Anthropology emerged from the colonial expansion of Europe. Colonialism structured the relationship between anthropologists and the people they studied and had an effect on methodological nd conceptual formulations in the discipline. For example, the role of "objective outsider" with its resultant professional exploitation of subject matter can be viewed as an academic manifestation of colonial...

This article surveys some descriptions of the Fore people made on early contact in the 1950s by patrol officers, social anthropologists and medical doctors. Sorcery accusations and cannibalism initially impressed these outside observers, though gradually they came to realize that a strange and fatal condition called kuru was a major affliction of the Fore, especially women and children. Fore at...

ANTHROPOLOGISTS cannot be said to have a theory of learning of their own. They borrow and apply concepts from behavioristic approaches in psy chology, from theories of learning, from social psychology, and particularly from psychoanalysis. 1 This has made anthro pological perspectives on learning some what less than systematic, but it has kept them flexible. Until the influence of Edward Sapir,...

The professionalization of Canadian anthropology in the first half of the twentieth century was tied closely to the matrix of the federal state, first though the Anthropology Division of the Geological Survey of Canada and then the National Museum. State anthropologists occupied an ambiguous professional status as both civil servants and anthropologists committed to the methodological and disci...

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,...