Best of
Anthropology

2011

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind


Yuval Noah Harari - 2011
    Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years


David Graeber - 2011
    The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it.Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy.

The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses


Paul Koudounaris - 2011
    For centuries, religious establishments constructed decorated ossuaries and charnel houses that stand as masterpieces of art created from human bone. These unique structures have been pushed into the footnotes of history; they were part of a dialogue with death that is now silent.The sites in this specially photographed and brilliantly original study range from the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Palermo, where the living would visit mummified or skeletal remains and lovingly dress them; to the Paris catacombs; to fantastic bone-encrusted creations in Austria, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and elsewhere.Paul Koudounaris photographed more than seventy sites for this book. He analyzes the role of these remarkable memorials within the cultures that created them, as well as the mythology and folklore that developed around them, and skillfully traces a remarkable human endeavor.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created


Charles C. Mann - 2011
    More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet. Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination

Quicksand / Blood Game / Eight Days to Live / Chasing the Night (An Eve Duncan Collection)


Iris Johansen - 2011
    Since then, Eve’s life has become an obsession to find her daughter’s remains. Only one man—a brilliant, ruthless killer—knows the truth about what happened to Bonnie. But taunting Eve might be his first and last mistake… Blood Game When a Georgia senator’s daughter is found dead and drained of blood, Eve enters the world of a twisted psychopath—a man whose name appears on Eve’s shortlist of killers connected to her own missing daughter, Bonnie. Eight Days to Live It all begins with a painting called Guilt. Eve Duncan’s daughter, Jane, has no idea why she painted the portrait of the chilling face that now hangs in a Paris gallery. But those who belong to a powerful cult—one that dates back to the time of Christ—know both the face and the significance behind it… Chasing the Night A CIA agent’s two-year-old child was stolen in the night as a brutal act of vengeance. Nine years later, Catherine Ling’s instincts—maternal and professional—tell her that her son is still alive. But she needs the help of someone as driven and obsessed as she is to find him. That person is Eve Duncan.

Evolution The Human Story


Alice Roberts - 2011
    A unique visual guide to human evolution that brings you face to face with our ancient ancestors.Illustrated throughout with amazingly realistic model reconstructions by world-renowned Dutch paleoartists Kennis and Kennis.Draws on cutting-edge research and the latest theories to explain the science, explore our relationship to other primates, and chart our journey out of Africa to colonize and settle the world.

Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight


Timothy Pachirat - 2011
    The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate.Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view. With much to say about issues ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare, Every Twelve Seconds is an important and disturbing work.

Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt


Robert Bauval - 2011
    Uncovering compelling new evidence, Egyptologist Robert Bauval and astrophysicist Thomas Brophy present the anthropological, climatological, archaeological, geological, and genetic research supporting this hugely debated theory of the black African origin of Egyptian civilization. Building upon extensive studies from the past four decades and their own archaeoastronomical and hieroglyphic research, the authors show how the early black culture known as the Cattle People not only domesticated cattle but also had a sophisticated grasp of astronomy; created plentiful rock art at Gilf Kebir and Gebel Uwainat; had trade routes to the Mediterranean coast, central Africa, and the Sinai; held spiritual and occult ceremonies; and constructed a stone calendar circle and megaliths at the ceremonial site of Nabta Playa reminiscent of Stonehenge, yet much older. Revealing these “Star People” as the true founders of ancient Egyptian civilization, this book completely rewrites the history of world civilization, placing black Africa back in its rightful place at the center of mankind’s origins.

The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia


Bill Gammage - 2011
    Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than most people have ever realized. For more than a decade, he has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire, the life cycles of native plants, and the natural flow of water to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and this book reveals how. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires Australians now experience. With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, this book rewrites the history of the continent, with huge implications for today.

Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader


Gayle S. Rubin - 2011
    Rubin, a pioneering theorist and activist in feminist, lesbian and gay, queer, and sexuality studies since the 1970s. Rubin first rose to prominence in 1975 with the publication of “The Traffic in Women,” an essay that had a galvanizing effect on feminist thinking and theory. In another landmark piece, “Thinking Sex,” she examined how certain sexual behaviors are constructed as moral or natural, and others as unnatural. That essay became one of queer theory’s foundational texts. Along with such canonical work, Deviations features less well-known but equally insightful writing on subjects such as lesbian history, the feminist sex wars, the politics of sadomasochism, crusades against prostitution and pornography, and the historical development of sexual knowledge. In the introduction, Rubin traces her intellectual trajectory and discusses the development and reception of some of her most influential essays. Like the book it opens, the introduction highlights the major lines of inquiry pursued for nearly forty years by a singularly important theorist of sex, gender, and culture.

Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization


Khiara M. Bridges - 2011
    Khiara M. Bridges investigates how race—commonly seen as biological in the medical world—is socially constructed among women dependent on the public healthcare system for prenatal care and childbirth. Bridges argues that race carries powerful material consequences for these women even when it is not explicitly named, showing how they are marginalized by the practices and assumptions of the clinic staff. Deftly weaving ethnographic evidence into broader discussions of Medicaid and racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality, Bridges shines new light on the politics of healthcare for the poor, demonstrating how the “medicalization” of social problems reproduces racial stereotypes and governs the bodies of poor women of color.

Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France


Miriam I. Ticktin - 2011
    Miriam Ticktin focuses on France and its humanitarian immigration practices to argue that a politics based on care and protection can lead the state to view issues of immigration and asylum through a medical lens. Examining two “regimes of care”—humanitarianism and the movement to stop violence against women—Ticktin asks what it means to permit the sick and sexually violated to cross borders while the impoverished cannot? She demonstrates how in an inhospitable immigration climate, unusual pathologies can become the means to residency papers, making conditions like HIV, cancer, and select experiences of sexual violence into distinct advantages for would-be migrants. Ticktin’s analysis also indicts the inequalities forged by global capitalism that drive people to migrate, and the state practices that criminalize the majority of undocumented migrants at the expense of care for the exceptional few.

The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena, and Nass


Wade Davis - 2011
    There, three of Canada's most important salmon rivers—the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Nass—are born in close proximity. Now, against the wishes of all First Nations, the British Columbia government has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. Imperial Metals proposes an open-pit copper and gold mine, called the Red Chris mine, and Royal Dutch Shell wants to extract coal bed methane gas across a tenure of close to a million acres.In The Sacred Headwaters, a collection of photographs by Carr Clifton and members of the International League of Conservation Photographers—including Claudio Contreras, Paul Colangelo, and Wade Davis—portray the splendour of the region. These photographs are supplemented by images from other professionals who have worked here, including Sarah Leen of the National Geographic.The compelling text by Wade Davis, which describes the region's beauty, the threats to it, and the response of native groups and other inhabitants, is complemented by the voices of the Tahltan elders. The inescapable message is that no amount of methane gas can compensate for the sacrifice of a place that could be the Sacred Headwaters of all Canadians and indeed of all peoples of the world.The Sacred Headwaters, is a visual feast and a plea to save an extraordinary region in North America for future generations.Published in partnership with the David Suzuki Foundation.

