Dear reader, in the last issue we looked at economic anthropology, and the current issue contains a comment on this by the anthropologist Chris Hann. The theme of the issue is economics. In our leading article, sociologists and economists look closer at economics. One conclusion, after having looked at contemporary economics, is that economists are getting closer to sociology. Rainer Diaz-Bone ...

A nonsecular medical anthropology insists on the ways medicine and science have constituted 'the secular' itself through the 'secular self'-how medical knowing has been used to craft the secular political subject. As James Boon noted, too often in social theory, "religion gets safely tucked away-restricted theoretically to 'meaning' rather than power" (1998:245). The authors of the six articles...

This report describes the identification of a merchant mariner who perished in 1948 when Northwest Airlines Flight 4422, a DC-4 carrying 24 seamen and six crew members crashed into Mount Sanford, Alaska. Fifty-one years later, a human forearm and hand were found close by the wreckage of the plane, prompting identification efforts using DNA and fingerprints. There were significant challenges to ...

This historical account of the methods used by anthropologists studying kuru from 1961 to 2010 illustrates the identity of anthropology as both a humanist and natural science. To understand and analyze complex historical processes anthropologists employ both interpretive and explanatory research methods. This chapter documents the emergence of medical anthropology as a subfield in anthropology,...