The goal of this paper is to provoke debate about the nature of an iconic artifact—the Acheulean handaxe. Specifically, we want to initiate a conversation about whether or not they are cultural objects. The vast majority of archeologists assume that the behaviors involved in the production of handaxes were acquired by social learning and that handaxes are therefore cultural. We will argue that this assumption is not warranted on the basis of the available evidence and that an alternative hypothesis should be given serious consideration. This alternative hypothesis is that the form of Acheulean handaxes was at least partly under genetic control.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain andIreland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Anthropology Today. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 9 Feb 2015 04:55:33 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions appropriation or imposition (Pieterse , 1997). And what makes this idea especially salient for discussions of globalization is the vast degree of diffusionism in the contemporary world as a result of the compression of time and space associated with the technologies of late modernity (Giddens, 1990).One of the problems with much of the writing on hybridity is that it attempts to describe general social processes rather than paying attention to the way hybrid institutions are actually produced through the agency of specific classes of social actors in culturally-defined fields (see Naficy 1993 for a significant exception). What smallscale ethnographies of practices like computer matchmaking services can offer us is a glimpse of the ways in which hybrid institutions are produced through the actions of entrepreneurs and the aspirations of middleclass men and women acting within a social field that is defined not by a generic 'modernization' or 'Westernization' but by specific political, economic and historical forces particular to Egypt. D Africanart in Brussels RAYMOND CORBEY This article sketches the primarily African tribal art scene in Brussels, a former colonial m?tropole, and its emergence in the course of the twentieth century. It is based on a number of formal interviews and frequent informal contacts with Belgian and some foreign dealers, a close monitoring of the goings-on in and around the Brussels tribal art galleries since 1995, archival and historical research, and the sparse scholarship available on this particular subject. Many hundreds of Belgian and foreign collectors of ethnographies regularly satisfy their hunger by visiting a number of galleries specializing in art tribal, primitieve kunst or art premier, around the Grote Zavel square (Place du Grand Sabl?n) in the centre of the bilingual Belgian capital. Several dozen dealers do business around the Grote Zavel, either through galleries or as marchand en chambre behind closed doors. Some of them live in Antwerp or in the provinces, but for them too the capital is where it happens. A few thousand of collectors and foreign dealers visit the yearly Grote Zavel 'open days' in June, when some twenty-five local galleries and an equal number of foreign dealers, hosted by them, show their treasures (?Uns. I). This has been a yearly manifestation of the Belgian Association of Dealers in Tribal Art (BADNEA), since 1990. That the foll...

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