Best of
Anthropology
2009
The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (CBC Massey Lecture)
Wade Davis - 2009
In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rain forest nomads struggle to survive. Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy--a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalog of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.
Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods
Shawn Wilson - 2009
Portraying indigenous researchers as knowledge seekers who work to progress indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing in a constantly evolving context, this examination shows how relationships both shape indigenous reality and are vital to reality itself. These same knowledge seekers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony of maintaining accountability. Envisioning researchers as accountable to all relations, this overview proves that careful choices should be made regarding selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis, and the way in which information is presented.
A Life Beyond Boundaries
Benedict Anderson - 2009
He was expelled from Suharto’s Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attempted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years, he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine study of the Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal in The Age of Globalization. In A Life Beyond Boundaries, Anderson recounts a life spent open to the world. Here he reveals the joys of learning languages, the importance of fieldwork, the pleasures of translation, the influence of the New Left on global thinking, the satisfactions of teaching, and a love of world literature. He discusses the ideas and inspirations behind his best-known work, Imagined Communities (1983), whose complexities changed the study of nationalism. Benedict Anderson died in Java in December 2015, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs of this book. The tributes that poured in from Asia alone suggest that his work will continue to inspire and stimulate minds young and old.
Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts
Margaret Kovach - 2009
These are the focal considerations of Margaret Kovach's study, which offers guidance to those conducting research in the academy using Indigenous methodologies.Kovach includes topics such as Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing theory, story as method, situating self and culture, Indigenous methods, protocol, meaning-making, and ethics. In exploring these elements, the book interweaves perspectives from six Indigenous researchers who share their stories, and also includes excerpts from the author's own journey into Indigenous methodologies. Indigenous Methodologies is an innovative and important contribution to the emergent discourse on Indigenous research approaches and will be of use to graduate students, professors, and community-based researchers of all backgrounds - both within the academy and beyond.
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
James C. Scott - 2009
This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
Ethan Watters - 2009
But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In "Crazy Like Us," Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties." Crazy Like Us" documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.
Direct Action: An Ethnography
David Graeber - 2009
The case study at the center of Direct Action is the organizing and events that led to the one of the most dramatic and militant mass protests in recent years—against the Summit of the Americas in Québec City. Written in a clear, accessible style (with a minimum of academic jargon), this study brings readers behind the scenes of a movement that has changed the terms of debate about world power relations. From informal conversations in coffee shops to large “spokescouncil” planning meetings and tear gas-drenched street actions, Graeber paints a vivid and fascinating picture.Along the way, he addresses matters of deep interest to anthropologists: meeting structure and process, language, symbolism and representation, the specific rituals of activist culture, and much more. Starting from the assumption that, when dealing with possibilities of global transformation and emerging political forms, a disinterested, “objective” perspective is impossible, Graeber writes as both scholar and activist. At the same time, his experiment in the application of ethnographic methods to important ongoing political events is a serious and unique contribution to the field of anthropology, as well as an inquiry into anthropology’s political implications.David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist who teaches at the University of London. Active in numerous direct-action political organizations, he has written for Harper’s Magazine and is the author of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, and Possibilities.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.
The Incredible Human Journey
Alice Roberts - 2009
On her travels she has witnessed some of the daunting and brutal challenges our ancestors had to face: mountains, deserts, oceans, changing climates, terrifying giant beasts and volcanoes. But she discovers that perhaps the most serious threat of all came from other humans. When our ancestors set out from Africa there were already two other species of human on the planet: Neanderthal in Europe and Homo erectus in Asia. Both (contrary to popular perception) were intelligent, adept at making tools and weapons and were long adapted to their environments. So, Alice asks, why did only Homo sapiens survive? Part detective story, part travelogue, and drawing on the latest genetic and archaeological discoveries, Alice examines how our ancestors evolved physically in response to these challenges, finding out how our colour, shape, size, diet, disease resistance and even athletic ability have been shaped by the range of environments that our ancestors had to survive. She also relates how astonishingly closely related we all are.
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy - 2009
From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution."Mothers and Others" finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends--and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.From its opening vision of "apes on a plane"; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, "Mothers and Others" is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children--and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.
The Disposable Skateboard Bible
Sean Cliver - 2009
In the process, he created a classic, but was left feeling less than satisfied. Ever the completist, the gaping omissions in the first book gnawed at him and drove him to envision compiling the ultimate encyclopedia of Skateboard decks. While Disposable was beautiful, capturing the essence of the aesthetic, The Disposable Skateboard Bible sets out to be the ultimate guide. The author's industry insider status (in 1989 he landed his first job as a designer at Powell-Peralta) allows him to guide readers through the culture and experience, the art and the mania of the skate world with authority and expertise. While the boards take center stage, fascinating vignettes and recollections by an A-list of skateboarding personalities from Tony Hawk to Mike Vallely, Mark Gonzales to Stacy Peralta and more.
Cannibal Metaphysics
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - 2009
Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology’s current return to the theoretical center stage.
Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon
Stephan V. Beyer - 2009
Some mestizos have migrated to Amazon towns and cities, such as Iquitos and Pucallpa; most remain in small villages. They have retained features of a folk Catholicism and traditional Hispanic medicine, and have incorporated much of the religious tradition of the Amazon, especially its healing, sorcery, shamanism, and the use of potent plant hallucinogens, including ayahuasca. The result is a uniquely eclectic shamanist culture that continues to fascinate outsiders with its brilliant visionary art. Ayahuasca shamanism is now part of global culture. Once the terrain of anthropologists, it is now the subject of novels and spiritual memoirs, while ayahuasca shamans perform their healing rituals in Ontario and Wisconsin. "Singing to the Plants" sets forth just what this shamanism is about--what happens at an ayahuasca healing ceremony, how the apprentice shaman forms a spiritual relationship with the healing plant spirits, how sorcerers inflict the harm that the shaman heals, and the ways that plants are used in healing, love magic, and sorcery.
Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume I - Civilization: The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised Kings
Abdullah Öcalan - 2009
Here Öcalan outlines a democratic alternative for the Middle East."Considering the circumstances under which the book was written, I’d say the achievement here is quite impressive. Abdullah Öcalan seems to have done a better job writing with the extremely limited resources allowed him by his jailers than authors like Francis Fukuyama or Jared Diamond did with access to the world’s finest research libraries."—David GraeberA criticism that limits itself to capitalism is too superficial, Öcalan argues, and turns his eyes to the underlying structures of civilization. Rethinking the methods of understanding culture, politics, and society, he provides the tools for what he calls a sociology of freedom.In this work, Abdullah Öcalan distills 35 years of revolutionary theory and praxis and 10 years of solitary confinement in Turkish prisons. These reflections represent the essence of his ideas on society, knowledge, and power.
Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda
Lee Ann Fujii - 2009
That ghastly violence has overshadowed a fact almost as noteworthy: that hundreds of thousands of Hutu killed no one. In a transformative revisiting of the motives behind and specific contexts surrounding the Rwandan genocide, Lee Ann Fujii focuses on individual actions rather than sweeping categories.Fujii argues that ethnic hatred and fear do not satisfactorily explain the mobilization of Rwandans one against another. Fujii's extensive interviews in Rwandan prisons and two rural communities form the basis for her claim that mass participation in the genocide was not the result of ethnic antagonisms. Rather, the social context of action was critical. Strong group dynamics and established local ties shaped patterns of recruitment for and participation in the genocide.This web of social interactions bound people to power holders and killing groups. People joined and continued to participate in the genocide over time, Fujii shows, because killing in large groups conferred identity on those who acted destructively. The perpetrators of the genocide produced new groups centered on destroying prior bonds by killing kith and kin.
My People's Dreaming: An Aboriginal Elder Speaks on Life, Land, Spirit and Forgiveness
Max Dulumunmun Harrison - 2009
He has been sharing his cultural knowledge for over 30 years and has taken over 6,000 people from all walks of life onto country, explaining Aboriginal ways and the intricate understandings of the environment.My People's Dreaming is a rare, personal insight into traditional Yuin teachings and is drawn from extensive interviews with Uncle Max.
First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America
David J. Meltzer - 2009
Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology. This dazzling, cutting-edge synthesis, written for a wide audience by an archaeologist who has long been at the center of these debates, tells the scientific story of the first Americans: where they came from, when they arrived, and how they met the challenges of moving across the vast, unknown landscapes of Ice Age North America. David J. Meltzer pulls together the latest ideas from archaeology, geology, linguistics, skeletal biology, genetics, and other fields to trace the breakthroughs that have revolutionized our understanding in recent years. Among many other topics, he explores disputes over the hemisphere's oldest and most controversial sites and considers how the first Americans coped with changing global climates. He also confronts some radical claims: that the Americas were colonized from Europe or that a crashing comet obliterated the Pleistocene megafauna. Full of entertaining descriptions of on-site encounters, personalities, and controversies, this is a compelling behind-the-scenes account of how science is illuminating our past.
Drawing Down the Spirits: The Traditions and Techniques of Spirit Possession
Kenaz Filan - 2009
Spirit possession is an integral part of shamanism as well as many neo-pagan forms of worship that draw down deities or invite spirit possession. However, spirit possession is not for the unprepared. In Drawing Down the Spirits, Kenaz Filan and Raven Kaldera, both initiated and experienced in shamanic and Vodou traditions, present the practical guidance needed to participate in ritual possession. Addressing the benefits and the dangers that await the naive, Filan and Kaldera show that there is no such thing as a guaranteed “safe” possession because spirits have their own agenda--and they are much more powerful than we are. The authors provide a variety of techniques to prepare for possession and abort possession and to promote the safety of the possessed as well as the spirits and witnesses present. With a wide-ranging look at the historic forms of ritual possession found throughout the world--including Uganda, Nepal, Korea, Bali, Greece, Turkey, Scandinavia, and France--the authors also include numerous firsthand accounts collected from witnesses of modern spirit possession.
Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary
Daniel E. Moerman - 2009
Moerman describes the medicinal use of more than 2700 plants by 218 Native American tribes. Information—adapted from the same research used to create the monumental Native American Ethnobotany—includes 82 categories of medicinal uses, ranging from analgesics, contraceptives, gastrointestinal aids, hypotensive medicines, sedatives, and toothache remedies.Native American Medicinal Plants includes extensive indexes arranged by tribe, usage, and common name, making it easy to access the wealth of information in the detailed catalog of plants. It is an essential reference for students and professionals in the fields of anthropology, botany, and naturopathy and an engaging read for anyone interested in ethnobotany and natural healing.
News, Nudity & Nonsense: Irresponsible Writing for Awkward Youth (The Best of Vice Magazine, 2003-2008)
Vice Magazine - 2009
The original manuscript was discovered amidst a verdant glade in a glowing golden box. The first men to gaze upon it had their faces melted off by its brilliance. It rocketed to the tops of best-seller lists and dollar bins. It has been bequeathed in wills from parents to children. It has supplanted Dianetics as the must-have spiritual tome of Hollywood, California. It is truly the book of the ages. But all of that is total bullshit compared to the tidal wave of press and accolades that will engulf all of us when we bringeth forth upon the world the second book of greatest hits from Vice Magazine. It is to be called
News, Nudity & Nonsense
, and will contain enough “wow”-filled reading material to power you through at least a year’s worth of defecations from its inevitable home atop the back of your toilet.
Ecological Developmental Biology: Integrating Epigenetics, Medicine, and Evolution: An Integrated Approach to Embryology, Evolution, and Medicine
Scott F. Gilbert - 2009
The Dreaming & Other Essays
W.E.H. Stanner - 2009
Stanner's words changed Australia. Without condescension and without sentimentality, in essays such as 'The Dreaming' Stanner conveyed the richness and uniqueness of Aboriginal culture. In his Boyer Lectures he exposed a 'cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale,' regarding the fate of the Aborigines, for which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. And in his essay 'Durmugam' he provided an unforgettable portrait of a warrior's attempt to hold back cultural change. 'He was such a man,' Stanner wrote. 'I thought I would like to make the reading world see and feel him as I did.' The pieces collected here span the career of W.E.H. Stanner as well as the history of Australian race relations. They reveal the extraordinary scholarship, humanity and vision of one of Australia's finest essayists. Their revival is a significant event. With an introductory essay by Robert Manne. 'Bill Stanner was a superb essayist with a wonderful turn of phrase and ever fresh prose. He always had important things to say, which have not lost their relevance. It is wonderful that they will now be available to a new and larger audience.' - Henry Reynolds 'Stanner's essays still hold their own among this country's finest writings on matters black and white.' - Noel Pearson
The Private World of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berg
Robert Murphy - 2009
Saint Laurent’s extraordinary taste went well beyond the world of fashion, and in this lavish volume, the eight splendid homes he shared with friend and lifelong business partner Pierre Bergé are presented in immaculate detail. Notoriously shy, the designer and Bergé lived in luxury, surrounded by incomparable collections of furniture and art. From the serene interiors of their apartment on the Rue Babylone to the incandescent beauty of the Villa Majorelle in Marrakech, Bergé and Saint Laurent’s sensibilities come alive. Taken after Saint Laurent’s death in 2008, Ivan Terestchenko’s photographs capture these exquisite surroundings in full, showcasing nineteenth-century French décor, important paintings by modern and Romantic artists, and masterpieces of furniture, sculpture, and silver ranging from the Renaissance to the Art Deco era. Though the homes presented here are now empty, The Private World of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé is a testament to a rare union of passion, elegance, and supreme connoisseurship. “The quintessence of very grand and highly personal French taste.” --
Le Figaro
“As he did with fashion, Yves seized at one moment in time, a taste that was in the air, only to show his mastery. During the 1970s exoticism and Marrakech were currents in the air and St. Laurent became the authority. He was interested in Art Deco before it became fashionable, even before Andy Warhol and Karl Lagerfeld . . . St Laurent’s and Bergé’s taste is an expression of a culture and is always a story. When they decorated a house it was no longer an ordinary house: it became a story to tell.”--
Jacques Grange
“Takes readers . . . inside all eight of the couple's spectacular homes, from Paris to Marrakech.”--
Elle Decor
“Some of the most influential interiors of our time.”--
Town & Country
“(A) beautiful glimpse into their private world.”--
Habitually Chic
“A visually stunning book about a richly layered lifestyle built over the course of 40-plus years.”--
Home Design with Kevin Sharke
y “(An) amazing book.”--
Decorati Access Interior Design Magazine
“You'll agree that this is a book with which you will be enchanted. And if a little of that YSL flair rubs off on us, all the better.”--
The Peak of Chic
“Terestchenko’s photographs beautifully capture the opulence and eclecticism of their dwellings.”--Clear “In this lavish volume, the eight splendid homes . . . are presented in immaculate detail.”--
California Home + Design
“Sumptuously showcase(s) the eight immaculately designed homes (of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé).”--
Elle
<!--StartFragment--> “A stunning book.” ~ ESFN FEATURED ON THE TODAY SHOW: Holiday Guide: Find the Perfect Book for Each Person on Your List (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/3350894...)
Cosmic Ordering: Sex Energy
Stephen Richards - 2009
Cosmic Ordering: Sex Energy shows you how to improve the entire sexual system and increases the vibrations of sexual energy, making desired change in the realm of manifestation. Harnessing the unique sex energy that can only arise through sexual expression can awaken multidimensional awareness and provide you with your desired goal. For anybody looking to find candid sexual orientation and having a psyche preoccupied with engaging in sex play will find they are let down! On the other hand, that is not to say there is no sexual situations contained in this book, hence there is and keeping this in mind, it would be prudent to state that you are better keeping an open point of view than a closed one when reading this.
Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings
Wendy Makoons Geniusz - 2009
The result is a "colonized" version of the knowledge, one that is distorted and trivialized by an ill-suited Eurocentric paradigm of scientific investigation and classification. In Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive, Wendy Makoons Geniusz contrasts the way in which Anishinaabe botanical knowledge is presented in the academic record with how it is preserved in Anishinaabe culture. In doing so she seeks to open a dialogue between the two communities to discuss methods for decolonizing existing texts and to develop innovative approaches for conducting more culturally meaningful research in the future.As an Anishinaabe who grew up in a household practicing traditional medicine and who went on to earn a doctorate and become a professional scholar, Geniusz possesses the authority of someone with a foot firmly planted in each world. Her unique ability to navigate both indigenous and scientific perspectives makes this book an invaluable contribution to the field and enriches our understanding of all native communities.
Genetics of Original Sin: The Impact of Natural Selection on the Future of Humanity
Christian de Duve - 2009
Thus, the human genome determines such properties as tribal and group cohesion and collaboration and often fierce and irrational competition with and hostility toward other groups’ attributes that were once useful but now often ruinously dysfunctional.Christian de Duve suggests that these traits, imprinted into human nature by natural selection, may have been recognized by the writers of Genesis, thus inspiring the myth of original sin. Is there redemption for genetic original sin? In a brilliant and original conclusion, the author argues that, unique in the living world, humankind is endowed with the ability to deliberately oppose natural selection. Human beings have the capacity to devise measures that, while contrary to local or personal interests, can bring forth a safer world.
Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe: Human Evolution, Behavior, History, and Your Future
Joanne Souza - 2009
Paul M. Bingham & Joanne Souza share the products of more than a decades research into our evolutionary history. Humans communicate, cooperate, reason, coerce, & influence in specific ways that separate us from all other species. Knowledge of how this originally came to be in the human species is crucial to understanding our current social, economic and political behavior. "Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe" reads like a gripping novel, while delivering an answer to Darwin's unanswered question; how did humans become unique? The authors, one a molecular & evolutionary biologist and the other a research psychologist, dedicated to the evolutionary logic of human social behavior, have taken us beyond the fundamental concepts of biology into a theory that merges the natural & social sciences. You will gain striking new insights into our evolutionary origins, our innate sexual behavior (yes, both monogamous and promiscuous), our unprecedented approach to childrearing, our language and brain evolution, and our current social/political/economic behaviors. Questions like what caused the demise of Neandertals, the appearance of the agricultural revolution, the growth and cycling of elite empires, the modern economic miracle and the formation of both hierarchical and democratic governments will be answered. Bingham and Souzas work opens an entirely new way of looking at science and the human future. From Foreword Clarion Reviews: Death from a Distance comprehensively unifies what it means to be human and gives readers the skills to analyze how our humanness continues to shape our world. Scholars, students, & general readers will all come away from this book with new insight on the human experience. From other scholars: This book is an astonishingly wide-ranging and provocative overview of evolution, human origins & social organization. Breathtaking in its scope, and ranging from the earliest prehistoric period, through the course of the evolution of life on Earth, this book presents a startlingly original thesis grounded in contemporary evolutionary theory. It will challenge countless well-entrenched theories about who we are as a species, where we came from & where we are going. John J. Shea Dept. of Anthropology, Stony Brook University and more...see book website www.deathfromadistance.com
Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia
David Vine - 2009
military installations outside the United States. Located near the remote center of the Indian Ocean and accessible only by military transport, the base was a little-known launch pad for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and may house a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated and tortured. But Diego Garcia harbors another dirty secret, one that has been kept from most of the world--until now.Island of Shame is the first major book to reveal the shocking truth of how the United States conspired with Britain to forcibly expel Diego Garcia's indigenous people--the Chagossians--and deport them to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where most live in dire poverty to this day. Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, military strategists, and exiled islanders, as well as hundreds of declassified documents, David Vine exposes the secret history of Diego Garcia. He chronicles the Chagossians' dramatic, unfolding story as they struggle to survive in exile and fight to return to their homeland. Tracing U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror, Vine shows how the United States has forged a new and pervasive kind of empire that is quietly dominating the planet with hundreds of overseas military bases.Island of Shame is an unforgettable expos� of the human costs of empire and a must-read for anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its consequences.The author will donate all royalties from the sale of this book to the Chagossians.
Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State
Neni Panourgia - 2009
The stories are those of Greek Leftists as paradigmatic figures of abjection, given that between 1929 and 1974 tens of thousands of Greek dissidents were detained and tortured in prisons, places of exile, and concentration camps. They were sometimes held for decades, in subhuman conditions of toil and deprivation.The history is that of how the Greek Left was constituted by the Greek state as a zone of danger. Legislation put in place in the early twentieth century postulated this zone. Once the zone was created, there was always the possibility--which came to be a horrific reality after the Greek Civil War of 1946 to 1949--that the state would populate it with its own citizens. Indeed, the Greek state started to do so in 1929, by identifying ever-increasing numbers of citizens as "Leftists" and persecuting them with means extending from indefinite detention to execution.In a striking departure from conventional treatments, Neni Panourgi� places the Civil War in a larger historical context, within ruptures that have marked Greek society for centuries. She begins the story in 1929, when the Greek state set up numerous exile camps on isolated islands in the Greek archipelago. The legal justification for these camps drew upon laws reaching back to 1871--originally directed at controlling "brigands"--that allowed the death penalty for those accused and the banishment of their family members and anyone helping to conceal them. She ends with the 2004 trial of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November.Drawing on years of fieldwork, Panourgi� uses ethnographic interviews, archival material, unpublished personal narratives, and memoirs of political prisoners and dissidents to piece together the various microhistories of a generation, stories that reveal how the modern Greek citizen was created as a fraught political subject.Her book does more than give voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades. It establishes a history for the notion of indefinite detention that appeared as a legal innovation with the Bush administration. Part of its roots, Panourgi� shows, lie in the laboratory that Greece provided for neo-colonialism after the Truman Doctrine and under the Marshall Plan.
The Roger Scruton Reader
Mark Dooley - 2009
It gathers selections from some of his earliest works such as The Aesthetics of Architecture (1979) to his most recent Culture Counts (2007). The book also includes a good number of unpublished essays. It is made up of five sections - the last section of all contains some of Scruton's most pugilistic pieces on Dawkins and on The Iraq War. Scruton holds Burkean political views and his book The Meaning of Conservatism was a response to the growth of liberalism in the Conservative party. At all times he is concerned to shift the right way from economics towards moral issues such as sex education and censorship laws. But he has in fact written on almost every aspect of philosophy - always in prose which is accessible and written with pellucid clarity.
Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning - 2009
Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity -- the incipiency at the heart of movement -- Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. Relationscapes takes a -Whiteheadian perspective, - recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century -- Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
The End of Belonging: Untold Stories of Leaving Home and the Psychology of Global Relocation
Greg Madison - 2009
It also warns us that there may be an unexpected psychological effect from thinking we can just live everywhere. We may end up homeless. The 21st century could herald 'the end of belonging'.
Breaking Ground: The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and the Unearthing of Tse-Whit-Zen Village
Lynda V. Mapes - 2009
The place chosen to dig a massive dry dock was atop one of the largest and oldest Indian village sites ever found in the region. Yet the state continued its project, disturbing hundreds of burials and unearthing more than 10,000 artifacts at Tse-whit-zen village, the heart of the long-buried homeland of the Klallam people.Excitement at the archaeological find of a generation gave way to anguish as tribal members working alongside state construction workers encountered more and more human remains, including many intact burials. Finally, tribal members said the words that stopped the project: "Enough is enough."Soon after, Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe chairwoman Frances Charles asked the state to walk away from more than $70 million in public money already spent on the project and find a new site. The state, in an unprecedented and controversial decision that reverberated around the nation, agreed.In search of the story behind the story, Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes spent more than a year interviewing tribal members, archaeologists, historians, city and state officials, and local residents and business leaders. Her account begins with the history of Tse-whit-zen village, and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century impacts of contact, forced assimilation, and industrialization. She then engages all the voices involved in the dry dock controversy to explore how the site was chosen, and how the decisions were made first to proceed and then to abandon the project, as well as the aftermath and implications of those controversial choices.This beautifully crafted and compassionate account, illustrated with nearly 100 photographs, illuminates the collective amnesia that led to the choice of the Port Angeles construction site. "You have to know your past in order to build your future," Charles says, recounting the words of tribal elders. Breaking Ground takes that teaching to heart, demonstrating that the lessons of Tse-whit-zen are teachings from which we all may benefit.A Capell Family Book
Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium
Michael Hogan - 2009
This new collection of essays, praised by Noam Chomsky, gives an on-the-ground report on conditions in Latin America by a well-known consultant and historian who has lived and worked in the region for the past twenty years.
Make Small Talk Sexy - Conversion Escalation eBook and DVD collection
Bobby Rio - 2009
Read Make Small Talk Sexy reviews from impartial GoodReads members here now.
Race and reality : what everyone should know about our biological diversity
Guy P. Harrison - 2009
Most people derive their attitudes about race from their family, culture, and education. Very few, however, are aware that there are vast differences between the popular notions of race and the scientific view of human diversity. Yet even among scientists, who understand the current evidence, there is great controversy regarding the definition of the term race or even the usefulness of thinking in terms of race at all. Drawing on research from diverse sources and interviews with key scientists, award-winning journalist Guy P. Harrison surveys the current state of a volatile, important, and confusing subject. Harrison’s thorough approach explores all sides of the issue, including such questions as these:• If analysis of the human genome reveals that all human beings are 99.9% alike, how meaningful are racial differences?• Is the concept of race merely a cultural invention?• If race distinctions are at least partially based in biological reality, how do we decide the number of races? Are there just three or maybe 3 million?• What do studies of racial attitudes reveal? Are we all, in one way or another, racists?• How does race correlate with environmental and geographical differences?• Are race-based drugs a good idea?• How does race influence intelligence, athletic ability, and love interests?Harrison delves into these and many more intriguing, controversial, and important questions in this enlightening book. After reading Race and Reality, you will never think about race in the same way again.
Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky's Ethnographic Expeditions
Eugene M. Avrutin - 2009
An-sky and the photographer Solomon Iudovin gathered materials and took photographs of Jewish daily life in pre-Revolutionary Russia’s Pale of Settlement. Photographing the Jewish Nation offers English-language readers their first look at over 170 extraordinary, recently rediscovered photographs from their expeditions. The pictures provide visual texture—in remarkable detail—that rarely appears in written sources. This volume includes a critical introduction and five chapters that document all aspects of Jewish life inside the Pale, including work, education, and religious and cultural traditions.
Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People
Kevin Bales - 2009
Written by the world’s leading experts, this shocking and powerful examination combines original research with first-hand stories from the slaves themselves to provide a reliable account of one of the worst humanitarian crises facing us today. Conservative estimates place the number of slaves living in the US right now at 40,000 with 17,000 individuals being trafficked a year. Around half of these will be forced into the sex industry while others labour in plain sight in hotels and restaurants. Only a few slaves are reached and freed each year, but the authors offer hope for the future with a global blueprint that proposes to end slavery in our lifetime. Kevin Bales is president of Free the Slaves and advisor to the UN and the US and British governments. He lives in Takoma Park, MD. Zoe Trodd teaches in the history and literature department at Harvard University. Dr. Alex Kent Williamson works at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard University.
Endocrinology of Social Relationships
Peter B. Gray - 2009
But in these relationships, so critical to our well-being, might we also detect the workings, even directives, of biology? This book, a rare melding of human and animal research and theoretical and empirical science, ventures into the most interesting realms of behavioral biology to examine the intimate role of endocrinology in social relationships.The importance of hormones to reproductive behavior from breeding cycles to male sexual display is well known. What this book considers is the increasing evidence that hormones are just as important to social behavior. Peter Ellison and Peter Gray include the latest findings both practical and theoretical on the hormonal component of both casual interactions and fundamental bonds. The contributors, senior scholars and rising scientists whose work is shaping the field, go beyond the proximate mechanics of neuroendocrine physiology to integrate behavioral endocrinology with areas such as reproductive ecology and life history theory. Ranging broadly across taxa, from birds and rodents to primates, the volume pays particular attention to human endocrinology and social relationships, a focus largely missing from most works of behavioral endocrinology."
