Biocultural Anthropology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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- History, Ancient History, Cultural History, Archaeology

Se hace un análisis epistemológico de los conocimientos y saberes locales; se aborda la perspectiva etnoecológica y sus relaciones ínter y trnasdisciplinarias; se discute la estrategia metodológica de la etnoecología; se reflexiona sobre... more

It is well established that breast milk is the ideal food for infants and that breastfeeding has short-and long-term health benefits for the mother and child. However, there is variation in breastfeeding patterns between populations. Women's work is thought to influence breastfeeding patterns and timing of supplementa-tion and it is often assumed that women in subsistence-oriented societies can more easily integrate their productive and reproductive activities. This article reports longitudinal data, collected in three rounds (resguardo [<40 days], peak [2–4 months], and late [14–16 months] lacta-tion), on breastfeeding structure, infant care, and work patterns of 17 rural Amazonian women in an effort to understand how breastfeeding structure and maternal time allocation changed over time, as well as the strategies women used to integrate their productive and reproductive roles. Women breastfed 10.6 6 3.1, 9.4 6 3.4, and 9.6 6 5.5 times per 9-h period in the three rounds, respectively. Breastfeeding structure, specifically session duration , changed over time (P < 0.05). As lactation progressed , women spent less time breastfeeding and in infant care and more time in subsistence work. In peak lactation, subsistence work was negatively correlated with infant care (r 5 20.4, P 5 0.01), breastfeeding (r 5 20.29, P 5 0.05) and session duration (r 5 20.39, P < 0.01) and in late lactation was negatively correlated with time spent breastfeeding (r 5 20.39, P < 0.01) and in infant care (r 5 20.50, P < 0.01) and positively correlated with inter-session interval (r 5 0.40, P < 0.01). Generally, women reduced time in subsistence work when breast-feeding was more intense and returned to normal activity patterns once infants were being supplemented. The costs and benefits associated with women's strategies are discussed. Am J Phys Anthropol 144:226–237, 2011. V

- by Barbara Piperata
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- Human Ecology, Nutrition, Food and Nutrition, Biocultural Anthropology
- by Ryan P Harrod and +1
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- Prehistoric Archaeology, Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Violence

Women in North India are socialized to care for others, so what do they do when they get a disease like diabetes that requires intensive self-care? In Sugar and Tension, Lesley Jo Weaver uses women’s experiences with diabetes in New Delhi as a lens to explore how gendered roles and expectations are taking shape in contemporary India. Weaver argues that although women’s domestic care of others may be at odds with the self-care mandates of biomedically-managed diabetes, these roles nevertheless do important cultural work that may buffer women’s mental and physical health by fostering social belonging. Weaver describes how women negotiate the many responsibilities in their lives when chronic disease is at stake. As women weigh their options, the choices they make raise questions about whose priorities should count in domestic, health, and family worlds. The varied experiences of women illustrate that there are many routes to living well or poorly with diabetes, and these are not always the ones canonized in biomedical models of diabetes management.

- by Lesley Jo Weaver
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- Psychological Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Depression, Diabetes
- by Joseph Carroll
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- Cultural Theory, Literary Theory, Biocultural Anthropology, Imagination

Abstract: Archaeologists–feminist or otherwise–use biologically sexed human remains to make inferences about cultures' conceptions of gender. Creating an easy link between 'sex' and 'gender', however, is not without problems. Recent debates within the social sciences have centered on the evolving, historical definition and cultural relevance of both of these terms. Interestingly, skeletal analysts' voices tend to remain silent in this debate.

- by Pamela L. Geller
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- Sex and Gender, Feminist Theory, Bioarchaeology, Osteoarchaeology

Public lecture given in Lokve, Croatia. May 2015.

