The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks

Abstract

The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks is the fifth Wenner-Gren Symposium to be published as an open-access supplement of Current Anthropology. The symposium was organized by M. Susan Lindee (University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) and Ricardo Ventura Santos (Museu Nacional & Fundacao Oswaldo Cruz, Brazil) and was held March 5–12, 2010, at the Hotel Rosa dos Ventos, Teresopolis, Brazil (fig. 1). There are interrelated and compelling reasons for WennerGren interest in this symposium. As Lindee and Santos emphasize in their introduction (Lindee and Santos 2012), modern biological anthropologists, and particularly human biologists, are generally embarrassed by the history of their discipline and rarely have an interest in delving into it. Rather, most see themselves as the scientific wing of anthropology, with little to learn from the past or from research less than a decade or so old, leaving the history to historians of science. Accompanying this lack of interest is an apparent absence of appreciation for the rich diversity in international biological anthropology and the development of these varied orientations and approaches. The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations is intended to provide an easily accessible resource to help remedy this situation. It builds on the prior success of World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), which grew out of a 2003 Wenner-Gren Symposium of the same name, looking at the interconnected global historical trajectories in aspects of social anthropology. Papers in the current supplementary issue are written by anthropologists, historians of science, and scholars of science studies and address the international development of the discipline as well as its contemporary condition and potential future development. Papers included in this collection cover the development