Lanterns on the Prairie: The Blackfeet Photographs of Walter McClintock
Steven L. Grafe - 2009
A forest survey had brought him to Montana, but a chance encounter with a part-Blackfeet scout led him instead to a career as a chronicler of Plains Indian life. McClintock is now well known as the author of two books about his experiences among the Blackfeet, but only a few of his photographs have ever been published. This volume features biographical and interpretive essays about McClintock’s life and work and presents more than one hundred of his little-known images.Many of McClintock’s photos were eventually reproduced as colored lantern slides. One set of signature views contained numerous brightly lit tepees, rendered so that the great circular Blackfeet encampment “looked like an enormous group of coloured Japanese lanterns.” His pictures, the photographer claimed, “were not posed” but were instead “of real life.” In truth, McClintock’s photographs captured the attire and activities of the Blackfeet during the few weeks each year when they actively celebrated their old ways. Rather than recording day-to-day reservation life, they instead revealed the photographer’s own romantic ideals and nostalgic longing.Lanterns on the Prairie explores the motivations of the players in McClintock’s story and the historic context of his engagement with the Blackfeet. The photographs themselves provide an irreplaceable visual record of the Blackfeet during a pivotal period in their history.
Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law: A Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance
Raymond D. Austin - 2009
Since the landmark 1959 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Williams v. Lee that affirmed tribal court authority over reservation-based claims, the Navajo Nation has been at the vanguard of a far-reaching, transformative jurisprudential movement among Indian tribes in North America and indigenous peoples around the world to retrieve and use traditional values to address contemporary legal issues.A justice on the Navajo Nation Supreme Court for sixteen years, Justice Raymond D. Austin has been deeply involved in the movement to develop tribal courts and tribal law as effective means of modern self-government. He has written foundational opinions that have established Navajo common law and, throughout his legal career, has recognized the benefit of tribal customs and traditions as tools of restorative justice.In Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law, Justice Austin considers the history and implications of how the Navajo Nation courts apply foundational Navajo doctrines to modern legal issues. He explains key Navajo foundational concepts like Hózhó (harmony), K'é (peacefulness and solidarity), and K'éí (kinship) both within the Navajo cultural context and, using the case method of legal analysis, as they are adapted and applied by Navajo judges in virtually every important area of legal life in the tribe.In addition to detailed case studies, Justice Austin provides a broad view of tribal law, documenting the development of tribal courts as important institutions of indigenous self-governance and outlining how other indigenous peoples, both in North America and elsewhere around the world, can draw on traditional precepts to achieve self-determination and self-government, solve community problems, and control their own futures.
Becoming Human
Colin Renfrew - 2009
These behaviours are also exhibited by populations throughout the world, from the prehistoric period through to the present day. How can we interpret these activities? What do they tell us about the beliefs and priorities of the people who carried them out? How do these behaviours relate to ideologies, cosmology, and understanding of the world? What can they tell us about the emergence of ritual and religious thought? And how do the activities of humans in prehistoric Europe compare with those of their predecessors there and elsewhere? In this volume, fifteen internationally renowned scholars contribute essays that explore the relationship between symbolism, spirituality, and humanity in the prehistoric societies of Europe and traditional societies elsewhere. The volume is richly illustrated with 50 halftones and 24 color plates.
The Extended Case Method: Four Countries, Four Decades, Four Great Transformations, and One Theoretical Tradition
Michael Burawoy - 2009
capitalism, and the African transition to post-colonialism in Zambia. Burawoy's odyssey began in 1968 in the Zambian copper mines and proceeded to Chicago's South Side, where he worked as a machine operator and enjoyed a unique perspective on the stability of advanced capitalism. In the 1980s, this perspective was deepened by contrast with his work in diverse Hungarian factories. Surprised by the collapse of socialism in Hungary in 1989, he journeyed in 1991 to the Soviet Union, which by the end of the year had unexpectedly dissolved. He then spent the next decade studying how the working class survived the catastrophic collapse of the Soviet economy. These essays, presented with a perspective that has benefited from time and rich experience, offer ethnographers a theory and a method for developing novel understandings of epochal change.
The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC
David W. Anthony - 2009
Its inhabitants lived in prosperous agricultural towns. The ubiquitous goddess figurines found in their houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women's roles. The Lost World of Old Europe is the accompanying catalog for an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. This superb volume features essays by leading archaeologists as well as breathtaking color photographs cataloguing the objects, some illustrated here for the first time.The heart of Old Europe was in the lower Danube valley, in contemporary Bulgaria and Romania. Old European coppersmiths were the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables gave rise to far-reaching trading networks. In their graves, the bodies of Old European chieftains were adorned with pounds of gold and copper ornaments. Their funerals were without parallel in the Near East or Egypt. The exhibition represents the first time these rare objects have appeared in the United States.An unparalleled introduction to Old Europe's cultural, technological, and artistic legacy, The Lost World of Old Europe includes essays by Douglass Bailey, John Chapman, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici, Ioan Opris and Catalin Bem, Ernst Pernicka, Dragomir Nicolae Popovici, Michel S�f�riad�s, and Vladimir Slavchev.
Human Sexuality
Roger R. Hock - 2009
Several versions of Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products exist for each title, including customized versions for individual schools, and registrations are not transferable. In addition, you may need a CourseID, provided by your instructor, to register for and use Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products. Packages Access codes for Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products may not be included when purchasing or renting from companies other than Pearson; check with the seller before completing your purchase. Used or rental books If you rent or purchase a used book with an access code, the access code may have been redeemed previously and you may have to purchase a new access code. Access codes Access codes that are purchased from sellers other than Pearson carry a higher risk of being either the wrong ISBN or a previously redeemed code. Check with the seller prior to purchase. -- Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE This access code card gives you access to all of MyPsychLab's tools and resources, including a complete eText of your book. You can also buy immediate access to MyPsychLab with Pearson eText online with a credit card at www.mypsychlab.com. "Choice, Awareness, Responsibility" "Human Sexuality, Third Edition," helps students develop and design their own sexual philosophy. Every chapter begins with actual student questions from the author's files during nearly 20 years of teaching the human sexuality course. Throughout each chapter the questions are answered and new ones are posed--encouraging students to think critically, analyze, and apply the material in personally relevant ways. Hock takes a psychosocial approach, infused with biological foundations throughout the text. The book focuses on topics that are most critical and of greatest relevance to students' personal lives and their interactions with others, and on how these topics affect them emotionally, psychologically, and interpersonally. This student-centered approach is incorporated into the text's discussions of all areas of sexuality: psychological, social and biological (including medical issues, sexual health, sexual anatomy and sexual physiology). Sensitivity to diverse groups, not only in terms of race and ethnicity, but also in terms if sexual orientation, age, sexual knowledge, and sexual experience allows all students to feel as comfortable and open about sexual topics as possible. Teaching & Learning Experience"Personalize Learning "The new MyPsychLab delivers proven results in helping students succeed, provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, and comes from a trusted partner with educational expertise and a deep commitment to helping students and instructors achieve their goals."Improve Critical Thinking" With features like Evaluating Sexual Research and Sexuality, Ethics, and the Law "Human Sexuality "encourages students to be critical and skeptical when confronted with sexuality research and information."Engage Students " An interpersonal approach and focus on helping students develop their own sexual philosophy connects course material to their real life decisions and behaviors."Explore Research" The most up-to-date, scientific research is included."Apply Your Knowledge " opportunities like self-tests and scenario-driven questions throughout the text give students a chance to think more deeply about the content presented and help them to relate the material to their own lives."Support Instructors "- An instructor s manual, Test Bank, MyTest, PowerPoints, teaching films, and class response systems provide instructors with the ultimate supplements package. "
Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life
Stan Goldberg - 2009
In this book, Stan shares the remarkable stories of people he met who were facing the end of life. Their stories shine a light on the human capacity for beauty, insight, forgiveness, and gratitude, as we see how people like us deal with anxiety and sadness with bravery and love.But what's especially remarkable is that the bravery and love aren't as much expressed in grand, dramatic gestures as they are in ordinary acts and small accomplishments: in simple efforts at kindness, in asking for and receiving forgiveness, in the abandonment of anger, and in learning to speak directly from the heart--and to listen in the same way. What Stan ultimately discovers--and shares here--are not lessons in dying, but rather, lessons in learning how to live.
Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future
Heide Göttner-Abendroth - 2009
Gender Studies. Political Science. SOCIETIES OF PEACE: MATRIARCHIES PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE, edited by Heide Goettner-Abendroth, celebrates women's largely ignored and/or invisible contribution to culture by exploring matriarchal societies that have existed in the past and that continue to exist today in certain parts of the world. Matriarchal societies, primarily shaped by women, have a non violent social order in which all living creatures are respected without the exploitation of humans, animals or nature. They are well-balanced and peaceful societies in which domination is unknown and all beings are treated equally. This book presents these largely misunderstood societies, both past and present, to the wider public, as alternative social and cultural models that promote trust, mutuality, and abundance for all.
Global Health in Times of Violence
Barbara Rylko-Bauer - 2009
Over 24 million people have died in these conflicts, and millions more suffered illness and injury. In this volume, leading scholars and practitioners examine the impact of structural, military, and communal violence on health, psychosocial well-being, and health care delivery. By investigating the fields of violence that define our modern world, the authors are able to provide alternative global health paradigms that can be used to develop more effective policies and programs.This volume springs from an ongoing collaboration between the School for Advanced Research and the Society for Applied Anthropology intended to result in visible activities with lasting effects on the discipline of anthropology and the sciences. The Dobkin Family Foundation generously sponsored the SAR seminar where the project began.
