Transcending the academic/public divide in the transmission of theory: Raglan, diffusionism, and mid-century anthropology

Diffusionism has had a bad press, for dark reasons: time for a revaluation. Via an analysis of the productive yet neglected career of that incisive hyperdiffusionist, Lord Raglan, I investigate why would-be hegemons in postwar British anthropology misrepresented or dismissed the power of this paradigm. In fact diffusionism, though declared moribund, did not die but remained a potent explanatory mode for decades, especially in anthropological circles outside Academe. I conclude questioning the life of theory in our discipline, and the conventional historiography of British anthropology

Characterizing Genetic Diversity of Contemporary Pacific Chickens Using Mitochondrial DNA Analyses

Background\ud Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) hypervariable region (HVR) sequences of prehistoric Polynesian chicken samples reflect dispersal of two haplogroups—D and E—by the settlers of the Pacific. The distribution of these chicken haplogroups has been used as an indicator of human movement. Recent analyses suggested similarities between prehistoric Pacific and South American chicken samples, perhaps reflecting prehistoric Polynesian introduction of the chicken into South America. These analyses have been heavily debated. The current distribution of the D and E lineages among contemporary chicken populations in the Western Pacific is unclear, but might ultimately help to inform debates about the movements of humans that carried them.\ud \ud Objectives\ud We sought to characterize contemporary mtDNA diversity among chickens in two of the earliest settled archipelagoes of Remote Oceania, the Marianas and Vanuatu.\ud \ud Methods\ud We generated HVR sequences for 43 chickens from four islands in Vanuatu, and for 5 chickens from Guam in the Marianas.\ud \ud Results\ud Forty samples from Vanuatu and three from Guam were assigned to haplogroup D, supporting this as a Pacific chicken haplogroup that persists in the Western Pacific. Two haplogroup E lineages were observed in Guam and two in Vanuatu. Of the E lineages in Vanuatu, one was identical to prehistoric Vanuatu and Polynesian samples and the other differed by one polymorphism. Contrary to our expectations, we observed few globally distributed domesticate lineages not associated with Pacific chicken dispersal. This might suggest less European introgression of chickens into Vanuatu than expected. If so, the E lineages might represent lineages maintained from ancient Pacific chicken introductions. The Vanuatu sample might thus provide an opportunity to distinguish between maintained ancestral Pacific chicken lineages and replacement by global domesticates through genomic analyses, which could resolve questions of contemporary haplogroup E chicken relationships and inform interpretations of debated sequences from archaeological samples

Bigger than ourselves: the Southgate narrative and the search for a sense of common purpose

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The paper examines two ‘turns’ in English national sporting culture, ‘Beckhamisation’ and ‘Southgatism’, and their contribution to an ‘imagined community’ through processes of ‘banal nationalism’. It examines the critiques of various academic and media commentators to demonstrate the link between the trappings of sport (in this case football), and people’s understanding of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Music/songs, flags, language, multi-cultural representation, team ethos and espoused values, are not just signifiers, but have a pivotal part to play in representing, repressing and resisting particular forms of Englishness. The focus here is on those national sporting occasions that all too often have been associated with virulent forms of nationalism. We conclude that Southgatism holds out more hope for a progressive sporting patriotism than did its Beckhamite predecessor, but that this has yet to be tested in the febrile cauldron (the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants and Brexit) currently forging English national identity

Sport and Society

Despite its economic and cultural centrality, sport is a relatively neglected and undertheorized area of sociological research. In this review, we examine sports\u27 articulation with stratification issues, especially race, class, and gender. In addition, we look at how the media and processes of globalization have affected sports.We suggest that sports and cultural sociologists need to attend more closely to how leisure products and practices are produced and distributed and how they intersect with educational, political, and cultural institutions. We propose the work of Bourdieu andthe new institutionalism to undergird future research

Dietary intake methods in the anthropology of food and nutrition

Dietary and nutritional studies in anthropology may attempt to address issues in which food and nutrition are central, or where diet may be a peripheral or contributory component of a complex of problems within a group, population or society. Studies may be concerned with nutritional factors or they may be concerned with food symbolism, the perception of food, or the role of food in forging and maintaining identity. Dietary intake studies can be used to inform the study of food consumption, nutrient intake and nutritional status. Thus the range of ways that dietary intake studies can serve anthropological enquiry is extremely broad. The choice of method or methods should involve the degree of appropriateness for the question in hand, the accuracy, precision, complexity, and cost (in time and money) of the techniques chosen, and the ease of subsequent interpretation of quantitative results. This is often not straightforward, and the aim of this chapter is to examine critically some of the problems associated with the choice and use of dietary methods in determining food and nutrient intake, and in estimating nutritional status from nutrient intake. Various books have been written about measurement of diet and nutritional intake, and nutritional status assessment from dietary intakes. Most of them consider the role of dietary and nutritional factors in human health. Volumes considering the study of diet and nutrition in anthropology include those edited by Johnston (1987) and Pelto et al. (1989) and written by Ulijaszek and Strickland (1993). Readers wanting more information than is possible to give in the present chapter are guided to these volumes.The full text of this book chapter is not available in ORA