Best of
Anthropology

2016

Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures: Biblical Foundations and Practical Essentials


Jayson Georges - 2016
    First there are those stuttering moments in the new social landscape. Then after missed cues and social bruises comes the revelation that this culture--indeed much of the world--runs on an honor-shame operating system. When Western individualism and its introspective conscience fails to engage cultural gears, how can we shift and navigate this alternate code? And might we even learn to see and speak the gospel differently if we did? In Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures Jayson Georges and Mark Baker help us decode the cultural script of honor and shame. What's more, they assist us in reading the Bible anew through the lens of honor and shame, often with startling turns. And they offer thoughtful and practical guidance in ministry within honor-shame contexts. Apt stories, illuminating insights and ministry-tested wisdom complete this well-rounded guide to Christian ministry in honor-shame cultures.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene


Donna J. Haraway - 2016
    Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

More Encounters with Star People: Urban American Indians Tells Their Stories


Ardy Sixkiller Clarke - 2016
    One intriguing difference between the two groups: there were more cases of physical evidence presented to back up the testimony of urban American Indians. As with her first book, this volume not only recounts their encounters, but the recounting itself becomes part of the story. A professor emeritus at Montana State University, the author reveals herself as part UFO investigator, part journalist, part therapist, and part friend. The result is a work of great authenticity.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes


Adam Rutherford - 2016
    It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is to each of the 100 billion modern humans who have ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in every one of our genomes we each carry the history of our species births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. Since scientists first read the human genome in 2001, it has been subject to all sorts of claims, counterclaims, and myths. In fact, as Adam Rutherford explains, our genomes should be read not as instruction manuals, but as epic poems. DNA determines far less than we have been led to believe about us as individuals, but vastly more about us as a species. In this captivating journey through the expanding landscape of genetics, Adam Rutherford reveals what our genes now tell us about history, and what history tells us about our genes. From Neanderthals to murder, from redheads to race, dead kings to plague, evolution to epigenetics, this is a demystifying and illuminating new portrait of who we are and how we came to be."

Prehistoric Investigations: From Denisovans to Neanderthals; DNA to stable isotopes; hunter-gathers to farmers; stone knapping to metallurgy; cave art to stone circles; wolves to dogs


Christopher Seddon - 2016
    In addition to fieldwork and traditional methods, paleoanthropologists and archaeologists now draw upon genetics and other cutting-edge scientific techniques. In fifty chapters, Prehistoric Investigations tells the story of the many thought-provoking discoveries that have transformed our understanding of the distant past.

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine


Catherine Besteman - 2016
    Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.

Death, Dying, and the Afterlife: Lessons from World Cultures


Mark Berkson - 2016
    While we’re predisposed to look on death with fear and sadness, it’s only by confronting and exploring death head-on that we can actually embrace the important role it plays in our lives. Death, it turns out, is a powerful teacher, one that can help us think responsibly and deeply about the meaning and value of life, connect with the beliefs and traditions of cultures and faiths different from our own, and gain the wisdom and guidance to live a richer, more fulfilling life while we have it.As religion scholar and award-winning Professor Mark Berkson of Hamline University says, “Reflecting on death and dying is an essential part of the examined life.” Take a wide-ranging look at this undeniably confounding and fascinating subject. Bringing together theology, philosophy, biology, anthropology, literature, psychology, sociology, and other fields, these 24 lectures are a brilliant compendium of how human beings have struggled to come to terms with mortality. You’ll encounter everything from ancient burial practices, traditional views of the afterlife, and the five stages of grief to the question of killing during wartime, the phenomenon of near-death experiences, and even 21st-century theories about transcending death itself. Prepare for a remarkable learning experience that brings you face-to-face with the most important topic mortals like us can consider.

Ministering Cross-Culturally: A Model for Effective Personal Relationships


Sherwood G. Lingenfelter - 2016
    On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, this contemporary classic has been thoroughly updated to reflect Sherwood Lingenfelter's mature thinking on the topic and to communicate with modern readers, helping them minister more effectively to people of different cultural and social backgrounds. It is accessible, practical, and applicable to many ministry situations. An accompanying interactive questionnaire, designed to help students reflect on their own cultural values, is available online through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

A Natural History of Human Morality


Michael Tomasello - 2016
    Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and human children, Michael Tomasello reconstructs how early humans gradually became an ultra-cooperative and, eventually, a moral species.There were two key evolutionary steps, each founded on a new way that individuals could act together as a plural agent “we”. The first step occurred as ecological challenges forced early humans to forage together collaboratively or die. To coordinate these collaborative activities, humans evolved cognitive skills of joint intentionality, ensuring that both partners knew together the normative standards governing each role. To reduce risk, individuals could make an explicit joint commitment that “we” forage together and share the spoils together as equally deserving partners, based on shared senses of trust, respect, and responsibility. The second step occurred as human populations grew and the division of labor became more complex. Distinct cultural groups emerged that demanded from members loyalty, conformity, and cultural identity. In becoming members of a new cultural “we”, modern humans evolved cognitive skills of collective intentionality, resulting in culturally created and objectified norms of right and wrong that everyone in the group saw as legitimate morals for anyone who would be one of “us”.As a result of this two-stage process, contemporary humans possess both a second-personal morality for face-to-face engagement with individuals and a group-minded “objective” morality that obliges them to the moral community as a whole.

What Is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity


Jean Clottes - 2016
    While other books focus on particular sites and surveys, Clottes’s work is a contemplative journey across the world, a personal reflection on how we have viewed these paintings in the past, what we learn from looking at them across geographies, and what these paintings may have meant—what function they may have served—for their artists. Steeped in Clottes’s shamanistic theories of cave painting, What Is Paleolithic Art? travels from well-known Ice Age sites like Chauvet, Altamira, and Lascaux to visits with contemporary aboriginal artists, evoking a continuum between the cave paintings of our prehistoric past and the living rock art of today. Clottes’s work lifts us from the darkness of our Paleolithic origins to reveal, by firelight, how we think, why we create, why we believe, and who we are.

The Power of Solitude


Mateo Sol - 2016
    However, at the same time, solitude is one of the easiest, most accessible paths out there to profound self-insight and liberation. In solitude, we descend into the womb of our souls to reconnect to the truth of who we are. Yet, to most people, solitude is avoided because it reveals to us the emptiness, fear and sadness we carry inside.In this book, you will be taken on a journey through nine of the greatest gifts solitude can enrich your life with and how these virtues help you to fulfill your destiny. These gifts include aloneness, awareness, introspection, gratitude, courage, acceptance, joy and self-fulfillment. You will also discover how to create a personal solitude practice.The Power of Solitude is a book that is composed of various articles that we have published on this website in the past. We have also added extra content to help illuminate your path and guide you through the sacred process of self-discovery and inner transformation.CHAPTERS:PrefaceIntroductionChapter 1 – AlonenessChapter 2 – AwarenessChapter 3 – IntrospectionChapter 4 – GratitudeChapter 5 – CourageChapter 6 – AcceptanceChapter 7 – Happiness and JoyChapter 8 – Self-FulfillmentChapter 9 – How to Create a Solitude PracticeConclusionAbout the AuthorsBibliography

From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read


Kristen R. Ghodsee - 2016
    So it is ironic that most scholars who do research on the intimate experiences of ordinary people write their books in a style that those people cannot understand. In recent years, the ethnographic method has spread from its original home in cultural anthropology to fields such as sociology, marketing, media studies, law, criminology, education, cultural studies, history, geography, and political science.  Yet, while more and more students and practitioners are learning how to write ethnographies, there is little or no training on how to write ethnographies well.  From Notes to Narrative picks up where methodological training leaves off.  Kristen Ghodsee, an award-winning ethnographer, addresses common issues that arise in ethnographic writing. Ghodsee works through sentence-level details, such as word choice and structure. She also tackles bigger-picture elements, such as how to incorporate theory and ethnographic details, how to effectively deploy dialogue, and how to avoid distracting elements such as long block quotations and in-text citations. She includes excerpts and examples from model ethnographies. The book concludes with a bibliography of other useful writing guides and nearly one hundred examples of eminently readable ethnographic books.

Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity


James Valliant - 2016
    The Romans employed a tactic they routinely used to conquer and absorb other nations: they grafted their imperial rule onto the religion of the conquered. After 30 years of research, authors James S. Valliant and C.W. Fahy present irrefutable archaeological and textual evidence that proves Christianity was created by Roman Caesars in this book that breaks new ground in Christian scholarship and is destined to change the way the world looks at ancient religions forever. Inherited from a long-past era of tyranny, war and deliberate religious fraud, could Christianity have been created for an entirely different purpose than we have been lead to believe? Praised by scholars like Dead Sea Scrolls translator Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus), this exhaustive synthesis of historical detective work integrates all of the ancient sources about the earliest Christians and reveals new archaeological evidence for the first time. And, despite the fable presented in current bestsellers like Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus, the evidence presented in Creating Christ is irrefutable: Christianity was invented by Roman Emperors. ***** ”I have rarely encountered a book so original, exciting, accessible and informed on subjects that are of obvious importance to the world and to which I have myself devoted such a large part of my scholarly career studying. In this book they have rendered a startling new understanding of Christianity with a controversial theory of its Roman provenance that is accessible to the layman in a very powerful way. In the process, they present new and comprehensive archeological and iconographic evidence, as well as utilizing the widest and most cutting edge work of other recent scholars, including myself. This is a work of outstanding and original scholarship. Its arguments are a brilliant, profound and thorough integration of the relevant evidence. When they are done, the conclusion is inescapable and obviously profound.” Prof. Robert Eisenman, Author of James the Brother of Jesus and The New Testament Code "A fascinating and provocative investigative history of ideas, boldly exploring a problem that previous scholarship has not clearly or credibly addressed: how (and why!) the Flavian dynasty wove Christianity into the very fabric of Western civilization." -Mark Riebling, author of Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler

The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine


Rita Charon - 2016
    The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine expresses the collective experience and discoveries of the originators of thefield. Arising at Columbia University in 2000 from roots in the humanities and patient-centered care, narrative medicine draws patients, doctors, nurses, therapists, and health activists together to re-imagine a health care based on trust and trustworthiness, humility, and mutual recognition.Over a decade of education and research has crystallized the goals and methods of narrative medicine, leading to increasingly powerful means to improve the care that patients receive. The methods described in this book harness creativity and insight to help the professionals in being with patients, not just to diagnose and treat them but tobear witness to what they undergo. Narrative medicine training in literary theory, philosophy, narrative ethics, and the creative arts increases clinicians' capacity to perceive the turmoil and suffering borne by patients and to help them to cohere or endure the chaos of illness.Narrative medicine has achieved an international reputation and reach. Many health care settings adopt methods of narrative medicine in teaching and practice. Through the Master of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program and health professions school curricula at Columbia University, more andmore clinicians and scholars have obtained the rigorous training necessary to practice and teach narrative medicine. This text is offered to all who seek the opportunity for disciplined training in narrative medicine. By clearly articulating our principles and practice, this book provides thestandards of the field for those who want to join us in seeking authenticity, recognition, affiliation, and justice in a narrative health care.

Sky Shamans of Mongolia: Meetings with Remarkable Healers


Kevin Turner - 2016
    Along the way, the author, a practicing shaman himself, tells of spontaneous medical diagnoses, all-night shamanic ceremonies, and miraculous healings, all welling from a rich culture in which divination, soul-retrieval, and spirit depossession are a part of everyday life.   Shamanism, described in the 1950s by Mircea Eliade as "archaic techniques of ecstasy," is alive and well in Mongolia as a means of accessing "nonordinary realities" and the spirit world. After centuries of suppression by Buddhist and then Communist political powers, it is exploding in popularity in Mongolia. Turner gives compelling accounts of healings and rituals he witnesses among Darkhad, Buryat, and Khalkh shamans, and goes on to provide us with his insights into a universal shamanism, principles that lie at the heart of shamanic traditions worldwide. This astounding, inspiring book will appeal to shamans and shamanic therapists, students of Mongolian culture and comparative religion, and fans of off-grid travel memoirs.

The Unseen Realm: A Question & Answer Companion


Dorn Douglas Van - 2016
    Michael S. Heiser unpacked 15 years of research while exploring what the Bible really says about the supernatural world.Now, Douglas Van Dorn helps you further explore The Unseen Realm with a fresh perspective and an easy-to-follow format. Van Dorn summarizes key concepts and themes and includes questions aimed at helping you gain a deeper understanding of the biblical author's supernatural worldview. Use your copy of The Unseen Realm: A Question & Answer Companion for personal study or for leading discussion with a small group.

Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil


Christen A. Smith - 2016
    But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. Christen A. Smith argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, Smith follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As Smith reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians.Based on years of field work, Afro-Paradise is a passionate account of a long-overlooked struggle for life and dignity in contemporary Brazil.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging


Sebastian Junger - 2016
    These are the very same behaviors that typify good soldiering and foster a sense of belonging among troops, whether they’re fighting on the front lines or engaged in non-combat activities away from the action. Drawing from history, psychology, and anthropology, bestselling author Sebastian Junger shows us just how at odds the structure of modern society is with our tribal instincts, arguing that the difficulties many veterans face upon returning home from war do not stem entirely from the trauma they’ve suffered, but also from the individualist societies they must reintegrate into.A 2011 study by the Canadian Forces and Statistics Canada reveals that 78 percent of military suicides from 1972 to the end of 2006 involved veterans. Though these numbers present an implicit call to action, the government is only just taking steps now to address the problems veterans face when they return home. But can the government ever truly eliminate the challenges faced by returning veterans? Or is the problem deeper, woven into the very fabric of our modern existence? Perhaps our circumstances are not so bleak, and simply understanding that beneath our modern guises we all belong to one tribe or another would help us face not just the problems of our nation but of our individual lives as well.Well-researched and compellingly written, this timely look at how veterans react to coming home will reconceive our approach to veteran’s affairs and help us to repair our current social dynamic.

The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny


Susan Lepselter - 2016
    

The Practical Guide to Men: How to Spot the Hidden Traits of Good Men and Great Relationships


Shawn T. Smith - 2016
    So why are they hard to find? And why do so many women choose the wrong men? “Is He Worth It?” answers both questions, and it holds time-tested wisdom for spotting the hidden characteristics of good men. It is the perfect guide to finding lasting romance in these complex times. (Originally published under the title "Is He Worth It?")

The Hidden South - Come Home


Brent Walker - 2016
    Through stunning portraiture and intimate conversations, Brent takes the reader on a journey across the Southeast United States, uncovering stories of heartbreak, addiction, and hope. The book features more than 100 stories and portraits of people from all walks of life juxtaposed with photos of the Southern landscape that help paint a rich and complex picture of The Hidden South.TheHiddenSouth.com was started as a photo journal documenting conversations with the unseen in September, 2014. It quickly garnered attention from press and is followed by thousands on social media.

The Luminous Stone: Lucifer in Western Esotericism


Michael Howard - 2016
    In the popular imagination, the fallen angel Lucifer evokes such concepts as heresy, rebellion, pride, liberation from the bonds of demiurgic oppression, and impetus for human evolution. From his earliest origins, the Proud Angel has been hailed by religious and artistic countercultures as a patron saint of enlightenment his most essential quality embodying overthrow of ignorance and the inspired process of revelation. Allied to ancient Gnostic Christian cosmological conceptions, the fallen angel has also found dominion within occult traditions, folk magic, philosophy, as well as art and literature. Lucifer has also, in many enduring mystical traditions, assumed a female form in the guise of Lucina, Lucia and Diana Lucifera. In his guise as the Serpent of Eden, he bestowed the magical philosophy of the Luciferian Woman, she who was not born of the clay, and was therefore especially receptive to the forbidden powers which would render one as God. "

Called to Be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification


Carl E. Olson - 2016
    The fifteen chapters show what "becoming God" meant for the early Church, for St. Thomas Aquinas and the greatest Dominicans, and for St. Francis and the early Franciscans. This book explains how this understanding of salvation played out during the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent. It explores the thought of the French School of Spirituality, various Thomists, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, and the Vatican Councils, and it shows where such thinking can be found today in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. No other book has gathered such an array of scholars or provided such a deep study into how humanity's divinized life in Christ has received many rich and various perspectives over the past two thousand years. This book seeks to bring readers into the central mystery of Christianity by allowing the Church's greatest thinkers and texts to speak for themselves, demonstrating how becoming Christ-like and the Body of Christ on earth, is the only ultimate purpose of the Christian faith."Rescue from sin and death is indeed a wonderful thing—but the salvation won for us by Jesus Christ is incomparably greater. And that is the subject of this book. In all its parts, this book, like Christianity in all its parts, is about salvation. But that means it's about everything that fills our lives, on earth and in heaven."— Dr. Scott Hahn, Author, Rome Sweet Home

Tales of the Narts: Ancient Myths and Legends of the Ossetians


Walter May - 2016
    Tales of the Narts presents a wide selection of fascinating tales preserved as a living tradition among the peoples of Ossetia in southern Russia, a region where ethnic identities have been maintained for thousands of years in the face of major cultural upheavals.A mythical tribe of tall, nomad warriors, the Narts were courageous, bold, and good-hearted. But they were also capable of cruelty, envy, and forceful measures to settle disputes. In this wonderfully vivid and accessible compilation of stories, colorful and exciting heroes, heroines, villains, and monsters pursue their destinies though a series of peculiar exploits, often with the intervention of ancient gods.The world of the Narts can be as familiar as it is alien, and the tales contain local themes as well as echoes of influence from diverse lands. The ancestors of the Ossetians once roamed freely from eastern Europe to western China, and their myths exhibit striking parallels with ancient Indian, Norse, and Greek myth. The Nart sagas may also have formed a crucial component of the Arthurian cycle.Tales of the Narts further expands the canon of this precious body of lore and demonstrates the passion and values that shaped the lives of the ancient Ossetians.

To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum


Nathaniel Roberts - 2016
    Focusing on the decision by many women to embrace locally specific forms of Pentecostal Christianity, Nathaniel Roberts challenges dominant anthropological understandings of religion as a matter of culture and identity, as well as Indian nationalist narratives of Christianity as a “foreign” ideology that disrupts local communities. Far from being a divisive force, conversion integrates the slum community—Christians and Hindus alike—by addressing hidden moral fault lines that subtly pit residents against one another in a national context that renders Dalits outsiders in their own land." Read an interview with the author on the Association for Asian Studies' #AsiaNow blog.

