Best of
Anthropology
2015
The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
Jason De León - 2015
The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of “Prevention through Deterrence,” the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field.In harrowing detail, De León chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert.The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
Joseph Henrich - 2015
On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often unable to solve basic problems, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced innovative technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into environments across the globe. What has enabled us to dominate such a vast range of environments, more than any other species? As this book shows, the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains--in the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers, neuroscientists, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Further on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and that this particular culture-gene interaction has propelled our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, "The Secret of Our Success" explores how our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and our human uniqueness.
Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari - 2015
This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.
Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
Graham Hancock - 2015
Twenty years on, Hancock returns with the sequel to his seminal work filled with completely new, scientific and archaeological evidence, which has only recently come to light...Near the end of the last Ice Age 12,800 years ago, a giant comet that had entered the solar system from deep space thousands of years earlier, broke into multiple fragments. Some of these struck the Earth causing a global cataclysm on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs. At least eight of the fragments hit the North American ice cap, while further fragments hit the northern European ice cap. The impacts, from comet fragments a mile wide approaching at more than 60,000 miles an hour, generated huge amounts of heat which instantly liquidized millions of square kilometers of ice, destabilizing the Earth's crust and causing the global Deluge that is remembered in myths all around the world. A second series of impacts, equally devastating, causing further cataclysmic flooding, occurred 11,600 years ago, the exact date that Plato gives for the destruction and submergence of Atlantis.The evidence revealed in this book shows beyond reasonable doubt that an advanced civilization that flourished during the Ice Age was destroyed in the global cataclysms between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. But there were survivors - known to later cultures by names such as 'the Sages', 'the Magicians', 'the Shining Ones', and 'the Mystery Teachers of Heaven'. They travelled the world in their great ships doing all in their power to keep the spark of civilization burning. They settled at key locations - Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, Baalbek in the Lebanon, Giza in Egypt, ancient Sumer, Mexico, Peru and across the Pacific where a huge pyramid has recently been discovered in Indonesia. Everywhere they went these 'Magicians of the Gods' brought with them the memory of a time when mankind had fallen out of harmony with the universe and paid a heavy price. A memory and a warning to the future...For the comet that wrought such destruction between 12,800 and 11,600 years may not be done with us yet. Astronomers believe that a 20-mile wide 'dark' fragment of the original giant comet remains hidden within its debris stream and threatens the Earth. An astronomical message encoded at Gobekli Tepe, and in the Sphinx and the pyramids of Egypt,warns that the 'Great Return' will occur in our time...
Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us
Paul Koudounaris - 2015
In Western society, death is usually medicalized and taboo, and kept apart from the world of the living, while in much of the rest of the world, and for much of human history, death has commonly been far more integrated into peoples daily existence, and human remains are as much a reminder of life, memento vitae, as of death, memento mori. Through photos taken at more than 250 sites in thirty countries over a decade, Paul Koudounaris has captured death around the world. From Bolivia's festival of the little pug-nosed ones, where skulls are festooned with flowers and given cigarettes to smoke and beanie hats to protect them from the weather to Indonesian families who dress mummies and include them in their household routines; from naturally preserved Buddhist monks and memorials to genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia to the dramatic climax of Europe's great ossuaries, Memento Mori defies taboo to demonstrate how the dead continue to be present in the lives of people everywhere."
The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
Leonard Mlodinow - 2015
Leonard Mlodinow takes us on a passionate and inspiring tour through the exciting history of human progress and the key events in the development of science. In the process, he presents a fascinating new look at the unique characteristics of our species and our society that helped propel us from stone tools to written language and through the birth of chemistry, biology, and modern physics to today’s technological world. Along the way he explores the cultural conditions that influenced scientific thought through the ages and the colorful personalities of some of the great philosophers, scientists, and thinkers: Galileo, who preferred painting and poetry to medicine and dropped out of university; Isaac Newton, who stuck needlelike bodkins into his eyes to better understand changes in light and color; and Antoine Lavoisier, who drank nothing but milk for two weeks to examine its effects on his body. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and many lesser-known but equally brilliant minds also populate these pages, each of their stories showing how much of human achievement can be attributed to the stubborn pursuit of simple questions (why? how?), bravely asked. The Upright Thinkers is a book for science lovers and for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. At once deeply informed, accessible, and infused with the author’s trademark wit, this insightful work is a stunning tribute to humanity’s intellectual curiosity. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - 2015
Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia
Barry Cunliffe - 2015
Set on a huge continental stage, from Europe to China, it is a tale covering over 10,000 years, from the origins of farming around 9000 BC to the expansion of the Mongols in the thirteenth century AD. An unashamedly big history, it charts the development of European, Near Eastern, and Chinese civilizations and the growing links between them by way of the Indian Ocean, the silk Roads, and the great steppe corridor (which crucially allowed horse riders to travel from Mongolia to the Great Hungarian Plain within a year). Along the way, it is also the story of the rise and fall of empires, the development of maritime trade, and the shattering impact of predatory nomads on their urbanneighbours. Above all, as this immense historical panorama unfolds, we begin to see in clearer focus those basic underlying factors - the acquisitive nature of humanity, the differing environments in which people live, and the dislocating effect of even slight climatic variation - which have driven change throughout the ages, and which help us better understand our world today.
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work
Kimberly Kay Hoang - 2015
Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.
The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest
David Roberts - 2015
His adventures range across Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado, and illuminate the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans and their contemporary neighbors the Mogollon and Fremont, as well as of the more recent Navajo and Comanche.
Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship
Aimee Meredith Cox - 2015
Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.
The Last of the Giants: How Christ Came to the Lumberjacks
Harry Rimmer - 2015
Men were employed as lumberjacks and worked like beasts, only to be tossed aside like used equipment when no longer needed. The grand forests were raped for their prime timber, the balance burned wastefully. The men were coarse and hard, but they had to be to survive. More than any other people that ever lived in our land, these old-time lumberjacks could truthfully say, “No man cared for my soul.” That is, until God sent three men to the great Northwoods of our country ¬– Frank Higgins, John Sornberger, and Al Channer. These men blazed new trails of the Spirit and founded an empire for God. They reached a sector of humanity for which no spiritual work had ever been done before, storming the Northwoods with a consuming passion for Christ. And with that passion, they also brought a heart as big as all outdoors, a love for men that burned like a flame, and a desperate desire to see these men saved.
Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America
Roberto G. Gonzales - 2015
I have grown up but I feel like I’m moving backward. And I can’t do anything about it.” –Esperanza Over two million of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, who had good grades and a strong network of community support that propelled him to college and DREAM Act organizing but still landed in a factory job a few short years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This vivid ethnography explores why highly educated undocumented youth share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, despite the fact that higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Mining the results of an extraordinary twelve-year study that followed 150 undocumented young adults in Los Angeles, Lives in Limbo exposes the failures of a system that integrates children into K-12 schools but ultimately denies them the rewards of their labor.
Embracing the Body: Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone
Tara M. Owens - 2015
Our bodies are more good than we can possibly imagine them to be. And yet at times we may struggle with feelings of shame and guilt or even pride in regard to our bodies. What is God trying to do through our skin and bones? In Embracing the Body spiritual director Tara Owens invites you to listen to your thoughts about your body in a way that draws you closer to God, calling you to explore how your spirituality is intimately tied to your physicality. Using exercises for reflection at the end of each chapter, she guides you to see your body not as an inconvenience but as a place where you can meet the holy in a new way a place to embrace God's glorious intention."
Sapo In My Soul: The Matsés Frog Medicine
Peter Gorman - 2015
Part memoir, adventure story, magical mystery tour, jungle jaunt and documentary, Sapo In My Soul is a power-packed ride into uncharted terrain. With more than three dozen photos, as well as stories and information on sapo's sister medicine, nü-nü. Visit sapoinmysoul.com for sample chapters and more. What people are saying: “Adventurous, courageous and foolish in fairly equal measures, Peter has drunk, snorted, inhaled and otherwise extensively fed deeply from the ingenious pharmacopoeia of the Amazonian shamans. In his latest tale Sapo In My Soul, he recounts his dramatic discovery of the use of sapo frog among the Peruvian Matsés. Using his well-developed eye for detail and driven by innate curiosity, Gorman shares his early days of sapo discovery, and sets the scene for the examination of sapo’s novel peptides by pharmaceutical entities.” “Observant, self-revealing, at times funny and always raging forward, Peter Gorman reminds me that people at the margins define any endeavor. Gorman, with his rough talk, his journalist’s eye, his seemingly alarming lack of regard for personal safety and his various well detailed mishaps, makes an ideal narrator for this tale. Discoveries are many, and researchers are always coming up with new candidates for drug development. But in Peter Gorman’s narration, the use and investigation of sapo simultaneously fascinates and entertains, albeit in an often squirmingly uncomfortable way.” “This is a wonderful account. And Peter’s portrayal of sapo reminds readers that the wild is very wild indeed.” CHRIS KILHAM, author of The Ayahuasca Test Pilots Handbook, The Essential Guide To Ayahuasca Journeying “Unlike ayahuasca, the purgative venom of the Phyllomedusa bicolor tree frog, or sapo, is called “ordeal medicine” by the Matsés natives. Peter Gorman’s new book charts his personal rediscovery of sapo, as well as his ongoing love story with the jungles of South America and the people and spirits that inhabit it. Gorman has gone through a tremendous ordeal to bring this timely medicine to the global tribe; reading it will not kill you, but it will make you stronger.” RAK RAZAM, author/producer Aya: Awakenings “This is pure Peter Gorman. Story telling, adventure and science rolled into one enjoyable read.” LYNN CHILSON, seeker and former NASA scientist
addicted.pregnant.poor
Kelly Ray Knight - 2015
In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women’s struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels. She approaches addicted pregnancy as an everyday phenomenon in these women's lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancy's demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted women's own narratives and examining addicted pregnancy from medical, policy, and social science perspectives, Knight forces us to confront and reconsider the ways we think about addiction, trauma, health, criminality, and responsibility.
