Best of
Anthropology

2014

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East


Gerard Russell - 2014
    These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States


Audra Simpson - 2014
    Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and evenhanded forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.

The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being: Evolution and the Making of Us


Alice Roberts - 2014
    Our bodies are a quirky mix of new and old, with strokes of genius alongside glitches and imperfections which are all inherited from distant ancestors. Our development and evolutionary past explains why, as embryos, we have what look like gills, and as adults we suffer from back pain.This is a tale of discovery, not only exploring why and how we have developed as we have, but also looking at the history of our anatomical understanding. It combines the remarkable skills and qualifications Alice Roberts has as a doctor, anatomist, osteoarchaeologist and writer. Above all, she has a rare ability to make science accessible, relevant and interesting to mainstream audiences and readers.

Eternal Living: Reflections on Dallas Willard's Teaching on Faith and Formation


Gary W. Moon - 2014
    With his unexpected passing in 2013, the world lost a brilliant mind. The wide breadth of his impact inspired friends, family, colleagues, students and leaders of the church to gather their reflections on this celebrated yet humble theologian and philosopher. Richard Foster, a friend for over forty years, writes of Dallas: "He possessed in his person a spiritual formation into Christlikeness that was simply astonishing to all who were around him. Profound character formation had transpired in his body and mind and spirit until love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control were at the very center of the deep habit-structures of his life. He exhibited a substantively transformed life. Dallas was simply soaked in the presence of the living Christ."Curated by Gary Moon, director of the Dallas Willard Center, this medley of Dallas's wise teaching and lived model of Christlikeness―as well as snapshots and "Dallas-isms"―will move and motivate readers. Whether influenced by him as a family member, close friend, advisor, professor, philosopher, minister or reformer, contributors bring refreshing insight into not only his ideas and what shaped him, but also to his contagious theology of grace and joy.Contributors include: Richard J. Foster Jane Willard J. P. Moreland John Ortberg James Bryan Smith Alan Fadling Ruth Haley Barton and dozens more

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes


Svante Pääbo - 2014
    Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA.We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Drawing on genetic and fossil clues, Pääbo explores what is known about the origin of modern humans and their relationship to the Neanderthals and describes the fierce debate surrounding the nature of the two species’ interactions. His findings have not only redrawn our family tree, but recast the fundamentals of human history—the biological beginnings of fully modern Homo sapiens, the direct ancestors of all people alive today.A riveting story about a visionary researcher and the nature of scientific inquiry, Neanderthal Man offers rich insight into the fundamental question of who we are.

The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea


Robert Wald Sussman - 2014
    This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today.The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned "Aryans," as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization--policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas's new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking.Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why--when it comes to race--too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic


Lisa Stevenson - 2014
    Along the way, Stevenson troubles our commonsense understanding of what life is and what it means to care for the life of another. Through close attention to the images in which we think and dream and through which we understand the world, Stevenson describes a world in which life is beside itself: the name-soul of a teenager who dies in a crash lives again in his friend’s newborn baby, a young girl shares a last smoke with a dead friend in a dream, and the possessed hands of a clock spin uncontrollably over its face. In these contexts, humanitarian policies make little sense because they attempt to save lives by merely keeping a body alive. For the Inuit, and perhaps for all of us, life is "somewhere else," and the task is to articulate forms of care for others that are adequate to that truth.

Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago


Laurence Ralph - 2014
    Walking the streets of one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—where the local gang has been active for more than fifty years—Laurence Ralph talks with people whose lives are irrecoverably damaged, seeking to understand how they cope and how they can be better helped.             Going deep into a West Side neighborhood most Chicagoans only know from news reports—a place where children have been shot just for crossing the wrong street—Ralph unearths the fragile humanity that fights to stay alive there, to thrive, against all odds. He talks to mothers, grandmothers, and pastors, to activists and gang leaders, to the maimed and the hopeful, to aspiring rappers, athletes, or those who simply want safe passage to school or a steady job. Gangland Chicago, he shows, is as complicated as ever. It’s not just a warzone but a community, a place where people’s dreams are projected against the backdrop of unemployment, dilapidated housing, incarceration, addiction, and disease, the many hallmarks of urban poverty that harden like so many scars in their lives. Recounting their stories, he wrestles with what it means to be an outsider in a place like this, whether or not his attempt to understand, to help, might not in fact inflict its own damage. Ultimately he shows that the many injuries these people carry—like dreams—are a crucial form of resilience, and that we should all think about the ghetto differently, not as an abandoned island of unmitigated violence and its helpless victims but as a neighborhood, full of homes, as a part of the larger society in which we all live, together, among one another.

Spurgeon's Catechism: With Scriptural Proofs


Charles Haddon Spurgeon - 2014
    Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), while only twenty-one years old, edited his Baptist Catechism for his own congregation and introduced it during a sermon entitled, "A Glorious Habitation." This book contains his 82 questions and answers, as well as the sermon which launched his timeless catechism.

The Enslaved Queen: A Memoir about Electricity and Mind Control


Wendy Hoffman - 2014
    The author's poetic prose contrasts with the horror of the subject matter. The adult journeys back to give voice to infant and child parts of her, describing her handlers' early interventions to destroy bonding and create dissociation, the foundation of reverse-Kabbalah suicide and pathway programming, and the installation of mind control. Scenes from ordinary life are interspersed throughout the memoir. Nazi post-war recruitment of American subjects during the 1940s and 50s (including the infamous Dr. Mengele), children used for prostitution, pornography and the drug trade along with the workings of the Illuminati leadership and their international Feast of the Beast rituals are all included. The memoir also covers attempts at recovery, experiences with cult therapists in disguise and finally the author's work with an honest, competent therapist, which led to healing and her brain melding together. The ending acknowledges spiritual experiences, the power of love, the memory process, and thoughts on living and surviving a life such as hers.

Ireland: A Luminous Beauty


Peter Harbison - 2014
    And none more so than Ireland's. Ireland's light floods the landscape, luring the senses with a restless presence. The water surrounding and carving through the island reflects back to us the ever-changing movement of the wind-blown clouds and light. Stop for a minute and the settings change: what was straight is bent, light is dark, still is in motion. It is as though an unseen hand directs the wind, the clouds, and the light to harness our attention.Ireland: A Luminous Beauty is a collection of stunning full-color photographs by some of Ireland's finest landscape photographers with concise text blending history, myth, and a sense of place. Many of the photographs were taken in the early morning light or as the sun set. That hour after sunrise and before sunset, with the sun low in the sky, is known to photographers as the golden hour and favored for its soft, diffused light.We take a journey to one of the most beautiful places in the world. From the ancient stone monuments of the Boyne Valley to the treacherous stone steps of Skellig Michael; from the distinctive columns of the Giant's Causeway and the spectacularly sited Dunluce Castle ruins to lush, green countryside and fields of heather; from the limestone of the Burren (the rockiest part of Ireland) to exuberant stretches of flowers and gardens; from a moody sea and crashing surf to massive stone cliffs battered by the relentless pounding of the waves, and from steely rivers to tranquil lakes, it's all here.The Irish respond to this dramatic environment by transforming it into one that solidifies and enriches their own sense of place. We all have this instinct to create our own space, but the Irish have made an art of it. Through the ancient, natural, and cultivated landscapes, surrounded by history and legend, we discover and celebrate the spirit of Ireland and its luminous beauty.

The Third Chimpanzee for Young People: On the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal


Jared Diamond - 2014
    Now, faced with the threat of nuclear weapons and the effects of climate change, it seems our innate tendencies for violence and invention have led us to a crucial tipping point. Where did these traits come from? Are they part of our species immutable destiny? Or is there hope for our species’ future if we change? With fascinating facts and his unparalleled readability, Diamond intended his book to improve the world that today’s young people will inherit. Triangle Square’s The Third Chimpanzee for Young People is a book for future generation and the future they’ll help build. From the Hardcover edition.

Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS


Sanyu Mojola - 2014
    Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV infection compared to young African men, navigate their relationships, schooling, employment, and finances in the context of economic inequality and a devastating HIV epidemic. Writing from a unique outsider-insider perspective, Mojola argues that the entanglement of love, money, and the transformation of girls into consuming women lies at the heart of women's coming-of-age and health crises. At once engaging and compassionate, this text is an incisive analysis of gender, sexuality, and health in Africa.

