Considerable tension among the subfields has existed within the discipline of anthropology. As a result, some anthropology departments have splintered, and the hallmark "holistic approach" of anthropology has been considered more myth than reality. However, as promoted by the American Anthropological Association and the American Anthropologist for over one hundred years, enhancing the holistic ...

I n 1997, I found myself newly arrived at Oxford University. I was taking a detour from my path to do research in West Africa thanks to a fellowship that funded a year of ancillary training before my fieldwork. Though studying anthropology, I was at St. Antony’s College, where Paul Collier’s Center for the Study of African Economies is located, and was in the same entering cohort as Collier’s n...

At the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference at Yale University, anthropologist Didier Fassin discussed social inequality and the politicization of health in the context of global public health.

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 ...

We present a review of the history of scientific inquiry into modern human origins, focusing on the role of the American Anthropologist. We begin during the mid–20th century, at the time when the problem of modern human origins was first presented in the American Anthropologist and could first be distinguished from more general questions about human and hominid origins. Next, we discuss the eff...

In his plenary session entitled Five Questions on the Future, Harvard anthropologist Arthur Kleinman capitalized on the 2009 Society for Medical Anthropology Conference's theme of Medical Anthropology at the Intersections to speculate on the future of the discipline.