Intelligence: All That Matters
Stuart Ritchie - 2015
Just mention IQ testing in polite company, and you'll sternly be informed that IQ tests don't measure anything "real", and only reflect how good you are at doing IQ tests; that they ignore important traits like "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences"; and that those who are interested in IQ testing must be elitists, or maybe something more sinister.Yet the scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals.This book will offer an entertaining introduction to the state of the art in intelligence and IQ, and will show how we have arrived at what we know from a century's research. It will engage head-on with many of the criticisms of IQ testing by describing the latest high-quality scientific research, but will not be a simple point-by-point rebuttal: it will make a positive case for IQ research, focusing on the potential benefits for society that a better understanding of intelligence can bring.
Standing in the Need: Culture, Comfort, and Coming Home After Katrina (Katrina Bookshelf)
Katherine E. Browne - 2015
Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives.In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
German Men Sit Down to Pee and Other Insights into German Culture
Niklas Frank - 2015
'German men sit down to pee' is a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to German culture that highlights the rules Germans consciously and unconsciously follow, while trying to make a little sense of it all along the way. Why, for example, mowing your lawn on a Sunday will mean getting an earful from your neighbour, but lie naked in the middle of a public park and nobody will bat an eyelid. Ideal for anyone visiting or moving to Germany, 'German Men Sit Down to Pee' offers a collection of insights into German culture while at the same time highlighting rules and cultural norms that those visiting Germany will not only find humorous but useful for avoiding any cultural faux-pas.
Exploring Christian Theology: Creation, Fall, and Salvation
Nathan D. Holsteen - 2015
They want readers to know why they're important and why they matter. This volume includes two parts: - From Dust to Dust: Creation, Humanity, and the Fall - Wise Unto Salvation: Gospel, Atonement, and Saving GraceThe authors explore these important topics in a concise and highly readable style that makes sense--whether you're a student of the Bible, a pastor, or someone who simply wants to know God better.For each topic you'll find- An introduction, overview, and review of the key points- Several applicable Bible texts, including verses to memorize- A quick-paced history of the doctrine- Distortions to be aware of and avoid- Reading lists for further study- A glossary of theological terms"Exploring Christian Theology is a wonderful doctrinal primer that teaches theology in a way that will engage you and cause you to reflect. . . . A great way to get acquainted with key biblical theological themes."--Darrell Bock, Senior Research Professor, Dallas Theological Seminary
Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
James Ferguson - 2015
More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.
The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - 2015
Published in a wide variety of venues, and often difficult to find, the pieces are brought together here for the first time in a one major volume, which includes his momentous 1998 Cambridge University Lectures, “Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere.”Rounded out with new English translations of a number of previously unpublished works, the resulting book is a wide-ranging portrait of one of the towering figures of contemporary thought—philosopher, anthropologist, ethnographer, ethnologist, and more. With a new afterword by Roy Wagner elucidating Viveiros de Castro’s work, influence, and legacy, The Relative Native will be required reading, further cementing Viveiros de Castro’s position at the center of contemporary anthropological inquiry.
Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
Peter Turchin - 2015
From stone-age assassins to the orbiting cathedrals of the space age, from bloodthirsty god-kings to India’s first vegetarian emperor, discover the secret history of our species—and the evolutionary logic that governed it all.
Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground: An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska
Elizabeth Marino - 2015
But the island, home to Iñupiaq Eskimos who still live off subsistence harvesting, is falling into the sea, and climate change is, at least in part, to blame. While countries sputter and stall over taking environmental action, Shishmaref is out of time.Publications from the New York Times to Esquire have covered this disappearing village, yet few have taken the time to truly show the community and the two millennia of traditions at risk. In Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground, Elizabeth Marino brings Shishmaref into sharp focus as a place where people in a close-knit, determined community are confronting the realities of our changing planet every day. She shows how physical dangers challenge lives, while the stress and uncertainty challenge culture and identity. Marino also draws on Shishmaref’s experiences to show how disasters and the outcomes of climate change often fall heaviest on those already burdened with other social risks and often to communities who have contributed least to the problem. Stirring and sobering, Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground proves that the consequences of unchecked climate change are anything but theoretical.
Being Dad: Father as a Picture of God's Grace
Scott Keith - 2015
Dr. Keith brings his experience with family, students, great mentors, and friends to bear on a subject that is crying out for attention. Equally, he brings his Christian faith, a scholarly eye for detail, and an ear for story along on the journey and works with the reader to navigate a path to a better country where the Father blesses His children and is honored.
A Settler's Year: Pioneer Life through the Seasons
Kathleen Ernst - 2015
Evocative photographs taken at Old World Wisconsin, the country's largest outdoor museum of rural life, lushly illustrate stories woven by historian, novelist, and poet Kathleen Ernst and compelling firsthand accounts left by the settlers themselves.In this beautiful book, readers will discover the challenges and triumphs found in the seasonal rhythms of rural life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As they turn the pages--traveling from sprawling farm to tidy crossroads village, and from cramped and smoky cabins to gracious, well-furnished homes--they'll experience the back-straining chores, cherished folk traditions, annual celebrations, and indomitable spirit that comprised pioneer life.At its heart "A Settler's Year" is about people dreaming of, searching for, and creating new homes in a new land. This moving book transports us back to the pioneer era and inspires us to explore the stories found on our own family trees.
Loneliness and Its Opposite: Sex, Disability, and the Ethics of Engagement
Don Kulick - 2015
But what about access to the private realm of desire and sexuality? How can one also facilitate access to that, in ways that respect the integrity of disabled adults, and also of those people who work with and care for them?Loneliness and Its Opposite documents how two countries generally imagined to be progressive engage with these questions in very different ways. Denmark and Sweden are both liberal welfare states, but they diverge dramatically when it comes to sexuality and disability. In Denmark, the erotic lives of people with disabilities are acknowledged and facilitated. In Sweden, they are denied and blocked. Why do these differences exist, and how do both facilitation and hindrance play out in practice?Loneliness and Its Opposite charts complex boundaries between private and public, love and sex, work and intimacy, and affection and abuse. It shows how providing disabled adults with access to sexual lives is not just crucial for a life with dignity. It is an issue of fundamental social justice with far reaching consequences for everyone.
Whatever Works: Feminists of Faith Speak
Trista Hendren - 2015
This anthology combines personal essays, poems and academic musings with the goal of sparking conversations among women of all faith backgrounds. Religion plays a key role in defining and maintaining value systems, and yet it is often disregarded within feminism itself. This book shares the stories of highly diverse women with the hope that we can find collective solutions to the global problems that plague women and girls living under patriarchy.Edited by Trista Hendren and Pat DalyPreface by Dr. Amina WadudWith selections by:Soraya Chemaly, Rev. Dr. Karen Tate, Shehnaz Haqqani, Priestess Bairavee Balasubramaniam, Ph.D., Monette Chilson, Sarah Ager, Pegi Eyers, Susan Mehegan, Jacqueline Hope Derby, Jen Raffensperger, Elizabeth Hall Magill, Zoharah Noy-meir, Rebecca Mott, Liona Rowan, Metis, DeAnna L'am, Patty Kay, Zoe Nicholson, Erin McKelle, Rabbi Dalia Marx Ph.D., Debbie Kozlovich, Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente,Vrinda Jamuna Shakti, Lora Koetsier, Lizette Galima Tapia-Raquel, Nafhesa Ali, Susan Morgaine, Trista Hendren, Ruth Calder Murphy, Celeste Gurevich, Nahida Nisa and Neorah García."The magic of this anthology of women is in its radical reflection that “we are every woman,” and women are NOT the same. We do not need to pretend to sameness in order to express what is most essential about us—that is—our very existence, and our engaged faith experiences.This unique collection has the powerful capacity to remind us of the awe and beauty in diversity without itself becoming a sort of pop culture of Self worship. Each of these stories is True, and each is intimately connected to the lives of the women telling them. Read deeply. Enjoy. Then, tell your own story. That is what this volume invites you to do. I did and I am already a better person for it." - Dr. Amina Wadud Order (and table of contents) on our website: http://www.thegirlgod.com/anthology.php
Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar
Marcus Baynes-Rock - 2015
So what happens when an anthropologist studies a clan of spotted hyenas, Africa's second-largest carnivores, up close--and in a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants? In Among the Bone Eaters, Marcus Baynes-Rock takes us to the ancient city of Harar in Ethiopia, where the gey waraba (hyenas of the city) are welcome in the streets and appreciated by the locals for the protection they provide from harmful spirits and dangerous "mountain" hyenas. They've even become a local tourist attraction.At the start of his research in Harar, Baynes-Rock contended with difficult conditions, stone-throwing children, intransigent bureaucracy, and wary hyena subjects intent on avoiding people. After months of frustration, three young hyenas drew him into the hidden world of the Sofi clan. He discovered the elements of a hyena's life, from the delectability of dead livestock and the nuisance of dogs to the unbounded thrill of hyena chase-play under the light of a full moon. Baynes-Rock's personal relations with the hyenas from the Sofi clan expand the conceptual boundaries of human-animal relations. This is multispecies ethnography that reveals its messy, intersubjective, dangerously transformative potential.
Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
Saba Mahmood - 2015
Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism--political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains.Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais--religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country--Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe.A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.
The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd
Quentin Beresford - 2015
Most of its profits came from woodchipping, mainly from clear-felled old-growth forests. A pulp mill was central to its expansion plans. Its collapse in 2012 was a major national news story, as was the arrest of its CEO for insider trading. Quentin Beresford illuminates, for the first time, the dark corners of the Gunns empire. He shows it was built on close relationships with state and federal governments, political donations and use of the law to intimidate and silence its critics. Fearless and forensic in its analysis, the book shows that Tasmania’s decades-long quest to industrialize nature fails every time—but the collapse of Gunns is the most telling of them all.
Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600
Nükhet Varlık - 2015
Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies and travellers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism
Liisa H. Malkki - 2015
Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.
Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds
Marisol de la Cadena - 2015
Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not abide by binary logics—reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work.
