Reviews In Anthropology

Discourse analysis and ethnography are sophisticated research methods used in fieldwork by all anthropologists. The recent tendencies in both linguistic and political anthropology have made even abundantly clear that reflexive ethnography and discourse analysis are become central for the current fundamental developments in anthropological theory. The discussion of anthropological methods as the political reproduction of knowledge cannot be, however, for the merely sake of an exclusive self-reflexive methodology and discoursing verbal flow. I strongly believe that the scope of anthropology as a discipline, be it linguistic or political, by using different kinds of research methods for writing and talking culture and cultural content is supposed to be after all a search of cultural meaning and cultural understanding. Namely, beyond questions of methodology, I try in these two articles to understand the politics of identity and religion in their organisational structure as ideological and cultural system as well as how they are reproduced in some recent anthropological accounts.

Abstract Cora Du Bois (1903–1991) achieved distinction in anthropology and the U.S. government—including leadership roles in the Office of Strategic Services and the State Department, a professorship at Harvard, and the presidency of the American Anthropological Association. Her contemporary, Henrietta Schmerler (1908–1931), suffered rape and murder while conducting her first summer of ethnographic fieldwork. Despite these stark differences, when taken together, Schmerler’s and Du Bois’s careers and reputations shed light on sexism and homophobia in and around the discipline, changing approaches to fieldwork and cultural analysis, and the political and public contexts of American anthropology in the mid-20th century.

Hunter-gatherers define humanity's Pleistocene evolutionary past. Yet, hunter-gatherer societies in the 20th–21st centuries are examples par excellence of cultural marginalization, domination, and resilience. This review of six recent works on hunter-gatherers—spanning Paleolithic archaeology, bioarchaeology, behavioral ecology, and cultural anthropology—underscores that human forager diversity can be explained neither by culturally embedded political processes nor by ecologically situated evolutionary factors alone. Yet, theoretical bridging frameworks remain elusive, with a narrowing but persistent culture-biology divide. Recent developments in evolutionary life-history theory provide a robust biocultural foundation for understanding human sociality and the symbolic constitution of embodied cultural practice.

Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. xvii + 448 pp. including chapter references and index. $19.95 paper.Hoberman, John. Darwin's Athletes: How Sports Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. New York: Houghton Miffin, 1997. xxvi + 341Williams, Vernon J., Jr. Rethinking Race: Franz Boas

Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1988. 17:461-95 Copyright © 1988 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES OF WOMEN'S STATUS REVISITED: 1977-1987 Carol C. Mukhopadhyay Department of Anthropology, California State University, Chico, California 95929-0400 ...

This article explores the anthropological goals of domesticating (through naming, categorizing, organizing) and liberating (through engagement with dynamism, process, complexity, contradiction) our data and the ways we consider culture. These complementary themes emerge in three volumes that explore Maya culture, past and present. The first theme offers powerful results by making named things real and valued. The second theme recognizes the multiple, contingent processes connected to people and cultures, with important ramifications for the use of cultural analogy over time. The two perspectives differ in how we relate to our data, and result in different ways of envisioning the Maya.

Collaborative research partnerships between academic anthropolo-gists and host or descendant communities are becoming more popular in anthropology. The reviewed books demonstrate there are different understandings of what collaboration means for professional identities ...

Wendorf, Fred, Romuald Schild, Angela E. Close, and Associates. Egypt during the Last Interglacial: The Middle Paleolithic of Bir Tarfawi and Bir Sahara East. New York: Plenum Press, 1993. xi + 596 pp. including chapter references and index. $95.00 cloth.Trigger, Bruce G. Early Civilizations: Ancient Egypt in Context. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1993. x + 158 pp. including chapter references and index. $25.00 cloth.

... taxi drivers, tourist shopkeepers, travel guides, teachers, tourist-office workers, street vendors and haw-kers, shoeshine boys, waiters, weavers—in ... Chapter 3, "The Setting: Ethnic and Class Relations in San Cristobal and die Development of Tourism," provides an overview of ...

Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xi + 471 pp. including chapter references and index. $64.95 clothMasolo, D. A. African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994. ix + 301 pp. including chapter references and index. $39.95 cloth, $15.95 paper.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, Gail Paradise Kelly, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, and Lillian S. Robinson. Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985. x + 227 pp. including bibliography and index. $19.95 cloth.McNaron, Toni A. H., ed. The Sister Bond: A Feminist View of a Timeless Connection. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. vi

... The Daykeeper is about the Ixil Maya of High-land Guatemala and especially about one Ixil man, named Shas Ko'w. Born in 1895 in Nebaj, one of three Ixil towns, Shas Ko'w endured in the eighty-one years of his life forced govern-ment labor, contract work on Pacific coast ...

RS Khare. The Hindu Hearth and Home. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976. vi+ 322 pp. Figures, tables, maps, appendixes, bibliography, index. Rs. 90. RS Khare. Culture and Reality. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1976. xxi+ 210 pp. Figures, tables, bibliography, index. Rs. 38.