Anthropology

North begins his book by stating that "institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction."(3) That being said North then proposes to examine institutions, changes in them, and their impact on economic performance over time.

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

This remarkable book, which is written in a very graceful, lucid and polemical style, is a symbolic interpretation of the rules of purity and pollution. Mary Douglas shows that to examine what is considered as unclean in any culture is to take a looking-glass approach to the ordered patterning which that culture strives to establish. Such an approach affords a universal understanding of the rules of purity which applies equally to secular and religious life and equally to primitive and modern societies.

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era. Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts." In a substantial new introduction, Escobar reviews debates on globalization and postdevelopment since the book's original publication in 1995 and argues that the concept of postdevelopment needs to be redefined to meet today's significantly new conditions. He then calls for the development of a field of "pluriversal studies," which he illustrates with examples from recent Latin American movements.

Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His most recent book is "Territories of Difference".

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a brief, multidimensional, selfadministered, social support survey that was developed for patients in the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), a two-year study of patients with chronic conditions. This survey was designed to be comprehensive in terms of recent thinking about the various dimensions of social support. In addition, it was designed to be distinct from other related measures. We present a summary of the major conceptual issues considered when choosing items for the social support battery, describe the items, and present findings based on data from 2987 patients (ages 18 and older).

mains are organized according to recurrent principles. However, the principles are difficult to extract from the text as a complete scheme; some readers might have appreciated a diagram or two. However, complaints are dwarfed by Kovecses's achievement: he details a plausible role of metaphor and metonymy in the formation of cognitive models, and he exceeds prior accounts in specifying why the role is indispensable.

Por que fazer a resenha da segunda edição em língua inglesa de um texto publicado pela primeira vez em 1983? De alguma forma a resposta está contida na própria pergunta, pois já se passaram mais de 20 anos e este livro seminal de Johannes Fabian ainda não foi publicado em português! Não que ele não circule nos meios acadêmicos nacionais, mas se mantém restrito a um público necessariamente bilíngüe, quem sabe para que o poder de sua crítica não ameace formações não consolidadas.

It is widely recognized that social relationships and aliation have powerful eects on physical and mental health. When investigators write about the impact of social relationships on health, many terms are used loosely and interchangeably including social networks, social ties and social integration. The aim of this paper is to clarify these terms using a single framework. We discuss: (1) theoretical orientations from diverse disciplines which we believe are fundamental to advancing research in this area; (2) a set of de®nitions accompanied by major assessment tools; and (3) an overarching model which integrates multilevel phenomena.

Building on prior conceptual schemes, this article presents a sociomedical model of disability, called The Disablement Process, that is especially useful for epidemiological and clinical research. The Disablement Process: (1) describes how chronic and acute conditions affect functioning in specific body systems, generic physical and mental actions, and activities of daily life, and (2) describes the persorrel und enuironmenrolfactors that speed or slow disablement, namely, risk factors, interventions, and exacerbators. A main pathway that links Pathology, Impairments, Functional Limitations, and Disability is explicated. Disability is defined as difficulty doing activities in any domain of life (from hygiene to hobbies, errands to sleep) due to a health or physical problem. Feedback effects are included in the model to cover dysfunction spirals (pernicious loops of dysfunction) and secondary conditions (new pathology launched by a given disablement process). We distinguish intrinsic disability (without personal or equipment assistance) and actual disability (with such assistance), noting the scientific and political importance of measuring both. Disability is not a personal characteristic, but is instead a gap between personal capability and environmental demand. Survey researchers and clinicans tend to focus on personal capability, overlooking the efforts people commonly make to reduce demand by activity accommodations, environmental modifications, psychological coping, and external supports. We compare the disablement experiences of people who acquire chronic conditions early in life (lifelong disability) and those who acquire them in mid or late life (late-life disability). The Disablement Process can help inform research (the epidemiology of disability) and public health (prevention of disability) activities.

The Prevention of Maternal Mortality Program is a collaborative effort of Columbia University's Center for Population and Family Health and multidisciplinary teams of researchers from Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Program goals include dissemination of information to those concerned with preventing maternal deaths. This review, which presents findings from a broad body of research, is part of that activity.