The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16-century Brazil


Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - 2011
    Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries’ lessons and “revert” to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives’ incapacity to believe in anything durably.In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

The Scots: A Genetic Journey


Alistair Moffat - 2011
    He is wonderfully able to communicate the epic elements of the story – which matters because that’s precisely what man’s survival has been’ - David Robinson, The Scotsman‘I’ve been enjoyably immersed in it since it arrived on my doorstep last week...wonderfully readable. This is no dry, academic account, but it’s the most fascinating and thought-provoking treatment of interlocking aspects of our early history I’ve yet to read. I recommend it whole-heartedly’ - Colin Will, poet and publisher‘Alistair Moffat explores the history of where we all came from, with the help of new DNA science’ - BBC Radio Scotland‘In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, historian and broadcaster Alistair Moffat taps into the latest advances in DNA science to find that our origins lie not only deep in the mists of time, but right off the map... with the help of historical geneticist Jim Wilson, he finds that, post-Ice Age, Scotland's earliest settlers walked here from what is now Spain’ - Jim Gilchrist, Scotsman‘In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat and James F. Wilson explore the history that is printed in our genes, and in a remarkable new approach come to some fascinating conclusions about who we are and where we came from’ - The Orcadian‘The fusion of science and the physical history – like an abandoned croft – allows people to trace their Scots ancestry with precision’ - Sunday Herald‘The Scots: A Genetic Journey, a book and radio series based on Moffat and Wilson’s research, concludes that all Scots are immigrants by descent. Britain as a whole is a mongrel nation’ - Julian Baggini‘Skillfully written, weaving together genetics, archaeology, history, and topics of interest like red hair ‘ - James Honeychuck on AmazonHistory has always mattered to Scots, and rarely more so than now at the outset of a new century, with a new census appearing in 2011 and after more than ten years of a new parliament. An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside our bodies and we carry the ancient story of Scotland around with us. The mushrooming of genetic studies, of DNA analysis, is rewriting our history in spectacular fashion. In The Scots: A Genetic Journey, Alistair Moffat explores the history that is printed on our genes, and in a remarkable new approach, uncovers the detail of where we are from, who we are and in so doing colour vividly a DNA map of Scotland.(less)

The Rights of Indians and Tribes


Stephen Pevar - 2011
    The book, which explains this complex subject in a clear and easy-to-understand way, is particularly useful for tribal advocates, government officials, students, practitioners of Indian law, and the general public. Numerous tribal leaders highly recommend this book. Incorporating a user-friendly question-and-answer format, The Rights of Indians and Tribes addresses the most significant legal issues facing Indians and Indiantribes today, including tribal sovereignty, the federal trust responsibility, the regulation of non-Indians on reservations, Indian treaties, the Indian Civil Rights Act, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. This fully-updated new edition features an introduction byJohn Echohawk, Executive Director of the Native American Rights Fund

Navajos Wear Nikes: A Reservation Life


Jim Kristofic - 2011
    Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexisted in a tenuous truce. After the births of his Navajo half-siblings, Jim and his family moved off the Reservation to an Arizona border town where they struggled to readapt to an Anglo world that no longer felt like home.With tales of gangs and skinwalkers, an Indian Boy Scout troop, a fanatical Sunday school teacher, and the author's own experience of sincere friendships that lead to ho?zho? (beautiful harmony), Kristofic's memoir is an honest portrait of growing up on--and growing to love--the Reservation.

Palo Mayombe -The Garden of Blood and Bones


Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold - 2011
    The original African faith is carried in chains across the abysmal waters of Kalunga and it flowers in Cuba as a New World Creole sorcery.This is an initiate's account of a much maligned religion and cult whose central mystery is the prenda, the cauldron containing the human skull or bones, re-animated by living spirits.The Garden of Blood & Bones gives explicit details of the workings of Palo Mayombe for good and ill: the method of divination, the herbs, animals, trees and plants, powders, baths and waters, the songs and chants. It presents a complete living system, one which embraces both the arts of healing and resurrection, and those that remove life.This is a serious study which confronts the sinister and violent aspects of the cult, but rather than purveying lurid sensationalism expresses the deep dignity and integrity of its nature.In drawing parallels with both the Ancient Greek practices of Necromancy and Nigromancy, and the grimoire tradition, Frisvold also illuminates the Western Tradition, showing what we have lost in our denial of the dead and the cult of the ancestors. Yet Palo Mayombe can only be truly understood in the light of a highly developed African cosmology. This is a book written from inside the cult, and will serve as a guide for practising Paleros and those seeking initiation. With access to rare materials, pamphlets, booklets and unpublished field notes, this is the most comprehensive study of Palo Mayombe to date.

Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture


Andrea Stone - 2011
    Yet despite a surge of popular interest in these remarkable people, few are fully aware of the richness of their artistic legacy, unique in all of pre-Columbian America. Maya art is a rare combination of linear elegance and naturalism blended with dazzling symbolic complexity. Decorated objects, ranging from painted vases and carved jade and shell ornaments to towering stone monuments and building facades, bear the traces of a symbol system that, while fascinating, can make an understanding of these images elusive to the uninitiated.Presented here for the first time is a compendium of one hundred hieroglyphs that are also the building blocks of ancient Maya painting and sculpture. Organized thematically, the symbols touch on many facets of the Maya world, from the natural environment—animals, plants, the heavens—to the mental landscape of gods, myths, and rituals. Using hundreds of line drawings and photographs, Andrea Stone and Marc Zender show how to identify these signs, understand their meaning, and appreciate the novel ways they appear in art. In addition to providing a basic introduction, the authors also offer many new and exciting interpretations.

A Treatise of Human Nature / An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding / An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals / Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (David Hume Collection)


David Hume - 2011
    He is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy. This Collection includes the full essays of A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. All essays include internal working Table of Contents.

Shiro: Wit, Wisdom & Recipes from a Sushi Pioneer


Shiro Kashiba - 2011
    He's been called many things--culinary master, fisherman, mushroom forager and nature lover--but first and foremost he's the "Sushi King." His eponymous debut cookbook is no chef-vanity affair, though, but a riveting and imaginative blending of East and West in the quest for high gastronomic art." —Shelf AwarenessShiro Kashiba used to walk to the fishing piers of Seattle in the 1960s to retrieve buckets of unwanted salmon roe and pesky Puget Sound octopus from the fishermen. He'd hike the beaches of the Pacific Northwest to gather geoduck before there was a market for the shellfish. Chef Shiro saw treasure where others saw trash. And through this sushi chef's eyes, readers discover the amazing bounty of the Pacific Northwest.In this revealing cookbook/memoir, Chef Shiro recounts his early days in Tokyo washing dishes and sleeping in the backroom of a prestigious Ginza sushi shop, his decision to come to the United States with little more than an introductory letter, and his ultimate success in Seattle.But the story doesn't stop there. While Shiro settles into his role as Seattle's premier sushi chef, he develops a deep appreciation for the local delicacies of his new home. Soon he begins to replace expensive Japanese imports with cheaper and more delicious local delicacies. Goodbye bluefin, hello albacore. Shiro tells fascinating and often humorous stories about the region's offerings: his first encounters with geoduck (some say he was the first to serve it raw), the world's tastiest sea urchin, hunting for matsutake mushrooms in the Cascades, a twelve-course meal of silvery ocean smelt, and much more. Ann Norton provides mouthwatering photographs of Shiro's seasonal recipes.

Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same-Sex Attraction


Tony E. Adams - 2011
    The closet is explored at each stage—entering it, inhabiting it, and coming out of it—and strategies are offered for reframing difficult closet experiences. Adams makes use of interviews, personal narratives, and autoethnography to analyze lived, relational experiences of sexuality. This is a must have for scholars and students of gender studies, qualitative research, and for any reader who has felt the closet’s reach.

Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism


Kristen R. Ghodsee - 2011
    Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social-support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.

Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description


Tim Ingold - 2011
    Generations of theorists, however, have expunged life from their accounts, treating it as the mere output of patterns, codes, structures or systems variously defined as genetic or cultural, natural or social. Building on his classic work The Perception of the Environment, Tim Ingold sets out to restore life to where it should belong, at the heart of anthropological concern.Being Alive ranges over such themes as the vitality of materials, what it means to make things, the perception and formation of the ground, the mingling of earth and sky in the weather-world, the experiences of light, sound and feeling, the role of storytelling in the integration of knowledge, and the potential of drawing to unite observation and description.Our humanity, Ingold argues, does not come ready-made but is continually fashioned in our movements along ways of life. Starting from the idea of life as a process of wayfaring, Ingold presents a radically new understanding of movement, knowledge and description as dimensions not just of being in the world, but of being alive to what is going on there.

Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture


Wouter J. Hanegraaff - 2011
    Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.

Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words


John Ayton - 2011
    What is the link between map and apron, acrobat and oxygen, zeal and jealousy, flour and pollen, secret and crime?Did you know that crimson originally comes from the name of tiny scale insects, the kermes, from whose dried bodies a red dyestuff is made? That Yankee began as a nickname for Dutchmen? That omelette evolved from amulette, “a thin sheet of metal,” and is a not-too-distant cousin of the word laminate? That jeans find their antecedent in jean fustian, meaning “a cotton fabric from Genoa”?They also contain an extensive selection of words whose life histories are intrinsically fascinating or instructive. This dictionary shows how modern English has developed from its Indo-European roots and how the various influences on the language—from migration and invasion to exploration, trade, technology, and scholarship—have intermingled. It is an invaluable addition to any English or linguistics library.

Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971


Yasmin Saikia - 2011
    For India, the war represents a triumphant settling of scores with Pakistan. If the war is acknowledged in Pakistan, it is cast as an act of betrayal by the Bengalis. None of these nationalist histories convey the human cost of the war. Pakistani and Indian soldiers and Bengali militiamen raped and tortured women on a mass scale. In Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, survivors tell their stories, revealing the power of speaking that deemed unspeakable. They talk of victimization—of rape, loss of status and citizenship, and the “war babies” born after 1971. The women also speak as agents of change, as social workers, caregivers, and wartime fighters. In the conclusion, men who terrorized women during the war recollect their wartime brutality and their postwar efforts to achieve a sense of humanity. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh sheds new light on the relationship among nation, history, and gender in postcolonial South Asia.

The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee


James Mooney - 2011
    His interest was primarily in the Indian background to the uprising. Admitting that the Indians had been generally overpowered by the Whites, what led the Indians to think they stood a chance against White arms? His answer was astonishing: the Ghost-Dance Religion.Investigating every Indian uprising from Pontiac to the 1980s, every Indian resistance to aggression, every incident of importance, Mooney discovered a cultural pattern: a messianic religion that permeated leaders and warriors from Tecumseh and his brother The Prophet on up to the Plains tribes that revived the Ghost-Dance in the 1880s and 90s. The message was: abandon the ways of the Whites; go back to Indian ways; an Indian messiah is coming; the Indian dead are to be resurrected — indeed, some have already returned; and the Whites are to be killed by the Spirits.Mooney made an exhaustive study of this cult, the rise of its latest version, diffusion to the Plains, and its relevance to the medicine man Sitting Bull and others. Citing many primary documents as well as anthropological data he gathered himself, Mooney gives an extremely detailed, thorough account of the cult; its songs and dances, ceremonies, and its social impact.This work has always been considered one of the great classics of American anthropology, a book that not only offers an account of a very interesting cultural phenomenon, but also throws light on many events in Indian-White relations that are otherwise dark. Its data have never been superseded and the book remains a work of primary importance in Native American studies.

Tribal Peoples for Tomorrow's World


Stephen Corry - 2011
    It shapes world history and raises profound questions about what it really means to be human. This book explains who these peoples are, how they live, why governments hate them, and why their disappearance is far from inevitable.

Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States


Adam Hanieh - 2011
    This book analyzes the recent development of Gulf capitalism through the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Situating the Gulf within the evolution of capitalism at a global scale, it presents a novel theoretical interpretation of this important region of the Middle East political economy. Accompanied by an extensive empirical analysis of all sectors of the GCC economy, the book argues that a new capitalist class, Khaleeji Capital, is forming in the Gulf--with profound implications for the Middle East as a whole.

Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings


Charles Lemert - 2011
    In this heavily revised fifth edition, Lemert reevaluates the received canon and reasserts this iconic text's place in the standard curriculum. Classic, essential texts from thinkers like Marx, Durkheim, and James remain; other key writers, like Dewey and Connell, are presented in a new light; and leading figures in the discussion of twenty-first-century society, such as Elijah Anderson and Bruno Latour, are anthologized here for the first time. In addition to classic and multicultural readings, the new fifth edition introduces a discussion of global social theory as well as important new and evolving topics like mobile technologies, the virtual realm, masculinities, and bare life. For the first time, timelines are included to visually present readings against the backdrop of significant events in social and world history. With more than 100 authors, thinkers, and scholars represented, the fifth edition of Social Theory is an essential component of any course on social theory.

Abraham Abulafia: Meditation on the Divine Name


Abraham Abulafia - 2011
    This is a method of concentrating on the Divine Name to fulfill the soul's deepest spiritual longings.

Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay


Kregg Hetherington - 2011
    Kregg Hetherington shows that the ideal of transparent information, meant to depoliticize bureaucratic procedures, has become a battleground for a new kind of politics centered on legal interpretation and the manipulation of official documents. In late-twentieth-century Paraguay, peasant land politics moved unexpectedly from the roads and fields into the documentary recesses of state bureaucracy. When peasants, bureaucrats, and development experts encountered one another in state archives, conflicts ensued about how bureaucracy ought to function, what documents are for, and who gets to narrate the past and the future of the nation. Hetherington argues that Paraguay’s neoliberal democracy is predicated, at least in part, on an exclusionary distinction between model citizens and peasants. Despite this, peasant activists have found ways to circumvent their exclusion and in so doing question the conceptual foundations of international development orthodoxy.

