating cultural and social capital and multiplying their chances of success. Initial small differences with their less successful co-ethnic peers generate an increasingly wider gap over time. Cultural and social capital theories primarily explain the reproduction of inequalities in society. The multiplier effect explains the breaking of the perpetual cycle of this reproduction, enabling steep upward mobility even when this group does not initially possess the right cultural and social capital to be successful.     

Female reproductive competition within families in rural Gambia

Many studies show that the extended human family can be helpful in raising offspring, with maternal grandmothers, in particular, improving offspring survival. However, less attention has been given to competition between female kin and co-residents. It has been argued that reproductive conflict between generations explains the evolution of menopause in cooperatively breeding species where females disperse, and that older females are related to the offspring of younger females through their sons, whereas younger, incoming females are unrelated to older females. This means the pattern of help will be asymmetric, so older females lose in reproductive conflict and become 'sterile helpers'. Here, we seek evidence for female reproductive competition using longitudinal demographic data from a rural Gambian population, and examine when women are helping or harming each other's reproductive success. We find that older women benefit and younger women suffer costs of reproductive competition with women in their compound. But the opposite is found for mothers and daughters; if mother and daughter's reproductive spans overlap, the older woman reduces her reproduction if the younger woman (daughter) reproduces, whereas daughters' fertility is unaffected by their mothers' reproduction. Married daughters are not generally co-resident with their mothers, so we find not only competition effects with co-resident females, but also with daughters who have dispersed. Dispersal varies across human societies, but our results suggest reproductive conflict could be influencing reproductive scheduling whatever the dispersal pattern. A cultural norm of late male marriage reduces paternal grandmother/daughter-in-law reproductive overlap almost to zero in this population. We argue that cultural norms surrounding residence and marriage are themselves cultural adaptations to reduce reproductive conflict between generations in human families.     

The language of "Circule": discursive construction of false referral in Iranian teaching hospitals

This article explores the practice of false patient out-referral by medical students in Iranian teaching hospital emergency departments. Drawing on participant-observations and interviews during eight months in six hospitals in Tehran, we investigate how discourse is appropriated to construct and legitimate out-referrals through four general strategies of sympathy, mystification, intimidation, and procrastination. Based on a critical approach to false out-referral discourse, we revisit the medical and educational functioning of teaching hospitals in Iran: Focusing on medical students involved in false out-referrals, their discursive reproduction of deception is examined along with their legitimate challenges to institutional structures. Moreover, focusing on the institution of hospital, institutional corruption is discussed along with the problematic of covert cultural defiance faced by a modernist organizational construct in a nonmainstream cultural context. Finally, we argue that the discourse of false out-referral calls for more profound public awareness in dealing with health institutions.     

A review: Dietary restrictions on hunter-gatherer women and the implications for fertility and infant mortality

The relatively low reproductive rates of huntergatherer populations have been attributed to high natural mortality, low fertility, and cultural practices such as infanticide and sexual abstention. While we currently lack the data necessary to determine the relative effects of each of these factors on reproduction in any huntergatherer population, an analysis of the relations between cultural practices and reproduction at a more general level can set the stage for further research in huntergatherer societies. This paper reviews and discusses the current literature on specific links between female nutritional health, fertility, and infant mortality. It begins with a consideration of food taboos, one potential source of huntergatherer female nutritional stress. In particular, it is argued that the timing of food taboos on females in many huntergatherer societies often coincides with critical periods in women's reproductive careers. Next, the paper explores the interrelationships between female nutritional health and fertility and infant mortality, using data from modern huntergatherer and agricultural populations. Finally, because data adequate to test specific relationships between patterns of food restrictions and reproduction are not yet available, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of the data necessary for testing these relationships in huntergatherer populations.     

Hindu nationalism in the US: changing configurations of political practice

The meaning and implications of Hindu nationalist expression in the United States are different from those at home, but both are linked through transnational circuits of communication and exchange. In India, the invocation of religion summons up the unresolved debates between nationalism and social reform, and presents Hinduism as an implicitly conservative force. By contrast, in the US, Hindu religion is more self-consciously a medium of cultural reproduction. This article points to the ways in which Hindu nationalism seeks and promotes transnational affiliations even while espousing a rhetoric of insularity, cultural pride and self-sufficiency.     

Reasons to be fussy about cultural evolution

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich’s models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points of concern for our critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions.     

外来树种生态经济综合评价指标体系

日益多样化的树木引种迫切要求对外来树种的生态、经济和文化等多种价值进行综合评价,而建立科学的评价指标体系则是实现这一目标的关键。本文采用4层结构设计,从外来种的适应性、繁殖扩散、危害、观赏和经济价值等方面确定了综合评价的各项指标,并建立了一个多层次外来树种的生态经济综合评价指标体系,采用专家咨询的方法确定各级评价指标的权重,将综合评价结果划分等级且提出相关管理措施和栽培建议,并对北京市城区及其周边地区引种栽培的14种主要外来树种进行了综合评价与分级。结果表明:绒毛白蜡(Fraxinus velutina)、美国白蜡(Faxinus americana)、刺槐(Robinia pseudoacacia)、火炬树(Rhus typhina)等外来树种较适合在城市园林绿化栽培模式和生态林栽培模式中使用;绒毛白蜡(Fraxinus velutina)、欧美杨(Populus×euramericana)、铅笔柏(Juniperus virginiana)、薄壳山核桃(Carya illinoensis)等外来树种更适合在自然保护栽培模式中使用。     

