1) British Academy Centenary Research Project, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Crown St, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK 2) new address: Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, UK 3) Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig D-0...

This commentary calls on medical anthropology to become programmatically non-secular. Despite recent anthropological critiques of secularity, within and outside of anthropology, most contemporary medical anthropologists continue to leave deities and religiosity out of their examinations of healing practices, especially in their accounts of biomedicine. Through a critical, relational constructio...

Psychological anthropology has a long history of integrative, crossdisciplinary research within the social sciences. This holistic tradition has substantially contributed to understanding the relationships between individuals and their cultural environment and to developing more sophisticated models of human variation within and between cultures. Whereas these contributions have generally arise...

Anthropology and global health have long been a focus of research for both biological and medical anthropologists. Research has looked at physiological adaptations to high altitudes, community responses to water-borne diseases, the integration of traditional and biomedical approaches to health, global responses to HIV/AIDS, and more recently, to the application of cultural approaches to the con...

This paper is concerned with a bio-cultural/bio-social approach to the study of human variability. The basic premise is that the bio-cultural approach is essential for anthropological study of the survival and well-being ofhuman populations in the 21 century. The chapter is delimited to two basic questions: What and why is bio-cultural approach? How is to go about it? Addressing the first q...

To discuss reflexivity in anthropology is not a new approach. The purpose of this article is to examine the meaning of reflexivity for the hermeneutical or confessional anthropology, which has been endemic in social sciences ever since the publication of Malinowski’s diaries and the onset of the recurrent and persistent crisis of objectivity that haunts modern scholarship. We have determined th...

EDWIN R. WALLACE (IV), Freud and anthropology. A history and reappraisal, New York, International Universities Press, 1983, 8vo, pp. xi, 306, $22.50. No scientific discipline outside his own gave Sigmund Freud's ideas such long-sustained and critical attention as did anthropology. Conversely, no other social or behavioural science so affected Freud's thinking over the course of his long career....

‘Transforming Economies, Changing States’ were the themes of the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society, held in Canberra at the Australian National University from 30 October to 2 November 2007. We were fortunate that our keynote speaker, Prof. Anna L. Tsing, addressed both conference themes directly in her stimulating address entitled ‘Beyond Economic and Ecological Stand...

Merrill Singer’s Anthropology of Infectious Disease argues that pathogens are intertwined with human social worlds. Through a variety of case studies drawn from around the world, from HIV to malaria and from Lyme disease to tuberculosis, the book emphasizes a biosocial or biocultural approach to the understanding of infectious disease. In contrast to a strictly biomedical framework, the core ar...