Sounding Thunder: The Stories of Francis Pegahmagabow


Brian D. McInnes - 2016
    Enlisting at the onset of the First World War, he served overseas as a scout and sniper and became Canada’s most decorated Indigenous soldier. After the war, Pegahmagabow settled in Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, where he married and raised six children. He served his community as both Chief and Councillor and was a founding member of the Brotherhood of Canadian Indians, the first national Indigenous political organization. In 1949 and 1950, he was elected the Supreme Chief of the National Indian Government.   Francis Pegahmagabow’s stories describe many parts of his life and are characterized by classic Ojibwe narrative. They reveal aspects of Francis’s Anishinaabe life and worldview. Interceding chapters by Brian McInnes provide valuable cultural, spiritual, linguistic, and historical insights that give a greater context and application for Francis’s words and world. Presented in their original Ojibwe as well as in English translation, the stories also reveal a rich and evocative relationship to the lands and waters of Georgian Bay.   In Sounding Thunder, Brian McInnes provides a new perspective on Pegahmagabow and his experience through a unique synthesis of Ojibwe oral history, historical record, and Pegahmagabow family stories.

They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among U.S. Farmworkers


Sarah Horton - 2016
    Through captivating accounts of the daily lives of a core group of farmworkers over nearly a decade, Sarah Bronwen Horton documents in startling detail how a tightly interwoven web of public policies and private interests creates exceptional and needless suffering.

Tamils and the Nation: India and Sri Lanka Compared


Madurika Rasaratnam - 2016
    Whilst Tamil and national identities have peaceably harmonised in India, in Sri Lanka these have come into escalating and violent contradiction, leading to three decades of armed conflictand simmering antagonism since the war's brutal end in 2009. Tracing these differing outcomes to distinct and contingent patterns of political contestation and mobilisation in the two states, Rasaratnam shows how, whilst emerging from comparable conditions and similar historical experiences, thesehave produced very different interactions between evolving Tamil and national identities, constituting in India a nation-state inclusive of the Tamils, and in Sri Lanka a hierarchical Sinhala-Buddhist national and state order hostile to Tamils' political claims. Locating these dynamics withinchanging international contexts, she also shows how these once largely separate patterns of national-Tamil politics, and Tamil diaspora mobilisation, are increasingly interwoven in the post-war internationalisation of Sri Lanka's ethnic crisis.

Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Vol. 1: The Immense Journey / The Firmament of Time / The Unexpected Universe / Uncollected Prose


Loren Eiseley - 2016
    At the height of a distinguished career as a “bone-hunter” and paleontologist, Eiseley turned from fieldwork and scientific publication to the personal essay in six remarkable books that are masterpieces of prose style. Weaving together anecdote, philosophical reflection, and keen observation with the soul and skill of a poet, Eiseley offers a brilliant, companionable introduction to the sciences, paving the way for writers like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now for the first time, the Library of America presents his landmark essay collections in a definitive two-volume set.Eiseley’s debut collection, The Immense Journey (1957), displays his far-reaching knowledge and boundless curiosity about the mysteries of the natural world. Here are vivid accounts of prehistoric ecosystems, the origins of consciousness, the search for “living fossils” at the bottom of the sea, and the complexities of our evolutionary inheritance. Here too are literary qualities and aspirations that led many to hail Eiseley as a “modern Thoreau”: his quest for the ultimate meanings and cosmological significance of natural phenomena, along with his immense expressive gifts.The Firmament of Time (1960), a lyrical and meditative tour de force, looks back at the many ways in which the sciences have been shaped by the changing cultures in which they developed. Examining the role of metaphor in scientific thought, anticipations of scientific discoveries in the works of poets and novelists, and the “unconscious conformity” of scientific theory to prevailing orthodoxies, Eiseley argues provocatively for the ongoing relevance to scientific progress of dreams, the imagination, and the irrational.In his wide-ranging collection The Unexpected Universe (1969), Eiseley turns to the theme of the voyage of discovery: accounts of the mythical and historic journeys of Odysseus, Captain Cook, and Darwin frame his own more modest wanderings in the environs of Philadelphia. Sometimes he travels no farther than the local dump: and yet, like Homer’s hero or these great explorers, he continually finds a universe “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”As an added feature, this volume presents a selection of Eiseley’s uncollected prose, including early autobiographical sketches, vivid and haunting entries from his private notebooks, and his 1957 lecture “Neanderthal Man and the Dawn of Human Paleontology.”

Our Most Troubling Madness: Why Schizophrenia Has Such a Poor Outcome in the West


Tanya Luhrmann - 2016
      This book gives an intimate, personal account of the different experiences living with serious psychotic disorder in the U.S., India, Africa, and South East Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—or the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism at work in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care as usual” as it occurs in the U.S. actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, whereas “care as usual” in a country like India diminishes it.

Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families


Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz - 2016
    citizens. There is a common perception that marriage to a U.S. citizen puts undocumented immigrants on a quick-and-easy path to U.S. citizenship. But forpeople who have entered the U.S. unlawfully and live here without papers, the line to legal status is neither short nor easy, even for those with spouses who are U.S. citizens.Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-Status Families follows mixed-status couples down the long and bumpy road of immigration processing. It explores how they navigate every step along the way, from the decision to undertake legalization, to the immigration interview in Ciudad Ju�rez, Mexico, to the effort to put together a case of extreme hardship so that the undocumented family member can return. Author Ruth Gomberg-Mu�oz also discusses families' efforts to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of immigration processing--both for those who are successful and those who are not.

Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States


María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo - 2016
    Saldaña-Portillo formulates the central place of indigenous peoples in the construction of national spaces and racialized notions of citizenship, showing, for instance, how Chicanos/as in the U.S./Mexico borderlands might affirm or reject their indigenous background based on their location.  In this and other ways, she demonstrates how the legacies of colonial Spain's and Britain's differing approaches to encountering indigenous peoples continue to shape perceptions of the natural, racial, and cultural landscapes of the United States and Mexico. Drawing on a mix of archival, historical, literary, and legal texts, Saldaña-Portillo shows how los indios/Indians provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of Mexico and the United States.

Darwin: A Life of Evolution


Alexander Kennedy - 2016
    He created the Theory of Evolution, wrote the revolutionary "On the Origin of Species", and went on a five-year voyage of scientific discovery. Enjoy the surprising and entertaining true story of Charles Darwin and rediscover one of history's most prolific figures...

Social Media in an English Village


Daniel Miller - 2016
    Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice, and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all, Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains, and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.This book is available as a free open access PDF from ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press. Print copies are also available.

Wade Davis: Photographs


Wade Davis - 2016
    Intimate portraits of family and community life, they are universal in feel, although they represent an enormous diversity of geographical locations and cultural backgrounds. Each one captures a rich story about the human condition, and invites the viewer to experience scenes of family, magic, love and tradition.Throughout his career, Davis's central aim has been to convey a visceral sense of the mystery and wealth of human culture, the embodiment of all that we are and all that we have created as a species. Through his words and photographs, he sheds light on the great peril that many traditions face, and the danger of losing forever the rich cultural heritages that have sustained us for thousands of years.

Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity


Jonathan Wyrtzen - 2016
    Making Morocco's historical coverage is remarkably thorough and sweeping; the author exhibits incredible scope in his research and mastery of an immensely rich set of materials from poetry to diplomatic messages in a variety of languages across a century of history. The monograph engages with the most important theorists of nationalism, colonialism, and state formation, and uses Pierre Bourdieu's field theory as a framework to orient and organize the socio-historical problems of the case and to make sense of the different types of problems various actors faced as they moved forward. His analysis makes constant reference to core categories of political sociology state, nation, political field, religious and political authority, identity and social boundaries, classification struggles, etc., and he does so in exceptionally clear and engaging prose. Rather than sidelining what might appear to be more tangential themes in the politics of identity formation in Morocco, Wyrtzen examines deeply not only French colonialism but also the Spanish zone, and he makes central to his analysis the Jewish question and the role of gender. These areas of analysis allow Wyrtzen to examine his outcome of interest--which is really a historical process of interest--from every conceivable analytical and empirical angle. The end-product is an absolutely exemplary study of colonialism, identity formation, and the classification struggles that accompany them. This is not a work of high-brow social theory, but a classic work of history, deeply influenced but not excessively burdened by social-theoretical baggage.

A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life


Ephraim Radner - 2016
    Mortality, like a dark specter, looms over all that lies in between. Human character, behavior, aims, and community are all inescapably shaped by this certainty of human ends. Mortality, like an unwanted guest, intrudes, becoming a burden and a constant struggle. Mortality, like a thief who steals, even threatens the ability to live life rightly. Life is short. Death is certain. Mortality, at all costs, should be resisted or transcended.In "A Time to Keep" Ephraim Radner revalues mortality, reclaiming it as God s own. Mortality should notbe resisted butreceived. Radner reveals mortality s true nature as a gift, God s gift, and thus reveals that the many limitations that mortality imposes should be celebrated. Radner demonstrates how faithfulness and not resignation, escape, denial, redefinition, or excess is the proper response to the gift of humanity s temporal limitation. To live rightly is to recognize and then willingly accept life s limitations. In chapters on sex and sexuality, singleness and family, education and vocation, andapanoply of end of life issues, "A Time to Keep" plumbs the depths of the secularimagination, uncovering the constantstrugglewith human finitudein its myriadforms. Radner shows thatby wrongly positioningcreaturely mortality, these parts of human experience havereceivedan inadequate reckoning. "A Time to Keep" retrieves the most basic confession of the Christian faith, that life is God s, which Radner offers as grace, asthe basis for a Christian understanding of human existence bound by its origin and telos. Thepossibilityand purposeof what comes between birth and deathisorderedby the pattern of Scripture, but isperformed faithfully onlyin obedience to thelimits that bind it."

