Reintegrating Anthropology

Since the Kroeber-Boas exchange, anthropologists have produced ethnographies, experiments, and analyses in periods of collaborative engagement and during times of acrimonious strife. For much of the 1940s through the early 1970s, collaborative engagement favored cross-fertilization between ethnographic, evolutionary, experimental, and interpretive approaches (e.g., see volumes edited by Meggers 1959; Tax 1965; and Washburn 1961). Between the 1970s and the early 2000s there was extensive fragmentation between different theoretical and methodological strains of anthropological inquiry. Trends in evolutionary and social theory meshed with a particularly sociopolitical context and ratcheted up the ubiquitous debate about “science and history.” The result was a highly unfortunate but quite substantial disentanglement of ethnographic, constructivist, and evolutionarily oriented methodologies. Some departments split, debates raged, and questions were raised as to whether anthropology would continue to exist as an integrated interdisciplinary field (e.g., Segal and Yananisako 2005, but see the discussion in Schultz 2009).

While this was going on, many of our colleagues recognized that the reintegration of anthropology was both theoretically and methodologically warranted if anthropology is to be of relevance to problems at hand: that anthropology can (and should) act as a “social space for reinventions of our distinctive hybridity” (Lederman 2005:73). The premise for this integrated perspective is that when diverse approaches are valued and combined, or at least interface with one another, it produces a better and more comprehensive suite of answers than any individual thread does by itself.

For instance, Harris and Robb (2012) have suggested that humans accommodate and accept multiple ontogenies and world realities, allowing people holding different ontogenies to communicate with one another over such matters as the human body and allowing historical change to take place. The discussions by Latour and Descola at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in 2013 proposed that the concept of the Anthropocene results in the recognition of the impact of human agency on the natural and social environment as well as the corresponding responsibility of humans to tackle the problems of such change through connecting the physical and cultural (and more). Ingold (2013:22) has called for a renewed paradigm of evolution as processual, developmental, and relational, not as the change along lines of descent but as “the developmental unfolding of an entire matrix of relations within which forms of life, human and non-human, emerge and are held in place.”

Discussions of the split(s) and possibilities of reintegration have been valuable; however, practical reintegration will only happen by anthropologists doing it with data. This volume is an attempt to provide examples of anthropologists reporting on their data and/or conceptualizing approaches to the data in ways that cross or straddle boundaries. For this purpose we intentionally chose colleagues who worked on a wide range of topics and did not attempt to force a uniform theoretical context or ideas as to what is “correct” in terms of methodological approaches: anthropology is not one thing, and there are many successful ways to practice it.

Providing Examples of an Integrated Anthropology

Humans construct, and are constructed by, niches with ecological, technical, and cultural components that influence selection pressures. Niche construction theory (NCT) is especially important in an integrated anthropology because it includes the effects of cultural contexts and perceptions, as well as bodies and ecologies, as key parts of human niches. Human interfaces with ecological contexts are often mediated via material culture (tools, clothes, buildings, towns), and the actions involved in the construction of niches are rooted in the beliefs, institutions, histories, and practices of human groups. Cultural practices and humanly constructed landscapes are important factors in niche construction processes.

However, while niche construction is a powerful framework for integrating the many factors that contribute to human behavior and the construction of human societies (Fuentes 2015, 2016), and it allows us to identify selection pressures that result from constructed niches, it has its limitations. For example, it does not provide a theory for explaining why humans living in different environments chose to modify their environments in certain ways, how bodies and behaviors develop and are reshaped, how technological innovations arise, or how and why social and cultural components of niches take the forms that they do. The articles in this special issue draw on numerous theoretical frameworks, in most cases integrating them, to gain a deeper understanding of human processes underlying niche construction through the use of qualitative and quantitative methods. These include frameworks from evolutionary biology, physiology, comparative primatology, behavioral ecology, cognitive science, institutional theory, actor-network theory, and linguistic/kinship theory, to name just a few. At the heart of most papers is the question of human ultrasociality–how humans build cooperative groups of considerable scale.

Lee Gettler (2016) tackles fatherhood via an integration of physiology, social history, and cultural institutions. He uses fatherhood as a framework for modeling human behavior across different explanatory scales, including evolutionary, ontogenetic-developmental, ecological, and cultural, as well as corresponding mechanisms of transmission and feedback. Gettler focuses on testosterone and the biology of fatherhood to integrate various aspects of human niches with patterns and adaptive processes in our physiology. He argues that culturally specific institutions across human groups shape the actions, beliefs, expectations, and structures of fathering. It is in human developmental plasticity (and some canalization) that individual- and cross-cultural variability in beliefs and behavior can be connected to patterns of neuroendocrine responses.

