social-cultural anthropology today one is usually referring to communication and culture. This is to say, when anthropologists use the term ‘media’, they tend to remain within a largely popular semantics, taking ‘media’ to mean communicational media and, more specifically, communicational media practices, technologies and institutions, especially print (Peterson 2001; Hannerz 2004), film (Ginsb...

Fifty years after the founding of the field of medical anthropology, the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association held its first independent meeting on September 24-27, 2009, at Yale University.

The meeting between cultural anthropology and mass media is, in fact, a meeting between an object of research and a scientific discipline. In such a situation, the discipline brings with it certain delineations, a number of investigating methods, and a group of relatively specific concepts and theories. In the case of media anthropology, the fact that various researchers do not assume that clea...

Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309; Department of Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA 94118; Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112; Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794; Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona S...

Evolutionary approaches to cultural change are increasingly influential, and many scientists believe that a 'grand synthesis' is now in sight. The papers in this Theme Issue, which derives from a symposium held by the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (University College London) in December 2008, focus on how the phylogenetic tree-building and network-based techniques used to ...

For over a century, Americanist anthropologists have argued about whether their discipline is a historical one or a scientific one. Proponents of anthropology as history have claimed that the lineages of human cultures are made up of unique events that cannot be generalized into laws. If no laws can be drawn, then anthropology cannot be a science. Proponents of anthropology as science have clai...

Anthropology and the other cognitive science (CS) subdisciplines currently maintain a troubled relationship. With a debate in topiCS we aim at exploring the prospects for improving this relationship, and our introduction is intended as a catalyst for this debate. In order to encourage a frank sharing of perspectives, our comments will be deliberately provocative. Several challenges for a succes...

Anthropology was a founding member of cognitive science (Bender et al., 2010; Gardner, 1985), sharing with other cognitive disciplines a deep interest in thinking and behavior. With its unique expertise in the cultural content, context, and constitution of cognition, it would still be essential to any comprehensive endeavor to explore the human mind (Bloch, 2012), but rather has turned into cog...