I appreciate the value of both evolutionary behavioural science and applied social research, and I see no better
foundation for the latter than the former. I admit to being a bit wary, however, that some current enthusiasm for
applied research stems from cynicism about the value of basic research. The editors of Applied Evolutionary
Anthropology note that funding agencies demand increasingly that anthropologists “prove their worth” by demonstrating applied value (p. 4). I hope this doesn’t imply that these agencies define “worth” as “immediate short-term value.

Price, ME

American Anthropologist

English

Brunel University Research Archive

12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758UNCORRECTEDPROOFBook Reviews 13ways of being that make dissent, not escape, a necessity”(p. 188).It is Garcı´a Canclini’s contention that sociology enablesus to read new global relations of interdependence, whileanthropology enables us to grasp the density of these “in-tercultural” interactions. Together with the above model-ing of the world and its generalities (including “collapse,”“dissent,” “hegemonies,” “periods,” “art worlds,” “cultures,”and “classes”), such sociology–anthropology enables us tomake these assertions: “Art attempts to narrate, to trans-late indecisions and enigmas, to make visible the tensionbetween rootedness and traveling” (p. 82); “we live in theage of unframed art,” art practice having moved from object-based practices to context-based ones (p. 101); “art existsbecause we live in tension between what we desire andwhat we lack, between what we would like to name andwhat is contradicted or disagreed upon by society” (p. 127);and “[works of art] situate themselves in a prior moment,when the real is possible, when it has not yet broken down”(p. xiv).Applied Evolutionary Anthropology: Darwinian Approachesto Contemporary World Issues by Mhairi A.Gibson andDavid W. Lawson, eds.Advances in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behaviour series. New York: Springer Science Business Media, 2014.299 pp.DOI: 10.1111/aman.12262Michael PriceBrunel University LondonI appreciate the value of both evolutionary behavioralscience and applied social research, and I see no betterfoundation for the latter than the former. I admit to beinga bit wary, however, that some current enthusiasm forapplied research stems from cynicism about the valueof basic research. The editors of Applied EvolutionaryAnthropology note that funding agencies demand increasinglythat anthropologists “prove their worth” by demonstratingapplied value (p. 4). I hope this doesn’t imply that theseagencies define “worth” as “immediate short-term value.”The uses of basic research are often unanticipated and maytake decades to emerge. Just as Isaac Newton didn’t foreseetaking us to the moon, evolutionary behavioral scientistscouldn’t have predicted how their basic research would beused in works such as Applied Evolutionary Anthropology.Having said all that, it certainly is important to demon-strate the applied value of evolutionary behavioral science,and Applied Evolutionary Anthropology succeeds impressivelyin this regard. Chapters focus on social issues as diverse aspopulation sex ratios, warfare, collective agriculture, micro-finance, altruistic punishment, and public health (includingmaternal and infant health, nutrition, behavior change, andthe effects of socioeconomic status on health). Below I’lldiscuss a few chapters that left a particularly big impressionand that are suggestive of the book’s overall tenor.An evolutionary perspective can generate novel solu-tions to problems of public health, and this is exemplifiedmost starkly in Gillian Pepper and Daniel Nettle’s chapter.They present a simple and powerful behavioral-ecologicalmodel to account for why people with lower socioeconomicstatuses tend to engage in unhealthy behavior. Because thesepeople’s lives tend to involve high “extrinsic mortality” risks(i.e., uncontrollable risks like violent crime), they havereduced incentives to avoid even those risks over which theyhave some control (e.g., quitting smoking). This model isused to radically consolidate existing explanations for thesehealth effects (from nine to two competing explanationclasses), deepen these explanations, and generate novelinterventions (e.g., a good way to encourage healthierlifestyle choices in these environments would be to reduceextrinsic mortality risks).I particularly enjoyed Bram Tucker’s chapter on col-lective agriculture, as I’ve conducted research in this areamyself. Collective agriculture is regarded here in terms of“group-level cultural adaptation” (p. 17), and many usefulapplications of evolutionary theory are made. I wondered,however, whether too much group-level focus would dis-tract from the problem of individualistic free riding, whichhas been identified as a key barrier to successful collectiveaction cross-culturally (Ostrom 2000; Price 2006).Mhairi Gibson’s chapter demonstrates not just thebenefits of taking an evolutionary approach but also theunanticipated dangers of not taking one. She reports ona development scheme that introduced water taps to ArsiOromo agropastoralists in Ethiopia. This scheme succeededin reducing women’s effort expended on water collectionbut had the unintended consequence of dramaticallyincreasing their fertility, leading to an unsustainable strainon resources. Had life history theory been used to predictthat these women would divert their conserved workeffort energy toward reproductive