Chod Practice In The Bon Tradition
Alejandro Chaoul - 2009
The chöd practices of the Bön tradition, a tradition that claims pre-Buddhist origins in the mysterious western lands of Zhang-zhung Tazig and Olmolungrig, are still almost entirely unknown.
Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing
Jo-Ann Episkenew - 2009
Taking Back Our Spirits traces the link between Canadian public policies, the injuries they have inflicted on Indigenous people, and Indigenous literature’s ability to heal individuals and communities. Episkenew examines contemporary autobiography, fiction, and drama to reveal how these texts respond to and critique public policy, and how literature functions as “medicine” to help cure the colonial contagion.
Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
Robbie Ethridge - 2009
The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a “shatter zone.” In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial South by examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists. The forces that destabilized the region included especially the frenzied commercial traffic in Indian slaves conducted by both Europeans and Indians, which decimated several southern Native communities; the inherently fluid political and social organization of precontact Mississippian chiefdoms; and the widespread epidemics that spread across the South. Using examples from a range of Indian communities—Muskogee, Catawba, Iroquois, Alabama, Coushatta, Shawnee, Choctaw, Westo, and Natchez—the contributors assess the shatter zone region as a whole, and the varied ways in which Native peoples wrestled with an increasingly unstable world and worked to reestablish order.
The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement
Nicholas De GenovaVictor Talavera - 2009
Anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, and sociologists consider not only the physical expulsion of noncitizens but also the social discipline and labor subordination resulting from deportability, the threat of forced removal. They explore practices and experiences of deportation in regional and national settings from the U.S.-Mexico border to Israel, and from Somalia to Switzerland. They also address broader questions, including the ontological significance of freedom of movement; the historical antecedents of deportation, such as banishment and exile; and the development, entrenchment, and consequences of organizing sovereign power and framing individual rights by territory. Whether investigating the power that individual and corporate sponsors have over the fate of foreign laborers in Bahrain, the implications of Germany’s temporary suspension of deportation orders for pregnant and ill migrants, or the significance of the detention camp, the contributors reveal how deportation reflects and reproduces notions about public health, racial purity, and class privilege. They also provide insight into how deportation and deportability are experienced by individuals, including Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims in the United States. One contributor looks at asylum claims in light of an unusual anti-deportation campaign mounted by Algerian refugees in Montreal; others analyze the European Union as an entity specifically dedicated to governing mobility inside and across its official borders. The Deportation Regime addresses urgent issues related to human rights, international migration, and the extensive security measures implemented by nation-states since September 11, 2001.Contributors: Rutvica Andrijasevic, Aashti Bhartia, Heide Castañeda , Galina Cornelisse , Susan Bibler Coutin, Nicholas De Genova, Andrew M. Gardner, Josiah Heyman, Serhat Karakayali, Sunaina Marr Maira, Guillermina Gina Nuñez, Peter Nyers, Nathalie Peutz, Enrica Rigo, Victor Talavera, William Walters, Hans-Rudolf Wicker, Sarah S. Willen
Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S.
Adele E. ClarkeNatalie Boero - 2009
political economy by the end of the Second World War, the first “social transformation of American medicine.” Then, in an ongoing process called medicalization, the jurisdiction of medicine began expanding, redefining certain areas once deemed moral, social, or legal problems (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity) as medical problems. The editors of this important collection argue that since the mid-1980s, dramatic, and especially technoscientific, changes in the constitution, organization, and practices of contemporary biomedicine have coalesced into biomedicalization, the second major transformation of American medicine. This volume offers in-depth analyses and case studies along with the groundbreaking essay in which the editors first elaborated their theory of biomedicalization.Contributors. Natalie Boero, Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Kelly Joyce, Jonathan Kahn, Laura Mamo, Jackie Orr, Elianne Riska, Janet K. Shim, Sara Shostak
What Color Is the Sacred?
Michael Taussig - 2009
Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path.
Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum, this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich.
Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.
C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature and the Primitive
Vine Deloria Jr. - 2009
G. Jung visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, where he spent several hours with Ochwiay Biano, Mountain Lake, an elder at the Pueblo. This encounter impacted Jung psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually, and had a sustained influence on his theories and understanding of the psyche. Dakota Sioux intellectual and political leader, Vine Deloria Jr., began a close study of the writings of C. G. Jung over two decades ago, but had long been struck by certain affinities and disjunctures between Jungian and Sioux Indian thought. He also noticed that many Jungians were often drawn to Native American traditions. This book, the result of Deloria’s investigation of these affinities, is written as a measured comparison between the psychology of C. G. Jung and the philosophical and cultural traditions of the Sioux people. Deloria constructs a fascinating dialogue between the two systems that touches on cosmology, the family, relations with animals, visions, voices, and individuation.
Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humankind
Craig Dilworth - 2009
Why is this so? This book reveals that our ecologically disruptive behavior is in fact rooted in our very nature as a species. Drawing on evolution theory, biology, anthropology, archaeology, economics, environmental science and history, this book explains the ecological predicament of humankind by placing it in the context of the first scientific theory of our species' development, taking over where Darwin left off. The theory presented is applied in detail to the whole of our seven-million-year history. Due to its comprehensiveness, and in part thanks to its extensive glossary and index, this book can function as a compact encyclopedia covering the whole development of Homo sapiens. It would also suit a variety of courses in the life and social sciences. Most importantly, Too Smart makes evident the very core of the paradigm to which our species must shift if it is to survive. Anyone concerned about the future of humankind should read this ground-breaking work. This book: - Provides the first and only theory of humankind's development - Explains that economic and political (military) power have their respective biological bases in individual vs. group territoriality - Provides the first classification of human instincts: into the survival, sexual and social instincts - Provides the most inclusive characterization of different kinds of population check yet presented - Explains the importance of the anthropological, archaeological and economic findings of the past 50 years to understanding humankind's development - Clarifies the preconditions for human life on earth - Predicts what will happen to us in the near future
The Phylogenetic Handbook: A Practical Approach to Phylogenetic Analysis and Hypothesis Testing
Philippe Lemey - 2009
This second edition includes six new chapters, covering topics such as Bayesian inference, tree topology testing and the impact of recombination on phylogenies, as well as a detailed section on molecular adaptation. The book has a stronger focus on hypothesis testing than the previous edition, with more extensive discussions on recombination analysis, detecting molecular adaptation and genealogy-based population genetics. Many chapters include elaborate practical sections, which have been updated to introduce the reader to the most recent versions of sequence analysis and phylogeny software, including BLAST, FastA, Clustal, T-coffee, Muscle, DAMBE, Tree-puzzle, Phylip, MEGA, PAUP*, IQPNNI, CONSEL, ModelTest, Prottest, PAML, HYPHY, MrBayes, BEAST, LAMARC, SplitsTree, and RDP. Many analysis tools are described by their original authors, resulting in clear explanations that constitute an ideal teaching guide for advanced-level undergraduate and graduate students.
Fashioning Models: Image, Text and Industry
Joanne Entwistle - 2009
How did models emerge as such powerful icons in modern consumer culture?This volume brings together cutting-edge articles on fashion models, examining modelling through race, class and gender, as well as its structure as an aesthetic marketplace within the global fashion economy. Essays include treatments of the history of fashion modelling, exploring how concerns about racial purity and the idealization of light skinned black women shaped the practice of modelling in its early years. Other essays examine how models have come to define femininity through consumer culture. While modelling's global nature is addressed throughout, chapters deal specifically with model markets in Australia and Tokyo, where nationalist concerns colour what is considered a pretty face. It also considers how models glamorize consumption through everyday activities, and neoliberal labour forms via reality TV. With commentaries from industry professionals who experienced the cultural juggernaut of the supermodels, the final essay situates their impact within the rise of brand culture and the globalization of fashion markets since 1990. Accessible and highly engaging, Fashioning Models is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and related disciplines.
Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village
Juliet Du Boulay - 2009
This sequel, the fruit of a lifetime's reflection, adds new dimensions to this portrait, exploring the all-encompassing religious awareness of the same village community, and its rootedness in both Orthodox Christian and pre- or non-Christian ideas and practices. The story is told through a steady development of rich ethnographic detail in which the people come to life in all their vitality, contradictoriness, humour, realism and courage. From the particularities of life in the village a picture is built up in which the Byzantine legacy intertwines with fragments of antiquity, both Greek and Jewish, and with the universal themes, both tragic and hopeful, which confront man as he struggles to make sense of life. In this way a compelling pattern of symbols and images is revealed which underpin every action and event in the human and natural spheres, and is described here lucidly, convincingly and with great affection. 'Juliet du Boulay's first book was a brilliant and elegant study of a community whose essential values were both material and sacred. Small subsistence holdings underlay the moral independence of families; and this reflected each day a kind of spiritual drama which she describes in this sequel, and relates to the symbolism of the Orthodox liturgy.' John Campbell, Emeritus Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford. 'A lovely work of ethnographic art . . . the book is virtually unsurpassed in its careful but not laborious coherence and overall development of exposition that convincingly extends the network of significant connections and at the same time presses the analysis deeper towards the ultimate grounds of Greek village imagination.' Rodney Needham, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, All Souls College, Oxford.
The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone - 2009
The corporeal turn is envisioned as an ever-expanding, continuous, and open-ended spiral of inquiry in which deeper and deeper understandings are forged, understandings that in each instance themselves call out for deeper and deeper inquiries. The first thirteen essays have already been published as distinct articles. The two new essays constituting the final two chapters are testimony to this open-ended spiral of inquiry.