Gettler delves into animal and primate models in order to provide the core physiological context (and neuroendocrine correlates) needed to develop a niche construction scenario for human fatherhood. Here the interfaces between broadly shared evolutionary patterns and culturally mitigated aspects of gender socialization and paternal roles interact in the construction and navigation of cultural niches and shape boys’ developmental trajectories from infancy, through adolescence, to fatherhood. Gettler concludes that “culturally constructed neurobiological-endocrine pathways enable individual behavior-cognition and social interactions, which are at least contributing factors to the emergent phenomenon of cultural complexity.”

Drawing on niche construction theory, neuroanthropology, ethnography, ecology, social theorists, and inferences from studies of various small-scale societies, Greg Downey (2016) demonstrates the power of an integrated anthropological analysis. He uses the template of niche sensitivity that he and Daniel Lende (Downey and Lende 2012) developed to demonstrate that the human neurological endowment primes us to heightened receptivity to a developmental niche. Using the urban landscape as that niche, Downey walks us through a case study of street children and urbanization to show how urban niche construction influences developmental trajectories and how the niche stratification of urban landscapes results in diverse effects on humans living there. Downey outlines how the urban context, with its radically simplified foraging landscape, availability of diverse high-energy food resources, decreased activity patterns, and challenges to mental health from unprecedented levels of social interaction, creates novel ecological and social challenges for its inhabitants. This is especially true for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. In the case of the children, some street children have so finely tuned their skills to harvest available urban resources, to exploit the urban niche, that they do better than one might expect outside of the traditional social structures.

While Downey notes that cities are too young to currently assess if urbanization has profound population genetic consequences, he demonstrates that the scale of urban anthropogenic change and its concomitant ecological consequences result in substantial phenotypic effects on their inhabitants. However, Downey cautions against an overly mechanistic application of niche construction theory (NCT) or any simplistic evolutionary approaches, and he stresses the need to move beyond reliance on meeting the neo-Darwinian litmus test of population-genetic consequences in attempts to connect NCT with core anthropological endeavors.

Doug Bird and his coauthors (2016) unpack the forces that create the productive landscape mosaic in the western desert of Australia through an anthropogenic fire regime. They draw on the concept of emergence to explain how larger patterns arise through a convergence of simpler entities that do not exhibit properties of the whole. At the base of the landscape architecture is Martu burning practices to acquire food through harvesting lizards, a foraging strategy that fits expectations derived from models in evolutionary ecology. Through hunting people seek to acquire enough food to produce a surplus to share and thereby bind communities and networks of kin through possession or sharing of a common substance. Decisions driving foraging are decisions about sharing, fueled by emotions for compassion.

Martu build wealth in people rather than wealth in things (Guyere 1995), wealth that allows them to lay claims as custodians of estates inherited from the ancestors by binding together networks of co-owners. Social prestige derived from sharing confers authority to maintain the estate through ritual performance, artistic expression, and negotiations concerning social institutions such as initiation and “the Law.” The landscape mosaic is thus motivated by mundane needs to obtain food, social desires and ambitions to build community and networks through sharing, and holding country through gathering co-owners and the regular performance of ritual. The ecological system that emerges is fragile. In the 1960s when the Martu were removed from their homelands, and therefore anthropogenic burning no longer occurred, the land became overgrown with spinifex grass, natural wild fires were devastating, and many species vanished.

The insights in the Bird et al. (2016) paper of how complex ecological niches arise from foraging goals, social agendas, and ritual performance come from mixed methodologies. Rigorous scientific methodology framed by both inside and outside perspectives provides quantitative data on the returns from foraging, patterns of sharing, and the impact of fire on flora and fauna in Martu estates. The vivid painting by Martu artists of a hunting ground also gives the view from both inside and out. It portrays how complex landscapes emerge from simpler individual choices, accompanying emotions, and perceptions, motivated in part by institutions and rituals that build wealth in people. It also utilizes media and values to draw an international audience. The science and art initiate a conversation between the Martu and the global community.

