Place In Anthropology Research Articles

A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge*

Social anthropology is used to terrains shifting under its feet. Things observed from afar suddenly become near, and the knowledge economy is an example. This article considers the place of anthropology as a discipline in a world where creativity becomes an adjunct of productivity, interdisciplinary collaborations become a paradigm for innovation, and everyone is valued for their expertise. How to lead a critical life emerges as a new kind of problem.

Возвращая антропологов в славистику

SUMMARY: Katherine Verdery, the first anthropologist to serve as the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, in her presidential address given on November 5, 2005, at the 37 th AAASS National Convention, offered her vision of the place of anthropology in the study of east central Europe and the former USSR. She pointed out the constantly increasing involvement of anthropologists in area studies of the region. She connected this trend with the 1960s decolonization movements against European empires, which pushed anthropologists out of the Third World and into the Second. The wave of decolonization in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet empire intensified that trend. However, western socio-cultural anthropology has become an object of emulation for scholars in the former Soviet realm, because anthropology – she insists – is not tainted (as it was before) by any prior association with the colonial center or compromises with the Party. Because it had never been an arm of the ideological apparatus, it came to symbolize democracy and the search for objective truth. Therefore anthropologists are best positioned to speak about the post-Cold War transition. Verdery calls upon anthropologists to combine forces with political scientists, historians, and literary studies specialists of the region to create theories and interpretations so innovative that scholars in their respective home disciplines and specialists in other world areas could not ignore them. She predicts that a reinvigorated area-based interdisciplinarity will give shape to the reconfigured activity of creating knowledge in the twenty-first century.

Space, Place and Speech: The Expressive Topography

Place is currently under-theorized in First Amendment jurisprudence. When it has been independently considered at all, place has been conceptualized as nothing more than an inert backdrop for expressive scenes. For more than sixty years, place has been treated as property, a public resource, like air or water, that the government controls. There are many and sustained critiques of the constitutional doctrine of place. But there has been no effort to fundamentally and systematically reconsider place itself. Building upon a forthcoming TEXAS LAW REVIEW article, entitled Speech and Spatial Tactics, this Article fashions a new perspective on place. Drawing upon the work of scholars of place in human geography, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy, the Article sets forth a conception of place that it calls Expressive Place. In contrast to current treatments of place as secondary, inert, given, and binary, Expressive Place is primary to expression, dynamic, constructed, and variable. The Article utilizes the concept of Expressive Place to re-plot the expressive topography, the sum of public space potentially available for expressive activity. The revised topography consists of at least six spatial types that substantially affect First Amendment rights - Embodied, Contested, Inscribed, Tactical, Cyber, and Non-places. The Article offers several prescriptive suggestions in light of this ambitious re-conceptualization of place. A new method by which courts can read place is proposed, as are several specific alterations of the manner in which courts review spatial regulations under the time, place, and manner doctrine.

Herder: culture, anthropology and the Enlightenment

The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder’s anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. But a comparison with a central Enlightenment figure like the natural historian Buffon (1708-88) reveals shared anthropological assumptions: human beings are characterized by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Herder’s critique of progress is thus an unstable one: culture [ Kultur] as the process through which humanity develops can also be called Enlightenment [ Aufklärung]. Herder’s definition of culture is much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilization than is frequently suggested. Herder’s relativism is thus open to question: he holds on to certain universal criteria for transcultural judgements. This reassessment of Herder’s place in Enlightenment anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernization and globalization on the other.

Locating the field: Metaphors of space, place and context in anthropology

ASA Conference, Grey College, Durham, 29 March‐1 April 2004

COMMENTARY: The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism

COMMENTARY: The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism

The place of anthropology in the philosophy of education

The study tries to define the anthropology of dialogue as a specific way of thinking on human being; it grounds mainly in Tzvetan Todorov's findings. It comments basic theses of Buber, Levinas, Bachtin, Habermas and Todorov while underlining their mutual interpretability as well as similarity. Because of possible significance of this anthropological conception for professional teacher training, it recommends to reserve some space for the anthropology of dialogue in the area of the philosophy of education thus enabling it to come out of the shadow of more influential anthropological conceptions.

Location or dis-location? Towards a conceptualization of people and place in the care-giving experience

Over the last two decades we have seen an increased interest in informal care within both political and academic communities in the UK. This has stemmed in large part from an increased emphasis on the home-space as the preferred site of care provision and a resultant increase in the complexity of the care-giving relationship. The explicitly spatial dimensions of this caring relationship, however, are vastly under-researched. This paper represents one attempt to redress the gap by examining the importance of place, and its conceptualization, in the care of frail older people. In doing so, the paper focuses, firstly, on the spatial manifestation of care at various scales, identifying some of the processes behind variations in the care-giving experience and, secondly, using the example of dementia care, it considers how Auge´'s concepts of anthropological place and non-space, when applied to domestic and institutional care settings, can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the importance of people and place in the construction and delivery of care to frail older people.