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice


Charles L. Briggs - 2016
    In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez government's hesitant and sometimes ambivalent reactions; and narrate the eventual diagnosis of bat-transmitted rabies. The book provides a new framework for analyzing how the uneven distribution of rights to produce and circulate knowledge about health are wedded at the hip with health inequities. By recounting residents' quest to learn why their children died and documenting their creative approaches to democratizing health, the authors open up new ways to address some of global health's most intractable problems.

The Royal Tombs of Ancient Egypt


Aidan Dodson - 2016
    This book is a history of the burial places of the rulers of Egypt from the very dawn of history down to the country's absorption into the Roman Empire, three millennia later. During this time, the tombs ranged from mudbrick-lined pits in the desert, through pyramid-topped labyrinths to superbly-decorated galleries penetrating deep into the rock of the Valley of the Kings. The first book to embrace in detail the entire range of royal tombs, the present volume covers the full extent of royal funerary monuments, which comprised not only the actual burial place, but also the place where the worlds of the living and the dead came together in the temples built to provide for the dead pharaoh's soul.

Legends Lore of East Tennessee


Shane S Simmons - 2016
    Locals spin age-old yarns of legends like Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Dragging Canoe. Stories of snake-handling churches and the myths behind the death crown superstitions dot the landscape. The mysteries surrounding the Sensabaugh Tunnel still haunt residents.

Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational Memory in Iran


Orkideh Behrouzan - 2016
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Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures


T.M. Luhrmann - 2016
    M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow argue that the root causes of schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural.   This book gives an intimate, personal account of those living with serious psychotic disorder in the United States, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care-as-usual” treatment as it occurs in the United States actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, while “care-as-usual” treatment in a country like India diminishes it.

Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti


Mark Schuller - 2016
    But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise.     Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag,” and often tended to “just do something,” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence.  Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.

The Five Roles of a Master Herder: A Revolutionary Model for Socially Intelligent Leadership


Linda Kohanov - 2016
    In The Five Roles of a Master Herder, she adapts these horse-inspired insights into useful tools for developing collaborative leadership and managing change.Over thousands of years, Kohanov writes, "master herders" of nomadic herding cultures developed a multifaceted, socially intelligent form of leadership combining the five roles of Dominant, Leader, Sentinel, Nurturer / Companion, and Predator. The fluid interplay of these roles allowed interspecies communities to move across vast landscapes, dealing with predators and changing climates, protecting and nurturing the herd while keeping massive, gregarious, often aggressive animals together -- without the benefit of fences and with very little reliance on restraints.She includes an innovative assessment tool that will help you determine which roles you currently overemphasize and which roles you may be ignoring -- or even actively avoiding. Through this powerful, at times surprising and moving book, Kohanov will show you how to recognize, cultivate, and utilize all five roles in the modern tribes of your workplace, family, and other social organizations.

Bubishi: The Classic Manual of Combat


Patrick McCarthy - 2016
    All of karate's legendary masters have studied it, applied its teachings, or copied passages from it. No other classic work has had as dramatic an impact on the shaping and development of karate as the Bubishi. Karate historian and authority Patrick McCarthy spent over ten years researching and studying the Bubishi and the arts associated with it. The first English translation of this remarkable martial arts manual includes numerous explanations and notes. McCarthy's work also includes groundbreaking research on Okinawan and Chinese history, as well as the fighting and healing traditions that developed in those countries, making it a goldmine for researchers and practitioners alike. For the final word on the true origins and spirit of classic Okinawan martial arts, one need look no further. This karate book is one of the best karate training supplements available. This new paperback edition includes additional commentary from the translator, as well as a new foreword.

Moldbug on Carlyle


Mencius Moldbug - 2016
    Challenge your political preconceptions with Mencius Moldbug's controversial introduction to the ultimate reactionary, Victorian writer and historian Thomas Carlyle.

The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics


Yuk Hui - 2016
    Yet the conception that there is only one—originally Greek—type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought.Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger’s challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal.This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization?In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

On Kings


David Graeber - 2016
    This collection of essays by two of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists—David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins—explores what kingship actually is, historically and anthropologically. As they show, kings are symbols for more than just sovereignty: indeed, the study of kingship offers a unique window into fundamental dilemmas concerning the very nature of power, meaning, and the human condition.Reflecting on issues such as temporality, alterity, piracy, and utopia—not to mention the divine, the strange, the numinous, and the bestial—Graeber and Sahlins explore the role of kings as they have existed around the world, from the BaKongo to the Aztec to the Shilluk to the eighteenth-century pirate kings of Madagascar and beyond. Richly delivered with the wit and sharp analysis characteristic of Graeber and Sahlins, this book opens up new avenues for the anthropological study of this fascinating and ubiquitous political figure.

100 Days of Cree


Neal McLeod - 2016
    As an Elder once said, Learn one Cree word a day for 100 days, and emerge a different person.In 100 Days of Cree Neal McLeod offers a portal into another way of understanding the universe-and our place within it-while demonstrating why this funny, vibrant, and sometimes salacious language is the sexiest of them all (according to Tomson Highway).Based on a series of Facebook posts, the 100 short chapters or days in the book present chains of related words, some dealing with the traditional -the buffalo hunt, the seasons-and others cheekily capturing the detritus of modern life-from internet slang to Johnny Cash songs to Viagra.The result is both an introduction to the most widely spoken Indigenous language in Canada and an opportunity to see the world, and ourselves, in another way.

The 1916 Irish Rebellion


Bríona Nic Dhiarmada - 2016
    One week later, their rebellion ruthlessly quashed by British forces, the surviving insurgents were jailed and many of their leaders quickly executed. Though their rebellion had failed, their actions galvanized a growing population of sympathizers who would, in years to come, succeed in establishing an independent Irish state.   Documentary writer, producer, and scholar Bríona Nic Dhiarmada has seized the occasion of the centenary of the Irish Rising to reassess this event and its historical significance. Her book explores the crucial role of Irish Americans in both the lead-up to and the aftermath of the events in Dublin and places the Irish Rising in its European and global context, as an expression of the anti-colonialism that found its full voice in the wake of the First World War. The 1916 Irish Rebellion includes a historical narrative; a lavish spread of contemporary images and photographs; and a rich selection of sidebar quotations from contemporary documents, prisoners’ statements, and other eyewitness accounts to capture the experiences of nationalists and unionists, Irish rebels and British soldiers, and Irish Americans during the turbulent events of Easter Week, 1916. In the first part of the book, Nic Dhiarmada surveys Ireland’s place as part of the British Empire in the decades leading up to 1916, with special emphasis on earlier Irish movements to achieve independence or at least some measure of self-governance. She then outlines the events leading to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, including the crucial events of Thursday through Saturday prior to Easter. The second part details the events of the Easter Rising and the week of violent fighting, ending in the failure of the armed insurrection in Dublin. Her third part discusses the fate of the leaders of the Rising, many of whom were immediately court-martialed and executed. Nic Dhiarmada suggests that the Irish Rising, its ideals, and the subsequent election of members of the nationalist movement to prominent government offices were instrumental to the later creation of the sovereign Republic of Ireland, as well as an inspiration to anti-colonialist insurrections elsewhere in the world.     Nic Dhiarmada’s The 1916 Irish Rebellion is the companion book to a three-part documentary series to be broadcast worldwide in 2016. Narrated by Liam Neeson, the documentary, entitled “1916 The Irish Rebellion,” and its related seventy-minute version are initiatives of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The series was produced by COCO Television and will broadcast on RTÉ and American Public Television. Both The 1916 Irish Rebellion and the related documentary are part of the Keough-Naughton Institute’s aim to broaden public understanding of the historical interconnections between Britain, Ireland, and the United States, connections that continued to have significance up to and including the recent peace process in Northern Ireland. "Stylish, pacy, and lucid, this narrative places the Rising in its national and international contexts. In vivid photographs and keynote quotations, it illustrates just how and why revolutionary Ireland became a test case of modernity in a rapidly decolonizing world." —Declan Kiberd, Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English and Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame "Crisply written, evocative, and, on occasion, poignant, this fine study by Bríona Nic Dhiarmada of Easter Week, 1916, in Ireland and beyond, is wonderfully complemented by a wide range of contemporary materials—poems, speeches, letters, and images—all of which add greatly to the immediacy of her prose and the impact of her narrative. Not to be missed." —Thomas Bartlett, professor emeritus of Irish history, University of Aberdeen

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest After Apartheid


Antina Von Schnitzler - 2016
    Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape.Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world.Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place


Setha Low - 2016
    In developing the concept of spatializing culture, Setha Low draws on over twenty years of research to examine social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches. A global range of fieldwork examples are employed throughout the text to highlight not just the theoretical development of the idea of spatializing culture, but how it can be used in undertaking ethnographies of space and place. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars from a number of disciplines who are interested in the study of culture through the lens of space and place.

