Biocultural Perspectives on Appalachian Anthropology

My road to scholarly work in Appalachia has been bumpy with many turns along the way. In fact, if you had asked me two years ago if I thought I’d be working in the region I would have said “no.” However, sometimes we are just as surprised as our advisers, friends, and family members where our research takes us. This is a personal account of my intellectual journey and how Appalachian Studies plays an important role in my academic career.

Entering the Field

As a new anthropology PhD student in 2010, I was offered a funded graduate research assistant (RA) position in the department of behavioral sciences. A past graduate of the anthropology program, friend, and co-author of mine had recommended meeting with faculty outside the department when I visited the university before I had received my acceptance letter to the program. I am very glad I did meet with so many faculty that day, and that I apparently didn’t make a total fool of myself, because that opportunity has led me on the path that I follow today.

When I entered the program, my goal was to study malnutrition in Africa but my RA work took me to the hills of Eastern Kentucky to work on community-based participatory research (CBPR) health projects. What started as a very successful faith-based cervical cancer screening project evolved into multiple projects that now aim to increase cancer screening, fruit and vegetable intake, and physical activity while reducing body mass index (where appropriate) by reaching community members within their churches  (Schoenberg et al. 2009). Community-based participatory work often engages local communities with academics who strive for a partnership approach to research that result in high participation and program success as well as community capacity building (Israel et al. 2010). I had done CBPR work for a few years before starting with these projects in Eastern Kentucky but the work in Appalachia was somehow different, transformative. I became much more interested in the structural barriers to healthy living that I was witnessing in this remote, rural environment.

“They Made Themselves Fat”

Most public health work in the region (well in the nation, really) is frustratingly focused on individual behaviors, in what anthropologists usually refer to as “blaming the victim” (Moffat 2010) because individuals are blamed for making themselves unhealthy. This is most evident in the recent obesity “epidemic” discourse where lifestyle is a “choice” and unhealthy behaviors become conflated with risk factors that do not account for structural barriers to healthy living. Common misconceptions are that Appalachians do not know how to eat healthy, lay around all day and collect welfare, and so maybe they deserve the extraordinarily high rates of morbidity and mortality experienced in the region. For example, in 2008, 70% of Kentucky’s adults were overweight or obese, 30% of adults that had been screened had high blood pressure, 39% had high cholesterol, and 10% had diabetes, with even higher percentages existing in Eastern Kentucky counties (CDC 2008). But of course these percentages cannot include many of the rural residents who have not been screened or surveyed and these rates have been increasing in recent years.

Since individual food choices are often implicated in obesity and chronic disease research, I became interested in the other factors that contribute to unhealthy eating. For example, I am currently working on a project to measure the food environment in several Eastern Kentucky counties. This form of “ground truthing,” which involves visiting grocery and convenience stores to assess the food options (Sharkey and Horel 2008), has not been attempted in Eastern Kentucky and should allow us to evaluate access to grocery stores and the quantity and quality of healthy foods available to rural residents (Glanz et al. 2007). In this way, researchers can measure how far people must drive to get to to a store (which is of course difficult to impossible without a car or reliable public transportation), what kind of stores are within a reasonable driving distance (convenience, grocery, or dollar stores), and the types of foods that are available in these venues. Once this these barriers are measured and published, it should become difficult to blame low-income rural residents for eating poorly when the evidence indicates they must drive for 45 minutes to get to a grocery store with any produce.

“This is the Price We Pay for Living in the Mountains”

As a biocultural anthropology student, I am very interested in the role the environment plays in rural health. The environment limits access to healthy food and opportunities for physical activity. However, the environment itself can make people sick. This was especially salient for me working in Martin County, KY during the summer of 2011. With a number of other social science graduate students, I conducted survey research about the 2000 coal sludge spill that leaked over 300 million gallons of coal waste into the Coldwater and Wolf Creeks, which made it 30 times the magnitude of the Exxon Valdez spill (Scott et al. 2005). Receiving little to no national recognition, this coal sludge spill is implicated by community members in poor water quality, environmental degradation, and high rates of cancer in the region (Scott et al., forthcoming; B.M. Howell field notes).