Essential to human ultrasociality is a cognitive capacity: the imagination. Without the imagination, groups of hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, cannot take on a common identity, and they cannot form a virtual community composed of kin, friends, and strangers as well as ancestors of generations past. Maurice Bloch (2016) combines approaches from experimental psychology and interpretive social anthropology to examine the imagination from the outside via scientific studies of cognition in children, and from the inside, through his own long-term ethnographic studies in Madagascar. He argues that despite its creative powers, the social imagination is by no means unbounded. Studies of children’s pretend play show predispositions for taking on already shared imaginations. Expectation of roles and rules begins at a very early age as the child joins a preconstituted system of shared conventions and institutions; cognitive predispositions allow him or her to learn easily.

Likewise, when the kinship system of the Malagasy villagers is seen from the inside, it characterizes all internal relations as kin relations, a very real “one family” with rules and duties. Once conceived as such, these relations are indeed very real. In the Malagasy’s elaborate circumcision rituals, the first part of the rites evoke a disorganized world where only links through women, particularly mothers, are recognized. The second part of the ritual violently replaces the first by legitimizing the child’s connection to father and father’s ancestors. The ritual brings about an ordered world out of a chaotic one through denial of basic facts, for example, that children are born from women. Malagasy, like Westerners, cannot imagine a world without rules, roles of groups.

Bloch concludes by asking what views from the outside and the inside have in common, or if the chasm is insurmountable. His answer: that all humans weave narratives about the fundamentally similar physical world that make sense of the way we behave on the basis of shared motivations and understandings; “scientific imagination involves imagining the imagination of those we write about.” Consequently, what is thought of as “from the outside” is not as “outside” as science often pretends, and the inside view of the people we study cannot be as coherent and closed to a “from the outside” view as some ethnographers pretend it is. The chasm might not be as great as we think.

Benjamin Purzycki (2016) addresses how religious beliefs correspond to the problems of cooperation and coordination among nomadic pastoralists in the Tyva Republic of southern Siberia. Using systems approaches motivated by evolutionary theory, he tests hypotheses regarding the potential of religion to minimize social and ecological costs in the pastoralist niche and how religions evolve in response to shifting pressures. Humans extend their cognitive capacity for “theory of mind” to the gods, that is, their ability to attribute mental states to others in order to discern their perspectives, desires, and intentions. Purzycki proposes that the gods should be concerned about salient local problems and their resolution. Their concerns should change as new problems arise.

Via their syncretically intertwined shamanism and Buddhism, the people of Tyva engage with a practical and ritual landscape structured by the placement, creation, and renovation of cairns (ovaa). The cher eezi are the spirits who reside in areas marked by these ovaa and are central figures in the rituals and herding movements and landscape use in Tyva. What do people believe about the concerns of the spirit masters and how do such beliefs relate to social and ecological problems? By measuring the degree to which Tyvans’ models of morality overlap with models of spirits’ concerns, Purzycki arrives at intriguing results: that Tyvan spirit masters are believed to care about ritual and maintaining the vitality of the resources over which they lord, but not to care about the broader moral order in Tyva society. Performance of rituals at ovaa signal respect of boundaries to other Tyvans, thereby generating trust in a competitive pastoralist niche. However, recent problems arising in the area, severe alcohol abuse and littering, are now being recognized as behaviors that anger the spirit-masters, indicating that representations of the god’s minds may evolve to meet new challenges.

Pierre Lienard (2016) asks the question of how humans overcome nepotistic tendencies to build large-scale social groups in decentralized societies, focusing on male age-sets that are typically found in tribal groups living in diverse ecological niches around the world. Lienard reviews the cognitive abilities that ground and motivate the cooperation of unrelated social agents in complex social groups. These include ability to grasp the “rules of the game”; to develop, adopt, and enforce norms; and to build social categories on the basis of observed characteristics such as age. Humans recognize cues of ages, show preference for peers, and tend to use the relative age difference as a proxy for competence and authority.

Among the Turkana of Eastern Africa, the primary incentive for forming large cooperative units is the defense of livestock in a niche where stores of wealth can be easily raided. The sustained pooling of individual contribution is accomplished through the grouping of male coevals in cohesive groups or sets. Members of age-sets have strong expectations about their peers’ appropriate behavior and defer to the scrutiny and judgment of their senior age-sets. Duties of age-mates in younger sets are demanding, but there are no alternative paths to secure protection and other forms of assistance offered by group membership. Age-sets play a role in the functioning of many distinct institutions: political and ritual participation, public courtship, collective dancing, marriage, and so on. Age-sets are self-organizing in that members establish effective task-oriented internal dynamics by taking into account the respective abilities of their members.

Lienard gives vivid and compelling ethnographic descriptions of the workings of age-sets and their relation to evolved psychological dispositions based on data and observations from long-term fieldwork. He closes by outlining the incompatibility between the growth of the market economy and age-based systems in Turkana. With cash, new educational opportunities, and business options, traditional hierarchies based on age ranking become inverted as youths enter a world filled with choices.

Humans construct social niches that have continuity through time, allowing for the inheritance of group membership, resources, property, and cumulative cultural traditions. Beverly Strassmann and Nikhil Kurapati (2016) address the question, what is the basis for patrilineal cooperation as opposed to other forms of human social organization? Under what conditions do humans chose patrilineal descent?

To test which factors explain patrilineal organization and cooperation among the Dogon of Mali, they bring data to bear on several hypotheses: (1) reciprocal altruism and indirect reciprocity or reputation, (2) inclusive fitness, and (3) the benefits of cooperation in defense, inheritance of land, ritual maintenance of the land, and mate guarding. They apply meticulously collected data on genealogy, genetic relatedness, residence, and land ownership from a study population of 9,675 Dogon to seek answers to their question. Results indicate that kin selection could only be important within small, closely related clusters of kin who work and eat together, but not for the lineage as a whole. Lineage members benefit from cooperation and collective action in the defense of land under the leadership of elders who also maintain a structured system of land inheritance. Lineage members hold rituals that tie people together both within the lineage and between lineages and represent a collective effort to elicit the help of the god Ama to enhance the fertility of their agricultural subsistence base.

Among the Dogon, land, the key resource, is a heritable and defensible resource that allows males to increase reproductive success through polygyny. Therefore, Dogon parents get better payoff from bequeathing wealth to sons than to daughters if paternity certainty is high. Paternity certainty is assured through cooperation of men in the lineage through mate guarding each other’s wives in menstrual huts and paying the cost of forgoing cuckoldry for more paternity security. The take-away message from this study involving years of data collection is that it takes multiple theories and a range of methodologies to develop a more effective explanatory account for patrilineal cooperation.

Most human societies express ethnic or in-group versus out-group affiliations that are marked symbolically, an essential process in defining the social landscape and structuring interaction. This process has both cognitive and cultural components. Cristina Moya and Robert Boyd (2016) use a functionalist cultural approach combined with an evolutionary approach to social cognition to uncover evolved biases for learning socially relevant taxonomies and cultural accommodations. From functionalist models, they predict that humans will have a predisposition to favor sartorial markers that allow subjects to make quick decisions without a high risk of errors, that will make detecting group membership easy, and will lead to adaptive interactions. Sartorial markers would be expected to be prioritized for signaling ethnic affiliation because they are highly visible and can accommodate cultural variation and change. If the use of sartorial markers for stereotyping has a cognitive basis, children should rely on sartorial signals for stereotyping more than adults because adults have a more nuanced sense of what sartorial markers mean from their lifetime of interactions.

Moya and Boyd look at two very different communities, one in highland Peru and one in the urban United States, to see if sartorial markers motivate ethnic stereotyping more than do body morphology, emotional expression, and socioeconomic cues. The results indicate higher reliance on sartorial markers for children than for adults, indicating a cognitive bias for guided learning in the construction of social taxonomies. However, American subjects relied on occupational status more than sartorial markers, indicating how culture and economically adaptive interests influence cognitively based learning biases.

Kinship systems provide the basis for extending cooperation beyond the local group in most small-scale societies. Alan Barnard (2016) argues that all kinship systems possess similar attributes that require explanation from the entire range of anthropological sciences. He reviews theories on the “revolutions” in human evolution, discusses the coevolution of language and kinship, and then presents his own model. True kinship, he argues, emerges with elementary structures (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1949]) and universal kin classification typical of most hunter-gatherers today. Classification of relatives must be reciprocal: if I call a person mother, she must call me daughter. With universal kinship systems, anybody who seeks alliances by marriage or exchange can be fitted into the kinship system, greatly expanding access to surrounding social and environmental niches.

