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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology
Taking a look at white supremacy, this work argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes, a problem of property as well as pigment. This work shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.
In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this
collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the
content and organization of culture. In the study of mental
activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart?
The Oxford Modern Britain series comprises authoritative introductory books on all aspects of the social structure of modern Britain. Lively and accessible, the books will be the first points of reference for anyone interested in the state of contemporary Britain. They will be invaluable to those taking courses in the social sciences. This is an expanded second edition of a well-established introduction to the role and importance of race and ethnicity in contemporary British society, relevant to students of sociology and many other disciplines. All sections of the book have been revised to include the most recently available data. A new chapter has been added on the criminal justice system in the light of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry. In addition the sections on citizenship have been revised to take account of recent developments. The first chapters set out some of the key conceptual issues in the study of race and ethnicity in modern Britain. Subsequent chapters examine the historical background to migration and ethnic diversity. Drawing attention to a key distinction between difference and diversity, the book examines the interplay of inequality, citizenship, and public policy in a number of areas central to life in modern Britain, including: employment, education, housing, health, criminal justice and political representation. The book concludes with a look to the future to assess how a range of trends, including developments in the European Union, the resurgence of racism, and developing patterns of social mobility may pose challenges for the shape and direction of British society as it enters a new millennium.
As part of the SFI series, this book presents the most up-to-date research in the study of human and primate societies, including recent advances in software and algorithms for modelling societies, and it is ideal for professionals in archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, or computer science.
In a further development of the nature-nurture debate, this
collection of articles questions how the human mind influences the
content and organization of culture. In the study of mental
activity, can the effects of evolution and history be teased apart?
Centered on a study of the early archives of the Venerabile Collegio Inglese in Rome, this book attempts to place in its political, commercial and religious setting the English community that was in Rome between 1362, when the first English hospice for poor people and pilgrims was founded, and 1420. The book also uncovers a notable, although unsuccessful, attempt to forward English participation in commerce with Rome before 1420, revealing important links between the English laity in Rome and the city of London.
This interdisciplinary book interprets early human evolution in the context of the local ecology and adaptation to specific habitats. It systematically assesses the possible role of climate change in driving early human evolution, and evaluates recent fossil finds from an ecological and biogeographic perspective, to provide a novel synthesis of hominid evolution.
This book is a tour-de-force on how human consciousness may have evolved. From the "phantom pain" experienced by people who have lost their limbs to the uncanny faculty of "blindsight," Humphrey argues that raw sensations are central to all conscious states and that consciousness must have evolved, just like all other mental faculties, over time from our ancestorsodily responses to pain and pleasure. '
This pathbreaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media -- including websites, email and chat -- the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a comprehensive approach to new media. It points to the future direction of Internet research, proposing a detailed agenda for comparative ethnographic study of the cultural significance and effects of the Internet in modern society. Clearly written for the non-specialist reader, it offers a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds. An innovative tie-in with the book's own website provides copious illustrations amounting to over 2,000 web-pages that bring the material right to your computer.
Ever since the emergence of human culture, people and animals have co-existed in close proximity. Humans have always recognized both their kinship with animals and their fundamental differences, as animals have always been a threat to humans' well-being. The relationship, therefore, has been complex, intimate, reciprocal, personal, and -- crucially -- ambivalent. It is hardly surprising that animals evoke strong emotions in humans, both positive and negative. This companion volume to Morris' important earlier work, The Power of Animals, is a sustained investigation of the Malawi people's sacramental attitude to animals, particularly the role that animals play in life-cycle rituals, their relationship to the divinity and to spirits of the dead. How people relate to and use animals speaks volumes about their culture and beliefs. This book overturns the ingrained prejudice within much ethnographic work, which has often dismissed the pivotal role animals play in culture, and shows that personhood, religion, and a wide range of rituals are informed by, and even dependent upon, human-animal relations.
In August 1945, the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is hardly known is that 4,000 Nisei (Japanese Americans), the sons and daughters of Japanese immigrants who had been sent back to Japan to be educated before World War II erupted, were caught in the Hiroshima bombing. This extraordinary book commemorates the 3,000 Nisei who died from the atomic blast in Hiroshima and documents the plight of another 1,000 "hibakusha" (survivors of the bomb) who returned to the West Coast after the war.Branded as "foreigners" in wartime Japan and as "enemies" in postwar United States, their existence as victims of the atomic blast has not been recognized by either the Japanese or the U.S. government, both of which have refused to alleviate the medical and political problems of the survivors. Drawing on primary sources and rich interview data, Rinjiro Sodei has contributed an original scholarly work to the literature on World War II and the Asian-American experience. This book bears witness to the human calamities of the nuclear age and to the dignity of these Japanese Americans striving to obtain their rights and sustain their bicultural identity.
