Essays
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Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space - McDonogh, Gary W.
Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history, and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions. -
Human Residence Patterns - Walker, Robert S.
This essay addresses the significance and evidence surrounding the debate about how hunter‐gatherers and other humans organize their residential groups. In most species of mammals, either males or female remain in their natal group (the philopatric sex) while the other sex disperses at maturity (the dispersing sex). Sex‐biased philopatry and dispersal has many downstream effects on all aspects of social bonds and organization. Recent genetic data and detailed cross‐cultural ethnographic information suggest that human societies are quite variable and flexible in nature with males and females likely to either stay or disperse from natal families. Brothers and sisters commonly coreside in the same community and form life‐long bonds in a system quite unlike that of our primate relatives. This multilocal human residence pattern of flexible residence combined with marriage exchange systems create complex meta‐group social structures with kin‐based coalitions that extend across multiple residential groups. Human kinship and social networks that encompass multiple communities led to the emergence of large alliances at scales unparalleled by other species.