The anthropology of tradition and transition.

Whilst it is widely accepted that the process of national transition from a »developing« to a »developed« status is assessed against economic indicators, it is also recognized that the process of transition is driven by a variety of demographic, social, political, cultural, and biological changes that both lead to and follow from economic transition. Anthropologists have traditionally sought to understand transition through examining cultural, social, or biological changes in, for example, the organization of society or in changes in humanmorphological variation. It was the aim of the collection of papers presented here to explore transition in the light of the empirical evidence from traditional, transitional and industrial societies that provide new insights into traditional anthropological theory regarding social, biological, and behavioral outcomes that result from »development«. In so doing the relationship between economic and demographic indicators of the level of transition and anthropological outcomes that reflect associated changes in social organization, behavior and morphology were explored. This workshop brought together a group of researchers representing social, cultural and biological anthropology in addition to economists, demographers and social scientists to review the evidence for transition in different national and international contexts and discuss and debate the critical issues in studying transition in anthropological terms. The different research fields, perspectives and backgrounds of our participants offered an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the topic and issues for discussion. The scientists are undertaking research in Bangladesh, Croatia, Ethiopia, Germany, Russia, Samoa, South Africa, and the USA dealing with topics relating to economic, demographic, social, cultural, behavioral, nutritional and epidemiological transition in addition to the underlying mechanism of epigenetics. This series of papers thus represents a unique collection of diverse approaches to societal transition in the 21 century. Background