Current Table of Contents

• The Archaeology of Childhood
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Linguistic Diversity in the Caucasus
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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, 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 ...
• Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• A Historical Appraisal of Clicks: A Linguistic and Genetic Population Perspective
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Detecting the Genetic Signature of Natural Selection in Human Populations: Models, Methods, and Data
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Reproduction and Inheritance: Goody Revisited
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Reproduction and Preservation of Linguistic Knowledge: Linguistics' Response to Language Endangerment
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• The Human Brain Evolving: A Personal Retrospective
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Demographic Transitions and Modernity
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Alternative Kinship, Marriage, and Reproduction
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• From Resilience to Resistance: Political Ecological Lessons from Antibiotic and Pesticide Resistance
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Evolution in Archaeology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 Effects of Kin on Primate Life Histories
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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, 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 ...
• Sexuality Studies in Archaeology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Linguistic Anthropology of Education
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 ...
• Rethinking Emergent Complexity in Andean Prehistory
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37 is September 16, 2008. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
• Post-Post Transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, 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 going through drastic transformations following the collapse of socialism in 1990 and the consequent ...
• Anthropology and Creationism
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37 is September 16, 2008. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
• Adoption of the Unrelated Child: Some Challenges to the Anthropological Study of Kinship
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Adoption of children born by others is practiced in some form or other in all known societies. Although there are numerous brief references to local adoption and/or fostering practices in ethnographic monographs from all over the world, very little ...
• The Archaeological Evidence for Social Evolution
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Social evolution is the appearance of new forms of social or sociopolitical organization, without necessarily implying changes in overall culture or ethnicity. Evolution is most successfully studied when ethnologists or ethnohistorians collaborate with ...
• Identity and Difference in the Middle East and North Africa
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37 is September 16, 2008. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
• Evolution and Environmental Change in Primates
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37, October 2008. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 37 is September 16, 2008. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
• Preface: Interdisciplinarity and the Tornillo Tree
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, 21 October 2007.
• Overview: Sixty Years in Anthropology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 1-16, 21 October 2007. My main efforts in anthropology have sought to unite ethnographic and theoretical work by using empirical findings as provocations to critique received theory and raise unasked questions. I have used generative modeling to identify the empirical processes ...
• The Archaeology of Religious Ritual
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 55-71, 21 October 2007. Archaeologists traditionally assumed that rituals were understood best in light of religious doctrines, beliefs, and myths. Given the material focus of archaeology, archaeologists believed that ritual was a particularly unsuitable area for archaeological ...
• Çatalhöyük in the Context of the Middle Eastern Neolithic
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 105-120, 21 October 2007. This review aims to show how the new results from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey contribute to wider theories about the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East. I argue that many of the themes found in symbolism and daily practice at Çatalhöyük occur very ...
• The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 211-228, 21 October 2007. This review explores recent research within the territory of the modern Sudan and Nubia. One special interest of this region's history and archaeology lies in its role as a zone of interaction between diverse cultural traditions linking sub-Saharan Africa,...
• A Bicycle Made for Two? The Integration of Scientific Techniques into Archaeological Interpretation
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 245-259, 21 October 2007. Much of the literature on the integration of science and archaeology has tended to focus on mistakes, tensions, and problems. Many scholars have also been obsessed with definitions and delineating the boundaries between varieties of archaeologist. In this ...
• Evolutionary Medicine
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 139-154, 21 October 2007. Biological anthropologists have been contributing to what is now referred to as evolutionary medicine for more than a half century, although the phrase itself began to be widely used only in the early 1990s. Three topics in which anthropological ...
• Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 191-209, 21 October 2007. The genome consists of the entire DNA present in the nucleus of the fertilized embryo, which is then duplicated in every cell in the body. A draft sequence of the chimpanzee genome is now available, providing opportunities to better understand genetic ...
• Geometric Morphometrics
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 261-281, 21 October 2007. Morphometrics, the field of biological shape analysis, has undergone major change in recent years. Most of this change has been due to the development and adoption of methods to analyze the Cartesian coordinates of anatomical landmarks. These geometric ...
• Genetic Basis of Physical Fitness
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 391-405, 21 October 2007. Environmental stimuli interact with common genetic variants to determine individual characteristics including physical performance: ∼80% of variation in arm eccentric flexor strength and grip strength may be genetically determined. However, many physical ...
• Sociophonetics
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 89-103, 21 October 2007. Investigators have recently made impressive progress in multiple areas of sociophonetics. One area is the use of increasingly sophisticated phonetic analysis, which is demonstrating that very fine phonetic detail is used for the construction of social ...
• Comparative Studies in Conversation Analysis
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 229-244, 21 October 2007. Conversation analysis initially drew its empirical materials from recordings of English conversation. However, over the past 20 years conversation analysts have begun to examine talk-in-interaction in an increasingly broad range of languages and ...
• Semiotic Anthropology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 337-353, 21 October 2007. From the 1970s through the present, semiotic anthropology has grown in importance but also has shifted its emphasis, in the process helping to push forward a more general change in the subfields of linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. This article ...
• Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 17-35, 21 October 2007. This review examines anthropological research on sexuality published in English since 1993, focusing on work addressing lesbian women, gay men, and transgendered persons, as well as on the use of history, linguistics, and geography in such research. ...
• Gender and Technology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 37-53, 21 October 2007. The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of ...
• The Anthropology of Organized Labor in the United States
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 73-88, 21 October 2007. Anthropological research has produced a number of robust findings about organized labor. National and state policies are the chief determinates of unions' power to organize workers for concerted action to redress the imbalance between those who provide ...
• Embattled Ranchers, Endangered Species, and Urban Sprawl: The Political Ecology of the New American West
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 121-138, 21 October 2007. The modern American West is one of the most contested landscapes in the world, yet anthropologists are just beginning to grapple with its dynamic political ecology. Since World War II, the West has been transformed from an overwhelmingly rural landscape ...
• Anthropology and Militarism
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 155-175, 21 October 2007. Anthropologists’ selections of topics and field sites have often been shaped by militarism, but they have been slow to make militarism, especially American militarism, an object of study. In the high Cold War years concerns about human survival were ...
• The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 177-190, 21 October 2007. Debate around the ecologically noble savage represents two markedly different research threads. The first addresses the issue of conservation among native peoples and narrowly focuses on case studies of resource use of ethnographic, archaeological, or ...
• The Genetic Reinscription of Race
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 283-300, 21 October 2007. Critics have debated for the past decade or more whether race is dead or alive in “the new genetics”: Is genomics opening up novel terrains for social identities or is it reauthorizing race? I explore the relationship between race and the new genetics by ...
• Community Forestry in Theory and Practice: Where Are We Now?*
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 301-336, 21 October 2007. Community forestry refers to forest management that has ecological sustainability and local community benefits as central goals, with some degree of responsibility and authority for forest management formally vested in the community. This review provides ...
• Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology
  Annual Review of Anthropology Volume 36, Page 355-389, 21 October 2007. This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign ...