Regna Darnell

Western University | UWO · Department of Anthropology

Through an application of the Environmental Affordance (EA) Model, this paper explores the impact of environmental degradation on the community at Walpole Island First Nation. We outline how a change in relationships, broadly defined within an Anishinaabek ontology, can impact not only access to the local ecosystem but also how the affordances offe...

The North American anthropological tradition, as a whole, contrasts sharply with the anthropologies which grew up elsewhere in the Western world, and forms a distinct part of contemporary anthropology on an international scale, a part which is accessible to us through disciplinary history. In this article I first argue for an historical approach as...

Through twelve ethnographic case studies, The Social Life of Standards reveals how standards – political and technical tools for organizing society – are developed, applied, subverted, contested, and reassembled by local communities interacting with norms often created by others. Contributors explore standards at work across different countries and...

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfie...

Abstract: Referred to as “The Father of American Anthropology”, Franz Boas (1858-1942) is often viewed as the quintessential Anthropologist. His commitment to holism, his meticulous and voluminous collections of anthropometric data, and his arguments against the concept of ‘stable human types’, or races, have made him a particularly salient figure...

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents localized perspectives on the discipline's history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. This tenth volume of the series, Local Knowledge, Global Stage, examines worldwide historical trends of ant...

The Northwest Coast has long held a seminal role in the ethnographic and theoretical development of anthropology in North America. Both that role and the saliency of Native American Indigenous peoples have seemingly waned over time. Almost invisibly, however, a critical mass of new ethnographic perspectives and a new aspiration toward synthesis hav...

This essay argues that the term applied anthropology is an unnecessary oxymoron because the discipline of anthropology itself entails application of anthropological knowledge. Examples from the author's personal experience are used to argue for the application of anthropology as a process of seeing in a particular way, rather than as a mechanical e...

This inaugural volume of The Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition series presents current scholarship from the various academic disciplines that were shaped and continue to be influenced by Franz Boas (1858–1942). Few of Boas's intellectual progeny span the range of his disciplinary and public engagements. In his later career, Boas moved beyond Na...

Stress is known to contribute to overall health status. Many individuals in sub-Saharan Africa are believed to be stressed about their employment, income, and health. This study aimed to investigate hair cortisol as a biomarker of chronic stress in settlement communities in Kenya. Hair samples were collected from 108 volunteers from settlement comm...

Volume 8 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, the premier series published in the history of the discipline, explores national anthropological traditions in Britain, the United States, and Europe and follows them into postnational contexts. Contributors reassess the major theorists in twentieth-century anthropology, including the work of...

Volume 8 of the Histories of Anthropology Annual series, the premier series published in the history of the discipline, explores national anthropological traditions in Britain, the United States, and Europe and follows them into postnational contexts. Contributors reassess the major theorists in twentieth-century anthropology, including luminaries...

Cortisol level in hair is increasingly being used as a biomarker of chronic stress. Members of First Nation communities in Canada are experiencing stress related to a higher incidence of chronic diseases, socioeconomic factors, the state of their environment, and cultural oppression. This study aimed to investigate hair cortisol as a biomarker of s...

This essay approaches the relationship that J. Edward Chamberlin posits between stories and land from the standpoint of First Nations narrative and reflects on the process by which outsiders may come to understand how Native storytellers construct meaning and reflect on their present-day social and political circumstances. Such storytellers often e...

John Leavitt presents an elegant and persuasive revisionist history of the variable responses of linguists to the question of linguistic relativity in light of contemporary theoretical concerns, and explores the misreading of this position over the half-century since its classic anthropological formulation. He argues that the time is ripe for reass...

The synergy between anthropology and history in the interdiscipline of ethnohistory has been productive in stretching the methods and reciprocal preoccupations of both disciplines. Archival history may be considered as a field site for the anthropologist as situated participant-observer. Alternatively, fieldwork in contemporary societies may be con...

The synergy between anthropology and history in the interdiscipline of ethnohistory has been productive in stretching the methods and reciprocal preoccupations of both disciplines. Archival history may be considered as a field site for the anthropologist as situated participant-observer. Alternatively, fieldwork in contemporary societies may be con...

Sapir is so well remembered for his work in linguistics that his role in cultural anthropology, represented by a much smaller number of publications, has been overshadowed. It is clear, however, that he hoped to make a major contribution to anthropological theory and to the social sciences in general, and that many of his contemporaries looked to h...

As a historian of Canadian anthropology and a student of First Nations languages and cultures, I have been thinking at least sporadically about the history of Canadian anthropology since my arrival at the University of Alberta in 1969. Fresh from an Ivy League education and having completed a dissertation on the history of Americanist anthropology...

Anna Wierzbicka, LINGUA MENTALIS: The SEMANTICS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE. 1980. Sydney: Academic Press, xi + 367 pg.

This paper approaches the habitual mis‐communication of Native and non‐Native cultural traditions within Canadian society interms of the fundamental distinction between main stream peoples who are settled farmers and First Peoples who move around to exploit resources. I argue that the ‘nomadic legacies’ of the latter persist today in patterns of se...

This article reflects on how anthropology has traditionally dealt with the alternation of cultural specificities and human universals. It revisits the foundational anthropological concept of cultural relativism in light of the inevitability of standpoint and ethnocentrism. Today, within the discipline of anthropology, it is possible, indeed necessa...

Although Ruth Benedict has been remembered within Americanist anthropology primarily for her cultural relativism expressed in terms of pattern integration and her best-selling Patterns of Culture (1934), her later work moved beyond the culture-specific study of small-scale societies like those of the American Southwest to encompass cross-cultural e...

The concept of interpretive community provides a bridge between literary studies and the social sciences. As an anthropologist and ethnographer, I consider First Nations [e.g. Aboriginal Canadian] identity in light of an historical tradition of nomadic subsistence refracted in contemporary decision-making procedures about such resources as employme...

Les anthropologues canadiens ont eu tendance à présumer que les recherches amérindiennes ont été reléguées à la périphéric de l'anthropologie canadienne. Après examen d'une liste de spécialistes en recherches amérindiennes dans les universités canadiennes et du dernier programme du congrès de la Société canadienne d'anthropologie (CASCA), l'auteure...

The Great Bear:. Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry in the Finno-Ugric Languages. Lauri Honko. Senni Timonem. and Keith Bosley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 785 pp.

Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last ”Wild„ Indian. Orin Starn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 352 pp.

This study was loosely sponsored by the Centennial Executive Commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), although it articulated questions I have thought about and hoped to explore formally for many years. Like most things worth doing, the project has taken longer and proved more complicated than I expected at its onset. I envisio...

This article reports on the work of an interdisciplinary research team involving faculty and students from Anthropology, First Nations Studies and Ecosystem Health (Medicine) working in collaboration with a Native community in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. Community-driven projects brought to the team focus on the correlation of human health with e...

William Nelson Fenton, a fellow of the American Folklore Society and long acknowledged as the dean of Iroquoian studies, died June 17, 2005, at Cooperstown, New York, at the age of 96. Except for brief visits to the Klamath Reservation and Taos Pueblo seeking comparative insights into factionalism and a stint as visiting professor in New Zealand, h...

Language TypologyGenetic ClassificationGrammatical Categories and Psychological RealityContemporary Language Preservation Efforts

The three volumes juxtaposed here reflect a recent burgeoning interest in law and American Indians. The intersection between the two is far from self-evident and evokes contemporary national anxieties about "how" the present state of America's first peoples could have come into being. How appears in two of these titles and is implicit in the third,...