On Shifting Ground: Changing Formulations of Place in Anthropology

This article explores the ways in which anthropologists have formulated ‘place’. In recent years, place and its companion concept ‘home’ have become themes conceived in terms of fluidity, unboundedness and multiplicity. These formulations are most apparent in that body of literature concerned with people who move between geographical and cultural worlds. The nature of recent conceptions I argue, is a necessary adaptation if anthropologists are to capture meaning in a world of increasing transnational flux.

Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the concept of place in anthropology, geography, and political ecology. “Place” — or, more accurately, the defense of constructions of place — has also become an important object of struggle in the strategies of social movements. This paper is situated at the intersection of conversations in the disciplines about globalization and place, on the one hand, and conversation in social movements about place and political strategy, on the other. By arguing against a certain globalocentrism in the disciplines that tends to effect an erasure of place, the paper suggests ways in which the defense of place by social movements might be constituted as a rallying point for both theory construction and political action. The paper proposes that place-based struggles might be seen as multi-scale, network-oriented subaltern strategies of localization. The argument is illustrated with the case of the social movement of black communities of the Pacific rainforest region of Colombia. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology

Culture/Power/Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. AKHIL GUPTA and JAMES FERGUSON, eds. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 361 pp. In our relentless search for theoretical guidance in understanding culture, the central conceptual cornerstone of our discipline, cultural anthropologists have long looked to other analytic realms and disciplines for insight. By counterpoising to ecology, personality, history, or now, power and we have tried to not only define the nebulous contours of what is by exploring what it is not, but sought, more importantly, to understand how is produced, reproduced, and transformed. As part of this pursuit, contemporary anthropologists have turned first to history (think, for example, of the important volume Culture/power/ history edited by Nicholas Dirks, Sherry Ortner, and Geoff Eley), and more recently to geography for assistance. The widespread appeal of geography's conceptual apparatus is revealed in the plethora of spatial metaphors -- landscapes, spaces, places, maps, displacement, global, local, to name just a few - in recent titles in anthropology. Culture/power/place is a landmark contribution to this current theoretical trajectory in cultural anthropology. The anthology reprints, in revised versions, the ground-breaking theoretical essays (by Lisa Malkki, John Borneman, James Ferguson, Lisa Rofel, Akhil Gupta, and Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson) which first appeared in a 1992 special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology dedicated to the theme of space and place in anthropology. Since their initial publication these essays, especially those by Malkki, Gupta, and Gupta and Ferguson, have become pivotal to current rethinkings of the relationship between and nation, territoriality, identity, difference, transnational processes, and power. The additional seven essays in the volume (some of which, like Kristin Koptiuch's, are also reprinted versions of published articles) complement, enhance, and complicate the themes raised in these earlier essays (all of the pieces were originally presented at three panels for the American Anthropological Association annual meetings). The volume therefore has a theoretical coherence and depth rarely found in edited collections, for which the editors, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, should be commended. Two themes organize the format and contributions of the volume: issues of and space, and the relationship of and power. As Gupta and Ferguson argue in their introduction and in their article, ideas of place have always been implicit in cultural theory. The terms may be the territorially circumscribed, symbolically bounded notions of cultures and areas in earlier anthropology (and the assumed isomorphism of space, place, and culture) or those of current interests in the and local. Making these assumptions explicit enables anthropologists to go beyond culture in order to analyze the relationship between and place, particularly in the spatialized production of identity and difference. In other words, as John Durham Peters suggests in his provocative tour through fact and fiction, anthropologists must learn to see bifocally, that is to read the local and global simultaneously in our ethnographic studies. Authors of the remaining essays in the first section use detailed ethnographic studies to explore and expand aspects of this argument. Several papers problematize the concept of nation and nationalism in cultural theory. Lisa Malkki explores how ideas about nations and nationalism inform anthropological studies and theories of and identity, in part through her comparative study of two settlements of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. In an evocative complement to Malkki's analysis, John Borneman investigates the shifting, ambivalent meanings of Heimat (home, homeland) in relation to the structuring and restructuring of state, nation, and territory in post World War II Germany. …

The intimate arctic: An early anthropologist's diary in the strict sense of the term

