Anthropological Work Research Articles

Main directions in the study of infants’ growth at Moscow school of anthropology: а review based on the articles published in «Moscow University Anthropology Bulletin (MUAB)» for the last 15 years

Introduction. The present study is of a complex nature and is devoted to the assessment of the main directions of the development of auxology in Russian anthropology. To a large extent, this work is a continuation of the review of the activities of the laboratory of auxology of the Anuchin Research Institute and the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow State University [Godina, 2010]. At the same time, the main directions of work are considered and described in more detail not only directly by the auxology laboratory, but also by other working groups of the same Institute, the Department of Anthropology of the Faculty of Biology of Lomonosov Moscow State University, as well as other academic institutions. Materials and methods. Specifically, in this part of the work, articles devoted to the comprehensive assessment of the processes of growth and development of children from birth to 3 years old, which were published in the «Moscow University Anthropology Bulletin» from 2009 to 2022, were used as a source of information. Results and discussion. The studies conducted in this area affect a large number of aspects of physical development in infancy and early childhood – for example, factors influencing these processes (evolutionary, climatic, geographical, ethnic and genetic factors, constitutional features of mothers, circumstances of intrauterine growth) are analyzed on representative samples. Special attention should be paid to the work on the evaluation in comparative and secular aspects of growth processes and indicators of sexual dimorphism of children under 3 years of age in the countries of the former USSR. Conclusion. Despite the difficulties in working with a rather specific contingent, the fact that these works, together with the results obtained, lead us to conclude that this stage of ontogenesis is represented to a large extent in the works of domestic anthropologists, which allows us to use these data both in the field of interdisciplinary and interdepartmental research.

Health for all? Pasts, presents and futures of aspirations for universal healthcare.

In this special issue, we bring together anthropological and historical work that considers successive aspirations towards 'health for all': their pasts, their futures, and their diverse meanings and iterations. Across the world, hopes for providing 'health for all' were central to nation building in the long 20th century, and for international relations, particularly after the second world war and the establishment of the WHO. Health became seen as a fundamental good by citizens of North and South and has remained a central force shaping global and national politics until today. But what does 'health for all' actually mean, and how did it come to matter? In this introduction we approach 'health for all as a situated, multi-faceted phenomenon, that - while having a shared aspiration towards universality of access and equality of care - comes into focus in partial, diverse and contentious policies, programmes, projects and practices. Beyond homogenising narratives that frame 'health for all' in terms of either success or failure, the special issue highlights the diverse iterations that 'health for all' has taken on the ground for different subjects and groups of people, exploring exclusions and limitations as well as dreams and aspirations.

Kubi-Nage Hobbes: An Ecocritique

This paper uses Thomas Hobbes’ argument for Commonwealth and the existence of the Leviathan as a foil within an immanent critique rejecting the notion of “the state’' presenting an escape from “the state of nature’' as Hobbes characterized it. It does so through a negative dialectic arguing that both conceptually and materially “civilization” needs “the wild,” or “the wilderness” to justify its everyday existence but, instead, rethreads wildness and wilderness through the production of lifeforms necessary for its continued expansion. I motivatie this Lukean ecocritique of Hobbes through Benton MacKaye’s philosophy of regional planning drawing from work in anthropology, sociology, geography, critical animal studies, and environmental studies to argue that “civilization” not only transcends the nation-state but is constituted as material fact through the manifestation of wildness within its environs. The Leviathan co-authors environment but has the power to unleash wildness on a planetary scale – creating localized states of nature, and cannot help but do so. I argue that as the Leviathan attempts to rid itself of wildness, it simply creates “wilderness” elsewhere in its material being through its material needs. This displacement is coupled with a critique recognizing that through Hobbes’ logic, those living within “states of nature,” or civilizational wildernesses have no reason to bind themselves to the Leviathan as it is the Leviathan that threatens their lives by displacing wildness through the rule of artifice. We may, after this examination, conclude that the Leviathan does not end the “State of Nature” but in fact extends and energizes it through manifesting multiple “states of nature” where life may be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Journalists in media companies: Proposals for an anthropology of their work

The crisis triggered by the effects of Covid-19 has created a new context for work among journalists. High unemployment rates in Europe, particularly worrying among the youth, are yet another reason to think about working conditions in the media sector, which has been considered crucial to the health of democratic societies. The practice of communication professions has privileged activity, production, and fast publication, which now takes place in multiple media, mobile and social platforms. According to different research, distrust in media content seems to be growing. Is there a relationship between these two problems? Are there ways in line with the anthropology of work that could help to regain trust? The academic literature has studied the crisis of trust in institutions and has also explored the work of journalists. However, there are not many studies that bridge the structural crisis of trust in the media and the working conditions of professionals. This article seeks to contribute to alleviating this gap. It proposes three possible lines of argument to develop the anthropological keys to the work of journalists: a recovery of time, making research the working method; a primacy of audiences; and a need to stress the personal growth of professionals.