What I found especially interesting about this follow-up research is that anger and distrust toward the coal companies has waned significantly over the past 10 years since the spill. Some people believe that things are back to the way they were before the spill, with a few commenting that things might even be better now that large-scale clean-up efforts have improved the local environment. A number of people were hostile to our research, stating that they were “friends of coal” and they didn’t want to take our surveys. One individual even commented that environmental disasters are the price they pay for their livelihoods in Martin County. Of course, that is not to mention that this livelihood makes Martin County one of the poorest counties in the state of Kentucky, Appalachia, and even the nation. In fact, as of May 2011 Martin County is ranked at 39 among the lowest income per capita counties in the entire nation. Only four of Kentucky’s 120 counties are poorer than Martin County (U.S. Census Bureau 2010).

It’s All about Structural Inequalities

These two disparate Appalachian research projects coalesce around issues of structural inequalities that lead to poor health. In Martin County, economic dependence on the coal companies has resulted in acceptance, and even some fatalistic attitudes, of environmental toxins. In southeastern Appalachian Kentucky, many people have little access to high quality and varied fresh produce and other healthy foods (this is probably true throughout Eastern Kentucky, but I am only working in the southeast). By revealing the underlying structures that create these inequities, many Appalachian researchers hope to eliminate victim blaming, especially when Appalachians have come to blame themselves for situations that they cannot fully control.
 

Both of these Appalachian projects utilize CBPR approaches to empower local communities to take action regarding their health and the environment. Althought access to healthy food and a toxin-free environment are basic human rights (United Nations 1948), many Appalachian communities are not granted these conditions. However, many Appalachian communities are willing and able to make changes that they deem important. I argue that the best research approach to research in the region is with CBPR which involves community members in all phases of the process, from formulating questions to data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination (Vaughn, Forbes, & Howell 2009).

Appalachia and Beyond

My work in Appalachian Kentucky has been integral for the development of my current research interests and future PhD dissertation work. Although I will be conducting dissertation research in Alaska, very similar issues of rural access to food and complex dietary decision-making link the two regions. In Alaska, these issues of food are complicated further by the harsh arctic environment and discourses of race involving the rights of low-income indigenous residents to continue obtaining traditional lifestyles and foods, such as seal and whale (Loring & Gerlach 2009). But, it is my work in Appalachia that helps me (begin to) grasp the structural inequalities in rural regions that I hope to investigate throughout my career.
 

Additionally, my work in the region has helped me find my roots. Growing up in the Detroit area, I was never really aware of my own heritage in the mountains. My father made a few references to family members “down south,” but it meant little to me because I had never met them. During my entire childhood I only visited relatives in Pikeville, KY once and all I remember is my brother having a pretty serious trampoline accident and my first encounter with wood ticks. However, working in Eastern Kentucky has helped me form a deeper relationship with my own father and to understand him and his family in a different way. In fact, his family was part of one of the major waves of migrations out of the mountains and into local industrial centers such as Cincinnati, OH and Detroit, MI (Obermiller 2004). Because he was not born in the mountains, my father was not aware of the term “Appalachian” and its current local meaning. We have had many interesting and rich conversations in the past two years due to my work in Eastern Kentucky. While it seems by accident that I ‘fell’ into Appalachian studies, it is for these and many more reasons that I am not struggling to get out of it.

Britteny M. Howell

References

CDC. 2008. Kentucky: Burden of Chronic Disease. Retrieved on 10/8/11 [link].

Glanz, K., J.F. Sallis, B.E. Saelens, and L.D. Frank. 2007. Nutrition Environment Measures Survey in Stores (NEMS-S): Development and Evaluation. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 32(4):282-289.

Israel, B.A., C.M. Coombe, R.R. Cheezum, A.J. Schulz, R.J. McGranaghan, R. Lichtenstein, A.G. Reyes, J. Clement, and A. Burris. 2010. Community-Based Participatory Research: A Capacity-Building Approach for Policy Advocacy Aimed at Eliminating Health Disparities. American Journal of Public Health 100(11):2094-2102.

Loring, P. A., and S.C. Gerlach. 2009. Food, Culture, and Human Health in Alaska: An Integrative Health Approach to Food Security. Environmental Science and Policy 12(4): 466-478.