Barnard goes on to give a key example of the importance of using different subdisciplines to understand the transformation of the kinship system of the Naro Bushmen of Botswana and Namibia. Originally the Naro spoke a Kx’a language and had a Kx’a kinship system similar to the Ju/’hoansi. Subsequently they acquired a Khoe language and kinship system. To explain this shift, it is necessary to turn to understandings from other subfields. First, in small populations it is likely that most people spoke several languages, as they do in southern Africa today. Since language governs the kinship system, people would operate in different kinship systems at different times according to which language they were speaking. Consequently they would understand the social structure and institutions of surrounding groups facilitating transitions, in the Naro case from a small set of multilingual groups to an essentially monolingual one. Human predispositions for taking on already shared imaginations or cultural traditions (Bloch 2016), both of one’s own society and those of others, facilitated cultural transmission and the widespread globalization we entertain today. Barnard proposes that our discipline is distinctive in that it seeks to capture truths that our informants might broadly agree with and so “we seek explanations from both the inside and from the outside.”

Polly Wiessner (2016) looks at how cultural institutions shape the cognition, motivations, emotions, and responses of actors in different niches. She compares the sanctioning of aggression, in- and out-group sentiments, revenge, and reconciliation in two radically different societies: the Ju’hoansi (!Kung) Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Enga of Papua New Guinea. She suggests that evolutionary dispositions to pursue agendas through aggression are modified by cultural institutions that adapt strategies to the needs of the local natural and social landscape. Among the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung Bushmen), the prevailing “sacred value” (Atran 2016) is the rejection of aggression and violence; violence is met with moral outrage. Eschewing violence allows people to gain access to social and ecological niches of others and thereby distribute themselves over the resources of a vast area. However, because the Ju/’hoansi have no cultural means for dealing with violence other than dispersal, they have a higher homicide rate than would be expected given their peaceful norms. In contrast, cultural institutions regulating aggression among the Enga define sacred values as defending clan honor and property and supporting brothers but have no greater ideological cause. Nonetheless, owing to material, individual, and social interests filled through maternal and affinal ties outside the clan, the Enga have developed cultural institutions to temper violent action. Wars are contained and peace is reestablished through mediation and compensation. These conventions lead to lower homicide rates among the Enga than in many other tribal societies.

Wiessner’s analysis indicates how the complimentary use of emic data, from the inside, and etic data, from the outside, is essential for understanding the impact of cultural institutions on behavior. A challenge for anthropology will be to understand how different kinds of emic data from the inside are generated, distributed, exchanged, and controlled so that they can be applied systematically in analyses.

Mary Shenk and her colleagues (2016) look at how cultural traditions governing marriage take the practice of mating far from its biological roots. In an analysis of how culture and economy govern mating, they analyze data from Matlab in rural Bangladesh, a community that is undergoing a rapid transition to a market-based economy. Drawing on the framework of intensive (consanguineous) and extensive kinship, they predict that with the shift away from intensive agriculture, marriage systems will become more extensive as people seek new social ties that open access to the resources of the modern world. The results of the analysis are mixed. Qualitative results suggest forward-looking desires for a shift to extensive marriage “to make new relatives.” Quantitative data do not support the model as strongly, in part because marriage is a moving target in this rapidly changing world. One of several confounding factors is that there are increasing numbers of “love marriages.” Such marriages would result in extensive kinship patterns, except that in rural areas, unlike urban ones, young people are more likely to meet and socialize with cousins and fall in love. Nonetheless, marriage patterns in Matlab are being gradually adapted with a shift from a niche involving intensive farming to one of a market economy where extensive kinship provides valuable new ties. Since marriage ties provide the foundation for a good part of social life in most traditional societies, changes in marriage patterns will redefine the extent of social niches, property rights, information flow, economic transactions, and social selection pressures.

Craig Palmer, Kathryn Coe, and Lyle Steadman (2016) revisit concepts of the “human social niche,” as well the processes by which it came to be, by interlacing theories of kin selection with ideas concerning selection on cultural traditions that were initiated and reproduced over generations by the ancestors. They reject the idea that the concepts of a group and group selection are necessary for the construction of traditions that promote cooperation and altruism. Rather, humans invented traditions that influenced offspring and their siblings to engage in cooperation and altruism and to extend such behavior to codescendants who were identified as distant kin by traditional names and other ethnic markers. Indeed, when ethnographers ask why people do something, the explanation is often “because that is what we learned from our forefathers.”

Key to this process was parental manipulation during the long human childhood that suppressed selfish behavior in descendants’ lifetimes, and even after death, through the transmission of traditions. Selection would have favored individuals who could most effectively influence the social behavior of their descendants through passing down traditions and codes of ethics to future generations. This enterprise required agency, social skills, and hard, sustained work if the landscape of cooperation and altruism was to be reproduced and expanded over generations. Palmer, Coe, and Steadman illustrate their arguments with examples from three very different societies: the Hewa of Papua New Guinea, the Chachi of Ecuador, and the Newfoundlanders of Canada. Their arguments do much to further understanding of construction and maintenance of the human social niche over hundreds or even thousands of years. They also clarify the role of the reproduction of traditions in defining some of the essential parameters for social selection.

