This commentary calls on medical anthropology to become programmatically non-secular. Despite recent anthropological critiques of secularity, within and outside of anthropology, most contemporary medical anthropologists continue to leave deities and religiosity out of their examinations of healing practices, especially in their accounts of biomedicine. Through a critical, relational constructio...

Anthropologists who work at the interface of psychology and anthropology are by and large committed to anthropology as science. The problem for us, however, is that the institutional development of the human sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effectively allotted different aspects of what it is to be human to different disciplines. Faced with separate epistemological ...

Social anthropology at INCAP evolved through a series of stages. The initial work in the 1950s was concerned with finding ways to make INCAP nutritional research more effective. In a second phase, emerging in the 1960s, anthropology examined the nutrition process in the population, especially as it was manifested in child care and feeding, lactation, and population growth and in the relation of...

This essay discusses the image and practice of cannibalism in a wide range of studies. It also presents the anthropological research on kuru which led to the proposal that cannibalism had enabled transmission of the infectious agent, as well as doubts about the hypothesis, and the assertion by some that cannibalism as a socially approved custom did not exist. The figure of the cannibal as an ic...

A meeting in Vienna in October 2010 brought together researchers using Virtual Anthropology (VA) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in order to explore the benefits and problems facing a collaboration between the two fields. FEA is used to test mechanical hypotheses in functional anatomy and VA complements and augments this process by virtue of its tools for acquiring data, for segmenting and pr...