Graphic anthropology, broadly construed, approaches drawing as a mode of anthropological inquiry. Most commonly, drawing and sketching have been employed by cultural anthropologists as visual research methods during fieldwork. This practice, which can include sketching fieldnotes and inviting research interlocutors to create or respond to drawings, has developed as a way to document the process of coming-to-know during research and to visually explore the different perspectives at play in an ethnographic encounter. In archaeology, technical drawings, field drawings, and the analysis of drawings from the archaeological record have been central to the research process. In recent years, anthropologists across the sub-disciplines have begun to more actively explore the conceptual and critical potentials of drawing as a process (to draw) and product (a drawing) that is open-ended, multidimensional, and attuned to bodily practice. The creation and analysis of graphic arts in anthropology has fostered cross-disciplinary affinities and overlaps with medical and digital humanities, public health, visual culture studies, and the visual and literary arts. Of particular interest to many cultural and medical anthropologists is the genre of comics, as its unique blend of text and image arranged in sequence allows for the layering of different times, spaces, bodies, and perspectives within a single page in non-linear and non-hierarchical ways. While comics have long been a tool in public health campaigns, the early 2000s saw the growth of the field of \u201cgraphic medicine,\u201d which explores how comics about illness and healing can provide unique insights into the cultural, personal, embodied, and epistemological contexts of medicine. Similarly, the fields of anthropology, literature, and visual studies have recently witnessed renewed interest in the social and aesthetic dimensions of drawings and there has been an upsurge in the creation of comics, zines, and graphic novels as major research outputs across academic disciplines and anthropological sub-disciplines. Graphic anthropology can also be situated in relation to the subfield of multimodal anthropology, which expands the domain of visual anthropology beyond its historical focus on film and photography to include engagement across multiple media technologies, platforms, producers, and publics. While graphic anthropology is connected to visual anthropology, the strong interdisciplinary articulations of drawing as a mode of research, practice, and creation combined with a focus on comics as site of cultural production mark the \u201cgraphic\u201d as a rich domain of anthropological inquiry in its own right.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0264","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,6,21]],"date-time":"2021-06-21T11:41:57Z","timestamp":1624275717000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Graphic Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,6,23]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Graphic Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,30]],"date-time":"2021-09-30T12:05:29Z","timestamp":1633003529000},"score":13.417164,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0264.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,6,23]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0264","published":{"date-parts":[[2021,6,23]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:53Z","timestamp":1715293493390},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Alternatively called linguistic anthropology or anthropological linguistics, this subfield of anthropology is dedicated to the study of the contextual impact of language on society and culture. The preference for one term or the other often reflects the theoretical leaning of the speakers or their training. The form \u201canthropological linguistics\u201d is older, while the form \u201clinguistic anthropology\u201d was adopted in the seventies and has become the most common since then. Linguistic anthropology is one of the four subfields of anthropology and has important intersections with the other subfields, namely, sociocultural anthropology, biological anthropology, and archaeology. For example, it shares with biological anthropology an interest in the origin and evolution of human language and in the study of primate forms of communication; with archaeology it shares an interest in the study of the relationships among languages and their speakers in the past as well as in the study of past writing systems. It is, however, with sociocultural anthropology that linguistic anthropology overlaps the most, given its interest in culture and society and the use of ethnography as one of its methods of inquiry. Because of this, linguistic anthropology has been considered at times part of sociocultural anthropology rather than a separate subfield. However, linguistic anthropology also deploys distinguishable methods that allow close attention to language structure and use and focuses on discipline-specific questions, such as the intersection of language, mind, culture, and society. Its wide-ranging theoretical and methodological tool kit is necessary because linguistic anthropology is comprehensive in nature. Rather than limiting itself to the study of just one component of communication, it intends to be holistic. This means that linguistic anthropology is interested in all aspects of language, not only its use in social encounters but also its history; its structure; and its poetic, affective, and reflexive sides; as well as the study of the theories themselves that humans have created (both in the West and elsewhere) in their attempt to describe and understand language. Thus, while being part of anthropology, linguistic anthropology is at the same time a highly interdisciplinary endeavor that borrows from other disciplinary approaches. Its work partially overlaps with such fields as applied linguistics (dedicated to offering solutions to language-related issues in the wider world), linguistics (the scientific study of the structural elements that compose language), the philosophy of language (the reasoned inquiry on language), sociolinguistics (the study of the effect of society on language from a structural perspective), sociology of language (the study of the effects of language on society from a sociological perspective), and communication studies (mass-mediated forms of communication). Scholars in linguistic anthropology, accordingly, often work in departments outside of anthropology, such as linguistics, sociology, and folklore studies, as well as literature and area studies.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0013","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Linguistic Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Valentina","family":"Pagliai","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Linguistic Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:30:39Z","timestamp":1632425439000},"score":13.302341,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0013.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0013","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:58Z","timestamp":1715293498937},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Political anthropology emphasizes context, process, and scale. The field has been most concerned with the contextual specificity of political processes and the mechanisms through which localities are differentially incorporated into larger scales of social, economic, and political life. Whereas political anthropology inhabits much of the same analytical ground as political science in considering phenomena such as state formation, democracy, citizenship, rights, and development, political anthropologists challenge normative assumptions of what counts as \u201cpolitics\u201d by illuminating connections between formal and informal political arenas, and among cultural, social, and political processes. There is a key internal distinction that has marked political anthropology virtually from the outset: that between a structuralist approach emphasizing the systemic nature of power and the role of political behavior and institutions in social reproduction, and a processual approach that highlights conflict, contradiction, and change. Significantly, political anthropology has been distinguished from other fields of anthropology by its relative lack of preoccupation with \u201cculture\u201d as an analytical category; most political anthropologists focus instead on social inequality, institutional dynamics, and political transformation. To put it differently, political anthropologists typically think of their research sites relationally and dynamically, and not in terms of enduring difference from a purported mainstream.