Scott Atran (2016) ventures into some of the most perplexing terrain of human behavior: that of devoted actors who fuse their identities with a collective one and thereby make extreme sacrifices that are disassociated from rationally expected risks and rewards. Collective identities are formed through shared beliefs, ritual communion, and emotional bonding. There is no fact-checking of the foundation of such beliefs. Atran traces evolutionary predispositions for such identity fusion to costly commitments to sacred values, rituals, and sacrifices that may have advanced individual interests directly or may have done so by promoting the survival of the groups upon which they depended for their existence. He proposes that in the past, beliefs and values that were seen as inherently sacred may have had more materialistic origins and were transmitted vertically across generations within defined territories. Outsized commitment may have allowed smaller groups to prevail against larger ones.

Today, through media-driven campaigns, the global jihad has co-opted these evolutionary-based predispositions to construct a transcultural niche composed of members from more than 80 countries, founded largely on peer-to-peer interactions. Once committed to sacred values and imagined kin, people will not compromise, regardless of the cost to their lives or the lives of loved ones. Recently, inspired by the media, bands of brothers composed of young people have been hooking up through personal contact or via the internet, inspiring each other to undertake wanton, extreme violence in the service of the heroic jihad cause. Atran proposes that this is not a resurgence of traditional culture but the result of unmoored generations seeking social identity that gives personal significance and glory. An essential takeaway message for the public and the politicians is that once identities are fused and committed to a sacred cause, actors are immune to material incentives. Initiatives to offer material incentives may even backfire by intensifying refusal to negotiate and compromise.

Hammad Sheikh, Ángel Gómez, and Scott Atran (2016) examine the relationship between threats to sacred values and the willingness of those who hold the values to defend them by extreme actions. They demonstrate that people will become willing to protect sacred values through costly sacrifice (life-threatening and other extreme actions) when such values are associated with groups whose individual members fuse into a unique collective identity. While broader cultural institutions generally regulate aggression and violence in societies, the sentiments associated with “brotherhood” and “sacred values” seem more effective at leading humans to forgo material concerns and even sacrifice their own lives as devoted actors. Sheikh and colleagues test the devoted actor hypothesis (Atran 2016) experimentally by comparing interviews and surveys of Moroccans associated with militant jihad and Spaniards upholding democracy to examine what conditions, perceptions, and experiences might make people willing to make costly sacrifices. Moroccans expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices for implementation of strict Sharia—and were supportive of militant jihad—when they were most connected to a kinlike group of friends and when they considered Sharia law as sacred. The Spaniards who felt most connected with a kinlike group of friends and who considered democracy as sacred were the most willing to make costly sacrifices for the concept of democracy, especially when reminded of the threat jihadi terrorism can offer to democracy. Spaniards were also more likely to consider their own group as formidable and jihadis as weak.

The work of Sheikh and colleagues presents a picture of devoted actors who have created a set of perceptual and social expectations and cohesion, whose participants are viscerally connected with a core group of fellows, who have strong values, and who are willing to make extreme sacrifices when they believe their values are under threat. They argue that it is the personal commitment to preserve and support their core group’s specific principles and positions, preferences and privileges—and to do so regardless of apparent risks or costs—that characterizes the devoted actor. This assertion and its consequences hold important information for anthropology writ large and for our understandings of the current complexities and realities of extremism and terrorism globally.

A Final Note

The papers in this volume run the gamut of approaches for reintegrating anthropology via the use of data, theory, and conceptualizing the complexity of human systems. They are not all in agreement on explanatory priorities nor do all of them focus on the same approaches in developing outcomes and solutions. But this is a good thing. To develop an effective reintegration requires anthropologists to take a genuinely open and intellectually expansive approach to the exchange of ideas. We need to move away from artificial dichotomies and standing grudges toward collaboration and a respect for theoretical plurality. The unifying aspect of this collection is the sincere attempt by all of its members to involve more than a single approach and to integrate or even fuse views from the inside and outside into novel, data-driven, and theoretically hybrid anthropological endeavors. There are already many anthropologists working in this manner in a variety of intellectual niches. We hope that the papers in this issue will motivate many more.