Moffat, Tina. 2010. The “Childhood Obesity Epidemic”: Health Crisis or Social Construction? Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(1):1-21.

Obermiller, P.J. 2004. Migration. In High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place. R.A. Straw and H.T. Blethen (eds), pp. 88-100.

Schoenberg, N.E., J. Hatcher, M.B. Dignan, B. Shelton, S. Wright, and K.F. Dollarhide. 2009. Faith Moves Mountains: An Appalachian Cervical Cancer Prevention Program. American Journal of Health Behavior 33(6):627-638.

Scott, S.L., S. McSpirit, S. Hardesty, and R. Welch. 2005. Post Disaster Interviews with Martin County Citizens: “Gray Clouds” of Blame and Distrust. Journal of Appalachian Studies 11(1&2):7-29.

Scott, S.L., S. McSpirit, B.M. Howell, and M. Irvin. Forthcoming. “A Blessing in Disguise” (?) Reform of Public Water Management in Post-Disaster Martin County, Kentucky.

Sharkey, J.R., and S. Horel. 2008. Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation and Minority Composition Are Associated with Better Potential Spatial Access to the Ground-Truthed Food Environment in a Large Rural Area. Journal of Nutrition 138:620-627.

United Nations.  1948.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved on 10/8/11 [link].

U.S. Census Bureau. 2010.  Per Capita Income by County. Retrieved on 10/8/11 [link].

Vaughn, L.M., J.R. Forbes, and B.M. Howell. 2009.  Enhancing Home Visitation Programs: Input from a Participatory Evaluation Using Photovoice. Infants and Young Children 22(2):132-145.

Selected References for Further Reading in Biological Anthropology

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1912 Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants. American Anthropologist 14(3):530-562.

Boas, Franz
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Foster, Z., et al.
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Goodman, Alan H. and Thomas L. Leatherman (eds.)
1998 Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin
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2005 A Space of Vulnerability in Poverty and Health: Political-Ecology and Biocultural Analysis. Ethos 33(1):46-70.

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Montagu, Ashley
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Moran, Emilio F.
1990 Ecosystem Ecology in Biology and Anthropology: A Critical Assessment. In The Ecosystem Approach to Anthropology. E.F. Moran, ed. Pp. 3-40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Moran, Emilio F.
2008 Human Adaptability to High Altitudes. In Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology. Pp. 157-187. Philadelphia: Westview Press.

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Pedersen, Jon, and Tor Benjaminsen
2008 One Leg or Two? Food Security and Pastoralism in the Northern Sahel. Human Ecology 36(1):43-57.

Pfeiffer, James, Stephen Gloyd, and Lucy Ramirez Li
2001 Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Child Growth in Mozambique: An Ethnographic Case-Control Study. Social Science & Medicine 53(1):83-97.

Piperata, Barbara Ann
2008 Forty Days and Forty Nights: A Biocultural Perspective on Postpartum Practices in the Amazon. Social Science & Medicine 67(7):1094-1103.

Ruff, Christopher
2002 Variation in Human Body Size and Shape. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:211-232.

Schell, Lawrence M.
1997 Culture as a Stressor: A Revised Model of Biocultural Interaction. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 102(1):67-77.

Schell, Lawrence M., and P. D. Magnus
2007 Is There an Elephant in the Room? Addressing Rival Approaches to the Interpretation of Growth Perturbations and Small Size. American Journal of Human Biology 19(5):606-614.

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2000 Human Biology: An Evolutionary and Biocultural Perspective. New York: Wiley-Liss.

Stojanowski, Christopher M.
2005 The Bioarchaeology of Identity in Spanish Colonial Florida: Social and evolutionary transformation before, during, and after demographic collapse. American Anthropologist 107:417-431.

Tomasello, Michael
1999 The Human Adaptation for Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology 28(1):509-529.

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Ulijaszek, S.J. and R. Huss-Ashmore (eds.)
1997 Human Adaptability: Past, Present, and Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wiley, Andrea S.
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Wiley, Andrea S.
2004 “Drink Milk for Fitness”: The Cultural Politics of Human Biological Variation and Milk Consumption in the United States. American Anthropologist 106(3):506-517.