Elemental Humanity in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

In this essay I read Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text’s nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko’s departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into a new lifeworld in the village of Golema Mmidi, I argue that his familiarization with the material grounds of life in a new clime provides an elemental coherence that enables the structuring of his personal narrative into a meaningful system. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that the novel’s expression of a composite ecological being is also reflected in the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Head’s writing. Throughout, I draw on Head’s correspondence, and on biographical aspects of her life, to situate Makhaya’s journey against a larger theme of struggling to make a home in the face of social alienation and the bureaucratic indifference of the nation-state. Reference to the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Hannah Knox situates my argument in the context of a larger ontological move in debates around the relationship between nature and culture.

The Open Society and Its Complexities

<i>The Open Society and Its Complexities</i>

CPI da Funai e do Incra - reflexões entre Antropologia e agronegócio

Abstract Between 2015 and 2017, a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI) took place in the Câmara dos Deputados (Brazil’s lower house) of the Brazilian National Congress, which investigated the formerly named National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) in their attributions of demarcating lands, Indigenous and Quilombola lands, respectively. This PCI was established by the Ruralista caucus, a group that represents the interests of agribusiness inside Congress. One of the focuses of the PCI was to discuss the role of anthropology in the demarcation processes of Indigenous and Quilombola lands, questioning not only the work of anthropologists, but the field of knowledge itself. Through an ethnography of documents (shorthand notes of the meetings and reports presented) and by direct observation, the research that culminated in this article sought to reflect on the anthropological practice related to public policies for the redistribution of land to Indigenous peoples and Quilombola communities and their friction with agribusiness interests. The centrality of the agrarian agenda and the model of territorial development defended by agribusiness clashes with public policies for the democratisation of access to land. The FUNAI-INCRA PCI reveals yet another articulated attempt by agribusiness to establish new benchmarks for these public policies, through the Ruralista caucus, and for this reason anthropology was included in the debate.

Death and suicide in ethnographic field: The case of Buell H. Quain

The immediate reason for writing this article is the novel Nine Nights by the Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho, and the subject is the thematization of anthropological thanatography and suicidology on the example of writing about the death of the forgotten anthropologist Buell Quain among the Brazilian Indians. The story of his anthropological work and suicide, once a taboo topic in the discipline, forms an integral part of a significant, but lesser-known episode in the history of American and Brazilian anthropology in the first half of the 20th century. The literary work in question is treated as one of the heuristic sources for the reconstruction of Quaine?s biography and ethnography and the anthropological-historical analysis of the case, and not as an analytical subject in itself. The anthropological understanding and interpretation of the ethnographer?s suicide in the field includes a number of interrelated subjective and objective factors: the idiosyncratic life history, the very nature and conditions of ethnographic research, the actual condition of the studied Indian communities, and the political climate in Brazil on the eve of World War II.

La antropología forense como antropología aplicada frente a la violencia social : una reflexión en torno al trabajo y la práctica interdisciplinar

This article reflects on the organization, possibilities, and practical requirements for the development of interdisciplinary work under the new contexts of intervention of forensic anthropology. As an applied anthropology, reflection on the social contexts in which forensic anthropology is practiced is of particular importance. The reciprocal influences of science and society, which cross the forms and practical uses of anthropology, acquire multiple dimensions and considerations in the case of forensic anthropology and its fields of activity. These influences have a clear projection and social impact in judicial processes, in the clarification of criminal investigations or contributing to the defense of human rights in contexts of conflict and political violence. An analysis and review of the scientific practices and techniques of forensic anthropology is presented in relation to all these considerations. It is argued that the obvious applied function of this discipline should not lead to mistaking the social commitment to provide reliable data and evidence in its contribution to legal work with ideological positions or specific political interests, which may bias or compromise the rigor of its scientific work. Such considerations on epistemological and ethical issues in the practice of forensic anthropology are particularly relevant when studying and intervening in contexts of political violence and civil conflicts, which are surrounded by strong ideological and political debates. The review of the role of the forensic anthropologist in these contexts highlights the need for an attitude of epistemological vigilance and reflexivity with respect to his or her practices (and the contexts of these). Positions of neutrality and objectivity must therefore be guaranteed in anthropological work, and these must be based on an attitude of vigilance, self-criticism, and reflection, of particular importance in relation to socially sensitive issues and with problematic extensions in the field of ideas and politics.