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0018","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Political Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Ajantha","family":"Subramanian","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Political Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:32:10Z","timestamp":1632425530000},"score":13.28322,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0018.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0018","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,9,13]],"date-time":"2024-09-13T18:09:29Z","timestamp":1726250969862},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Emotions have always appeared in anthropological monographs\u2014in the study of kinship or ritual, for example\u2014but for a long time they were either taken for granted or judged to be beyond the scope of the discipline. They became an object of study in their own right only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the development of various branches of psychological anthropology. Many debates have focused on the possibility of studying the inner states of others, and even of endorsing the Western definition of emotion as an inner state. The 1980s were marked by reflections on native concepts of emotion, and by the radical decision made by some anthropologists to locate emotion in discourse and to repudiate psychological concerns. This period was also marked by major developments in linguistic anthropology, which threw light on the embedding of affect in language, beyond the gloss of emotion words. In a way, the label \u201canthropology of emotion\u201d refers to a specific moment in the history of the discipline, although anthropologists are still as interested as ever in the topic. Later research in the field has faced two main challenges, which are still relevant today. On the one hand, how is it possible to avoid reducing emotion to emotion talk while also taking seriously the methodological and epistemological critique that led to the discursive turn? On the other hand, how can we grasp variations in affective intensity, which can be a property of things or situations, while not dismissing earlier research on specific emotions such as anger or grief, nor the definition of emotions as discrete events in the flow of affective life?<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0161","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2016,11,28]],"date-time":"2016-11-28T09:20:43Z","timestamp":1480324843000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Anthropology of Emotion"],"prefix":"10.1093","member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2016,11,28]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology of Emotion"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2022,8,22]],"date-time":"2022-08-22T10:55:36Z","timestamp":1661165736000},"score":13.275735,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0161.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2016,11,28]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0161","published":{"date-parts":[[2016,11,28]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:25:14Z","timestamp":1715293514335},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Psychological anthropology is the study of psychological topics using anthropological concepts and methods. Among the areas of interest are personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory, consciousness, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and mental health. Considered thus, hardly a topic in the anthropological mainstream does not offer grist for the analytical mill. Like economic or political anthropology, psychological anthropology can be seen as a perspective on the social as well as being a subfield of the broader discipline. The overlap in subject matter with the related discipline of psychology is obvious, but the approach, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and comparativism, is usually quite different. Moreover, as a reflexive endeavor, psychological anthropology shines a light not only on the cultural vehicles of thought (language, symbolism, the body) but also on the concepts we use to think about those means. Psychological anthropologists are concerned, for example, not merely with emotional practices in diverse cultures (what angers people? how do they express it?), but in the shape and cross-cultural validity of the concept of emotion. To the ethnographic question, \u201cHow do the Nuaulu classify animals?\u201d they add, \u201cHow is their classification structured and what does that structure reveal about broader processes of cognition?\u201d Some of the basic categories of psychology\u2014self, mind, emotion\u2014turn out, in cross-cultural perspective, to be less self-evident, less transparently objective than expected. While rough equivalents can often be found in other linguistic traditions, the scholar soon finds that English (or French or Malay) is not a neutral inventory of psychological universals. Comparison can be corrosive of confidence. And perhaps more than in other subfields, in psychological anthropology there is a full spectrum from the hard scientific to the soft interpretive. Indeed, a divergence between a scientific, positivist psychology\u2014confident in its categories and methods, bent on universals\u2014and a relativist, meaning-oriented, often doubt-ridden constructionism is one of the productive tensions that animate inquiry. Until recently, the subfield has fared very differently on either side of the Atlantic. With some exceptions, anthropologists in Britain and France until at least the 1960s pursued strongly sociological or structuralist agendas unsympathetic to psychological anthropology. American anthropologists, with their broader conception of culture and interest in individual experience, led the way with culture and personality studies, a diverse body of work that has a recent reinvention in person-centered anthropology. Parallel endeavors in psychoanalytic anthropology and cognitive anthropology drew on different intellectual traditions. These complementary, sometimes rival, approaches span and crosscut in surprising ways the scientific-humanistic division that characterizes anthropology generally. Psychiatric anthropology has, from the beginning, formed an important strand of psychological anthropology besides having some overlap with medical anthropology.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0124","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2013,7,29]],"date-time":"2013-07-29T20:01:36Z","timestamp":1375128096000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Psychological Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Andrew","family":"Beatty","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Psychological Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:20:19Z","timestamp":1632424819000},"score":13.25231,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0124.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0124","published":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:48Z","timestamp":1715293488902},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Feminist anthropology is simultaneously a critique of male as well as Euro-centered and biased anthropology; a historical moment that marks the development of theoretical frames through which different ways of knowing are produced; and a vast body of literature through which dynamic conversations are situated that engage questions around gender, race, sexuality, ability, and class among much more. Discussions of the sort that follow are necessarily partial and thus perspectival; consequently, the genealogy presented, with few exceptions, focuses primarily on the work of U.S. or U.S.