The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement represents a collection of work that reveals and explores the often times dramatic relationship of our biology and culture that is inextricably woven into a tapestry of movement patterns. It explores the underpinning of human movement, reflected in play, sport, games and human culture from an evolutionary perspective and contemporary expression of sport and human movement.

The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement represents a collection of work that reveals and explores the often times dramatic relationship of our biology and culture that is inextricably woven into a tapestry of movement patterns. It explores the underpinning of human movement, reflected in play, sport, games and human culture from an evolutionary perspective and contemporary expression of sport and human movement.

The Anthropology of Sport and Human Movement represents a collection of work that reveals and explores the often times dramatic relationship of our biology and culture that is inextricably woven into a tapestry of movement patterns. It explores the underpinning of human movement, reflected in play, sport, games and human culture from an evolutionary perspective and contemporary expression of sport and human movement.

In _Biocultural Creatures_, Samantha Frost brings feminist and political theory together with findings in the life sciences to recuperate the category of the human for politics. Challenging the idea of human exceptionalism as well as other theories of subjectivity that rest on a distinction between biology and culture, Frost proposes that humans are biocultural creatures who quite literally are cultured within the material, social, and symbolic worlds they inhabit. Through discussions about carbon, the functions of cell membranes, the activity (...) of genes and proteins, the work of oxygen, and the passage of time, Frost recasts questions about the nature of matter, identity, and embodiment. In doing so, she elucidates the imbrication of the biological and cultural within the corporeal self. In remapping the relation of humans to their habitats and arriving at the idea that humans are biocultural creatures, Frost provides new theoretical resources for responding to political and environmental crises and for thinking about how to transform the ways we live. (shrink)

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

On the basis of a revision of the real dynamics of Greek poiesis and autopoiesis as evolutionary processes of meaning and knowledge-of-the-World evaluative-construction, Cognitive Poetics proposes key philological, ontological and cultural adjustments to improve our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origins and social nature of language. It searches for an integrated theory of social problems in general Cognitive Science: from Linguistics or Psychology, through Anthropology, Neurophilosophy or Literary Studies, to Neurobiology or Artificial Life Sciences. From an essential (...) turn to the real thing, cognition as (social) action, it provides new unforeseen accounts of the complex dynamics of human essentially creative understanding studying and analyzing all form of texts as active fossils as mentils (Guerra 2009). (shrink)

Abstract.This article examines an orientation for thinking theologically and ethically about the cultural pattern of technology and a vision for living responsibly within it. Building upon and joining select insights of philosophers Hans Jonas and Albert Borgmann, I recommend the analytic and evaluative leverage to be gained through development of an integrative biocultural theological anthropology.

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well (...) as on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

The evolutionary origin of human pair-bonds is uncertain. One hypothesis, supported by data from forgers, suggests that pair-bonds function to provision mothers and dependent offspring during lactation. Similarly, public health data from large-scale industrial societies indicate that single mothers tend to wean their children earlier than do women living with a mate. Here we examine relations between pair-bond stability, alloparenting, and cross-cultural trends in breastfeeding using data from 58 “traditional” societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Analyses show that stable (...) conjugal relationships were associated with significantly later weaning among the societies in the SCCS. The relationship between pair-bond stability and age at weaning was not mediated by women’s ability to provision themselves or women’s kin support. Availability of alloparental care was also inversely related to age at weaning, and the association was not significantly reduced after controlling for frequency of divorce. This study indicates that among a woman’s kin relationships, a pair-bond with a child’s father is especially supportive of breastfeeding. These cross-cultural findings are further evidence that human pair-bonds may have evolved to support lactation. (shrink)

The human community faces today the most serious challenges ever to have confronted the planet in the areas of health, environment, and security. Science and technology are essential for responding to these challenges. More is needed, however, because science is not equipped to deal adequately with the values dimensions and the political issues that accompany the challenges. For an adequate response, there must be cooperative effort by scientists and statespersons, informed for moral leadership by the religious wisdom that is available. (...) The religious communities can provide this spiritual dimension, thereby fulfilling their traditional role, but it will require their coming to terms with the character of the scientific and technological base of contemporary culture. The paper lays the conceptual groundwork for understanding these issues. (shrink)

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized (...) in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural history without reducing the (...) literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses-often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology. (shrink)