effort (Gibson arguesconvincingly on pp. 69–71 that reduced workload was thekey mediating variable here), the need for interventions12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758UNCORRECTEDPROOF14 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2015(e.g., contraceptive provisioning) would have been easier toforesee.Robert Layton’s chapter is one of the most ambitiousin that he tackles the particularly big problem of war. Hereaches the reasonable conclusion that human nature is nei-ther peaceful nor warlike, and he seems to suggest that it isflexibly adapted for both, with behavioral output dependingon environmental input (p. 196). I was confused, however,about why he portrays this view as being radically opposedto that of Steven Pinker, who he describes as holding a“genetic[ally] determinis[tic]” view of humans as inflexiblyviolent creatures (p. 195). On the contrary, Pinker’s (2011)main message is not that violence is inevitable but thatcultures have become vastly less violent over time, as thepeaceful aspects of human nature have prevailed increasinglyover the violent ones (hence his title, The Better Angelsof Our Nature). As the views of Layton and Pinker seemcompatible, it’s not clear why a conflict is perceived here.Academic debates shouldn’t distract from the book’smain function as a demonstration of evolutionary anthropol-ogy’s added social value or from the fact that it representsa landmark achievement in this regard. It is a difficult chal-lenge to bridge the gap between basic and applied researchin evolutionary behavioral science. This book meets thatchallenge by demonstrating convincingly, in chapter afterchapter, how these applications are assisting anthropologistsin their everyday efforts to improve people’s lives.REFERENCES CITEDOstrom, Elinor2000 Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms. Journalof Economic Perspectives 14(3):137–158.Pinker, Steven2011 The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violencein History and Its Causes. London: Penguin.Price, Michael E.2006 Judgments about Cooperators and Freeriders on a ShuarWork Team: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective.Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes101(1):20–35.Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous andCorporate Actors in Papua New Guinea by Alex Golub.Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 264 pp.DOI: 10.1111/aman.12263Pierre-Yves Le MeurInstitut de Recherche pour le De´veloppement“It is not easy to separate ‘Ipili culture’ from ‘the mine’”(p. 9), writes the author of Leviathans at the Gold Mine. Thisintriguing assertion, at least from a classically culturaliststandpoint, is followed by an explanatory outline that liesat the core of Alex Golub’s argument: “Decades of miningin Porgera have made kinship and landownership contestedtopics, even in areas not directly affected by mining” (p. 9).The story told in this book can be read on two intertwinedlevels. First, the book tells the story of the encounter be-tween local people and a foreign corporation in a seeminglyremote part of Papua New Guinea, the Porgera Valley. It fo-cuses on the Porgera gold-mining project, which stands at aspecific historical juncture marked by the Bougainville crisis,the closure of Panguna copper mine in 1989, and the des-perate search for revenues in which the Papua New Guineangovernment has engaged to compensate for this loss whilealso having demonstrated its inability to “operate a mine inthe face of local opposition. The result was a moment of op-portunity that the Ipili seized, becoming one of the most ac-tive and successful groups in pressing claims against the stateand transnational capitalism” (p. 8). Second, the book pro-poses a Latourian “sociology of associations,” which exploresthe translation processes resulting in the making of powerfulmacroactors or leviathans—bureaucracy, mine, customarylandowners, clans, the Ipili—who come to structure themining arenas in various human and nonhuman guises.The book is organized as “a long zoom out” (p. 21) thatstarts with a Manchesterian extended case study, tracing aneventually unsuccessful 18-month-long negotiation between“the Ipili” and “the mine” in different arenas (ch. 1) and cul-minating in a reappraisal of the postcolonial discourses anddebates on national identity in Papua New Guinea, with afocus on an elusive ethnicity and a constructivist indigenousconception of patrimony (ch. 4). The local taste for innova-tion and the integration of foreign items goes hand in handwith an allergy to “leviathans” as “cold” and to institutionalorganizational forms, be they mine or state: “Papua NewGuineans may be pre-adapted to entrepreneurship, but notto its institutionalization” (p. 196). Chapters 2 and 3 bridgethe gap between case study and generalization through theadoption of historical and ethnographic lenses respectively.Golub aims to analyze within a common theoreticalframework the proliferation and interplay of actors in thearenas, in which resource access and identity distributionare negotiated along with as the efficacy and actual“concreteness” of macroactors able to “sign an agreementgiven the fact... [they have] no hands” (p. 4). Chapters 1 and

Applied evolutionary anthropology: Darwinian approaches to contemporary world issues

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Applied evolutionary anthropology: Darwinian approaches to contemporary world issues

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