THE TRANS/NATIONAL STUDY OF CULTURE AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF HUMAN SPECIATION (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
What are the principles of current evolutionism? Starting from the very important evolutionary science base since Darwin, this book tries to tell the history of the human being as a species, from its earliest origins, to the closest irony of its biological condition with respect to the environmental environment, passing through anchored explanations In Archeology and Anthropology, as well as by the more materialistic explanations of human beings, Marxism and other social schools. It is true that, although it is true that many of the evolutionary determinants of the human being are only scientifically explicable through evolutionism, the different interpretations of the same, as well as the different theoretical applications to the human being and its nature remain, even today in Day, a reason for discussion (a discussion that, from the point of view of the vast majority of the specialized scientific community, is not useful today). Prologue by José Julio Martínez Valero.
Social Anthropology and Human Origins
2009
List of figures page viii List of tables ix Preface xi 1 Introduction 1 2 If chimps could talk 18 3 Fossils and what they tell us 33 4 Group size and settlement 53 5 Teaching, sharing and exchange 70 6 Origins of language and symbolism 90 7 Elementary structures of kinship 8 A new synthesis 9 Conclusions Glossary References Index viii 1 Social anthropology is a discipline largely missing from the study of human origins. Until now, the discipline has sidelined itself. Yet its central concerns with notions like society, culture and cross-cultural comparison make it of the utmost relevance for understanding the origins of human social life, and relevant too as an aid for speculation on the kinds of society our ancestors inhabited. Like archaeologists, social anthropologists can dig backwards through layers of time, into the origins of language, symbolism, ritual, kinship and the ethics and politics of reciprocity. When did human origins begin? That is a trick question. Of course, human origins began when humanity began, but in another sense human origins began when origins became an intellectual issue. There is no real history of engagement between social anthropology and early humanity, so one must be created here. Social anthropology's ancestral disciplines, like moral philosophy and jurisprudence, natural history and antiquarianism, travelogue and philology, all fed into post-medieval developments in building a picture of 'early man'. Yet, as I have implied, social anthropology proper has been absent. Since the days of Franz Boas at the dawn of the twentieth century, the study of human origins has been seen instead as the preserve of biological or physical anthropology. While not wishing to encroach too deeply into biological territory, in this book I want to carve out within social anthropology a new subdiscipline. I see this as a subdiscipline that touches on the biological and makes full use too of a century and a half of social anthropology-its accumulated experience and especially some of its more recent, and relevant, developments. Scientific interest in human origins in fact has quite a long history. Seventeenth-century European thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke speculated on the 'natural' condition of 'man', and its relation to the earliest forms of human society. Eighteenth-century thinkers continued this tradition, and archaeological and linguistic concerns were added at that time. In the nineteenth century, the theory or theories of evolution, as well as important fossil finds like the first Neanderthal in 1857 and Pithecanthropus in 1891, provided much added impetus. Indeed, the later A short history of human origins The seventeenth century Archaeology, or more accurately its predecessor, antiquarian studies, emerged as an amateur pursuit in the seventeenth century. Even before that, in the early sixteenth century, Italian geologists had speculated on the idea of stone tools as antecedents of iron ones (Trigger 1989: 53). However, the great social thinkers like Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and even Locke were not among those who had such notions. Social theory in the seventeenth century seemed almost completely oblivious to such insights and to the growing interest, throughout much of Europe, in early technology and in comparisons between Europeans of the past and the inhabitants of Africa or the Americas at the time. In retrospect, Darwinian theory, though, might as easily be contrasted to Monboddo's. Far from being a 'forerunner of Darwin', as is often said, Monboddo embodies an otherwise never-fully realized eighteenth-century vision which is the antithesis of Darwin. If in probing the boundaries of 'man' Monboddo defined the 'Orang Outang' as part of the category, Darwin did the opposite: he defined 'man' as an 'ape' (figure 1.1). Linnaeus came close to seeing both sides of the problem that would haunt Darwin when (later Lord Avebury), were also prominent in archaeology. Among other twists of fate, the foremost ethnologist of the late nineteenth century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, met Henry Christie while travelling in Cuba in 1856, and Christie persuaded him to accompany him to Mexico. Christie, like Lubbock a banker, ethnologist and archaeologist, was
Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution
American Anthropologist, 2015
A niche is the structural, temporal, and social context in which a species exists. Over the last two million years, the human lineage underwent clear morphological changes alongside less easily measurable, but significant, behavioral and cognitive shifts as it forged, and was shaped by, new niches. During this time period, core human patterns emerged, including the following: hypercooperation; lengthy childhood and complex parenting; intricate and diverse foraging and hunting patterns; novel and dynamic material and symbolic cultures; and complex communication and information sharing, eventually resulting in language. Approaches to human evolution grounded in paleoanthropology and archaeology offer fundamental insights into our past, and traditional evolutionary theory offers a strong grounding for explaining them. However, given the centrality of distinctive physiological, social, semiotic, and cognitive processes in human evolutionary histories, a broader anthropological approach can facilitate additional understanding of the human story. An integrative anthropology, reaching across subfields and foci, combined with contemporary evolutionary theory is an approach that can enhance our abilities to model and understand human evolution. [integrative anthropology, niche construction, evolution, extended evolutionary synthesis, Homo, semiosis, Pleistocene] RESUMEN Un nicho es el contexto estructural, temporal y social en el que una especie existe. Durante losúltimos 2 millones de años, el linaje humano pasó por claros cambios morfológicos junto a cambios conductuales y cognitivos menos fácilmente medibles, pero significativos, en la medida, que forjó, y fue moldeado por, nuevos nichos. Durante este período de tiempo, patrones humanos centrales emergieron incluyendo los siguientes: hiper-cooperación; prolongada niñez y crianza compleja; patrones de caza y recolección intrincados y diversos; culturas simbólicas y materiales novedosas y dinámicas, y el compartir complejo de información y comunicación que finalmente resultó en lenguaje. Aproximaciones a la evolución humana basadas en paleo-antropología y arqueología ofrecen conocimiento fundamental de nuestro pasado, y la teoría evolucionaria tradicional ofrece un conocimiento básico sólido para explicarlo. Sin embargo, dada la centralidad de procesos fisiológicos, sociales, semióticos, y cognitivos distintivos en historias evolucionarias humanas, una aproximación antropológica más amplia puede facilitar un entendimiento adicional de la historia humana. Una antropología integrativa, extendiéndose a través de sub-campos y focos, combinada con teoría evolucionaria contemporánea es una aproximación que puede enriquecer nuestras habilidades para modelar y entender la evolución humana. [antropología integrativa, construcción de nichos, evolución, síntesis evolucionaria extendida, Homo, semiosis, Pleistoceno]
