New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology

Molly K. Zuckerman, Debra L. Martin, Molly K. Zuckerman, Debra L. Martin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781118962961
• eBook ISBN: 9781118962947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Physical Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Biocultural or biosocial anthropology is a research approach that views biology and culture as dialectically and inextricably intertwined, explicitly emphasizing the dynamic interaction between humans and their larger social, cultural, and physical environments. The biocultural approach emerged in anthropology in the 1960s, matured in the 1980s, and is now one of the dominant paradigms in anthropology, particularly within biological anthropology. This volume gathers contributions from the top scholars in biocultural anthropology focusing on six of the most influential, productive, and important areas of research within biocultural anthropology. These are: critical and synthetic approaches within biocultural anthropology; biocultural approaches to identity, including race and racism; health, diet, and nutrition; infectious disease from antiquity to the modern era; epidemiologic transitions and population dynamics; and inequality and violence studies. Focusing on these six major areas of burgeoning research within biocultural anthropology makes the proposed volume timely, widely applicable and useful to scholars engaging in biocultural research and students interested in the biocultural approach, and synthetic in its coverage of contemporary scholarship in biocultural anthropology. Students will be able to grasp the history of the biocultural approach, and how that history continues to impact scholarship, as well as the scope of current research within the approach, and the foci of biocultural research into the future. Importantly, contributions in the text follow a consistent format of a discussion of method and theory relative to a particular aspect of the above six topics, followed by a case study applying the surveyed method and theory. This structure will engage students by providing real world examples of anthropological issues, and demonstrating how biocultural method and theory can be used to elucidate and resolve them.

Key features include:

• Contributions which span the breadth of approaches and topics within biological anthropology from the insights granted through work with ancient human remains to those granted through collaborative research with contemporary peoples.
• Comprehensive treatment of diverse topics within biocultural anthropology, from human variation and adaptability to recent disease pandemics, the embodied effects of race and racism, industrialization and the rise of allergy and autoimmune diseases, and the sociopolitics of slavery and torture.
• Contributions and sections united by thematically cohesive threads.
• Clear, jargon-free language in a text that is designed to be pedagogically flexible: contributions are written to be both understandable and engaging to both undergraduate and graduate students.
• Provision of synthetic theory, method and data in each contribution.
• The use of richly contextualized case studies driven by empirical data.
• Through case-study driven contributions, each chapter demonstrates how biocultural approaches can be used to better understand and resolve real-world problems and anthropological issues.

Chapter 1
Introduction: the development of biocultural perspectives in anthropology

Molly K. Zuckerman¹ & Debra L. Martin²

¹Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, Mississippi State University

²Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada at Las Vegas

Introduction

Since the mid-twentieth century, the biocultural approach has acted as a cohering and integrative intellectual approach within anthropology, particularly within the subdisciplines of biological, medical, and sociocultural anthropology (Goodman and Leatherman 1998; Goodman et al. 1988). It has provided an avenue for synthetic research that unites and crosscuts these diverse arenas, helping to prevent fragmentation and schisms in the face of increasing specialization. Further, it enables anthropologists to achieve the core anthropological objectives of explaining human behavior across time and space, comprehending cultural similarity, difference, and complexity across space and time, and applying this knowledge to the solution of human problems (AAA 2012). These objectives are obtained by addressing and answering complex research questions through an array of methods, theory, and data from across anthropology and related disciplines, such as demography, public health, medicine, biology, ecology, and geological sciences, with the biocultural approach providing coherence.

Definitions of the biocultural¹ approach have varied over the past several decades and, to a certain extent, based on the intellectual enterprise to which it is being applied, but it is characterized by several core themes. Overall, the biocultural approach attends to both the intertwined biological and cultural aspects of any given human phenomena (Levins and Lewontin 1985), explicitly emphasizing the dynamic, dialectical interactions between humans and their larger physical, social, and cultural environments. In this approach, human variation is conceptualized as a function of phenotypic plasticity and responsiveness to factors within these larger environments that both mediate and produce each other (Blakely 1977; Dufour 2006; Van Gerven et al. 1974).

