8 posts tagged “anthropology”

Debates and ideas about when, from where, and by what route Native American Indians peopled the Americas are often “resolved” within generalized models based on an assumption of north to south expansion processes. Likewise, these generalized models of the peopling of the Americas assume either single or multi-wave pulses of Native American Indians entering North America and migrating internally down through North America or along the Pacific Coast. Recently, however, models focused on Iberian chipped stone similarities and African or Austronesian skeletal similarities have introduced additional, “extra-Beringial,” migration scenarios to the peopling of the Americas debate. As a result, one way to address these competing models is to reconstruct the pattern and progression of population growth of the earliest viable and archaeologically visible populations in the Americas to see which models are supported.

Reconstructing the pattern and progression of the earliest viable Native American Indian populations into the Americas can be accomplished, or at least begun, by comparing the geographical distributions and progressions of archaeological sites with the earliest known accurate and precise radiometric dates. By comparing the geographical and chronological distributions of the earliest known archaeological sites, the directions from which the earliest viable Native American Indian populations came into the continents and how they expanded can begin to be understood. In Archaeological Roots of Human Diversity in the New World: A Compilation of Accurate and Precise Radiocarbon Ages from Earliest Sites, researcher Michael K. Faught has published the results of such a study.

Read more on the First Peopling of the Americas: New Archaeological Evidence Sheds Light here.

The social sciences have experienced a number of rapid and expansive theoretical developments over the course of the last hundred years. From fighting for their existence as an intellectual endeavor within academia and the university during the 19th century, to experiencing a series of popular and wide scale adoptions with such theoretical epistemologies as positivism and behaviorism, the social sciences are currently at an epistemological crossroads. In the aftermath of such powerful critiques as deconstructionism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the Frankfurt School’s singular attack on positivism and the Vienna School, the social sciences are struggling to find their epistemological footing. This is particularly true within the field of anthropology, including its daughter discipline of archaeology, for not only has the theoretical foundations of the discipline been called into question, but the field’s subject matter – its source of data and existence – has also been brought to bear. In an effort to reestablish some form of theoretical footing, the social sciences have begun to open their epistemological doors to cultures and ways of knowing historically allowed to only represent data. In this process, indigenous peoples and their epistemology have played a key role.

Over the past two decades a significant amount of academic energy has been invested in professing the urgent need and essentialness for developing what some have called an indigenous archaeology. Books, essays, and academic conferences have discussed, defined, and designed a multiplicity of paths towards this goal. Very little effort has been expanded, however, in seriously examining the intellectual viability or the social and cultural desirability of this project. In a recent paper entitled Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology Robert McGhee attempts to examine this theoretical endeavor within the field of archaeology.

Read more about indigenous peoples, archaeology, and the development of social science theory here.

There are two contradicting, but broadly held, views and understandings when it comes to the deep history of indigenous Native American Indian peoples in the Great Basin culture region of North America. The predominate one found in archaeology and across much of the social sciences is that today’s indigenous Native American Indians of the Great Basin (the Paiute, Shoshone, Washoe, Ute, Bannock, Kawaiisu, and Chemehuevi) have only resided in the area for a relatively short time; on the order of perhaps 1000 years. The other understanding of Great Basin human history held by the Native Americans and those scientists who look at a slightly different dataset, includes indigenous Native Americans as deeptime participants of the region.

Often argued under the rubric of Lamb’s 1958 Numic hypothesis, these two conflicting views on history have slowly been coming together. As initially argued by Dr. Jones in Respect for the Ancestors: American Indian Cultural Affiliation in the American West, and then Lithic Projectile Points and the Great Basin Region of North America, new archaeological analyses is lending continued support to an emerging understanding. This emerging understanding centers around the idea of cultural transmission: the mechanism by which technological skills, knowledge, and practices are passed from individual to individual and from group to group.

In an attempt to explain the spatial and temporal patterns observed in the archaeological record, such as why a particular artifact is found in one region but not in another region, or why an artifact type differs in shape or size between two sites, the idea of cultural transmission has slowly gained ground. As cultural transmission has been embraced in the Great Basin, the Numic hypothesis has lost what shaky evidence it had to start. In a recent paper entitled The Cultural Transmission of Great Basin Projectile-Point Technology II: An Agent-Based Computer Simulation authors Alex Mesoudi and Michael J. O’Brien lend support to the emerging understanding of Native American deeptime history in the region.

Read more about Native American Indian archaeological history in the Great Basin here.

One of the most important trends to develop in both anthropology and archaeology during the latter half of the 20th century was the inclusion of indigenous peoples into the larger social science discourse (beyond simply being “subjects” or “objects”). In some countries and in some areas of investigation this inclusive process began at an earlier time then in others. For example, in North America the collaborative process between anthropologists and Native Americans began as early as 1941 (Jones and Stapp, 2008). In other places, such as in South America, the process of including indigenous voices and knowledge in social science research and theoretical discussion did not begin until much later. Despite these differences in time, it has generally been acknowledged that including indigenous peoples in the anthropological and archaeological research process has greatly expanded our knowledge base, data sets, and overall understanding of the human condition. A contemporary example of this is the current collaborative process taking place in the Central Andean region of South America between archaeologists and local indigenous people.