A lively debate has taken place in anthropology in recent years on field‐work and its representation in ethnographic accounts. At the same time, historians and cultural critics have dissected the ideology and rhetoric of early explorations. Here I examine the writings of the anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefans‐son (1879–1962) in the light of current debates about textual representation, drawing upon recent discussions of ethnography, gender, and the power relations of early twentieth‐century explorations. Stefansson went on lengthy expeditions into the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic and wrote extensively on his encounters with indigenous groups, I argue that while Stefansson was a perceptive ethnographer and explorer, he was silent in both his publications and his diaries about important aspects pertaining to his fieldwork, in particular the ethnographic contributions of his Inuit companions and his intimate relations with a native woman named Pannigabluk. This silence, I suggest, contradicts the narrative trope Stefansson generally adopted, summed up in his concept of the friendly Arctic’

Anthropology and Ethnicity: From Herder to Hermeneutics

For a long time, the central focus of anthropology has been on the study of the so-called traditional societies. However, with the transformation of those societies into “ethnicized” groups within state systems, anthropologists have had to rethink their concepts, theories, and methods. They have had to deal with, among others things, issues of cultural difference, cultural boundaries, and cultural movements. This article looks retrospectively at certain changes that have taken place in anthropology especially with regard to the study of ethnicity.

Human adaptation to high altitude: regional and life-cycle perspectives.

Studies of the ways in which persons respond to the adaptive challenges of life at high altitude have occupied an important place in anthropology. There are three major regions of the world where high-altitude studies have recently been performed: the Himalayas of Asia, the Andes of South America, and the Rocky Mountains of North America. Of these, the Himalayan region is larger, more geographically remote, and likely to have been occupied by humans for a longer period of time and to have been subject to less admixture or constriction of its gene pool. Recent studies of the physiological responses to hypoxia across the life cycle in these groups reveal several differences in adaptive success. Compared with acclimatized newcomers, lifelong residents of the Andes and/or Himalayas have less intrauterine growth retardation, better neonatal oxygenation, and more complete neonatal cardiopulmonary transition, enlarged lung volumes, decreased alveolar-arterial oxygen diffusion gradients, and higher maximal exercise capacity. In addition, Tibetans demonstrate a more sustained increase in cerebral blood flow during exercise, lower hemoglobin concentration, and less susceptibility to chronic mountain sickness (CMS) than acclimatized newcomers. Compared to Andean or Rocky Mountain high-altitude residents, Tibetans demonstrate less intrauterine growth retardation, greater reliance on redistribution of blood flow than elevated arterial oxygen content to increase uteroplacental oxygen delivery during pregnancy, higher levels of resting ventilation and hypoxic ventilatory responsiveness, less hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction, lower hemoglobin concentration, and less susceptibility to CMS. Several of the distinctions demonstrated by Tibetans parallel the differences between natives and newcomers, suggesting that the degree of protection or adaptive benefit relative to newcomers is enhanced for the Tibetans. We thus conclude that Tibetans have several physiological distinctions that confer adaptive benefit consistent with their probable greater generational length of high-altitude residence. Future progress is anticipated in achieving a more integrated view of high-altitude adaptation, incorporating a sophisticated understanding of the ways in which levels of biological organization are articulated and a recognition of the specific genetic variants contributing to differences among high-altitude groups.

Continuity, Collapse or Metamorphosis? Demographic anthropology and the study of change within human populations.Foreword

this first paper introduces the topic of the volume, outcomes of a symposium organised at the 13th ICAES held in Mexico in August 1993. It briefly reminds of the convergence between anthropology and demography up to date and stresses on the need of real transdisciplinary work in this challenging domain. The aim of the symposium was to make a contribution on the central theme chosen by the congress — the cultural and biological dimensions of global change — while examining the place of demographic anthropology in the study of change. The papers presented at the symposium have been organised in three parts which form the present volume: the composition of population, the choice of spouse and mobility, the reproduction and dynamics of populations. The basic mechanisms of change are considered through examples at the level of local populations. This also leads to question the definitions of human groups and to make a “declaration” stressing on the importance of individual heterogeneity and the arbitrariness and reductive nature of any grouping of individuals, stating therefore the misapprehension of the most recent scientific work inherent to the rationale of programs of “ethnic cleasing”.