House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth


Richard Conniff - 2016
    The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, now celebrating its 150th anniversary, has remade the way we see the world. Delving into the museum’s storied and colorful past, award-winning author Richard Conniff introduces a cast of bold explorers, roughneck bone hunters, and visionary scientists. Some became famous for wresting Brontosaurus, Triceratops, and other dinosaurs from the earth, others pioneered the introduction of science education in North America, and still others rediscovered the long-buried glory of Machu Picchu.   In this lively tale of events, achievements, and scandals from throughout the museum’s history. Readers will encounter renowned paleontologist O. C. Marsh who engaged in ferocious combat with his “Bone Wars” rival Edward Drinker Cope, as well as dozens of other intriguing characters. Nearly 100 color images portray important figures in the Peabody’s history and special objects from the museum’s 13-million-item collections. For anyone with an interest in exploring, understanding, and protecting the natural world, this book will deliver abundant delights.

Living on the Land: Indigenous Women’s Understanding of Place


Nathalie Kermoal - 2016
    This research has for the most part been conducted by scholars operating within Western epistemological frameworks that tend not only to deny the subjectivity of knowledge but also to privilege masculine authority. As a result, the information gathered predominantly reflects the types of knowledge traditionally held by men, yielding a perspective that is at once gendered and incomplete. Even those academics, communities, and governments interested in consulting with Indigenous peoples for the purposes of planning, monitoring, and managing land use have largely ignored the knowledge traditionally produced, preserved, and transmitted by Indigenous women. While this omission reflects patriarchal assumptions, it may also be the result of the reductionist tendencies of researchers, who have attempted to organize Indigenous knowledge so as to align it with Western scientific categories, and of policy makers, who have sought to deploy such knowledge in the service of external priorities. Such efforts to apply Indigenous knowledge have had the effect of abstracting this knowledge from place as well as from the world view and community - and by extension the gender - to which it is inextricably connected.Living on the Land examines how patriarchy, gender, and colonialism have shaped the experiences of Indigenous women as both knowers and producers of knowledge. From a variety of methodological perspectives, contributors to the volume explore the nature and scope of Indigenous women's knowledge, its rootedness in relationships both human and spiritual, and its inseparability from land and landscape. From the reconstruction of cultural and ecological heritage by Naskapi women in Qu?bec to the medical expertise of M?tis women in western Canada to the mapping and securing of land rights in Nicaragua, Living on the Land focuses on the integral role of women as stewards of the land and governors of the community. Together, these contributions point to a distinctive set of challenges and possibilities for Indigenous women and their communities.

State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic


Louisa Lombard - 2016
    In the face of seemingly senseless bloodshed, journalists, politicians, and scholars struggled to account for the conflict’s origins. In this first comprehensive account of the violence, Louisa Lombard argues that the conflict was more than a straightforward religious clash between Christians and Muslims. Instead, she traces the roots of the conflict to fears of spiritual insecurity and a social breakdown that drove inter-communal violence.   Placing the uprising within its broader social, cultural, and historical context , Lombard reveals the complicated roles played by marginalized rural youths, local political leaders, and the global community in sustaining the conflict, and she offers an urgent corrective to our perceptions of this little-understood country, making a compelling case for international leaders to rethink their approach to resolving the conflict.

Social Media in Southeast Turkey


Elisabetta Costa - 2016
    Print copies are also available.This book presents an ethnographic study of social media in Mardin, a medium-sized town close to the Syrian-Turkish border inhabited mainly by Sunni Muslim Arabs and Kurds, that has been transformed in recent years by urbanisation, neoliberalism and political events.Elisabetta Costa explains why public-facing social media is more conservative than offline life. Yet, at the same time, social media has opened up unprecedented possibilities for private communications between genders and in relationships among young people. She also shows why an ethnography reveals a very different picture of political participation on social media than has been reported by other studies.This book is available as a free open access PDF from ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press. Print copies are also available.

Seawomen of Iceland: Survival on the Edge


Margaret Willson - 2016
    "She "So began a quest. Were there more Icelandic seawomen? Most Icelanders said no, and, after all, in most parts of the world fishing is considered a male profession. What could she expect in Iceland?She found a surprise. This book is a glimpse into the lives of vibrant women who have braved the sea for centuries. Their accounts include the excitement, accidents, trials, and tribulations of fishing in Iceland from the historic times of small open rowboats to today's high-tech fisheries. Based on extensive historical and field research, Seawomen of Iceland allows the seawomen's voices to speak directly with strength, intelligence, and - above all - a knowledge of how to survive.This engaging ethnographic narrative will intrigue both general and academic readers interested in maritime culture, the anthropology of work, Nordic life, and gender studies.

Epitaphs of the Great War: The Somme


Sarah Wearne - 2016
    By the time the fighting in the region finally ended on November 18, 141 days later, the British and French had pushed the German lines back six miles—at a cost for all sides of more than 1 million soldiers killed or wounded. The Battle of the Somme was thus one of the bloodiest in human history, and it has occupied a central place in the tragic story of World War I for a century.         This book brings together one hundred epitaphs from headstones marking the graves of British soldiers who died in the battle. The Imperial War Graves Commission limited epitaphs to sixty-six letters, including spaces, a constraint that left little room for flowery sentiment and rendered these commemorations stark and unforgettable. Lieutenant Dillwyn Parrish Starr’s epitaph reads merely “Of Philadelphia, U.S.A.,” while Lieutenant Richard Roy Lewer’s reads “For England.” The headstone of South African Private John Paul however, asks “Did He Die in Vain?” Sarah Wearne has selected epitaphs that cover a range of approaches and emotions, from soldiers famous and forgotten, each one simultaneously a personal tribute to an individual and a marker of the era, the culture, and the sacrifices it expected. As the centennial commemorations of World War I continue, this book brilliantly reminds us that its staggering costs, while marked in the millions, ultimately reduce down to the individual.

Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City


Amy Starecheski - 2016
      Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

My Life with Things: The Consumer Diaries


Elizabeth Chin - 2016
    Chin centers the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items—kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano—and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favorite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta. Throughout, Chin keeps Karl Marx and his family's relationship to their possessions in mind, drawing parallels between Marx's napkins, the production of late nineteenth-century table linens, and Chin's own vintage linen collection. Unflinchingly and refreshingly honest, Chin unlocks the complexities of her attachments to, reliance on, and complicated relationships with her things. In so doing, she prompts readers to reconsider their own consumption, as well as their assumptions about the possibilities for creative scholarship.

The Memory Code


Lynne Kelly - 2016
    We can still use the memory code today to train our own memories.In the past, the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape, and the stars in the sky too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem.Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists.The stone circles across Britain and northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, the huge animal shapes at Nasca in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorise the vast amounts of practical information they needed to survive.

Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology


Karin Amimoto Ingersoll - 2016
    Developing the concept of seascape epistemology, she articulates an indigenous Hawaiian way of knowing founded on a sensorial, intellectual, and embodied literacy of the ocean. As the source from which Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) draw their essence and identity, the sea is foundational to Kanaka epistemology and ontology. Analyzing oral histories, chants, artwork, poetry, and her experience as a surfer, Ingersoll shows how this connection to the sea has been crucial to resisting two centuries of colonialism, militarism, and tourism. In today's neocolonial context—where continued occupation and surf tourism marginalize indigenous Hawaiians—seascape epistemology as expressed by traditional cultural practices such as surfing, fishing, and navigating provides the tools for generating an alternative indigenous politics and ethics. In relocating Hawaiian identity back to the waves, currents, winds, and clouds, Ingersoll presents a theoretical alternative to land-centric viewpoints that still dominate studies of place-making and indigenous epistemology.

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid


Andrej Grubačić - 2016
    As capitalism developed, people tried to escape capitalist constraints connected with state control. This powerful book gives voice to three communities living at the edges of capitalism: Cossacks on the Don River in Russia; Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; and prisoners in long-term isolation since the 1970s. Inspired by their experiences visiting Cossacks, living with the Zapatistas, and developing connections and relationships with prisoners and ex-prisoners, Andrej Grubacic and Denis O’Hearn present a uniquely sweeping, historical, and systematic study of exilic communities engaged in mutual aid.    Following the tradition of Peter Kropotkin, Pierre Clastres, James Scott, Fernand Braudel and Imanuel Wallerstein, this study examines the full historical and contemporary possibilities for establishing self-governing communities at the edges of the capitalist world-system, considering the historical forces that often militate against those who try to practice mutual aid in the face of state power and capitalist incursion.

Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology


Brian Noble - 2016
    Following the complex exchanges of palaeontologists, museums specialists, film- and media-makers, science fiction writers, and their diverse publics, he witnesses how fossil remains are taken from their partial state and re-composed into astonishingly precise, animated presences within the modern world, with profound political consequences.Articulating Dinosaurs examines the resurrecting of two of the most iconic and gendered of dinosaurs. First Noble traces the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex (the "king of the tyrant lizards") in the early twentieth-century scientific, literary, and filmic cross-currents associated with the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Then he offers his detailed ethnographic study of the multi-media, model-making, curatorial, and laboratory preparation work behind the Royal Ontario Museum's ground-breaking 1990s exhibit of Maiasaura (the "good mother lizard"). Setting the exhibits at the AMNH and the ROM against each other, Noble is able to place the political natures of T. rex and Maiasaura into high relief and to raise vital questions about how our choices make a difference in what comes to count as "nature." An original and illuminating study of science, culture, and museums, Articulating Dinosaurs is a remarkable look at not just how we visualize the prehistoric past, but how we make it palpable in our everyday lives.