We introduce readers to the development, utility, and applications of the biocultural approach. We provide a short history of its origins and development, and unpack the approach and demonstrate how it translates into a model that can be operated to guide research. Further, we demonstrate the diverse theories and explanatory approaches, methods, and data sets that have been incorporated into the biocultural approach, through the course of its development into its contemporary usage, through a short review of the chapters included in this volume, highlighting the unique applications of the biocultural approach found in each. Importantly, each of the chapters contained within this edited volume has a consistent format. Each is centered around a key concept within the biocultural approach, from the causes and meaning of violence to the effects of colonialism on indigenous communities. Each chapter provides a review of relevant theory, methods, and data, and then delves into a case study, grounded in a real-world human problem that demonstrates the applicability of the biocultural approach to each particular concept and the utility of the approach for generating resolutions and solutions to the problem. We highlight each chapter and case study, emphasizing for readers how the biocultural approach can be used to elucidate, think through, and in some cases productively resolve real-world human problems. While some of these are ostensibly far removed from the lives of modern-day students, such as the effects of agricultural intensification during the Neolithic (c. 10 kya) on human health, readers will see many of their own tribulations and trials reflected in these case studies, from an exploration of what cultural factors motivate violence (see Chapters 22 and 23), to the role that the ‘cleanliness’ of modern environments may play in producing high rates of allergies and asthma (see Chapter 18), to the continuing effects of agricultural diets and sedentary lifestyles on modern-day human health and well-being (see Chapters 3 and 14). While the biocultural approach is a deeply useful analytical tool for exploring the diversity of problems that human societies have faced throughout time, it is also very useful for laying bare just how many of these challenges are shared across societies, time, and space.

The origins and development of the biocultural approach

The biocultural approach has a rich and varied history in anthropology, which is discussed in greater detail in Zuckerman and Armelagos (2011). Here, we provide a short survey of its origins and development.

The biocultural approach has its origins within biological anthropology, though for much of its history biological anthropology was deeply uninterested in the humanistic, cultural, and historical inquiries that have characterized the other anthropological subdisciplines since their nineteenth-century emergence (Armelagos and Goodman 1998). Instead, throughout the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, biological anthropologists were devoted to descriptive attempts to establish racial typologies for various regions and cultural contexts, largely through cranial morphology and other phenotypic traits. This focus did not shift until the 1950s, with the Holocaust, eugenic science, and the fall of colonialism, all of which demonstrated to physical anthropologists the disastrous, real-world applications of racial classification and typological thinking (Armelagos and Goodman 1998; Blakey 1987). This paradigmatic shift coincided with the development of the population approach in the biological sciences, which emphasized population-level rather than individual-level analyses and investigation of characteristics in breeding populations. This perspective provided an avenue for biological anthropologists to investigate the mechanics and effects of evolutionary processes in human populations for the first time. This development was augmented by the introduction of Washburn's (1951, 1953) “new physical anthropology” to the field, which proposed a strategic redirection from typological thinking towards synthetic, theory-driven research, and hypothesis testing based on models of evolution and adaptation.

At the end of the 1950s, Livingstone (1958), in what is widely regarded as one of the first truly biocultural works in anthropology, cohered these trends into an investigation of the complex relationships between the adoption of agriculture in West Africa, the protective effect of sickle cell anemia on malaria, and the ecology of the Anopheles mosquito that carries the plasmodium parasite that causes malaria. This study not only was one of the first to conceptualize the “environment” as more than just external physical conditions, it also struck a wedge into typological thinking about phenotypic and genetic traits as static “racial markers” (Dufour 2006). Livingstone's use of deep time to unravel the complexities of contemporary health problems is one of the foundational components of the biocultural approach, as is his entanglement of humans with many aspects of their environments, including insect vectors and changing ecologies. Together, these advances mark the beginnings of the development of the biocultural approach (Armelagos 2008).

