Wenner-Gren Symposium Series Published in Current Anthropology (2010- current)

Wenner-Gren Symposium volumes published through Current Anthropology can all be accessed as an open access journal at Current Anthropology through JSTOR. Click on the links below for a description of each special Issue and their Table of Contents.

Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism
Current Anthropology (51), Supplement 1, June 2010
Guest Edited by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge

Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas
Current Anthropology (51), Supplement 2, October 2010 
Guest Edited by Setha M. Low and Sally Engle Merry

Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form
Current Anthropology, (52), Supplement 3, April 2011
Guest Edited by Damani J. Partridge (University of Michigan), Marina Welker (Cornell), and Rebecca Hardin (University of Michigan)
 

The Origins of Agriculture, New Data, New Ideas
Current Anthropology, Volume 52, Supplement 4 October 2011
Guest edited by: T. Douglas Price (Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Ofer Bar-Yosef (Harvard University)

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Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas 

Guest Edited by Setha M. Low (CUNY) and Sally Engle Merry (NYU)
Current Anthropology  Volume 51, Supplement 2,  October 2010

As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement.  Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all sub-fields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in US cultural and practicing anthropology.   Within this field, the contributors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: 1) sharing and support, 2) teaching and public education, 3) social critique, 4) collaboration, 5) advocacy and 6) activism.  They show that engagement takes place during fieldwork, through applied practice, and as individual activists work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice, human rights, and violence. A close examination of the history of engaged anthropology in the US reveals an enduring set of dilemmas, many of which persist in contemporary anthropological practice. The articles in this collection document the striking growth of an engaged anthropology along with continuing ambivalence and uncertainty about its practice.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Leslie C. Aiello  Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: Wenner-Gren Symposium, Supplement 2
Setha M. Low and Sally Engle Merry Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas: An Introduction to Supplement 2
Ida Susser The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working toward a More Engaged Anthropology
Barbara Rose Johnston Social Responsibility and the Anthropological Citizen
Norma Gonzalez Advocacy Anthropology and Education: Working through the Binaries
Michael Herzfeld Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History
Signe Howell Norwegian Academic Anthropologists in Public Spaces
John L. Jackson Jr.On Ethnographic Sincerity
Jonathan Spencer The Perils of Engagement: A Space for Anthropology in the Age of Security
Kamari M. Clarke Toward a Critically Engaged Ethnographic Practice
Kamran Asdar Ali Voicing Difference: Gender and Civic Engagement among Karachi’s Poor
Alan Smart Tactful Criticism in Hong Kong: The Colonial Past and Engaging with the Present

Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism

Guest Edited by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge
Current Anthropology, Volume 51, Supplement 1, June 2010

Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism examines the role of working memory in human evolution and, more specifically, the hypothesis that a late enhancement of working memory capacity powered the evolution of the modern mind.. Working Memory is psychologist Alan Baddeley’s model of the cognitive processes that support higher level planning abilities, also known as executive functions.  Working memory itself is the ability to hold information in active attention and process it even in the face of distracting stimuli.  Almost forty years of psychological research have established working memory as perhaps the most well-researched and influential model of a component of human cognition, but its role in human evolution has only recently become a focus of attention.    Chapters in the volume address the nature of working memory itself, alternative models of higher level thinking, methodological issues in recognizing working memory in the paleoanthropological record, and initial attempts at documenting an evolutionary sequence.  The chapters in this Supplementary Issue make a strong case for the importance of Working Memory in the evolution of human cognition, although the volume reaches no general agreement on the timing of  its final enhancement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Leslie C. Aiello  The Wenner-Gren Symposium Series: An Introduction by the President
Leslie C. Aiello Working Memory and the Evolution of Modern Thinking: Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement
Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge Beyond Symbolism and Language: An Introduction to Supplement 1, Working Memory
Randall W. Engle Role of Working-Memory Capacity in Cognitive Control
C. Philip Beaman Working Memory and Working Attention: What Could Possibly Evolve?
Philip J. Barnard From Executive Mechanisms Underlying Perception and Action to the Parallel Processing of Meaning
Francisco Aboitiz, Sebastia´n Aboitiz, and Ricardo R. Garcı´a The Phonological Loop: A Key Innovation in Human Evolution
Manuel Martı´n-Loeches Uses and Abuses of the Enhanced-Working-Memory Hypothesis in Explaining Modern Thinking
Emiliano Bruner Morphological Differences in the Parietal Lobes within the Human  Genus: A Neurofunctional Perspective
Matt J. Rossano Making Friends, Making Tools, and Making Symbols
Eric Reuland Imagination, Planning, and Working Memory: The  Emergence of Language
Lyn Wadley Compound-Adhesive Manufacture as a Behavioral Proxy for Complex Cognition in the Middle Stone Age
April Nowell Working Memory and the Speed of Life
Stanley H. Ambrose Coevolution of Composite-Tool Technology, Constructive Memory, and Language: Implications for the Evolution of Modern Human Behavior
Miriam Noe¨l Haidle Working-Memory Capacity and the Evolution of Modern Cognitive Potential: Implications from Animal and Early Human Tool Use
Anna Belfer-Cohen and Erella Hovers Modernity, Enhanced Working Memory, and the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Record in the Levant
Iain Davidson The Colonization of Australia and Its Adjacent Islands and the Evolution of Modern Cognition
Rex Welshon Working Memory, Neuroanatomy, and Archaeology

Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form 

Guest Edited by Damani J. Partridge (University of Michigan), Marina Welker (Cornell), and Rebecca Hardin (University of Michigan)
Current Anthropology, Volume 52, Supplement 3, April 2011

This special issue of Current Anthropology calls for more anthropological attention to how the corporate form shapes daily life. The Introduction traces anthropologists’ engagements with corporations over time and presents transformations in traditionally corporate arenas, such as mining and textile production, alongside parallel developments in transnational cooperatives, organic production systems, and ethnic deployments of the corporate form.  The articles in the volume explore the influence of corporations in unexpected sectors from conservation to “poverty alleviation” to cancer survival. Furthermore, they analyze corporate norms and practices in relation to broader governance trends, from fair trade dynamics to shareholder activism and from corporate social responsibility initiatives to the spread of accountability measures and the influence of corporate sovereignty. The volume brings together the voices of anthropologists, social activists, NGO managers, corporate executives, financial planners, and entrepreneurs.  It is the product of a five-day Wenner-Gren Symposium held in August 2008 at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) campus in Santa Fe, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the School for American Research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Leslie C. Aiello and James F. Brooks , Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form: Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 3
Marina Welker, Damani J. Partridge, and Rebecca Hardin, Corporate Lives: New Perspectives on the Social Life of the Corporate Form: An Introduction to Supplement 3
Jane I. Guyer,Blueprints, Judgment, and Perseverance in a Corporate Context
with CA✩ comment by Melissa Cefkin
Catherine Coumans,Occupying Spaces Created by Conflict: Anthropologists, Development NGOs, Responsible Investment, and Mining
with CA✩ comment by Stuart Kirsch
S. Lochlann Jain,Survival Odds: Mortality in Corporate Time
with CA✩ comment by Jane E. Lynch
Marina Welker and David Wood, Shareholder Activism and Alienation
with CA✩ comment by Robert A. G. Monks
Anke Schwittay,The Marketization of Poverty(br/>with CA✩ comment by Krista Badiane and David Berdish
Sally Engle Merry,Measuring the World: Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance
with CA✩ comment by John M. Conley
Damani James Partridge,  Activist Capitalism and Supply-Chain Citizenship: Producing Ethical Regimes and Ready-to-Wear Clothes
with CA✩ comment by Bena´ Burda
Rebecca Hardin, Concessionary Politics: Property, Patronage, and Political Rivalry in Central African Forest Management
with CA✩ comment by Serge Bahuchet
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina,Corporations, Cooperatives, and the State: Examples from Italy
with CA✩ comment by Michael Woodard and Emilie Bess
Jessica R. Cattelino,“One Hamburger at a Time”: Revisiting the State-Society Divide with the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Hard Rock International
with CA✩ comments by Thabo Mokgatlha and Kgosi Leruo Molotlegi
Susan E. Cook,The Business of Being Bafokeng: The Corporatization of a Tribal Authority in South Africa
with CA✩ comments by Steven J. Bohlin and Robert L. Gips

The Origins of Agriculture, New Data, New Ideas

Guest edited by: T. Douglas Price (Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Ofer Bar-Yosef (Harvard University)

Current Anthropology, Volume 52, Supplement 4 October 2011

This supplementary issue of the Wenner-Gren Symposia Series in Current Anthropology brings together a diverse international group of archaeological scientists to consider a topic of common interest and substantial anthropological import—the origins of agriculture. The volume is the outcome of a Wenner-Gren Symposium, (number 141) held from March 6-13, 2009, at the Hacienda Temozon, Yucatan, Mexico. The group included individuals working in most of the places where farming began. This resulting volume is organized by chronology and geography. The goal was to consider the most recent data and ideas from these different regions in order to examine larger questions of congruity and disparity among the groups of first farmers. There is much new information from a number of important areas, particularly Asia. Findings highlight at least 10 different places around the world where agriculture was independently developed, and the antiquity of domestication is being pushed back in time in light of these discoveries. The volume emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to such large questions in order to assemble as much information as possible and anticipates that the results and consequences of the symposium and this supplementary issue will have long-term ripple effects in anthropology and archaeology.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Leslie C. Aiello The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas
T. Douglas Price and Ofer Bar-Yosef The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas: An
Introduction to Supplement 4
Ofer Bar-Yosef Climatic Fluctuations and Early Farming in West and East Asia
A. Nigel Goring-Morris and Anna Belfer-Cohen Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope
Anna Belfer-Cohen and A. Nigel Goring-Morris Becoming Farmers: The Inside Story
Melinda A. Zeder The Origins of Agriculture in the Near East
Ehud Weiss and Daniel Zohary The Neolithic Southwest Asian Founder Crops: Their
Biology and Archaeobotany
Jean-Denis Vigne, Isabelle Carre`re, Franc¸ois Briois, and Jean Guilaine The Early Process of Mammal Domestication in the Near East: New Evidence from the Pre-Neolithic and Pre-
Pottery Neolithic in Cyprus
David Joel Cohen The Beginnings of Agriculture in China: A Multiregional View
Zhijun Zhao New Archaeobotanic Data for the Study of the Origins of Agriculture in China
Gyoung-Ah Lee The Transition from Foraging to Farming in Prehistoric Korea
Gary W. Crawford Advances in Understanding Early Agriculture in Japan
Dorian Q Fuller Finding Plant Domestication in the Indian Subcontinent
Peter Bellwood Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals
Tim Denham Early Agriculture and Plant Domestication in New Guinea and Island Southeast Asia
Fiona Marshall and Lior Weissbrod Domestication Processes and Morphological Change:
Through the Lens of the Donkey and African Pastoralism
Mehmet O¨ zdog˘an Archaeological Evidence on the Westward Expansion of Farming Communities from Eastern Anatolia to the Aegean and the Balkans
Peter Rowley-Conwy Westward Ho! The Spread of Agriculturalism from Central Europe to the Atlantic
Dolores R. Piperno The Origins of Plant Cultivation and Domestication in the New World Tropics: Patterns, Process, and New Developments
Bruce D. Smith The Cultural Context of Plant Domestication in Eastern North America
Greger Larson Genetics and Domestication: Important Questions for New Answers
Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel The Agricultural Demographic Transition During and After the Agriculture Inventions