-based feminist theorists\/anthropologists, with an emphasis on cultural anthropologists. Feminist anthropology emerged in response to the recognition that across the subdisciplines, anthropology operated within andocentric paradigms. Early questions ranged from identifying women in the anthropological record to explaining universal female subordination. Although many of the questions that fuel research interests have changed, underlying concerns with understanding the operation of power in various contexts continue to animate feminist anthropological research. Different understandings of the relationships between gender and sex, or between race and culture, for instance, alter more questions that can even be imagined. Thinking about the ways each of us is positioned in relation to various privileges and penalties centers the importance of intersectionality both as theoretical frame and as methodology. Concern with the difference that difference makes; how it is constructed, performed, and reproduced; and the role of heteronormativity in the framing of questions as well as in our analyses are a few examples of questions that continue to invigorate discussions among feminist anthropologists. Feminist anthropology has had and continues to have productive theoretical exchanges with a variety of feminist theories, such as Third World and postcolonial feminisms. Critiques by feminists of color and lesbians have also been crucial to grounding theories that are used by feminist anthropologists. Although the specifics of the questions have changed as feminist anthropology has evolved, at the core several key elements remain: What is the role of power in the construction of a variety of gendered\/raced\/sexed\/classed identities? What do these mean for how people (re)produce meanings in their daily lives? How can we, as anthropologists, and specifically as feminist anthropologists, begin to understand these constructions and our role in their production? Feminist anthropology is often seen as the domain of cultural anthropologists, yet important work has also been done by feminist archeologists and biological anthropologists.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0007","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Feminist Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Lisa","family":"Anderson-Levy","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Feminist Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:23:07Z","timestamp":1632424987000},"score":13.229146,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0007.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0007","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:51Z","timestamp":1715293491704},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Legal practices, processes, and claims are among the most powerful forces that shape our lives. Legal anthropology has historically tried to understand the relationship between legal processes and other aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political life as well as the meanings and implications of legal practices on their own terms. It is arguable that, at its 19th-century origins, anthropology was the product of legal concerns, as scholars tried to understand what made 19th-century Europe and North America seemingly so different from other times and other places. For many of these scholars, law was a key point of difference. Yet, much anthropology in the 20th century implicitly challenged such rigid and implicitly evolutionary distinctions. In particular, anthropologists tried to show how other cultures had \u201clawlike\u201d institutions that were as complex and reasonable as those of Western law. In the mid-20th century, in the search for lawlike processes, anthropology settled on disputes as the basic unit of comparison. This move saw a relative decline in wider interest in legal anthropology, as the analysis tended to produce endless studies of small-scale decision making. In the late 1980s, however, a general resurgence in legal anthropology occurred. This was marked, in large measure, by a shift from studying processes that seemed lawlike to a focus on self-consciously legal procedures. That shift can broadly be understand as a move from legal anthropology to the anthropology of law, in which the object of study is those institutions, processes, and concepts that have their roots in (but are not limited to) \u201cWestern liberal law.\u201d Anthropologists have therefore increasingly turned their attention to issues such as human rights, property, and citizenship. This, of course, has not ruled out the analysis of alternative legal orders\u2014for example, what is taken to be Islamic law\u2014but these are not usually studied as isolated cultural processes.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0049","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Legal Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Tobias","family":"Kelly","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Legal Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:29:31Z","timestamp":1632425371000},"score":13.22839,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0049.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0049","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,22]],"date-time":"2024-11-22T05:05:56Z","timestamp":1732251956469,"version":"3.28.0"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Corruption has become an essential rationale for explaining failures of governance and development, particularly for countries outside of Europe and North America. Wherever societies fail to thrive, politically or economically, politicians and policy analysts summon the notion of corruption to explain why. Corruption is cited as a central contributor to poverty, inequality, lawlessness, ethnic factionalism, weak institutions, and military coups. In countries throughout the world, the news media is dominated by sensational investigative stories exposing bribery, extortion, and embezzlement among elites and government officials. In popular culture and everyday conversations, citizens in these countries express profound dissatisfaction with the frustrations of corrupt processes and crooked officials. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the study of corruption has been dominated by the discipline of political science. Using normative models, political scientists categorize distinctive forms of corruption, document consequences, and diagnose causes, suggesting possible solutions. Following this path, scholars from other social-scientific disciplines, such as economics, area studies, international development, and public policy, similarly approach corruption as a kind of scholarly mystery, looking for clues and correlations in data sets and comparative case studies. The central aim of this scholarship is to find some key culprit that might explain why some societies suffer so much corruption and how they\/we might put a stop to it. Anthropologists frequently become fascinated by the public fascinations of the people around them\u2014that is, while conducting immersive, long-term fieldwork on one topic, an anthropologist may realize that people in the surrounding society are much more interested in something else. As preoccupation with corruption has surged in local, national, and global discourses throughout the neoliberal period, a growing number of anthropologists have turned their scholarly attention to the ubiquitous discourses of corruption, exploring the multiple meanings and uses of the concept. The disciplinary commitment to holism motivates anthropologists to explore how the discourses and practices of corruption intersect with other sociocultural realms, including morality, kinship, politics, the state, and economic processes. Relativism encourages anthropologists to set aside condemnations of corruption to explore alternative ways of understanding the actors, practices, and institutions deemed corrupt. In contrast to the normative scholarship from political science and other disciplines, the anthropology of corruption avoids the diagnostic approach of causes and consequences, aiming instead at exploring corruption as a cultural predicament, a complex and elusive problem that seems to defy solution. This bibliography focuses on recent work in the anthropology of corruption, particularly scholarship published over the past decade or so. While several general overviews already trace the anthropology of corruption from the 1990s into the 2010s, the explosion of scholarship since the early 2010s calls for an updated synthesis highlighting new perspectives and arguments. Exceptions are made for earlier works that are particularly seminal or unusual.