Overheating offers a groundbreaking new way of looking at the problems of the Anthropocene, exploring crises of the environment, economy, and identity through an anthropological lens. Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that while each of these crises is global in scope, they are nonetheless perceived and responded to locally—and that once we realize that, we begin to see the contradictions that abound between the standardizing forces of global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices. Only by acknowledging the primacy of the local, Eriksen shows, can we begin to even properly understand, let alone address, these problems on a global scale.

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    The book is organized around problems rather than topics, creating a natural and integrated discussion of such traditional concerns as kinship, caste, gender roles, and religion within the context of meaningful questions, including How can people begin to understand beliefs and behaviors that are different from their own. How do societies give meaning to and justify collective violence? Why are some societies more industrially advanced that others? What can anthropology tell us about attempts to link intelligence and class?

    Even as most Christian believers cleave to a traditional faith, other people give Jesus a leading role as folk hero, pitchman, and countercultural icon. And so it has been since the nation's founding--from Thomas Jefferson, who took scissors to his New Testament to sort out true from false Jesus material; to the Jews, Buddhists and Muslims who fit Jesus into their own traditions; to the people who adapt Jesus for stage and screen and the Holy Land theme park. American Jesus is a lively, illuminating and accessible survey that takes us into unexpected corners of our shared religious heritage (Dan Cryer, Newsday).

    But it seems the world around her won't cooperate -- she keeps getting involved with the wrong friends, the wrong older man, even the wrong Mr. Right. Her relationship with her family is downright dysfunctional -- while her mother is a holdover from the 1950s, her father embraces the go-go 1970s with abandon. So Taylor, left to her own devices, determines her life's road map -- a plan that will get her out of her house and out of Houston. A plan that will get her somewhere. "The Way to Somewhere" traces Taylor's odyssey as she moves from teenager to woman, with equal parts awkwardness, conflict, and resolve. All the while, Taylor struggles to shape reality into her dreams of the forever after. When a complex romantic entanglement leads to a fascination with furniture restoration, Taylor seems to have found the precise balance of science and logic that she desperately seeks. Yet somehow, her experiences continue to be more surprising and disastrous than smoothly aligned, until eventually all of these wrong turns set her life further on its own true course.Resonant and moving, funny and wise, "The Way to Somewhere" charts Taylor's growth as she flings herself headlong into sex, love, relationships, and renewal. In the end, Taylor's happiness hinges on learning not only to accept but to embrace those elements of her life that she had once tossed aside in search of better things.With the quick wit of Tom Perrotta's "Bad Haircut" and the emotional timbre of Wally Lamb's "She's Come Undone," Angie Day's "The Way to Somewhere" is an exceptional exploration ofthat fragile bridge between adolescence and adulthood, and what shores us up -- or breaks us apart.

    This book looks at the use of natural experiments or the comparative method.

    Seekers and sages travelled north and south, east and west, across mountains and along rivers, ignoring artificial boundaries, seeking and finding gods. Renowned mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik takes us on an insightful journey to thirty-two holy sites where ancient and modern deities unravel the complex and layered history, geography, and imagination of the land once known as ‘land of the Indian blackberry’ (Jambudvipa), ‘land of rivers’ (Sindhusthala in Sanskrit, or Hindustan in Persian), ‘expanse of King Bharata’ (Bharatvarsha, or Bharatkhanda), and even ‘abode of joy’ (Sukhavati to the Chinese).

    Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

    Whether he's summing up the state of the discipline ("Some things are better left un-Said") or ruminating on the ancients, Sahlins delivers a strong mixture of wit and wisdom.

    Van der Post describes his desert travels, the splendid landscape and wildlife, and his encounters with the Bushman, an elusive culture. Drawings by Maurice Wilson.

    It provides information needed to understand each article, its central concepts, and its relationship to the social and historical context.

    The engaging articles on all key issues related to the anthropology of religion grab the attention of students, while giving them an excellent foundation in contemporary ideas and approaches in the field. The multiple authors included in each chapter represent a range of interests, geographic foci, and ways of looking at each subject. Divided into ten chapters, this book begins with a broad view of anthropological ways of looking at religion, and moves on to some of the core topics within the subject, such as myth, ritual, and the various types of religious specialists.

    A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation's protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

    But Dharavi is much more than cold a statistic. What makes it special are the extraordinary people who live there, many of whom have defied fate and an unhelpful State to prosper through a mix of backbreaking work, some luck and a great deal of ingenuity. It is these men and women whom journalist Kalpana Sharma brings to life through a series of spellbinding stories. While recounting their tales, she also traces the history of Dharavi from the days when it was one of the six great koliwadas or fishing villages to the present times when it, along with other slums, is home to almost half of Mumbai.

    With a new introduction by the author.