Closer Holiday Service – Most cited AAA Anthropology Articles Available
It’s almost holiday here and what is better than to read a good article from an anthropological journal (except swimming, riding and/or walking in the mountains or doing nothing at all)? Current Anthropology is ranked as the second most-cited journal in anthropology. I cannot find #1, what is that? Why not show who the ‘winner’ is as well? Anyway, because the AAA journals do so well, they decided to give people free access to the most cited articles of their different journals, for one one month. Here’s the overview with the links you need:
Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time. JANE I. GUYER. 2008; American Ethnologist – Wiley InterScience
Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time
JANE I. GUYER 1
1 Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Macaulay Hall 111, Baltimore, MD 21218 jiguyer@jhu.edu
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
time • macroeconomics • evangelism • events • future
ABSTRACTA view from 1950s and 1960s Britain suggests that the public culture of temporality in the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon. This temporal perspective is most marked in the public rhetoric of macroeconomics, but it also corresponds in remarkable ways to evangelicals’ views of time. In this article, I trace the optionality and consonance of this shift toward the relative evacuation of the near future in religion and economics by examining different theoretical positions within each domain. In conclusion, I suggest that the near future is being reinhabited by forms of punctuated time, such as the dated schedules of debt and other specific event-driven temporal frames.
Race, Ethnicity, and Racism in Medical Anthropology, 1977–2002
Clarence C. Gravlee 1 Elizabeth Sweet 2
1 Department of Anthropology University of Florida
2 Department of Anthropology Northwestern University
Copyright © 2008 American Anthropological Association
KEYWORDS
Race • ethnicity • racism • health disparities • systematic review
ABSTRACTResearchers across the health sciences are engaged in a vigorous debate over the role that the concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” play in health research and clinical practice. Here we contribute to that debate by examining how the concepts of race, ethnicity, and racism are used in medical–anthropological research. We present a content analysis of Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, based on a systematic random sample of empirical research articles (n =283) published in these journals from 1977 to 2002. We identify both differences and similarities in the use of race, ethnicity, and racism concepts in medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, and we offer recommendations for ways that medical anthropologists can contribute to the broader debate over racial and ethnic inequalities in health.
Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability. Jerome Bruner. 2008; Ethos – Wiley InterScience
Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability
Jerome Bruner 1
1 School of Law, New York University
Copyright © 2008 American Anthropological Association
ABSTRACTAbstract I reflect here on the historical junctures where anthropology and psychology cross paths, creating foundations for a general cultural psychology in the present.1 I am particularly attuned to those points of intersection that inform understanding of mind in culture and culture in mind. I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, each of which entails intersections of mind and culture. Recent encounters with U.S. legal culture provide a ground for illustrating these intertwining relations of subjects and their cultural milieux. [culture, mind, law, institutions, selectivity]
Navigating Contradictory Communities of Practice in Learning to Teach for Social Justice
Maria Timmons Flores 1
1 Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
social justice • practice theory • new teachers • teacher socialization • teacher education
ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore the contradictions that four new teachers experienced as their commitments to social justice collide with urban school culture. Framed within Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s (1999) theory of situated learning and development concepts of identity, practice, and relationships illustrate how teachers’ ideals are challenged as socializing features of two communities of practice—the universities and schools—intersect in new teachers’ development. This research contributes empirical evidence of the application of critical multicultural teacher preparation into practice, a cultural representation of how educational inequities are reproduced or disrupted in the situated contexts of urban schools, an application of Lave and Wenger’s theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation that incorporates formal and informal education across multiple activity settings, and a call for collaborative communities of practice that support teachers’ situated learning in creating transformative practices.
Critical Social Learning: A Solution to Rogers’s Paradox of Nonadaptive Culture
MAGNUS ENQUIST 1 KIMMO ERIKSSON 2 STEFANO GHIRLANDA 3
1 Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691 2 Department of Mathematics and Physics, Mälardalen University, 721 23 Västerås, Sweden, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691 3 Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy, and Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 11691
Copyright 2007 American Anthropological Association.
KEYWORDS
social learning • origin of culture • culture • biology • mathematical modeling
ABSTRACTAlan Rogers (1988) presented a game theory model of the evolution of social learning, yielding the paradoxical conclusion that social learning does not increase the fitness of a population. We expand on this model, allowing for imperfections in individual and social learning as well as incorporating a “critical social learning” strategy that tries to solve an adaptive problem first by social learning, and then by individual learning if socially acquired behavior proves unsatisfactory. This strategy always proves superior to pure social learning and typically has higher fitness than pure individual learning, providing a solution to Rogers’s paradox of nonadaptive culture. Critical social learning is an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) unless cultural transmission is highly unfaithful, the environment is highly variable, or social learning is much more costly than individual learning. We compare the model to empirical data on social learning and on spatial variation in primate cultures and list three requirements for adaptive culture.
ROSE-COLORED GLASSES? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia
PAUL MANNING 1
1 Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
Copyright 2007 by the American Anthropological Association
KEYWORDS
political oratory • images • postsocialism • revolution
ABSTRACTThe Georgian “Rose Revolution” of 2003 was preceded by events in November 2001, in which students protested against a government raid on a popular TV station, Rustavi 2, and forced then-President Shevardnadze to request the resignation of the Georgian cabinet as the students demanded. This article describes these events in detail to show how political transition in Georgia has been carried out and exemplified by new political rhetorics and metarhetoric that expressly confronted entrenched logics of reception. The article illustrates how shifts in state formation, in postsocialist contexts in particular, are tied to shifts in representational modes.