Rethinking Indigenous Place: Igorot Identity and Locality in the Philippines

Spanish and American colonisers ascribed the identity ‘Igorot’ to the peoples of the northern Philippine mountains, positioning them in the ‘tribal slot’, somewhere between ordinary peasants and ‘backward’ primitives. From this marginal position, contemporary Igorot communities have been comparatively successful in formalising their entitlements to land and resources in their dealings with the Philippine State. This success depends on a discourse tying indigenous or ‘tribal’ culture to particular places. Colonial and, now, local anthropology has been recruited to this process through the mapping of community boundaries. This has allowed groups to secure official status as ‘cultural communities' and gain legal recognition of their ancestral domains. Ironically, even as ancestral domains are recognised, the municipalities that hold such domains have ceased to be bounded containers for Igorot localities, if they ever were. Participation in global indigenous networks, circular migration, and ongoing relations with emigrants overseas blur the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of Igorot communities. Transnational flows of people, information, and value are recruited to support the essentialised versions of indigenous identity necessary for negotiations with the state. Here, I show how the specific history of the Igorot ‘tribal slot’ enables communities to perform essentialised indigeneity and simultaneously enact highly translocal modes of cultural reproduction.     

Culture and the evolution of obesity

Human predispositions to fatness and obesity are best understood in the context of cultural and biological evolution. Both genes and cultural traits that were adaptive in the context of past food scarcities play a role today in the etiology of maladaptive adult obesity. The etiology of obesity must account for the social distribution of the condition with regard to gender, ethnicity, social class, and economic modernization. This distribution, which has changed throughout history, undoubtedly involves cultural factors. A model of culture is presented that has advantages over an undifferentiated concept of the “environment” for hypothesis generation. Cultural predispositions to obesity are found in the productive economy, the mode of reproduction, social structure, and cultural beliefs about food and ideal body size. Cross-cultural comparison can contribute to an understanding of the prevalence of obesity in some modern affluent societies.     

Field and cultural observations on the growth and reproduction of Polysiphonia denudata from Texas

The life history of an isolate of Polysiphonia denudata (Dillw.) Kütz. from Texas is shown by means of cultural studies to be of the Polysiphonia-type (a sequence of gametophytic, carposporophytic and tetrasporophytic phases in which the former and latter are morphologically similar). The effects of light intensity and temperature on the isolate have been investigated by a cross-gradient culture apparatus; a series of incubators was used to investigate the effects of variations in daylength on the growth and reproduction of the species. Seasonal observations were conducted on growth and reproduction of the species in nature and an attempt is made to explain the observed distribution of the species on the basis of the cultural study.     

Conceiving Reproduction: New Reproductive Technologies and the Redefinition of the Kinship Narrative in New Zealand Society

This paper focuses on technologies for assisting conception and considers how normative notions of conception and family formation have informed the rejection, incorporation and adaptation of technologies and their regulation in New Zealand. Drawing on a textual analysis of primary written materials and secondary sources generated between 1965 and 2004, the paper reveals how these technologies help various groups in New Zealand society make explicit their understandings of relatedness, identity and social and cultural belonging. Whilst biological/genetic connection and social connections inform understandings of kinship, reproduction, parenthood and social structure for many New Zealanders, the boundaries between the biological and social are often blurred and precedence of one over the other is very much context dependent. The incorporation of the new reproductive technologies has been an inherently politicised process, with barriers to access to these technologies emerging in relation to ethnic identity and race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, gender, and marital status.     

Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?

Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race]     

Language choices in the teaching of human reproduction

The choice of which language strategies to use in schools in Africa is the subject of much debate. In the Life Sciences, cultural issues associated with the use of biological terminology add to this debate. In our study, we examined the language choices made by Grade 7 Natural Sciences teachers in South Africa during their teaching of human reproduction. A mixed method approach was employed, involving firstly a survey questionnaire amongst 40 teachers in urban schools followed by a multiple case study of 10 of these teachers. Data were collected during classroom observations by means of field notes and audio-recordings followed by interviews which were transcribed and coded. We found that teachers used a variety of language strategies including use of home languages, English or code switching. The teacher’s and/or learners’ fluency in English and the teacher’s perception of the need for learners to feel at ease when discussing human reproduction influenced their choices. In addition, teachers’ belief in the importance of using biological terminology rather than traditional metaphors in order to create a more formal and thus respectful discourse, led them to use the English version of the biological terms. We argue that different language choices are appropriate for different urban contexts, and that teachers should use the language/s in which learners are most comfortable in order to enable deep and rich discussions on the sensitive subject of human reproduction.     

Genetic demography of the amazonian Ticuna Indians

The Ticuna Indians of Brazil are now a largely acculturated and integrated tribe, situated for the most part in villages along the Solimões river. Demographic information collected in eight of their villages is reported here. For five of them detailed data concerning migration, fertility and mortality were obtained. They are characterized by a relatively large mobility, high fertility (mean number of livebirths per female of age 40 or more: seven), low (2·5%) frequency of sterile couples, and relatively low mortality for groups living at this cultural stage (25% of deaths before the age of reproduction). This low mortality, and a relatively small variance in the number of live-born children in completed families, lead to the lowest index of opportunity for selection obtained thus far in populations of South American Indians (0·54).