Roadmap to Liberty: The Liberty-Approach to Every Economic, Political and Social Topic
Lucas Vincent - 2015
Every major economic, political and social issue is covered: ranging from our $22 trillion in welfare spending that has failed to lower poverty by even 1% point over the last 50 years, to our bloated military industrial complex that costs the average US taxpayer $5,000 per year.
Whether you are looking for a comprehensive guide on how to apply the principles of liberty to any life situation, an introduction to key libertarian concepts, or simply a repertoire of fact-based arguments ordered by issue - Roadmap to Liberty delivers.
Your time is limited - this is why I made all efforts to summarize everything you need to know about liberty in little more than 40 chapters and sub-chapters - readable in any order! "Roadmap to Liberty" has one of the highest "information densities" of any book out there - promised.
Written in an Easy-to-Grasp Conversational Style
Featuring examples from around the world on how government should and should not work - including cases on:How one company was granted the monopoly right to produce TSA baggage locksHow privatization of wildlife saved entire species from extinction in AfricaThe US' 900 foreign military bases worldwide - 30 times more than all the foreign military bases owned by all other countries combinedThe background on why the US abandoned the gold standard, and how the petrodollar system replaced itThe success of school vouchers in NYC and DC, and the fact that government schooling costs more than private schoolThe mathematical proof of why truly unregulated free trade (i.e. not government regulated trade such as the TPP) is always goodHow the total word count of US regulations increased by 40% between 1997 and 2012 alone - reaching more than 100 million wordsHow Libya went from Africa's richest state to a failed countryAbove list includes just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of mind-blowing, around-the-world case stories.Happy Reading & Thinking! - For more information visit RoadmapToLiberty.comChapter OverviewCh 1 - Principles of LibertyCh 2 - Political IdeologiesCh 3 - Government- Section 1 - Passing Laws- Section 2 - Special InterestsCh 4 - Taxation- Section 1 - Types of Tax Systems- Section 2 - Income Tax- Section 3 - Consumption Tax- Section 4 - Property TaxCh 5 - Social Security- Section 1 - Pensions- Section 2 - Unemployment Benefits- Section 3 - Health Insurance- Section 4 - Assistance to the PoorCh 6 - InfrastructureCh 7 - EducationCh 8 - The Judiciary- Section 1 - The Court System- Section 2 - Correctional FacilitiesCh 9 - Domestic Security- Section 1 - Police Force- Section 2 - Fire ServicesCh 10 - International Security- Section 1 - GunsCh 11 - Marriage and ReligionCh 12 - AbortionCh 13 - Discrimination- Section 1 - Racism Ch 14 - ImmigrationCh 15 - Regulation- Section 1 - Consumer Protection- Section 2 - Environmental Protection- Section 3 - Individual LifestylesCh 16 - Trade and ProtectionismCh 17 - Monetary System- Section 1 - The Federal Reserve- Section 2 - Fiat Currencies- Section 3 - Inflation VS Deflation- Section 4 - Privatization of Money
Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT
Graham St. John - 2015
While most known as a crucial component of the “jungle alchemy” that is ayahuasca, DMT is a unique story unto itself. Until now, this story has remained untold. Mystery School in Hyperspace is the first book to delve into the history of this substance, the discovery of its properties, and the impact it has had on poets, artists, and musicians. DMT has appeared at crucial junctures in countercultural history. William Burroughs was jacking the spice in Tangier at the turn of the 1960s. It was present at the meeting between Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Tim Leary's associates. It guided the inception of the Grateful Dead in 1965. It showed up in Berkeley in the same year, falling into the hands of Terence McKenna, who would eventually become its champion in the post-rave neo-psychedelic movement of the 1990s. Its indole vapor drifted through Portugal's Boom Festival and has been evident at Nevada's Burning Man, where DMT has been adopted as spiritual technology supplying shape, color, and depth to a visionary art movement. The growing prevalence of use is evident in a vast networked independent research culture, and in its impact on fiction, film, music and metaphysics. As this book traces the effect of DMT's release into the cultural bloodstream, the results should be of great interest to contemporary readers. The book permits a broad reading audience to join ongoing debates in studies in consciousness and theology where the brain is held to be either a generator or a receiver of consciousness. The implications of the "spirit molecule" or "the brain's own psychedelic" among other theories illustrate that DMT may lift the lid on the Pandora's Box of consciousness. Features a foreword by Dennis McKenna, cover art by Beau Deeley, and thirty color illustrations by various artists, including Alex Grey, Android Jones, Martina Hoffmann, Luke Brown, Carey Thompson, Adam Scott Miller, Randal Roberts, along with Jay Bryan, Cyb, Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule, Art Van D'lay, Stuart Griggs, Jay Lincoln, Gwyllm Llwydd, Shiptu Shaboo, Marianna Stelmach, and Mister Strange. Regarded as the “nightmare hallucinogen” or celebrated as the “spirit molecule,” labelled “psychotogenic” or “entheogenic,” considered a dangerous drug or the suspected X-factor in the evolution of consciousness, DMT is a powerful enigma. Documenting the scientists and artists drawn into its sphere of influence, navigating the liminal aesthetics of the “breakthrough” experience, tracing the novum of “hyperspace” in esoteric and science fiction currents, Mystery School in Hyperspace excavates the significance of this enigmatic phenomenon in the modern world. Exposing a great many myths, this cultural history reveals how DMT has had a beneficial influence on the lives of those belonging to a vast underground network whose reports and initiatives expose drug war propaganda and shine a light in the shadows. This conversation is highly relevant at a time when significant advances are being made to lift the moratorium on human research with psychedelics.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The True Story of Human Evolutionary Genesis
Elvis Newman - 2015
The view that the Earth was the physical and the biological center of the Universe was one such failed theory, one that cost many famous scientists most of their lives, and held back societies everywhere for decades or hundreds of years behind what is now considered a given truth. In the current work under consideration, religion and evolution theories come under scrutiny in light of recent scientific facts that dispute their most important claims about the origins of the species. In The True Story of Human Evolutionary Genesis, Elvis Newman presents both astounding facts and findings about the human genome, as well as paradigm-shifting theories emanating from Zecharia Sitchin's work around the Sumerian clay tablets. About the Author A futurist researcher with an MBA, Elvis Newman has worked as a ghost writer and researcher for well-known new age and futurist gurus of our times. He professes to insatiable interests in humanity's progress into the future and past lessons from history, because we all know that our most outrageous imaginations of the past will quickly become our most indispensable realities. His website is www.ElvisNewman.com.
Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East
Lara Deeb - 2015
involvement in the Middle East has brought the region into the media spotlight and made it a hot topic in American college classrooms. At the same time, anthropology—a discipline committed to on-the-ground research about everyday lives and social worlds—has increasingly been criticized as "useless" or "biased" by right-wing forces. What happens when the two concerns meet, when such accusations target the researchers and research of a region so central to U.S. military interests?This book is the first academic study to shed critical light on the political and economic pressures that shape how U.S. scholars research and teach about the Middle East. Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar show how Middle East politics and U.S. gender and race hierarchies affect scholars across their careers—from the first decisions to conduct research in the tumultuous region, to ongoing politicized pressures from colleagues, students, and outside groups, to hurdles in sharing expertise with the public. They detail how academia, even within anthropology, an assumed "liberal" discipline, is infused with sexism, racism, Islamophobia, and Zionist obstruction of any criticism of the Israeli state. Anthropology's Politics offers a complex portrait of how academic politics ultimately hinders the education of U.S. students and potentially limits the public's access to critical knowledge about the Middle East.
Hunting with Eagles: The Kazakh Eagle-Hunters of Mongolia
Palani Mohan - 2015
The Altai Kazakhs are unique in their tradition of using golden eagles to hunt on horseback. The lifestyle of these hunters, known in Kazakh as burtkitshis, is changing rapidly, and over the last few years the award-winning photographer Palani Mohan has spent time with these men and their families, documenting a culture under threat.The special bond between a hunter and his eagle begins when the hunter takes an eagle pup from a nest high on the rock face. The pups are usually about four years old (a golden eagle can live to 30 years of age). It’s important that the pup has learned to hunt and is not still dependent on her mother; but neither can she be too old nor experienced, or she will not learn to live with humans. The hunters take only female pups from the nest, as females are larger and more powerful and aggressive than the males. Adult female golden eagles can have a wingspan of up to 9 feet, and weigh over 15 pounds.The eagle pup gradually learns to accept food from the hunter, and once trust has been established, the hunter begins to train the bird. The hunters describe the eagle as part of their family. The eagle takes pride of place in the home most of the time except during the day in the summer months or the warmest part of the day in the winter months. While all the men in the family handle the eagle, only the man who took her from the nest hunts with her.Hunting takes place in winter, when temperatures can plummet to minus 40 degrees Farenheit. The birds are carried in swaddling, which the hunters claim keeps them both warm and calm. The strong bond between hunter and eagle is strengthened by the amount of time they spend together. Hunting trips can last many days, as the hunter and eagle trek up to a mountain ridge to obtain a good view across the landscape. Once the prey – usually a fox – is spotted, the hunter charges towards it to flush it into the open, then releases the eagle to make the kill. Hunters traditionally wear fur coats made from the skins of the prey their eagle has caught.The relationship between hunter and eagle typically lasts six to eight years, then the eagle is released back into the wild to breed. One hunter tells Mohan: ‘You love them as your own, even when you set them free at the end.’In his book, which comprises an introductory essay and 90 dramatic duotone images, Mohan explains how the burkitshis are slowing dying out. Rather than endure the brutal winters, their children choose to move to the capital, Ulan Bator, for a better way of life. There are also fewer golden eagles in the Altai Mountains. Although the ‘Golden Eagle Festival’ takes place every October to showcase the ancient art of hunting with eagles, attracting tourists from across the world, there are only between 50 and 60 ‘true’ hunters left. This book is therefore a timely, important record of these proud men and their magnificent eagles in a remote, unforgiving part of the planet.
Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History
Brant A. Gardner - 2015
Similar to the Bible, its sermons and explications of religious principles are presented against the framework of the story of a people. It is a story that covers a thousand years. In this book Brant Gardner looks around and behind the religious purposes of the book and teases out how those thousand years of Book of Mormon history correspond to those same years in the geographic and cultural context where they most plausibly took place.Gardner works through the Book of Mormon chronologically, examining how events in the Book of Mormon reflect the greater historical and cultural developments happening around them at the same time. Gardner asks and answers questions against particular historical backdrops. Why does Nephi appear to be so Christian so long before Christ, and why does his particular time period in Jerusalem help answer that question? Why do Nephi apostate groups from different times appear to adopt the same religion? Why does the Book of Mormon end around A.D. 400? Why not earlier or later? The answers are developed by looking at the Book of Mormon as history in the context of what has become known of Mesoamerican history. Along the way, Gardner also looks at the problem of anachronisms, DNA, and some popular “proofs” of the Book of Mormon that need to be abandoned.
Dignity and Destiny: Humanity in the Image of God
John F. Kilner - 2015
S., genocide in Nazi Germany, and the demeaning of women everywhere.In Dignity and Destiny John Kilner explores what the Bible itself teaches about humanity being in God's image. He discusses in detail all of the biblical references to the image of God, interacts extensively with other work on the topic, and documents how misunderstandings of it have been so problematic.People made according to God's image, Kilner says, have a special connection with God and are intended to be a meaningful reflection of him. Because of sin, they don't actually reflect him very well, but Kilner shows why the popular idea that sin has damaged the image of God is mistaken. He also clarifies the biblical difference between being God's image (which Christ is) and being in God's image (which humans are). He explains how humanity's creation and renewal in God's image are central, respectively, to human dignity and destiny.Locating Christ at the center of what God's image means, Kilner charts a constructive way forward and reflects on the tremendously liberating impact that a sound understanding of the image of God can have in the world today.
Emergent Ecologies
Eben Kirksey - 2015
Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.
The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil
Erika Mary Robb Larkins - 2015
Police, for their part, conduct raids reminiscent of action films or video games, wearing masks and riding in enormous armored cars called “big skulls.” Images of these spectacles circulate constantly in local, national, and global media, masking everyday forms of violence, prejudice, and inequality. The Spectacular Favela offers a rich ethnographic examination of the political economy of spectacular violence in Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela. Based on more than two years of residence in the community, the book explores how entangled forms of violence shape everyday life and how that violence is, in turn, connected to the market economy. Erika Robb Larkins shows how favela violence is produced as a marketable global brand. While this violence is projected in disembodied form through media, the favela is also sold as an embodied experience through the popular practice of favela tourism. The commodification of the favela becomes a form of violence itself; favela violence is transformed into a commercially viable byproduct of a profit-driven war on drugs, which serves to keep the poor marginalized. This book tells the story of how traffickers, police, cameras, tourists, and even anthropologists come together to create what the author calls the “spectacular favela.”
Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India
Nayanika Mathur - 2015
A welfare legislation aimed at providing employment and commanding a huge budget becomes 'unimplementable' in a region bedeviled by high levels of poverty and unemployment. Paper Tiger provides a lively ethnographic account of how such seemingly bizarre scenarios come to be in contemporary India. Based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork, this book presents a unique explanation for why and how progressive laws can do what they do and not, ever-so-often, what they are supposed to do. It reveals the double-edged effects of the reforms that have been ushered in by the post-liberalization Indian state, particularly the effort to render itself more transparent and accountable. Through a meticulous detailing of everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland, Paper Tiger makes an argument for shifting the very frames of thought through which we apprehend the workings of the developmental Indian state.
David Attenborough: The Early Years: Plus David Attenborough In His Own Words
David Attenborough - 2015
Zoo Quest for a Dragon takes us back to one of his earliest projects, when the BBC and London Zoo joined forces on several animal-collecting expeditions. Quest in Paradise follows his next animal collecting and filming trip to New Guinea, home of the exotic Birds of Paradise. Quest Under Capricorn details Attenborough’s expedition to Australia in 1963 in search of more rare species. There he meets Aborigines, goes walkabout in the bush, and learns the secret craft of the artists of Arnhem Land.Specially recorded for audio, David Attenborough's earliest adventures are sometimes life-threatening, often hilarious and always totally absorbing. Also included is David Attenborough In His Own Words, a collection of interviews taken from the BBC radio and TV archives.
On Becoming a Teen Mom: Life before Pregnancy
Mary Patrice Erdmans - 2015
These efforts demonize teen mothers but tell us nothing about their lives before they became pregnant. In this myth-shattering book, the authors tell the life stories of 108 brown, white, and black teen mothers, exposing the problems in their lives often overlooked in pregnancy prevention campaigns. Some stories are tragic and painful, marked by sexual abuse, partner violence, and school failure. Others depict "girl next door" characters whose unintended pregnancies lay bare insidious gender disparities. Offering a fresh perspective on the links between teen births and social inequalities, this book demonstrates how the intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and class shape the biographies of young mothers.
Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity
Adam Rosenblatt - 2015
In the past few decades, due to rapidly developing technologies and a powerful global human rights movement, the scientific study of those graves has become a standard facet of post-conflict international assistance. Digging for the Disappeared provides readers with a window into this growing but little-understood form of human rights work, including the dangers and sometimes unexpected complications that arise as evidence is gathered and the dead are named.Adam Rosenblatt examines the ethical, political, and historical foundations of the rapidly growing field of forensic investigation, from the graves of the "disappeared" in Latin America to genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. In the process, he illustrates how forensic teams strive to balance the needs of war crimes tribunals, transitional governments, and the families of the missing in post-conflict nations. Digging for the Disappeared draws on interviews with key players in the field to present a new way to analyze and value the work forensic experts do at mass graves, shifting the discussion from an exclusive focus on the rights of the living to a rigorous analysis of the care of the dead. Rosenblatt tackles these heady, hard topics in order to extend human rights scholarship into the realm of the dead and the limited but powerful forms of repair available for victims of atrocity.
The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals
Gerardo Ceballos - 2015
In The Annihilation of Nature, three of today’s most distinguished conservationists tell the stories of the birds and mammals we have lost and those that are now on the road to extinction. These tragic tales, coupled with eighty-three color photographs from the world’s leading nature photographers, display the beauty and biodiversity that humans are squandering.Gerardo Ceballos, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Paul R. Ehrlich serve as witnesses in this trial of human neglect, where the charge is the massive and escalating assault on living things. Nature is being annihilated, not only because of the human population explosion, but also as a result of massive commercial endeavors and public apathy. Despite the well-intentioned work of conservation organizations and governments, the authors warn us that not enough is being done and time is short for the most vulnerable of the world’s wild birds and mammals. Thousands of populations have already disappeared, other populations are dwindling daily, and soon our descendants may live in a world containing but a minuscule fraction of the birds and mammals we know today.The Annihilation of Nature is a clarion call for engagement and action. These outspoken scientists urge everyone who cares about nature to become personally connected to the victims of our inadequate conservation efforts and demand that restoration replace destruction. Only then will we have any hope of preventing the worst-case scenario of the sixth mass extinction.
Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America
Catherine M. Cameron - 2015
But though these diseases were devastating, their impact has been widely exaggerated. Warfare, enslavement, land expropriation, removals, erasure of identity, and other factors undermined Native populations. These factors worked in a deadly cabal with germs to cause epidemics, exacerbate mortality, and curtail population recovery.Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America challenges the “virgin soil” hypothesis that was used for decades to explain the decimation of the indigenous people of North America. This hypothesis argues that the massive depopulation of the New World was caused primarily by diseases brought by European colonists that infected Native populations lacking immunity to foreign pathogens. In Beyond Germs, contributors expertly argue that blaming germs lets Europeans off the hook for the enormous number of Native American deaths that occurred after 1492. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians come together in this cutting-edge volume to report a wide variety of other factors in the decline in the indigenous population, including genocide, forced labor, and population dislocation. These factors led to what the editors describe in their introduction as “systemic structural violence” on the Native populations of North America. While we may never know the full extent of Native depopulation during the colonial period because the evidence available for indigenous communities is notoriously slim and problematic, what is certain is that a generation of scholars has significantly overemphasized disease as the cause of depopulation and has downplayed the active role of Europeans in inciting wars, destroying livelihoods, and erasing identities.
The Mystic Path (Rosicrucian Order AMORC, Kindle Editions)
Raymund Andrea - 2015
This informative and inspirational work will guide you across the threshold of mystical initiation. The author provides insights into the states of consciousness and experiences you may have as you travel the mystic path. It is filled with the fire and paths of the initiate’s quest. His spiritual, mental, and physical crises are fully described and pondered. Andrea’s deep understanding of the essence of Western mystical and transcendental thought makes this a book you will treasure and refer to often as you advance in your mystical studies. Among the many topics addressed are: Meditation, Contemplation, Awakening Consciousness, the Dark Night of the Soul, Mystical Participation, and Mystical Union.
Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter
Natasha Myers - 2015
Proteins twist and wriggle as they carry out the activities that keep cells alive. Figuring out how to make these unruly substances visible, tangible, and workable is a challenging task, one that is not readily automated, even by the fastest computers. Natasha Myers explores what protein modelers must do to render three-dimensional, atomic-resolution models of these lively materials. Rendering Life Molecular shows that protein models are not just informed by scientific data: model building entangles a modeler’s entire sensorium, and modelers must learn to feel their way through the data in order to interpret molecular forms. Myers takes us into protein modeling laboratories and classrooms, tracking how gesture, affect, imagination, and intuition shape practices of objectivity. Asking, ‘What is life becoming in modelers' hands?’ she tunes into the ways they animate molecules through their moving bodies and other media. In the process she amplifies an otherwise muted liveliness inflecting mechanistic accounts of the stuff of life.
Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture
Allison McCracken - 2015
Although Vallée and other crooners reflected the gender fluidity of late-1920s popular culture, their challenge to the Depression era's more conservative masculine norms led cultural authorities to stigmatize them as gender and sexual deviants. In Real Men Don't Sing Allison McCracken outlines crooning's history from its origins in minstrelsy through its development as the microphone sound most associated with white recording artists, band singers, and radio stars. She charts early crooners’ rise and fall between 1925 and 1934, contrasting Rudy Vallée with Bing Crosby to demonstrate how attempts to contain crooners created and dictated standards of white masculinity for male singers. Unlike Vallée, Crosby survived the crooner backlash by adapting his voice and persona to adhere to white middle-class masculine norms. The effects of these norms are felt to this day, as critics continue to question the masculinity of youthful, romantic white male singers. Crooners, McCracken shows, not only were the first pop stars: their short-lived yet massive popularity fundamentally changed American culture.
Woodsmoke and Leafcups: Autobiographical Footnotes to the Anthropology of the Durwa People
Madhu Ramnath - 2015
What began as impulsive travel to a swathe of land that had no roads criss-crossing it soon turned into a homecoming: each stint in the forest compelled him to return and, finally, to stay. Over the years he became a student of Durwa life, living in the forest, tending cattle, working a hill-slope in the village. He immersed himself in the Durwa world while indulging his passion for devising a botanical classification that would be accessible to a layperson. Woodsmoke and Leafcups is a first-hand account of life in Bastar: the routines of communal life and the interactions of the Durwas with the State machinery. He writes of a culture where energy and laughter are currency, although of no value to anyone else. He draws a portrait of friends and teachers, threats and ways of eliding them, and the lure of politics for those long indifferent to it. At a time when 'there are few places in which to lose oneself', Ramnath writes of a people and a place that exist outside, sometimes counter to, known narratives.
The Lost Tribes of Tierra del Fuego: Selk'nam, Yamana, Kawésqar
Martin Gusinde - 2015
While his mission was ostensibly to convert the native peoples among whom he lived, Gusinde did just the opposite, eventually becoming one of the first Westerners ever to be initiated into the various sacred rites of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. In the course of four sojourns made between 1919 and 1924, from the canals of Western Patagonia to the great island of Tierra del Fuego, he learned and wrote about the Kawésqar, Yamana, and Selk’nam peoples. Gradually, the missionary became an anthropologist.Fascinated by what he saw, Gusinde took more than one thousand photographs, all produced using a portable darkroom. Gusinde captured some truly extraordinary images that his contemporaries were unable to: feather-clad bodies sporting high headdresses made of bark, wrapped up in guanaco furs, or entirely covered with ritual paint, populating a landscape battered by wind, rain, and snow—the heart of a natural world that Darwin had celebrated, not long before, for its wildness. A dazzling visual experience, Gusinde’s photographs are a monument to the memory of the Tierra del Fuego people as well as an exceptional anthropological document.
Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature
Jamie Lorimer - 2015
Too social and sagacious to be objects, too strange to be human, too captive to truly be wild, but too wild to be domesticated—where do elephants fall in our understanding of nature?In Wildlife in the Anthropocene, Jamie Lorimer argues that the idea of nature as a pure and timeless place characterized by the absence of humans has come to an end. But life goes on. Wildlife inhabits everywhere and is on the move; Lorimer proposes the concept of wildlife as a replacement for nature. Offering a thorough appraisal of the Anthropocene—an era in which human actions affect and influence all life and all systems on our planet— Lorimer unpacks its implications for changing definitions of nature and the politics of wildlife conservation. Wildlife in the Anthropocene examines rewilding, the impacts of wildlife films, human relationships with charismatic species, and urban wildlife. Analyzing scientific papers, policy documents, and popular media, as well as a decade of fieldwork, Lorimer explores the new interconnections between science, politics, and neoliberal capitalism that the Anthropocene demands of wildlife conservation.Imagining conservation in a world where humans are geological actors entangled within and responsible for powerful, unstable, and unpredictable planetary forces, this work nurtures a future environmentalism that is more hopeful and democratic.
Dubuque's Forgotten Cemetery: Excavating a Nineteenth-Century Burial Ground in a Twenty-first Century City
Robin M. Lillie - 2015
Though many local residents knew the property had once been a Catholic burial ground, they believed the graves had been moved to a new cemetery in the late nineteenth century in response to overcrowding and changing burial customs. But in 2007, when a developer broke ground for a new condominium complex here, the heavy machinery unearthed human bones. Clearly, some of Dubuque’s early settlers still rested there—in fact, more than anyone expected. For the next four years, staff with the Burials Program of the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist excavated the site so that development could proceed. The excavation fieldwork was just the beginning. Once the digging was done each summer, skeletal biologist Robin M. Lillie and archaeologist Jennifer E. Mack still faced the enormous task of teasing out life histories from fragile bones, disintegrating artifacts, and the decaying wooden coffins the families had chosen for the deceased. Poring over scant documents and sifting through old newspapers, they pieced together the story of the cemetery and its residents, a story often surprising and poignant. Weaving together science, history, and local mythology, the tale of the Third Street Cemetery provides a fascinating glimpse into Dubuque’s early years, the hardships its settlers endured, and the difficulties they did not survive. While they worked, Lillie and Mack also grappled with the legal and ethical obligations of the living to the dead. These issues are increasingly urgent as more and more of America’s unmarked (and marked) cemeteries are removed in the name of progress. Fans of forensic crime shows and novels will find here a real-world example of what can be learned from the fragments left in time’s wake.
Recovery's Edge: An Ethnography of Mental Health Care and Moral Agency
Neely Laurenzo Myers - 2015
Recovery's Edge sends us to urban America to view the inner workings of a mental health clinic run, in part, by people who are themselves in recovery from mental illness.In this provocative narrative, Neely Myers sweeps us up in her own journey through three years of ethnographic research at this unusual site, providing a nuanced account of different approaches to mental health care. Recovery's Edge critically examines the high bar we set for people in recovery through intimate stories of people struggling to find meaningful work, satisfying relationships, and independent living.This book is a recipient of the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of medicine.
One Gospel for All Nations: A Practical Approach to Biblical Contextualization
Jackson Wu - 2015
Did you know it also shows how to contextualize the gospel? In One Gospel for All Nations, Jackson Wu does more than talk about principles. He gets practical. When the biblical writers explain the gospel, they consistently use a pattern that is both firm and flexible. Wu builds on this insight to demonstrate a model of contextualization that starts with interpretation and can be applied in any culture. In the process, he explains practically why we must not choose between the Bible and culture. Wu highlights various implications for both missionaries and theologians. Contextualization should be practical, not pragmatic; theological, not theoretical.
With Our Own Hands: A Celebration of Food and Life in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tadjikistan
Frederik Van Oudenhoven - 2015
It is also a book about the origins of food. In the mountainous cradle of one of the world's least known and most isolated civilizations, many of the foods that are found on Western fields and dinner tables are cultivated and invented in an enduring quest for survival.Combining stories, essays, recipes, and photography, With Our Own Hands seeks to strengthen the pride of the Pamiri people and excite the curiosity of those who appreciate diversity in food and agriculture, and the role it plays in people's relationships with nature and with each other. In the mountain valleys of the Pamirs life depends on these relationships, today as much as thousands of years ago, and it is not difficult to discern in Pamiri food the practices, customs, and beliefs that form their most ancient expressions. At the same time, the book describes landscape and cultural changes in response to global forces and developments, and the struggle of Pamiri people to reimagine and recreate their ties with the land and their communities. A process that is as unique in its locality as it is universal in meaning.
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
Seth Dowland - 2015
Ministers, legislators, and laypeople came together to fight abortion, gay rights, and major feminist objectives. They supported private Christian schools, home schooling, and a strong military. Family values leaders like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Anita Bryant, and James Dobson became increasingly supportive of the Republican Party, which accommodated the language of family values in its platforms and campaigns. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism.Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians. Conservative evangelicals saw traditional gender norms as crucial in cultivating morality. They thought these gender norms would reaffirm the importance of clear lines of authority that the social revolutions of the 1960s had undermined. In the 1970s and 1980s, then, evangelicals founded Christian academies and developed homeschooling curricula that put conservative ideas about gender and authority front and center. Campaigns against abortion and feminism coalesced around a belief that God created women as wives and mothers--a belief that conservative evangelicals thought feminists and pro-choice advocates threatened. Likewise, Christian right leaders championed a particular vision of masculinity in their campaigns against gay rights and nuclear disarmament. Movements like the Promise Keepers called men to take responsibility for leading their families. Christian right political campaigns and pro-family organizations drew on conservative evangelical beliefs about men, women, children, and authority. These beliefs--known collectively as family values--became the most important religious agenda in late twentieth-century American politics.
The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization
Asko Parpola - 2015
In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.
Elongated Skulls Of Peru And Bolivia: The Path Of Viracocha
Brien Foerster - 2015
Nowhere was it more prevalent than it the countries now known as Peru and Bolivia. In this book the author shows how many ancient South American societies, such as the Inca had elongated heads, and that this cultural practice may be traced back to mysterious ancestors with very complex genetics origins.
Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness
Janis H. Jenkins - 2015
Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and interpretation. Extraordinary Conditions illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human. Jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book asserts that the study of mental illness is indispensable to the anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness.
Way of the Bushman: Spiritual Teachings and Practices of the Kalahari Ju/'hoansi
Bradford P. Keeney - 2015
Translated by Beesa Boo, a Bushman, and interspersed with detailed commentary from Bradford and Hillary Keeney, this book presents the core teachings of the Kalahari Bushmen as told by the tribal elders themselves. Decades in the making, it constitutes the first comprehensive work on the world’s oldest tradition of healing and spiritual experience. Told in their own words, these teachings reveal how the Bushmen are able to receive direct transmissions of God’s love in the form of the universal life force, n/om. The individuals who are filled with this force describe it as an awakened, energized feeling of love that inspires a spontaneous and heightened ecstatic awareness that opens mystical perception. Having your heart transfixed by this force enables true healing and spiritual growth to occur. Experiencing the force in your entire being, through a vision of “God’s egg”, awakens deep spiritual wisdom and extraordinary healing gifts. Those who “own the egg” are blessed with the ability to have direct communication with the Divine, a “rope to God,” and can communicate with others for all “ropes” are connected. Conveying the deep love that is the dominant emotion of Bushman spirituality, the book explores tribal legends and teaching tales, the importance of dreams and encounters with animals, the origins of their dances, such as the giraffe dance, and specific rituals and ceremonies, including puberty rites for boys and girls. “As the elder teachers of the Ju’/hoan Bushman (San) people, we hold the most enduring traditional wisdom concerning healing and spiritual experience. This book is a testimony of our ecstatic ways. We happily share our basic teachings about spirituality and healing with those whose hearts are sincerely open.”