Medicina, lélekfilozófia, kutatástörténet

This essay focuses on interrelations among alternative aspects of medical knowledge and historically concerns the theoretical background of philosophical and anthropological works of the 18th and 19th centuries based on the Renaissance philosophy of humanity. The author determines the interpretive points of view in medicine and shows the development of relevant changes in social, historical and medical narratives in the modern ages. The first approach of criticism provides already a particular position in the oeuvre of Galeotto Marzio (Astrology, medical practice and physiognomic knowledge) a humanist researcher, which presents him as a philosopher of nature. The other interpretation of this historical timeline is the relation of Michel Foucault’s philosophical understanding of specific categories of power and sexuality in his works concerning the social sciences and historical criticism. This essay review focused on the popular and alternative thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries while endeavoured to present the historical traditions and methods of the relevant body of knowledge based on alternative receipts and principles of medical and mechanical analogies of human interrelations. This point of view focused on some collective interpretations of the New Age historical presentation of some characteristics of the knowledge history and on the interpretation of messages targeting the present generation by means of critical methodology.

THE LOGIC OF RELIGIOUS RITUAL: THE PATHOS OF FAITH OR THE TRIUMPH OF MAGISM

The article examines the phenomenon of ritual, understood as an independent phenomenon that goes beyond the scope of religious culture. Referring to the works of religious studies, anthropology and psychology, the main features of ritual are identified, allowing to talk about ritual as a peculiar form of archetypal consciousness. Particular attention is focused on religious discourse, for it is here that the nature of ritual in its most varied forms emerges most clearly. It is established that ritual practices in the religious and psychological spheres have a common cause – the symbolic function of protection from the outside world by means of certain actions, verbal formulas, and ceremonials. The idea is postulated that ritual as a magical action is opposed to conscious faith; ritual dependence is opposed to religious freedom. It is emphasized that “inside” the developed religious systems the concept of ritual is used more often in a negative sense. The theoretical basis is mainly represented by the works of V. Terner, K. Jung, B. Malinowski, and M. Eliade. The methodology of the work includes phenomenological, textual, conceptual and comparative analysis. The data of the study can be used in philosophical and theological analysis of the phenomenon of ritual. The practical value of the study lies in the possibility of including the results of the study in the classes of philosophy, religious studies, psychology and theology.

Natural selection of immune and metabolic genes associated with health in two lowland Bolivian populations

A growing body of work has addressed human adaptations to diverse environments using genomic data, but few studies have connected putatively selected alleles to phenotypes, much less among underrepresented populations such as Amerindians. Studies of natural selection and genotype-phenotype relationships in underrepresented populations hold potential to uncover previously undescribed loci underlying evolutionarily and biomedically relevant traits. Here, we worked with the Tsimane and the Moseten, two Amerindian populations inhabiting the Bolivian lowlands. We focused most intensively on the Tsimane, because long-term anthropological work with this group has shown that they have a high burden of both macro and microparasites, as well as minimal cardiometabolic disease or dementia. We therefore generated genome-wide genotype data for Tsimane individuals to study natural selection, and paired this with blood mRNA-seq as well as cardiometabolic and immune biomarker data generated from a larger sample that included both populations. In the Tsimane, we identified 21 regions that are candidates for selective sweeps, as well as 5 immune traits that show evidence for polygenic selection (e.g., C-reactive proteinlevels and the response to coronaviruses). Genes overlapping candidate regions were strongly enriched for known involvement in immune-related traits, such as abundance of lymphocytes and eosinophils. Importantly, we were also able to draw on extensive phenotype information for the Tsimane and Moseten and link five regions (containing PSD4, MUC21 and MUC22, TOX2, ANXA6, and ABCA1) with biomarkers of immune and metabolic function. Together, our work highlights the utility of pairing evolutionary analyses with anthropological and biomedical data to gain insight into the genetic basis of health-related traits.