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0292","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,21]],"date-time":"2024-11-21T04:14:54Z","timestamp":1732162494000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Anthropology of Corruption"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Jennifer","family":"Hasty","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,22]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology of Corruption"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,21]],"date-time":"2024-11-21T04:14:55Z","timestamp":1732162495000},"score":13.209623,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0292.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,22]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0292","published":{"date-parts":[[2024,11,22]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,5]],"date-time":"2026-03-05T18:47:38Z","timestamp":1772736458863,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Anthropology has long had a love-hate relationship to liberalism. As the disciplinary proponents of other cultures\u2019 dignity, anthropologists laid the groundwork for multiculturalism and affirmed a pluralist public sphere. On the other hand, ethnographic translations of other cultures are implicitly written in defiance of their readership\u2019s liberal \u201ccommonsense,\u201d e.g., the presumed universality of the self-maximizing individual (homo economicus). Inspired by either perspective, anthropologists constituted their field as the study of all that is illiberal \u201cout there\u201d in the world. When they found among their ethnographic subjects those who talked a liberal game, they probably tried to ignore them, much as they did the missionaries (or native converts) whose Christianity placed them outside the frame of \u201ctraditional culture.\u201d Liberalism became an object of anthropological study only after the unit of ethnographic analysis shifted (during the 1980s) from that of the bounded cultural group to that of the globally intertwined locus (with the concomitant advent of \u201cstudying up\u201d in the developed world). Around the same time, a new theoretical armature came to such studies from Michel Foucault\u2019s later lectures on \u201cgovernmentality,\u201d in which he exposed individual freedom\u2019s complicity with projects of rule. And there was a third influence: the sea changes of globalization associated with the diminution of Keynesian welfare states, the loosening of regulations on capital flows, and the ascendancy of market fundamentalism signaled the rebirth of an economic liberalism\u2014\u201cneoliberalism\u201d\u2014that altered many ethnographic landscapes. Indeed, it is a disciplinary irony that interest in neoliberal generally preceded interest in liberalism. And yet the irony makes sense in light of the increasingly visible contradiction between the deepening of market-driven inequalities and the continued hegemony of classical liberalism\u2019s premises (rationality, universalism, progress, etc.). In the early 21st century, the anthropology of liberalism falls between two ideal types. Comprising one type are the relatively few inquiries for which liberalism is the central object of study, those presented under the headings \u201clate liberalism\u201d and \u201cthe liberal subject.\u201d Comprising the second type are those lines of inquiry\u2014\u201chumanitarianism,\u201d \u201csecularism,\u201d \u201chuman rights,\u201d \u201ccivil society and the public sphere,\u201d \u201ccitizenship,\u201d \u201cdemocracy,\u201d \u201cmulticulturalism,\u201d and \u201cgovernmentality\u201d\u2014in which liberalism figures as one among other key analytics. Within these literatures, one finds more or less attention to liberalism per se. At times, it appears to be only the philosophical or historical backdrop to the ethnographic frame, while at others, liberalism\u2019s diaspora and contradictions are named as the most salient precipitate of the social activity under description. In sum, anthropology, proceeding on a number of fronts (and not always in coordination), has begun to ambush liberalism as a belated object of study.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0216","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,26]],"date-time":"2019-04-26T07:35:21Z","timestamp":1556264121000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Anthropology of Liberalism"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Aaron","family":"Ansell","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology of Liberalism"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:20:17Z","timestamp":1632424817000},"score":13.160503,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0216.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0216","published":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,21]],"date-time":"2025-08-21T17:10:26Z","timestamp":1755796226466,"version":"3.44.0"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"9780199766567"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Originally from the Greek \u201cnostos\u201d (home, return) and \u201calgos\u201d (sorrow, pain), 17th-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer first applied the term \u201cnostalgia\u201d to Swiss soldiers fighting outside their homeland in Europe. He saw their intense longing for home as a form of bodily suffering that could be cured through medicine. Over time, nostalgia migrated from the body to the mind, becoming a psychological experience rather than a physical ailment. In recent decades, anthropologists have taken up the concept and applied it to social and cultural settings. But what is nostalgia, and how is it distinct from other forms of remembering? Why does it matter for the study of anthropology? How is anthropology itself, as a discipline, dependent on nostalgic renderings of the past? How do carefully curated versions of the past reflect on cultural and social realities? How much of nostalgia is universal, and how much is culturally specific? What methodological challenges does nostalgia pose for ethnographers? Nostalgia raises these and other important questions for anthropologists, as it is a phenomenon both intimately familiar to all and yet distinctly set in a particular time and place. Instead of a transparent window into history, nostalgia paints a portrait of the past that is preferable and puts it into dialogue with an often unsatisfactory or deeply disappointing present. In this way, nostalgia has just as much to teach anthropologists about societal histories as it does about societal presents. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Philosophy article Memory.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0316","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,18]],"date-time":"2025-08-18T05:12:23Z","timestamp":1755493943000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Anthropology of Nostalgia"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Amber","family":"Reed","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,19]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology of Nostalgia"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,18]],"date-time":"2025-08-18T05:12:23Z","timestamp":1755493943000},"score":13.154645,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0316.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,19]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0316","published":{"date-parts":[[2025,8,19]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:41Z","timestamp":1715293481579},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