The Holy Dusters: Fragments
Judith Wermuth-Atkinson - 2015
This is an appeal for attention to our attitudes toward the elderly. The author stresses that although "old age seems to be an inconvenience for many families, for society, and most certainly for the economics of any state" we should remember that "the old people of our time are also the creators of this time" and that "what the present represents for us was their project, their work - not just ours."
Aids To Scouting: for N.C.O.s and Men
Robert Baden-Powell - 2015
It was a non-typical training manual filled with personal stories of intrigue and even games. Its goal was to encourage the development of light reconnaissance scouting skills within the British Army. The book was well received by various armies of its time, including the French Army. His successful defense of Mafeking (1899-1900) in South Africa made Baden-Powell a well-known national hero in Britain. But what completely surprised Baden-Powell was that his book was eagerly taken up by teachers and youth groups to help organize outdoor activities and sport. He eventually embraced the idea of adapting his work into a new youth-oriented book, Scouting for Boys (1908) which went on to sell approx. 150 million copies to date. It was that follow-on book that firmly launched the international Boy Scouts movement. Aids to Scouting contains sections on the characters of a scout, as well as practical advice on observation, stealth/camouflage, map reading, sketching, tracking, reporting and care of horses. It presents these topics is a simple conversational style that makes it easy to read, and is illustrated with personal anecdotes of military adventures by the author. It gives scholars clear insights into his mindset and beliefs that served him well in the siege of Mafeking and shows a clear lineage to the formation of the tenets of his formation of the Boy Scouts. Anyone interested in the history of Boy Scouting will definitely want to read this interesting and formative book. (Note - Appendix C contents is missing in this Kindle version - but we hope to update the ebook with it once a suitable facsimile can be referenced).
Scanning the Pharaohs: CT Imaging of the New Kingdom Royal Mummies
Zahi A. Hawass - 2015
The remains of these pharaohs and queens can inform us about their age at death and medical conditions from which they may have suffered, as well as the mummification process and objects placed within the wrappings. Using the latest technology, including Multi-Detector Computed Tomography and DNA analysis, co-authors Zahi Hawass and Sahar Saleem present the results of the examination of royal mummies of the Eighteenth to Twentieth Dynasties. New imaging techniques not only reveal a wealth of information about each mummy, but render amazingly lifelike and detailed images of the remains. In addition, utilizing 3D images, the anatomy of each face has been discerned for a more accurate interpretation of a mummy's facial features. This latest research has uncovered some surprising results about the genealogy of, and familial relationships between, these ancient individuals, as well as some unexpected medical finds. Historical information is provided to place the royal mummies in context, and the book with its many illustrations will appeal to Egyptologists, paleopathologists, and non-specialists alike, as the authors seek to uncover the secrets of these most fascinating members of the New Kingdom royal families.
Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves
Albert Bandura - 2015
Bandura provides a definitive exposition of the psychosocial mechanism by which people selectively disengage their moral self-sanctions from their harmful conduct. They do so by sanctifying their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes; they absolve themselves of blame for the harm they cause by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; they minimize or deny the harmful effects of their actions; and they dehumanize those they maltreat and blame them for bringing the suffering on themselves. Dr. Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement is uniquely broad in scope. Theories of morality focus almost exclusively at the individual level. He insightfully extends the disengagement of morality to the social-system level through which wide-spread inhumanities are perpetrated. In so doing, he offers enlightening new perspectives on some of the most provocative issues of our time, addressing:Moral disengagement in all aspects of the death penalty—from public policy debates, to jury decisions, to the processes of execution The social and moral justifications of major industries—including gun manufacturers, the entertainment industry, tobacco companies, and the world of "too big to fail" finance Moral disengagement in terrorism, and how terrorists rationalize the use of violence as a means of social change Climate change denial, and the strenuous efforts by some to dispute the overwhelming scientific consensus affirming the impact of human behavior on the environment“Al Bandura is the most cited individual in the history of psychology for the depth, breadth and originality of his ideas and writings. Now with his ground-breaking new contribution, Moral Disengagement, his reach extends not only to teachers and students but also to the general public --making them aware of everyday evils in many spheres of daily life that must be counteracted by mindful moral engagement.” ----Phil Zimbardo, Ph.D. Author, The Lucifer Effect; President, The Heroic Imagination Project“The authoritative statement by the world’s most-cited living psychologist, laying out his influential theory. Plunge into these fascinating historical and modern case studies of moral disengagement—morality tales for all time, illuminated by the psychology of how people do harm to themselves and others.”-- Susan T. Fiske, Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University "This fascinating book is a sad reminder of the ubiquity of moral disengagement; it is a much needed call to arms; and it is even a practical primer of how to engage with others in ways that recognize and build on our shared humanity. It helps us identify and resist what threatens to diminish each of us and reminds us that morality is less about the ends we seek to achieve and more about the means we use. "----Thomas D. Cook, Joan and Serepta Harrison Professor of Ethics and Justice, Professor of Sociology, Psychology, Education, and Social Policy, Northwestern University; and Senior Fellow, Mathematica Policy Research, Washington, DC“Dr. Albert Bandura is one of the great behavioral scientists of our time. His superb contributions include a deep analysis of human morality, its fundamental importance and the complexity of its development.” ----David A. Hamburg, MD, Visiting Scholar, American Association for the Advancement of Science; DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Weill Cornell Medical College; President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York
The Hiddenness Argument: Philosophy's New Challenge to Belief in God
J.L. Schellenberg - 2015
According to the hiddenness argument, this is actually a reason to suppose that it is not a fact at all.The hiddenness argument is a new argument for atheism that has come to prominence in philosophy over the past two decades. J. L. Schellenberg first developed the argument in 1993, and this book offers a short and vigorous statement of its central claims and ideas. Logically sharp but so clear thatanyone can understand, the book addresses little-discussed issues such as why it took so long for hiddenness reasoning to emerge in philosophy, and how the hiddenness problem is distinct from the problem of evil. It concludes with the fascinating thought that retiring the last of the personal godsmight leave us nearer the beginning of religion than the end.Though an atheist, Schellenberg writes sensitively and with a nuanced insider's grasp of the religious life. Pertinent aspects of his experience as a believer and as a nonbeliever, and of his own engagement with hiddenness issues, are included. Set in this personal context, and against anauthoritative background on relevant logical, conceptual, and historical matters, The Hiddenness Argument's careful but provocative reasoning makes crystal clear just what this new argument is and why it matters.
Lesbian Love Addiction: Understanding the Urge to Merge and How to Heal When Things Go Wrong
Lauren D. Costine - 2015
Sometimes they learn from those mistakes. Other times, they return to those behaviors and cycle through failed relationship after failed relationship. Sometimes those behaviors become an addiction to love that may leave a person feeling unhappy, unfulfilled, lonely, or worse. Lesbian Love Addiction: Understanding the Urge to Merge and How to Heal When Things go Wrong makes visible the elements of love addiction that many lesbians suffer from. Love addiction for lesbians comes in many forms. Some struggle by sexually acting out and others are serial relationship junkies, jumping from one relationship into the next. Some are addicted to the high of falling in love and once that wears off don't know how to handle the day-to-day realities of a committed relationship. Some are even addicted to fantasy and intrigue, while others are love avoidants and sexual anorexics. Love avoidants may be able to get into a relationship but once they are fully committed, struggle with feeling smothered. Others may avoid intimate or sexual relationships all together, becoming sexually anorexic. Some may even vacillate between all of these. The underlying component and common denominator in all of these scenarios is the "Urge to Merge." Lesbian Love Addiction is designed to help ameliorate at least part of this problem. Lauren D. Costine offers insight for lesbians, bisexual women in relationships with women, queer women, and more specifically, any woman who loves women, as well as their family and friends, and health care professionals, into the psychology of lesbian love addiction. It will give those who struggle with and suffer from love addiction ways to understand, cope, and heal from this debilitating addiction. It will give those who work with this population new tools to use to do this more effectively. Mostly, it will help lesbians understand their relationship failures and how to heal from problems associated with them, so they may grow and cultivate happier, more fulfilling connections in the future.
Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil's Sexual Economy
Gregory C. Mitchell - 2015
In Tourist Attractions, Gregory C. Mitchell presents a pioneering ethnography that focuses on the personal lives and identities of male sex workers who occupy a variety of roles in Brazil’s sexual economy. Mitchell takes us into the bath houses of Rio de Janeiro, where rent boys cruise for clients, and to the beaches of Salvador da Bahia, where African American gay men seek out hustlers while exploring cultural heritage tourist sites. His ethnography stretches into the Amazon, where indigenous fantasies are tinged with the erotic at eco-resorts, and into the homes of “kept men,” who forge long-term, long-distance, transnational relationships that blur the boundaries of what counts as commercial sex. Mitchell asks how tourists perceive sex workers’ performances of Brazilianness, race, and masculinity, and, in turn, how these two groups of men make sense of differing models of racial and sexual identity across cultural boundaries. He proposes that in order to better understand how people experience difference sexually, we reframe prostitution—which Marxist feminists have long conceptualized as sexual labor—as also being a form of performative labor. Tourist Attractions is an exceptional ethnography poised to make an indelible impact in the fields of anthropology, gender, and sexuality, and research on prostitution and tourism.