Human ontogeny has been shaped through evolution, resulting in markers of physical, cognitive, and social development that are widely shared and often used to demarcate the lifespan. Yet, development is demonstrably biocultural and strongly influenced by context. As a result, emic age categories can vary in duration and composition, constituted by both common physical markers as well as culturally meaningful indicators, with implications for our understanding of the evolution of human life history. Semi-structured group interviews (_n_ = 24) among (...) Sidama adults and children, as well as individual interviews with children (_n_ = 30), were used to identify age categories across the lifespan and to specifically investigate acquisition of sociocultural skills and cognitive development. Ten major age categories were identified, covering birth through death. These largely map onto patterning of human universals, but specific cultural beliefs and behaviors were indicated as important markers of development. Adults and children are oriented toward the dynamic relationships between physical development and acquisition of skills tied to social and cultural success. Culture, ecology, and ontogeny are co-determinants of human development, and the interactions among them should be considered in studies examining human life history and its evolution. (shrink)

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These include (...) new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence. (shrink)

Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions. In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change. From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or reinterpretation (...) of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evolution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis. Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, South America hosts the world’s greatest di­versity of plants and most animal groups, as well as a variety of environmental movements, involving urban and rural communities. South American academic philosophy, however, has given little consideration to this rich biocultural context. To nourish an emergent regional environmental philosophy three main sources can be identified. First, a variety of ancient and contemporary ecological worldviews and practices offer a rich biocultural array of South American (...) environmental thought that can be disclosed and valued through the work of cultural anthropology, liberation philosophy, liberation pedagogy, liberation theology, ecofeminism, and biocultural conservation. Second, some recent academic environmental philosophy research and teaching teams have been formed in South American universities with the support of the interdisciplinary United Nations Environmental Programme or based on the individual interests of some scattered scholars. Third, social movements have increasingly demanded the incorporation of environmental values into regional policies and decision-making processes. These three sources can foster intercultural, international, and transdisciplinary dialogues to further develop a South American environmental philosophy grounded in its precious biocultural diversity. (shrink)

While the social and ecological landscape of the twenty-first century is worlds away from the historical-cultural context in which the biblical myth-symbols of the image of God and the knowledge of good and evil first emerged, Philip Hefner's understanding that Homo sapiens image God as created co-creators presents a plausible starting point for constructing a second naïveté interpretation of biblical anthropology and a fruitful concept for envisioning and enacting our human future.

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

Kant famously identified 'What is man?' as the fundamental question that encompasses the whole of philosophy. Yet surprisingly, there has been no concerted effort amongst Kant scholars to examine Kant's actual philosophy of man. This book, which is inspired by, and part of, the recent movement that focuses on the empirical dimension of Kant's works, is the first sustained attempt to extract from his writings on biology, anthropology and history an account of the human sciences, their underlying unity, their (...) presuppositions as well as their methodology. In exploring his philosophical and epistemological foundation of the human sciences, it reveals an unexpected picture of Kant, a picture of a thinker who is profoundly attentive to the diversity, detail and complexity of the human world. (shrink)

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and (...) embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the (...) ontological dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is mediated historically through dialectical critique, which, informed by concrete utopianism, can have emancipatory power. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 13-44 Authors Craig Reeves, Brunel University Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the early history of discussions of participant observation and objectivity in anthropology. The discussions resolve around the question of whether participant observation is a reliable method for obtaining data that may serve as the basis for true accounts of native ways of life. I show how Malinowski in 1922 introduced participant observation as a straightforwardly reliable method and then discuss how—and why—most of the discussants in the 1940s and 1950s maintained that the method is (...) reliable only if the researcher takes a whole number of precautionary measures. (shrink)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of (...) Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the relationship between Martin Heidegger's work and modern anthropology. Heidegger attracts much scholarly interest among social scientists, but few have explored his ideas in relation to current anthropological debates. The discipline's modernist foundations, the nature of cultural constructionism and of art ñ even what an anthropology of art must include ñ are all informed and illuminated by Heidegger's work. The author argues that many contemporary anthropologists, in their concern to return subjectivity (...) and 'voice' to their interlocutors, neglect to recognize that language and other representational practices conceal the world and human subjectivity as much as reveal it. The author also suggests that Heidegger's critique of western technology provides the basis for a return to anthropology's sociological foundations. Emerging from over ten years of original research, and drawing on a rich knowledge of Australian and Melanesian ethnography, this book reassesses the underlying framework of modern and, particularly, visual anthropology. Innovative and provocative, it will be of interest to all anthropologists, philosophers and students of art and culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I situate Hans Blumenberg historically and conceptually in relation to a subtheme in the famous debate between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland in 1929. The subtheme concerns Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s divergent attitudes toward philosophical anthropology as it relates to the starting points and goals of philosophy. I then reconstruct Blumenberg’s anthropology, which involves reconceptualizing Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms in relation to Heidegger’s objections to the philosophical anthropology of his day (e.g., (...) Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen) as unduly anthropocentric. Blumenberg builds on anthropologist Gehlen’s assumption that human beings are biologically underdetermined and therefore world-open. With this starting point, symbolic forms, such as myth and language, make up a compensatory life-world that supports human existence. Action, or self-assertion, which is necessary given the lack of a seamless fit between human beings and the environment, is thus circumscribed and shaped by the historied, cultural constructs that constitute a life-world. Human beings can thus be characterized as a species that continually renegotiates the shape of its existence through its relation to biological limits on the one hand and cultural constants on the other. Because Blumenberg and philosophical anthropology are relatively unexplored by Anglophone philosophers, and because philosophical anthropology is central to Blumenberg’s methodology generally, this study provides an introduction to both. (shrink)

