Search Results (127)

The Field Guide “Paleopathology Collection at the University of Granada” includes one of the most important collections of human bone remains that present anomalies or specific characteristics that can be used to determine the existence of diseases, accidents or malformations in each subject’s life, as well as the probable cause of death. The collection consists of several thousand skeletons or parts of them. It is located at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Granada and has been created and managed by Professor Miguel C. Botella López, founder and director of the Anthropology Laboratory of the University of Granada, between 1971 and 2024. Professor Botella is the author of the diagnoses made for each specimen from different geographical areas of Spain in a time period ranging from the Neolithic to the present day. The collection is of special interest to students and professionals in medicine, archaeology, criminology or law. Full article

This study traces the origin and migration of the Nsit Clan of the Ibibio ethnic nationality, focusing on its distinct characteristics. The origin and migration of the Western Nsit Clan in the Niger Delta of Nigeria constitute a complex historical narrative shaped by a confluence of cultural, economic, and environmental factors. Rooted in pre-colonial times, this study delves into the clan’s ancestral origins, tracing the intricate patterns of migration that have defined its historical trajectory. Drawing from a diverse range of primary sources, including oral traditions, and anthropological findings, this research illuminates the cultural dynamics that propelled the clan’s movement across the Niger Delta region. This study also explores the impact of external influences, such as trade and colonialism, on the migration patterns and socio-political organization of the Western Nsit Clan. By unraveling the historical tapestry of this community, this research contributes valuable insights into the broader understanding of the Niger Delta’s rich and multifaceted history. A significant emphasis is placed on the migration patterns of the Western Nsit Clan, analyzing the push and pull factors that compelled movements within the Niger Delta region. Ultimately, this study aims to contribute to a deeper comprehension of the Western Nsit Clan’s historical trajectory, offering valuable insights into the complexities of migration patterns, cultural evolution, and resilience within the context of the Niger Delta’s diverse tapestry. Full article

Recent discussions between evolutionary and theological anthropology have intensified, particularly through the work of Michael Tomasello. As a key figure in evolutionary anthropology, Tomasello synthesizes extensive empirical research into an accessible ‘natural history’ of core human abilities. He posits that a unique human trait distinguishing us from our closest relatives is the capacity for “collective intentionality”, a concept he adapts from the philosophy of action. In this article, I show that Tomasello’s insights carry significant implications for philosophical and theological debates. Philosophically, his evolutionary framework invites a new understanding of the mind–brain problem, promoting a non-reductive view of human consciousness which questions the basic metaphysical assumptions of the debate by taking a genealogical perspective. Theologically, his work supports a “practical metaphysics”, suggesting that although morality is autonomous, it can lead to theistic interpretations of human existence. This supports the Kantian idea that religion does not precede morality but that religious views of the world are interpretations of human moral life. At the same time, religion is not just an add-on to morality but an interpretation of a human form of life as such. Both discourses exemplify the importance of a genealogical perspective in philosophy and theology, especially reinforcing the necessity of considering the ‘natural history’ of consciousness, free will or religiosity in anthropology. Full article

Numerous previous studies indicate that both wild hedgehogs and those kept as pets pose a significant risk to human health. At the same time, humans can also transmit various pathogens to hedgehogs (e.g., human herpesvirus 1). The risk of human infection from hedgehogs by various bacteria, viruses, fungi, rickettsiae, and parasites, and of hedgehog infection from humans, arises from close contact with pet hedgehogs, wild hedgehogs, and/or the contaminated environment which they cohabit with humans. People can also come into close contact with hedgehogs in city parks, rescue and rehabilitation centers, gardens, suburbs, and zoos. Numerous zoos keep different species of hedgehogs, which are often used for education and interaction with visitors, especially children. In spite of certain preventive measures, periodic examinations, and disease controls being carried out, the possibility of the transmission of infectious diseases from hedgehogs to visitors and employees is not excluded. Close contact poses a risk, especially if biosecurity is not properly maintained. The anthropological effects of coexistence, habitat sharing, and frequent human intrusion into hedgehog habitats have disrupted the natural relationship between humans and animals, and have led to an increase in the prevalence of various pathogens. Although many different pathogens have been isolated in hedgehogs, there is a need to study some of them in more detail and to understand their interaction and transmission possibilities, as well as zoonotic and reverse zoonotic pathogens. Full article

