Anthropology Research Articles

Franz Tappeiner (1816-1902): The physician who became headhunter. Portrait of a leading figure in 19th Century anthropology.

Franz Tappeiner (1816, Laas - 1902, Merano) was an Austrian physician and anthropologist. He studied at the universities of Prague, Padua and Vienna and in 1846 he moved to Merano. Tappeiner investigated the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis in animal models and he dealt with public health. As an anatomist, he performed thousands of craniometrics measurements, creating a huge skull collection later donated to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. In 1878, Tappeiner turned to archeology and palaeoanthropology, with the aim of clarifying the origins of the Alpine population of Tyroleans. He was also active as a botanist.

Pre-Roman Libyan Religion

Since its inception, the study of Iron Age North African (“Libyan”) religion has been bound up with European ethnographic accounts of modern Berber practices and mentalities. Analyses are based around notions of “survival” and “permanence” observed in later (Roman, post-antique) material and retrojected as belonging to an earlier stage. This approach is itself drawn from 19th century anthropology, and remains current. To move the study of Iron Age cult forwards, we must pose new questions which recognise that religión is never an ahistorical mentality, but rather is entangled with dynamics of social power and lived experience.

History, rhetoric, and synthesis in 20th century anthropology and evolutionary biologyDarwinism, Democracy, and Race. American anthropology and evolutionary biology in the twentieth century.By John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew.Routledge. 2019. 252 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐367‐35858‐7. $39.95/$39.96/$128.00 (paperback/ebook/hardback).

History, rhetoric, and synthesis in 20th century anthropology and evolutionary biologyDarwinism, Democracy, and Race. American anthropology and evolutionary biology in the twentieth century.By John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew.Routledge. 2019. 252 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐367‐35858‐7. $39.95/$39.96/$128.00 (paperback/ebook/hardback).

Emergent Axioms of Violence: Toward an Anthropology of Post-Liberal Modernity

ABSTRACT This collection highlights the diverse and complicated ways that violence becomes axiomatic, namely through political rhetoric, epistemological impositions, and colonial legacies. Considering how axiomatic violence emerges from events of rupture as well as slow-moving structural inequalities, authors interrogate both the novelty and mundane quality of the current political moment. Approaching violence as axiomatic expands the conceptual lexicon for discussing how rhetorics, metaphors, and prescriptive assumptions can be inherently violent and become normalised, losing their event-like status. Through the routinisation of the extraordinary, truths become indisputable. Axioms combine neoteric and foundational violence to lend legitimacy to apparently incontestable categories of domination, disenfranchisement, and epistemological governance.

Bruno Latour's Mode(s) in Situations

Book Review| July 01 2021 Bruno Latour's Mode(s) in Situations L'appel des entités fragiles: Enquêter avec des modes d'existence de Bruno Latour, by Thoreau, François and D'Hoop, Ariane, Liège: Presse Universitaire de Liège, 2018, 186 pages, €15 (paperback), ISBN 9782875621542. Siavash Bakhtiar Siavash Bakhtiar Siavash Bakhtiar is a lecturer in French studies at the University of Westminster. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Cultural Politics (2021) 17 (2): 249–251. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947949 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Siavash Bakhtiar; Bruno Latour's Mode(s) in Situations. Cultural Politics 1 July 2021; 17 (2): 249–251. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947949 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCultural Politics Search Advanced Search With such an explicit title, the intention of L'appel des entités fragiles: Enquêter avec des modes d'existence de Bruno Latour is more than clear: referring to the conceptual toolbox developed in Latour's Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, the book aims to “listen to the call” of nonhuman entities to recognize them as important elements in the different “modes” in which modern human existence manifests itself. The term modes of existence, borrowed from Étienne Souriau (2015) and used by Latour as a framework for his own anthropology of modernity, upgrades the notion of “mediation” used in his previous works, which was too ambivalent and often mistaken for inferring that nonhuman entities are simple intermediaries that only convey a message without transforming, reshaping, and rebuilding the old situation into a new one. Latour's new terminology attempts to identify how seemingly universal “modes”—such as... Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Kin Against Kin: Internal Co-selection and the Coherence of Kinship Typologies

