Gary Pak has emerged as one of the most important Asian Hawaiian writers of our time. In this new collection, Pak expertly crafts a memorable cast of Hawai'i's Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Native Hawaiians, amplifying our cross-cultural understanding of Hawaiian life today. The nine short stories in Language of the Geckos and Other Stories paint an array of locals caught up in failed dreams of financial success and romantic fulfillment. Many of these stories deal with issues particular to Native Hawaiian perspectives, while others take slice-of-life glimpses at characters alienated in the land of their birth. Pak's sure narrative voice shifts deftly between his actors, shading the nuanced voices and interior lives of housewives, mechanics, cabdrivers, aging hippies, and desperate bargirls. Most of these characters speak in the lingua franca of the islands, a highly developed Creole that is commonly called Pidgin English. Also strongly present is the spiritual ambiance of the land. The worlds of Pak's Hawaiians, Asian locals, and the haoles sometimes intersect and collide and other times remain parallel, but each world is haunted by the past. Whether Pak evokes shadows of World War II, the Vietnam War, the radical sixties, or the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan in Korea, the larger historical context looms ominously in the background as wounded memories of characters in despair.

Just 28,000 years ago, the blink of an eye in geological time, the last of Neanderthals died out in their last outpost, in caves near Gibraltar. Thanks to cartoons and folk accounts we have a distorted view of these other humans - for that is what they were. We think of them as crude and clumsy and not very bright, easily driven to extinction by the lithe, smart modern humans that came out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. But was it really as simple as that? Clive Finlayson reminds us that the Neanderthals were another kind of human, and their culture was not so very different from that of our own ancestors. In this book, he presents a wider view of the events that led to the migration of the moderns into Europe, what might have happened during the contact of the two populations, and what finally drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It is a view that considers climate, ecology, and migrations of populations, as well as culture and interaction. His conclusion is that the destiny of the Neanderthals and the Moderns was sealed by ecological factors and contingencies. It was a matter of luck that we survived and spread while the Neanderthals dwindled and perished. Had the climate not changed in our favour some 50 million years ago, things would have been very different. There is much current research interest in Neanderthals, much of it driven by attempts to map some of their DNA. But it's not just a question of studying the DNA. The rise and fall of populations is profoundly moulded by the larger scale forces of climate and ecology. And it is only by taking this wider view that we can fully understand the course of events that led to our survival and their demise. The fact that Neanderthals survived until virtually yesterday makes our relationship with them and their tragedy even more poignant. They almost made it, after all.

Human Paleobiology provides a unifying framework for the study of human populations, both past and present, to a range of changing environments. It integrates evidence from studies of human adaptability, comparative primatology, and molecular genetics to document consistent measures of genetic distance between subspecies, species and other taxonomic groupings. These findings support the interpretation of the biology of humans in terms of a smaller number of populations characterised by higher levels of genetic continuity than previously hypothesised. Using this as a basis, Robert Eckhardt then goes on to analyse problems in human paleobiology including phenotypic differentiation, patterns of species range expansion and phyletic succession in terms of the patterns and processes still observable in extant populations. This book will be a challenging and stimulating read for students and researchers interested in human paleobiology or evolutionary anthropology.

When it was published in 1996 Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia was the first book to examine the biology and lives of the prehistoric people of this region. Bringing together the most active researchers in late Pleistocene/Holocene Southeast Asian human osteology, the book deals with major approaches to studying human skeletal remains. Using analysis of the physical appearance of the region's past peoples, the first section explores issues such as the first inhabitants of the region, the evidence for subsequent migratory patterns (particularly between Southeast and Northeast Asia) and counter arguments centering on in situ microevolutionary change. This second section reconstructs the health of these people, in the context of major economic and demographic changes over time, including those caused by the adoption or intensification of agriculture. Written for archaeologists, bioarchaeologists and biological anthropologists, it is a fascinating insight into the bioarchaeology of this important region.

Canada's brand of nationalism celebrates diversity - so long as it doesn't challenge the unity, authority, or legitimacy of the state. Caitlin Gordon-Walker explores this tension between unity and diversity in three nationally recognized museums, institutions that must make judgments about what counts as "too different" in order to celebrate who we are as a people and nation through exhibits, programs, and design. Although the contradictions that lie at the heart of multicultural nationalism have the potential to constrain political engagement and dialogue, the sensory feasts on display in Canada's museums provide a space for citizens to both question and renegotiate the limits of their national vision.