Curating the Widerstandsaviso: three cases of ethnographic intravention in R&D consortia

ABSTRACT Aligning technological innovation with societal needs is a key concern for knowledge economies. Integrating ethical, legal, and social inquiry into research and development consortia that drive innovation processes has thus become common practice. Ethnographic research in consortia is one such practice. Here, these cover three cases of open ethnographic engagement within R&D consortia in the field of medical and rehabilitation technology. Rather than executing a preconfigured plan, these ethnographic intraventions explored emerging frictions that arose from observant participation within the fast science of dominant workflows in technological R&D. Curating these emerging frictions within the consortia produced what Ludwig Fleck called ‘Widerstandsavisos’, or signals of resistance. Widerstandsavisos disrupt dominant workflows by introducing methodological openness, fostering critical reflection on sampling approaches, placing the focus on actual practices, and engaging in anthropological concept work. The curation of Widerstandsavisos fosters reflexive awareness among members of consortia and opens a space for mutual learning: to produce new knowledge, alter problem framings, and reshape devices. Advancing ongoing discussions on midstream modulation, situated interventions and multimodal anthropology, such ethnographic intraventions present a different means of generating the capacity to address societal needs as well as responsibilities and relevance from within such consortia rather than as strategic interventions from the outside. Intraventions are, however, a risky practice as they produce ethnographic excess that is not easily controlled or directed within the bounds of R&D consortia. This uncertainty is a form of creativity that should be encouraged.

The Spell of Place in Carpentaria

The following paper allows us to study the links between place and Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime or Dreaming. Such an approach foregrounds the need to re-envision our world as in permanent co-presence of human and other-than-human, and thus the necessity to reassess and ultimately refuse monological nationalist foundation narratives and replace them with more inclusive ones to reflect more fully what sustainable relationships in nature and society at large really consist in.Carpentaria offers a very original revisiting of the Gothic spectral motifs of disappearance and disorientation so prevalent in non-Indigenous Australian literature – replacing them instead with an acceptance of being haunted and “possessed”. Possession in Carpentaria is about being revitalised by place, as the work of anthropologists, poets and thinkers like Glowcewski, Glissant or Abram (The Spell of The Sensuous), have amply demonstrated. In Wright’s novel, the notion of possession and being possessed by the river country takes on a unique urgency, thus foregrounding the importance of stories, “stories of deep knowledge”, not only for themselves, but precisely because such law stories can have a major and lasting impact on ideological, economic and social choices but also point to new or, to be more accurate, rediscovered epistemologies.

Tacit and embedded as forms: A tropological approach to neoliberalism

What might we learn by considering the social and literary forms that makeup neoliberalism, and their relationship to the figurations of anthropological thought and writing? Inspired by tropological work in literary criticism and anthropology, this article considers how two terms introduced into the analytic literature by Karl and Michael Polanyi—embeddedness and tacit knowledge respectively—can give us new insights into important aspects of neoliberal practice. In considering the interrelation of these tropes, we can begin to parse out the relationship among several key aspects of the practice of neoliberalism: marketization, audit culture, and quantification; and how these are intertwined in their opposition to embeddedness and tacit knowledge. This article considers what different forms afford for analytic thinking about our present moment, as well as for formulating various protests and oppositions to neoliberalism.

Irish Whiteness and the Nineteenth-Century Construction of Race

Much Victorian Irish studies has followed the Americanist Noel Ignatiev's famous claim that the Irish “became white” upon migration to the United States, whereas they had not been in the context of the United Kingdom. This article argues, in contrast, that an emphasis on the undeniable racialization of Irish poverty and politics can distract us from an important truth: nineteenth-century Irish people, in Britain and Ireland as well as in the United States, were broadly understood as white, and “Celticness” was not in any serious or widespread way treated as equivalent to Blackness, although that did not stop some nineteenth-century Irish advocates from drawing that misleading analogy. Drawing upon cultural and anthropological work of the mid-nineteenth century, from Robert Knox, Thomas Carlyle, and John Mitchel to Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, and the caricaturists ofPunchto Frederick Douglass, this article proposes that the implication that nineteenth-century Irishness was cognate to Blackness—or the Irish experience a version of the Black experience—represents the epistemological and ethical error that Frank B. Wilderson III has called “the ruse of analogy” that we must interrogate more critically lest we, in Wilderson's formulation, enact a “mystification, and often erasure, of Blackness's grammar of suffering.”