Debt as Power
Tim Di Muzio - 2015
Rather than focusing on the historical emergence of debt as a moral obligation, the authors argue that debt under capitalism can be conceived of as a technology of power, intimately tied up with the requirement for perpetual growth and the differential capitalization that benefits 'the 1%'.Their account begins with the recognition that the histories of human communities and their natural environment are interconnected in complex spatial and hierarchical relations of power and to understand their development we need to not only examine the particularities of a given case, but more importantly their interconnected, interdependent and international relations. Since debt under capitalism is increasingly ubiquitous at all levels of society and economic growth is now the sole mantra of dominant political parties around the world, the authors argue that tracing the evolution and transformation of debt as a technology of power is crucial for understanding the 'present as history' and possible alternatives to our current trajectory.
Maya Forest Garden: Eight Millennia of Sustainable Cultivation of the Tropical Woodlands
Anabel Ford - 2015
Using research on contemporary Maya farming techniques and important new archaeological research, Ford and Nigh refute this Malthusian explanation of events in ancient Central America and posit a radical alternative theory. The authorsshow that ancient Maya farmers developed ingenious, sustainable woodland techniques to cultivate numerous food plants (including the staple maize);examine both contemporary tropical farming techniques and the archaeological record (particularly regarding climate) to reach their conclusions;make the argument that these ancient techniques, still in use today, can support significant populations over long periods of time.
At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain
Philip Howell - 2015
In At Home and Astray, Philip Howell focuses on Victorian Britain, and especially London, to show how the dog's changing place in society was the subject of intense debate and depended on a fascinating combination of forces even to come about.Despite a relationship with humans going back thousands of years, the dog only became fully domesticated and installed at the heart of the middle-class home in the nineteenth century. Dog breeding and showing proliferated at that time, and dog ownership increased considerably. At the same time, the dog was increasingly policed out of public space, the "stray" becoming the unloved counterpart of the household "pet." Howell shows how this redefinition of the dog's place illuminates our understanding of modernity and the city. He also explores the fascinating process whereby the dog's changing role was proposed, challenged, and confronted--and in the end conditionally accepted. With a supporting cast that includes Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Darwin, and subjects of inquiry ranging from vivisection and the policing of rabies to pet cemeteries, dog shelters, and the practice of walking the dog, At Home and Astray is a contribution not only to the history of animals but also to our understanding of the Victorian era and its legacies.
The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi
Stephen A. Berrey - 2015
Yet, as Stephen A. Berrey shows, it was also a high-stakes drama that played out in the routines of everyday life, where blacks and whites regularly interacted on sidewalks and buses and in businesses and homes. Every day, individuals made, unmade, and remade Jim Crow in how they played their racial roles--how they moved, talked, even gestured. The highly visible but often subtle nature of these interactions constituted the Jim Crow routine.In this study of Mississippi race relations in the final decades of the Jim Crow era, Berrey argues that daily interactions between blacks and whites are central to understanding segregation and the racial system that followed it. Berrey shows how civil rights activism, African Americans' refusal to follow the Jim Crow script, and national perceptions of southern race relations led Mississippi segregationists to change tactics. No longer able to rely on the earlier routines, whites turned instead to less visible but equally insidious practices of violence, surveillance, and policing, rooted in a racially coded language of law and order. Reflecting broader national transformations, these practices laid the groundwork for a new era marked by black criminalization, mass incarceration, and a growing police presence in everyday life.
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 1: Foundation
David M. Buss - 2015
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the seminal work in this vibrant, quickly-developing new discipline. In this thorough revision and expansion, luminaries in the field provide an in-depth exploration of the foundations of evolutionary psychology and explain the new empirical discoveries and theoretical developments that continue at a breathtaking pace.Evolutionary psychologists posit that the mind has a specialized and complex structure, just as the body has a specialized and complex structure. From this important theoretical concept arises the vast array of possibilities that are at the core of the field, which seeks to examine such traits as perception, language, and memory from an evolutionary perspective. This examination is intended to determine the human psychological traits that are the products of sexual and natural selection and, as such, to chart and understand human nature.Join the discussion of the big questions addressed by the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology Explore the foundations of evolutionary psychology, from theory and methods to the thoughts of EP critics Discover the psychology of human survival, mating, parenting, cooperation and conflict, culture, and more Identify how evolutionary psychology is interwoven with other academic subjects and traditional psychological disciplines The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the definitive guide for every psychologist and student interested in keeping abreast of new ideas in this quickly-developing field.
I.D: Early Hunters of the Open Plains (Historical Atlas of World Mythology
Joseph Campbell - 2015
This was most emphatically so on those vast, northern animal plains of the Upper Paleolithic Great Hunt, onto which Neanderthal Man was apparently the first of humankind to venture. — Joseph CampbellIn this installment in the release of he Historical Atlas of World Mythology — Digital Edition, Joseph Campbell explores the mythologies and cultures of the migratory hunting tribes from the days of the great ritual caves like Lascaux and Trois Frères to the modern-day !Kung of the Kalahari desert. Exploring both the beautiful artifacts and the amazing stories that these cultures have left behind, Campbell examines just what it means for humans to live in close relationship with both prey and predator. The animals become more than sustenance; for such tribes they become mythic neighbors who are part of a covenant where to eat and to be eaten is part of cycle, a sacred bond that gives spiritual shape to the daily struggle — human and animal — to survive.Joseph Campbell's multivolume Historical Atlas of World Mythology, his magnum opus, marked the culmination of his brilliant career as scholar, writer, teacher, and one of the foremost interpreters of our most sacred traditions.Campbell described his work as an attempt to tell humankind's "One Great Story" — our saga of spiritual awakening and the subsequent development of the many different mythological perspectives that have shaped us throughout time. His central theme is that our seemingly disparate spiritual traditions are neither discrete nor unique, but rather each is simply an "ethnic manifestation" of one or another of those "elemental ideals" that have forever transfixed the human psyche.
Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border
Ieva Jusionyte - 2015
The Triple Frontera is one of the major "hot borders" in the Western Hemisphere and a site associated with drug and human trafficking, contraband, money laundering, and terrorism. It's also a place where residents, particularly on the Argentine side, are subjected to increased governmental control and surveillance.But how does a scholar tell a story about a place characterized by illicit international trading, rampant violence, and governmental militarization? Jusionyte has inventively centered her ethnographic fieldwork on a community of journalists who investigate and report on crime and violence in the region. There is a fair amount of petty, small-scale illicit trading that goes unreported—this is a consequence of a community invested in promoting the idea that the border is a secure place that does not warrant militarized attention. Her work demonstrates that while media is often seen as a powerful tool for spreading a sense of danger and uncertainty, sensationalizing crime and violence, and creating moral panics, journalists can actually do the opposite. Those who selectively report on illegal activities use the news to tell particular types of stories in an attempt to make their communities look and ultimately be more secure.
Gypsy Movements
Jud Nirenberg - 2015
Here is the truth about flawed people aspiring toward the noblest goals. After the fall of communism, the Roma (Gypsies), Europe's largest and poorest ethnic minority group began a civil rights movement. An American from small-town New England, Jud Nirenberg became one of the Romani movement's key personalities, working for a Romani political party, running billionaire George Soros' charitable support of the movement and working as the right hand to each of the movement's most charismatic figures as they rose up, taking one another's places in the dawn of Eastern Europe's freedom. "[Nirenberg] makes a significant contribution to Romani communal memory with realism and wit, without losing his grounding or honest engagement with the movement.” – Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, Professor, Purdue University"Jud Nirenberg is a respected consultant, public speaker, author and interpreter of the Romani quest for empowerment...[while an] electronic book may arouse doubts about its value as an academic resource, this work delivers plenty of interesting insights and observations...iconoclastic exploration of a sensitive topic" -Romani Studies, 2016
Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution
Jonathan Marks - 2015
In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology. Tales of the Ex-Apes argues that human evolution has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes and thus cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes. Marks shows that human evolution has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles—notably spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology.
Ordinary Medicine: Extraordinary Treatments, Longer Lives, and Where to Draw the Line
Sharon R. Kaufman - 2015
In today’s aging society, however, the line between life-giving therapies and too much treatment is hard to see—it’s being obscured by a perfect storm created by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, along with insurance companies. In Ordinary Medicine Sharon R. Kaufman investigates what drives that storm’s “more is better” approach to medicine: a nearly invisible chain of social, economic, and bureaucratic forces that has made once-extraordinary treatments seem ordinary, necessary, and desirable. Since 2002 Kaufman has listened to hundreds of older patients, their physicians and family members express their hopes, fears, and reasoning as they faced the line between enough and too much intervention. Their stories anchor Ordinary Medicine. Today’s medicine, Kaufman contends, shapes nearly every American’s experience of growing older, and ultimately medicine is undermining its own ability to function as a social good. Kaufman’s careful mapping of the sources of our health care dilemmas should make it far easier to rethink and renew medicine’s goals.
Through the Lens of Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Evolution and Culture
Robert J. Muckle - 2015
By viewing the world through the lens of anthropology, students will learn not only about anthropological methods, theories, and ethics, but also the ways in which anthropology is relevant to their everyday lives and embedded in the culture that surrounds them.Beautifully illustrated throughout, with over 150 full-color images, figures, feature boxes, and maps, this is an anthropology text with a fresh perspective, a lively narrative, and plenty of popular topics that are sure to engage readers. A strong pedagogical framework structures the book: each chapter features learning objectives, glossary terms, and chapter summaries, as well as review and discussion questions which guide students' analysis of the topics, themes, and issues raised in the text. This book is interesting to read, manageable to teach, and succeeds at igniting interest in anthropology as a discipline.
Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork
Gail Pool - 2015
The first, a field trip the author took with her husband to live with the Baining people of Papua New Guinea, was a fiasco that haunted the couple for years. The second, their redemptive return to the Baining forty years on, gave their story a whole new ending.Lost Among the Baining is a memoir, a travel book, and a love story. Reviewers have called it "provocative," "inspiring," "compulsively readable," and "laugh-out-loud funny."
HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone
Adia Benton - 2015
Seeking international attention and development aid, its government faced a dilemma. Though devastated by conflict, Sierra Leone had a low prevalence of HIV. However, like most African countries, it stood to benefit from a large influx of foreign funds specifically targeted at HIV/AIDS prevention and care.What Adia Benton chronicles in this ethnographically rich and often moving book is how one war-ravaged nation reoriented itself as a country suffering from HIV at the expense of other, more pressing health concerns. During her fieldwork in the capital, Freetown, a city of one million people, at least thirty NGOs administered internationally funded programs that included HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Benton probes why HIV exceptionalism—the idea that HIV is an exceptional disease requiring an exceptional response—continues to guide approaches to the epidemic worldwide and especially in Africa, even in low-prevalence settings.In the fourth decade since the emergence of HIV/AIDS, many today are questioning whether the effort and money spent on this health crisis has in fact helped or exacerbated the problem. HIV Exceptionalism does this and more, asking, what are the unanticipated consequences that HIV/AIDS development programs engender?
The Bible in the Contemporary World: Hermeneutical Ventures
Richard Bauckham - 2015
In this book Bauckham models how this task can be carried out. Bauckham calls for our reading of Scripture to lead us to greater engagement with critical issues in today’s world, including globalization, environmental degradation, and widespread poverty. He works to bring biblical texts to bear on these contemporary realities through the Bible’s metanarrative of God and the world, according to which God’s purpose takes effect in the blessing and salvation and fulfillment of the world as his cherished creation.
Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology
Edia ConnoleAspasia Stephanou - 2015
If there's a more intense sleep-killer compilation out there somewhere, it's concealing itself well. – Nick Land, author of Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time (Urbanatomy, 2014)We simultaneously love and hate serial killers: we dread them, and yet we are fascinated by them. Both in reality, and in books and television shows, serial killers seem to stand at the very edge of what is possible, or of what is human. The essays in this volume push to the extremes of philosophy, and of art and literature, in order to speak to our uneasy relationship with what we both desire and abhor. – Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University, author of The Universe of Things (UMP, 2014)Serial Killing leaves behind the analysis of the serial killer as a romantic anti-hero, diagnostic category of psychopathology or sociological symptom to offer a collection of essays that infuses the conventional delusions of critical distance with the passionate, homicidal embrace of loving neighborliness. The theoretical, photographic and fictional essays in this volume take the serial killer as an object of both philosophical speculation and spiritual contemplation. In a brilliant cornucopia of styles and obsessions, serial killing becomes, among many other things: the touchstone of common in-humanity, a form of sacrifice and mystical rite, a leisure activity, a kind of bloody ikebana, a kaligraphic and auto-graphic mode of self-portraiture and flesh inscription, the meta-relational emanation of immanent suffering, a form of kleptomancy, an expression of neoliberal love, an ascetic practice of cosmic joy. It is properly mad. – Scott Wilson, Kingston University, author of Stop Making Sense (Karnac, 2015)One of the deepest and darkest truths in psychoanalysis is about the serial nature of the object. We pretend that it is unique, irreplaceable, singular, but it isn't, and it always exists as part of a multiple whose secret truth, to our real horror, is the emptiness or nothing at the center of this excess. In this fascinating collection of essays edited by Edia Connole and Gary Shipley we find out about this serial perversion of everyday life. – Jamieson Webster, Eugene Lang College, author of Stay! Illusion (Vintage, 2014)
The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971
Nayanika Mookherjee - 2015
Nayanika Mookherjee demonstrates that while this celebration of birangonas as heroes keeps them in the public memory, they exist in the public consciousness as what Mookherjee calls a spectral wound. Dominant representations of birangonas as dehumanized victims with disheveled hair, a vacant look, and rejected by their communities create this wound, the effects of which flatten the diversity of their experiences through which birangonas have lived with the violence of wartime rape. In critically examining the pervasiveness of the birangona construction, Mookherjee opens the possibility for a more politico-economic, ethical, and nuanced inquiry into the sexuality of war.
Chinese Philosophy: An Introduction
Ronnie Littlejohn - 2015
China has been the home not only of its indigenous philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Daoism, but also of uniquely modified forms of Buddhism. As Ronnie L Littlejohn shows, these traditions have for thousands of years formed the bedrock of the longest continuing civilization on the planet; and Chinese philosophy has profoundly shaped the institutions, social practices and psychological character of East and Southeast Asia. The author here surveys the key texts and philosophical systems of Chinese thinkers in a completely original and illuminating way. Ranging from the Han dynasty to the present, he discusses the six classical schools of Chinese philosophy (Yin-Yang, Ru, Mo, Ming, Fa and Dao-De); the arrival of Buddhism in China and its distinctive development; the central figures and movements from the end of the Tang dynasty to the introduction into China of Western thought; and the impact of Chinese philosophers ranging from Confucius and Laozi to Tu Weiming on their equivalents in the West."
The Tuareg
Henrietta Butler - 2015
This ancient culture that once controlled the lucrative caravan routes through North Africa is now dispersed across several countries, but their common bonds of language, music and art transcend national borders. In a series of visits to the region, Henrietta Butler has beautifully documented the lives of these desert nomads. Her remarkable photographs are joined by historical maps and illustrations from the first European explorers to visit the Sahara, along with the art and poetry of the Tuareg themselves.Henrietta Butler was the arts photographer for the Guardian from 1992 to 1997 and 1999 to 2001. Since 1998 she has also produced feature stories, notably for the Independent on Saturday and the Sunday Times magazines, and portraits for Le Monde.
Versos, or: The Things a Woman Learns on the Banks of the Great River
M.R. Graham - 2015
A poetic ethnography of the Rio Grande Valley in sixty short verses.
Lincoln's Ethics
Thomas L. Carson - 2015
Lincoln's Ethics addresses the question of whether Lincoln deserves his reputation as a moral exemplar. It discusses some of his morally controversial policies and presents the evidence for thinking he was morally virtuous in many important respects.
Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges
Tim Lewens - 2015
Convinced of the exceptional power of natural selection, many thinkers--typically working in biological anthropology, cognitivepsychology, and evolutionary biology--have suggested it should be freed from the confines of biology, and applied to cultural change in humans and other animals. At the same time, others-typically with backgrounds in disciplines like social anthropology and history-have been just as vocal indismissing the evolutionary approach to culture. What drives these disputes over Darwinism in the social sciences? While making a case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, Lewens shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance. Indeed, confusions about what evolutionary approaches entail are propagated by their proponents, as well asby their detractors. By taking seriously the problems faced by these approaches to culture, Lewens shows how such approaches can be better formulated, where their most significant limitations lie, and how the tools of cultural evolutionary thinking might become more widely accepted.
Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship among the White Earth Anishinaabeg
Jill Doerfler - 2015
Those Who Belong explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century, how it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood quantum criteria with lineal descent. Those Who Belong illustrates the ways in which Anishinaabeg of White Earth negotiated multifaceted identities, both before and after the introduction of blood quantum as a marker of identity and as the sole requirement for tribal citizenship. Doerfler’s research reveals that Anishinaabe leaders resisted blood quantum as a tribal citizenship requirement for decades before acquiescing to federal pressure. Constitutional reform efforts in the twenty-first century brought new life to this longstanding debate and led to the adoption of a new constitution, which requires lineal descent for citizenship.
How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth
David Clarke - 2015
The book will also explore the overlaps between UFO belief and religion and superstition.
The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City
Barbara E. Mundy - 2015
Built on an island in the middle of a shallow lake, its population numbered perhaps 150,000, with another 350,000 people in the urban network clustered around the lake shores. In 1521, at the height of Tenochtitlan's power, which extended over much of Central Mexico, Hernando Cortes and his followers conquered the city. Cortes boasted to King Charles V of Spain that Tenochtitlan was "destroyed and razed to the ground." But was it?Drawing on period representations of the city in sculptures, texts, and maps, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City builds a convincing case that this global capital remained, through the sixteenth century, very much an Amerindian city. Barbara E. Mundy foregrounds the role the city's indigenous peoples, the Nahua, played in shaping Mexico City through the construction of permanent architecture and engagement in ceremonial actions. She demonstrates that the Aztec ruling elites, who retained power even after the conquest, were instrumental in building and then rebuilding the city. Mundy shows how the Nahua entered into mutually advantageous alliances with the Franciscans to maintain the city's sacred nodes. She also focuses on the practical and symbolic role of the city's extraordinary waterworks--the product of a massive ecological manipulation begun in the fifteenth century--to reveal how the Nahua struggled to maintain control of water resources in early Mexico City.
enGendered: God’s Gift of Gender Difference in Relationship
Sam A. Andreades - 2015
It concludes that the more distinction is embraced, the closer a man and woman become. Thus gender, rightly understood, is a tool for intimacy. Written in a compassionate tone and winsome style, the volume speaks to Christians who want to know what the Bible says about gender differences and why. This theology of gender is also of value for people who struggle with same-sex attraction but want to follow Christ.
Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism
Maple Razsa - 2015
His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinching—an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth.
The Holy Madmen of Tibet
David M. Divalerio - 2015
They became known far and wide asmadmen (smyon pa, pronounced ny�npa), achieving a degree of saintliness in the process. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Tibet's holy madmen drawing on their biographies and writings, as well as tantric commentaries, later histories, oral traditions, and more.Much of The Holy Madmen of Tibet is dedicated to examining the lives and legacies of the three most famous holy madmen who were all of the Kagy� sect: the Madman of Tsang (author of The Life of Milarepa), the Madman of �, and Drukpa K�nl�, Madman of the Drukpa Kagy�. Each born in the 1450s, theyrose to prominence during a period of civil war and of great shifts in Tibet's religious culture.By focusing on literature written by and about the holy madmen and on the yogins' relationships with their public, this book offers in-depth looks at the narrative and social processes out of which sainthood arises, and at the role biographical literature can play in the formation of sectarianidentities. By showing how understandings of the madmen have changed over time, this study allows for new insights into current notions of crazy wisdom. In the end, the holy madmen are seen as self-aware and purposeful individuals who were anything but insane.