Diana E. Forsythe was a leading anthropologist of science, technology, and work, and especially of the field of artificial intelligence. This volume collects her best-known essays, along with other major works that remained unpublished upon her death in 1997.
The essays proceed as a series of developing variations on the key questions that still confront science and technology studies today. What assumptions do expert systems designers make about users, and about knowledge more broadly, when they build software? How should humans interact with computers, and how do they, really? Why do computing firms hire anthropologists to study human-computer interaction, and what do anthropologists find once they are hired? And how and why are traditional power asymmetries between men and women produced and maintained in engineering firms and laboratories?
The book is not only a significant anthropological study of artificial intelligence and informatics, but is also an exemplar of how reflexive ethnography should be done. Among several pioneering strands of thought, it investigates the roles of gender and power in computer engineering, looking at the cultural mechanisms that support the persistent male domination of engineering, and analyzing the laboratory as a fictive kin group that reproduces gender asymmetries.

A Hindu monk in Calcutta refuses to take his psychotropic medications. His psychiatrist explains that just as his body needs food, the drugs are nutrition for his starved mind. Does it matter how--or whether--patients understand their prescribed drugs? Millions of people in India are routinely prescribed mood medications. Pharmaceutical companies give doctors strong incentives to write as many prescriptions as possible, with as little awkward questioning from patients as possible. Without a sustained public debate on psychopharmaceuticals in India, patients remain puzzled by the notion that drugs can cure disturbances of the mind. While biomedical psychopharmaceuticals are perceived with great suspicion, many non-biomedical treatments are embraced. Stefan Ecks illuminates how biomedical, Ayurvedic, and homeopathic treatments are used in India, and argues that pharmaceutical pluralism changes popular ideas of what drugs do. Based on several years of research on pharmaceutical markets, Ecks shows how doctors employ a wide range of strategies to make patients take the remedies prescribed. Yet while metaphors such as "mind food" may succeed in getting patients to accept the prescriptions, they also obscure a critical awareness of drug effects. This rare ethnography of pharmaceuticals will be of key interest to those in the anthropology and sociology of medicine, pharmacology, mental health, bioethics, global health, and South Asian studies.Stefan Ecks is Director of the Medical Anthropology Program and Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

The Palace of Culture and Science is a massive Stalinist skyscraper that was "gifted" to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. Framing the Palace's visual, symbolic, and functional prominence in the everyday life of the Polish capital as a sort of obsession, locals joke that their city suffers from a "Palace of Culture complex." Despite attempts to privatize it, the Palace remains municipally owned, and continues to play host to a variety of public institutions and services. The Parade Square, which surrounds the building, has resisted attempts to convert it into a money-making commercial center. Author Michal Murawski traces the skyscraper's powerful impact on 21st century Warsaw; on its architectural and urban landscape; on its political, ideological, and cultural lives; and on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The Palace Complex explores the many factors that allow Warsaw's Palace to endure as a still-socialist building in a post-socialist city.

White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The book explores how fourteen philosophers, seven white and seven black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization. Combined, the contributions demonstrate different and similar conceptual trajectories of raced identities that emerge from within and across the racial divide. Each of the fourteen philosophers, who share a textual space of exploration, name blackness/whiteness, revealing significant political, cultural, and existential aspects of what it means to be black/white. Through the power of naming and theorizing whiteness and blackness, White on White/Black on Black dares to bring clarity and complexity to our understanding of race identity.

Our purpose in assembling the papers in this collection is to introduce readers to studies of normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture. We want to offer a sense o/what psychiatrists and social scientists are doing to advance our under standing of this subject, including what fmdings are being made, what questions researched, what conundrums worried over. Since our fund of knowledge is obviously incomplete, we want our readers to be aware of the limits to what we know and to our acquisition of new knowledge. Although the subject is too vast and uncharted to support a comprehensive synthesis, in a few areas - e. g., psychiatric epidemiology - enough is known for us to be able to present major reviews. The chapters themselves cover a variety of themes that we regard as both intrinsically interesting and deserving of more systematic evaluation. Many of the issues they address we believe to be valid concerns for comparative cross cultural studies. No attempt is made to artificially integrate these chapters, since the editors wish to highlight their distinctive interpretive frameworks as evidence of the rich variety of approaches that scholars take to this subject. 'We see this volume as a modest and self-consciously limited exploration. Here are some accounts and interpretations (but by no means all) of normal and ab normal behavior in the context of Chinese culture that we believe fashion a more discriminating understanding of at least a few important aspects of that subject."

Estimation of the Time Since Death is a current comprehensive work on the methods and research advances into the time since death and human decomposition. This work provides practitioners a starting point for research and practice to assist with the identification and analysis of human remains. It contains a collection of the latest scientific research, various estimation methods, and includes case studies, to highlight methodological application to real cases. This reference first provides an introduction, including the early postmortem period, biochemical methods, and the value of entomology in estimating the time since death, along with other factors affecting the decomposition process. Further coverage explores importance of microbial communities in estimating time since death. Separate chapters on aquatic environments, carbon 14 dating and amino acid racemization, and total body scoring will round out the reference. The final chapter ties together the various themes in the context of the longest running human decomposition facility in the world and outlines future research directions.

Through the voices of women activists in the welfare rights movement across the United States, The Price of Progressive Politics exposes the contemporary reality of welfare rights politics, revealing how the language of colorblind racism undermines this multiracial movement. Through in-depth interviews with activists in eight organizations across the United States, Rose Ernst presents an intersectional analysis of how these activists understand the complexities of race, class and gender and how such understandings have affected their approach to their grassroots work. Engaging and accessible, The Price of Progressive Politics offers a refreshing examination of how those working for change grapple with shifting racial dynamics in the United States, arguing that organizations that fail to develop a consciousness that reflects the reality of multiple marginalized identities ultimately reproduce the societal dynamics they seek to change.