- by James Ahern
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- Paleoanthropology, Human Evolution, Biocultural Anthropology, Paleolithic Europe
- by Alan Goodman
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- Biocultural Anthropology

La obesidad, a partir de la década de 1980, ha evolucionado hasta convertirse en una de las enfermedades que causan mayor preocupación a nivel mundial. Su incremento constante en las sociedades occidentales afecta principalmente a las mujeres adultas de medio socioeconómico precario. En algunas zonas urbanas degradadas de Nueva York, París y Guadalajara, las políticas antiobesidad se entretejen con políticas de planiicación urbana para impulsar una war on obesity que pretende disminuir los riesgos de salud respecto a la alimentación y actividad física. Este libro tiene por objetivo realizar un abordaje espacial de la obesidad en South Bronx, La Courneuve y Lomas del Sur y revisar las relaciones que se construyen entre las formas de alimentarse y de habitar. Incluye un análisis de las trayectorias urbanas y de las experiencias vividas por las mujeres adultas desde la relación específica que establecen con la alimentación y la actividad física y desde las tensiones entre los modos de habitar y las políticas regulatorias de la salud corporal. La investigación se apoya en un conjunto de observaciones etnográficas y entrevistas realizadas a mujeres adultas y actores implicados en la alimentación y actividad física de los tres escenarios. Las mujeres adultas con sobrepeso y obesidad, en la heterogeneidad de las situaciones revisadas, se enfrentan con diferentes limitaciones impuestas por las dinámicas urbanas que contradicen las políticas antiobesidad.

En este capítulo, los autores retomamos del enfoque de los sistemas social-ecológicos y del enfoque sobre Patrimonio Biocultural, una estrategia operativa que permite comprender diversas dimensiones de lo que consideramos constituye un Complejo Biocultural en la Sierra Tarahumara. El objetivo central es dar cuenta de algunas de las dimensiones y componentes que integran este complejo biocultural indígena a través de una etnografía biocultural que nos proporciona un conocimiento más detallado acerca del peso y la relevancia que tienen los marcos culturales rarámuri (tarahumara), o´óba (pima), ó´ódame (tepehuan) y warijó (guarojío) en el desarrollo, reproducción, conservación e innovación de los sistemas bioculturales adaptativos basados en el manejo de recursos naturales. Para cumplir con el objetivo señalado, esbozamos muy brevemente las categorías analíticas en la primera parte del documento. En la segunda parte, damos cuenta de algunas características generales pero prioritarias de la región Sierra Tarahumara. Ilustramos, con algunos casos etnográficos, dimensiones de cada sistema biocultural adaptativo que conforma el complejo biocultural indígena. Finalmente, incorporamos información acerca de los aspectos generales del cambio climático y su impacto en la Sierra Tarahumara

- by Kelsey Anderson
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- Obesity, Diabetes, Health, Biocultural Anthropology

This 2012/2013 study looks at corset dimensions and skeletal rib deformation in female remains from three time periods and two locations to understand certain aspects of longevity. All artifacts and skeletal remains originate from the Early Modern, Victorian, and Edwardian periods. The corsets are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and range in date from 1750-1908. The data on the skeletal remains are the result of the author’s examination of collections held in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, France, and the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology at the Museum of London Archaeology (MoL) in London, England. An anachronistic view of corseted women posits that they lived short and painful lives. I examine these skeletal remains with an eye toward establishing that rich or poor, young or old, corseted women lived comparatively long lives, and that the corset was not, in itself, a death sentence. My findings indicate that although women experienced skeletal deformation because of co...

- by Rebecca Gibson
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- History, Cultural History, Anthropology, Biological Anthropology
- by Danielle R Gendron
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- Japanese Studies, Education, Food Safety, Sociology of Food and Eating

Over the past several years, a growing number of social scientists studying addiction have begun paying attention to materiality, embodiment, and biology in potentially novel ways. In this this chapter, I ask what it means, concretely, for social scientists to think seriously about materiality and biology while remaining ambivalent toward prevailing notions of addiction as brain disease. In the first part of this chapter, I examine the brain–disease model of addiction as an epistemic object, tracing its emergence from a particular scientific style of reasoning and examining some of its key social effects. In the remainder of the chapter, I briefly review the social science of addiction literature associated with four conceptual frameworks, which I suggest highlight domains and mechanisms of biosocial entanglement – and are thus particularly fruitful as potential sites of conversation between social scientists and bioscientists. These frameworks are: (1) embodied sensations; (2) will and habit; (3) social and material milieu; and (4) trajectories.