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the biocultural approach matured under the influences of ecological anthropology and political economy. Livingstone's work launched research within biological anthropology exploring human adaptability, which includes genetic adaptation, and non-genetic acclimatization and phenotypic plasticity in response to a wide range of environmental and social stressors (see Chapter 2). This coincided with increasing popular concern in the United States and around the world about environmental issues and ecology; these issues became popular within anthropology and the larger social and natural sciences as well (Goodman and Martin 2002). As part of these studies, anthropologists developed an ecological approach that conceptualized all of the social, cultural, biological, and physical aspects of human environments as an integrated whole that could influence human behavior and biology (see Chapter 3). This integrative, ecological approach became fundamental to biocultural studies (Goodman and Leatherman 1998), as is evident in many of the case studies in this volume, from Thomas's attention to how political conflict can shape the biology of affected communities in Peru to Smith-Guzmán et al.'s holistic, ecologically informed approach to identifying the disease responsible for causing an ancient epidemic, the Hittite plague.

Political economy, and with it, processual ecology, both developed in the 1980s, became critical for developing political economic perspectives within biocultural anthropology. Processual ecology places greater emphasis on mechanisms of change, actor-based models, and on conceptualizing adaptive strategies as being constrained by scarce resources and social and economic hierarchies. A processual approach is one that focuses on methodological study of culture change and variability. Overall, political economy paradigms in anthropology focus on the history of intersections between local and global systems, how these intersections shape social relations and institutions that control access to fundamental resources such as housing, food, and medical care (Goodman and Leatherman 1998). In this way, power – and who has it and who does not – as well as related issues of sex, sexuality, gender, class, race, and ethnicity, are central foci (Roseberry 1988; see Chapters 2 and 3).

In the 1980s and 1990s, these approaches and paradigms – human adaptability, processual ecology, and political economy – became firmly embedded within biocultural anthropology, permanently shaping the approach (Zuckerman and Armelagos 2011). These have made the biocultural approach and its practitioners more socially engaged, action oriented, and activist than previous generations of anthropologists, particularly during the earlier adaptationist paradigm (Buikstra 2006). In particular, it has produced the biocultural approach's focus on the impacts of power relations and social inequality, such as processes affecting the control, production, and distribution of material resources on human biology in cultural systems throughout history, as well as the reciprocal influence of compromised biologies on these cultural systems (Blakey 2001; Goodman and Leatherman 1998; Leatherman and Goodman 1997). In this way, the biocultural approach is deeply dynamic and diachronic, attending to the dialectical (the interaction of opposition forces) relationships between biology and culture, power and well-being across time and space.

In these first few decades of the twenty-first century, the biocultural approach has forcefully maintained its political economic, ecological, and processual ecological components (Stinson et al. 2012). Foci are diverse and proliferating, but some are highlighted here (see also Chapter 2). Practitioners have intensified their focus on the key variable of poverty and determining the best ways to unpack and operationalize this complex, multifaceted, and culturally and historically contingent or context-dependent concept (Dufour 2006). Political economic perspectives have been applied to better understand how adaptive responses to environmental stress will vary depending on an individual and their community's relative social and economic status, with attention to the fact that some overly stressed and extremely poor individuals may find themselves beyond their ability to adapt, making short-term adjustments with long-term detrimental consequences; this reminds scholars, as Thomas and Leatherman et al. discuss (see Chapters 2 and 3), that not all biological responses are adaptive (Bailey and Schell 2007).

Biocultural anthropologists increasingly attend to how co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• A biocultural tribute to a biocultural scholar: Professor George J. Armelagos, May 22, 1936–May 15, 2014
• Chapter 1: Introduction: the development of biocultural perspectives in anthropology
• Part I: Critical and synthetic approaches to biocultural anthropology
• Part II: Biocultural approaches to identity
• Part III: Biocultural approaches to health and diet
• Part IV: Biocultural approaches to infectious disease
• Part V: Biocultural approaches to understanding population dynamics
• Part VI: Biocultural approaches to inequality and violence
• Part VII: The next generation
• Index
• End User License Agreement