As a term and a subject area, applied anthropology refers to that broad array of research, methods, and outcomes developed and used for the explicit purpose of recognizing, understanding, and addressing human problems. It has been described both as the fifth field of anthropology and as the bridging discipline since the application of research and knowledge to social problems cross-cuts all fields of anthropology. Some view applied anthropology narrowly, in terms of work conducted outside of university settings that is typically defined and produced under some form of contractual relationship, with services and resulting products used in some sort of problem-solving way. In this usage, applied anthropologists work to resolve problems, often in technocratic contexts, with theoretically informed praxis that generates and refines methodologies though rarely contributes toward the production of theory. For others, applied anthropology has broader meaning and refers to the varied uses of anthropology in public and private settings, including academia, where the primary objective involves problem-focused concerns. In this usage all forms of anthropological endeavor have social meaning and an applied dimension. Both the varied meanings of term and the varied outcomes of endeavor reflect the political economic conditions, social contexts, and identity politics within the discipline as it has been practiced over the past century, especially in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Classification and restricted access agreements imposed by research sponsors (governments, other international institutions, and corporations), limited peer review, publication and distribution of grey literature reports, and the membership-restricted publication of flagship journals historically reinforced the boundaries between university-based anthropologists and applied practitioners. With the advent of the web, library scanning projects, changes in information disclosure laws, the ease of uploading the collected works of various journals, newsletters, and magazines to the web, and the increased sophistication and use of web-based translation, access to the collective works in applied anthropology has never been greater. Increasingly, the distinction between applied and four-field anthropology has relatively less meaning as anthropologists are engaged as disciplinary and public actors in a wide array of scholarly, practical, and advocacy endeavors. Globally, anthropological work involves and is celebrated for its combined theoretical, applied, and practical contributions to society.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0002","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Applied Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Barbara Rose","family":"Johnston","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Applied Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:29:41Z","timestamp":1632425381000},"score":13.152965,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0002.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0002","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,12]],"date-time":"2025-09-12T18:40:39Z","timestamp":1757702439342},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Economic anthropology emerged in the twentieth century at the interface between sociocultural anthropology (commonly known as ethnology in earlier times, hereafter anthropology) and economics (in earlier nomenclature commonly political economy). The latter is nowadays predominantly a universalizing discipline, theorizing deductively on the basis of maximizing individuals and firms. By contrast, anthropologists tend to work inductively from their particular ethnographic cases. Many are suspicious of generalizing the modern concept of \u201cthe economy\u201d because it is not easy to demarcate; ways of procuring material livelihood are always embedded in larger contexts of immaterial values and practices that cannot be reduced to a utilitarian calculus. Such scholars may not recognize this subfield at all, or they may argue instead that every aspect of life has an economic aspect and that studies of this aspect should be dispersed across the other bibliographies of this series, rather than be brought together in one place (thus the economic ethic of world religions would be covered under religion, the importance of the family for small businesses under household and kinship, etc.). However, some anthropologists have sympathized with the universalist camp. They hold that the axioms of mainstream economics, increasingly shaped by work in fields such as evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, are applicable to all societies in time and space. Meanwhile, economics too varies in time and space. Heterodox practitioners have taken an interest in anthropological ideas in fields such as consumption and even in theories of ritual and symbols, where they may converge with anthropological approaches. In short, a significant body of literature has developed at this interface, but it remains decidedly fuzzy. To restrict consideration to scholars who self-identify as economic anthropologists would be too narrow. Practitioners who prioritize the cultural ordering of social life prefer the nomenclature anthropological economics. On the other hand, not every adaptation of the word economy (as in representational economy, occult economy, etc.) is relevant to our purposes. Not every ethnographic investigation of \u201ceconomic culture\u201d or social change can be considered a contribution to economic anthropology. Broad definitions of economic anthropology would include topics such as applied anthropology, business studies, comparative economic systems, development, environmental anthropology (subsuming ecology), climate change and the Anthropocene, and so on, but these subjects are not covered extensively here (some are the subjects of separate OBO articles). This article proceeds via pragmatic compromises, including a balancing of classical studies from the past with samples and overviews of contemporary trends. It is structured by the standard terms of economics, although recent anthropological investigations of global capitalism show a renewed holistic ambition. Whether economists will take any notice is another matter. The author of this article wishes to thank James G. Carrier, Stephen Gudeman, Keith Hart, Andrew Sanchez, Mih\u00e1ly S\u00e1rk\u00e1ny, and two anonymous referees.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0040","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2013,7,29]],"date-time":"2013-07-29T20:01:36Z","timestamp":1375128096000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Economic Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Chris","family":"Hann","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Andrew","family":"Sanchez","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2013,3,19]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Economic Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,6,23]],"date-time":"2023-06-23T04:24:32Z","timestamp":1687494272000},"score":13.136448,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0040.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2013,3,19]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0040","published":{"date-parts":[[2013,3,19]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:26:14Z","timestamp":1715293574512},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Mathematical anthropology has as its raison d\u2019\u00eatre formally expressing models, ideas, and concepts developed by anthropologists so as to extend our understanding of human societies. When addressing cultural systems, the mathematical content of mathematical anthropology depends on which of two possible ways culture is understood to be constituted. One way considers culture to consist mainly of socially learned and transmitted behaviors, and the other way considers culture to be composed of shared idea systems that provide the framework through which behavior is formulated and articulated. The first way leads to statistical modeling of behavior patterns measured over an aggregate and to quantitative and descriptive accounts of cultural system revealed through patterns of behavior. The second way involves mathematical representations aimed at working out the structural organization and generative logic of cultural idea systems. Mathematical anthropology, as it is considered here, relates to culture in this latter sense, and thus involves using mathematical representations as a way to express and work out the structural implications of the concepts forming the cultural idea systems making up the cultural milieu of a group.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0215","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,26]],"date-time":"2019-04-26T07:32:57Z","timestamp":1556263977000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Mathematical Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Dwight W.","family":"Read","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Mathematical Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:20:27Z","timestamp":1632424827000},"score":13.1177,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0215.