A Different Kind of Ethnography: Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies


Denielle Elliott - 2016
    The authors treat ethnography as a methodology that includes the whole process of ethnography, from being fully present while engaging with the experience to analyzing representing, and communicating the results, with the hope of capturing different kinds of knowledge and experiencesThe book is structured around various methodologies sensing, walking, writing, performing, and recording and includes innovative exercises that allow both seasoned and aspiring ethnographers to develop a practice that can deepen and extend ethnographic inquiry."

The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art


Luca Vercelloni - 2016
    At the heart of the book is an intriguing question: why did the sensory attribute of human taste become a social metaphor and aesthetic value for judging cultural qualities of art, fashion, cuisine and other social constructions?Unique amongst the senses, taste is at once a biologically derived sense, private, personal and individual, yet also a sensibility which can be acquired, shared, and communicated. Exploring the many factors that defined the evolution of taste – from medieval morals and medicine to social and cultural philosophy, the rise of aesthetics, birth of fashion, branding trends, and luxury worship in the age of mass consumption – Luca Vercelloni's ambitious text provides readers with an outstanding introduction to the subject, making it the cultural history of taste.Now available for the first time in English, Taste features a new final chapter and a preface by series editor David Howes. Rich in detail and examples, this interdisciplinary work is an important read for students and researchers in sensory studies, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, as well as gastronomy, fashion, design, and branding.

Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity


Peter T. Struck - 2016
    Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact--that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights--and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition.Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition.Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

Quotes From Clarissa Pinkola Estés' Women Who Run With The Wolves: Great Non-Fiction Books Quotation Series


University Scholastic Press - 2016
    On the New York Times’ best seller list for 145 weeks, Estes’ book is a call to action for women all over the world to embrace the Wild Woman archetype she says lives in every woman. Within these pages, University Scholastic Press, internationally renowned publisher of textbooks, quote books, study guides and creative nonfiction novels, carefully curates hundreds of quotes from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ work. Learn what Estes says about shedding secrets, the need for solitude, delighting in sexuality and living your best wild woman life in Quotes From Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves by University Scholastic Press.

The Tale of the Axe: How the Neolithic Revolution Transformed Britain


David Miles - 2016
    They farmed and domesticated animals, created new tools, built monuments, and began preserving and storing food. What brought about this shift? What difference did it make to the overall population? And what effects did this Neolithic Revolution have on generations to come?The Tale of the Axe explores the New Stone Age—named for the new types of stone tools that appeared at that time, specifically the ground stone axe—taking Britain as its focus. David Miles takes the reader on a journey through Neolithic Britain by way of its ancestors, geographical neighbors, and the species from which humans emerged before turning an eye to the future and those aspects of the Neolithic Revolution that live on today: farming, built communities, modern man, and much more.

Kowloon Walled City, 1984


Nicholas Morine - 2016
    In the heart of Hong Kong, Kowloon Walled City seethes with human passions, both good and evil. Not a single ray of light penetrates this fortress of hope and despair. This is a lost, illicit city filled to bursting with shady businessmen, drug dealers, junk shops, and desperate gamblers seeking an avenue for one last thrill. It is said that the police do not dare to enter. Whether this is true or not remains a mystery. Fang, a heroin slinger and a brother of the 14K, becomes a marked man beneath the roars of the crowd, fists bloodied. The love of his life stands between him and his glory, a choice that may never be reconciled. The Siu Nin a Fu, an annual martial arts tournament calling the very best warriors from across the globe to the depths of Kowloon Walled City, is about to take place. Buried in liquor, needles, and smoke, Fang's future is about to take flight. Take a step into the black tapestry of the past, where ghosts walk the dim, decrepit alleys as if neon still fell upon their defeated shoulders. Kowloon Walled City, 1984. A shredded memory of a living, breathing entity that once was... and is no longer.

The Statebuilder's Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention


David A. Lake - 2016
    This is a necessary condition for stable, effective governance. States sufficiently motivated to bear the costs of building a state in some distant land are likely to have interests in the future policies of that country, and will therefore seek to promote loyal leaders who are sympathetic to their interests and willing to implement their preferred policies. In The Statebuilder's Dilemma, David A. Lake addresses the key tradeoff between legitimacy and loyalty common to all international statebuilding attempts. Except in rare cases where the policy preferences of the statebuilder and the population of the country whose state is to be built coincide, as in the famous success cases of West Germany and Japan after 1945, promoting a leader who will remain loyal to the statebuilder undermines that leader's legitimacy at home.In Iraq, thrust into a statebuilding role it neither anticipated nor wanted, the United States eventually backed Nouri al-Malaki as the most favorable of a bad lot of alternative leaders. Malaki then used the support of the Bush administration to govern as a Shiite partisan, undermining the statebuilding effort and ultimately leading to the second failure of the Iraqi state in 2014. Ethiopia faced the same tradeoff in Somalia after the rise of a promising but irredentist government in 2006, invading to put its own puppet in power in Mogadishu. But the resulting government has not been able to build significant local support and legitimacy. Lake uses these cases to demonstrate that the greater the interests of the statebuilder in the target country, the more difficult it is to build a legitimate state that can survive on its own.

Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities


D. Davis - 2016
    D�na-Ain Davis and Christa Craven tease out the influences of feminist ethnography across a variety of disciplines including women's and gender studies, critical race studies, ethnic studies, education, communications, psychology, sociology, urban studies, and American studies. Feature elements of the text include Essentials (excerpts from key texts in the field), Spotlights (interviews with feminist ethnographers), and suggested assignments and readings. The text concludes with a "conversation" among contemporary feminist ethnographers about what feminist ethnography looks like today and into the future. This text is accompanied by an author-maintained website that can be found here: http: //discover.wooster.edu/feministethnogra...

Anthrozoology: Embracing Co-Existence in the Anthropocene


Michael Charles Tobias - 2016
    Through lean and elegant text, readers will learn that human interconnections with other species and ecosystems are severely endangered precisely because we lack - by our evolutionary self-confidence - the very coherence that is everywhere around us abundantly demonstrated. What our species has deemed to be superior is, according to Tobias and Morrison, the cumulative result of a tragically tenuous argument predicated on the brink of our species' self-destruction, giving rise to a most unique proposition: We either recognize the miracle of other sentient intelligence, sophistication, and genius, or risk enshrining the shortest lived epitaph of any known vertebrate in earth's 4.1 billion years of life.Tobias and Morrison draw on 45 years of research in fields ranging from ecological anthropology, animal protection and comparative ethics to literature and spirituality - and beyond. They deploy research in animal and plant behavior, biocultural heritage contexts from every continent and they bring to bear a deeply metaphysical array of perspectives that set this book apart from any other. The book departs from most work in such fields as animal rights, ecological aesthetics, comparative ethology or traditional animal and plant behaviorist work, and yet it speaks to readers with an interest in those fields.A deeply provocative book of philosophical premises and hypotheses from two of the world's most influential ecological philosophers, this text is likely to stir uneasiness and debate for many decades to come.

Saga Six Pack 7 - Tales of the Enchanted Islands, Saga of King Harald Grafeld, The Death of Baldur, The Magic Mead, The Viking’s Code and The Vikings Discover America (Illustrated)


Emilie Kip Baker - 2016
    Saga Six Pack 7 is a sizzling smorgasbord of sagas for fans of Viking literature and history. Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Saga of King Harald Grafeld and of Earl Hakon Son of Sigurd by Snorri Sturluson. The Death of Baldur by Jean Song. The Story of the Magic Mead by Emilie Kip Baker. The Viking’s Code by Florence Holbrook. The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen by Benjamin Franklin DeCosta. Includes image gallery and The Sagas essay by anthropologist Andrew Lang.

Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology


Angela Willey - 2016
    science and culture, propelled by queer feminist desires for new modes of conceptualization and new forms of belonging. She approaches the politics and materiality of monogamy as intertwined with one another such that disciplinary ways of knowing themselves become an object of critical inquiry. Refusing to answer the naturalization of monogamy with a naturalization of nonmonogamy, Willey demands a critical reorientation toward the monogamy question in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The book examines colonial sexual science, monogamous voles, polyamory, and the work of Alison Bechdel and Audre Lorde to show how challenging the lens through which human nature is seen as monogamous or nonmonogamous forces us to reconsider our investments in coupling and in disciplinary notions of biological bodies.