- by Eugene Raikhel
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- Medical Sociology, Medical Anthropology, Social Sciences, Anthropology of Science

El 30 de abril se conmemoran 102 años del fallecimiento en Florencia, Italia, de Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, importante historiador mexicano del siglo XIX. Fue director en tres ocasiones del
Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnología; además de ser un preservador clave de las fuentes históricas que daban cuenta de las culturas prehispánicas.

Shamanism is commonly understood through reference to spirits and souls. However, these terms were introduced by Christian missionaries as part of the colonial effort of conversion. So, rather than trying to comprehend shamanism through medieval European concepts, this book examines it through ideas that started developing in the West after encountering Amerindian shamans. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings develops three major arguments: First, since their earliest accounts Amerindian shamanic notions have had more in common with current microbial ecology than with Christian religious beliefs. Second, the human senses allow the unaided perception of the microbial world; for example, entoptic vision allows one to see microscopic objects flowing through the retina and shamans employ techniques that enhance precisely these kinds of perception. Lastly, the theory that some diseases are produced by living agents acquired through contagion was proposed right after Contact in relation to syphilis, an important subject of pre-Contact Amerindian medicine and mythology, which was treasured and translated by European physicians. Despite these early translations, the West took four centuries to rediscover germs and bring microbiology into mainstream science.
Giraldo Herrera reclaims this knowledge and lays the fundaments for an ethnomicrobiology. It will appeal to anyone curious about shamanism and willing to take it seriously and to those enquiring about the microbiome, our relations with microbes and the long history behind them.

For much of recent human history, the "traditional" family has consisted of a mother, father, and their biological offspring. However, this definition does not encompass the extensive biocultural evolutionary development of the human family from the earliest hominin groups to the dynamic families seen in modern society. This research synthesizes and analyzes recent literature on the biological and sociocultural changes which have revolutionized what it means to be a family.

People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of others. Literature contains much violence because violence reveals the underlying conflicts in all social relationships. Evolutionary psychology offers the best explanatory framework for understanding social conflicts, but evolutionary psychology is still in the process of formulating theories about the way core motives interact with specific cultural constructs. To explain the significance of violence in particular works of literature, critics must analyze the interactions between human life history, specific cultural values, individual differences in authorial vision, and relations between the minds of authors and readers in response to characters. This chapter offers examples of that kind of analysis for three works of literature: Grimms’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf,” and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The analysis of “Little Red Riding Hood” identifies fear of predation and fear of strangers as core concerns in the story and examines the way symbolic images affect the emotions of child readers. The analysis of “The Werewolf” contrasts the author’s relations with characters and audience in that story with the authors’ relations with characters and audience in the other two works. The analysis of King Lear contrasts the emotional effects of tragedy with the emotional effects of action movies, identifies normative human universals as the basis for audience response, examines the way characters in the play and critics of the play seek meaning through religious ideas, contrasts religious ideas with Shakespeare’s naturalistic world view, and argues that intuitive insights into human life history form the moral core of the play.

- by Joseph Carroll
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- Evolutionary Psychology, Violence, Shakespeare, Cultural Theory

Este proyecto busca analizar desde la memoria biocultural e historia ambiental, el impacto del capitalismo en la relación entre el pueblo cucapá y el ecosistema que habitó. A partir de la pregunta de investigación ¿Cómo se transformó la relación entre los cucapá y la naturaleza desde su conformación como comunidad hasta la llegada del capitalismo en el Delta del Colorado y Alto Golfo de California?
La hipótesis con la que se pretende responder este cuestionamiento es que la relación que establecieron los cucapá con el medio ambiente se caracterizó en un primer momento por su equilibrio y su alto grado de simbiosis. Esto cambió con la colonización europea y se transformó de manera radical con la introducción del capitalismo.

- by Alejandro Bonada
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- History, Native American Studies, Latin American Studies, Social Sciences

Social science has positioned climate change at the centre of its research agenda. The limited success of hegemonic responses and the advance of impacts have strengthened the emergence of non-state actors. However, their role remains underexplored, especially in Latin America. In this article, we explore three central dimensions to consider for addressing climate change challenges and policies, which are still incipient areas of research in Latin America: Indigenous Peoples' demands for participation, civil society organisation, and collaboration between local communities, academia and other social actors through transdisciplinarity. Non-State actors' responses must be taken into more significant consideration. In addition to strengthening democracy, the participation of non-State actors has the potential to promote the transformations needed to respond justly to climate change.

