For many scholars, the Cartesian mind/body split is one of the fundamental mistakes of the Western scientific tradition. Anthropologists who study notions of the body in cultures around the world regularly take Descartes as their point of departure. Many also suggest that breaking free from Descartes is politically liberating: if the mindful body could be rediscovered, society could move away f...

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,...