Imago Dei Psychotherapy: A Catholic Conceptualization
G.C. Dilsaver - 2009
Food and Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World
Melissa Caldwell - 2009
By the late 1980s, the arrival of McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain epitomized the changes that swept across the socialist world. Not quite two decades later, the effects of these arrivals were evident in the spread of foreign food corporations and their integration into local communities. This book explores the role played by food—as commodity, symbol, and sustenance—in the transformation of life in Russia and eastern Europe since the end of socialism. Changes in food production systems, consumption patterns, food safety, and ideas about health, well-being, nationalism, and history provide useful perspectives on the meaning of the postsocialist transition for those who lived through it.
The Making Of Humanity (1919)
Robert Briffault - 2009
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders
Helen Malson - 2009
Over the past decade there have been significant shifts both in feminist approaches to the field of eating disorders and in the ways in which gender, bodies, body weight, body management and food are understood, represented and regulated within the dominant cultural milieus of the early twenty-first century.Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders addresses these developments, exploring how eating disordered subjectivities, experiences and body management practices are theorised and researched within postmodern and post-structuralist feminist frameworks.Bringing together an international range of cutting-edge, contemporary feminist research and theory on eating disorders, this book explores how anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and obesity cannot be adequately understood in terms of individual mental illness and deviation from the norm but are instead continuous with the dominant cultural ideas and values of contemporary cultures.This book will be essential reading for academic, graduate and post-graduate researchers with an interest in eating disorders and critical feminist scholarship, across a range of disciplines including psychology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies as well as clinicians interested in exploring innovative theory and practice in this field.
Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life
Anna Grimshaw - 2009
Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz provide the first critical history and in-depth appraisal of this movement, examining key works, filmmakers, and theorists, from Andre Bazin and the Italian neorealists, to American documentary films of the 1960s, to extended discussions of the ethnographic films of Herb Di Gioia, David Hancock, and David MacDougall. They make a new case for the importance of observational work in an emerging experimental anthropology, arguing that this medium exemplifies a non-textual anthropology that is both analytically rigorous and epistemologically challenging.
The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real
Michael D. Jackson - 2009
Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others. Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens’s late poem, “Of Mere Being,” Jackson explores a range of experiences where “the palm at the end of the mind” stands “beyond thought,” on “the edge of space,” “a foreign song.” Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafés, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.
The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
Frans de Waal - 2009
By studying social behaviors in animals, such as bonding, the herd instinct, the forming of trusting alliances, expressions of consolation, and conflict resolution, Frans de Waal demonstrates that animals–and humans–are "preprogrammed to reach out." He has found that chimpanzees care for mates that are wounded by leopards, elephants offer "reassuring rumbles" to youngsters in distress, and dolphins support sick companions near the water's surface to prevent them from drowning. From day one humans have innate sensitivities to faces, bodies, and voices; we've been designed to feel for one another.De Waal's theory runs counter to the assumption that humans are inherently selfish, which can be seen in the fields of politics, law, and finance, and which seems to be evidenced by the current greed-driven stock market collapse. But he cites the public's outrage at the U.S. government's lack of empathy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a significant shift in perspective–one that helped Barack Obama become elected and ushered in what may well become an Age of Empathy. Through a better understanding of empathy's survival value in evolution, de Waal suggests, we can work together toward a more just society based on a more generous and accurate view of human nature.Written in layman's prose with a wealth of anecdotes, wry humor, and incisive intelligence, The Age of Empathy is essential reading for our embattled times.
Those Who Work, Those Who Don't: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America
Jennifer Sherman - 2009
In Those Who Work, Those Who Don't, Jennifer Sherman offers a much-needed sympathetic understanding of poor rural Americans, persuasively arguing that the growing cultural significance of moral values is a reasonable and inevitable response to economic collapse and political powerlessness.Those Who Work, Those Who Don't is based on the intimate interviews and in-depth research Sherman conducted while spending a year living in "Golden Valley," a remote logging town in Northern California. Economically devastated by the 1990 ruling that listed the northern spotted owl as a threatened species, Golden Valley proved to be a rich case study for Sherman. She looks at how the members of the community coped with downward mobility caused by the loss of timber industry jobs and examines a wide range of reactions. She shows how substance abuse, domestic violence, and gender roles fluctuated under the town's economic strain.Compellingly written, shot through with honesty and empathy, Those Who Work, Those Who Don't is a rare firsthand account that studies the rural poor. As incomes erode and the American dream becomes more and more inaccessible, Sherman reveals that moral values and practices become a way for the poor to gain status and maintain a sense of dignity in the face of economic ruin.
Birth Models That Work
Robbie E. Davis-Floyd - 2009
The contributors describe examples of maternity services from both developing countries and wealthy industrialized societies that apply the latest scientific evidence to support and facilitate normal physiological birth; deal appropriately with complications; and generate excellent birth outcomes—including psychological satisfaction for the mother. The book concludes with a description of the ideology that underlies all these working models—known internationally as the midwifery model of care.
Revisiting Usog, Pasma, Kulam
Michael L. Tan - 2009
The author explains the social and cultural contexts of usig, pasma, kulam, and other folk illnesses in the Philippines.
Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India
Raka Ray - 2009
In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere.This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.
The Red Church or the Art of Pennsylvania German Braucherei
C.R. Bilardi - 2009
Pow Wow, or Braucherei, as it is known by its practitioners, is a system of folk magic that has its roots in Christian and Pre-Christian Germany, but its character is wholy American - the quintissential American magical system. Drawing on quotes from the Bible, qabalistic principles and old gromoires, it is empowered by the Holy Trinity, and most practitioners consider themselves to be Christian, much like the Cunning Folk of England. The final chapter, about Doctor Santee, references material and uses a photograph that is copyright GLHoke, and used with permission. "The Red Church: The Art of Pennsylvania German Braucherei is the finest book on German magic to be seen in decades. Comprehensive in its historical, philosophical and cultural roots, The Red Church is a book that will be appreciated by academics and modern practitioners of not just folk and ceremonial magic alike, but also energetic and faith healing, symbolism, and cultural psychology. Extensively researched and documented, no one interested in the survival of Medieval and Renaissance magic into the modern era should be without a copy of it within easy reach." - Mark Stavish, Director of Studies, Institute for Hermetic Studies, author of, The Path of Alchemy, Freemasonry - Rituals, Symbols and History of the Secret Society, and Between the Gates: Lucid Dreaming, Astral Projection and the Body of Light.
Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976
Peter Mackridge - 2009
It begins in the late eighteenth-century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled on the one hand by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and on the other by the different groups' contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The vernacularists -- later known as demoticists -- sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. Peter Mackridge explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, he traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. He describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. This is a timely book. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last 25 years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and to what it once aspired to be.
Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales
Michelle Li - 2009
Grotesque representations in general typically direct our attention to unfinished and unrefined things; they are marked by an earthy sense of the body and an interest in the physical. Because they have many meanings, they can both sustain and undermine authority. This book aims to make sense of grotesque representations in setsuwa—animated detached body parts, unusual sexual encounters, demons and shape-shifting or otherwise wondrous animals—and, in a broader sense, to show what this type of critical focus can reveal about the mentality of Japanese people in the ancient, classical, and early medieval periods. It is the first study to place Japanese tales of this nature, which have received little critical attention in English, within a sophisticated theoretical framework. Li masterfully and rigorously focuses on these fascinating tales in the context of the historical periods in which they were created and compiled.
The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance
Nasser Abufarha - 2009
In so doing, he sheds much-needed light on how Palestinians have experienced and perceived the broader conflict. During the Intifada, many of the martyrdom operations against Israeli targets were initiated in the West Bank town of Jenin and surrounding villages. Abufarha was born and raised in Jenin. His personal connections to the area enabled him to conduct ethnographic research there during the Intifada, while he was a student at a U.S. university. Abufarha draws on the life histories of martyrs, interviews he conducted with their families and members of the groups that sponsored their operations, and examinations of Palestinian literature, art, performance, news stories, and political commentaries. He also assesses data—about the bombers, targets, and fatalities caused—from more than two hundred martyrdom operations carried out by Palestinian groups between 2001 and 2004. Some involved the use of explosive belts or the detonation of cars; others entailed armed attacks against Israeli targets (military and civilian) undertaken with the intent of fighting until death. In addition, he scrutinized suicide attacks executed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad between 1994 and 2000. In his analysis of Palestinian political violence, Abufarha takes into account Palestinians’ understanding of the history of the conflict with Israel, the effects of containment on Palestinians’ everyday lives, the disillusionment created by the Oslo peace process, and reactions to specific forms of Israeli state violence. The Making of a Human Bomb illuminates the Palestinians’ perspective on the conflict with Israel and provides a model for ethnographers seeking to make sense of political violence.
52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication
Donna M. Stringer - 2009
Every culture has a "communication style norm" and when that style mixes with another, stereotypes and misperceptions arise. 52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication explores cross-cultural communication issues with an eye toward increasing understanding and effectiveness. 52 Activities for Improving Cross-Cultural Communication is a practical trainer's manual that includes applications from many sectors, such as business, diversity, cross-cultural fields, and from many trainers in the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. Exercises are organized according to audience, time required to perform and the risk level for participants, a unique feature created by the authors, and are easily adaptable to the user's particular need and situation. Many of the exercises are written with instructions that address requirements for a specific audience (e.g., gender or generation). There is something for everyone: those who like hands-on, practical activities; those who prefer experiential exercises; and those who learn best through reflection.
Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge
Laurelyn Whitt - 2009
Numerous historians of science have documented the vital role of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science as a part of statecraft, a means of extending empire. This book follows imperialism into the present, demonstrating how pursuit of knowledge of the natural world impacts, and is impacted by, indigenous peoples rather than nation-states. In extractive biocolonialism, the valued genetic resources, and associated agricultural and medicinal knowledge, of indigenous peoples are sought, legally converted into private intellectual property, transformed into commodities, and then placed for sale in genetic marketplaces. Science, Colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples critically examines these developments, demonstrating how contemporary relations between indigenous and Western knowledge systems continue to be shaped by the dynamics of power, the politics of property, and the apologetics of law.
The A to Z of the Berbers (Imazighen)
Hsain Ilahiane - 2009
Ranging anywhere between 15-50 million, depending on how they are classified, the Berbers have influenced the culture and religion of Roman North Africa and played key roles in the spread of Islam and its culture in North Africa, Spain, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, these dynamics have over time converted to redefine the field of Berber identity and its socio-political representations and symbols, making it an even more important issue in the new century. Through the use of maps, a list of acronyms, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy and politics-past and present-The A to Z of the Berbers (Imazighen) provides necessary information on this under-studied group of people.
The Alaska Native Reader: History, Culture, Politics
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams - 2009
Yet the long histories and diverse cultures of Alaska’s first peoples are often ignored, while the stories of Russian fur hunters and American gold miners, of salmon canneries and oil pipelines, are praised. Filled with essays, poems, songs, stories, maps, and visual art, this volume foregrounds the perspectives of Alaska Native people, from a Tlingit photographer to Athabascan and Yup’ik linguists, and from an Alutiiq mask carver to a prominent Native politician and member of Alaska’s House of Representatives. The contributors, most of whom are Alaska Natives, include scholars, political leaders, activists, and artists. The majority of the pieces in The Alaska Native Reader were written especially for the volume, while several were translated from Native languages.The Alaska Native Reader describes indigenous worldviews, languages, arts, and other cultural traditions as well as contemporary efforts to preserve them. Several pieces examine Alaska Natives’ experiences of and resistance to Russian and American colonialism; some of these address land claims, self-determination, and sovereignty. Some essays discuss contemporary Alaska Native literature, indigenous philosophical and spiritual tenets, and the ways that Native peoples are represented in the media. Others take up such diverse topics as the use of digital technologies to document Native cultures, planning systems that have enabled indigenous communities to survive in the Arctic for thousands of years, and a project to accurately represent Dena’ina heritage in and around Anchorage. Fourteen of the volume’s many illustrations appear in color, including work by the contemporary artists Subhankar Banerjee, Perry Eaton, Erica Lord, and Larry McNeil.
Aphrodite's Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti
Anne Salmond - 2009
As she discerns the impact and meaning of the European effect on the islands, she demonstrates how, during the early contact period, the mythologies of Europe and Tahiti intersected and became entwined. Drawing on Tahitian oral histories, European manuscripts and artworks, collections of Tahitian artifacts, and illustrated with contemporary sketches, paintings, and engravings from the voyages, Aphrodite's Island provides a vivid account of the Europeans' Tahitian adventures. At the same time, the book's compelling insights into Tahitian life significantly change the way we view the history of this small island during a period when it became a crossroads for Europe.
The Body in Contemporary Art
Sally O'Reilly - 2009
From painting and sculpture to installation, video art, and performance, it examines the roles played by the body in art, from being the subject of portraiture to becoming an active presence in participatory events.Organized thematically, the book focuses on subjects such as nature and technology, the grotesque, identity politics, and the place of the individual in society. Featuring work by artists such as Matthew Barney, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Oleg Kulik, and Ernesto Neto, it shows how the body continues to be pivotal to the understanding and expression of our place in the universe.
Theory Construction and Model-Building Skills: A Practical Guide for Social Scientists
James Jaccard - 2009
It is illustrated with numerous practical examples drawn from multiple social science disciplines and research settings. The authors offer clear guidance for defining constructs, thinking through relationships and processes that link constructs, and deriving new theoretical models (or building on existing ones) based on those relationships. Step by step, they show readers how to use causal analysis, mathematical modeling, simulations, and grounded and emergent approaches to theory construction. A chapter on writing about theories contains invaluable advice on crafting effective papers and grant applications.
Useful pedagogical features in every chapter include:
*Application exercises and concept exercises.
*Lists of key terms and engaging topical boxes.
*Annotated suggestions for further reading.
The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies
Hugh B. Urban - 2009
For European colonisers, Orientalist scholars and Christian missionaries of the Victorian era, Tantra was generally seen as the most degenerate and depraved example of the worst tendencies of the so-called "Indian mind": a pathological mixture of sensuality and religion that prompted the decline of modern Hinduism. Yet for most contemporary New Age and popular writers, Tantra is celebrated as a much-needed affirmation of physical pleasure and sex: indeed as a "cult of ecstasy" to counter the perceived hypocritical prudery of many Westerners. In recent years, Tantra has become the focus of a still larger cultural and political debate. In the eyes of many Hindus, much of the western literature on Tantra represents a form of neo-colonialism, which continues to portray India as an exotic, erotic, hyper-sexualized Orient. Which, then, is the "real" Tantra? Focusing on one of the oldest and most important Tantric traditions, based in Assam, northeast India, Hugh B. Urban shows that Tantra is less about optimal sexual pleasure than about harnessing the divine power of the goddess that flows alike through the cosmos, the human body and political society. In a fresh and vital contribution to the field, the author suggests that the "real" meaning of Tantra lies in helping us rethink not just the history of Indian religions, but also our own modern obsessions with power, sex and the invidious legacies of cultural imperialism.
Cherokee Basketry: From the Hands of Our Elders
M. Anna Fariello - 2009
Cherokee Basketry describes the craft's forms, functions and methods and records the tradition's celebrated makers.In the mountains of Western North Carolina, stunning baskets are still made from rivercane, white oak and honeysuckle and dyed with roots and bark. This complex art, passed down from mothers to daughters, is a thread that bonds modern Native Americans to ancestors and traditional ways of life. Anna Fariello, associate professor at Western Carolina University, reveals that baskets hold much more than food and clothing. Woven with the stories of those who produce and use them, these masterpieces remain a powerful testament to creativity and imagination.
Finding Our Sea-Legs: Ethics, Experience and the Ocean of Stories
Will Buckingham - 2009
Since the beginning, the philosophers have always dreamed of finally reaching solid ground, but their proofs and demonstrations and laws have failed to bring us into harbour. Incapable of defining virtue, we manage to tell tales about it; not quite sure what justice is, we still spin yarns about the just and the unjust. Casting the reader adrift onto the sea of stories, attentive to the changes in the winds and the tides, through both philosophy and storytelling, this book explores ethics not as a means of finding our way back home to a safe harbour, but instead as a way of acclimatising ourselves to life on the seas of uncertainty.
We Are One: A Celebration Of Tribal Peoples, In Association With Survival International
Joanna Eede - 2009
It is both a celebration of the fragile beauty of the world's remaining tribes, and a powerful call to arms.
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Popular Music History) (Studies In Popular Music)
Graham St. John - 2009
The book documents an emerging network of techno-tribes, exploring their pleasure principles and cultural politics. Attending to sound system culture, electro-humanitarianism, secret sonic societies, teknivals and other gatherings, intentional parties, revitalisation movements and counter-colonial interventions, Technomad investigates how the dance party has been harnessed for transgressive and progressive ends, for manifold freedoms. Seeking freedom from moral prohibitions and standards, pleasure in rebellion, refuge from sexual and gender prejudice, exile from oppression, rupturing aesthetic boundaries, re-enchanting the world, reclaiming space, fighting for "the right to party," and responding to a host of critical concerns, electronic dance music cultures are multivalent sites of resistance. Drawing on extensive ethnographic, netogaphic and documentary research, Technomad details the post-rave trajectory through various local sites and global scenes, with each chapter attending to unique developments in the techno counterculture: e.g. Spiral Tribe, teknivals, psytrance, Burning Man, Reclaim the Streets, Earthdream. The book offers an original nuanced theory of resistance to assist understanding of these developments. This cultural history of hitherto uncharted territory will be of interest to students of cultural, performance, music, media, and new social movement studies, along with enthusiasts of dance culture and popular politics.REVIEWS"Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures is the most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and 'vibe-tribes' of the 1990s and beyond.... Like Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe's The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, St John's book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I've read in some time."Professor Will Straw, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University"A critical utopianism is articulated and celebrated with a textual energy too rare in today's cultural studies. Graham St John is wide-eyed in order to look more closely. I recommend his shining and grubby doofscape to all interested in the radical possibilities and limitations of contemporary culture."Professor George McKay, University of Salford"Technomad offers important insights into the meeting points between countercultural discourses and post-rave techno cultures. Optimistic regarding the progressive potential of outdoor techno-trance gatherings, this well-documented study traces the complex genealogy of a global nomadic 'technoccult', with emphasis on Europe, North-America and Australia. Not to be missed by anyone interested in the study of rave cultures, countercultures and festivals."Dr Hillegonda Rietveld, Reader in Cultural Studies, London South Bank University
Bioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas
Kelly J. Knudson - 2009
The integration of biological and mortuary data results in new approaches to the construction of social identity."--Dale L. Hutchinson, University of North CarolinaBioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas represents an important shift in the interpretation of skeletal remains in the Americas. Until recently, bioarchaeology has focused on interpreting and analyzing populations. The contributors here look to examine how individuals fit into those larger populations.The overall aim is to demonstrate how bioarchaeologists can uniquely contribute to our understanding of the formation, representation, and repercussions of identity. The contributors combine historical and archaeological data with population genetic analyses, biogeochemical analyses of human tooth enamel and bones, mortuary patterns, and body modifications. With case studies drawn from North, Central, and South American mortuary remains from AD 500 to the Colonial period, they examine a wide range of factors that make up identity, including ethnicity, age, gender, and social, political, and religious constructions.By adding a valuable biological element to the study of culture--a topic traditionally associated with social theorists, ethnographers, and historical archaeologies--this volume highlights the importance of skeletal evidence in helping us better understand our past.