Votive offerings are one of the most common devotional practices in Hindu temples of Kerala and are today resorted to by an ever-growing number of worshippers seeking divine help in times of need. As this article will show, these offerings are deeply embedded in the logics of the hyper-personalized and unmediated devotion that characterizes popular Hinduism in this part of India. They are also markers of the recent opening of religion to individual contribution and intervention, as well as active tools for the intimate worshipper–deity relationship. Ritual arts conducted as votive offerings allow us to dive even deeper into these considerations and open up new alleys of analysis, for they connect public and private worlds in specific ways and introduce unique aesthetic and transactional dimensions. This article draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the south Indian state of Kerala, with particular focus on the ritual performing art muṭiyēṯṯu’, which is mainly conducted as a votive offering in high-caste temples devoted to the goddess Bhadrakāḷi. It pulls together anthropology, performance, and religious studies to analyze the current grassroot-level realities of lived popular religion through the prism of votive offerings in general and of ritual performing arts conducted as votive offerings in particular. Full article

The anthropology of food is a sub-field of cultural anthropology interested in studying food and foodways. This article provides a concise overview of the anthropology of food, tracing its development from the early twentieth century to contemporary debates and emerging research trajectories. Drawing on foundational work by figures such as Boas and Malinowski, it shows how early anthropologists approached food as integral to understanding social organization, kinship, and cultural meaning. As the field evolved, structuralist, materialist, feminist, and political-economic perspectives broadened its scope, highlighting the symbolic significance of cuisine, the interplay between environment and subsistence, and the pivotal role of gender and class in shaping food practices. In recent decades, the anthropology of food has engaged intensively with globalization, investigating how transnational flows reshape culinary identities, local economies, and cultural heritage, as well as other significant topics. At the same time, emerging themes—such as multispecies perspectives, sensory studies, and the application of innovative methodologies—offer new lenses for understanding how food mediates relationships between humans, non-human beings, and environments. By examining case studies spanning regions from Africa and Asia to Europe and the Americas, this article illustrates how contemporary anthropologists use food as a prism to investigate cultural identity, social change, ethical relations, and the complex entanglements of local and global food systems. Full article

This essay explores the mid-eighteenth-century travel experience of Scottish writer Anne Macvicar Grant [1775–1838]. Grant is perhaps best known for her late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travel writing and anthropological discourse focussed primarily upon the Scottish Highlands. Yet, the majority of Grant’s childhood was spent in Albany, New York. After she had established herself as a writer and published various texts dealing with her more recent experience in the Scottish Highlands, in 1808, Grant published Memoirs of an American Lady, a semi-biographical account of her childhood spent in the multicultural contact zone of a British military outpost. There are two key issues that this essay explores. First, I discuss the process of memory. Unlike intentional travelogues of the time, Grant’s text was not compiled with the aid of a diary or ledger. Grant’s entire account comprises memories of events that occurred over forty years in the past. Part of this essay then discusses the potential fallibilities of the fragility of human memory upon the traveller. While it may be anticipated that this first issue is detrimental to the account of the traveller, the second key issue that I explore is arguably advantageous to Grant’s account. The extent to which Grant, throughout her life, immersed herself within various marginalised communities undoubtedly allows for the production of a more nuanced and balanced account of external cultures than was the custom at the time. What complicates this account is the mixing of memory and cultural immersion. In her writing around the Scottish Highlands, Grant frequently relies upon her experience of certain cultures as a child to explain and convey her understanding of the different marginalised communities she encounters as an adult. Integral to this essay is the fact that this mixing of memory and cultural exposure also occurs the opposite way around. In the Memoirs, the writer’s recollections of the Mohawk or the Kanien’kehà:ka people and colonial Dutch communities as a child seem to be coloured and subjected by her more recent experience of the Highland people. Full article

Natural disasters are mostly seasonal and caused by anthropological, climatic, and geological factors that impact human life, economy, ecology, and natural resources. This paper focuses on increasingly widespread forest fires, causing greater destruction in recent years. Data obtained from sensors for predicting forest fires and assessing fire severity, i.e., area burned, are multivariate, seasonal, and highly imbalanced with a ratio of 100,000+ non-fire events to 1 fire event. This paper presents Spatio-Temporal Agnostic Sampling (STAS) to overcome the challenge of highly imbalanced data. This paper first presents a mathematical understanding of fire and non-fire events and then a thorough complexity analysis of the proposed STAS framework and two existing methods, NearMiss and SMOTE. Further, to investigate the applicability of STAS, binary classification models (to determine the probability of forest fire) and regression models (to assess the severity of forest fire) were built on the data generated from STAS. A total of 432 experiments were conducted to validate the robustness of the STAS parameters. Additional experiments with a temporal data split were conducted to further validate the results. The results show that 180 of the 216 binary classification models had an $F1score>0.9$ and 150 of the 216 regression models had an $R^{2}score>0.75$. These results indicate the applicability of STAS for fire prediction with highly imbalanced multivariate seasonal time series data. Full article