This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of identity through both movement and attachment. The study follows the Italian identity project since 1975, when community leaders first raised concerns about 'the future of invisible immigrants'. The author uses the image of 'invisible immigrants' as the starting point of her inquiry, for it captures the ambivalent position Italians occupy within the British political and social landscape. As a cultural minority absorbed within the white European majority, their project is steeped in the ideal of visibility that relies on various 'displays of presence'. Drawing on a wide range of material, from historical narratives, to political debates, processions, religious rituals, activities of the Women's Club, war remembrances, card games, and beauty contests, the author explores the notion of migrant belongings in relation to performative acts that produce what they claim to be reproducing. She reveals how these acts work upon the historical and cultural environment to re-member localized terrains of migrant belongings, while they simultaneously manufacture gendered, generational and ethnicized subjects. Located at the crossroads of cultural studies, 'diaspora' studies, and feminist/queer theory, this book is distinctive in connecting an empirical study with wider theoretical debates on identity. Nominated for the Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize 2001.
There are some 6,500 different languages in the world, belonging to around 250 distinct families, and conforming to numerous grammatical types. This text investigates and seeks to explain that diversity. Daniel Nettle examines why diversity evolved at all, given that the biological mechanisms underlying language are the same in all normal human beings. He then considers whether the distribution of diversity may be linked with the major patterns of human geography and prehistory. Human languages and language families are not distributed evenly: there are few in Eurasia compared to the thousands in Australasia, the Pacific, and the Americas. There is also a marked correlation between bio- and linguistic diversity. The author explains how and why this diversity arose. To do so he returns to the earliest origins of language, reconstructing the processes of linguistic change and diffusion that occurred when humans first filled the continents and, thousands of years later, turned to agriculture. He concludes by examining the causes of linguistic mortality, and why the number of the world's languages may halve before 2100. The text draws on work in anthropology, linguistics, geography, ar
This book traces the formation of Italian migrant belongings in
Britain, and scrutinizes the identity narratives through which they
are stabilized. A key theme of this study is the constitution of
identity through both movement and attachment.
"Struggling with Development" is a study of the complex relationships among international development, hunger, and gender in the context of political violence in the Philippines. This ethnography demonstrates that gender-specific international development, which has among its main goals the alleviation of hunger in women and children and the raising of women's social position, has instead perpetuated the problems of hunger and gender inequality in societies.This ethnographic study of upland Ifugao social and cultural life in the Philippines portrays how Ifugao women's unequal relationship to men has been perpetuated by international development programs largely because development personnel tend to ignore ongoing processes of social inequality operating within local communities and between nations. International development programs leave local forms of inequality unchanged and sometimes increase social inequality despite their efforts to improve women's and children's social position and nutritional status. Examples and analyses of how local forms of inequality are ignored by international development programs are provided in the text. This book questions the international "women in development" thrust of some feminist and development scholarships and organizations.Lynn Kwiatkowski also demonstrates how health care has been used in a variety of ways by different groups to serve ends other than the reduction of hunger or illness, including religious healing and military and revolutionary healing generated during the internal political conflict in the Philippines. "Struggling with Development" will be useful for advanced courses in medical anthropology and sociology, gender studies, development studies, and Asian studies.
A Companion to Paleopathology offers a comprehensive overview of this rapidly growing sub- field of physical anthropology. * Presents a broad overview of the field of paleopathology, integrating theoretical and methodological approaches to understand biological and disease processes throughout human history * Demonstrates how paleopathology sheds light on the past through the analysis of human and non-human skeletal materials, mummified remains and preserved tissue * Integrates scientific advances in multiple fields that contribute to the understanding of ancient and historic diseases, such as epidemiology, histology, radiology, parasitology, dentistry, and molecular biology, as well as archaeological, archival and historical research. * Highlights cultural processes that have an impact on the evolution of illness, death and dying in human populations, including subsistence strategies, human environmental adaptations, the effects of malnutrition, differential access to resources, and interpersonal and intercultural violence
Death, for bacteria, is not inevitable. Protect a bacterium from
predators, and provide it with adequate food and space to grow, and
it would continue living--and reproducing asexually--forever. But a
paramecium (a slightly more advanced single-cell organism), under
the same ideal conditions, would stop dividing after about 200
generations--and die. Death, for paramecia and their offspring, is
inevitable. Unless they have sex. If at any point during that 200
or so generations, two of the progeny of our paramecium have sex,
their clock will be reset to zero. They and their progeny are
granted another 200 generations. Those who fail to have sex
eventually die. Immortality for bacteria is automatic; for all
other living beings--including humans--immortality depends on
having sex. But why is this so? Why must death be inevitable? And
what is the connection between death and sexual reproduction?