Childbirth and the Evolution of Homo sapiens


Michel Odent - 2014
    Michel Odent, former obstetrician and revolutionary childbirth pioneer, believes that these are two good reasons to raise questions about the way babies are born, and the consequences this may have for the evolution of Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the transmission of acquired traits to subsequent generations can now be scientifically interpreted (epigenetics, the transmission of the mircobiome, etc), which may represent a defining moment in our understanding of the mechanisms by which evolution occurs. Recent scientific advances have been so spectacular that they merit this updated edition of a book that was originally published in 2013.Obstetric practice is generally evaluated in the short term; this ground-breaking book encourages us to think about modes of birth in the long term, and to consider the impact they have on our species and its evolution. It is a readable, yet thought-provoking book, which will give anyone interested in evolution and the future of Homo sapiens much new material to consider.A previous edition of this book was published under the title Childbirth and the Future of Homo sapiens.

Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power (Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods)


Timothy Pachirat - 2014
    But before the trial can get underway, a one-eyed wolfdog arrives with a mysterious liquid potion capable of rendering the ethnographers invisible in their fieldsites. Presented as a play that unfolds in seven acts, the ensuing drama provides readers with both a practical guide for how to conduct immersive participant-observation research and a sophisticated theoretical engagement with the relationship between ethnography as a research method and the operation of power. By interpolating "how-to" aspects of ethnographic research with deeper questions about ethnography’s relationship to power, this book presents a compelling introduction for those new to ethnography and rich theoretical insights for more seasoned ethnographic practitioners from across the social sciences. Just as ethnography as a research method depends crucially on serendipity, surprise, and an openness to ambiguity, the book’s dramatic and dialogic format encourages novices and experts alike to approach the study of power in ways that resist linear programs and dogmatic prescriptions. The result is a playful yet provocative invitation to rekindle those foundational senses of wonder and generative uncertainty that are all too often excluded from conversations about the methodologies and methods we bring to the study of the social world.

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve


H. Clark Barrett - 2014
    It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ ofplasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions and evolutionary histories that shape how theydevelop, what information they use, and what they do with that information.The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using therich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between nativist approaches to development, based on innateness, and empiricist approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependentspecies is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends.

Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture


Hisham D. Aidi - 2014
    He explains how certain kinds of music—particularly hip hop, but also jazz, Gnawa, Andalusian, Judeo-Arabic, Latin, and others—have come to represent a heightened racial identity and a Muslim consciousness that crisscrosses the globe. He describes how Western governments—particularly the U.S. and England—use music in an attempt to deradicalize Muslim youth abroad.

Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba


Katerina Martina Teaiwa - 2014
    As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human impact on the environment.

The Ends of the World


Déborah Danowski - 2014
    Environmental catastrophe and planetary apocalypse are subjects of enduring fascination and, as ethnographic studies show, human cultures have approached them in very different ways. Indeed, in the face of the growing perception of the dire effects of global warming, some of these visions have been given a new lease on life. Information and analyses concerning the human causes and the catastrophic consequences of the planetary 'crisis' have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, mobilising popular opinion as well as academic reflection.In this book, philosopher D�borah Danowski and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offer a bold overview and interpretation of these current discourses on 'the end of the world', reading them as thought experiments on the decline of the West's anthropological adventure � that is, as attempts, though not necessarily intentional ones, at inventing a mythology that is adequate to the present. This work has important implications for the future development of ecological practices and it will appeal to a broad audience interested in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and environmentalism.

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala


Kirsten Weld - 2014
    After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

Speaking Our Minds: Why human communication is different, and how language evolved to make it special


Thom Scott-Phillips - 2014
    Where did it come from? How did it develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective tell us about the nature of language and communication?Drawing on a range of disciplines including cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, Speaking Our Minds explains how language evolved and why we are the only species to communicate in this way. Written by a rising star in the field, this groundbreaking book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the origins and evolution of human communication and language.

Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health


Salmaan Keshavjee - 2014
    What started as an untested and unproven theory that the creation of unfettered markets would give rise to political democracy led to policies that promoted the belief that private markets were the optimal agents for the distribution of social goods, including health care. A vivid illustration of the infiltration of neoliberal ideology into the design and implementation of development programs, this case study, set in post-Soviet Tajikistan’s remote eastern province of Badakhshan, draws on extensive ethnographic and historical material to examine a “revolving drug fund” program—used by numerous nongovernmental organizations globally to address shortages of high-quality pharmaceuticals in poor communities. Provocative, rigorous, and accessible, Blind Spot offers a cautionary tale about the forces driving decision making in health and development policy today, illustrating how the privatization of health care can have catastrophic outcomes for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Humans: from the beginning: From the first apes to the first cities


Christopher Seddon - 2014
    Humans: from the beginning will appeal to anybody who reads about these discoveries, is intrigued by them, and would like to know more about prehistory. Now brought fully up to date for 2015, Humans: from the beginning is a single-volume guide to the human past. Drawing upon expert literature and the latest multi-disciplinary research, this rigorous but accessible book traces the whole of the human story from the first apes to the first cities. The end product of five years of research, it has also been planned from the ground up to take advantage of the eBook format and ease access to visual matter, references and glossary items. Humans: from the beginning is written for the non-specialist, but it is sufficiently comprehensive in scope, rigorous in content, and well-referenced to serve as an ideal ‘one-stop’ text not only for undergraduate students of relevant disciplines, but also to postgraduates, researchers and other academics seeking to broaden their knowledge. This 32-chapter work presents an even-handed coverage of topics including: • How climate change has long played a pivotal role in our affairs and those of our ancestors. • How humans evolved from apes at a time when the apes were facing extinction. • Why the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees (our closest living relatives) might have been more like a human than a chimpanzee. • A possible Asian rather than African origin for the earliest humans. • Why the Neanderthals were not the dimwits of popular imagination. • How language and modern human behaviour evolved: an examination of theories including those of Robin Dunbar, Steven Mithen and Derek Bickerton. • How the small group of modern humans that eventually colonised the whole of the non-African world might have started from Arabia rather than Africa. • David Lewis-Williams’ theory that the cave art of Ice Age Europe was linked to a shamanistic belief system that might be rooted in the very architecture of the human brain. • Why the Neolithic transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture was a lengthy process, with many down sides. • Colin Renfrew’s still-controversial theory that the spread of farming communities in Neolithic times was responsible for the languages now spoken in many parts of the world. • How an ‘Urban Revolution’ replaced egalitarian farming communities with socially-stratified kingdoms and city-states in just a few millennia. • How the complex, technological societies of today have much in common with not only the earliest states but much earlier primate societies.

Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity, and Drug Dealing


Sandra M. Bucerius - 2014
    Unwanted builds on five years of ethnographic research with a group of fifty-five second-generation Muslim immigrant drug dealers in Frankfurt, Germany to examine therelationship between immigration, social exclusion, and the informal economy. Having spent countless hours with these young men, hanging out in the streets, in cafes or bars and at the local community center, Sandra Bucerius explores the intimate aspects of one of the most discriminated and excludedpopulations in Germany. Bucerius looks at how the young men negotiate their participation in the drug market while still trying to adhere to their cultural and religious obligations and how they struggle to find a place within German society. The young men considered their involvement in the drugtrade a response to their exclusion at the same time that it provides a means of forging an identity and a place within German society. The insights into the lives, hopes, and dreams of these young men, who serve as an example for many Muslim and otherwise marginalized immigrant youth groups inWestern countries, provides the context necessary to understand their actions while never obscuring the many contradictory facets of their lives.