Wiley, Andrea S., and John S. Allen
2009 Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

Worthman, Carol M., and E. Jane Costello
2009 Tracking Biocultural Pathways in Population Health: The Value of Biomarkers. Annals of Human Biology 36(3):281-297.

Biological Perspectives on Food and Nutrition

Brewis, Alexandra, and Sarah Lee
2010 Children's Work, Earnings, and Nutrition in Urban Mexican Shantytowns. American Journal of Human Biology 22(1):60-68.

Brown, Peter
1991 Culture and the Evolution of Obesity. Human Nature 2(1):31-57.

Brown, Peter J., and Melvin Konner
2000 An Anthropological Perspective on Obesity. In Nutritional Anthropology: Biocultural Perspectives on Food and Nutrition. A.H. Goodman, D.L. Dufour, and G.H. Pelto, eds. Pp. 347-357. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Brunson, Emily K., Bettina Shell-Duncan, and Matthew Steele
2009 Women's Autonomy and its Relationship to Children's Nutrition among the Rendille of Northern Kenya. American Journal of Human Biology 21(1):55-64.

Berzok, Linda Murray
2005 American Indian Food. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.

Carlile, William K., et al.
1972 Contemporary Nutritional Status of North American Indian Children. In Nutrition, Growth, and Development of North American Indian Children W.M. Moore, M.M. Silverberg, and M.S. Read, eds. Pp. 47-64. Washington, D.C.: National Institutes of Health.

Counihan, C. and P. V. Esterik (Eds.)
1997 Food and Culture. New York: Routledge.

Crooks, Deborah L.
1999 Understanding Children's Nutritional Status: Combining Anthropological Approaches in Poverty Research. Nutritional Anthropology 22(2):1-4.

Crooks, Deborah L.
2000 Food Consumption, Activity, and Overweight among Elementary School Children in an Appalachian Kentucky Community. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 112(2):159-70.

Crooks, Deborah L.
2003 Trading Nutrition for Education: Nutritional Status and the Sale of Snack Foods in an Eastern Kentucky School. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17(2):182-99.

Decaro, Jason A., Erin Decaro, and Carol M. Worthman
2010 Sex Differences in Child Nutritional and Immunological Status 5-9 Years Post Contact in Fringe Highland Papua New Guinea. American Journal of Human Biology 22(5):657-666.

Dettwyler, Katherine A.
1994 Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.

Drewnowski, Adam, and Barry M. Popkin
1997 The Nutrition Transition: New Trends in the Global Diet. Nutrition Reviews 55(2):31-43.

Drewnowski, Adam
2009 Obesity, Diets, and Social Inequalities. Nutrition Reviews 67:S36-S39.

Goodman, A.H., Dufour, D.L., and G.H. Pelto (eds.)
2000 Nutritional Anthropology: Biocultural Perspectives on Food and Nutrition. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Haas, J D, and G G Harrison
1977 Nutritional Anthropology and Biological Adaptation. Annual Review of Anthropology 6(1):69-101.

Hadley, Craig, et al.
2008 Gender Bias in the Food Insecurity Experience of Ethiopian Adolescents. Social Science & Medicine 66(2):427-438.

Herring, D. Ann, Sylvia Abonyi, and Robert D. Hoppa
2003 Malnutrition Among Northern Peoples of Canada in the 1940s: An Ecological and Economic Disaster. In Human Biologists in the Archives D.A. Herring and A.C. Swedlung, eds. Pp. 289-310. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jenike, Mark R., et al.
2011 Thinking about Food, Drink, and Nutrition Among Ninth Graders in the United States Midwest: A Case Study of Local Partnership Research. Human Organization 70(2):139-152.

Jensen, B.
2008 Nutritional Anthropology. New Delhi: Global Vision Publishing.

Kuhnlein, Harriet V., and Olivier Receveur
1996 Dietary Change and Traditional Food Systems of Indigenous Peoples. Annual Review of Nutrition 16:417-442.