In the yungas (hot valleys in Quechuan) of the eastern cordillera Montana along the eastern face of the Central Andes archaeologists are working with indigenous peoples in several endeavors (see the work of Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump for example). The Montana plays a decisive ecological role at both the continental and global scales – forcing the moist easterly air masses of the South Atlantic anticyclone to ascend and release precipitation that feeds the Amazonian drainage with nutrient-rich, sediment-laden water. The Montana provides an important variable for Amazonian rain forest ecology, structure, and distribution and played an important role in the growth of indigenous peoples’ prehistoric complex societies in the lowland Neotropics, as well as contemporary indigenous groups and cultures. But the Montana physiography is not a homogenous slope landscape; it forms a complex mosaic of landforms that house considerable ecological variation principally based on differences in altitude, precipitation level, and slope gradient.

Read more about indigenous peoples and archaeologists collaborating in the Peruvian Amazon here.

One of the most perplexing problems in the field of anthropology over the last hundred years has been the relationship between language and culture. Does language shape culture? Does culture shape language? Further, and perhaps more interesting, does language shape our cognition, effecting the very way that we see the world? Similarly, does culture shape our language in such a way that the very words, concepts, and semantic structures within a language are the direct result of the culture’s physical manifestation? These questions and many others have been the subject of debate within anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and other fields of inquiry for well over a century. Out of this interdisciplinary debate, however, one theory has been of particular interest to all parties – the theory of linguistic relativity.

Developed primarily by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf (Sapir 1949; Whorf 1956), linguistic relativity originally focused on controlled comparisons between contrasting linguistic traditions and related patterns of behavior in a culture, often with an emphasis on the historical impact of cultural categories on the evolution of language. The reason that the theory has been the subject of debate for so long, however, is because of the lack of good, solid evidence to support it. Although anthropologists, indigenous scholars, and a few psychologists have long recognized the deep interconnection between language, culture, and cosmology, in-depth studies of indigenous languages and their grammatical and semantic differences has been lacking. Likewise, comparisons of different indigenous languages across similar cultural patterns has been hard to achieve. Contributing to the debate, and adding much needed data and evidence, is the recent book by Sean O’Neill: Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California.

Read more about Culture contact and language among Native Americans in California here.

The South Central Gond indigenous people live in the forests and hills of India in Maharashatra and Andhra Pradesh, north of the Godavari River. They are essentially concentrated in the Chandrapur, Adilabad, and Garhichiroli districts. The Southeast Gond indigenous people live in the forests and hills of southern India. They are primarily concentrated in the state of Andhra Pradesh, south of the Godavari River and in bordering districts north of the river.

The South Central Gond speak a Central Dravidian language called Adilabad Gondi. Today, The Southeast Gond are bilingual, speaking both their native language, Koi Gondi, and the Telugu language. The Telugu, their bygone rulers and present neighbors, immovably influenced both the South Central and Southeast Gond indigenous peoples.

Read more about the Gond indigenous peoples and deforestation in south India here.

One of the strengths of cultural anthropologists (as opposed to political scientists or mass media researchers) conducting research in the emerging field of media anthropology is that through their deep relationship with a particular place, particular people, and particular media, they are able to more holistically document the visible and audible evidence of cultural production in all of its situated complexity. Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes,in this way creates a comprehensive media ethnography of La Paz, Bolivia, but he also goes beyond geographic constraints to look at the history of media circulation and distribution in the country as its own unique narrative and constitutive cultural process. Himpele performs an ethnographic service to his readers by offering a focused perspective of an emerging indigenous public media sphere, with increasing political consequence, that largely has been unobserved, unnoticed, unanalyzed, unarticulated, and thus unknown. At base this is a superb example of an intimately engaged, meticulously researched longitudinal ethnography.

Read more about Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes here.

Barbara Bower and Barbara Rose Johnston, eds.

2007

On May 2, 2008 the cyclone Nargis crashed into Myanmar, killing an estimated 78,000 people and inundating countless acres of land. A week later, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck Wenchuan County in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. These two events brought the world’s attention to South and Central Asia for a brief moment, shinning for an instant the world’s attention on the plight of the indigenous peoples of this area. Although the media’s focus on the conditions and issues of these peoples was brief, their plights continue. In fact, the condition of many of these indigenous peoples existed long before these two traumatic events. As the book Disappearing Peoples? Indigenous Groups and Ethnic Minorities in South and Central Asiaclearly points out, most of the current issues impacting indigenous peoples in South and Central Asia stem not from natural disasters, but from processes associated with globalization and its sister processes of imperialism and capitalism.

Today, no place is beneath the radar or beyond the reach of the sweeping force of globalization. No part of the planet can escape the impact of the way one set of peoples – typically characterized as being in the “developed” world – use the planet, its resources, and its people to fulfill a cultural mandate of endless growth, using their power and influence to conquer, redeem, and transform the world and its people. The formerly isolated regions of the world are now part of the global mainstream, as illustrated by a quick glance at the headlines in our daily newspapers featuring the issues, problems, and conditions in once-distant lands: Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Kashmir, and Tibet. (p. 9)

Read more about Disappearing Peoples: Indigenous Groups and Ethnic Minorities in South and Central Asia here.