Anthropology
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Through fieldwork, laboratory work, and close study, faculty in the Department of Anthropology guide students in the examination and analysis of the global varieties of human thought and activity, as well as the evolutionary origins of the human biology. Anthropologists at BU are experts in issues relating to religion in the modern world, the effects of religion on politics and society, grassroots civil societies, democratic transitions, and evolutionary biology. The department offers two tracks of study between social anthropology and biological anthropology.
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Department chair: Tom Barfield
Campus address: 232 Bay State Road
Phone: 617-353-2195
Fax: 617-353-2610
Website: www.bu.edu/anthrop
All materials in OpenBU are subject to Title 17 of the U.S. Code.
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Environmental reconstruction and wood use at late Chalcolithic Çamlıbel Tarlası, Turkey
(Elsevier BV, 2020-09)Çamlıbel Tarlası is a short-lived, mid 4th millennium BCE Chalcolithic archaeological site in northern central Anatolia, modern Turkey, with evidence for both intensive metallurgy and permanent occupation. Analysis of a ... -
Best practices for digitizing a wood slide collection: The Bailey-Wetmore Wood Collection of the Harvard University Herbaria
(Elsevier BV, 2020-09)As herbaria move to digitize their collections, the question remains of how to efficiently digitize collections other than standard herbarium sheets, such as wood slide collections. Beginning in September 2018, the Harvard ... -
What can words do? Debating a 'good' death in French palliative care
(George Washington University, Institute for Ethnographic Research, 2020)This article explores the ambivalent ways that care providers in a southern French hospital (the Center) thought about patient subjectivities and the power and role of language as they argued about how to orchestrate a ... -
Reducing the primate pet trade: actions for primatologists
(2020-01)This commentary emerged from a panel presentation at the International Primatological Society Congress in Nairobi, Kenya, 2018. The goal was to provide regional updates on the status of primate removal from habitat countries, ... -
Neanderthal plant use and pyrotechnology: phytolith analysis from Roc de Marsal, France
(Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019-08)The plant component of Neanderthal subsistence and technology is not well documented, partially due to the preservation constraints of macrobotanical components. Phytoliths, however, are preserved even when other plant ... -
Population-specific use of the same tool-assisted alarm call between two wild orangutan populations (Pongopygmaeus wurmbii) indicates functional arbitrariness
(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2013-07-05)Arbitrariness is an elementary feature of human language, yet seldom an object of comparative inquiry. While arbitrary signals for the same function are relatively frequent between animal populations across taxa, the same ... -
SIVagm infection in wild African green monkeys from South Africa: epidemiology, natural history, and evolutionary considerations
(Public Library of Science, 2013-01-01)Pathogenesis studies of SIV infection have not been performed to date in wild monkeys due to difficulty in collecting and storing samples on site and the lack of analytical reagents covering the extensive SIV diversity. ... -
Low testosterone correlates with delayed development in male orangutans
(PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE, 2012-10-15)Male orangutans (Pongo spp.) display an unusual characteristic for mammals in that some adult males advance quickly to full secondary sexual development while others can remain in an adolescent-like form for a decade or ... -
Two deaths and a funeral: ritual inscriptions' affordances for mourning and moral personhood in Vietnam
(WILEY, 2018-02-01)Mortuary rituals constitute the social nature of death and mourning, often working to ease painful transitions for the deceased and bereaved. In Vietnam, such rituals involve objects, including commodified yet personalized ... -
Beyond the clinic? Eluding a medical diagnosis of anorexia through narrative
(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2018-08-01)The persistence and recurrence of anorexia nervosa poses a clinical challenge, and provides support for critiques of oppressive and injurious facets of society inscribed on women’s bodies. This essay illustrates how a ...