Larsen, C. S., A. W. Crosby, and et al.
2002 A Biohistory of Health and Behavior in the Georgia Bight: The Agricultural Transition and the Impact of European Contact. In The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. R.H. Steckel, ed. Pp. 406-439. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, Cheryl P., et al.
2010 Excess Weight and Physical Health-Related Quality of Life in Postmenopausal Women of Diverse Racial/Ethnic Backgrounds. Journal of Women's Health 19(8):1449-1458.

McKeown, Thomas
1983 Food, Infection, and Population. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14(2):227-247.

Messer, E.
1984 Anthropological Perspectives on Diet. Annual Review of Anthropology 13(1):205-249.

Mintz, Sidney W., and Christine M. Du Bois
2003 The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:99-119.

Morfin, Lourdes Marquez, et al.
Health and Nutrition in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. In The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. R.H. Steckel, ed. Pp. 307-339. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Patil, Crystal, Craig Hadley, and Perpetue Nahay
2009 Unpacking Dietary Acculturation among New Americans: Results from Formative Research with African Refugees. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health 11(5):342-358.

Pelto, Gretel H., and Pertti J. Pelto
1983 Diet and Delocalization: Dietary Changes since 1750. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14(2):507-528.

Pelto, Gretel H., and Luis Alberto Vargas
1992 Dietary Change and Nutrition. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 27:159-161.

Popkin, B.M.
2002 An Overview on the Nutrition Transition and its Health Implications: The Bellagio Meeting. Public Health Nutrition 5(1a):93-103.

Scott, Susan, and Christopher J. Duncan
2002 Demography and Nutrition: Evidence from Historical and Contemporary Populations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Scrimshaw, Nevin S.
1983 Functional Consequences of Malnutrition for Human Populations: A Comment. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 14(2):409-411.

Stinson, Sara
1992 Nutritional Adaptation. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:143-170.

Sue Lieberman, L.
2002 Personal Perspectives and Contemporary Trends in Nutritional Anthropology. Appetite 38(1):77-78.

Ubelaker, Douglas H., and Linda A. Newson
2002 Patterns of Health and Nutrition in Prehistoric and Historic Ecuador. In The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. R.H. Steckel, ed. Pp. 343-375. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Usfar, A. A., et al.
2010 Obesity as a Poverty-Related Emerging Nutrition Problem: The Case of Indonesia. Obesity Reviews 11(12):924-928.

Waterlow, J.C.
1990 Nutritional Adaptation in Man: General Introduction and Concepts. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 51:259-263.

Walker, Phillip L., and Russell Thornton
2002 Health, Nutrition, and Demographic Change in Native California. In The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere. R.H. Steckel, ed. Pp. 506-523. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Willett, Walter
1998 Nutritional Epidemiology. New York: Oxford University Press.

The Role of a Biological Perspective

To me, the question of what a biological perspective adds to anthropology is an awkward one; anthropology has always been inherently biological. As the product of the Enlightenment’s zeal for natural history and classifying everything under the sun, anthropology’s main and initial goal was to classify the “human primitives” on earth - to catalog and study non-western people. Some of the earliest concerns of anthropology were regarding our evolutionary lineage and physical variation in humans. More sophisticated versions of these and other biological questions continue to drive investigators in this discipline toward very exciting research. Today, the main goals of biological anthropology are to understand contemporary human variation, the ancestry of human and non-human primate species, and the intersection between biology and culture. However, a question I find more interesting for this issue is why the four sub-fields of American anthropology have become so divided. And, in this division, why has biological anthropology gotten such a bad rap?

It seems that in many anthropology programs (with notable exceptions such as University of Tennessee, University of Michigan, and others), biological anthropology is one of the outcast sub-fields, relegated to the shadow of the anthropological superstars, archaeology and cultural anthropology. Some departments that do hang on to their biological sub-field seem to experience confusion or animosity towards the biological perspective. It seems that students (and maybe even faculty) in anthropology departments are reluctant to utilize a biological perspective or take biological anthropology courses because it is seemingly irrelevant to their research questions on culture, identity, or health. Some researchers even seem hostile to a biological approach, assuming that we are trying to explain away all human cultural variation or health problems in terms of biological determinants. For the record, biological anthropologists are not all sociobiologists and we do recognize a political-economic approach (see Goodman & Leatherman 1998; Schell et al. 2007)!

