Current Table of Contents

• Preface: Keep Evolving!
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 21 October 2008.
• Special Themes in This Volume
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 21 October 2008.
• The Human Brain Evolving: A Personal Retrospective
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 1-19, 21 October 2008. Minor controversies notwithstanding, the evolution of the human brain has been an intermingled composite of allometric and nonallometric increases of brain volume and reorganizational events such as the reduction of primary visual cortex and a relative ...
• Evolution in Archaeology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 75-91, 21 October 2008. This review begins with a brief outline of the key concepts of Darwinian archaeology. Its history is then summarized, beginning with its emergence as a significant theoretical focus within the discipline in the early 1980s; its main present-day currents ...
• The Archaeology of Childhood
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 159-175, 21 October 2008. The archaeology of childhood has grown over the past decade and a half as a vibrant field of specialized interest within archaeology as a whole. A thematic treatment of the literature highlights a variety of approaches to how and why archaeologists should ...
• The Archaeological Evidence for Social Evolution
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 251-266, 21 October 2008. Social evolution can be defined as the appearance of new forms of social or sociopolitical organization. In the case of the prehistoric record, such changes are perhaps most successfully studied when archaeologists collaborate with ethnologists or ...
• Sexuality Studies in Archaeology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 317-336, 21 October 2008. Does sexuality have a past? A growing body of archaeological research on sexuality demonstrates that the sexual politics of the past were as richly varied and complex as those of the present. Furthermore, investigations of past sexualities have much to ...
• The Effects of Kin on Primate Life Histories
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 21-36, 21 October 2008. Advances in our understanding of primate life histories and dispersal patterns provide insights into the ways in which facultative responses to local ecological and demographic conditions are mediated by phylogenetic constraints. The long life spans ...
• Evolutionary Models of Women's Reproductive Functioning
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 53-73, 21 October 2008. Life history theory posits that natural selection leads to the evolution of mechanisms that tend to allocate resources to the competing demands of growth, reproduction, and survival such that fitness is locally maximized. (That is, among alternative ...
• Detecting the Genetic Signature of Natural Selection in Human Populations: Models, Methods, and Data
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 197-217, 21 October 2008. Patterns of DNA sequence variation in the genome contain a record of past selective events. The ability to collect increasingly large data sets of polymorphisms has allowed investigators to perform hypothesis-driven studies of candidate genes as well as ...
• Linguistic Anthropology of Education
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 37-51, 21 October 2008. Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to ...
• A Historical Appraisal of Clicks: A Linguistic and Genetic Population Perspective
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 93-109, 21 October 2008. Clicks are often considered an exotic feature of languages, and the fact that certain African “Khoisan” groups share the use of clicks as consonants and exhibit deep genetic divergences has been argued to indicate that clicks trace back to an early common ...
• Linguistic Diversity in the Caucasus
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 131-143, 21 October 2008. The Caucasus is characterized by a relatively high level of linguistic diversity, whether measured in terms of number of languages, number of language families, or structural properties. This is in stark contrast to low levels of linguistic diversity in ...
• Evolutionary Linguistics
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 219-234, 21 October 2008. Both qualitative concepts and quantitative methods from evolutionary biology have been applied to linguistics. Many linguists have noted the similarity between biological evolution and language change, but usually have employed only selective analogies or ...
• Reproduction and Preservation of Linguistic Knowledge: Linguistics’ Response to Language Endangerment
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 337-350, 21 October 2008. In responding to the globally accelerating rate at which linguistic varieties are disappearing, structural linguistics is confronted with a number of challenges for which it is ill-equipped because of limitations in its basic conceptualization of ...
• Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 111-130, 21 October 2008. Recent work in biology, cognitive psychology, and archaeology has renewed evolutionary perspectives on the role of natural selection in the emergence and recurrent forms of religious thought and behavior, i.e., mental representations of supernatural ...
• Reproduction and Inheritance: Goody Revisited
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 145-158, 21 October 2008. According to Jack Goody, in a body of work that dates back to the 1950s, differences in the mode of inheritance between Eurasia and sub-Saharan Africa have multiple connections to domestic groups, kin terminology, politics and stratification, and above ...
• Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 177-196, 21 October 2008. In 1978, the world's first “test-tube” baby was born via in vitro fertilization (IVF). The past 30 years have seen the rapid evolution of many other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs)—some are simple variants of IVF, whereas others bridge the ...
• Post-Post-Transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 235-250, 21 October 2008. This article reviews recent ethnographic works on the former Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, and Mongolia that explore the experiences of people enduring drastic transformations following the collapse of socialism in 1990 and the consequent ...
• From Resilience to Resistance: Political Ecological Lessons from Antibiotic and Pesticide Resistance
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 267-282, 21 October 2008. This article investigates the interplay of natural and human systems with reference to the growing global problem of antibiotic resistance. Among the diverse causes of antibiotic resistance, we focus broadly on three related causes: pharmaceutical ...
• Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 283-299, 21 October 2008. This review examines the interlocking of violence, gender, and subjectivity within the overarching framework of the sexualization of the social contract. Tracking the question of gendered belonging to the nation state, the article discusses the ...
• Demographic Transitions and Modernity
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 301-315, 21 October 2008. Much contemporary anthropology is concerned with the origin, character, and consequences of late modernity. Surprisingly absent in this literature is the importance of population size, structure, and process. In particular, the demographic transition—or ...
• The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 351-373, 21 October 2008. The ambiguity of the concept of crime is evident in the two strands of anthropological research covered in this review. One strand, the anthropology of criminalization, explores how state authorities, media, and citizen discourse define particular groups ...
• Alternative Kinship, Marriage, and Reproduction
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, Page 375-389, 21 October 2008. This review examines the implications of new kinship practices for anthropological theory, with a special focus on recent research in gay and lesbian kinship and assisted reproduction. The article begins with an account of the theoretical contexts in ...