- by Rosario Carmona and +2
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- Anthropology, Climate Change, Transdisciplinarity, Biocultural Anthropology

This seminar will focus on human aging in biocultural perspective. We will consider how patterns and processes of human aging compare with those in other animals, particularly nonhuman primates and other hominins. Evolutionary life history theory will be employed to frame adaptive and non-adaptive views of human aging. Cross-cultural patterns in aging will be considered to highlight similarities and differences in the aging process and experience. Discussions will feature topically salient aspects of aging such as sexuality, work, grandparenting, and health. An emphasis is on student critical evaluation of aging research, including methodological approaches one might employ to address some scholarly or applied problem or question concerning human aging.

- by Peter Gray
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- Aging, Biocultural Anthropology

The physicalistic and mechanistic view of Western biomedicine provides a convenient escape route from explanations of phenomena like the placebo effect, “sham” or “inert” treatments having the faculty to rally the healing process by causing objective changes in physiological functioning. Because anthropology is dialectical and comparative in its approach, it establishes a biocultural dialogue in its interpretations. Anthropologists speculate that what is overlooked are the systems of beliefs and expectations of patients. Local cultures present traditional ideas of what sickness is and of what to expect, reinforced by processes of socialization and communication. In portraying placebos as ultimately “culturogenic”, products of culturally-derived expectations that interact directly with individual physiology, anthropology has provided what is a refreshing narrative for the understanding of medical phenomena such as the placebo effect.

Conceptually and methodologically, medical anthropology is well-positioned to support a “big-tent” research agenda on health and society. It fosters approaches to social and structural models of health and wellbeing in ways that are critically reflective, cross-cultural, people-centered, and transdisciplinary. In this review article, we showcase these four main characteristics of the field, as featured in Social Science & Medicine over the last fifty years, highlighting their relevance for an international and interdisciplinary readership. First, the practice of critical inquiry in ethnographies of health offers a deep appreciation of sociocultural viewpoints when recording and interpreting lived experiences and contested social worlds. Second, medical anthropology champions cross-cultural breadth: it makes explicit local understandings of health experiences across different settings, using a fine-grained, comparative approach to develop a stronger global platform for the analysis of health-related concerns. Third, in offering people-centered views of the world, anthropology extends the reach of critical enquiry to the lived experiences of hard-to-reach population groups, their structural vulnerabilities, and social agency. Finally, in developing research at the nexus of cultures, societies, and health, medical anthropologists generate new, transdisciplinary conversations on the body, mind, person, community, environment, prevention, and therapy. As featured in this journal, scholarly contributions in medical anthropology seek to debate human health and wellbeing from many angles, pushing forward methods, social theory, and health-related practice.

- by Catherine Panter-brick
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- Medical Anthropology, Social Sciences, Ethnography, Mixed Methods

Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parent-ing, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology , culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent , collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.

- by Joseph Carroll and +5
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- Cultural Studies, Social Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, Gene Culture Coevolution

Como seres humanos sentimos la curiosidad de expresar «“¿quiénes somos?”, inseparable de un “¿dónde estamos, de dónde venimos, a dónde vamos?”» ; interrogar nuestra condición humana, es entonces interrogar nuestra situación en el mundo, la curiosidad nos lleva a saber más. A este reto es al cual se ha enfrentado Edgar Morin a lo largo de su extensa obra y a la cual ha dedicado toda su vida. Intentar conocer verdaderamente que es lo humano, colocarlo en su lugar dentro del universo y acercarse a la naturaleza del ser humano desde su complejidad, es decir, desde un pensamiento que intente reunir y organizar lo biológico, lo social y psicológico, lo cultural y espiritual, y lo individual. Es a lo que nuestro autor ha dedicado su vida y es, precisamente, lo que afrontaremos con el presente trabajo, estudiando y desentrañando algunas de sus obras y escritos. Muchas son las obras de Edgar Morin que durante estos últimos meses he tenido la oportunidad de leer y consultar, y podría decirse que todas, por la multidisciplinariedad con las que han sido abordadas por el autor, podrían ser objeto de estudio de cara a la elaboración de este trabajo, pero en el presente artículo tendré en cuenta como obras principales tres importantes trabajos que han sido como hitos en la compresión y explicitación del concepto de la condición humana y la antropología compleja de Morin: (1°) “El Paradigma Perdido, Ensayo de Bioantropología” ; (2°) “El Método” y dentro de éste, el volumen V, que lleva por título “La Humanidad de la Humanidad, la Identidad Humana”; y (3°) “Los siete saberes necesarios para la educación del futuro” , publicado este último libro por la UNESCO. Pretendo con este trabajo realizar un recorrido para descubrir la visión de persona humana en su totalidad tal y como la concibe Edgar Morin, es decir, en el conocimiento por igual de sus dimensiones que se integran en la persona humana concreta que es cada sujeto con su vida fisiológica (cuerpo-cerebro), su contexto psico-social y su dimensión espiritual. Como afirma Morin, «el conocimiento humano es a la vez cultural, espiritual, cerebral».

