YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: ANTHROPOLOGY-AND-ARCHAEOLOGY: ...

ANTHROPOLOGY: Cultural. Cultural anthropologists in 1995 struggled to reconcile research interests with strongly held ethical commitments to human rights and scholarly integrity as they debated the effects of exponential population growth, global warming, AIDS, the collapse of old political orders, and the rise of new ethnic, gender, and race coalitions. Increasingly aware of the potential of their research and particular points of view to affect their subjects, who often were people fighting for cultural or physical survival, they argued whether their discipline is an art or a science, whether they had the ability or the right to represent other cultures, and whether it was appropriate to involve themselves in issues affecting the people that they studied. In a review of Adam Kuper's The Chosen Primate: Human Nature and Cultural Diversity, ethnologist Roy A. Rappaport of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor framed the central problem of anthropological development in his characterization of humanity as a species that must construct meaningful symbol systems "in a world devoid of intrinsic meaning but subject to natural law." Emphasizing the dynamically complex nature of meaning systems in After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, ethnologist Clifford Geertz of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J., urged colleagues to focus efforts on interpretive cultural understandings. Impressed by the influence of natural laws on culture, anthropologist Robin Fox of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., in The Challenge of Anthropology: Old Encounters and New Excursions, called on ethnologists to direct their attention toward scientific explanations of regularities crossing cultural boundaries. The debate over whether anthropology is a science or one of the humanities progressed from a simple "either-or" argument to considerably more nuanced examinations of the relative merits of scientific and humanistic approaches, such as those presented in the books by Geertz and Fox cited above. This more balanced perspective was mirrored in the call by David J. Hess of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y., in his book Science and Technology in a Multicultural World: The Cultural Politics of Facts and Artifacts, for renewed efforts to build creatively upon anthropology's tradition as the most humanistic of sciences. Anthropologists and their subjects throughout the world increasingly questioned both the abilities and the rights of outside observers to represent their cultures. While few objected to the efforts of support groups to protect indigenous knowledge and resources from foreign exploitation, controversy continued to swirl around anthropological representations of other cultures. For example, in his 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific, Princeton University professor Gananath Obeyesekere claimed that his perspective as a Sri Lankan enabled him to expose the fallacies underlying University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins' hypothesis that mythic thinking caused Hawaiians to confuse British explorer James Cook with the god Lono. Maintaining that Hawaiians, like Sri Lankans, were fully capable of rational thought, Obeyesekere turned Sahlins' argument on its head with the assertion that the actual mythmongers were British writers perpetuating "white god" legends. In his 1995 book How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook, For Example, Sahlins responded by questioning the privileged position of "native" informant assumed by Obeyesekere. He pointed out that Indo-European-speaking Sri Lankan people had long been in close contact with Eurasian nation-states and that they had more in common with Western European cultures than with the isolated and more traditional Hawaiian chiefdoms. Reaffirming the need to view the actions of the Hawaiians from the perspective of their own cultural logic, Sahlins went on to show that mythic thinking did not obstruct Hawaiian rationality any more than Western belief in a Judeo-Christian God precluded scientific understanding. More and more use was being made of the vast amounts of information already amassed in previous fieldwork. In Yanomami Warfare, for instance, anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University showed how competition for Western manufactures, rather than innate ferocity, could account for the bellicose nature of Venezuelan and Brazilian native people who belonged to what was regarded as one of the world's most violent cultures. Western psychiatrists increasingly consulted anthropological studies for insights in treating patients who suffered from syndromes afflicting members of particular cultures. Two examples were susto, a state of unhappiness and sickness, caused by "soul loss," that afflicts Latin Americans in the U.S. and the Caribbean, and latah, a trancelike condition characterized by giddily inappropriate behaviour and mimicry that strikes Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai people. (ROBERT S. GRUMET)