However, it seems to many students that the field of anthropology has somehow developed beyond the need to understand human biological variation, which might be best left to geneticists. This situation seems to stem from general Western thought that divides the sociocultural from the biophysical (Ingold 2001) and the pioneering anthropological work of Franz Boas. As anthropologists had set out to distinguish culture from race, Boas declared that “any attempt to explain cultural form on a purely biological basis is doomed to failure” (Boas 1940: 1656). Of course, Boas was not indicating that biological perspectives should be dismissed entirely, but just that biology could not be the sole lens through which to view human culture. However, this statement seemingly delineated the study of the cultural from the study of the biological. Indeed, early Boasian anthropologists rarely integrated the biological and the cultural into a single synthetic work and this trend has largely continued to today (Borofsky 2002). 

So, back to the question: what does a biological perspective bring to the field of anthropology? Obviously, as a biocultural anthropologist, I think questions about culture, identity, and health cannot possibly be answered without an understanding of how stress, disease, and diet affect our bodies. Of course structural issues are important, those that address how people are able to access healthy lifestyles or not, but we all must also understand how our human biologies are affected by lifestyle and vice versa. 

For example, my own research investigates how individual dietary decision-making both creates identity and has biological consequences. In Appalachia, people often make claims to “comfort food,” “cultural foods,” and “this is how I was raised to eat.” Clearly, people use food to help create their identities in this region. However, these foods affect the biologies of people as high rates of nutrition-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer can attest. Additionally, Alaska Natives (ANs) experience these same issues, although they are manifested differently. ANs have their own ideas about cultural and traditional foods and eating these items is what makes someone a “true” Eskimo. Even as they continue to construct their native identities from what they eat, they are also transitioning to a more Westernized diet. The increasing intake of energy dense, sugary, and fatty foods is contributing to rising rates of those same diseases experienced by Appalachians: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and certain cancers. For me, questions about cultural identity or health in these two disparate regions cannot be answered without investigating diet, which inherently leads to biological questions about health and disease. It is important to note that these research projects are not neglecting a political-economic perspective. Structural issues such as access to healthy foods, rates of poverty, and the factors leading to food insecurity are being investigated within this biocultural approach (for example, see Borré 1991; Crooks 2000; Fazzino & Loring 2009; Hadley et al. 2008).

In short, I think most anthropological questions could be enhanced with a biological perspective or component. Very little about humanity can be studied without understanding how our bodies operate and how our cultural practices interact with our biologies. Additionally, as anthropology and the social sciences continue to come under attack (Mervis 2011), the holism on which our discipline was founded and that continues to make our field unique should not be abandoned now.

Britteny Howell

References

Mervis, Jeffrey. 2011. Social Sciences Face Uphill Battle Proving Their Worth to Congress. Science. Retrieved on 7-10-11 from http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/06/social-sciences-face-uphill-battle.html.

Boas, Franz. 1940. Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Free Press.

Borofsky, Robert. 2002. The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers. American Anthropologist 104(2):463-480.

Borré, Kristen. 1991. Seal Blood, Inuit Blood, and Diet: A Biocultural Model of Physiology and Cultural Identity. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 5(1):48-62.

Crooks, Deborah L. 2000. Food Consumption, Activity, and Overweight among Elementary School Children in an Appalachian Kentucky Community. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 112(2):159-70.

Fazzino, David V., and Philip A. Loring. 2009. From Crisis to Cumulative Effects: Food Security Challenges in Alaska. NAPA Bulletin 32(152-177).

Goodman, Alan H. and Thomas L. Leatherman (eds.). 1998. Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Hadley, Craig, et al. 2008. Gender Bias in the Food Insecurity Experience of Ethiopian Adolescents. Social Science & Medicine 66(2):427-438.

Ingold, Tim. 2001. From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, and Psychology. In S. Oyama, P.E. Griffiths, and R.D. Gray Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Pp 255- 280. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schell, Lawrence M., et al. 2007. Advancing Biocultural Models by Working with Communities: A Partnership Approach. American Journal of Human Biology 19:511-524.