- by Bas Verschuuren
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- Religion, Indigenous Studies, Social Policy, Conservation Biology

This study examines corset dimensions and skeletal rib deformation in female remains from three time periods and two locations to understand the relationship between the practice of corset wearing and longevity. The corsets are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and range in date from 1750-1908, while the skeletal remains are the result of the author’s examination of collections held in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, France, and the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology at the Museum of London Archaeology (MoL) in London, England. An anachronistic view of corseted women posits that they lived short and painful lives. These skeletal remains were examined with an eye toward establishing that rich or poor, young or old, corseted women lived comparatively long lives, and that the corset was not, in itself, a death sentence. The findings indicate that although women experienced skeletal deformation because of corseting, they also lived longer than the average age for their times.

- by Rebecca Gibson
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- History, Cultural History, Anthropology, Biological Anthropology

 For a multitude of North Americans 'tuned in' to the holiday traditions of mainstream United States (U.S.) culture, the culinary additions of the tastants vanilla, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, cardamom, and cinnamon likely evoke romantic thoughts of Thanksgiving or Christmas, or of colonial New England during the fall and winter seasons. "Eating," write Turner and Thompson (N.d.:3), "is rarely divorced from social and cultural spheres." Indeed, the essences that exude from culinary inclusions of combinations of these seven spices likely conjure up in many tradition-minded Americans visualizations of an archetypal and romantic 'collective memory'-that of seventeenth-century Puritans and Native Americans sharing outdoor feasts across long tables for Thanksgiving beside Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. The seven seasonings "stimulate[] the taste buds of mouth and mind" (Cardina N.d.:2), and, for many in the U.S., bring to mind the distinctive tastes of recipes destined for decorating fall and winter dining tables, such as pumpkin or sweet potato pies. There are several ways to imagine how such sense-memory matrices are formed. As Berman et al. (2000:7017; see Bures et al. 1998) propose, "consumption of even a small amount of an unfamiliar tastant is a salient experience that may suffice to imprint a long-term memory of the new taste and its hedonic valence." The authors' findings offer evidence for this proposition: "a key role in the detection of … taste memory is played by the central gustatory area in the insular cortex (IC)" (Berman et al.

- by Michael D Sharbaugh
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- Sociology, Health Psychology, Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology

In this article, I revisit Harold Garfinkel's classic ethnomethodolog-ical account of Agnes, a transgender woman he met in the 1950s. I situate this case in its larger historical context, within the arc of a contemporary transgender studies, and incorporate recent material from bio-neuro-cultural studies of gender and sexuality. Within this framework I ask: what can ethnomethodology learn from transgender studies and what can it contribute.

- by Jodi O'Brien
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- Social Psychology, Transgender Studies, Ethnomethodology, Biocultural Anthropology

Se presenta un diagnóstico preliminar sobre las aproximaciones al patrimonio biocultural en Baja California.