The notion of impurity is identified in numerous belief systems, ranging from certain religions to nationalisms. Understanding its nature and functioning beyond its concrete objects is therefore a fundamental anthropological question. This work is grounded in anthropology, though it may be of interest to scholars from other disciplines. Impurity has been highlighted by numerous authors in ethnographic and theoretical texts, but a comparison of these various works indicates a lack of theoretical development. We will therefore begin by presenting the various explanations attributed to it, before proposing that the notion of impurity is primarily a knowledge of natural laws causing illness, death, and misfortune, based on the observation of contagion and implying an ontology of moral substantiality. I propose this concept to designate an ontology in which everything is a substance (bodily fluids and food, but also glances, words, and thoughts) and at the same time a moral value, without distinguishing between materiality and symbolism, a proposal inspired by McKim Marriott’s substance-codes (1976). This knowledge has then become a tool of social control, aiming to protect reproduction (social, cosmic, and ontological), through its effective language combining a somatopsychological aspect (disgust reaction) and social rejection. Full article

Systematic studies on Late Islamic cemeteries that integrate architectural, ritual, and biological aspects remain relatively rare, particularly in Islamic countries or regions with an active Muslim presence. Typically, available research focuses more on epigraphic and artistic features. Since 2018, excavations at the Cathedral and surveys in the ruins of the city of Adulis (Massawa, Eritrea) have uncovered 326 Muslim graves: six dating to the 15th and 18th centuries CE and 320 attributed to the mid-19th to the early 20th century CE. These discoveries have enabled, for the first time in Eritrea, a detailed scientific study of the biological characteristics of the human remains, the funerary architecture, and the burial rites of Muslim communities from the 15th to the early 20th century. The skeletal remains were analyzed through taphonomic and anthropological studies. The graves were categorized into various typologies based on their structural features, while evidence of funerary rituals was documented as indicative elements of the burial practices adopted. These findings were further enriched by ethnographic sources and collaborative work with local communities, who acted as custodians of the historical memory and traditions of the region. The results provide insights into a historical period of Eritrea that is otherwise poorly documented. More broadly, they contribute to the understanding of the history of the Horn of Africa, a region with limited data from funerary and archaeological contexts. The Muslim cemeteries of Adulis represent the most extensively investigated Muslim burial site in recent years, providing critical insights into the historical Muslim presence in the region. These findings also allow researchers to hypothesize the succession of various communities that chose Adulis as a central location for interring their deceased, reflecting its enduring significance as a focal point for cultural and ritual practices across different periods. Full article

The work of the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún is widely recognized in the field of anthropology, primarily due to his methodological contributions. The research techniques he employed—such as learning the native language, placing emphasis on linguistic aspects to understand the culture and worldview of “the others”, carefully selecting informants from all social strata, and designing open-ended questionnaires—seem more akin to those of modern British social anthropology than to practices from 500 years ago. In 2015, his work was designated as part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program, an acknowledgment aimed at highlighting his cultural contributions and preserving the world’s documentary heritage as a symbol of humanity’s collective memory. This designation has renewed Sahagún’s prominence as a precursor of this discipline. This study explores the impact of such recognition and the enduring value of his work. In a time like the present, where interethnic tensions and rejection of difference are on the rise, Sahagún’s work stands as an unquestionable legacy against intolerance and ethnocentrism. Full article

Background: This paper presents research on the comparison and evaluation of lower limb power, movement, position on the court, and effectiveness in the players of men’s volleyball. The study involved professional players in the first division of a men’s volleyball team. The main aim of this paper was to show the correlation between lower limb power, movement, position on the pitch, and volleyball efficiency. Methods: The authors presented basic somatic characteristics of anthropology metrics, advanced research results obtained with the Optojump measuring system, players’ results statistics obtained with the Data Volley software (v.4.2024.01), and by applying scientific statistical methods and graphics interpretation. Results: The analyses with the Kruskal-Wallis test showed statistically significant differences in all the variables studied. Flight time (TF, H = 122.967; p < 0.001.) was the shortest for the players in the libero position, then the setter, attacker, middle and longest flight time was shown by the receiving players. The height of the jumps (JH, H = 123.018; p < 0.001) was the highest for receiving and mid players, and then attackers and setters, and the lowest jumps were recorded by libero players. The highest power of lower limbs (P, H = 20.392; p < 0.001) was characteristic for receivers, setters, mid-players and, curiously, libero achieved a better result than attackers. Conclusions: The analysis shows that the power of the lower extremities in volleyball players is associated with the function they perform on the court. Full article

