As Kertzer and Fricke note in their introduction to Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis, the relationship between sociocultural anthropology and demography has been less than harmonious—spanning a spectrum ranging from ambivalence to mutual distaste and distrust (Kertzer and Fricke 1997, 1). The emphasis in anthropology on small samples, long-term fieldwork, and qualitative analy...

Recent outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (2013-2016) and Zika virus (2015-2016) bring renewed recognition of the need to understand social pathways of disease transmission and barriers to care. Social scientists, anthropologists in particular, have been recognised as important players in disease outbreak response because of their ability to assess social, economic and political factors in local ...

Forensic anthropology is the discipline that traditionally deals with the examination of human remains for legal purposes and it derives from the fields of anatomy, physical anthropology and forensic medicine. For more than a century, forensic anthropologists in the United States have been offering their services in the court of law complementing the medico-legal investigation of other forensic...

In this essay we argue that the key barriers to interdisciplinary work between economists and anthropologists are differences of methodology and epistemology -in what the two disciplines consider important to explain, and how they evaluate the criteria for a good explanation. The essay is an introduction to three papers, on economics, anthropology, and the question of the commons, that illustra...

Paleoanthropology emerged as a science during the late nineteenth century. The discovery of prehistoric artifacts in Pleistocene deposits soon led to the excavation of fossilized human bones. The archaeologists and geologists who unearthed them were primarily concerned with determining whether the human fossils and the artifacts found with them actually dated from the Pleistocene, thus offering...

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens access our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand social cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout globe. This entry examines work anthropologists done on, with, photography. It surveys conclusions reached a...