Rethinking Power and Culture in Anthropology

Who Can Compete against the World? Power-Protection and Buddhism in Shan Woridview. Nicola Tannenbaum. Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies, 1995.228 pp.
State Power and Culture in Thailand. E. Paul Durrenberger. ed. Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph, 44. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. 200 pp.     

The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power

The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. Carole M. Counihan. New York: Routledge, 1999.256 pp.     

Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power

Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. Cris Shore and Susan Wright. eds. New York: Routledge, 1997. 294 pp.     

The Future of Anthropology

The future of anthropology depends on what it contributes, both to thought and to society. Whether it survives, flourishes, or becomes extinct depends on anthropology's ability to become an intregal and significant, yet not subservient, part of our culture and society. To flourish, we must press outward; we must mobilize our work and ourselves to make a difference beyond the discipline and the academy. This objective implies change in our priorities and hence in our work.     

The Death and Rebirth of Anthropology

This paper is a study of one component of the recent and contemporary circulation of cultural objects, the exhibition of Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings in a French museum. The author argues that the recent emphases on ‘appropriation ‘ and the primitivizing gaze ‘ are not sufficient to understand what happens when such objects circulate. To ask what does happen in circulation, at the sites of exhibition, is to ask how they are produced, inflected, and invoked in concrete institutional settings, which have distinctive histories, purposes, and structures of their own. The gazes’ (representations) which are discussed in this French example are analyzed within the specific conditions of their production to show how such exhibitions and circulations of culture are produced in relationship to the requirements internal to museums to distinguish themselves from others, to respond to claims placed upon them by their own institutional settings.     

The Anthropology of Welfare

The Anthropology of Welfare. Iain R. Edgar and Andrew Russell. eds. New York: Routledge, 1998. 268 pp.     

Distinguished Lecture in General Anthropology: The Anthropology of Trouble

This essay was presented as the Distinguished Lecture in General Anthropology at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, December 4, 1992, in San Francisco, California.     

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]     

The Geist of Modern Anthropology

Book reviewed in this article: John H. Zammito. Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology. Andrew Zimmerman. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany.     

The Misrepresentation of Anthropology and Its Consequences

Critiques of anthropology from within the discipline and from without have been a major feature of our intellectual life since the late 1960s. The theoretical and empirical bases of cultural and social anthropology have been under attack since the Marxist and New Left critiques of the 1960s to those coming more recently from poststructuralism, postmodernist and literary theory, and postcolonial and cultural studies. As a result, several academic generations have been educated by reading the attacks on the field but rarely dealing with the actual theoretical works and ethnographies of earlier anthropologists. This article deals with several of the most common charges leveled at anthropology, notably that it has regularly and necessarily exoticized "Others," has been ahistorical, and has treated each culture as if it were an isolate, unconnected to any other. It demonstrates how inaccurate and easily falsifiable such claims are and recommends a critical reevaluation of these unexamined and destructive cliches,