New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology (eBook)

Debra L. Martin, Molly K. Zuckerman (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2016
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-118-96294-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Biocultural or biosocial anthropology is a research approach that views biology and culture as dialectically and inextricably intertwined, explicitly emphasizing the dynamic interaction between humans and their larger social, cultural, and physical environments. The biocultural approach emerged in anthropology in the 1960s, matured in the 1980s, and is now one of the dominant paradigms in anthropology, particularly within biological anthropology. This volume gathers contributions from the top scholars in biocultural anthropology focusing on six of the most influential, productive, and important areas of research within biocultural anthropology. These are: critical and synthetic approaches within biocultural anthropology; biocultural approaches to identity, including  race  and racism; health, diet, and nutrition; infectious disease from antiquity to the modern era; epidemiologic transitions and population dynamics; and inequality and violence studies. Focusing on these six major areas of burgeoning research within biocultural anthropology makes the proposed volume timely, widely applicable and useful to scholars engaging in biocultural research and students interested in the biocultural approach, and synthetic in its coverage of contemporary scholarship in biocultural anthropology. Students will be able to grasp the history of the biocultural approach, and how that history continues to impact scholarship, as well as the scope of current research within the approach, and the foci of biocultural research into the future.  Importantly, contributions in the text follow a consistent format of a discussion of method and theory relative to a particular aspect of the above six topics, followed by a case study applying the surveyed method and theory. This structure will engage students by providing real world examples of anthropological issues, and demonstrating how biocultural method and theory can be used to elucidate and resolve them. 

Key features include:

• Contributions which span the breadth of approaches and topics within biological anthropology from the insights granted through work with ancient human remains to those granted through collaborative research with contemporary peoples.
• Comprehensive treatment of diverse topics within biocultural anthropology, from human variation and adaptability to recent disease pandemics, the embodied effects of race and racism, industrialization and the rise of allergy and autoimmune diseases, and the sociopolitics of slavery and torture. 
• Contributions and sections united by thematically cohesive threads.
• Clear, jargon-free language in a text that is designed to be pedagogically flexible: contributions are written to be both understandable and engaging to both undergraduate and graduate students. 
• Provision of synthetic theory, method and data in each contribution.
• The use of richly contextualized case studies driven by empirical data.
• Through case-study driven contributions, each chapter demonstrates how biocultural approaches can be used to better understand and resolve real-world problems and anthropological issues.

Molly K. Zuckerman is an Assistant  Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. The author of numerous peer-reviewed publications employing the biocultural approach, Dr Zuckerman also teaches graduate and undergraduate introductory courses in anthropology and biological anthropology, osteology, diet and nutrition, and human behavior and disease.
 
Debra L. Martin is the UNLV Barrick Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  Her expertise is in the biocultural approach as it can be applied to understanding poor health, inequality and violence.  She has published fo

Autor

Molly K. Zuckerman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. The author of numerous peer-reviewed publications employing the biocultural approach, Dr Zuckerman also teaches graduate and undergraduate introductory courses in anthropology and biological anthropology, osteology, diet and nutrition, and human behavior and disease. Debra L. Martin is the UNLV Barrick Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her expertise is in the biocultural approach as it can be applied to understanding poor health, inequality and violence. She has published four co-edited volumes, three co-authored volumes, and over 100 chapters and peer-reviewed articles on biocultural approaches in anthropology.

Textauszug

A biocultural tribute to a biocultural scholar: Professor George J. Armelagos, May 22, 1936–May 15, 2014

Debra L. Martin1 & Molly K. Zuckerman2

1Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

2Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, Mississippi State University

The case studies that comprise this volume all share one fundamental theme: the primary authors worked with George Armelagos on a variety of human behaviors and cultural strategies that have resulted in human suffering, in the past and the present. Most of the scholars in this volume obtained their doctoral degrees in anthropology under George, or worked closely and collaboratively with him on research projects, and so the tie that binds these chapters is one man's vision for how to utilize a particular approach to solving the core problems that humans face in their lives. The problems addressed by everyone working with George are fundamental and inclusive in scope. These include topics such as the evolution of diet, human nutrition, and health; the effects of racism on the health and well-being of generations of African Americans; the meaning and causes of violence; how inequality, poverty, and marginalization affect human biology and well-being, especially of women, children, and minorities – the most vulnerable members of a given society; the effects of economic change and development on human health and well-being, from agriculture to industrialization; how infectious diseases and the pathogens that cause them have adapted to and co-evolved with humans over time and across space, and the dialectics of this relationship; and how indigenous people all over the world have fared throughout time under conditions of climate change or cultural disruptions (see Chapters 19 and 20). How could one person oversee the production of so many different dissertation, postdissertation, and collaborative research projects? We provide a little background to the man, the teacher, and the scholar so that his vision for how engaged and important research should be done might be better understood.

George was born in Detroit on May 22, 1936. He died unexpectedly but peacefully at his home in Atlanta on May 15, 2014 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer one week before. At the American Association for Physical Anthropology meetings in Knoxville, TN, a year before (2013), an afternoon-long session honoring his work by his former graduate students and colleagues paid tribute to the many directions in which his mentoring and interests had taken his students and collaborators. Those presentations form the basis of this volume. In turn, each of George's former students and collaborators spoke about the importance of having George as a mentor in graduate school, as a colleague and collaborator in continued projects, and as a fiercely loyal friend for decades after leaving graduate school. Grown men had tears in their eyes as they spoke lovingly of George's generosity and spirit as he guided them in their careers and research.

