Feature Papers Defining Humans

A special issue of Humans (ISSN 2673-9461).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2024 | Viewed by 19160

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Anthropology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada
Interests: the evolution of early agricultural and early complex societies in the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia) from the Neolithic to the Iron Age

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

As Editors-in-Chief of Humans, we are delighted and excited to announce the call for papers for the upcoming Special Issue Defining Humans. This Special Issue of the journal Humans will consider high-quality articles from all subfields of Anthropology. The goal is to present cutting-edge research that will define the current scope of the discipline and possible paths forward.

We welcome submissions from Editorial Board Members and outstanding scholars invited by the Editorial Board and the Editorial Office.

All of the accepted papers in this Special Issue will be published free of charge in open access. You are welcome to send short proposals for submissions of feature papers to our Editorial Office ([email protected]) or to contact Dr. Kevin M. Kelly, Humans Co-Editor-in-Chief ([email protected]) to discuss and/or to comment.

We believe that we can make a great contribution to the academic community and our discipline by presenting our own research together in a single volume. Submissions will first be evaluated by academic editors. Subsequently, selected papers will be thoroughly and rigorously peer reviewed. The entire issue will be published in book format after the call for papers has closed and the collection has been thoughtfully vetted.

Dr. Kevin M. Kelly
Prof. Dr. Haskel J. Greenfield
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humans is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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29 pages, 327 KiB  
Article
Mormon Fundamentalist, Polygamous Marriage and What It May Tell Us about Being Human
by William Jankowiak
Humans 2022, 2(4), 190-218; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2040013 - 12 Oct 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5119
Abstract
The research that forms this paper was conducted over six years 1993-1999 in a Mormon Fundamentalist community in Western USA. I wanted to understand if it was possible to love multiple individuals at the same time or if, instead, there was a preference [...] Read more.
The research that forms this paper was conducted over six years 1993-1999 in a Mormon Fundamentalist community in Western USA. I wanted to understand if it was possible to love multiple individuals at the same time or if, instead, there was a preference for emotional involvement. I live inside the community dwelling with different families which enable me to view ordinary life and daily interactions that are often not noted in survey research. I supplement this approach by collecting the life history of people’s relationships and feelings toward one another. My results are present as a set of ethnographic narratives that highlight the emotional fulfillment and angst of individual experience trying to love more than one person at the same time. I found that the impulse to form dyadic love is relentless; women are the primary agents behind the push towards a more exclusive couple centered or dyad love intimacy; the “favorite” wife was readily identified in 52 out of 60 families. This presents something of a paradox: humans are both a pair-bond species who desire to form dyadic unions, even when they are not culturally sanctioned, and who have an adaptive cognitive capacity to create alternative ways of living. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers Defining Humans)
13 pages, 258 KiB  
Article
Space Colonization and Exonationalism: On the Future of Humanity and Anthropology
by Jack David Eller
Humans 2022, 2(3), 148-160; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2030010 - 15 Sep 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 8765
Abstract
First anthropology became unbound from “the village”, then from the single site, and gradually from the physical site altogether. As humans resume their push into space, anthropology is set to become unbound from the earth itself. This essay considers what the discipline has [...] Read more.
First anthropology became unbound from “the village”, then from the single site, and gradually from the physical site altogether. As humans resume their push into space, anthropology is set to become unbound from the earth itself. This essay considers what the discipline has offered and can offer toward understanding the present and future of space colonization. It begins by examining the surprisingly long and productive history of anthropology’s engagement with the subject, going back at least to the 1950s. Then it surveys current analysis of law, sovereignty, and nationalism in space, which largely imagines law and identity in off-earth settlements as more-or-less direct extensions or transfers of earth law and identity; in other words, space settlers will remain affiliated with and loyal to their source countries (or companies). However, taking seriously the analogy of terran migration and colonialism, where colonies developed distinct and separatist identities, the essay predicts the emergence of exonationalism, in which over generations colonists will invent new identities and shift their affiliations to their non-terran homes and ultimately seek independence from the earth. The essay concludes with reflections on how the settlement of space, still a distant goal, will reshape our definition of the human and therefore the practice of anthropology as the science of human diversity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers Defining Humans)

Review

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16 pages, 1709 KiB  
Review
The Evolution of Well-Being: An Anthropology-Based, Multidisciplinary Review
by Seth Dornisch
Humans 2022, 2(4), 161-176; https://doi.org/10.3390/humans2040011 - 28 Sep 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3645
Abstract
Evolutionary perspectives have generated many questions and some answers in the study of human health and disease. The field of evolutionary medicine, and related analytics of evolutionary psychiatry and evolutionary psychology have extended and expanded the way health disorders are viewed by searching [...] Read more.
Evolutionary perspectives have generated many questions and some answers in the study of human health and disease. The field of evolutionary medicine, and related analytics of evolutionary psychiatry and evolutionary psychology have extended and expanded the way health disorders are viewed by searching for why humans, as a species, are vulnerable to certain pathological conditions. The search is organized into four domains that apply proximate and evolutionary explanations to human traits and developmental sequences. This framework opens inquiry to the ontogeny, phylogeny, mechanism, and adaptive significance of human health conditions. In this paper I argue that evolutionary medicine seems to parallel biomedicine in its primarily pathogenic focus. That is, conditions of pain, suffering, and disorder have received the most attention. Some work has used the architecture of evolutionary medicine to take a salutogenic approach, evaluating the proximate and evolutionary explanations of human well-being. I propose that an evolutionary understanding of human well-being requires a survey of emotions and their relationship with neurobiology, language, and culture. My anthropology-based, multidisciplinary review of biopsychosocial processes reveals the way evolution has shaped modern human understanding of well-being through sociolinguistic learning processes and thereby our individual experiences of well-being. These insights have the power to contextualize human suffering and flourishing as we progress toward the goal of attenuating the former and expanding the latter. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Feature Papers Defining Humans)
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