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0215","published":{"date-parts":[[2019,4,24]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:25:01Z","timestamp":1715293501680},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Visual anthropology can be broadly understood as the anthropological study of the visual and the visual study of the anthropological. However, for much of its history, the term has been associated almost exclusively with ethnographic film (see Ethnographic Film) and it is only in more recent decades that a broader consideration of other visual forms and visuality itself have come under the subdiscipline\u2019s purview. Since the early twenty-first century, the boundaries have expanded further, partly through changes in technology (expensive celluloid film technology giving way to cheap high-quality video and digital processes, the rise of the Internet) but more through changes in theory and the opening up of new lines of intellectual inquiry. As with many other subdisciplines within the field of anthropology, many visual anthropologists would claim that they are simply anthropologists\u2014with the same interests in kinship, politics, the economy, aesthetics, materiality, religion, and so forth as their colleagues\u2014but with special attention paid to the visual and visible manifestations of those areas of human activity and creativity. The subdiscipline overlaps strongly with the anthropology of art and with the anthropology of material culture as well as with other disciplines such as media studies, film studies, and photographic history; in recent years, the field has also overlapped with action anthropology and other applied work coming out of development studies, and the rise of the Internet has given a new forum for the storage, study, and dissemination of images. There is no equivalent subdiscipline in the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology and primatology, though scholars in these fields do of course use photography and film or video for purposes of documentation (archaeology, forensic anthropology) and recording observations (primatology); interpretative approaches in archaeology, for example in the study of rock art, may draw upon approaches from visual anthropology as well as from the anthropology of art and the anthropology of material culture.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0028","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Visual Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Chihab","family":"El Khachab","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Marcus","family":"Banks","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Visual Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,2,20]],"date-time":"2023-02-20T06:25:38Z","timestamp":1676874338000},"score":13.07032,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0028.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0028","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,4,16]],"date-time":"2025-04-16T13:27:52Z","timestamp":1744810072513},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Digital anthropology is an established and growing field focused on the Internet-related transformations that make possible a whole array of new social phenomena. Research in this exciting domain provides valuable perspectives regarding the relationship between digital communications technology and cultural practice, revealing new configurations of labor and capital, reinscriptions of hegemonic power, and novel experimentations with self-making and relationality. \u201cDigital anthropology\u201d is in conversation with other fields, including media anthropology, science and technology studies, sociology, art history, communications, design, media studies, and black studies. Digital anthropology, as such, is profoundly interdisciplinary. Indeed, many of the scholars cited here would not describe themselves as digital anthropologists, nor would they always be seen as such by others. This article is an updated version of Tom Boellstorff\u2019s original article, published in 2013. The goal is to provide an examination of some key themes that broadly fall under the remit of digital anthropology. This version offers a \u201crefresh\u201d and slight remix of the sections that Boellstorff developed in the first version. Each section included in this bibliographic entry is not exhaustive. The listing of topics are heuristic and many of the cited works could have appeared under multiple headings. The citations included emphasize ethnographic research and relevant anthropological theory and, as such, the article does not include primarily quantitative, literary, historical, or philosophical scholarship. While early digital anthropological work focused on Euro-Western locations, more recent work has engaged with digital life, worlds, and cultural practices in the Global South and between geographic locations. This updated entry reflects this shift. In an era where \u201cbig data\u201d can make quantitative methods appear to have a privileged vantage, digital anthropological research can offer simultaneously detailed and expansive studies with an attention to novel and consequential logics of digital communication technologies in relation to selfhood, power, and capital.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0087","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2013,7,29]],"date-time":"2013-07-29T20:01:36Z","timestamp":1375128096000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":6,"title":["Digital Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Tom","family":"Boellstorff","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Ethiraj Gabriel","family":"Dattatreyan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Digital Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,5,23]],"date-time":"2023-05-23T12:36:23Z","timestamp":1684845383000},"score":13.065443,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0087.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0087","published":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,25]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:58Z","timestamp":1715293498615},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
The field of museum anthropology predates the institutionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in universities. The formation of collections from as early as the 17th century spurred the study of the cultures that produced the objects destined for display. Early on, anthropology collections were integrated either into national museums (e.g., the British Museum), museums of \u201cfolk culture,\u201d or, especially in the United States, natural history museums. The first major anthropology and archaeology museum was the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, founded in 1866. Eventually, the collections became the foundation for research and documentation of the lifeways, material circumstances, and human ecology of diverse cultures. For more than a century, anthropologists situated in museums curated the collections by documenting them through catalogues and publications and by creating public displays. However, after the 1970s, museum anthropology became more research oriented, moving beyond collections-based documentation to an emphasis on field research. Simultaneously, it became more difficult to acquire objects because of diminishing resources and international and national policies on cultural patrimony. In the 1980s, a growing critique of the representation of cultures began to emerge from outside the museum walls. The critiques concerned the ahistorical, evolutionary-oriented display of non-European cultures, and the lack of inclusion of \u201cfirst voice\u201d (the perspective of the peoples themselves). The authority of the curator was questioned, as were the colonialist perspectives that museum displays embodied. Critiques came from academically situated scholars as well as from the communities whose cultures were represented in museum displays. The response from within the museum has been transformative. Curators developed new forms of representation, more attuned to contemporary theory, and they began to collaborate with communities to include their perspectives. Studies of material culture and human ecology continue to dominate museum anthropology, but they are very diverse and cover a huge geographical terrain. Interest has also revived in material-culture studies outside of museums, and we have included some sampling of this work here. Museum-based education programs and publications oriented toward the general public cover the classic four fields of anthropology. Museums of specific cultural groups or heritage-based museums may not always include anthropologists on staff; however, their work represents an important contribution to the understanding of the role of culture and ethnicity in social life. \u201cEco-museums,\u201d museums dedicated to a single place or a single cultural heritage, represent an important trend of this kind.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0053","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Museum Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Alaka","family":"Wali","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Rosa","family":"Cabrera","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Jennifer","family":"Anderson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Museum Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:36:13Z","timestamp":1632425773000},"score":13.039887,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0053.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0053","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:27:24Z","timestamp":1715293644922},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
