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Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman, eds., Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 330 pages.
Reviewer: Matthew Wolf-Meyer
University of Minnesota
Complexities is the fruit of an attempt to bring together anthropologists from across the discipline's subfields to consider anthropology's fraught relationship with models of human determinism and the public debates (as the title implies) regarding "nature" and "nurture" in human cultures, development and their futures. As the editors make clear in their introduction, the contributors to the volume include the organizers of the Wenner-Gren funded workshops from the mid1980s to the late 1990s. This set of largely senior researchers is supplemented with material solicited from junior faculty and subdisciplines otherwise under-represented in the collection. All told, there is an impressive array of scholarship included in Complexities, which represents watershed essays from some of the contributors, as well as state-of-the-science summaries from others.
I imagine that most readers of Complexities will approach the book much as I did, from the unenviable position of only being formally trained in one of anthropology's subdisciplines, but having interest in how the subdisciplines might articulate. Because of this, some essays fail to properly orient the reader to debates within the respective subdiscipline, with some chapters unnecessarily arcane in their interests, and in a couple cases, arguing against concepts which seem to no longer hold such great sway in the minds of the public or within the academy. It should be noted, however, that there is no attempt to appeal to cultural anthropologists in particular (as might be expected since both editors are cultural anthropologists); rather, each author frames the debates they engage in as they see fit, which, in at least a couple of cases makes the debate seem quite distant from the anthropological mainstream. The more successful essays in the collection are the ones that borrow from a number of the subdisciplines, or which deploy subdisciplinary methodologies on issues germane to more than one of the anthropological subdisciplines. Rather than stress the inadequate contributions (which might be more appealing to adherents to the subdiscipline of the author), I prefer to focus on some of the contributions to Complexities that are exceptional in their ability to engage readers from across the subdisciplines.
In their "Reassessing...