Preface We begin with an observation and a particular point of view. American anthropology emerged as an integrative discipline, one which has espoused holism and engaged in a " four-field " conversation since its inception (Boas1940). There have been challenges to this holistic framing of the discipline as more " myth " than reality (Borofsky 2002; Segal and Yanagisako 2005; see also Calcagno 2003), and equally strong concerns over fragmentation and fissioning of disciplinary subfields that advocate for a holistic anthropology (Peacock 1995; Brown and Yoffee 1992). We come to this essay as anthropologists committed to the vision of anthropology's unique ability for the integration of multiple perspectives on humans and humanity that is the promise of a four-field, holistic, approach. By 'four-field', however, we do not mean four, five or six silos of expertise that can somehow, if uncomfortably, inhabit the single space of a department or discipline. Departments that 'cover' and 'represent' anthropological breadth, but without integration, are hardly more holistic than those units that eschew one or more perspective (usually from biological anthropology) or that have split into separate departments or programs over seemingly irreconcilable differences in approaches to anthropological sciences. Rather, we are talking about the sort of anthropology that blurs divisions among the subfields, that occupies hybrid spaces at the margins of normative approaches, that bleed into and demand input from other perspectives within and out of anthropology, and that allow for and even privilege the anthro-pological promise of integration of natural and social sciences and humanities. These are also often uncomfortable spaces – perhaps more so the more integration one seeks. We live and work within a political economy of specialization and expert knowledge, especially within universities, granting agencies, and publishers, that promotes and rewards depth over breadth, and believes that success is better ensured by developing more narrowly conceived and specialized academic departments with a comparative advantage of particular " expert knowledge " in the global exchange of knowledge production. Thus, as 'common sense' and seemingly necessary as holism might be to anthropology, and a biocultural approach might be for the studies that include human biology, intra-disciplinary integration is not always rewarded and indeed not frequently used to frame research and publications (Calcagno 2003; Goodman 2013). Nevertheless, we argue here for an anthropology that seeks integration across historically traditional subfields to make 'anthropological connections' (Wolf 1982) – in this case between

- by Morgan Hoke and +1
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- Biological Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Food and Nutrition, Health

Notre problématique de recherche porte sur les mutations, durant le dernier siècle, de la relation à l’environnement d’une petite communauté d’agro-pasteurs du Haut Atlas de Marrakech, les Aït Ikis. Cette population montagnarde d’environ 700 habitants dépende de plusieurs espaces mais très spécialement du Yagour, un pâturage de 70 km² étagé entre 2.000 m et 3.600 m. L’institution coutumière de l’agdal qui gère tous les espaces en question et participe fortement aux rapports à l’environnement, consiste en la mise en défens saisonnière des espaces, dont la date exacte d’ouverture est décidée par toute la communauté d’usagers. Le but est d’assurer un repos minimal aux espèces végétales et la durabilité de son utilisation. Dans ce contexte, nous avons essayé de répondre à trois hypothèses : 1- Le système traditionnel de l’agdal était globalement durable, mais mis en crise notamment par son contact croissant avec les sociétés industrielles. 2- Dans le monde actuel, l’agdal aurait des potentialités de développement et de conservation. 3- Une approche profondément transdisciplinaire, qui utilise à la fois les disciplines individualisées, est nécessaire pour bien comprendre des problématiques éco-anthropologiques complexes de ce genre. Nous sommes partis d’une étude du contexte géographique, écologique, social et historique. Ensuite, nous avons analysé le système agro-économique et la culture symbolique qui accompagne ce système, ainsi que l’état de l’environnement au sein d’importants processus de changement. Pour conclure, nous avons corroboré nos hypothèses, et affirmé spécialement notre soutien à « une transdisciplinarité qui combine des approches disciplinaires spécialisées ».

- by Pablo Dominguez
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- Landscape Ecology, Environmental Economics, Anthropology, Cultural Heritage

This article presents a theoretical framework for an evolutionary understanding of minds and meaning in fictional narratives. The article aims to demonstrate that meaning in fiction can be incorporated in an explanatory network that includes the whole scope of human behavior.
In both reality and fiction, meaning consists of experiences in individual minds: sensations, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Writing and reading fiction involve three sets of minds, those of authors, readers, and characters. Meaning in the minds of authors and readers emerges in relation to the experiences of fictional characters. Characters engage in motivated actions. To understand minds and meaning in fiction, researchers need analytic categories for human motives. A comprehensive model of human motives can be constructed by integrating ideas from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Motives combine in different ways to help create different cultures and different individual identities, which influence experience in individual minds. The mental experiences produced in authors and readers by fictional narratives have adaptive psychological functions. By encompassing the minds of authors, characters, and readers within a comprehensive model of human motives, this article situates the psychology of fiction within the larger research program of the evolutionary social sciences.
Keywords: perspective taking, motives, psychology of reading, biocultural theory, evolutionary literary theory