One constant theme in the presenters' narratives was what a great teacher George was. They talked about how caring he was and how it was his goal to turn every student on to the joys of seeing the world through an anthropological lens. In particular, speakers recalled his use of the biocultural model and detailed the ways in which this approach was useful to them in their research. As is discussed in greater detail throughout the text, the biocultural approach is an analytical perspective in anthropology that explicitly emphasizes the dynamic interaction between humans and their larger social, cultural, and physical environments. That is when we got the idea to honor George by producing a textbook for undergraduates and graduate students taking anthropology classes that highlighted a wide range of case studies on the theory backing the biocultural approach and how the biocultural approach could be applied.

George had a very distinguished career in biological anthropology. With a BA with Honors in Anthropology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, George entered the Medical School at Michigan. This foreshadowed his life-long commitment to understanding human disease and human variation within a biocultural perspective. He transferred a year later into the Rackham Graduate School in Anthropology at Michigan, and from there he moved into the PhD program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was here that he began formulating his early ideas about the biocultural nature of human health and disease, and the forces that shape the emergence and development of disease and human responses to it and experiences of it.

George Armelagos worked within several areas of anthropology in developing and using the biocultural approach (see Chapter 1). Working on human skeletal remains from Sudanese Nubia in the late 1960s for the purposes of his dissertation, George began to piece together the patterns of morbidity, the diseased state, and mortality, or death, that he saw in this skeletal sample and the portion of the ancient population that it represented. As was the custom in the field of paleopathology, the study of ancient disease, at that time, he would only have been expected to publish case studies or single episodes of the more interesting or unusual pathologies. However, George instead drew from the fields of epidemiology and demography to study the patterns of illness and death within a population-level framework (see Chapters 10, 15, and 16). His first published study, “Disease in ancient Nubia” (Armelagos 1969), was holistic and integrative, looking not only at evidence of poor health but also at the cultural and environmental processes that produce poor health and disease (see Chapters 8, 9, and 12). He was able to empirically demonstrate that the patterns of disease evident in the sample were strongly associated with the age and sex of the skeletal individuals, as well as their dietary practices and patterns of consumption. He further demonstrated that temporal changes in patterns of health and disease were evident in the sample and this corresponded to political, economic, and cultural shifts in the larger region. This classic publication, still used in paleopathology seminars, stands as a mile-marker in paleopathology and the biocultural approach.

Figure I.1 George Armelagos with skeletal material from ancient Nubia.

As he developed this bioculturally based approach in subsequent research projects and publications, the perspective began to have widespread influence on the development of biological anthropology overall, medical anthropology, and the cultural ecology of disease (see Chapters 2 and 3). What was so innovative and outside the box about this research perspective, specifically with regard to health, well-being, and disease, is that in the approach, disease was conceptualized as a process, involving multiple levels of analysis on single individuals – from histological and chemical to anatomical – that needed to be understood at a population level and across time and space, using comparative and cross-cultural perspectives. This produced a paradigmatic shift in the way that disease in the past and present was analyzed. In paleopathology, it shifted the field from its previous focus on descriptions of isolated cases of pathology to comprehending both the proximate and ultimate causes of diseases and their diverse manifestations at a population level, a regional level, and throughout time (see Chapters 9, 10, and 21). In medical anthropology and studies of the cultural ecology of disease, George argued for – and through his research demonstrated the utility of – a systematic, integrated, biocultural approach that attended to ecological, social, cultural, and political economic aspects of diseases processes (see Chapters 3–5). An example of the broad appeal of his research was when a new journal entitled Ethnicity and Disease, a broadly multidisciplinary journal publishing research on causal and associative relationships in the etiology of common illnesses through the study of ethnic patterns of disease, came out in the early 1990s. George published a short overview in the first issue entitled “Human evolution and the evolution of human disease” which comprehensively addressed patterns of human health, disease, and co-evolutionary processes with pathogens throughout human history (Armelagos 1991) – no mean feat.

Another area of great interest to George was diet, disease, and nutritional anthropology. At the same time that George was pioneering the study of disease in broad biocultural terms, he was also making in-roads into how diet and disease interact, how food choices and nutrition structure population health, and the evolution and biological impact of changing diet during the population transformation known as the first epidemiologic transition, the increase in dietary disease and mortality from acute, epidemic infectious diseases associated with the shift from foraging to farming during the Neolithic Transition (c. 10 kya) (see Chapters 12, 13, 14, and 18). In 1980, George co-wrote with Peter Farb a text entitled Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, which explores the anthropological connections between various eating habits and human behavior. This text helped to create the newly emerging field of nutritional anthropology.

Another major contribution that George made to the subdisciplines of both biological anthropology and archaeology was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.8.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Archäologie
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Vor- und Frühgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Humanbiologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: Anthropologie • Anthropology • Approach • Between • biocultural • biological • Biological Anthropology • Biologische Anthropologie • biosocial • Biowissenschaften • dialectically • Dominant • dynamic • emerged • Epidemiologie u. Biostatistik • Epidemiology & Biostatistics • Evolution des Menschen • Gesundheits- u. Sozialwesen • Health & Social Care • Human Evolution • inextricably • interaction • intertwined • Larger • Life Sciences • Paradigms • Research • Social • Views
• ISBN-10: 1-118-96294-X / 111896294X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-96294-7 / 9781118962947