Examining the significance of Kant's account of "rational faith," this study argues that he profoundly revises his account of the human will and the moral philosophy of it in his later religious writings.

This multidisciplinary subject in clinical anthropology was started in April 1996 among 206 students distributed over all Colleges and Schools in the University of Tsukuba with the exception of School of Medical Sciences. After every class students write down their comments on a compulsory attendance slip, and these comments were examined. Female students agreed with the surrogate mothers and homosexuality more than male students. Male students denied childcare by homosexual parents more than female students. Sex selection insemination with the (...) exception for disease prevention was denied by female students significantly more than male students. (shrink)

This review essay assesses Michael Jackson’s ongoing project of staging an encounter between anthropology and philosophy in two books: Lifeworlds (2013) and As Wide as the World Is Wise (2016). Considering his philosophical enrichment of ethnographic theory and method, this essay addresses foundational questions about the prospects and practices of interdisciplinary engagement. It also suggests future avenues for continued dialogue between philosophy and anthropology.

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence (...) within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

In Marking Time, Paul Rabinow presents his most recent reflections on the anthropology of the contemporary. Drawing richly on the work of Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Niklas Luhmann, and, most interestingly, German painter Gerhard Richter, Rabinow offers a set of conceptual tools for scholars examining cutting-edge practices in the life sciences, security, new media and art practices, and other emergent phenomena. Taking up topics that include bioethics, anger and competition among molecular biologists, the lessons of the Drosophila genome, the (...) nature of ethnographic observation in radically new settings, and the moral landscape shared by scientists and anthropologists, Rabinow shows how anthropology remains relevant to contemporary debates. By turning abstract philosophical problems into real-world explorations and offering original insights, Marking Time is a landmark contribution to the continuing re-invention of anthropology and the human sciences. (shrink)

In this article the advent of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology is described as a reaction against the predominantly phenomenological bias of French philosophy in the post-war years as well as against the old humanism of existentialism which seemed parochial both in its confinement to a specific tradition of western philosophy and in its lack of interest in scientific approach. Nevertheless, the paradigm of structural anthropology cannot be equated with the field of structuralism, which became a very contestable form of (...) intellectual fashion. The reception of Lévi-Strauss's theory in the English-speaking world carried on both the same enthusiasm and the same distortions and simplifications, to the extent that in the course of anti-structural criticism, the main thrust of the epistemological approach of Lévi-Strauss seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology. (shrink)

Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their relations to each other – the last point (...) being disputed between the monogenists and the polygenists. James Cowles Prichard, a proponent of the comparative historical approach, was able to do without images in his pioneering Researches Into the Physical History of Man of 1813, but the third edition, which appeared in five volumes between 1836 and 1847, was richly illustrated with ‘ethnic types’ and skulls, including diagrams. What was happening is a process I engage with in detail for Samuel George Morton, who collected and distributed human skulls as lithographs in Crania americana (1839) and Crania aegyptiaca (1844). Along with the paper skulls travelled detailed instructions of how to look at them through a set of lines and to set their individual parts in relation to each other as well as to those of other types. Drawing on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Peter Camper, the Crania thus played a pivotal role in establishing what I call a diagrammatics of race – a diagrammatics that became overtly political with Types of Mankind (1854), which was written in Morton's honour by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon. (shrink)

Moral philosophy continues to be enriched by an ongoing empirical turn,mainly through contributions from neuroscience, biology, and psychology. Thusfar, cultural anthropology has largely been missing. A recent and rapidly growing‘ethical turn’ within cultural anthropologynow explicitly and systematically studiesmorality. This research report aims to introduce to an audience in moral philosophyseveral notable works within the ethical turn. It does so by critically discussing theethical turn’s contributions to four topics: the definition of morality, the nature ofmoral change and progress, the truth (...) of moral relativism, and attempts to debunkmorality. The ethical turn uncovers a richer picture of moral phenomena on theintersubjective level, one akin to a virtue theoretic focus on moral character, withstriking similarities of moral phenomena across cultures. Perennial debates are notsettled but the ethical turn strengthens moral philosophy’s empirical turn and itrewards serious attention from philosophers. (shrink)