Biocultural anthropology

Biocultural anthropology can be defined in numerous ways. It is the

• Biocultural approaches to
  sickle cell gene in Liberia.^[4]
• Human adaptability research in the 1960s focused on two biocultural approaches to fatigue: functional differentiation of skeletal muscles associated with various movements, and human adaptability to modern living involving different work types.[5]
• "What's Cultural about Biocultural Research," Written by William W. Dressler, connects the cultural perspective of biocultural anthropology to "cultural consonance" which is defined as "a model to assess the approximation of an individuals behavior compared to the guiding awareness of his or her culture.^[6] This research has been used to examine outcomes in blood pressure, depressive symptoms, body composition, and dietary habits.^[6]
• Dr. Romendro Khongsdier's approach to the study of human variation and evolution.^[7][8]
• "Building a New Biocultural Synthesis" by Alan H. Goodman and Thomas L. Leatherman.^[2]
• "New Directions in Biocultural Anthropology" edited by Molly Zuckerman and Debra Martin uses various case studies from around the world to understand how biocultural anthropology can be used to understand the relationship between biology and culture in both past and present populations.

Contemporary biocultural anthropology

Biocultural methods focus on the interactions between humans and their environment to understand human biological adaptation and variation.^[9] Contemporary biocultural anthropologists view culture as having several key roles in human biological variation:

• Culture is a major human adaptation, permitting individuals and populations to adapt to widely varying local
  ecologies
  .
• Characteristic human biological or biobehavioral features, such as a large
  frontal cortex and intensive parenting compared to other primates, are viewed in part as an adaptation to the complex social relations created by culture.^[10]
• Culture shapes the political economy, thereby influencing what resources are available to individuals to feed and shelter themselves, protect themselves from disease, and otherwise maintain their health.^[2]
• Culture shapes the way people think about the world, altering their biology by influencing their behavior (e.g., food choice) or more directly through
  psychological stress).^[11]

Reception and criticism

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Modern anthropologists, both biological and cultural, have criticized the biocultural synthesis, generally as part of a broader critique of "four-field holism" in U.S. anthropology (see anthropology main article). Typically such criticisms rest on the belief that biocultural anthropology imposes holism upon the biological and cultural subfields without adding value, or even destructively. For instance, contributors in the edited volume Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology^[14] argued that the biocultural synthesis, and anthropological holism more generally, are artifacts from 19th century social evolutionary thought that inappropriately impose scientific positivism upon cultural anthropology.

Some departments of anthropology have fully split, usually dividing

Biocultural research has shown to contain a few challenges to the researcher. "In general we are much more experienced in measuring the biological than the cultural. It is also difficult to precisely define what is meant by constructs such as socioeconomic status, poverty, rural, and urban. Operationalizing key variables so that they can be measured in ways that are enthnographically valid as well as replicable. Defining and measuring multiple causal pathways."^[4]

See also

• Biocultural evolution
• Cultural neuroscience
• Evolutionary anthropology
• Sociocultural anthropology

References