Death: Living to Talk about It


Brian M. Hayden - 2011
    

Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction


Deborah Bird Rose - 2011
    In Wild Dog Dreaming, Deborah Bird Rose explores what constitutes an ethical relationship with nonhuman others in this era of loss. She asks, Who are we, as a species? How do we fit into the Earth's systems? Amidst so much change, how do we find our way into new stories to guide us? Rose explores these questions in the form of a dialogue between science and the humanities. Drawing on her conversations with Aboriginal people, for whom questions of extinction are up-close and very personal, Rose develops a mode of exposition that is dialogical, philosophical, and open-ended.An inspiration for Rose--and a touchstone throughout her book--is the endangered dingo of Australia. The dingo is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing because the threat to its future is being actively engineered by humans. The brazenness with which the dingo is being wiped out sheds valuable, and chilling, light on the likely fate of countless other animal and plant species."People save what they love," observed Michael Soule, the great conservation biologist. We must ask whether we, as humans, are capable of loving--and therefore capable of caring for--the animals and plants that are disappearing in a cascade of extinctions. Wild Dog Dreaming engages this question, and the result is a bold account of the entangled ethics of love, contingency, and desire.

Communing with the Gods: Consciousness, Culture and the Dreaming Brain


Charles D. Laughlin - 2011
    -The book examines the place of dreaming in the experience of peoples from diverse cultures and historical backgrounds. -Communing with the Gods surveys anthropological theories of dreaming, what we know about how the brain produces dreams and why, and lucid dream research and how the notion of lucidity applies to dreaming of traditional societies. It explores the ways that societies encourage, evoke, experience and interpret dreams, as well as how people act in response to information obtained in the dream state. A comprehensive theory of brain, culture and dreaming is presented that explains the neurobiological functions of sleep and dreaming, the evolution of dreaming, the universality of, and cultural variation in dream elements, and the role of dreaming as a system of intra-psychic communication. -This theory is then applied to an examination of dreaming in modern society. The book discusses how modern dream-work may ameliorate wide-spread alienation, spiritual exhaustion and despair in modern society."

King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns


Michael A. Messner - 2011
    This candid memoir will make engrossing reading for both seasoned scholars and newcomers to gender studies. Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War For decades, feminist scholars, memoirists, and novelists have explored the lineaments of mother-daughter relationships, yet the world of fathers and sons has garnered relatively little attention. In his closely observed memoir, King of the Wild Suburb, noted Gender Studies scholar Michael Messner opens up the affective terrain between fathers and sons, and in the process deepens and complicates our understanding of masculinity. Alice Echols, author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture Michael Messner's reflections on coming of age in the pivotal Sixties deftly captures the fault lines that separated so many young men and women from the lives of their parents and grandparents. It was, perhaps, easier for young women to rebel and choose careers over homemaking than it was for young men to opt out of a culture that made war, guns, and hunting the anchors of manhood. King of the Wild Suburb helps us understand how masculinity has changed, albeit still precariously, making it possible to maintain a fidelity to one's past while passing on to the next generation a freedom to explore new ways to be a man. Jan E. Dizard, author of Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America

Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South


Kristina DuRocher - 2011
    White children rested at the core of the system of segregation between 1890 and 1939 because their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. Their socialization in the segregated South offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture's efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation.In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year


Sara Hannant - 2011
    Award-winning photographer Sara Hannant has travelled the length and breadth of the country, capturing the seemingly bizarre regional rituals – costumed processions, symbolic dramatizations, traditional dances and fire ceremonies – that mark the changing seasons. Many of these customs claim an ancient origin, and are kept alive today by local communities. Hannant’s vibrant photographs reflect her keen eye for the unexpected, offering a captivating and surprising surprising study of English identity.

Social Zooarchaeology


Nerissa Russell - 2011
    Until recently, archaeological analysis of faunal evidence has primarily focused on the role of animals in the human diet and subsistence economy. This book, however, argues that animals have always played many more roles in human societies: as wealth, companions, spirit helpers, sacrificial victims, totems, centerpieces of feasts, objects of taboos, and more. These social factors are as significant as taphonomic processes in shaping animal bone assemblages. Nerissa Russell uses evidence derived from not only zooarchaeology, but also ethnography, history, and classical studies to suggest the range of human-animal relationships and to examine their importance in human society. Through exploring the significance of animals to ancient humans, this book provides a richer picture of past societies.

Health Care in Canada: A Citizen's Guide to Policy and Politics


Katherine Fierlbeck - 2011
    In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate cannot occur without an understanding of how the system actually operates. In this overview, Fierlbeck outlines the basic framework of the health care system with reference to specific areas such as administration and governance, public health, human resources, drugs and drug policy, and mental health. She also discusses alternative models in other countries such as Britain, the United States, and France. As health care becomes increasingly complex, it is crucial that Canadians have a solid grasp of the main issues within both the policy and political environments. With its balanced and accessible assessment of the main political and theoretical debates, Health Care in Canada is an essential guide for anyone with a stake in Canada's health system.

Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong


Timothy Choy - 2011
    During his research, Tim Choy became increasingly interested in the power of the notion of specificity. While documenting the expert and lay production of Hong Kong’s biological, cultural, and political specificities, he began comparing the logics and narrative forms that made different types of specificity—such as species, culture, locality, and state autonomy—possible and meaningful. He came to understand these logics and forms as “ecologies of comparison,” conceptual practices through which an event or form of life comes to matter in environmentalist and other political terms. Choy’s ethnography is about environmentalism, Hong Kong, and the ways that we think about environmentalism in Hong Kong and other places. It is also about how politics, freedom, culture, expertise, and other concepts figure in comparison-based knowledge practices.

Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century


Donald W. Livingston - 2011
    Coming from a wide range of backgrounds, these experts explore such complex issues as government by judiciary and a reconsideration of nationalistic government. They address the sources of nationalism and the influence of early political leaders, while discussing the continuing struggle between federal and local governments. The debate culminates in an analysis paralleling the disintegration of the Soviet Union with the current situation in the United States and urges readers to preserve the sovereignty of individual state governments.The collection is an outgrowth of the Abbeville Conference, held in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2010 and features arguments by Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo, Yuri Maltsev, Donald W. Livingston, Kent Masterson Brown, Marshall DeRosa, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Rob Williams. The essays present challenging ideas on issues that have remained current since the birth of the American nation.

I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own


Michael Taussig - 2011
    Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

Location Based Marketing for Dummies


Aaron Strout - 2011
    This book is a necessary resource for anyone eager to create a two-way dialog with their customers in order to establish customer loyalty programs, drive promotions, or encourage new visitors. You'll learn how to successfully build, launch, and measure a location-based marketing program and figure out which location-based services are right for your business.Packed with resources that share additional information, this helpful guide walks you through the tools and techniques needed to measure all the data that results from a successful location-based marketing program.Serves as an ideal introduction to location-based marketing and gets you started building a location-based marketing program Helps you figure out which location-based service (LBS) is right for your business and then integrate LBS with your social graph Details ways to create compelling offers, using location-based marketing as a customer loyalty program, and set performance goals and benchmarks Explains how to use tools to measure your campaign, analyze results, and determine your business's success Includes examples of companies that are successfully using location-based marketing to demonstrate techniques and concepts featured in the book No matter your location, location-based services can benefit your business and this For Dummies book shows you how!

Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis


Umeek / E Richard Atleo - 2011
    In this book, Umeek argues that contemporary environmental and political crises and the ongoing plight of indigenous peoples reflect a world out of balance, a world in which Western approaches to sustainable living are not working. Nuu-chah-nulth principles of recognition, consent, and continuity, by contrast, hold the promise of bringing greater harmony, where all life forms are treated with respect and accorded formal constitutional recognition.

Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the Gdr


Josie McLellan - 2011
    Love in the Time of Communism is a fascinating history of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution and its limits. Josie McLellan shows that under communism divorce rates soared, abortion become commonplace and the rate of births outside marriage was amongst the highest in Europe. Nudism went from ban to state-sponsored boom, and erotica became common currency in both the official economy and the black market. Public discussion of sexuality was, however, tightly controlled and there were few opportunities to challenge traditional gender roles or sexual norms. Josie McLellan's pioneering account questions some of our basic assumptions about the relationship between sexuality, politics and society and is a major contribution to our understanding of the everyday emotional lives of postwar Europeans.

How to Become a Rasta


Empress Yuajah - 2011
    Find out what deep Rasta men are not allowed to do. The black King of Ethiopias' (Emperor Haile Selassie) appeal to the leage of Nations. Learn the best way to start your Dreadlocks, based on your hair type, know the meaning of life according to Rastafari.

Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class


Smitha Radhakrishnan - 2011
    Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian. Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India’s high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though, global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family.

Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions


Samantha Hurn - 2011
    Samantha Hurn explores the work of anthropologists and scholars from related disciplines concerned with the growing field of anthrozoology. Case studies from a wide range of cultural contexts are discussed, and readers are invited to engage with a diverse range of human-animal interactions including blood sports (such as hunting, fishing and bull fighting), pet keeping and ‘petishism’, eco-tourism and wildlife conservation, working animals and animals as food. The idea of animal exploitation raised by the animal rights movements is considered, as well as the anthropological implications of changing attitudes towards animal personhood, and the rise of a posthumanist philosophy in the social sciences more generally. Key debates surrounding these issues are raised and assessed and, in the process, readers are encouraged to consider their own attitudes towards other animals and, by extension, what it means to be human.

Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia


Derek Hall - 2011
    Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, "intimate" exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land farmed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four "powers of exclusion" - regulation, market, force and legitimation - have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways.Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing "exclusion" to "inclusion", the book argues taht attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences.Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.

In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka


Sharika Thiranagama - 2011
    Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war.Sharika Thiranagama's In My Mother's House provides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war.In My Mother's House revolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence--carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state--on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for postconflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.

Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men


Carlos Ulises Decena - 2011
    Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.

Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushmen Rock Art


James David Lewis-Williams - 2011
    Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists.Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both.The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.

Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary


Roger T. Ames - 2011
    The book establishes an interpretive context by exploring some of the cosmological foundations of Confucian philosophy through discussion of commentary on the Yijing (The Book of Changes), Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Chinese cosmology. The author proceeds to delineate the morals and ideals of a Confucian life and its foundation in feelings of familial intimacy and its human-centered religiousness. These ideas are contrasted with the principle and virtue based traditions of the Abrahamic religions as well as of the individualistic tradition beginning in ancient Greece. Lastly, Ames attempts to critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of Confucian role ethics as articulated in the early canonical texts, discussing both its return to prominence and feasibility as a system of ethical conduct for the present day.

Grave Matters: Excavating California's Buried Past


Tony Platt - 2011
    Explores the relationship of archeology and the competing interests that color the recovery of Indian remains

Worldwide Gothic: A Chronicle of a Tribe


Natasha Scharf - 2011
    From the UK's sprawling post-punk scene, Japan's highly visual movement, the USA's deathrock explosion and Germany's extremely popular Schwarze Szene, Worldwide Gothic explores how they all came about and the influence they've had on contemporary music and fashion. Spat out of punk at the tail end of the 1970s, goth became a major subculture in the UK with bands like Siouxsie And The Banshees and The Sisters Of Mercy scoring Top Ten hits and its fashion inspiring catwalk collections. After the scene died down in the early 1990s, it spread out to Europe where it attracted hundreds of thousands of followers and became assimilated with other muscial genres. This book also looks at how goth is now returning to its roots now with the emergence of dark rock and indie bands who pay homage to gothic greats like Bauhaus and Joy Division.

Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism


Elizabeth A. Povinelli - 2011
    Povinelli explores how late liberal imaginaries of tense, eventfulness, and ethical substance make the global distribution of life and death, hope and harm, and endurance and exhaustion not merely sensible but also just. She presents new ways of conceptualizing formations of power in late liberalism—the shape that liberal governmentality has taken as it has responded to a series of legitimacy crises in the wake of anticolonial and new social movements and, more recently, the “clash of civilizations” after September 11. Based on longstanding ethnographic work in Australia and the United States, as well as critical readings of legal, academic, and activist texts, Povinelli examines how alternative social worlds and projects generate new possibilities of life in the context of ordinary and extraordinary acts of neglect and surveillance. She focuses particularly on social projects that have not yet achieved a concrete existence but persist at the threshold of possible existence. By addressing the question of the endurance, let alone the survival, of alternative forms of life, Povinelli opens new ethical and political questions.

Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New


Anthony Bartlett - 2011
    Using the anthropology of Rene Girard and drawing out its radical implications, 'Virtually Christian' reconfigures the traditional framework of theology.

The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture


Pete Sigal - 2011
    In this innovative ethnohistory, Pete Sigal seeks to shed new light on Nahua concepts of the sexual without relying on the modern Western concept of sexuality. Along with clerical documents and other Spanish sources, he interprets the many texts produced by the Nahua. While colonial clerics worked to impose Catholic beliefs--particularly those equating sexuality and sin-on the indigenous people they encountered, the process of cultural assimilation was slower and less consistent than scholars have assumed. Sigal argues that modern researchers of sexuality have exaggerated the power of the Catholic sacrament of confession to change the ways that individuals understood themselves and their behaviors. At least until the mid-seventeenth century, when increased contact with the Spanish began to significantly change Nahua culture and society, indigenous peoples, particularly commoners, related their sexual lives and imaginations not just to concepts of sin and redemption but also to pleasure, seduction, and rituals of fertility and warfare.

Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development


David Mosse - 2011
    Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development's discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about 'pure' and 'applied' anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

Čerwuiš aneb Z Pacheka do Pacheka oklikou přes střední Evropu


Alberto Vojtěch Frič - 2011
    V. Fric in 1908. Tragi-comic story of the "wild man" in civilization.

Child and Adolescent Development: An Integrated Approach


David F. Bjorklund - 2011
    Organized topically to realistically present the three overarching perspectives that guide today's researchers and practitioners of developmental psychology, David Bjorklund and Carlos Hernandez Blasi's CHILD AND ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT: AN IINTEGRATED APPROACH shows how the major perspectives on human development must be integrated--rather than presented as contrasting and sometimes contradictory ways of looking at development--in order to meaningfully understand infants, children, and adolescents as well as how they develop.

Between One and One Another


Michael D. Jackson - 2011
    Grounding his discussion in the subtle shifts between being acted upon and taking action, Jackson shows how the historical complexities and particularities found in human interactions reveal the dilemmas, conflicts, cares, and concerns that shape all of our lives. Through portraits of individuals encountered in the course of his travels, including friends and family, and anthropological fieldwork pursued over many years in such places as Sierra Leone and Australia, Jackson explores variations on this theme. As he describes the ways we address and negotiate the vexed relationships between "I" and "we"--the one and the many--he is also led to consider the place of thought in human life.

Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory


Loring M. Danforth - 2011
    The Greek Communist Party relocated half of them to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while their adversaries in the national government placed the rest in children’s homes elsewhere in Greece. A point of contention during the Cold War, this controversial episode continues to fuel tensions between Greeks and Macedonians and within Greek society itself. Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten present here for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they forever transformed.Marshalling archival records, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, the authors analyze the evacuation process, the political conflict surrounding it, the children’s upbringing, and their fates as adults cut off from their parents and their homeland. They also give voice to seven refugee children who poignantly recount their childhood experiences and heroic efforts to construct new lives in diaspora communities throughout the world. A much-needed corrective to previous historical accounts, Children of the Greek Civil War is also a searching examination of the enduring effects of displacement on the lives of refugee children.

Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules


Chris Bobel - 2011
    This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.

Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese "Comfort Women"


Joshua D. Pilzer - 2011
    Hearts of Pine brings us into the lives of three such survivors: Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. Over the course of eight years, author Joshua Pilzer worked with these now-elderly women, smoking with them, eating with them, singing and playing with them, trying to understand and document their worlds of song. During four decades of secrecy and thesubsequent decades of the comfort women protest movement, singing served these women as a means of coping with and expressing their experiences, forging and sustaining identities and social relationships, and recording and conveying their struggles and philosophies of life. Through these intimateportraits, Hearts of Pine illustrates the personal and social power of music vis-�-vis other expressive media, models a humanistic history of modern Korean music, and presents heretofore unrecorded histories of the comfort women system and postwar South Korean public culture written in women'ssong.

Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia


Patrick Hyder Patterson - 2011
    Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. In Bought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.Based on extraordinary research and featuring remarkable examples of Yugoslav print advertising and mass culture, this book reconstructs in often dramatic detail the rise of a culture in which shoppers' desires trumped genuine human needs. Yugoslavia, Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation.Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders. Patterson argues that consumerism was one of the critical factors that held the multiethnic society together during the years of the Yugoslav Good Life of the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic downturn of the 1980s, however, the reliance on expanding consumerism ultimately led to bitter disillusionment, stripping the unique Yugoslav model of its legitimacy and priming the populace for mutual resentment, ethnic conflict, and war.

Visualizing the Sacred: Cosmic Visions, Regionalism, and the Art of the Mississippian World


George E. Lankford - 2011
    Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

John Henry Haynes: A Photographer and Archaeologist in the Ottoman Empire 1881-1900 (1st Edition)


Robert G. Ousterhout - 2011
    In a landmark study, with many photographs published for the first time, Robert Ousterhout rediscovers Hayne's career, assessing his unique blend of artistry and documentation. His photographic odyssey took Haynes across the Ottoman Empire, from Athens to Constantinople, across Anatolia, and ultimately to Mesopotamia. Although he had scant academic credentials and just a short training in 'aesthetic' photography, Haynes broke new ground. In 1900 he uncovered an astounding cache of 23,000 cuneiform tablets that are the foundation of much of what we know about the Sumerian literary tradition. And with his discerning eye and artistic sensibility, he captured astonishing sights, many never photographed before, and many no longer in existence. The victim of rivalry, snobbery and outright skulduggery, he died 'broken in body and spirit'. Professor Ousterhout tells the story of Haynes the unsung hero and assesses his unique contribution with insight and addestion.

Tibet: Culture on the Edge


Phil Borges - 2011
    Known as the “water tower of Asia,” the Tibetan Plateau is heating up twice as fast as the global average. These rapidly melting glaciers-along with recent unprecedented development on the plateau-are quickly changing the lives of the deeply devotional nomads, monks, and farmers who have lived in this area for centuries.Photographer Phil Borges uses individual stories and portraits to illustrate how dramatic development, climate change, and the deep devotion of the Tibetan people are interacting to transform Tibetan culture. The portraits of the land and the people bring a powerful visual component as the reader meets and learns about Tibet firsthand through these storytellers.

Bone Histology: An Anthropological Perspective


Christian Crowder - 2011
    Bone Histology: An Anthropological Perspective brings together authors with extensive experience and expertise in various aspects of hard tissue histology to provide a comprehensive discussion of the application of methods, current theories, and future directions in hard tissue research related to anthropological questions.Topics discussed include:The biology underlying skeletal growth and development leading to adult skeletal morphology Current research in understanding in bone modeling Histological features of dental hard tissues and their utility in biological anthropology Histological analysis as a means to differentiate human from nonhuman bone and for the purpose of age estimation The biomechanics of cortical bone Histotaphonomy and how postmortem microstructural change can be used for taphonomic inquiry The application of light microscopy in paleopathology to classify pathological conditions The histological study of bone tissue of archaeological origin Researchers' access to collections of bone samples with known demographic information Technological aspects of hard tissue histology, including laboratory requirements and high-resolution imagingIn most cases, the physical remains of humans available to bioarchaeologists, paleopathologists, and paleontologists are limited to skeletal material. Fortunately, these hard tissues are a storehouse of information about biological processes experienced during the life of an individual. This volume provides an overview of the current state of research and potential applications in anthropology and other fields that employ a histological approach to the study of hard tissues.

Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City: How Resourceful Latinas Beat the Odds


Sabrina Marie Chase - 2011
    For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.

Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications


Erkki Huhtamo - 2011
    Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The Changing Body


Roderick Floud - 2011
    However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain


Sadiah Qureshi - 2011
    Dickens was not the only Londoner intrigued by these “living curiosities”: displayed foreign peoples provided some of the most popular public entertainments of their day. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial difference, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work, and empire. Peoples on Parade provides the first substantial overview of these human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain. Sadiah Qureshi considers these shows in their entirety—their production, promotion, management, and performance—to understand why they proved so commercially successful, how they shaped performers’ lives, how they were interpreted by their audiences, and what kinds of lasting influence they may have had on notions of race and empire. Qureshi supports her analysis with diverse visual materials, including promotional ephemera, travel paintings, theatrical scenery, art prints, and photography, and thus contributes to the wider understanding of the relationship between science and visual culture in the nineteenth century. Through Qureshi’s vibrant telling and stunning images, readers will see how human exhibitions have left behind a lasting legacy both in the formation of early anthropological inquiry and in the creation of broader public attitudes toward racial difference.

The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo


Michael R. Dove - 2011
    Dove employs this phrase as a root metaphor to frame the history of resource relations between the indigenous peoples of Borneo and the world system. In analyzing production and trade in forest products, pepper, and especially natural rubber, Dove shows that the involvement of Borneo’s native peoples in commodity production for global markets is ancient and highly successful and that processes of globalization began millennia ago. Dove’s analysis replaces the image of the isolated tropical forest community that needs to be helped into the global system with the reality of communities that have been so successful and competitive that they have had to fight political elites to keep from being forced out.

Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement


Farzaneh Milani - 2011
    The privilege of self-directed movement, the power to pick up and go as one pleases, has not been a traditional "right" of Iranian women. This prerogative has been denied them in the name of piety, anatomy, chastity, class, safety, and even beauty. It is only during the last 160 years that the spell has been broken and Iranian women have emerged as a moderating, modernizing force. Women writers have been at the forefront of this desegregating movement and renegotiation of boundaries.Words, Not Swords explores the legacy of sex segregation and its manifestations in Iranian literature and film and in notions of beauty and the erotics of passivity. Milani expands her argument beyond Iranian culture, arguing that freedom of movement is a theme that crosses frontiers and dissolves conventional distinctions of geography, history, and religion. She makes bold connections between veiling and foot binding, between Cinderella and Barbie, between the figures of the female Gypsy and the witch. In so doing, she challenges cultural hierarchies that divert attention from key issues in the control of women across the globe.

Anthropology Unmasked: Museums, Science, and Politics in New York City


Stanley A. Freed - 2011
    The book features the groundbreaking research by a cast of extraordinary characters who made a success of difficult and dangerous projects in remote places – from Siberia to Greenland to the Straits of Magellan – where danger was routine and where heroics were necessary and expected.Dr. Stanley Freed, curator emeritus of Anthropology at the AMNH, introduces the vivid personalities who developed anthropology and the major early museums. With over 50 years experience that included personal relationships with some of these men and women, Freed offers fresh insights, an “inside-the-museum” point of view, and heretofore unpublished material.

Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You: Elsewheres and Ethnosuicide in the Colonial Mesoamerican World


José Rabasa - 2011
    As an artifact of seismic cultural and political shifts, the manuscript painting is a singular document of indigenous response to Spanish conquest. Examining the ways in which the folio's tlacuilo (indigenous painter/writer) creates a pictorial vocabulary, this book embraces the place "outside" history from which this rich document emerged.Applying contemporary intellectual perspectives, including aspects of gender, modernity, nation, and visual representation itself, Jose Rabasa reveals new perspectives on colonial order. Folio 46r becomes a metaphor for reading the totality of the codex and for reflecting on the postcolonial theoretical issues now brought to bear on the past. Ambitious and innovative (such as the invention of the concepts of elsewheres and ethnosuicide, and the emphasis on intuition), Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You embraces the performative force of the native scribe while acknowledging the ineffable traits of 46r--traits that remain untenably foreign to the modern excavator/scholar. Posing provocative questions about the unspoken dialogues between evangelizing friars and their spiritual conquests, this book offers a theoretic-political experiment on the possibility of learning from the tlacuilo ways of seeing the world that dislocate the predominance of the West.

Ethnobiology


E.N. Anderson - 2011
    Ethnobiological research has produced a wide range of medicines, natural products, and new crops, as well as striking insights into human cognition, language, and environmental management behavior from prehistory to the present.This is the single authoritative source on ethnobiology, covering all aspects of the field as it is currently defined. Featuring contributions from experienced scholars and sanctioned by the Society of Ethnobiology, this concise, readable volume provides extensive coverage of ethical issues and practices as well as archaeological, ethnological, and linguistic approaches.Emphasizing basic principles and methodology, this unique textbook offers a balanced treatment of all the major subfields within ethnobiology, allowing students to begin guided research in any related area--from archaeoethnozoology to ethnomycology to agroecology. Each chapter includes a basic introduction to each topic, is written by a leading specialist in the specific area addressed, and comes with a full bibliography citing major works in the area. All chapters cover recent research, and many are new in approach; most chapters present unpublished or very recently published new research. Featured are clear, distinctive treatments of areas such as ethnozoology, linguistic ethnobiology, traditional education, ethnoecology, and indigenous perspectives. Methodology and ethical action are also covered up to current practice."Ethnobiology" is a specialized textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students; it is suitable for advanced-level ethnobotany, ethnobiology, cultural and political ecology, and archaeologically related courses. Research institutes will also find this work valuable, as will any reader with an interest in ethnobiological fields.

Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala


Kevin Lewis O'Neill - 2011
    Following a peace process that ended Central America’s longest and bloodiest civil war and impelled the transition from a state-centric economy to the global free market, Guatemala’s neoliberal moment is now strikingly evident in the practices and politics of security. Postwar violence has not prompted public debates about the conditions that permit transnational gangs, drug cartels, and organized crime to thrive. Instead, the dominant reaction to crime has been the cultural promulgation of fear and the privatization of what would otherwise be the state’s responsibility to secure the city. This collection of essays, the first comparative study of urban Guatemala, explores these neoliberal efforts at security. Contributing to the anthropology of space and urban studies, this book brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how postwar violence and responses to it are reconfiguring urban space, transforming the relationship between city and country, and exacerbating deeply rooted structures of inequality and ethnic discrimination.Contributors. Peter Benson, Manuela Camus, Avery Dickins de Girón, Edward F. Fischer, Deborah Levenson, Thomas Offit, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Kedron Thomas, Rodrigo José Véliz

On the Frontlines: Gender, War, and the Post-Conflict Process


Fionnuala Ní Aoláin - 2011
    Thankfully, that is changing. Today, in avariety of post-conflict settings--the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Northern Ireland --international advocates for women's rights have focused bringing issues of sexual violence, discrimination and exclusion into peace-making processes.In On the Frontlines, Fionnuala N� Aol�in, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Naomi Cahn consider such policies in a range of cases and assess the extent to which they have had success in improving women's lives. They argue that there has been too little success, and that this is in part a product of afocus on schematic policies like straightforward political incorporation rather than a broader and deeper attempt to alter the cultures and societies that are at the root of much of the violence and exclusions experienced by women. They contend that this broader approach would not just benefitwomen, however. Gender mainstreaming and increased gender equality has a direct correlation with state stability and functions to preclude further conflict. If we are to have any success in stabilizing failing states, gender needs to move to fore of our efforts. With this in mind, they examine theefforts of transnational organizations, states and civil society in multiple jurisdictions to place gender at the forefront of all post-conflict processes. They offer concrete analysis and practical solutions to ensuring gender centrality in all aspects of peace making and peace enforcement.

The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals


Vincent Crapanzano - 2011
    After tens of thousands of Harkis were massacred by other Algerians at the end of the war, the survivors fled to France where they were placed in camps, some for as long as sixteen years. Condemned as traitors by other Algerians and scorned by the French, the Harkis became a population apart, and their children still suffer from their parents’ wounds. Many have become activists, lobbying for recognition of their parents’ sacrifices, compensation, and an apology.More than just a retelling of the Harkis’ grim past and troubling present, The Harkis is a resonant reflection on how children bear responsibility for the choices their parents make, how personal identity is shaped by the impersonal forces of history, and how violence insinuates itself into every facet of human life.

How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes


David D. Friedman - 2011
    A book on medieval and renaissance cooking including more than 330 recipes, articles on how to do a feast, information on what ingredients were available when, and more.

The River and the Railroad: An Archaeological History of Reno


Mary Ringhoff - 2011
    The River and the Railroad traces the people and events that shaped the city, incorporating archaeological findings to add a more tangible physical dimension to the known history. It offers fascinating insights into the lives of many different people from Reno’s past and helps to correct some common misperceptions about the history of the American West.

No Land! No House! No Vote!: Voices from Symphony Way


Symphony Way Pavement Dwellers - 2011
    But soon they were told that the move had been illegal, and they were kicked out of their new homes. They built shacks next to the road opposite the housing project and hundreds organized themselves into the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, vowing to stay on the road until the government gave them permanent housing. This anthology of stories of justice miscarried, of violence domestic and public, of bigotry and xenophobia, is both testimony and poetry. This book is a means to dignity, a way for the poor to reflect and be reflected. It is testimony that there's thinking in the shacks, that there are humans who dialogue, theorize, and fight to bring about change.