Emu Dreaming
Ray Norris - 2009
Many share common traditions such as the “emu in the sky” constellation of dark clouds, and stories about the Sun, Moon, Orion, and the Pleiades. Several use the rising and setting of particular stars to indicate the time to harvest a food source, and some link the Sun and Moon to tides, and even explain eclipses as a conjunction of the Sun and Moon.Thse traditions reveal a depth and complexity of Aboriginal cultures which are not widely appreciated by outsiders. This book explores the wonderful mystical Aboriginal astronomical stories and traditions, and the way in which these are used for practical applications such as navigation and harvesting. It also describes the journey of exploration which is opening Western eyes to this treasury of ancient Aboriginal knowledge.
Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos
Lynn M. Morgan - 2009
Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China-most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of “ourselves unborn,” and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.
The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition
Li Zehou - 2009
1930) has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, Li published works on Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. The present volume, a translation of his Huaxia meixue (1989), is considered among Li's most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China's foremost intellectuals, The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents Li's synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern period, incorporating pre-Confucian and Confucian ideas, Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and the influence of Western philosophy during the late-imperial period. As one of China's major contemporary philosophers and preeminent authority on Kant, Li is uniquely positioned to observe this trajectory and make it intelligible to today's readers. The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the "art of living." Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to Li this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi's artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. In this enduring and stimulating work, Li demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define "humanity."
Quest for Harmony: The Moso Traditions of Sexual Union and Family Life.
Chuan-kang Shih - 2009
Among the Moso, a majority of the adult population practice a visiting system called tisese instead of marriage as the normal sexual and reproductive institution. Until recently, tisese was noncontractual, nonobligatory, and nonexclusive. Partners lived and worked in separate households. The only prerequisite for a tisese relationship was a mutual agreement between the man and the woman to allow sexual access to each other. In a comprehensive account, Quest for Harmony explores this unique practice specifically, and offers thorough documentation, fine-grained analysis, and an engaging discussion of the people, history, and structure of Moso society. Drawing on the author's extensive fieldwork, conducted from 1987 to 2006, this is the first ethnography of the Moso written in English.
Ugly Stories of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform
Enrique Mayer - 2009
That process began in 1969, when the left-leaning military government implemented a drastic program of land expropriation. Seized lands were turned into worker-managed cooperatives. After those cooperatives began to falter and the country returned to civilian rule in the 1980s, members distributed the land among themselves. In 1995–96, as the agrarian reform process was winding down and neoliberal policies were undoing leftist reforms, the Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer traveled throughout the country, interviewing people who had lived through the most tumultuous years of agrarian reform, recording their memories and their stories. While agrarian reform caused enormous upheaval, controversy, and disappointment, it did succeed in breaking up the unjust and oppressive hacienda system. Mayer contends that the demise of that system is as important as the liberation of slaves in the Americas.Mayer interviewed ex-landlords, land expropriators, politicians, government bureaucrats, intellectuals, peasant leaders, activists, ranchers, members of farming families, and others. Weaving their impassioned recollections with his own commentary, he offers a series of dramatic narratives, each one centered around a specific instance of land expropriation, collective enterprise, and disillusion. Although the reform began with high hopes, it was quickly complicated by difficulties including corruption, rural and urban unrest, fights over land, and delays in modernization. As he provides insight into how important historical events are remembered, Mayer re-evaluates Peru’s military government (1969–79), its audacious agrarian reform program, and what that reform meant to Peruvians from all walks of life.
Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture
Carrie Noland - 2009
Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia--feeling the body move--encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory's inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.
The Bakala of North America: The Living Suns of Vitality
Asar Imhotep - 2009
With the loss of ancestral family names, cultures and social systems, the formerly enslaved Africans have been like a ship adrift in a hostile sea; moving in whatever direction the tide of identity takes them.Black people in America have had to ask some very fundamental questions about their identity, such as: What is the historic nature of names? How did we acquire our names? What is the importance of a proper name? What do our current names mean? Do our current names accurately reflect our collective history, gifts, vision and purpose?The BAKALA of North America: The Living Suns of Vitality asserts that the historical names given to the formerly enslaved Africans in the United States (Black, Colored, Negro, African, African-American) do not adequately reflect the spirit of the people. Asar Imhotep offers for consideration a name that is rich in meaning and wide in its application which accurately reflects the history, gifts, vision and purpose of African-American people.The BAKALA of North America takes us on a philosophical and linguistic journey that begins on the banks of the river Nile, to the forests of the Kongo; from the slave ports in Ghana, to the river of the mighty Mississippi. Asar Imhotep’s research, scholarship, synthesis and creative application of various disciplines convincingly supports the notion that the name BAKALA (the charcoal, enlightened, vitalistic, people of the sun) best reflects the personality of the African-American. The more fascinating aspect of this work is the notion that we've always been BAKALA, we just never realized it.
Arctic Twilight: Leonard Budgell and Canada's Changing North
Leonard Budgell - 2009
He put his observations into words as few others ever could.As a "Servant of the Bay" Budgell ran Hudson's Bay Company trading posts for decades in isolated communities up the Labrador coast and across the Arctic. Living among aboriginal Canadians he witnessed episodes and heard stories that would never again be repeated - except he wrote them down. His pen memorably portrays everything from dancing northern lights and hunting practices of birds to astonishing human adventures and predicaments.Northern ways intact for centuries changed with rifles and motorboats, radios and electric generators, new foods and different medicines. Most often, it was Budgell who bridged the aboriginal and southern cultures, building and operating remote radio stations at places like Hebron, taking an RCMP officer into a settlement where a choice had to be made between two different codes of law and behaviour in a murder case. In Arctic Twilight, Budgell chronicles, in an outpouring of letters to a much younger female friend, a traditional way of life that was changing forever.Claudia Coutu Radmore, a teacher, writer, and artist, first met Len Budgell in Winnipeg when she was a fine arts student and he had retired from the Company. Their friendship grew stronger when he began writing remarkable letters after she returned to Queen's University. Now edited and organized by her, this unique memoir is available to the public for the first time.
Possession: Jung's Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche
Craig E. Stephenson - 2009
Analogizing the concept - lining it up comparatively beside the history of religion, anthropology, psychiatry, and even drama and film criticism - offers not a naive syncretism, but enlightening possibilities along the borders of these diverse disciplines.An original, wide-ranging exploration of phenomena both ancient and modern, this book offers a conceptual bridge between psychology and anthropology, it challenges psychiatry to culturally contextualize its diagnostic manual, and it posits a much more fluid, pluralistic and embodied notion of selfhood.
Cultural Critique and the Global Corporation
Purnima Bose - 2009
Six case studies draw on CEO memoirs, annual reports, management manuals, advertising campaigns, and other sources to analyze the self-representations and rhetorical maneuvers that corporations use to obscure the full extent of their power. Images of corporate character and responsibility are intertwined with the changes in local economy, politics, and culture wrought by globalization and neoliberalism. The contributors to this volume describe the effects of specific corporate practices on individuals and communities and how activists and academics are responding to labor and environmental abuses.
Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Diane Singerman - 2009
Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the "march to the modern and the global" as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (AUC Press, 2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
The Langobards Before the Frankish Conquest: An Ethnographic Perspective
Giorgio Ausenda - 2009
They were nonetheless one of the longest-lasting, for their state survived Charlemagne's conquest in 774, and was the core of the medieval kingdom of Italy. The incompleteness of their conquest of Italy was also one of the root causes of Italian division for over 1300 years after their arrival. But they present a challenge to the historian, for most of the evidence for them dates to the last half-century of their independence, up to 774, a period in which Langobard Italy was a coherent and apparently tightly-governed state by early medieval standards. How they reached this from the incoherent and disorganised situation visible in late sixth-century Italy is still a matter of debate. The historians and archaeologists who contribute to this volume discuss Langobard archaeology and material culture both before and after their invasion, Langobard language, political organisation, the church, social structures, family structures, and urban economy. It is thus an important and up to date starting point for future research on early medieval Italy. Contributors: G. AUSENDA, S. BARNISH, S. BRATHER, T.S. BROWN, N. CHRISTIE, M. COSTAMBEYS, P. DELOGU, D. GREEN, W. HAUBRICHS, J. HENNING, B. WARD-PERKINS, C. WICKHAM.
River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil
Alexander Dent - 2009
Beginning in the mid-1980s, commercial musical duos practicing música sertaneja reached beyond their home in Brazil’s central-southern region to become national bestsellers. Rodeo events revolving around country music came to rival soccer matches in attendance. A revival of folkloric rural music called música caipira, heralded as música sertaneja’s ancestor, also took shape. And all the while, large numbers of Brazilians in the central-south were moving to cities, using music to support the claim that their Brazil was first and foremost a rural nation.Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.