Craniofacial development is a critical aspect of pediatric growth, influencing fields such as physical anthropology, pediatrics, forensic sciences, and clinical practice. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the trends in craniofacial measurements and indices in Latvian children aged 1–15. Methods: The anthropometrical measurements (head circumference, length, width, facial length, and width) were conducted on 375 children according to the guidelines by R. Martin, K. Saller, and J. Prīmanis at the Anthropology laboratory at the Institute of Anatomy and Anthropology, Rīga Stradiņš University. The cephalic index (CI) and the facial or prosopic index (PI) were calculated, allowing for a detailed examination of cranial and facial proportions. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics, including the Pearson Chi-square test and the Spearman correlation coefficient. Results: The findings revealed a consistent increase in head circumference with age, with boys generally having slightly larger heads than girls. The boys and girls exhibited growth in head length and width, particularly noticeable between 1 and 2 years of age. Facial length and width increased with age, with boys typically having longer facial lengths and broader faces than girls. The most common cephalic index category is mesocephaly, which accounts for 52.85% of the population, followed by dolichocephaly at 32.94%. Brachycephaly and hyperbrachycephaly are less prevalent, representing 11.36% and 2.86% of the population. Regarding the facial index categories, hypereuryprosopic is the most prevalent, representing 45.54% of the population, closely followed by euryprosopic at 43.74%. Mesoprosopic is significantly less common, representing only 9.95%. The least common categories are leptoprosopic and hyperleptoprosopic, with prevalences of 0.64% and 0.12%, respectively. The indices analysis showed variations across age groups, with dolichocephaly being more common at younger ages and decreasing over time. Brachycephaly and hyperbrachycephaly remained relatively stable or decreased slightly with age, while mesocephaly displayed less variation. The relationship between the FI and CI in younger age groups was typically weak to moderate and inverse, with a significance level of p < 0.001 or p < 0.01. However, no meaningful correlation was observed in older children aged 14–15. Conclusions: This study provides valuable insights into the craniofacial development of Latvian children, highlighting the measurements, cranial and facial types, and their variations across age groups. Full article

The aim of this article is to approach the epistemology of revelation through the approach of political anthropology. It departs from Max Weber’s distinction between ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary situations, which led to his idea of charismatic power. This article complements the Weberian perspective by introducing the anthropological term “liminality” for such situations, as well as the term “trickster” for figures who have a specific affinity for appearing in such situations, creating havoc instead of offering a solution. Ordinary knowledge does not apply to liminal void situations of incommensurability; incommensurable knowledge can be gained by magic and religion. Magic forces the transcendent and claims to produce effects, while religion is based on revealed knowledge, the validity of which is established by trust. Under particularly anguishing liminal conditions, the hardly tolerated practitioners of magic might gain positions of power. An important such example is offered by Persian Magi. Turning to the present, modern rationalism, with Bacon and Descartes, undermined both ordinary and revealed knowledge. The possible relevance of revealed knowledge in contemporary times is discussed through the related phenomena of apocalyptic expectations and Marian apparitions. Full article

Often, artists of all time periods have unintentionally crystallized in their works the image of landscapes distant in time; of those landscapes, sometimes only faint traces remain, adding to the collection of so-called indirect sources. In many cases, a critical analysis carried out using the comparative method of those iconographic sources allows the inference of the relevant information regarding the layout of places, the structures housed there, and the practice of arts and crafts, or about customs and habits (e.g., dressing, eating, etc.); it is possible to recompose the so-called ‘buried landscapes’ by combining it with, and thanks to, the substantial contributions of other disciplines (such as history, archaeology, and anthropology). This contribution shows the first outcomes of research carried out within the Ghibertiana Project by CHMlab of DIDA (UNIFI), which aims to analyze the ‘landscape characterised by cultivated areas’ from the Florentine countryside in the early fifteenth century. In particular, it is maintained that Lorenzo Ghiberti (Pelago, 1378–Florence, 1455), just like other contemporary artists, depicted territories and architectures he had first experienced in some of the ten bronze panels of the Gates of Paradise of the Baptistery of Florence. He described in great detail the flora, fauna, and anthropic structures of the extra moenia territory. The focus of the early stage of analysis and this contribution is mainly on shelters: temporary structures functional to agricultural work. The encouraging results obtained may give rise to new research on other Florentine landscape elements artfully chiseled in Ghiberti’s workshop. Full article