Over seventy per cent of the population in industrialized nations live in cities; soon, so will most of the world's population. This volume examines the impact of urban living on human health and biology. Cities pose numerous and diverse social and biological challenges to human populations which bear little resemblance to the forces that moulded human biology through millions of years of evolution. Urban populations in industrialized nations have distinctive patterns of behaviour, social stratification, stress, infectious disease, diet, activity and exposure to pollutants from years of industrialization. These features affect diverse aspects of human function including human nutrition, energy expenditure, growth and reproduction. This volume begins with an introduction to the history of urbanism and poverty, infectious disease, reproductive function, child health, nutrition, physical activity and psychosocial stress. The book will appeal to workers in urban planning, human biology, anthropology, preventative medicine, human ecology and related areas.

This book is entirely devoted to the study of children's skeletons from archaeological and forensic contexts. It provides an extensive review of the osteological methods and theoretical concepts of their analysis. Non-adult skeletons provide a wealth of information on the physical and social life of the child from their growth, diet and age at death, to factors that expose them to trauma and disease at different stages of their lives. This book covers the factors that affect non-adult skeletal preservation; the assessment of their age, sex and ancestry; growth and development; infant and child mortality including infanticide; weaning ages and disease of dietary deficiency; skeletal pathology; personal identification and exposure to trauma from birth injuries, accidents and child abuse; providing insights for graduates and postgraduates in osteology, palaeopathology and forensic anthropology.

Age-old ideas about the deserving and undeserving poor are still pervasive in our society. Stereotypes of the scrounger and the malingerer, and the widespread belief that much joblessness is voluntary, continue to constitute the ideological basis of conservative social policy on unemployment and poverty. In this study of unemployment in Belfast, Dr Howe successfully refutes some of the widely held myths about the black economy, the welfare benefit system and the so-called culture of dependency. This is a major ethnography of unemployment and the first community-based book on contemporary unemployment in the United Kingdom. It is an account of the social, psychological and material circumstances of working-class, long-term unemployed married men in both Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast. Dr Howe shows how the experience of unemployment is shaped both by local factors and by factors that are more generally characteristic of industrial societies. These include the bureaucratic administration of welfare benefits, the exploitation of opportunities in the black economy and the conflict between those with and those without jobs.

On 15 August 1959 Dr L. S. B. Leakey announced the discovery, in the lowest level of Olduvai Gorge, of a new and beautifully preserved fossil cranium of a hominid, which he tentatively named Zinjanthropus boisei. For this second volume, Professor Tobias has undertaken a definitive analysis of the cranium. This is a most comprehensive study to be made on a hominid skull belonging to the early and mid-Pleistocene group of australopithecines. The fossilised skull provides a wealth of information on taxonomic status, way of life and age at death. To evaluate Zinjanthropus fully, the author has reviewed in detail the cranial and dental anatomy of all australopithecines from Tanzania and South Africa and has placed on record much valuable information about the group as a whole.

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway's readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of "the libertine colony." She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean.Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation-including the Code noir-that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Olduvai is one of the most important prehistoric sites in the world; indeed, the only Middle Pleistocene site of comparable importance is Choukoutien and Olduvai can show deposits far older. The site has produced a mass of material of the highest archaeological and palaeontology importance and in this first of five volumes Dr Leakey and his collaborators make their preliminary reports. The story of the excavations initiated by Dr Leakey in 1951 is well known. Their purpose was to locate and uncover a series of living-floors of early Hand-axe man and, if possible, of the preceding Olduwan culture. The discoveries were of striking and far-reaching importance. They included, besides a mass of tools and artefacts, small animal and human remains and the famous skull of Zinjanthropus boisei, the earliest tool-making man. Against this background Leakey and his collaborators discuss the geological evidence, its relation to the fauna and other fossil evidence, the problems of climatic sequence and the use of potassium-argon dating. The purpose of this volume is to provide a context in which the fossil human remains and the Stone Age cultural sequence at Olduvai can be studied.