Current Anthropology, 2012
We introduce a special issue of Current Anthropology developed from a Wenner-Gren symposium held in Teresópolis, Brazil, in 2010 that was about the past, present, and future of biological anthropology. Our goal was to understand from a comparative international perspective the contexts of genesis and development of physical/biological anthropology around the world. While biological anthropology today can encompass paleoanthropology, primatology, and skeletal biology, our symposium focused on the field's engagement with living human populations. Bringing together scholars in the history of science, science studies, and anthropology, the participants examined the discipline's past in different contexts but also reflected on its contemporary and future conditions. Our contributors explore national histories, collections, and scientific field practice with the goal of developing a broader understanding of the discipline's history. Our work tracks a global, uneven transition from a typological and essentialist physical anthropology, predominating until the first decades of the twentieth century, to a biological anthropology informed by postsynthesis evolutionism and the rise of molecular biology, a shift that was labeled "new physical anthropology." We place biological anthropology in a broad historical context and suggest how the histories we document can inform its future.
This book promises nothing less than to revolutionize our understanding of human history. Maybe more than a revolution, however, it is a revival of the quest for political alternatives that greatly concerned earlier generations of anthropologists but significantly lost thrust in recent decades. In this vein, the book revitalizes a once constitutive interest in the Other as a potential source of dissidence against taken-for-granted pillars of our political constitution and social life. The loss of interest in the Other as an inspiration for socio-political otherness occurred in at least temporal correlation with the rise of neoliberal dogma and, even if somewhat paradoxically, reinforced its core mantra: there is no alternative. This book is full of alternatives, and maybe it is no coincidence that its protagonist is a Native American called Kandiaronk-and thus a member of the community that inspired the visions of the hippie generation. In their book, the archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber are mainly concerned with alternative endings and twists to dominant narrations of human history. Popular elements of such narrations are agriculture and its presumed consequence in generating social hierarchies, the city as a hotbed of 'social complexity' to be tamed by means of bureaucracy, and the state as an inevitable outcome of agriculture and city life. The authors refute these popular assumptions with numerous examples from ancient history and relatively recent 'egalitarian' societies. With regard to agriculture, the authors convincingly show that not only did its practice not necessarily lead to sedentary life forms, but that it was sometimes abandoned altogether by societies that returned to more mobile forms of economy-all this in a context in which agriculture was often just one economic activity among others, and often not even the most articulate one. This leads the authors to conclude that classic classifications of societies along lines of 'hunter-gatherers', 'horticulturalists', 'pastoral nomads' etc. are anything but useful, because most societies are most of these for most of the time-often varying with the seasons. This prompts the authors to another highly important conclusion, namely that seasonality allows for political experimentation. This conclusion is developed in accordance with Marcel Mauss (1979 [1904-5]), who had already observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that the circumpolar Inuits had two political structures-a hierarchical one during the hunting season in summer, and a relatively egalitarian one
The Racial Analysis of Human Populations in Relation to Their Ethnogenesis
Current Anthropology, 1962
Born in 1930, he was educated at the University of Warsaw (M.Sc. 1951) and the University of L6dz (Ph.D. 1957). He has done much archeological and anthropometrical fieldwork in Poland (1949-1961) and in Egypt (1959). He is the author of over 20 scientific publications dealing with raciology, methodology and paleoanthropology. He developed, together with A. Goralski, the formal approach to the tempo of development of human skull in phylogeny and ontogeny with cybernetical interpretation.
Some Major Problems in the Social Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers [and Comments and Reply]
Current Anthropology, 1988
What is the relationship between the present-day hunter-gatherer studied by anthropologists and the societies of the Palaeolithic? And how is the articulation between the economy of these societies and their other aspects to be conceived? In attempting to answer these questions, this article takes into account a further problem, that of the uniqueness of Australian Aboriginal social organization. ALAIN TESTART is Directeur de Recherche, deuxieme classe, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (mailing address: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75270 Paris Cedex 6, France). Born in 1945, he was educated at the Ecole National Superieure des Mines de Paris (dipl6me d'ingenieur, i968) and at the Universite de Paris VII (doctorat de troisieme cycle en ethnologie, 1975). His research interests are th social organization of the Australian Aborigines, the social anthropology of hunter-gatherers, and symbolism. His publications include Des classifications dualistes en Australie: Essai sur l'evolution de l'organisation sociale (Paris and Lille: Editions de 1 Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Lille III, 1978), Les chasseurs-cueilleurs, ou l'origine des in6galit6s (Paris: Societe d'Ethnographie [Universite de Paris X, Nanterre], i982), Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs (Paris: EHESS, Cahiers de l'Homme, i986), and L communisme primitif, I, Economie et id6ologie (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, i985). The present paper was submitte in final form I9 VI 87.