The beginnings of medical anthropology in the Netherlands have a 'xenophile' character in two respects. First, those who started to call themselves medical anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s were influenced and inspired not so much by anthropological colleagues, but by medical doctors working in tropical countries who had shown an interest in the role of culture during their medical work. S...

Anthropologists have long held contrasting viewpoints about their relationships with governments and about how far they should work with them and other stakeholders involved in ‘development.’ Such divisions also occur among anthropologists and social scientists working on tourism’s role in development, and when they are prepared to work in matters related to tourism policy, management and plann...

Abstract Anthropologists’ arrival stories have long served to justify, naturalize, and domesticate—often through humor—the fraught moment of entering unasked into other people's lives. This textual convention has been thoroughly critiqued, but no comparable attention paid the analogous departure from field. The digital age enables both sides maintain contact, a shift that negates finality earli...

As Beller, Bender, and Medin (in press) pointed out in their target article, in the contemporary study of culture in psychology, anthropology is virtually invisible. In this commentary, I traced this invisibility to a root conflict in epistemological goals of the two disciplines: Whereas anthropologists value rich description of specific cultures, psychologists aspire to achieve theoretical sim...

8 “Life Begins When they Steal your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life Lynn M. Morgan This paper examines two reasons anthropological expertise has recently come to be considered relevant to American debates about the beginnings and ends of life. First, bioethicists and clinicians working to accommodate diverse perspectives into clinical decision...

Recent innovations in digital technologies have exponentially increased the opportunities for collaborative ethnographic filmmaking between anthropologists and our interlocutors. In this article, I focus on a relatively unexplored aspect of these emergent forms of collaboration: the unruliness of circulation in the digital age. I draw on long-standing anthropological debates about controlling t...

It is self-evident, I suppose, that I am conspicuously taking exception to the all-tao-prevalent idea that things are pretty well fixed in the Jesuitical first seven years. This idea has constituted one of the greatest problems for some anthropologists who have tried to translate psychiatric thought into anthropologically useful ideas. The anthropologists have noised at them from all sides the ...

Wary of the ‘denial coevalness’ associated with earlier anthropology, anthropologists at turn millennium increasingly emphasized how sharing not just space but also time is constitutive ethnographic encounter. However, drawing on online and offline fieldwork conducted in Jordan, I use tensions between a blood feud holy month Ramadan to illustrate humans often refuse inhabit each others’ histori...

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding the growing scholarly interest among anthropologists and historians in more in-depth engagements with silence, this special issue we ...