- by Joseph Carroll
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- Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Narrative, Cultural Theory

Relationships between people and trees are continually unfolding in the contexts of situated social-ecological systems, in which properties of the system emerge from localized interactions among complex fabrics of biological, social, and cultural actors. In current studies on social-ecological systems linked with trees, we commonly find two approaches: the first focuses on biological entities, examining the ecological dynamics of tree species and associated biodiversity. The second approach focuses on people, analyzing human agency along with historical and contemporary political or other forces shaping human-tree relationships. In this chapter, we explore social-ecological systems associated with the Pewen (Araucaria araucana), one of the most iconic and sacred trees from the southern Andes. We first describe some of our own research findings on Pewen for both of the approaches described above. We then develop a third perspective, which highlights social-ecological relations and has the potential to overcome both the ecological/social and the biological entity/human agency spheres. Our relational approach allows a closer enquiry on how actors (trees and their seeds, wildlife, and people) interact in complex and sympoietic social-ecological fabrics. This approach also allows us to identify the social-ecological memory of the system that emerges as an on-going complex of relations that are never stable, that must be enacted, performed on a daily basis within this specific context of South America. Furthermore, it stresses that people-pewen fabrics are continuously built and rebuilt, putting an emphasis on the openness and future of social-ecological systems subjected to historical and contemporary drivers of change.

- by José Tomás Ibarra and +2
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- Biocultural Diversity, Biocultural Anthropology, Ethnobiology, Forest Ecology

A journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, popular culture, religion, ideology, politics. Two volumes per year. Double-blind peer review. Regularly publishes multiple book reviews in the... more

- by Joseph Carroll and +2
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- American Literature, Cultural Studies, Evolutionary Psychology, Comparative Literature

co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll

abstract: The evolution of human sociality is a field in ferment, with writers struggling to isolate elementary causal forces and organize them systematically. The elements of a usable model for evolved human sociality have become available only within the past few years. Those elements are scattered throughout the books here under review and a small set of articles. None of the books or articles fully exemplifies the whole model. After laying out the model, I use it to evaluate the books, describing how each contributes to it, and measuring each against it. The central idea in a usable model of human sociality is that the identity of the social group is integral to individual identity. In addition to that one central idea, a minimum of seven concepts is necessary to construct a model of sociality that includes the complex forms of organization in post-agricultural societies: (1) dominance, (2) egalitarianism or reverse dominance, (3) leadership, (4) internalized norms, (5) strong reciprocity or third-party enforcement of norms, (6) legal institutions, and (7) legitimacy in the exercise of power. These seven concepts can be reduced to four components: power, values, individuals, and groups. This model of evolved human sociality moves beyond the inconclusive debate between proponents of inclusive fitness and proponents of group selection. It also offers a distinct alternative to the identity politics that currently pervade literary and cultural study.

- by Joseph Carroll
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- Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Community Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology

co-edited by Alice Andrews and Joseph Carroll

The aim of this paper is three-fold: 1) to present results of the archaeological excavations conducted in the area surrounding the Black Church in Braşov (Transylvania, Romania); 2) to show the outcome of the analysis of a small human skeletal sample, and 3) to stress the importance of biocultural interpretations of burial sites for a better understanding of the process of urbanization in southern Transylvania.During the Middle Ages Braşov, founded in the 12th century by Central European colonists, was a flourishing multi-cultural and multi-ethnic urban community located in the heart of the Carpathian Mountains (Transylvania, Romania), and a busy crossroad for travellers, merchants and diplomats from Romania, other European countries and the Middle East. Between 2012 and 2013 a team of archaeologists conducted rescue excavations in the area surrounding the Black Church, unearthing a stratigraphically challenging complex of structures formed by centuries of uninterrupted human habita...

- by Daniela Marcu Istrate
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- History, Archaeology, Anthropology, Bioarchaeology
- by Juan Manuel Rodríguez Caso and +1
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- Biocultural Anthropology, Biocultural theory, Evolución