At Olduvai Gorge natural erosion exposed a deep series of superimposed geological beds containing rich artefact and fossil assemblages spanning the last 1.8 million years. The sire ot famous as a rsult of excavations conducted there since 1951 under the direction of Mary Leakey and her husband, the late Louis Leakey. This volume, written largely by Mary Leakey herself, is the last of the reports and records the archaeological finds in the upper part of the Olduvai sequence from excavations carried out from the end of 1968 until 1971. The period covered here is from about 1.2 to 0.4 million years ago and th efinds include artefacts and faunal remains excavated from sites in beds II, IV na the Masek beds. The volume follows on from the archaeological record in beds I and II published in volume 3 of the series.

While their health has suffered enormously because of the arrival of the Europeans, it is assumed that Aboriginal people enjoyed good health before 1788. Using data collected from all parts of the continent, this 1995 book studies the health of Australia's original inhabitants over 50,000 years. It represents the first continental survey of its kind and is the first to quantify and describe key aspects of Australian hunter-gatherer health. The book takes a theoretical approach to Upper Pleistocene regional epidemiology and presents empirical data of the health of late Pleistocene and Holocene populations. Major categories of disease described are: stress, osteoarthritis, fractures, congenital deformations, neoplasms and non-specific and treponemal infections. The author also describes surgical techniques used by Aboriginal people. Offering fresh insight into the study of Australian prehistory and Aboriginal culture, this book will be accessible to specialists and general readers alike. It illuminates the origins of human disease, and will fill a gap in our knowledge of health in the Australasian region.

In hospital rooms across the country, doctors, nurses, patients, and their families grapple with questions of life and death. Recently, they have been joined at the bedside by a new group of professional experts, bioethicists, whose presence raises a host of urgent questions. How has bioethics evolved into a legitimate specialty? When is such expertise necessary? How do bioethicists make their decisions? And whose interests do they serve?
Renowned sociologist Charles L. Bosk has been observing medical care for thirty-five years. In "What Would You Do?" he brings his extensive experience to bear on these questions while reflecting on the ethical dilemmas that his own ethnographic research among surgeons and genetic counselors has provoked. Bosk considers whether the consent given to ethnographers by their subjects can ever be fully voluntary and informed. He questions whether promises of confidentiality and anonymity can or should be made. And he wonders if social scientists overestimate the benefits of their work while downplaying the risks.
Vital for practitioners of both the newly prominent field of bioethics and the long-established craft of ethnography, "What Would You Do?" will also engross anyone concerned with how our society addresses difficult health care issues.

The relationship between diet and those diseases caused by, or related to, poor nutrition is influenced by anthropological and physiological factors. This volume, first published in 1990 and based on a symposium organised in collaboration with the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food, emphasises the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of diet and disease. Distinguished contributors, from nutritionists to anthropologists, examine the ways in which nutrition may affect sociocultural circumstances and how the causation and distribution of disease is linked to anthropological factors. Amongst the topics addressed are the extent to which human beings can adapt to food shortage, how nutritional factors affect people's capacity to work and develop properly mentally, how nutritional status influences susceptibility to infectious disease, who is most at risk in the community and why, the relationship between environment , economy and malnutrition and how people perceive food in relation to health. This research level text will interest both nutritionists and anthropologists.

An intimate portrait of London life in the first decade of the 21st century, this study reveals the "lived reality" of metropolitan labor--its satisfactions and frustrations, positives and negatives. Based on interviews with working people, this is a story of unsung heroes and heroines, of bus drivers, shop-keepers, metro workers, computer programmers, artisans, teachers, and entrepreneurs--the everyday people whose labors underwrite Britain's economic powerhouse.

Studies of brain evolution have moved rapidly in recent years, building on the pioneering research of Harry J. Jerison. This book provides state-of-the-art reviews of primate (including human) brain evolution. The volume is divided into two sections, the first offers new perspectives on the developmental, physiological, dietary, and behavioral correlates of brain enlargement. However, it has long been recognized that brains do not merely enlarge globally as they evolve, but that their cortical and internal organization also changes in a process known as reorganization. Species-specific adaptations therefore have neurological substrates that depend on more than just overall brain size. The second section explores these neurological underpinnings for the senses, adaptations, and cognitive abilities that are important for primates. With a prologue by Stephen J. Gould and an epilogue by Harry J. Jerison, this is an important new reference work for all those working on primate brain evolution.