Across the world people in different societies structure their family relationships in many different ways. These relationships become encoded in their languages as kinship terminology, a word set that maps variably onto a vast genealogical grid of kinship categories, each of which could in principle vary independently. But the observed diversity of kinship terminology is considerably smaller than the enormous theoretical design space. For the past century anthropologists have captured this variation in typological schemes with only a small number of model system types. Whether those types exhibit the internal co-selection of parts implicit in their use is an outstanding question, as is the sufficiency of typologies in capturing variation as a whole. We interrogate the coherence of classic kinship typologies using modern statistical approaches and systematic data from a new database, Kinbank. We first survey the canonical types and their assumed patterns of internal and external co-selection, then present two data-driven approaches to assess internal coherence. Our first analysis reveals that across parents’ and ego’s (one’s own) generation, typology has limited predictive value: knowing the system in one generation does not reliably predict the other. Though we detect limited co-selection between generations, “disharmonic” systems are equally common. Second, we represent structural diversity with a novel multidimensional approach we term kinship space. This approach reveals, for ego’s generation, some broad patterning consistent with the canonical typology, but diversity (and mixed systems) is considerably higher than classical typologies suggest. Our results strongly challenge the descriptive adequacy of the set of canonical kinship types.

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic

The critique of ethnocentrism in retrospect

This article opens with a review of the origins of the term ‘ethnocentrism’ as the linchpin of modern anthropology despite the discipline's background in the colonial past. The author is stimulated by Step Stuurman's The invention of humanity: Equality and cultural difference in human history (2017) to ask to what extent the critique of ethnocentrism, which gradually gathered strength in the West, has had parallels in non‐Western civilizations. His conclusion is that the astonishing sophistication of a Persian and a Chinese polymath in studying cultures alien to their own does not seem, according to records available, to have influenced their respective civilizations in the same way that modern ‘anthropological intelligence’ (to borrow Gillian Tett's term) was extensively foreshadowed in Europe. Counter‐ethnocentrism as a principle has now become indispensable to all the social sciences that aspire to be cosmopolitan, though it still has to compete with the baleful legacy of scientific racism.

Images of Sakhalin in the research legacy of B.O. Pilsudsky (based on materials of the Far-Eastern archives)

In modern anthropology, researchers pay increasing attention to photographic data as a category of histori-cal/ethnographic documents. This article is based on visual and anthropological materials of Bronislaw Pilsudsky (1866–1918), a renowned researcher of Sakhalin ethnic groups, collected by the authors from the archives and museums in the Far East during the expedition in June — August 2019. The study is focused on Pilsudsky’s pho-tographic and manuscript collections on the thnography of the Nivkhs reposited in holdings of the Sakhalin Re-gional Museum (Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk) and the Society for Research on the Amur Region (Vladivostok). Many of these photographic documents, being unique evidence of the evolution of the material and spiritual culture of the indigenous people of Sakhalin at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, are introduced into the scientific discourse for the first time. The photographic materials are analyzed from the historical and anthropological perspectives, in conjunction with the published papers and archival manuscripts of the scientist (in particular, “Wants and needs of the Sakhalin Gilyaks”). Correlation of the textual and visual materials shows that B. Pilsudsky represented Sakhalin in a series of images: the island of native dwellers (traditional lifestyle of the Gilyaks) — the island of convicts (colonization of the territory, involuntary-settlement community) — the island of autonomies (cultural and economic zoning). In the course of his studies, B. Pilsudsky used concurrently textual description of the impressions and their photographic cap-ture. The key feature of the scientific work of B. Pilsudsky of this period was the absence of a “metric” perspective — he photographed his characters in their natural habitat, in their daily routine. The conclusion is drawn on the archive photo-graphs as multi-layered visual-anthropological documents on their time, which under a proper critical research perspec-tive constitute valuable historical sources of scientific interest for studies in a wide range of the humanities.