Alan Goodman

Hampshire College · School of Natural Science

Human health is biocultural. Indeed, the recognition that human health, illness, and well‐being are complexly interwoven biocultural processes, best understood through a variety of humanistic and scientific perspectives, is a foundational tenant of medical anthropology. This chapter outlines the history and debates leading to a critical biocultural...

Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political Economic Perspectives in Human Biology called for an integration of political economy with ecological and adaptability perspectives in biocultural anthropology. A major goal of this volume was to explore the utility of including political‐economic and sociocultural processes in analyses of human biolo...

Biocultural anthropology is a broad and holistic approach to the study of Human biology within social and cultural contexts. A critical Biocultural approach furthers these considerations by paying particular attention to how historical and political economic forces help shape social contexts and biological variation, as well as the research process...

Health disparities by ‘race’ are large, consistent, and persistent. These disparities are attributed to two divergent causal pathways, either (1) genetic differences in disease susceptibility among races or (2) variation among groups socially defined as ‘races,’ deriving from lived experiences of discrimination, including both subtle and more overt...

Watch online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa0lS0ZMxxU While it is typically understood that identities are multiple and fluid, the same instability and fluidity applies to human biology. The instability of biology makes the use of “racial categories” particularly problematic and shows that the notion of closed and isolated groups is typically...

This article provides a critical historical overview of the stress concept in bioarcheological research and critically evaluates the term "health" in reference to skeletal samples. Stress has a considerable history in 20th century physiological research, and the term has reached a critical capacity of meaning. Stress was operationalized around a se...

In the recent past, human biology in anthropology was typically theorized as separate from—even in tension with—culture. In contrast, by further theorizing the social, political, and ecological processes through which what I call “cultural–biologicals” dialectically come into being, I foreground the restlessness and site specificity of human biolog...

Distributional analysis of trace metals in biological tissue provides important archived toxicological and nutritional information. In this study, lead, strontium, zinc, and lithium concentrations were measured in dental tissue using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Teeth from two populations were sampled: an...

Featuring new and engaging essays by noted anthropologists and illustrated with full color photos, RACE: Are We So Different? is an accessible and fascinating look at the idea of race, demonstrating how current scientific understanding is often inconsistent with popular notions of race. Taken from the popular national public education project and m...

Because the dental hard tissues commence development in the 13th week in utero and once formed are essentially inert, they may provide unique windows onto environmental and physiological changes during pregnancy and early life. We review the general potential of teeth as biomonitors and then the development of laser ablation-inductively coupled-pla...

IntroductionEmergence of a Critical Biocultural ApproachCritical Biocultural Approaches in Studies of Human HealthNew DirectionsConclusions References

Over the past 40 years, tourism-based economic development has transformed social and economic conditions in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. We address how these changes have influenced anthropometric indicators of growth and nutritional status in Yalcoba, a Mayan farming community involved in the circular migration of labor in the tourist economy....

Anthropology, with its dual emphasis on biology and culture, is--or should be--the discipline most suited to the study of the complex interactions between these aspects of our lives. Unfortunately, since the early decades of this century, biological and cultural anthropology have grown distinct, and a holistic vision of anthropology has suffered. T...

Despite attempts to use zinc (Zn) concentrations in hard tissues to comment upon the degree of carnivory in past populations, zinc has yielded inconsistent trophic level effects. The question of what, if anything, zinc in human enamel reveals regarding past diets is the focus of this research. We test whether the zinc content of deciduous tooth ena...

The Barker hypothesis asserts that stressful events early in the life history of an individual have negative health consequences later in adulthood. The hypothesis initially focused on prenatal stressors as indicated by birth weight and related outcomes. This initial concern with the fetal phase of development led to its description as the “fetal p...

: Joseph Jones is contributing editor for the AAA's RACE Project column in Anthropology News.

Alan H Goodman was the President of the American Anthropological Association (2005–2007) and Professor of Biological Anthropology at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, where he is the former Dean of Natural Sciences. He is also an Associate Director of the New York African Burial Ground project and a recipient of the Anti-Defamation League'...

The Archaeology of Disease, 2nd. ed. Charlotte Roberts and Keith Manchester. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995 (cloth), x + 243 pp. Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians: Health and Disease across a Hunter‐Gatherer Continent. Stephen Webb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (cloth), xii + 324 pp.

to be added soon

Microspatial analyses of the trace element composition of dental enamel are made possible using laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). Fine spatial resolution, multielement capabilities, and minimal sample destruction make this technique particularly well-suited for documenting the distribution of elements in seque...

Human dental enamel is composed of sequentially calcifying growth layers that can provide an archival record of temporal changes such as past pollution events and changes in elemental nutrition. Human teeth and bones alike are mainly made out of calcium and a phosphorous rich crystalline building block called hydroxyapatite [Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2]. Dival...

Over the past three decades, tourism-based economic development has transformed social and economic conditions in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Mayan communities have become directly involved in the changing economy as the main source of inexpensive labor for construction and service jobs at tourism centers, and as sites of ecotourism and archeoto...

To examine maternal intake of a mildly alcoholic beverage (pulque) during pregnancy and lactation, and its potential effect on postpartum child growth and attained size. A prospective cohort study that followed mothers (during pregnancy and lactation) and their offspring (from birth to approximately 57 months of age). Six villages in rural, central...

Human tooth enamel provides a nearly permanent and chronological record of an individual's nutritional status and anthropogenic trace metal exposure during development; it might thus provide an excellent bio archive. We investigated the micro-spatial distribution of trace metals (Cu, Fe, Mg, Sr, Pb, and Zn) in 196 x 339 microm2 raster pattern areas...

The so-called science wars pit science against culture, and nowhere is the struggle more contentious-or more fraught with paradox-than in the burgeoning realm of genetics. A constructive response, and a welcome intervention, this volume brings together biological and cultural anthropologists to conduct an interdisciplinary dialogue that provokes an...

For the same reasons that explorers of the early twentieth century strove to reach the poles, and their modern counterparts journey to outer space, most people want to visualize the contours of the human experience - the peaks of adaptive success that led to the expansion of civilization, and the troughs in which human presence ebbed. The Backbone...

For the same reasons that explorers of the early twentieth century strove to reach the poles, and their modern counterparts journey to outer space, most people want to visualize the contours of the human experience - the peaks of adaptive success that led to the expansion of civilization, and the troughs in which human presence ebbed. The Backbone...

There is a paradoxical relationship between "race" and genetics. Whereas genetic data were first used to prove the validity of race, since the early 1970s they have been used to illustrate the invalidity of biological races. Indeed, race does not account for human genetic variation, which is continuous, complexly structured, constantly changing, an...

HAPPENINGS AND HEARSAY: EXPERIENCES OF A BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGIST. By Gabriel W. Lasker. Detroit: Savoyard Books, Wayne State University Press. 1999. ISBN 0-8143-2840-7. $30.00 (cloth).