Paleodemography is the field of enquiry that attempts to identify demographic parameters from past populations (usually skeletal samples) derived from archaeological contexts, and then to make interpretations regarding the health and well-being of those populations. However, paleodemographic theory relies on several assumptions that cannot easily be validated by the researcher, and if incorrect, can lead to large errors or biases. In this book, physical anthropologists, mathematical demographers and statisticians tackle these methodological issues for reconstructing demographic structure for skeletal samples. Topics discussed include how skeletal morphology is linked to chronological age, assessment of age from the skeleton, demographic models of mortality and their interpretation, and biostatistical approaches to age structure estimation from archaeological samples. This work will be of immense importance to anyone interested in paleodemography, including biological and physical anthropologists, demographers, geographers, evolutionary biologists and statisticians.

Seasonality has effects on a wide range of human functions and activities, and is important in the understanding of human-environment relationships. In this volume, distinguished contributors including human biologists, anthropologists, physiologists and nutritionists consider many of the different ways in which seasonality influences human biology and behaviour. Topics addressed include the influence of seasonality on hominid evolution, seasonal climatic effects on human physiology, fertility and physical growth, seasonality in morbidity, mortality and nutritional state, and seasonal factors in food production, modernization and work organization in Third World economies. This book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in human biology, anthropology and nutrition.

This new revised edition of African Civilizations re-examines the physical evidence for developing social complexity in Africa over the last six thousand years. Unlike the two previous editions, it is not confined to tropical Africa but considers the whole continent. Graham Connah focuses upon the archaeological research of two key aspects of complexity, urbanism and state formation, in ten main areas of Africa: Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, Ethiopia, the West African savanna, the West African forest, the East African coast and islands, the Zimbabwe Plateau, parts of Central Africa and South Africa. The book's main concern is to review the available evidence in its varied environmental settings, and to consider possible explanations of the developments that gave rise to it. Extensively illustrated, including new maps and plans, and offering an extended list of references, this is essential reading for students of archaeology, anthropology, African history, black studies and social geography.

This journal of European ethnology presents articles and reviews by international scholars on ethnicity and culture in Europe. This issue includes the writings on the commercialization of childhood; killing in the name of the Lord; and political protest and snobbery.

Animal-herding (pastoralism) is a subsistence strategy that is practised by populations of low-producing ecosystems worldwide. Increasingly, it is vanishing due to land pressure and ecological degradation, particularly in the developing world. While previous books have examined the social, cultural and economic dimensions of the pastoral way of life, there has been little systematic examination of the biology and health of pastoral groups. The Human Biology of Pastoral Populations fills this gap by drawing together our knowledge of the biology, population structure and ecology of herding populations. It investigates how pastoral populations adapt to limited and variable food availability, the implications of the herding way of life for reproductive patterns, population structure and genetic diversity and the impacts of ongoing social and ecological changes on the health and well-being of these populations. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars in anthropology, human biology, genetics and demography.

Latah, the Malayan hyperstartle pattern, has fascinated Western observers since the late nineteenth century and is widely regarded as a 'culture-bound syndrome'. Dr Winzeler critically reviews the literature on the subject, and presents new ethnographic information based on his own fieldwork in Malaya and Borneo. He considers the biological and psychological hypotheses that have been proposed to account for latah, and explains the ways in which local people understand it. Arguing that latah has specific social functions, he concludes that it is not appropriate to regard it as an 'illness' or 'syndrome'.

"Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography" explores some of the latest developments in the literary and cultural practices of Canadians of Asian heritage. While earlier work by ethnic, multicultural, or minority writers in Canada was often concerned with immigration, the moment of arrival, issues of assimilation, and conflicts between generations, literary and cultural production in the new millennium no longer focuses solely on the conflict between the Old World and the New or the clashes between culture of origin and adopted culture. No longer are minority authors identifying simply with their ethnic or racial cultural background in opposition to dominant culture.

The essays in this collection explore ways in which Asian Canadian authors (such as Larissa Lai, Shani Mootoo, Fred Wah, Hiromi Goto, Suniti Namjoshi, and Ying Chen) and artists (such as Ken Lum, Paul Wong, and Laiwan) have gone beyond what Francoise Lionnet calls autoethnography, or ethnographic autobiography. They demonstrate the ways representations of race and ethnicity, particularly in works by Asian Canadians in the last decade, have changedhave become more playful, untraditional, aesthetically and ideologically transgressive, and exciting.