The field of anthropology and education, also referred to as educational anthropology, was formally organized in the mid-twentieth century, with primary research interests at the time in infant and childhood socialization as this took place in everyday life in families in non-Western, smaller-scale societies. This focus on early enculturation was informed by the cultural relativist perspective of Franz Boas in American anthropology and its assumption that everyone learns to be human, and by the psychodynamic perspective of Sigmund Freud and its assumption that early childhood learning is what is most consequential for later development. The key contribution of anthropology was the notion that education, broadly conceived, is culturally shaped, and that parallels and differences exist in educative processes across cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts. In subsequent years, research interests broadened to consider teaching and learning of cultural practices across the life span and in myriad societies, including socialization in and across global immigrant flows and in a wide array of interactional environments in and out of schools. Educational anthropology is characterized by its interdisciplinarity and the diversity of topics, sociocultural settings, and education processes it investigates. To capture this complexity and the trajectory of scholarship over more than one hundred years of its development, some sections of this article are divided into Early Works\u2014publications prior to the mid-1990s\u2014and Contemporary Works that have shaped the field from the late twentieth century to the present. As a consequence, the entire bibliography presents a history of the field as it has evolved across disciplines, topics, and research settings, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the countries of the European Union. In selecting entries, emphasis is given to books and monographs, but seminal book chapters and journal articles that are particularly useful for research and course readings are also included. While entries are divided into categories based on their salience to particular strands of scholarship, a great deal of overlap is found among the categories. Finally, entries are limited to those published in English, which, as noted in Anderson-Levitt 2012 (cited under General Overviews: Contemporary Works), disguises the \u201cvoluminous but less visible\u201d educational-anthropological scholarship published in other languages. Readers are referred to the global guide in Anderson-Levitt\u2019s 2012 for publications in languages representative of the diverse regions of the world in which educational anthropologists conduct research.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0280","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,11]],"date-time":"2023-01-11T02:47:30Z","timestamp":1673405250000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Anthropology and Education"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Teresa","family":"McCarty","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Frederick","family":"Erickson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,12]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology and Education"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,11]],"date-time":"2023-01-11T02:47:31Z","timestamp":1673405251000},"score":13.010608,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0280.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,12]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0280","published":{"date-parts":[[2023,1,12]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:58Z","timestamp":1715293498854},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Although anthropologists have long addressed topics related to media and communications technologies, some have argued that a truly institutionalized commitment to the anthropology of media has only developed within the past twenty years. This might be due, at least in part, to a traditional disciplinary emphasis on \u201cprimitive\u201d communities lacking the ostensible features of modernity, including electronic forms of mass mediation. Thick description, a central aim of ethnography as touted by Clifford Geertz, was historically geared toward small-scale societies and precluded the study of contemporary forms of mass media in modern life. However, anthropologists have begun to develop productive ways of including mass mediation into their ethnographic accounts. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to talk about cultural practices at all without some nod to the ubiquity of global media. From an anthropological perspective, it is important to consider varying cultural contexts of mass-media production, consumption, and interpretation. And this begs a question that several anthropologists have begun to answer. What is the most appropriate way to study \u201cthe media\u201d as a cultural phenomenon? Content analyses of media texts? The measuring and identifying of media\u2019s social effects and influence? Ethnographic studies of \u201creception\u201d and \u201cproduction\u201d? Or something else entirely? Anthropologists engage in all of these and more. Additionally, new questions are emerging about how anthropology might best address digital media and online communities. There are multiple ways in which anthropologists have engaged with \u201cthe media\u201d both as a tool of representation and an object of study. To outline some of those ways, it makes sense to provide a history of developments in the field, summarizing several thematic topics that have recently been of central focus to anthropologists of media, including religion, globalization, and nationalism. It also makes sense to think about approaches to studying mass media that other disciplines deploy\u2014disciplines that are in conversation with anthropologists on this subject, including and especially media studies, communications studies, and cultural studies. The categorical divisions here attempt to reflect anthropology\u2019s historical commitments to various analytical, thematic, and medium-based modes of inquiry.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0015","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Media Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Rebecca","family":"Pardo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Elizabeth","family":"ErkenBrack","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"John L.","family":"Jackson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Media Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,9,23]],"date-time":"2021-09-23T19:35:52Z","timestamp":1632425752000},"score":12.970665,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/view\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0015.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0015","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,22]],"date-time":"2025-10-22T22:17:08Z","timestamp":1761171428822,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