The origin of agriculture is one of the defining events of human history. Some 11-10,000 years ago bands of hunter-gatherers started to abandon their high-mobility lifestyles in favour of growing crops, and the creation of settled, sedentary communities. This shift into an agricultural lifestyle triggered the evolution of complex political and economic structures, and technological developments, and ultimately underpinned the rise of all the great civilisations of recent humanhistory.Domestication of Plants in the Old World reviews and synthesises the information on the origins and domestication of cultivated plants in the Old World, and subsequently the spread of cultivation from southwest Asia into Asia, Europe, and north Africa, from the very earliest beginnings. This book is mainly based on detailed consideration of two lines of evidences: the plant remains found at archaeological sites, and the knowledge that has accumulated about the present-day wildrelatives of domesticated plants. This new edition revises and updates previous data and incorporates the most recent findings from molecular biology about the genetic relations between domesticated plants and their wild ancestors, and incorporates extensive new archaeological data about the spread of agriculturewithin the region. The reference list has been completely updated, as have the list of archaeological sites and the site maps.

Communication can be seen as the main ingredient in medical care. In reviewing doctor-patient communication, the following topics are addressed: (1) different purposes of medical communication; (2) analysis of doctor-patient communication; (3) specific communicative behaviors; (4) the influence of communicative behaviors on patient outcomes; and (5) concluding remarks.Three different purposes of communication are identified, namely: (a) creating a good inter-personal relationship; (b) exchanging information; and (c) making treatment-related decisions. Communication during medical encounters can be analyzed by using different interaction analysis systems (IAS). These systems differ with regard to their clinical relevance, observational strategy, reliability/validity and channels of communicative behavior. Several communicative behaviors that occur in consultations are discussed: instrumental (cure oriented) vs affective (care oriented) behavior, verbal vs non-verbal behavior, privacy behavior, high vs low controlling behavior, and medical vs everyday language vocabularies. Consequences of specific physician behaviors on certain patient outcomes, namely: satisfaction, compliance/adherence to treatment, recall and understanding of information, and health status/psychiatric morbidity are described. Finally, a framework relating background, process and outcome variables is presented.

Weighted networks a b s t r a c t Ties often have a strength naturally associated with them that differentiate them from each other. Tie strength has been operationalized as weights. A few network measures have been proposed for weighted networks, including three common measures of node centrality: degree, closeness, and betweenness. However, these generalizations have solely focused on tie weights, and not on the number of ties, which was the central component of the original measures. This paper proposes generalizations that combine both these aspects. We illustrate the benefits of this approach by applying one of them to Freeman's EIES dataset.

As anthropology at its best can do, this book ex-poses hidden cultural assumptions about the nature of reality. Martin has produced a powerful study of the dialectic between medical metaphors for women's reproductive processes and women's own views of those processes. She ...

Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idio...

The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior Proponents of the model known as the ''human revolution'' claim that modern human behaviors arose suddenly, and nearly simultaneously, throughout the Old World ca. 40-50 ka. This fundamental behavioral shift is purported to signal a cognitive advance, a possible reorganization of the brain, and the origin of language. Because the earliest modern human fossils, Homo sapiens sensu stricto, are found in Africa and the adjacent region of the Levant at >100 ka, the ''human revolution'' model creates a time lag between the appearance of anatomical modernity and perceived behavioral modernity, and creates the impression that the earliest modern Africans were behaviorally primitive. This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record. In fact, many of the components of the ''human revolution'' claimed to appear at 40-50 ka are found in the African Middle Stone Age tens of thousands of years earlier. These features include blade and microlithic technology, bone tools, increased geographic range, specialized hunting, the use of aquatic resources, long distance trade, systematic processing and use of pigment, and art and decoration. These items do not occur suddenly together as predicted by the ''human revolution'' model, but at sites that are widely separated in space and time. This suggests a gradual assembling of the package of modern human behaviors in Africa, and its later export to other regions of the Old World. The African Middle and early Late Pleistocene hominid fossil record is fairly continuous and in it can be recognized a number of probably distinct species that provide plausible ancestors for H. sapiens. The appearance of Middle Stone Age technology and the first signs of modern behavior coincide with the appearance of fossils that have been attributed to H. helmei, suggesting the behavior of H. helmei is distinct from that of earlier hominid species and quite similar to that of modern people. If on anatomical and behavioral grounds H. helmei is sunk into H. sapiens, the origin of our species is linked with the appearance of Middle Stone Age technology at 250-300 ka.

A stochastic model is proposed for social networks in which the actors in a network are partItIoned mto subgroups called blocks. The model provides a stochastrc generalization of the blockmodel. Estimation techniques are developed for the special case of a single relation social network, with blocks specified D prrorr. An extension of the model allows for tendencies toward reciprocation of ties beyond those explained by the partition. The extended model prowdes a one degree-of-freedom test of the model. A numerical example from the social network hterature 1s used to illustrate the methods.