Introduction: Fracturing Boundaries of Time and Place in Melanesian Anthropology

The notion of knowledge as discourse contrived, political and constitutive of realities can destabilise disciplinary definition, consensus and authority. It denaturalised historians' comfortable certainties about the ontological reality of the past, the transparency of primary sources and the objectivity of their own enterprise (Barthes 1970; White 1978, 1987). It exposed anthropology to obloquy as an intellectual arm of Western colonialism and neocolonialism and condemned its practitioners to ponder the vertiginous prospects of a discipline at once embedded in history and no longer able to avoid the imperative to do history.1 It also helped transform the margins between the disciplines from despised badlands inhabited by weirdo misfits and renegades into a liberating and exhilarating liminal zone, Victor Turner's 'fructile chaos, a storehouse of possibilities, not a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures' (1986:42). I have long trodden those once lonely spaces, and now enjoy being a trendy rather than a loony. For all this synergy, the disciplines of History and Anthropology are not dead, pessimistic postmodern homogenisation/fragmentation and Cultural Studies notwithstanding; nor ought they to be, so long as 'discipline' means control of self rather than others, and leaves space to explore and celebrate various ways of looking at and doing things. Generally speaking, historians and anthropologists have different temporal foci, dramatised in anthropologists' experiential anchorage in the compelling fieldwork present: grubbing away in archives is present enough and has its attractions, but it's scarcely ethnographic in the sense of direct encounters with real people. The tyranny of outcomes,2 the urge to reinvent the past as cause of a later present, teleologically designated as effect, and to telescope backwards in time later outcomes perceived as inevitable, may be a widespread human propensity and is intrinsic to all Whig varieties of history;3 it must be particularly poignant and seductive for an historically-minded ethnographer, determined to resist the discipline's fading impulse to essentialise the primitive as timeless exotics, yet steeped in the emotions and immediacy of present indigenous constructions of the past (their histories, partial, like all histories) and of an ethnographic present which it is her or his purpose to explain. Ethnographic historians seek the best of both disciplinary worlds: to subvert the tyranny of outcomes by directing their gaze to contemporary textual traces of past actions, and to construe those

The Northwest Coast: Complex Hunter-Gatherers, Ecology, and Social Evolution

Northwest Coast cultures have long held a central place in anthropology. Recently, the coast has become important in two major topics of theoretical interest: 1. the existence and socioeconomic evolution of complex hunter-gatherers (74) and 2. the origins and evolution of permanent forms of social inequality (3). The coast’s culture history also has intrinsic value to its native and non-native peoples. This review focuses on recent developments in the coast’s archaeology relevant to theories and questions about its culture history and the evolution of social complexity among hunter-gatherers.

Objectivism, Relativism and the Importance of Rhetoric for Marxist Economics

The revolution in social thought which has taken place in anthropology, sociology, history, literature and even law has been squelched in economics by both neoclassicals and Marxists. It is the purpose of this essay to show that aspects of contemporary poststructuralist and feminist theory are considerably more compatible with Marxian and neo-Marxian theory than with neoclassical thought. More important, we argue that these poststructuralist and feminist approaches, and especially their implicit theory of the relation between the individual and society, can significantly enhance Marxian economic analysis of the production process and consumer behavior by creating a richer theory of individual behavior and by expanding the Marxian conception of institutions and thus of accumulation and reproduction.

The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch.

The most prolific ethnographic filmmaker in the world, a pioneer of cine ma ve rite and one of the earliest ethnographers of African societies, Jean Rouch (1917-) remains a controversial and often misunderstood figure in histories of anthropology and film. By examining Rouch's neglected ethnographic writings, Paul Stoller seeks to clarify the filmmaker's true place in anthropology. A brief account of Rouch's background, revealing the ethnographic foundations and intellectual assumptions underlying his fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger in the 1940s and 1950s, sets the stage for his emergence as a cinematic griot, a peripatetic bard who recites the story of a people through provocative imagery. Against this backdrop, Stoller considers Rouch's writings on Songhay history, myth, magic and possession, migration, and social change. By analyzing in depth some of Rouch's most important films and assessing Rouch's ethnography in terms of his own expertise in Songhay culture, Stoller demonstrates the inner connection between these two modes of representation. Stoller, who has done more fieldwork among the Songhay than anyone other than Rouch himself, here gives the first full account of Rouch the griot, whose own story scintillates with important implications for anthropology, ethnography, African studies, and film.

Regional Studies in Anthropology: A Melanesian Prospectus

Previous articleNext article No AccessReportsRegional Studies in Anthropology: A Melanesian ProspectusJohn TerrellJohn Terrell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 34, Number 2Apr., 1993 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/204157 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:John Edward Terrell, Kevin O. Pope, James R. Goff Chapter 3: Context and Relevance, Fieldiana Anthropology 42 (May 2011): 21–28.https://doi.org/10.3158/0071-4739-42.1.21John Edward Terrell Human biogeography: evidence of our place in nature, Journal of Biogeography 33, no.1212 (Dec 2006): 2088–2098.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01581.xRichard Eves The play of powers made visible: magic and dance in New Ireland, Ethnos 69, no.33 (Sep 2004): 341–362.https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184042000260026John Edward Terrell, Pamela J. Stewart The paradox of human population genetics at the end of the twentieth century, Reviews in Anthropology 25, no.11 (Jun 1996): 13–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/00988157.1996.9978138Bronwen Douglas Introduction: Fracturing Boundaries of Time and Place in Melanesian Anthropology, Oceania 66, no.33 (Feb 2015): 177–188.https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1834-4461.1996.tb02550.x