Psychiatry and politics in Pelotas, Brazil: the equivocal quality of conduct disorder and related diagnoses.
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The world-wide emergence of categories for diagnosing mental health problems in children and youth such as conduct disorder is often attributed to the globalization of a highly biomedical form of psychiatry. In Brazil, a small group of therapists are resisting biomedicalization by keeping psychodynamic traditions alive and aiming to transform psychotherapy into a resource for politicized youth empowerment. Nevertheless, clinical practices demonstrate an increased use of biomedical diagnoses and therapeutic routines. On the basis of fieldwork with therapists and teachers, and a nine-year-long ethnography of young people, this article explores the localized effects of these potentially contradictory developments. Results show that the growth of biomedical practices alongside politicized therapeutic approaches is not indicative of underlying ambiguities but has, rather, emerged from the purposefully equivocal nature of Brazilian social, medical, and professional life. The article uses this Brazilian case study to critically debate theories of medicalization in the anthropology of psychiatry. (+info)
Pego do Diabo (Loures, Portugal): dating the emergence of anatomical modernity in westernmost Eurasia.
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The unmaking of an anthropologist: Wallace returns from the field, 1862-70.
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This essay follows Alfred Russel Wallace back from the field in 1862, tracing how his views on human evolution developed after his field experiences in the East Indies and how he articulated them within the social structure of British science during the 1860s. It analyses his involvement in the metropolitan scientific institutions dedicated to the study of man, the Ethnological Society of London and its breakaway counterpart, the Anthropological Society of London, which offered differing visions for a science of man and its intersection with political commitments. Using evidence from his participation in society meetings, the reception of his own anthropological papers, and the responses to the views he expressed in his field travel narrative, The Malay Archipelago, I show that although Wallace's involvement was initially enthusiastic, over time his views came into conflict with both groups. His involvement in established human science institutions declined, and Wallace turned towards other social locations for cultivating his knowledge of and engagement with questions involving the study of humanity. (+info)
Ancestral facial morphology of Old World higher primates.
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Fossil remains of the cercopithecoid Victoria-pithecus recently recovered from middle Miocene deposits of Maboko Island (Kenya) provide evidence of the cranial anatomy of Old World monkeys prior to the evolutionary divergence of the extant subfamilies Colobinae and Cercopithecinae. Victoria-pithecus shares a suite of craniofacial features with the Oligocene catarrhine Aegyptopithecus and early Miocene hominoid Afropithecus. All three genera manifest supraorbital costae, anteriorly convergent temporal lines, the absence of a postglabellar fossa, a moderate to long snout, great facial height below the orbits, a deep cheek region, and anteriorly tapering premaxilla. The shared presence of these features in a catarrhine generally ancestral to apes and Old World monkeys, an early ape, and an early Old World monkey indicates that they are primitive characteristics that typified the last common ancestor of Hominoidea and Cercopithecoidea. These results contradict prevailing cranial morphotype reconstructions for ancestral catarrhines as Colobus- or Hylobates-like, characterized by a globular anterior braincase and orthognathy. By resolving several equivocal craniofacial morphocline polarities, these discoveries lay the foundation for a revised interpretation of the ancestral cranial morphology of Catarrhini more consistent with neontological and existing paleontological evidence. (+info)
Personality and reproductive success in a high-fertility human population.
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