The relationship between the ethnographic text and cultural background of the anthropologist hailing from a culture different than the people he studied has already been well discussed in the wide range of anthropological literature. This paper explores the relationship between ethnographic text and the native anthropologist that has seldom been discussed so far. The paper also discusses the pr...

Honor cultures have often been associated with herding societies in the anthropological literature. This has led Nisbett and Cohen (1996) to conflate the honor psychology they describe in their book Culture of Honor with the pastoral personality that was documented in earlier anthropological studies of herding societies. I argue that although honor psychology and pastoral personality appear ver...

The article analyzes the economic reasons behind the rise of Neolithic agriculture some 10,000 years ago in consideration of evidence that agriculture was not associated with increasing standards of living. On the basis of archeological and anthropological literature, the article presents a modelling framework that allows for four broad explanations to the agricultural transition; (i) environme...

This paper investigates the determinants of female autonomy in Indonesia using the 2000 Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS3). We consider the role of kinship norms and the effect of labor force participation on female autonomy. Our measure of autonomy is based on self-reported answers to an array of questions relating to decision making authority in the household. They include economic and chi...

Parallel with anthropological literature, analysis of genealogical data shows a strong relationship between infant mortality rates and allowing deceased infants to remain unnamed. This was especially true for infants dying shortly after birth. Findings suggest the question, “When does life begin?” has had social as well as biological and religious answers. 2 The Journal of Public and Profession...

Along with recent widely publicized problems of Melanesian states comes renewed interest in “customary modes of governance.” Although talk of custom now fl ows easily in discussions of political reform in the region, few of these discussions make any serious use of the extensive anthropological literature on the politics of “tradition.” The fact that custom now crosses lines of academic and pol...

1 end of October. But other media outlets which pride themselves on their commitment to the serious discussion of indigenous issues, such as The Australian and the ABC, have presented a succession of laudatory commentaries on the judgment without examining whether Noongar people really had a sound basis for their native title claim. As an anthropologist who gave evidence in the Single Noongar c...

An important debate in the anthropological literature concerns the benefits children in poor countries derive from the presence of a grandmother. The broadly held idea that grandmothers are beneficial for their grandchildren has been challenged by the finding that in a resource poor society (the Dogon in Mali) the presence of a grandmother could negatively affect the life chances of their grand...

In his concept of an anthropological physiology, F.J.J. Buytendijk has tried to lay down the theoretical and scientific foundations for an anthropologically-oriented medicine. The aim of anthropological physiology is to demonstrate, empirically, what being specifically human is in the most elementary physiological functions. This article contains a sketch of Buytendijk's life and work, an overv...