The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future


Robert L. Kelly - 2016
    I know tomorrow.” This inscription in Tutankhamun’s tomb summarizes The Fifth Beginning. Here, archaeologist Robert L. Kelly explains how the study of our cultural past can predict the future of humanity.   In an eminently readable style, Kelly identifies four key pivot points in the six-million-year history of human development: the emergence of technology, culture, agriculture, and the state. In each example, the author examines the long-term processes that resulted in a definitive, no-turning-back change for the organization of society. Kelly then looks ahead, giving us evidence for what he calls a fifth beginning, one that started about AD 1500. Some might call it “globalization,” but the author places it in its larger context: a five-thousand-year arms race, capitalism’s global reach, and the cultural effects of a worldwide communication network.   Kelly predicts that the emergent phenomena of this fifth beginning will include the end of war as a viable way to resolve disputes, the end of capitalism as we know it, the widespread shift toward world citizenship, and the rise of forms of cooperation that will end the near-sacred status of nation-states. It’s the end of life as we have known it. However, the author is cautiously optimistic: he dwells not on the coming chaos, but on humanity’s great potential.

When Mary Becomes Cosmic: A Jungian and Mystical Path to the Divine Feminine


David Richo - 2016
    In exploring the Divine Feminine imaged in Mary, When Mary Becomes Cosmic opens us to another way to honor hernot unlike the mystics, who have traveled along this way to the depthsand helps us to explore the richness that lies in what Jung referred to as the Catholic Church's treasury of image and metaphor.The archetypal images found in the ancient and treasured "Litany of Loreto" form the framework for this book, and enriched with quotes from a variety of spiritual writers, Richo guides us through reflections on: "Who is Mary?" and "What is the Divine Feminine?"Finally, in the appendix, "A Retreat with Mary," the author encourages prayer with suggestions for various ways of praying with music, art, movement, silence, etc., as well as "being" with the image of Mary.

Killing the Competition: Economic Inequality and Homicide


Martin Daly - 2016
    There is a simple, compelling answer: most homicides are the denouements of competitive interactions between men. Relatively speaking, where desired goods are distributed inequitably and competition for those goods is severe, dangerous tactics of competition are appealing and a high homicide rate is just one of many unfortunate consequences. Killing the Competition is about this relationship between economic inequality and lethal interpersonal violence.Suggesting that economic inequality is a cause of social problems and violence elicits fierce opposition from inequality's beneficiaries. Three main arguments have been presented by those who would acquit inequality of the charges against it: that "absolute" poverty is the real problem and inequality is just an incidental correlate; that "primitive" egalitarian societies have surprisingly high homicide rates, and that inequality and homicide rates do not change in synchrony and are therefore mutually irrelevant. With detailed but accessible data analyses and thorough reviews of relevant research, Martin Daly dispels all three arguments.Killing the Competition applies basic principles of behavioural biology to explain why killers are usually men, not women, and counters the view that attitudes and values prevailing in "cultures of violence" make change impossible.

Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption after Empire


Yukiko Koga - 2016
    As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II.  Inheritance of Loss chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life, Koga directs us to see how the violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.

Children of God in the World: An Introduction to Theological Anthropology


Paul O'Callaghan - 2016
    The first attempts to clarify the relationship between theology, philosophy and science in their respective approaches to anthropology, and establishes the fundamental principle of the text, stated in Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, n. 22, "Christ manifests man to man". The second part provides a historical overview of the doctrine of grace: in Scripture (especially the teaching of the book of Genesis on humans 'made in the image of God', as well as Paul and John), among the Fathers (in particular the oriental doctrine of 'divinization' and Augustine), during the Middle Ages (especially Thomas Aquinas) and the Reformation period (centered particularly on Luther and the Council of Trent), right up to modern times. The third part of the text, the central one, provides a systematic understanding of Christian grace in terms of the God's life present in human believers by which they become children of God, disciples, friends and brothers of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit. This section also provides a reflection on the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity), on the relationship between grace and human freedom, on the role of the Church and Christian apostolate in the communication of grace, and on the need humans have for divine grace. After considering the relationship between the natural and the supernatural order, the fourth and last part deals with different philosophical aspects of the human condition, in the light of Christian faith: the union between body and soul, humans as free, historical, social, sexual and working beings. The last chapter concludes with a consideration of the human person, Christianity's greatest and most enduring contribution to human thought.

Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel


Michèle Lamont - 2016
    Getting Respect illuminates their experiences by comparing three countries with enduring group boundaries: the United States, Brazil and Israel. The authors delve into what kinds of stigmatizing or discriminatory incidents individuals encounter in each country, how they respond to these occurrences, and what they view as the best strategy--whether individually, collectively, through confrontation, or through self-improvement--for dealing with such events.This deeply collaborative and integrated study draws on more than four hundred in-depth interviews with middle- and working-class men and women residing in and around multiethnic cities--New York City, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv--to compare the discriminatory experiences of African Americans, black Brazilians, and Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Israeli Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi (Sephardic) Jews. Detailed analysis reveals significant differences in group behavior: Arab Palestinians frequently remain silent due to resignation and cynicism while black Brazilians see more stigmatization by class than by race, and African Americans confront situations with less hesitation than do Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahim, who tend to downplay their exclusion. The authors account for these patterns by considering the extent to which each group is actually a group, the sociohistorical context of intergroup conflict, and the national ideologies and other cultural repertoires that group members rely on.Getting Respect is a rich and daring book that opens many new perspectives into, and sets a new global agenda for, the comparative analysis of race and ethnicity.

Sanctuary and Asylum: A Social and Political History


Linda Rabben - 2016
    From primate populations to ancient religious traditions to the modern legal institution of asylum, anthropologist Linda Rabben explores the long history of sanctuary and analyzes modern asylum policies in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, contrasting them with the role that courageous individuals and organizations have played in offering refuge to survivors of torture, persecution, and discrimination. Rabben gives close attention to the mid-2010s refugee crisis in Europe and to Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States.This wide-ranging, timely, and carefully documented account draws on Rabben�s experiences as a human rights advocate as well as her training as an anthropologist. Sanctuary and Asylum will help citizens, professionals, and policy makers take informed and compassionate action.

World of the Teton Sioux Indians: Their Music, Life, and Culture


Frances Theresa Densmore - 2016
    What Old Buffalo and Swift Dog said that day about life as they knew it before the reservation era began lives on still in the pages of this fascinating book. Densmore went on to interview numerous Sioux (or Lakota)/Teton (Lakota) Sioux men and women, collecting both their songs and their stories. The present version is an abridged edition of Teton Sioux Music, which according to William Powers is one of the few monographs universally regarded as a true classic of Lakota culture. It has been skillfully edited to focus less on musical technicality and more on the cultural value of Densmore's work. Its subjects include the Sun Dance, dreams, treatment of the sick, military societies, buffalo hunts, and social dances. Also included are over 130 color and black-and-white illustrations which further bring to life the world of the Teton Sioux."

The Sex Thieves: The Anthropology of a Rumor


Julien Bonhomme - 2016
    As he soon discovered, these accusations can have dramatic outcomes: the “sex thieves” are often targeted by large crowds and publicly lynched. Moreover, such rumors are an extremely widespread practice, having affected almost half of the African continent since the 1970s. In this book, Bonhomme examines the story of the “penis snatcher,” asking larger questions about how to account for such a phenomenon—unique in its spatial and temporal scale—without falling prey to the cliché of Africa as an exotic other. Bonhomme argues that the public belief in sex thieves cannot be considered a superstition or form of mass hysteria. Rather, he brings to light multiple factors that explain the rumor’s success and shows how the cultural dynamic can operate on a vast scale. Analyzing the rumor on both transnational and local levels, he demonstrates how it arises from the ambiguities and dangers of anonymity, and thus that it reveals an occult flipside to everyday social interaction. Altogether, this book provides both richly ethnographic and theoretical understandings of urban sociality and the dynamics of human communication in contemporary Africa and beyond.

Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence


Elizabeth Currie - 2016
    With the establishment of the ducal regime in Florence in 1530, there was increasing debate about how to be a nobleman. Was fashionable clothing a sign of magnificence or a source of mockery? Was the graceful courtier virile or effeminate? How could a man dress for court without bankrupting himself? This book explores the whole story of clothing, from the tailor's workshop to spectacular court festivities, to show how the male nobility in one of Italy's main textile production centers used their appearances to project social, sexual, and professional identities.Sixteenth-century male fashion is often associated with swagger and ostentation but this book shows that Florentine clothing reflected manhood at a much deeper level, communicating a very Italian spectrum of male virtues and vices, from honor, courage, and restraint to luxury and excess. Situating dress at the heart of identity formation, Currie traces these codes through an array of sources, including unpublished archival records, surviving garments, portraiture, poetry, and personal correspondence between the Medici and their courtiers.Addressing important themes such as gender, politics, and consumption, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence sheds fresh light on the sartorial culture of the Florentine court and Italy as a whole.

Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea


Paige West - 2016
    Paige West's searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

How the World Changed Social Media


Daniel MillerXinyuan Wang - 2016
    Print copies are also available.How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet?Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences.This book is available as a free open access PDF from ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press. Print copies are also available.

The Image of God in an Image Driven Age: Explorations in Theological Anthropology


Beth Felker JonesChristina Bieber Lake - 2016
    Some images help shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us in positive ways, while others lead us astray and distort our relationships. Christians confess that human beings have been created in the image of God, yet we chose to rebel against that God and so became unfaithful bearers of God's image. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus, who is the image of God, restores the divine image in us, partially now and fully in the day to come. The essays collected inThe Image of God in an Image Driven Age explore the intersection of theology and culture. With topics ranging across biblical exegesis, the art gallery, Cormac McCarthy, racism, sexuality and theosis, the contributors to this volume offer a unified vision--ecumenical in nature and catholic in spirit--of what it means to be truly human and created in the divine image in the world today. This collection from the 2015 Wheaton Theology Conference includes contributions by Daniela C. Augustine, Craig L. Blomberg, William A. Dyrness, Timothy R. Gaines and Shawna Songer Gaines, Phillip Jenkins, Beth Felker Jones, Christina Bieber Lake, Catherine McDowell, Ian A. McFarland, Matthew J. Milliner, Soong-Chan Rah and Janet Soskice, as well as original poems by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner and Brett Foster.

Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima


Aya Hirata Kimura - 2016
    They took matters into their own hands, collecting their own scientific data that revealed radiation-contaminated food. In Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists Aya Hirata Kimura shows how, instead of being praised for their concern about their communities’ health and safety, they faced stiff social sanctions, which dismissed their results by attributing them to the work of irrational and rumor-spreading women who lacked scientific knowledge. These citizen scientists were unsuccessful at gaining political traction, as they were constrained by neoliberal and traditional gender ideologies that dictated how private citizens—especially women—should act. By highlighting the challenges these citizen scientists faced, Kimura provides insights into the complicated relationship between science, foodways, gender, and politics in post-Fukushima Japan and beyond.

Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil


Emilia Sanabria - 2016
    She shows how hormones have become central to contemporary understandings of the body, class, gender, sex, personhood, modernity, and Brazilian national identity. Through interviews with women and doctors; observations in clinics, research centers and pharmacies; and analyses of contraceptive marketing, Sanabria traces the genealogy of menstrual suppression, from its use in population control strategies in the global South to its remarketing as a practice of pharmaceutical self-enhancement couched in neoliberal notions of choice. She links the widespread practice of menstrual suppression and other related elective medical interventions to Bahian views of the body as a malleable object that requires constant work. Given this bodily plasticity, and its potentially limitless character, the book considers ways to assess the values attributed to bodily interventions. Plastic Bodies will be of interest to all those working in medical anthropology, gender studies, and sexual and reproductive health.

Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed


Misagh Parsa - 2016
    For the first time in decades, the adoption of serious liberal reforms seemed possible. But the opportunity proved short-lived, leaving Iranian activists and intellectuals to debate whether any path to democracy remained open.Offering a new framework for understanding democratization in developing countries governed by authoritarian regimes, Democracy in Iran is a penetrating, historically informed analysis of Iran's current and future prospects for reform. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Misagh Parsa traces the evolution of Iran's theocratic regime, examining the challenges the Islamic Republic has overcome as well as those that remain: inequalities in wealth and income, corruption and cronyism, and a "brain drain" of highly educated professionals eager to escape Iran's repressive confines. The political fortunes of Iranian reformers seeking to address these problems have been uneven over a period that has seen hopes raised during a reformist administration, setbacks under Ahmadinejad, and the birth of the Green Movement. Although pro-democracy activists have made progress by fits and starts, they have few tangible reforms to show for their efforts.In Parsa's view, the outlook for Iranian democracy is stark. Gradual institutional reforms will not be sufficient for real change, nor can the government be reformed without fundamentally rethinking its commitment to the role of religion in politics and civic life. For Iran to democratize, the options are narrowing to a single path: another revolution.

Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Vol. 2: The Invisible Pyramid / The Night Country / Essays from The Star Thrower


Loren Eiseley - 2016
    As Western civilization attains new heights of scientific awareness and technological skill, is it also blind to its own limits, doomed to destroy itself like the lost civilizations of the ancients or other “spore-bearers” in our evolutionary past? Eiseley makes an urgent, environmentalist plea in these essays: we must protect the planet from which we emerged against our unchecked power to overpopulate and pollute and consume it.The essays in The Night Country (1971) look not to the stars but backward and inward: to the haunted spaces of Eiseley’s lonely Nebraska childhood and to those moments, often dark and unexpected, when chance observations disturb our ordinary understandings of the universe. The naturalist here seeks neither “salvation in facts” nor solace in wild places: encountering an old bone, or a nest of wasps, he recognizes what he calls “the ghostliness of myself,” his own mortality, and the paradoxes of the evolution of consciousness.Shortly before his death, Eiseley made plans for what would be his last book, published posthumously as The Star Thrower (1978). Here are late essays on the life and legacy of Henry David Thoreau, the writer to whom he turned more often than any other; thoughts on the “two cultures” he sought to bring together throughout his career; and on the relations between hard science and “awe before the universe.” Of particular interest are two early stories discovered among his papers, “The Dance of the Frogs” and “The Fifth Planet.”

Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art


Ian McLean - 2016
    But it is controversial, dividing the artists, purveyors, and collectors from those who smell a scam. Whether the artists are victims or victors, there is no denying the impact of their work in the media, on art collectors and the art world at large, and on our global imagination. How did Australian art become the most successful indigenous form in the world? How did its artists escape the ethnographic and souvenir markets to become players in an art market to which they had historically been denied access? Beautifully illustrated, this full stunning account not only offers a comprehensive introduction to this rich artistic tradition, but also makes us question everything we have been taught about contemporary art.

Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women's Voices


Jeanine M. Canty - 2016
    The women are prominent academics, writers and leaders spanning Native American, Indigenous, Asian, African, Latina, Jewish and Multiracial backgrounds. The contributors express a myriad of ways that the relationship between the ecological and social have brought new understanding to their experiences and work in the world. Moreover by working with these edges of awareness, they are identifying new forms of teaching, leading, healing and positive change. Ecological and Social Healing is rooted in these ideas and speaks to an "edge awareness or consciousness." In essence this speaks to the power of integrating multiple and often conflicting views and the transformations that result.  As women working across the boundaries of the ecological and social, we have powerful experiences that are creating new forms of healing.This book is rooted in academic theory as well as personal and professional experience, and highlights emerging models and insights. It will appeal to those working, teaching and learning in the fields of social justice, environmental issues, women's studies, spirituality, transformative/environmental/sustainability leadership, and interdisciplinary/intersectionality studies.

Environment, Society and the Black Death: An interdisciplinary approach to the late-medieval crisis in Sweden


Per Lagerås - 2016
    

Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment: Scotland, 1670-1740


Lizanne Henderson - 2016
    It explores the changing attitudes and diversity of opinions towards witch belief, the interface between folk conceptions and the philosophies of the learned.

Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory


Walter Zev Feldman - 2016
    Emerging in 16th century Prague, the klezmer became a central cultural feature of the largesttransnational Jewish community of modern times - the Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe. Much of the musical and choreographic history of the Ashkenazim is embedded in the klezmer repertoire, which functioned as a kind of non-verbal communal memory. The complex of speech, dance, and musical gesture isdeeply rooted in Jewish expressive culture, and reached its highest development in Eastern Europe. Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory reveals the artistic transformations of the liturgy of the Ashkenazic synagogue in klezmer wedding melodies, and presents the most extended study available in anylanguage of the relationship of Jewish dance to the rich and varied klezmer music of Eastern Europe.Author Walter Zev Feldman expertly examines the major written sources--principally in Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Romanian--from the 16th to the 20th centuries. He draws upon the foundational notated collections of the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods, as well as rare cantorial and klezmermanuscripts from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. He has conducted interviews with authoritative European-born klezmorim over a period of more than thirty years, in America, Europe, and Israel. Thus, his analysis reveals both the musical and cultural systems underlying the klezmer music ofEastern Europe.

Obesity in Canada: Critical Perspectives


Jenny Ellison - 2016
    Conceptualizing obesity as a biological condition, these experts insist that it needs to be "prevented" and "managed."Obesity in Canada takes a broader, critical perspective of our supposed epidemic. Examining obesity in its cultural and historical context, the book's contributors ask how we measure health and wellness, where our attitudes to obesity develop from, and what the consequences are of naming and targeting as "obese" those whose body weights do not match our expectations. A broad survey of the issues surrounding the obesity panic in Canada, it is the first collection of fat studies and critical obesity studies from a distinctly Canadian perspective.

Childhood: Origins, Evolution, and Implications


Courtney L. Meehan - 2016
    Moreover, the importance of studying the evolution of childhood has begun to extend beyond academic modeling and into real-world applications for maternal and child health and well-being in contemporary populations around the world. Combined, the chapters show that what we call childhood is culturally variable yet biologically based and has been critical to the evolutionary success of our species; the significance of integrating childhood into models of human life history and evolution cannot be overstated. This volume further demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary investigation and is sure to spur further interest in the field.

Reel World: On Location in Kollywood


Anand Pandian - 2016
    But what happens to life when the real world begins to look and feel so much like the reel one? And what about those countless craftsmen who make this happen, toiling each day to turn ordinary moments into elements of a cinematic world? For the last few years, Anand Pandian has trailed some of the most renowned figures in the New Wave of contemporary Tamil cinema, from the studios of Chennai to Switzerland and Kuala Lumpur. His gripping stories reveal how their films come together and sometimes fall apart--the pitched scripts and rickety sets, their stormy fights and digital marvels, the joy of a hit tune and the heartbreak of box office disaster. With an anthropologist’s eye and a cinephile’s zeal, Pandian vividly conjures the frenzied highs and lows of this extraordinary creative process. Enthralling, original, and written in a dazzlingly experimental style, Reel World is a moving meditation on the power of film, offering rich insight into a fascinating, frenetic world.