The quest for Jewish anthropology in Germany post-1945

ABSTRACT While some of the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology were part of the transregional Jewish and non-Jewish German speaking community, Jewish anthropology, and anthropology by or on Jews in German-speaking countries, was seriously impacted by the Shoah. Some sources in the area of historical anthropology engage with Jews, who were anthropologists, and who were murdered or who fled, others focus on the appropriation of Jewish cultural heritage and zoom in on discourses about Jews. Living Jews are oftentimes covered in dissertations, after which the nascent ethnologist/anthropologist vanishes from academia, or leaves the country: research on living Jews seems an unsustainable career move. This paper is a first attempt to sketch out the developments of Jewish anthropology – in the broadest sense – in Germany post-1945. It will pay due attention to structures, societal, social, and academic; the place of anthropology within these structures; and Jews, as an ethno-religious group being researched by anthropologists (and other ethnographers); and the anthropologists/ethnographers who research them. By paying close attention to the anthropologists and ethnographers themselves, it is possible to “map the margins” (Crenshaw 1991) of anthropological and ethnographic work in an emotionalized, ideologized, and politicized field, a field that is indicative of post-genocidal intergroup relations in situ.

Antropologinė karo analizė: mikrolygmens perspektyva etnografijoje

The Anthropological Analysis of War: The Micro-Level Perspective in Ethnography The article aims to analyse the micro-level perspective in ethnography, highlighting the main features of the anthropological analysis of war. The focus of this article is the discourses that the Polish-English anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski applied in the general discipline of anthropology and in micro-level war studies. The article reveals that war is a complex process, inseparable from the daily lives of societies. This is reflected in the theoretical and practical work of anthropologists, who develop academic knowledge and apply anthropology for political purposes. Finally, the micro-level perspective is an example of interdisciplinary thinking that combines anthropological, sociological and historical approaches. Key words: anthropology, ethnography, individual, micro level, war.

Crossing Lines: Stylistic gradients in Chinese electroacoustic music

In this article, I discuss the case of Chinese electroacoustic music with a focus on contemporary music, Asian instruments and mixed music. I pay particular attention to mixed music, without however limiting myself to it, also dealing with contemporary Western-style instrumental music. Several authors have discussed the question of the relationship between contemporary creation and certain stylistic factors of Asian cultures. They questioned what might constitute identifiable traits unique to Asia that could be observed in contemporary creations and they sought to determine whether systems of relationships can be established. Some, such as Chou Wen-Chung (周文中 Zhou Wenzhong), emphasised syncretism, thus establishing a link with the works of anthropology and cultural studies. In his 1971 article, ‘Asian Concepts and Twentieth-Century Western Composers’, Chou cites many examples that tend to emphasise notions of integration and syncretism across various stylistic gradients found in many composers, mostly Western. More recently, musicologist Yayoi Uno Everett described distinct categories in these relationships, on the part of both Asian and Western composers. This article attempts to find which cultural gradients can be observed in the electroacoustic music production of Chinese composers. For instance, the specific case of mixed music creates an unprecedented situation of contact between instrument and sound material in the context of renewed intercultural relations.

Weather Magic as Environmental Knowledge in Southern Vanuatu

This paper presents weather magic practices from the islands of Tanna and Aneityum, in southern Vanuatu, and highlights how this phenomenon is a critical domain of Indigenous environmental knowledge, particularly knowledge involving plants. Recent literature suggests that diverse cultural systems, such as music, can be viewed as domains of environmental knowledge, and we propose that magical systems should be afforded the same recognition. Although anthropological work in Melanesia has historically featured various magical practices, relatively little has been said about how these have been used to influence or understand the weather, and even less has been presented directly by Indigenous weather magic practitioners, who are co-authors on this paper. In this contribution, we intersperse anthropological and ethnobotanical commentary with verbatim narratives provided by three local experts in weather magic from southern Vanuatu, including oral histories, contemporary narratives, and the results of ethnobotanical surveys. The detailed knowledge that weather magic practitioners on these islands hold regarding their local environment represents an important means of transmitting not only cultural heritage, but also botanical knowledge, the maintenance of which may be critical for current and future conservation efforts. This research documents rich cultural traditions of local and global significance which are worthy of the attention and preservation afforded to other forms of Indigenous environmental knowledge. The goals of magic and those of science are not necessarily inherently opposed, and we show that magical practice can indeed involve and even preserve a detailed and powerful mode of knowing the environment.