California Indian Languages


Victor Golla - 2011
    This comprehensive illustrated handbook, a major synthesis of more than 150 years of documentation and study, reviews what we now know about California's indigenous languages. Victor Golla outlines the basic structural features of more than two dozen language types and cites all the major sources, both published and unpublished, for the documentation of these languages—from the earliest vocabularies collected by explorers and missionaries, to the data amassed during the twentieth-century by Alfred Kroeber and his colleagues, to the extraordinary work of John P. Harrington and C. Hart Merriam. Golla also devotes chapters to the role of language in reconstructing prehistory, and to the intertwining of language and culture in pre-contact California societies, making this work, the first of its kind, an essential reference on California’s remarkable Indian languages.

Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real


Mattijs van de Port - 2011
    Thus, successive generations of followers have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion. This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did believers respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsiders’ imaginations.“Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today.”— Birgit Meyer, Free University of Amsterdam.

Unearthing London: The Ancient World Beneath the Metropolis


Simon Webb - 2011
    This prehistoric landscape, molded and shaped by early men and women, determined the position of such famous London landmarks as St Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey. It has not been completely obliterated by the concrete and tarmac and this book explores what remains of these early sites. It also examines the religious beliefs and mythology of the pre-Roman area which became London, and discusses how these legends tie in with the various ancient features of the city.

Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums: Preserving Our Language, Memory, and Lifeways


Loriene Roy - 2011
    What is unique in these settings is the commitment to tribal protocols and expressions of tribal lifeways-from their footprints on the land to their architecture and interior design, institutional names, signage, and special services, such as native language promotion. This book offers a collection of articles devoted to tribal libraries and archives and provides an opportunity for tribal librarians to share their stories, challenges, achievements, and aspirations with the larger professional community. Part one introduces the tribal community library, providing context and case studies for libraries in California, Alaska, Oklahoma, Hawai'i, and in other countries. The role of tribal libraries and archives in native language recovery and revitalization is also addressed in this section. Part two features service functions of tribal information centers, addressing the library facility, selection, organization, instruction, and programming/outreach. Part three includes a discussion of the types of records that tribes might collect, legal issues, and snapshot descriptions of noteworthy archival collections. The final part covers strategic planning, advice on working in the unique environments of tribal communities, advocacy and marketing, continuing education plans for library staff, and time management tips that are useful for anyone working in a small library setting.

Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran


Satnam Mendoza Forrest - 2011
    These two forces, good and evil, which have always vied for superiority, needed helpers in this struggle. According to the Zoroastrians, every entity had to take sides, from the cosmic level to the microcosmic self.One of the results of this battle was that certain humans were thought to side with evil. Who were these allies of that great Evil Spirit? Women were inordinately singled out. Male healers were forbidden to deal with female health disorders because of the fear of the polluting power of feminine blood. Female healers, midwives, and shamans were among those who were accused of collaborating with the Evil Spirit, because they healed women. Men who worked to prepare the dead were also suspected of secret evil. Evil even showed up as animals such as frogs, snakes, and bugs of all sorts, which scuttled to the command of their wicked masters.This first comprehensive study of the concept of evil in early Iran uncovers details of the Iranian struggle against witchcraft, sorcery, and other "evils," beginning with their earliest texts.

Living with Herds


Natasha Fijn - 2011
    In this book, Natasha Fijn examines the process of animal domestication in a study that blends biological and social anthropology, ethology, and ethnography. She examines the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. After living with Mongolian herding families, Dr. Fijn has observed through firsthand experience both sides of the human-animal relationship. Examining their reciprocal social behavior and communication with one another, she demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process.

After the First Full Moon in April: A Sourcebook of Herbal Medicine from a California Indian Elder


Josephine Grant Peters - 2011
    At a time of the commercialization of traditional ecological knowledge, Peters presents her rich tradition on her own terms, and according to her spiritual convictions about how her knowledge should be shared. This volume is essential for anyone working in ethnobotany, ethnomedicine, environmental anthropology, Native American studies, and Western and California culture and history.

Evolution


Carl T. Bergstrom - 2011
    Extensive, in-depth, current research examples, an emphasis on problem solving, and a stunning art program engage students, helping them to understand fundamental concepts and processes.

Sex Panic and the Punitive State


Roger N. Lancaster - 2011
    Lancaster was startled by a report that a friend, a gay male school teacher, had been arrested for a sexually based crime. The resulting hysteria threatened to ruin the life of an innocent man. In this passionate and provocative book, Lancaster blends astute analysis, robust polemic, ethnography, and personal narrative to delve into the complicated relationship between sexuality and punishment in our society. Drawing on classical social science, critical legal studies, and queer theory, he tracks the rise of a modern suburban culture of fear and develops new insights into the punitive logic that has put down deep roots in everyday American life.

Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States


Samantha MacBride - 2011
    The accomplishments of the recycling movement can be seen in municipal practice, a thriving private recycling industry, and widespread public support and participation. In the United States, more people recycle than vote. But, as Samantha MacBride points out in this book, the goals of recycling -- saving the earth (and trees), conserving resources, and greening the economy -- are still far from being realized. The vast majority of solid wastes are still burned or buried. MacBride argues that, since the emergence of the recycling movement in 1970, manufacturers of products that end up in waste have successfully prevented the implementation of more onerous, yet far more effective, forms of sustainable waste policy. Recycling as we know it today generates the illusion of progress while allowing industry to maintain the status quo and place responsibility on consumers and local government.MacBride offers a series of case studies in recycling that pose provocative questions about whether the current ways we deal with waste are really the best ways to bring about real sustainability and environmental justice. She does not aim to debunk or discourage recycling but to help us think beyond recycling as it is today.

Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility


Tamler Sommers - 2011
    Drawing on research in anthropology, psychology, and a host of other disciplines, Sommers argues that cross-cultural variation raises serious problems for theories that propose universally applicable conditions for moral responsibility. He then develops a new way of thinking about responsibility that takes cultural diversity into account. Relative Justice is a novel and accessible contribution to the ancient debate over free will and moral responsibility. Sommers provides a thorough examination of the methodology employed by contemporary philosophers in the debate and a challenge to Western assumptions about individual autonomy and its connection to moral desert.

Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević


Marko Živković - 2011
    ?ivkovia? traces the recurring themes, scripts, and narratives that permeated public discourse in Milo?evia?'s Serbia, as Serbs described themselves as Gypsies or Jews, violent highlanders or peaceful lowlanders, and invoked their own mythologized defeat at the Battle of Kosovo. The author investigates national narratives, the use of tradition for political purposes, and local idioms, paying special attention to the often bizarre and outlandish tropes people employed to make sense of their social reality. He suggests that the enchantments of political life under Milo?evia? may be fruitfully seen as a dreambook of Serbian national imaginary.

Thinking, Doing Culture


Michael L. Tan - 2011
    The book contains essays culled by the author from his column “Pinoy Kasi” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer as a fine example of how studying culture should be done. For Tan, culture-making is “a work in progress, involving heart and mind.”