When evolutionary biology stretched out a tentacle called sociobiology and began to probe human behavior back in the 1970s, there was no room for neutrality. Advocates of the new science hailed the dawn of a new era in our understanding of human behavior, while opponents wrung their hands with concern over the new field's potential to transform and even destroy anthropology and other social and behavioral sciences. Twenty years later, little has changed. Anthropology and its sister disciplines are still intact and thriving, though they seldom make use of insights from evolutionary biology. Cultural anthropology in particular has recoiled from the biological threat by moving away from the sciences and toward the humanities. During that same time, a new generation of scholars in biological anthropology, psychology, and other fields has made great progress by using evolutionary theory to understand human behavior, applying it to everything from mating and parenting to the study of mental illness. The success of this research program is threatened, however, by its lack of a serious role for the concept of culture."That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior" is an effort to develop a scientific study of human behavior that is at once evolutionary and cultural. In a lively, readable style, it deals with such serious, scholarly issues as how to best define culture, the question of whether culture is present in other species, human universals and human diversity, the relationship between culture and behavior, and cultural and moral relativism. It covers existing models of the relationship between cultural and biological evolution, including the concept of the meme and the new science of memetics, as well as the author's own work on the role of culture in human communications that draws upon the study of animal signals.
Throughout the twentieth century, Spanish people have deployed
conflicting sexual moralities in their struggle for political
supremacy within the state. The Spanish Gypsies or Gitanos, who
live at the very bottom of the Spanish socio-economic scale, have
appropriated this concern with gender morality and, in the process,
have reinvented themselves as the only honourable Spaniards.
Although the Gitano gender ideology has a distinctively Spanish
flavour, it revolves around a conceptualization of the female body
that is radically different from that of other Spaniards.
This valuable study of 20th-century reservation life, first published in 1939, portrays 150 families on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota in a period of loss of traditional ways. Sister M. Inez Hilger used a straightforward approach in her research and elicited a wealth of information. By concentrating on both the traditional Chippewa (Ojibway) ways as well as on the adaptations the families had made, Hilger was able to present a Chippewa world in transition. She placed her broad cultural analysis in the context of reservation housing. The many quotes from the people she interviewed bring a lively, personal expression to the story. This reprint edition contains a new introduction by Brenda J. Child, assistant professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota, and Kimberly M. Blaeser, professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally important and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups. In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals." At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contmeporary American culture and race relations.
In the revised and updated second edition of this comprehensive book, the first anthology to integrate social-psychological literature on prejudice with sociological and historical investigations, contributors introduce readers to the key debates and principal writings on racial and ethnic conflict, representing conservative, liberal, and radical positions. Presented in debate format, each section offers a provocative discussion of contemporary problems and issues, allowing students to take part in the controversies from an informed perspective. The editors' introductions provide current data and describe cutting-edge arguments that are reshaping the study of race and ethnicity today. The second edition boasts new readings which serve to further enhance the dialogue on America's continuing struggle with racial issues. Contributors tackle a wide array of issues which plague the country today--from discrimination and immigration to education and politics--and ask how we can affect change as we move into the twenty-first century.
A major critique of the globalization of the culture principle in
anthropology. This study contends that the subjective anthropology
promoted through postmodernism represents an extreme development of
long established, highly patronizing and misleading evaluations in
the anthropologist's creative role in the construction of theory.
Arguing that theory building is dependent on the actual study of
peoples - a study which is empirically based and historically
sensitive - the book advocates the "fieldwork mode of production
and reproduction." The simplest model for the construction of
empirically-grounded theory involves three interacting sets of
factors: the subjective ethnographer and their deployment of
current theoretical assumptions; the multi-layered ethnographic
"facts" disclosed by fieldwork; and the geopolitical and historical
contexts in which fieldwork is conducted. |
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