The Lost World of Ladakh: Photographic journeys through Indian Himalaya 1931-1934 (AHP:31)


Rupert Wilmot, Roger Bates, Nicky Harman - 2014
    Rangdol, President of Tserkarmo Monastery, Ladakh, IndiaA superb collection of 150 black-and-white photographs of 1930s Ladakh, capturing its final days as a hub of trade routes between Tibet and Kashmir, India and Yarkand. These portraits of people, landscapes and Buddhist ceremonies taken by amateur photographer Rupert Wilmot, are notable for their careful composition, fine detail and engaging informality. They have been meticulously researched and captioned by Nicky Harman and Roger Bates, respectively, niece and nephew of Rupert Wilmot, and include maps, an introduction and a bibliography. Of considerable historical and ethnographic interest.Claude Rupert Trench Wilmot (1897-1961) was a British army officer stationed in India during the 1930s, and a talented amateur photographer. Nicky Harman translates Chinese literature, and was formerly a lecturer at Imperial College London.Roger Bates digitized the photographs. A retired engineer, he has many years of experience working in digital photography.What other writers have said about The Lost World of Ladakh:“A wonderfully elegaic set of photographs recording a lost world: an almost mediaeval Ladakh untouched by modernity and still living at the hub of the old trans-Himalayan trade routes, a timeless Central Asia where soot writing boards, itinerant monks, arcane astrologers, masked dancers and elaborate turquoise headdresses were ‎still common. ‎These skillfully restored photographs make me ache to cross again the snowy heights of the Zoji-la and to re-visit this most fascinating region to see what is left.”William Dalrymple, author of Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42“Rupert Wilmot’s pictures are a delight. The monastery images include a spectacular set of the religious dance-drama at Hemis. There is also a visual record of the trades that lifted so many of Ladakh's villagers above the poverty level: the bustle in Leh Bazaar, the interior of a serai, and caravans of sheep, donkeys and ponies. Perhaps the book’s most outstanding feature is the series of portraits of Wilmot’s fellow-travellers and other Ladakhis, most of them in relaxed and cheerful mode, rather than posing stiffly.” Dr Janet Rizvi, writer and historian of Ladakh, Kashmir and the western Himalaya “These illustrations, superb as photographs in their own right, capture in visual form the essence of Ladakhi life as it was in the 1930s. While the Ladakh pictured here is in many ways gone, its legacy lives on in the distinctive culture of present-day Ladakh, which cannot be fully appreciated without a knowledge of its history. In this book we have a unique and vital contribution to that history.”Dr Philip Denwood, Emeritus Reader in Tibetan Studies, SOAS, University of LondonPrice for printed book: $28.00/£24.74. Published by Asian Highlands Perspectives, print copies available here: ¬http://www.lulu.com/shop/roger-bates-...

The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror


Joseph Masco - 2014
    counterterrorism apparatus in the Cold War's "balance of terror." He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. global War on Terror mobilized a wide range of affective, conceptual, and institutional resources established during the Cold War to enable a new planetary theater of operations. Tracing how specific aspects of emotional management, existential danger, state secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American social contract, Masco draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts, and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats--real, imagined, and emergent.

Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction


Gaston R. Gordillo - 2014
    Based on ethnographic research in this region where the mountains give way to the Gran Chaco lowlands, Gastón R. Gordillo shows how geographic space is inseparable from the material, historical, and affective ruptures embodied in debris. His exploration of the significance of rubble encompasses lost cities, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit missions and Spanish forts, stranded steamships, mass graves, and razed forests. Examining the effects of these and other forms of debris on the people living on nearby ranches and farms, and in towns, Gordillo emphasizes that for the rural poor, the rubble left in the wake of capitalist and imperialist endeavors is not romanticized ruin but the material manifestation of the violence and dislocation that created it.

Sri Lanka: Hiding the Elephant’ Documenting War Crimes, Crimes against humanity and Genocide


Ramu Manivannan - 2014
    The answer is, YES!, the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka has taken place over period of time involving several steps and strategies. This book is not only document of mass murder, the war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also an effort to carry forward the struggle to prevent genocides anywhere in the world in the future.

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory


Lynnell L. Thomas - 2014
    In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.

Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India


Amrita Pande - 2014
    In the first detailed ethnography of India's surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics and hostels and speaks with surrogates and their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons in order to shed light on this burgeoning business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande's research focuses on how reproduction meets production in surrogacy and how this reflects characteristics of India's larger labor system.Pande's interviews prove surrogates are more than victims of disciplinary power, and she examines the strategies they deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. While some women are coerced into the business by their families, others negotiate with clients and their clinics to gain access to technologies and networks otherwise closed to them. As surrogates, the women Pande meets get to know and make the most of advanced medical discoveries. They traverse borders and straddle relationships that test the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality. Those who focus on the inherent inequalities of India's surrogacy industry believe the practice should be either banned or strictly regulated. Pande instead advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

AmalgaNations


Doug Hendrie - 2014
    A whirlwind world tour through surprising subcultures told with subtle humour, AmalgaNations picks up where Louis Theroux leaves off.

The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers


Sherene Baugher - 2014
    An essential text for many archaeologists, art historians, and cultural anthropolgists.”—Harold Mytum, coeditor of Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of 19th- and 20th-Century Mass Internment Gravestones, cemeteries, and memorial markers offer fixed points in time to examine Americans’ changing attitudes toward death and dying. In tracing the evolution of commemorative practices from the seventeenth century to the present, Sherene Baugher and Richard Veit offer insights into our transformation from a preindustrial and agricultural to an industrial, capitalist country.           Paying particular attention to populations often overlooked in the historical record—African Americans, Native Americans, and immigrant groups—the authors also address the legal, logistical, and ethical issues that confront field researchers who conduct cemetery excavations. Baugher and Veit reveal how gender, race, ethnicity, and class have shaped the cultural landscapes of burial grounds and summarize knowledge gleaned from the archaeological study of human remains and the material goods interred with the deceased.           From the practices of historic period Native American groups to elite mausoleums, and from almshouse mass graves to the rise in popularity of green burials today, The Archaeology of Cemeteries and Gravemarkers provides an overview of the many facets of this fascinating topic.

Autoethnography


Tony E. Adams - 2014
    The method challenges canonical ways of doing research and recognizes how personal experience influences the research process. Autoethnographyacknowledges and accomodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research. In this book, the authors provide a historical and conceptual overview of autoethnography. They share their stories of coming to autoethnography and identify key concerns and considerations that ledto the development of the method. Next, they outline the purposes and practices--the core ideals--of autoethnography, how autoethnographers can accomplish these ideals, and why researchers might choose to do autoethnography. They describe the processes of doing autoethnography, conducting fieldwork, discussing ethics in research, and interpreting and analyzing personal experience, and they explore the various modes and techniques used and involved in writing autoethnography. They conclude with goals for creating and assessing autoethnography and describe the future of autoethnographic inquiry.Throughout, the authors provide numerous examples of their work and share key resources. This book will serve as both a guide to the practices of doing autoethnography and an exemplar of autoethnographic research processes and representations.

Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World


Kathy Davis - 2014
    Since its origin among immigrants from the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it has crossed and re-crossed many borders.Yet, never before has tango been danced by so many people and in so many different places as today. Argentinean tango is more than a specific music and style of dancing. It is also a cultural imaginary which embodies intense passion, hyper-heterosexuality, and dangerous exoticism.In the wake of its latest revival, tango has become both a cultural symbol of Argentinean national identity and a transnational cultural space in which a modest, yet growing number of dancers from different parts of the globe meet on the dance floor.Through interviews and ethnographical research in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, Kathy Davis shows why a dance from another era and another place appeals to men and women from different parts of the world and what happens to them as they become caught up in the tango salon culture. She shows how they negotiate the ambivalences, contradictions, and hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and global relations of power between North and South inwhich Argentinean tango is--and has always been--embroiled.Davis also explores her uneasiness about her own passion for a dance which--when seen through the lens of contemporary critical feminist and postcolonial theories--seems, at best, odd, and, at worst, disreputable and even a bit shameful. She uses the disjuncture between the incorrect pleasures and complicated politics of dancing tango as a resource for exploring the workings of passion as experience, as performance, and as cultural discourse. She concludes that dancing tango should be viewed less as a love/hate embrace with colonial overtones than a passionate encounter across many different borders between dancers who share a desire for difference and a taste of the 'elsewhere.' Dancing Tango is a vivid, intriguing account of an important global cultural phenomenon.

Home: A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory


Francis Pryor - 2014
    In Home, the Time Team expert explores the first nine thousand years of life in Britain, from the retreat of the glaciers to the Romans' departure. Tracing the settlement of domestic communities, he shows how archaeology enables us to reconstruct the evolution of habits, traditions and customs. But this, too, is Francis Pryor's own story: of his passion for unearthing our past, from Yorkshire to the west country, Lincolnshire to Wales, digging in freezing winters, arid summers, mud and hurricanes, through frustrated journeys and euphoric discoveries. Evocative and intimate, Home shows how, in going about their daily existence, our prehistoric ancestors created the institution that remains at the heart of the way we live now: the family.'Under his gaze, the land starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today . . . Pryor feels the land rather than simply knowing it' - Guardian Former president of the Council for British Archaeology, Dr Francis Pryor has spent over thirty years studying our prehistory. He has excavated sites as diverse as Bronze Age farms, field systems and entire Iron Age villages. He appears frequently on TV's Time Team and is the author of The Making of the British Landscape, Seahenge, as well as Britain BC and Britain AD, both of which he adapted and presented as Channel 4 series.Show More Show Less

Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America


Andrew Woolford - 2014
    Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples.Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Margaret D. Jabobs, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford

Consuming Flame: A Devotional Anthology for Loki and His Family


Galina Krasskova - 2014
    It includes the texts of "Feeding the Flame," "Honoring Sigyn," and "Sigyn: Our Lady of the Staying Power" with a significant portion of new material venerating Loki, Sigyn, Angurboda, and Their Children. This omnibus edition provides the reader with the result of twenty years of engagement with this most controversial of Gods. Galina Krasskova has been a priest of Loki and Odin for over twenty years. A Diviner and Northern Tradition shaman, she is also the author of over a dozen books on Heathenry, including several stand-alone devotions to Loki and His family. Ms. Krasskova holds a Masters Degree in Religious Studies and is currently pursuing her PhD in Classics. She may be found blogging and causing trouble at http://krasskova.weebly.com.