The statement \u201cthere is nothing \u2018natural\u2019 about disasters\u201d has achieved foundational status in disaster studies, as noted in Roberto E. Barrios\u2019s 2017 Annual Review of Anthropology article, \u201cWhat Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom?\u201d By re-embedding catastrophes in their social contexts, anthropologists throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century have asked, What constitutes a disaster? And what are the socio-environmental geographies that give rise to, and are shaped by, these events? This framing has allowed scholars to move away from the seeming \u201ceventedness\u201d of disasters, toward distinctively anthropological approaches that examine how catastrophes emerge from and reshape temporalities, technologies, political formations, economic systems, and human-environment relations. This article focuses primarily on the anthropology of disasters, while drawing from the broader interdisciplinary field of disaster studies. Following a view into important works that ground disaster\u2019s multiplicities, the bibliography surveys the vulnerabilities framework. The vulnerabilities framework widened the aperture for social analysis to consider preexisting and enduring inequities that shape disaster outcomes. It gave rise to an important research agenda spotlighting what we might call \u201cdesigned disasters,\u201d where the conditions of possibility for catastrophe are engineered out of imperial, racial, and gendered projects of domination and violence. Drawing on biopolitical and postcolonial theories, this scholarship reveals how disasters are not aberrations, but rather predictable outcomes of systems designed to concentrate risk among marginalized populations while insulating others. While emphasizing ethnographic approaches, this article also highlights international scholarship that has been particularly influential within anthropological circles. This understanding of disasters as designed systems leads this article to consider ethnographic scholarship in the field of science and technology studies (STS) focused on disaster science itself. These projects, which have shaped our understanding of disasters over the last two decades, explore regimes of governance, projects of calculation, language\/knowledge systems in fields such as engineering, disaster finance, and technopolitics. Many of these anthropologists would not classify themselves as disaster experts per se. However, their ethnographic research reveals how disasters are constituted through scale-making projects within wider planetary environments marked by ecological crisis, positioning anthropology of disaster at the forefront of disciplinary innovation. A social justice and applied agenda has remained central to the anthropology of disasters, including both early works exploring the social effects of catastrophes as well as contemporary research on disaster vulnerabilities. Building on this long tradition of contributing to applied research and policy around disaster risk management, the final section reviews public-facing work that communicates anthropology of disasters to wider publics beyond technocrats and policymakers. Most notably, this includes graphic ethnographies that leverage sequential art (i.e., comics) to interrogate the complex spatiotemporal dimensions of disasters in ways that make anthropological analysis accessible to broader publics.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0317","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,22]],"date-time":"2025-10-22T03:50:11Z","timestamp":1761105011000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Anthropology of Disasters"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Caroline E.","family":"Schuster","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Chitra","family":"V.","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,23]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Anthropology of Disasters"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,22]],"date-time":"2025-10-22T03:50:12Z","timestamp":1761105012000},"score":12.9026575,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0317.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,23]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0317","published":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,23]]}},{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2024,5,9]],"date-time":"2024-05-09T22:24:43Z","timestamp":1715293483414},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Oxford University Press","isbn-type":[{"value":"9780199766567","type":"electronic"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"abstract":"
Business refers to an institutional field comprised of privately and publicly owned firms, public organizational entities (e.g., regulatory bodies), and other actors (e.g., consumers) that engage in market-oriented interactions resulting in mutual influence. In the broadest sense, business anthropology encompasses inquiry or practice related to some aspect of the business domain that is grounded in anthropological epistemology, methodology, or substantive knowledge. In the early twentieth century, anthropology, as a discipline, was encouraged by American business interests to develop as an empirically based social science that could provide a scientific basis for social welfare. Partially as a result of this influence, anthropologists\u2019 research and problem-solving interests in the business domain focused primarily on manufacturing productivity and the contexts of economic growth, and they were shaped by the traditions of other disciplines, such as industrial psychology, through the Human Relations School, a theory of organizational management. After World War II, anthropological research on industry became more independent intellectually and fragmented into several streams of literature, including neo-Marxian approaches and studies of industrialization in non-Western societies. Since the end of the Cold War, anthropological studies of business have been reinvigorated, as increasing numbers of academic anthropologists have acknowledged the marketplace and its attendant activities as worthy subjects of study. At the same time, anthropological epistemology and methods have been assimilated into corporate venues as more anthropologists engage in research or become practitioners in the private sector, stimulating self-reflection on the discipline\u2019s relationship with business. As a result, the field has become increasingly complex, with linkages to several other disciplines and traditions. Another consequence is that anthropological perspectives gradually have shifted from the mid-twentieth century view of business as an external and potentially hostile \u201cother\u201d to more varied and nuanced views, including the perspective that business is a field in which anthropologists may hold engaged positions. Because of this evolving situation, the worlds of business are recognized as deserving of our understanding, interpretation, and critical assessment; yet, this dawning awareness brings its own quandaries with respect to positionality and ethics. Accordingly, items have been selected for inclusion here on the basis of three criteria: understanding the context for the historical development of business anthropology as one of the institutional anthropologies; gaining an overview and an in-depth perspective on the major dimensions of the field; and\/or providing access to literature reflecting empirical research, practice, and\/or theoretical and critical reflection in relation to the business domain.<\/p>","DOI":"10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0033","type":"reference-entry","created":{"date-parts":[[2012,2,14]],"date-time":"2012-02-14T18:17:05Z","timestamp":1329243425000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Business Anthropology"],"prefix":"10.1093","author":[{"given":"Marietta L.","family":"Baba","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Christine","family":"Heyes LaBond","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Emily","family":"Altimare","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"286","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"container-title":["Anthropology"],"original-title":["Business Anthropology"],"language":"en","deposited":{"date-parts":[[2023,2,20]],"date-time":"2023-02-20T06:23:55Z","timestamp":1676874235000},"score":12.87918,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/oxfordbibliographies.com\/display\/document\/obo-9780199766567\/obo-9780199766567-0033.xml"}},"issued":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]},"ISBN":["9780199766567"],"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1093\/obo\/9780199766567-0033","published":{"date-parts":[[2012,1,11]]}}],"items-per-page":20,"query":{"start-index":0,"search-terms":"Anthropology"}}}