Eternal Remains: World Mummification and the Beliefs That Make It Necessary


Ken Jeremiah - 2014
    It is unique, as it focuses on the religious and spiritual beliefs that necessitated the practice. Eternal Remains: World Mummification and the Beliefs that make it Necessary provides an overview of mummification, but it concentrates on the reasons behind the act. It investigates the justification for preserving dead bodies, and in so doing, probes the true nature of both life and death. Author Bio: Dr. Ken Jeremiah has written extensively about history, religion, and critical thinking. His previous books include Remnants of a Distant Past, Christian Mummification, Living Buddhas, Aikido Ground Fighting, and If the Samurai Played Golf...Zen Strategies for a Winning Game. He teaches world language and comparative religion courses, and currently resides in Narragansett, RI. Keywords: Religion, Mummies, Christian, Buddhist, Inca, Jivaro, Tutankhamen, Death, Incorruptible, Tarim

Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion


David Chidester - 2014
    In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project.   In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Dictionary of Classical Mythology


Jennifer R. March - 2014
    It is a comprehensive A - Z guide to Greek and Roman mythology. All major myths, legends and fables are here, including gods and goddesses, heroes and villains, dangerous women, legendary creatures and monsters. Characters such as Achilles and Odysseus have extensive entries, as do epic journeys and heroic quests, like that of Jason and the Argonauts to win the Golden Fleece, all alongside a plethora of information on the creation of the cosmos, the many metamorphoses of gods and humans, and the Trojan War, plus more minor figures - nymphs, seers, kings, rivers, to name but a few. In this superbly authoritative work the myths are brilliantly retold, along with any major variants, and with extensive translations from ancient authors that give life to the narratives and a sense of the vibrant cultures that shaped the development of classical myth. The 172 illustrations give visual immediacy to the words, by showing how ancient artists perceived their gods and heroes. The impact of myths on ancient art is also explored, as is and their influence in the post-classical arts, emphasising the ongoing inspiration afforded by the ancient myths. Also included are two maps of the ancient world, a list of the ancient sources and their chronology, the more important genealogies, and an index of recurrent mythical motifs. Praise for the first edition: -... the Dictionary of Classical Mythology is exemplary, indeed the best I have consulted ... clearly and engagingly written ...it not only gives reliable answers but also encourages reading on.- Simon Goldhill, Times Literary Supplement -a prodigious, authoritative gazetteer, each entry both typographically and stylistically readable, and if you know more than is contained in these pages then you have no need of it.- Nicholas Lezard, Guardian Book of the Week -Greek myths pervade our own art and literature almost as much as they influenced that of classical times, and this will be an invaluable guide.- The Good Book Guide -... a modern encyclopaedia of myth and legend which is user-friendly in layout, presentation and style ... vivid and readable.- Paula James, The Classical Review -These stories are frequently the spark that ignites a wider interest in the classical world, and March provides a wealth of inflammatory material.- Charles Paterson, JACT Review -This dictionary will still be valuable all through the next century.- Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones -... vivid, detailed where it matters, yet concise, accurate, no padding, always to the point - it's a joy to read.- Herwig Maehler

Evolved Morality: The Biology and Philosophy of Human Conscience


Frans de Waal - 2014
    New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behavior, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behavior is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume debates the origin and working of human morality within the context of science as well as religion and philosophy. Experts from widely different backgrounds speculate how morality may have evolved, how it develops in the child, and what science can tell us about its working and origin. They also discuss how to deal with the age-old facts-versus-values debate, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. The implications of this exchange are enormous, as they may transform cherished views on if and why we are the only moral species. These articles are also published in Behaviour, Volume 151, Nos. 2/3 (February 2014). Suitable for course adoption!

Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between


Bjørn Thomassen - 2014
    Coming to the fore in recent years in social and political theory and extending beyond is original use as developed within anthropology, liminality has come to denote spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge, often in unpredictable ways. Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of a non-spacesa, the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society. Shedding new light on a concept central to social thought, as well as its capacity for pushing social and political theory in new directions, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and philosophy working in fields such as social, political and anthropological theory, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and historical anthropology and sociology."

Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism


Richa Nagar - 2014
    With stories, encounters, and anecdotes as well as methodological reflections, Nagar grapples with the complexity of working through solidarities, responsibility, and ethics while involved in politically engaged scholarship. Experiences that range from the streets of Dar es Salaam to farms and development offices in North India inform discussion of the labor and politics of coauthorship, translation, and genre blending in research and writing that cross multiple--and often difficult--borders. The author links the implicit assumptions, issues, and questions involved with scholarship and political action, and explores the epistemological risks and possibilities of creative research that bring these into intimate dialogueDaringly self-conscious, Muddying the Waters reveals a politically engaged researcher and writer working to become ""radically vulnerable,"" and the ways in which such radical vulnerability can allow a re-imagining of collaboration that opens up new avenues to collective dreaming and laboring across sociopolitical, geographical, linguistic, and institutional borders.

Ang Diablo sa Filipinas ayon sa nasasabi sa mga casulatan luma sa Kastila (The Devil in the Philippines according to ancient Spanish documents)


Isabelo de los Reyes - 2014
    With work erudite, wide-ranging, and energetically written, he has given to the Philippines visibility in the world of transnational scholarship. His recent essays in New Left Review and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination—and now the present volume—are not only eye-opening but a joy to read. More than an incursion into scholarship, reading Anderson is an intellectual adventure.- Resil B. Mojares (Professor Emeritus, University of San Carlos)

An Anthropologist's Arrival: A Memoir


Ruth M. Underhill - 2014
    Underhill (1883-1984) was one of the twentieth century's legendary anthropologists, forged in the same crucible as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. After decades of trying to escape her Victorian roots, Underhill took on a new adventure at the age of forty-six, when she entered Columbia University as a doctoral student of anthropology. Celebrated now as one of America's pioneering anthropologists, Underhill reveals her life's journey in frank, tender, unvarnished revelations that form the basis of An Anthropologist's Arrival. This memoir, edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash, is based on unpublished archives, including an unfinished autobiography and interviews conducted prior to her death, held by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. In brutally honest words, Underhill describes her uneven passage through life, beginning with a searing portrait of the Victorian restraints on women and her struggle to break free from her Quaker family's privileged but tightly laced control. Tenderly and with humor she describes her transformation from a struggling "sweet girl" to wife and then divorcee. Professionally she became a welfare worker, a novelist, a frustrated bureaucrat at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a professor at the University of Denver, and finally an anthropologist of distinction. Her witty memoir reveals the creativity and tenacity that pushed the bounds of ethnography, particularly through her focus on the lives of women, for whom she served as a role model, entering a working retirement that lasted until she was nearly 101 years old. No quotation serves to express Ruth Underhill's adventurous view better than a line from her own poetry: "Life is not paid for. Life is lived. Now come."

The Andean Cosmovision: A Path for Exploring Profound Aspects of Ourselves, Nature, and the Cosmos


Oakley Gordon - 2014
    It is fundamentally different than the Western worldview. This Cosmovision is not a set of concepts or beliefs. It cannot be described or encompassed by words. It can, however, be experienced and it can be explored. This is a guidebook for exploring the Andean Cosmovision. The Cosmovision provides a path for discovering profound aspects of ourselves and the Cosmos. It is a path with a heart. It nourishes a more loving and mutually supportive relationship between ourselves and nature and the Cosmos. In addition to being personally significant, this relationship may be exactly what our species needs to start heading toward a future of greater beauty and greater health for the planet.For this path you don't need a guru. You need the Pachamama (the great being who is the mother earth); you need the Apus (the great beings who are the majestic mountain peaks); you need the stars, the wind, the trees, the rivers, the sun. This book will open the door to new territory and give you a map and some advice. It will then be up to you to determine whether what you find touches you deeply.

The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism


Mayanthi L. Fernando - 2014
    The headscarf crisis signaled an Islamic revival among the children of North African immigrants; it also ignited an ongoing debate about the place of Muslims within the secular nation-state. Based on ten years of ethnographic research, The Republic Unsettled alternates between an analysis of Muslim French religiosity and the contradictions of French secularism that this emergent religiosity precipitated. Mayanthi L. Fernando explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions to create novel modes of ethical and political life, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a new future for France. She also examines how the political discourses, institutions, and laws that constitute French secularism regulate Islam, transforming the Islamic tradition and what it means to be Muslim. Fernando traces how long-standing tensions within secularism and republican citizenship are displaced onto France's Muslims, who, as a result, are rendered illegitimate as political citizens and moral subjects. She argues, ultimately, that the Muslim question is as much about secularism as it is about Islam.

Written as I Remember It: Teachings (??ms t???w) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder


Elsie Paul - 2014
    In this remarkable book, Sliammon elder Elsie Paul collaborates with a scholar, Paige Raibmon, and her granddaughter, Harmony Johnson, to tell her life story and the history of her people, in her own words and storytelling style. Raised by her grandparents who took her on their seasonal travels, Paul spent most of her childhood learning Sliammon ways, teachings, and stories and is one of the last surviving mother-tongue speakers of the Sliammon language. She shares this traditional knowledge with future generations in Written as I Remember It.

Ötzi the Iceman


Amanda Lanser - 2014
    This title examines the study of Ötzi the iceman. The book explores what scientists know about Ötzis life, traces his discovery and the subsequent scientific investigation, and discusses future study and conservation efforts. Well-placed sidebars, vivid photos, helpful maps, and a glossary enhance readers understanding of the topic. Additional features include a table of contents, a selected bibliography, source notes, and an index, plus a timeline and essential facts. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

Longing for the Past: The 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia


David Murray - 2014
    In doing so, they created a rich historical archive of beautiful music that has been vastly underexplored and barely studied. "Longing for the Past "is the first-ever survey of the 78 rpm record era in Southeast Asia. A kaleidoscopic collection featuring four CDs with 90 tracks of music from 1905 to 1966, this beautifully produced 272-page volume includes essays and annotations by ethnomusicologists, along with more than 250 vintage photographs, record labels and sleeves. Illustrations include photographs of musicians from the countries covered, which range from Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam to Singapore, Cambodia and Malaysia. The nearly 100 tracks range from Laotian classical music, Vietnamese opera and Cambodian monks to Khmer classical selections, Buddhist sermons from Laos and folk opera and piphat ensembles from Thailand.

Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life


Lucas Bessire - 2014
    By showing how this disconnect reverberates within Ayoreo bodies and minds, his reflexive account takes aim at the devastating consequences of our society’s continued obsession with the primitive and raises important questions about anthropology’s potent capacity to further or impede indigenous struggles for sovereignty. The result is a timely update to the classic literary ethnographies of South America, a sustained critique of the so-called ontological turn—one of anthropology’s hottest trends—and, above all, an urgent call for scholars and activists alike to rethink their notions of difference.

Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor


Nicole Constable - 2014
    In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.

The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky


Gaylord Torrence - 2014
    The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky celebrates the extraordinary beauty, power, and spiritual resonance of Plains Indian art throughout time. Richly illustrated, this monumental volume includes a wealth of masterworks from European and North American collections, ranging from a 2,000-year-old Human Effigy stone pipe to a 2011 beaded adaptation of designer shoes. Works of art collected centuries ago by French traders and travelers are presented together with those acquired by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition of 1804–6, along with objects from the early reservation era and contemporary works based in traditional forms and ideas. The distinct Plains aesthetic—intertwined with the natural world, ephemeral, and materially rich—is revealed through an array of forms and mediums: painting and drawing; sculptural works in stone, wood, antler, and shell; porcupine quill and glass bead embroidery; feather work; painted robes depicting figures and geometric shapes; and richly ornamented clothing and ceremonial objects. Many nations are represented—Osage, Quapaw, Omaha, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Mesquakie, Kansa, and others. With newly researched texts by leading scholars, this important book charts the continuum of centuries of artistic tradition and reflects the significant place that Plains Indian culture holds in European history and in the heritage of North America.

Cutted Chicken in Shanghai


Sharon Winters - 2014
    From supermarkets to restaurants, and her driver who doesn’t speak English, every aspect of her daily life contains a challenge. A delightfully realized memoir full of humor, warmth, and thoughtful insights. Readers will find this well-written diary-cum-travelogue an eye-opening and entertaining read.

The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry


Adam Wyeth - 2014
    Each chapter begins with a poem by one of Ireland's leading poets, followed by sharp, shrewd analysis of its making and references. As well as poetry's inner workings, the reader will discover a wealth of Celtic culture - their gods, heroes, and folklore - and its continuing role in Ireland's identity today.

Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America


Nancy J. Turner - 2014
    In Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge, she integrates her research into a two-volume ethnobotanical tour-de-force. Drawing on information shared by Indigenous botanical experts and collaborators, the ethnographic and historical record, and from linguistics, palaeobotany, archaeology, phytogeography, and other fields, Turner weaves together a complex understanding of the traditions of use and management of plant resources in this vast region. She follows Indigenous inhabitants over time and through space, showing how they actively participated in their environments, managed and cultivated valued plant resources, and maintained key habitats that supported their dynamic cultures for thousands of years, as well as how knowledge was passed on from generation to generation and from one community to another. To understand the values and perspectives that have guided Indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge and practices, Turner looks beyond the details of individual plant species and their uses to determine the overall patterns and processes of their development, application, and adaptation. Volume 1 presents a historical overview of ethnobotanical knowledge in the region before and after European contact. The ways in which Indigenous peoples used and interacted with plants - for nutrition, technologies, and medicine - are examined. Drawing connections between similarities across languages, Turner compares the names of over 250 plant species in more than fifty Indigenous languages and dialects to demonstrate the prominence of certain plants in various cultures and the sharing of goods and ideas between peoples. She also examines the effects that introduced species and colonialism had on the region's Indigenous peoples and their ecologies. Volume 2 provides a sweeping account of how Indigenous organizational systems developed to facilitate the harvesting, use, and cultivation of plants, to establish economic connections across linguistic and cultural borders, and to preserve and manage resources and habitats. Turner describes the worldviews and philosophies that emerged from the interactions between peoples and plants, and how these understandings are expressed through cultures’ stories and narratives. Finally, she explores the ways in which botanical and ecological knowledge can be and are being maintained as living, adaptive systems that promote healthy cultures, environments, and indigenous plant populations. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge both challenges and contributes to existing knowledge of Indigenous peoples' land stewardship while preserving information that might otherwise have been lost. Providing new and captivating insights into the anthropogenic systems of northwestern North America, it will stand as an authoritative reference work and contribute to a fuller understanding of the interactions between cultures and ecological systems.

Eden in Sumer on the Niger: Archaeological, Linguistic, and Genetic Evidence of 450,000 Years of Atlantis, Eden, and Sumer in West Africa (African Digital Education Series Book 2) [Kindle Edition]


Catherine Obianuju Acholonu - 2014
    It provides multidisciplinary evidence of the actual geographical location in West Africa of the Garden of Eden, Atlantis and the original homeland of the Sumerian people before their migration to the "Middle East". By translating hitherto unknown pre-cuneiform inscriptions of the Sumerians, Catherine Acholonu and Sidney Davis have uncovered thousands of years of Africa's lost pre-history and evidences of the West African origins of the earliest Pharaohs and Kings of Egypt and Sumer such as Menes and Sargon the Great. This book provides answers to all lingering questions about the African Cavemen (Igbos/Esh/Adamas/Adites) original guardians of the human races, Who gave their genes for the creation of Homo Sapiens (Adam) and were the teachers in the First Age of the world.

God's Design for Man and Woman: A Biblical-Theological Survey


Andreas J. Köstenberger - 2014
    Moving beyond other treatments that primarily focus on select passages, this winsome volume traces Scripture's overarching pattern related to male-female relationships in both the Old and New Testaments. Those interested in careful discussion rather than caustic debate will discover that God's design is not confining or discriminatory but beautiful, wise, liberating, and good.

Land's End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier


Tania Murray Li - 2014
    Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Yet the winners and losers in this transition were not strangers—they were kin and neighbors. Li's richly peopled account takes the reader into the highlanders' world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them.The book challenges complacent, modernization narratives promoted by development agencies that assume inefficient farmers who lose out in the shift to high-value export crops can find jobs elsewhere. Decades of uneven and often jobless growth in Indonesia meant that for newly landless highlanders, land's end was a dead end. The book also has implications for social movement activists, who seldom attend to instances where enclosure is initiated by farmers rather than coerced by the state or agribusiness corporations. Li's attention to the historical, cultural, and ecological dimensions of this conjuncture demonstrates the power of the ethnographic method and its relevance to theory and practice today.

Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia


Valerie Sperling - 2014
    Despite their enmity, regime allies and detractors alike have wielded traditional concepts of masculinity, femininity, and homophobia as a means of symbolic endorsement or disparagement of political leaders and policies.By repeatedly using machismo as a means of legitimation, Putin's regime (unlike that of Gorbachev or Yeltsin) opened the door to the concerted use of gendered rhetoric and imagery as a means to challenge regime authority. Sex, Politics, and Putin analyzes the political uses of gender norms and sexualization in Russia through three case studies: pro- and anti-regime groups' activism aimed at supporting or undermining the political leaders on their respective sides; activism regarding military conscription and patriotism; and feminist activism. Arguing that gender norms are most easily invoked as tools of authority-building when there exists widespread popular acceptance of misogyny and homophobia, Sperling also examines the ways in which sexism and homophobia are reflected in Russia's public sphere.

Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond


Beatriz Caiuby Labate - 2014
    The volume focuses on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon.Ayahuasca use has spread to countries far beyond its Amazonian origin, spurring a wide variety of legal and cultural responses. The essays in this volume look at how these responses have influenced ritual design and performance in traditional and non-traditional contexts, how displaced indigenouspeople and rubber tappers are engaged in the creative reinvention of rituals, and how these rituals help build ethnic alliances and cultural and political strategies. These essays explore important classic and contemporary issues in anthropology, including the relationship between the expansion ofecotourism and ethnic tourism and recent indigenous cultural revival and the emergence of new ethnic identities. The volume also examines trends in the commodification of indigenous cultures in post-colonial contexts, the combination of shamanism with a network of health and spiritually relatedservices, and identity hybridization in global societies.The rich ethnographies and extensive analysis of these essays will allow deeper understanding of the role of ritual in mediating the encounter between indigenous traditions and modern societies.

The Ethnic Restaurateur


Krishnendu Ray - 2014
    In this ground-breaking new book, Krishnendu Ray reverses this trend by exploring the culinary world from the perspective of the ethnic restaurateur.Focusing on New York City, he examines the lived experience, work, memories, and aspirations of immigrants working in the food industry. He shows how migrants become established in new places, creating a taste of home and playing a key role in influencing food cultures as a result of transactions between producers, consumers and commentators.Based on extensive interviews with immigrant restaurateurs and students, chefs and alumni at the Culinary Institute of America, ethnographic observation at immigrant eateries and haute institutional kitchens as well as historical sources such as the US census, newspaper coverage of restaurants, reviews, menus, recipes, and guidebooks, Ray reveals changing tastes in a major American city between the late 19th and through the 20th century.Written by one of the most outstanding scholars in the field, The Ethnic Restaurateur is an essential read for students and academics in food studies, culinary arts, sociology, urban studies and indeed anyone interested in popular culture and cooking in the United States.

Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power


Bryan Tilt - 2014
    The benefits are considerable: dams deliver hydropower, provide reliable irrigation water, protect people and farmland against flooding, and produce hydroelectricity in a nation with a seeimingly insatiable appetite for energy. As hydropower responds to a larger share of energy demand, dams may also help to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, welcome news in a country where air and water pollution have become dire and greenhouse gas emissions are the highest in the world.Yet the advantages of dams come at a high cost for river ecosystems and for the social and economic well-being of local people, who face displacement and farmland loss. This book examines the array of water-management decisions faced by Chinese leaders and their consequences for local communities. Focusing on the southwestern province of Yunnan--a major hub for hydropower development in China--which encompasses one of the world's most biodiverse temperate ecosystems and one of China's most ethnically and culturally rich regions, Bryan Tilt takes the reader from the halls of decision-making power in Beijing to Yunnan's rural villages. In the process, he examines the contrasting values of government agencies, hydropower corporations, NGOs, and local communities and explores how these values are linked to longstanding cultural norms about what is right, proper, and just. He also considers the various strategies these groups use to influence water-resource policy, including advocacy, petitioning, and public protest. Drawing on a decade of research, he offers his insights on whether the world's most populous nation will adopt greater transparency, increased scientific collaboration, and broader public participation as it continues to grow economically.

Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone


Susan Shepler - 2014
    Based on eighteen months of participant-observer ethnographic fieldwork and ten years of follow-up research, the book argues that there is a fundamental disconnect between the Western idea of the child soldier and the individual lived experiences of the child soldiers of Sierra Leone. Susan Shepler contends that the reintegration of former child soldiers is a political process having to do with changing notions of childhood as one of the central structures of society.For most Westerners the tragedy of the idea of "child soldier" centers around perceptions of lost and violated innocence. In contrast, Shepler finds that for most Sierra Leoneans, the problem is not lost innocence but the horror of being separated from one's family and the resulting generational break in youth education. Further, Shepler argues that Sierra Leonean former child soldiers find themselves forced to strategically perform (or refuse to perform) as the"child soldier" Western human rights initiatives expect in order to most effectively gain access to the resources available for their social reintegration. The strategies don't always work--in some cases, Shepler finds, Western human rights initiatives do more harm than good.While this volume focuses on the well-known case of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, it speaks to the larger concerns of childhood studies with a detailed ethnography of people struggling over the situated meaning of the categories of childhood.It offers an example of the cultural politics of childhood in action, in which the very definition of childhood is at stake and an important site of political contestation.

Anishinaabe Mino-Bimaadiziwin - The Way of a Good Life


D'Arcy Rheault - 2014
    An examination of Anishinaabe philosophy, ethics and traditional knowledge

From Samoa With Love?: Samoan Völkerschauen: Ethnological Displays in the German Empire. Retracing the Footsteps


Hilke Thode-Arora - 2014
    

Medieval Childhood: Archaeological Approaches


Dawn M. Hadley - 2014
    The everyday use of space and changes in the layout of buildings are examined, in order to reveal how these impacted upon the daily practices and tasks of household tasks relating to the upbringing of children. Aspects of work and play are explored: how, archaeologically, we can determine whether, and in what context, children played board and dice games? How we may gain insights into the medieval countryside from the perspective of children and thus begin to understand the processes of reproduction of particular aspects of medieval society and the spaces where children's activities occurred; and the possible role of children in the medieval pottery industry. Funerary aspects are considered: the burial of infants in early English Christian cemeteries the treatment and disposal of infants and children in the cremation ritual of early Anglo-Saxon England; and childhood, children and mobility in early medieval western Britain, especially Wales. The volume concludes with an exploration of what archaeologists can draw from other disciplines - historians, art historians, folklorists and literary scholars - and the approaches that they take to the study of childhood and thus the enhancement of our knowledge of medieval society in general.

Tooth Development in Human Evolution and Bioarchaeology


Simon Hillson - 2014
    When and where did this schedule evolve? Have technological advances, farming and cities had any effect upon it? Addressing these and other key questions in palaeoanthropology and bioarchaeology, Simon Hillson examines the unique role of teeth in preserving detailed microscopic records of development throughout childhood and into adulthood. The text critically reviews theory, assumptions, methods and literature, providing the dental histology background to anthropological studies of both growth rate and growth disruption. Chapters also examine existing studies of growth rate in the context of human evolution and primate development more generally, together with implications for life history. The final chapters consider how defects in the tooth development sequence shed light on the consequences of biological and social transitions, contributing to our understanding of the evolution of modern human development and cognition.

The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA


Sarah Lynn Lopez - 2014
    With The Remittance Landscape, Sarah Lynn Lopez offers the first extended look at what is done with that money, and in particular how the building boom that it has generated has changed Mexican towns and villages. Lopez not only identifies a clear correspondence between the flow of remittances and the recent building boom in rural Mexico but also proposes that this construction boom itself motivates migration and changes social and cultural life for migrants and their families. At the same time, migrants are changing the landscapes of cities in the United States: for example, Chicago and Los Angeles are home to buildings explicitly created as headquarters for Mexican workers from several Mexican states such as Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. Through careful ethnographic and architectural analysis, and fieldwork on both sides of the border, Lopez brings migrant hometowns to life and positions them within the larger debates about immigration.

Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism


Robert Fletcher - 2014
    Drawing on ethnographic research and his own experiences working as an ecotour guide throughout the United States and Latin America, Robert Fletcher argues that participation in rigorous outdoor activities resonates with the particular cultural values of the white, upper-middle-class Westerners who are the majority of ecotourists. Navigating 13,000-foot mountain peaks or treacherous river rapids demands deferral of gratification, perseverance through suffering, and a willingness to assume risks in pursuit of continuous progress. In this way, characteristics originally cultivated for professional success have been transferred to the leisure realm at a moment when traditional avenues for achievement in the public sphere seem largely exhausted. At the same time, ecotourism provides a temporary escape from the ostensible ills of modern society by offering a transcendent "wilderness" experience that contrasts with the indoor, sedentary, mental labor characteristically performed by white-collar workers.

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies


Pashaura Singh - 2014
    A number of essays within this collection also provide a more practical dimension, written by artists and practitioners of the tradition. The handbook is divided into eight thematic sections that explore different "expressions" of Sikhism. Historical, literary, ideological, institutional, and artistic expressions are considered in turn, followed by discussion of Sikhs in the Diaspora, and of caste and gender in the Panth. Each section begins with an essay by a prominent scholar in the field, providing an overview of the topic. Further essays provide detail and further treat the fluid, multivocal nature of both the Sikh past and the present. The handbook concludes with a section considering future directions in Sikh Studies.

Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity


Shabana Mir - 2014
    Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives. Mir, an anthropologist of education, focuses on key leisure practices--drinking, dating, and fashion--to probe how Muslim American students adapt to campus life and build social networks that are seamlessly American, Muslim, and youthful. In this lively and highly accessible book, we hear the women's own often poignant voices as they articulate how they find spaces within campus culture as well as their Muslim student communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals, women, and Americans. Mir concludes, however, that institutions of higher learning continue to have much to learn about fostering religious diversity on campus.

A Natural History of Human Thinking


Michael Tomasello - 2014
    In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today's great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello's "shared intentionality hypothesis" captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City


Laurent Gayer - 2014
    It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, landand bhatta-protection money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a Pakistan in miniature, has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially.Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in thecity's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence manageable for its populations. Whether such ordered disorder is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachiworks despite-and sometimes through-violence.

The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean


Michael Hannan - 2014
    This book is for senior executives who are on a mission to jack up the performance of their information-technology (IT) project portfolios, and who are no longer satisfied that established "best practices" are sufficient to achieve their organizations' business and mission objectives.The authors cut through the confusion and zealotry of leading improvement approaches, and distill them down to a practical set of specific techniques you can apply for maximum benefit to your IT project portfolio.If you seek a carefully designed set of proven, harmoniously integrated techniques engineered to deliver significantly higher performance thresholds—all presented in a concise, focused manner with executive audiences in mind—then this book is for you.

School's Out: Gay and Lesbian Teachers in the Classroom


Catherine Connell - 2014
    Catherine Connell's examination of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers complicating factors, from local law and politics to gender privilege. She also describes how racialized discourses of homophobia thwart challenges to sexual injustices in schools. Written with ethnographic verve, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics.

Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty


Veena Das - 2014
    It traces the unfolding of illness within families, local communities, neighborhood markets and in occult worlds. Privileging the experience of people living in these neighborhoods it asks how can global health be made to take this experience into account rather than escape from it?

Moral Laboratories: Family Peril and the Struggle for a Good Life


Cheryl Mattingly - 2014
    It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.

Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith


Timothy Larsen - 2014
    Many of its most prominent theorists have been agnostics who assumed that ethnographic findings and theories had discredited religious beliefs. E. B. Tylor, thefounder of the discipline in Britain, lost his faith through studying anthropology. James Frazer saw the material that he presented in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough, as demonstrating that Christian thought was based on the erroneous thought patterns of savages. On the other hand, some of the most eminent anthropologists have been Christians, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Edith Turner. Moreover, they openly presented articulate reasons for how their religious convictions cohered with their professional work.Despite being a major site of friction between faith and modern thought, the relationship between anthropology and Christianity has never before been the subject of a book-length study. In this groundbreaking work, Timothy Larsen examines the point where doubt and faith collide with anthropologicaltheory and evidence.

Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches


Lindsay Guarino - 2014
    The art form's roots are African. Its trunk is vernacular, shaped by European influence, and exemplified by the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. The branches are many and varied and include tap, Broadway, funk, hip-hop, Afro-Caribbean, Latin, pop, club jazz, popping, B-boying, party dances, and much more.Unique in its focus on history rather than technique, Jazz Dance offers the only overview of trends and developments since 1960. Editors Lindsay Guarino and Wendy Oliver have assembled an array of seasoned practitioners and scholars who trace the many histories of jazz dance and examine various aspects of the field, including trends, influences, training, race, gender, aesthetics, the international appeal of jazz dance, and its relationship to tap, rock, indie, black concert dance, and Latin dance.Featuring discussions of such dancers and choreographers as Bob Fosse and Katherine Dunham, as well as analyses of how the form's vocabulary differs from ballet, this complex and compelling history captures the very essence of jazz dance.

Social Origins of Language


Daniel Dor - 2014
    Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual and other social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and novel perspectives on the time-frame for language evolution. The contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics, anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive science.

Capturing Contemporary Japan: Differentiation and Uncertainty


Satsuki Kawano - 2014
    Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the "professional" housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots.Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life


Sayantani DasGuptaSeema Mohapatra - 2014
    One would not think so with parenthood, however, especially motherhood, as it is a fundamental activity humans have historically preserved as personal and private. In our modern age, however, the advent and accessibility of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and the ease with which they have traversed global borders, has fundamentally altered the meaning of childbearing and parenting. In the twenty-first century, parenthood is no longer achieved only through gestation, adoption, or traditional surrogacy, but also via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), where science and technology play lead roles. Furthermore, in a globalized world economy, where the movement and transfer of people and commodities are increasing to serve the interests of capitalism, gamete donation and surrogate birth can traverse innumerable geographic, socio-economic, racialized, and political borderlands. Thus, reproduction itself can be outsourced. This edited volume explores one specific aspect of the new assisted reproductive technologies: gestational surrogacy and how its practice is changing the traditional concept of parenthood across the globe. The phenomenon of transnational surrogacy has given rise to a thriving international industry where money is being 'legally' exchanged for babies and 'reproductive labor' has taken on a lucrative commercial tone. Yet, law, research, and activism are barely aware of this experience and are still playing catch-up with rapidly changing on-the-ground realities. This interdisciplinary collection of essays assuages the dearth of knowledge and addresses significant issues in transnational commercial gestational surrogacy as it takes shape in a peculiar relation between the West (primarily the United States) and India.

Working with Stories in Your Community Or Organization: Participatory Narrative Inquiry


Cynthia F. Kurtz - 2014
    PNI methods help people discover insights, catch emerging trends, make decisions, generate ideas, resolve conflicts, and connect people.Participatory narrative inquiry draws on theory and practice in narrative inquiry, participatory action research, oral history, mixed-methods research, participatory theatre, narrative therapy, sensemaking, complexity theory, and decision support. Its focus is on the exploration of values, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives through collaborative sensemaking with stories of lived experience.

Sacred Number and the Lords of Time: The Stone Age Invention of Science and Religion


Richard Heath - 2014
    Exploring the numerical patterns of time and then the size and shape of the Earth, they created an exact science of measures and preserved their discoveries within sacred structures, spiritualized landscapes, and mythologies, which interpreted the religious ideas associated with their science. In this way, the ancient measures of space and time reached our present age and still embody the direct but forgotten truths of our sacred planet. By recovering the megalithic secrets of space and time, carefully preserved in megalithic stone structures, Richard Heath tells an untold story of four megalithic ages. He identifies a first age of astronomical discovery in the French sites around Carnac, where, using only counted lengths and simple geometries, the ancients created a sophisticated cosmic clockwork. A second age centered in Britain, and including Stonehenge, successfully measured the Earth and revealed a simple pattern held within the Earth’s shape, using metrological ratios. A third age, centered in Egypt and Greece, saw a perfecting of the monumental arts, associated metrology, and religious ideas, revealing the Earth and the heavens as the work of a numerical genius. The fourth age saw pyramids and other metrological buildings spread to the New World, at Teotihuacan in Mexico, and also to the Far East. Examining Earth’s harmonic relevance to the Universe as a whole, Heath shows how we can recognize the long-forgotten foundations of our own civilization and revive the sacred teaching preserved by the four great megalithic ages.

Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond


Yasmine Musharbash - 2014
    These monsters come in all sorts of (non-gothic) guises, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt. Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, media, and cultural studies, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world, from Aboriginal Australia in the Pacific to Asia and Europe.

The Force of Family: Repatriation, Kinship, and Memory on Haida Gwaii


Cara Krmpotich - 2014
    In the summer of 2010, they achieved what many thought was impossible: the repatriation of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The Force of Family is an ethnography of those efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from museums around the world.Focusing on objects made to honour the ancestors, Cara Krmpotich explores how memory, objects, and kinship connect and form a cultural archive. Since the mid-1990s, Haidas have been making button blankets and bentwood boxes with clan crest designs, hosting feasts for hundreds of people, and composing and choreographing new songs and dances in the service of repatriation. The book comes to understand how shared experiences of sewing, weaving, dancing, cooking and feasting lead to the Haida notion of "respect," the creation of kinship and collective memory, and the production of a cultural archive.

Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea


Alex Golub - 2014
    It was not until 1939 that Australian territorial patrols reached the Ipili. By 1990, the third largest gold mine on the planet was operating in their valley. Alex Golub examines how "the mine" and "the Ipili" were brought into being in relation to one another, and how certain individuals were authorized to speak for the mine and others to speak for the Ipili. Considering the relative success of the Ipili in their negotiations with a multinational corporation, Golub argues that a unique conjuncture of personal relationships and political circumstances created a propitious moment during which the dynamic and fluid nature of Ipili culture could be used to full advantage. As that moment faded away, social problems in the valley increased. The Ipili now struggle with the extreme social dislocation brought about by the massive influx of migrants and money into their valley.

Haunted by Hitler: Liberals, the Left, and the Fight against Fascism in the United States


Christopher Vials - 2014
    Traversing the Popular Front of the 1930s, the struggle against McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s, Haunted by Hitler highlights the value of "antifascist" cultural politics, showing how it helped to frame the national discourse. Christopher Vials examines the ways in which anxieties about fascism in the United States have been expressed in the public sphere, through American television shows, Off-Broadway theater, party newspapers, bestselling works of history, journalism, popular sociology, political theory, and other media. He argues that twentieth-century liberals and leftists were more deeply unsettled by the problem of fascism than those at the center or the right and that they tirelessly and often successfully worked to counter America's fascist equivalents.

Reproduction and Society: Interdisciplinary Readings


Carole Joffe - 2014
    Divided into six rich and varied sections, this book offers students and instructors a broad overview of the social meanings of reproduction and offers opportunities to explore significant questions of how resources are allocated, individuals are regulated, and how very much is at stake as people and communities aim to determine their own family size and reproductive experiences. This is an ideal core text for courses on reproduction, sexuality, gender, the family, and public health.

Shamans, Queens, and Figurines: The Development of Gender Archaeology


Sarah Milledge Nelson - 2014
    The book covers her theoretical contributions, her extensive studies of gender in the archaeology of East Asia, and her literary work on the subject. Included with the selections of her writing-- taken from diverse articles and books published in a variety of places-- is an illuminating commentary about the development of her professional and personal understanding of how gender plays out in ancient societies and modern universities and her current thinking on both topics.

Language and Identity in Modern Egypt


Reem Bassiouney - 2014
    As well as deepending their understanding of the relationship between identity and language in general, readers will gain insights about the intricate ways in which media and public discourse help shape and outline identity through linguistic processes.

Soccer: Why Does It Matter?


Larry Edwards - 2014
    In this book you will learn: -The Playing Field-Coin Toss-Goal Kicks and Corner Kicks-The Goalie (Goal Keeper)-The Referees-Fouls-Free kicks-Yellow and Red Cards-Penalty Kicks-Player Positions-Forwards (Strikers)-Midfielders-Defenders-Player Formations-Professional and Tournament Play-And much, much more...Throughout this book, you will discover the game, the field, the players, and the rules. You will be able to learn enough about soccer to understand why it is the most popular sport on the planet. Get this book now, and understand why soccer is the most popular sport on the planet. Once you understand soccer, you will proudly make this wonderful game of soccer part of your life!

Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present


Keith Breckenridge - 2014
    A groundbreaking study of South Africa's role as a site for global experiments in biometric identification throughout the twentieth century.

Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity


Alexander Henn - 2014
    When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and considers its implications for our understanding of power, religion, and postcoloniality.

The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory


Patricia MacCormack - 2014
    Featuring contributions from leading academics, lawyers, artists and activists, the book examines key issues such as: - How "compassion" for animals reinforces ideas of what distinguishes human beings from other animals. - How speciesism and human centricity are built into the legal system. - How individualist subjectivity works in relation to animals who may not think of themselves in the same way. - How any consideration of animal others must involve a radical deconstruction of our very notion of the "human." - How art, philosophy and literature can both avoid speciesism and deliver the human from subjectivity.This volume is a unique project which stands at the cutting edge of both animal rights philosophies and posthuman/artistic/abstract philosophies of identity. It will be of great interest to undergraduates and researchers in philosophy, ethics, particularly continental philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies."

The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan


Abubakar Siddique - 2014
    Abubakar Siddique sets out to demonstrate that the failure, or even unwillingness, of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to absorb the Pashtuns into their state structures and to incorporate them into the economic and political fabric is central to these dynamics, and a critical failure of nation- and state-building in both states. In his book he argues that religious extremism is the product of these critical failures and that responsibility for the situation lies to some degree with the elites of both countries. Partly an eye-witness account and partly meticulously researched scholarship, The Pashtun Question describes a people whose destiny will shape the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

What Your Body Knows about God: How We Are Designed to Connect, Serve and Thrive


Rob Moll - 2014
    Scientists are now discovering ways that our bodies are designed to connect with God. Brain research shows that our brain systems are wired to enable us to have spiritual experiences. The spiritual circuits that are used in prayer or worship are also involved in developing compassion for others. Our bodies have actually been created to love God and serve our neighbors. Award-winning journalist Rob Moll chronicles the fascinating ways in which our brains and bodies interact with God and spiritual realities. He reports on neuroscience findings that show how our brains actually change and adapt when engaged in spiritual practices. We live longer, healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives when we cultivate the biological spiritual capacity that puts us in touch with God. God has created our bodies to fulfill the Great Commandment; we are hardwired to commune with God and to have compassion and community with other people. Moll explores the neuroscience of prayer, how liturgy helps us worship, why loving God causes us to love others, and how a life of love and service leads to the abundant life for which we were created. Just as our physical bodies require exercise to stay healthy, so too can spiritual exercises and practices revitalize our awareness of God. Heighten your spiritual senses and discover how you have been designed for physical and spiritual flourishing.

The Global Prehistory of Human Migration


Peter Bellwood - 2014
    Previously published as the first volume of The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, this work is devoted exclusively to prehistoric migration, covering all periods and places from the first hominin migrations out of Africa through the end of prehistory.Presents interdisciplinary coverage of this topic, including scholarship from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, genetics, biology, linguistics, and more Includes contributions from a diverse international team of authors, representing 17 countries and a variety of disciplines Divided into two sections, covering the Pleistocene and Holocene; each section examines human migration through chapters that focus on different regional and disciplinary lenses

Jakarta, Drawing the City Near


AbdouMaliq Simone - 2014
    Alongside its megastructures, high-rise residential buildings, and franchised convenience stores, Jakarta’s massive slums and off-hour street markets foster an unsettled urban population surviving in difficult conditions. But where does the vast middle of urban life fit into this dichotomy? In Jakarta, Drawing the City Near, AbdouMaliq Simone examines how people who the largest part of the population, such as the craftsmen, shopkeepers, and public servants, navigate and affect positive developments.In a city where people of diverse occupations operate in close proximity to each other, appearance can be very deceptive. Set in a place that on the surface seems remarkably dysfunctional, Simone guides readers through urban spaces and encounters, detailing households, institutions, markets, mosques, and schools. Over five years he engaged with residents from three different districts, and now he parses out the practices, politics, and economies that form present-day Jakarta while revealing how those who face uncertainty manage to improve their lives.Simone illustrates how the majority of Jakarta’s population, caught between intense wealth and utter poverty, handle confluence and contradictions in their everyday lives. By exploring how inhabitants from different backgrounds regard each other, how they work together or keep their distance in order to make the city in which they reside endure, Jakarta, Drawing the City Near offers a powerful new way of thinking about urban life.