At the turn of the century, America is both retrenching and expanding, becoming more restrictive and more expansive, more utilitarian and, more value- and religion-oriented. As was true a century ago, the flow of these changes is very much a story of immigrants, their lives in America, and the changing lives of those they join. This book examines the interaction of immigrants and the native-born in nine widely varying locales, including Richmond, VA, St. Louis, West Palm Beach, FL, Tacoma, WA, Garden City, KS, Dallas, Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City.

The volume considers a broad range of immigrants from well-educated and economically successful Chinese and Indians, to legally recognized refugees, who often have more difficulty accommodating to U.S. society, to illegal immigrants, who are being Americanized to a shadow world of limited opportunity and limited protection. Through insight into the interactions between immigrants and native-born at the local level, the authors collectively sketch an America that is changing but also re-creating its past.

"Multiculturalism and Citizenship" investigates the European dimension of multiculturalism and immigration. This book argues that the political theory discourse of multiculturalism and resulting policies in this area assume an interpretation of liberalism that has developed from the American experience, rather than the European, and that this issue must be addressed. Much of the theoretical debate up to now understates the normative power of majority/state nationality, and overlooks the diverse societal and political contexts that may condition multicultural debates in different countries. Most seriously, such debate misses out the central feature of the multicultural challenge in Western Europe today: the assertion of religious-communal, especially Muslim, identities in polities whose self image is secular. This book argues, therefore, that a European theory must focus on different normative and political dilemmas than a North American one and must interrogate the claims for and against secularism.
"Multiculturalism and Citizenship" is truly interdisciplinary in scope (combining sociological, political science and discourse analytical themes) and thus presents a fresh and unique perspective on multiculturalism and citizenship in Western Europe today. It offers a comparative and coherent series of national case studies by a diverse range of leading scholars in the field, which provide a theoretical framework for the volume as a whole.
This is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, researchers and policy makers interested in immigration, multiculturalism, European integration, Islamic studies and ethnicities.

Dental Wear in Evolutionary and Biocultural Contexts provides a single source for disseminating the current state-of-the-art research regarding dental wear across a variety of hominoid species under a number of temporal and spatial contexts. The volume begins with a brief introductory chapter addressing the general history, understandings and approaches to the study of dental wear. Remaining chapters cover dental macrowear and dental microwear. Students and professionals in anthropology, specifically paleoanthropologists, bioarcheologists, archaeologists, and primatologists will find this book to be a valuable resource. In addition, it is a helpful guide for dentists and other dental professionals interested in dental function.

Can the way a word is used give legitimacy to a political movement? Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy traces the use of the word "femminicidio" (or "femicide") as a tool to mobilize Italian feminists, particularly the Union of Women in Italy (UDI). Based on nearly two years of fieldwork among feminist activists, Giovanna Parmigiani takes a broad look at the many ways in which violence inflects the lives of women in Italy. From unchallenged gendered grammar rules to the representation of women as victims, Parmigiani examines the devaluing of women's contribution to their communities through the words and experiences of the women she interviews. She describes the first uses of the word "femminicidio" as a political term used by and within feminist circles and traces its spread to ultimate legitimization and national relevance. The word redefined women as a political subject by building an imagined community of potentially violated women. In doing so, it challenged Italians to consider the status of women in Italian society, and to make this status a matter of public debate. It also problematized the connection between women and tropes of women as objects of suffering and victimhood. Parmigiani considers this exchange within the context of Italian Catholic heritage, a precarious economy, and long-held notions of honor and shame. Parmigiani provides a careful and searing consideration of the ways in which representations of violence and the politics of this representation are shaping the future of women in Italy and beyond.

This book introduces Proto-Indo-European, describes how it was reconstructed from its descendant languages, and shows what it reveals about the people who spoke it between 5,500 and 8,000 years ago. Using related evidence from archaeology and natural history the authors explore the lives,
thoughts, passions, culture, society, economy, history, and environment of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. They include chapters on fauna, flora, family and kinship, clothing and textiles, food and drink, space and time, emotions, mythology, and religion, and describe the quest to discover the
Proto-Indo-European homeland.

In this book, a team of leading scholars in the fields of Medieval Literature and History explore the origins of European ethnic groups which subsequently developed into the nations of Modern Europe. Evidence for the existence of ethnic consciousness, which was later to form the basis of nation states, is examined for leading European peoples. The reconstruction and invention of the past by medieval writers in search of ethnic origins for their own particular political or tribal groups is also studied from a literary and historical point of view. For many historians, nationalism is seen as a nineteenth-century invention. The contributors in this book show that ethnic awareness and national identities for all the leading states of Europe have their origins firmly embedded in the medieval past. The book covers the British Isles as well as Continental Europe, for strong national divisions have survived within Britain to the present day in spite of its location for several centuries at the heart of the British Empire.

Globalisation and migration have created a vibrant yet dysphoric world fraught with different, and sometimes competing, practices and discourses. The emergent properties of the modern world inevitably complicate the being, doing, and thinking of Chinese diasporic populations living in predominantly white, English-speaking societies. This raises questions of what 'Chineseness' is. The gradual transfer of power from the West to the East shuffles the relative cultural weights within these societies. How do the global power shifts and local cultural vibrancies come to shape the social dispositions and positions of the Chinese diaspora, and how does the Chinese diaspora respond to these changes? How does primary pedagogic work through family upbringing and secondary pedagogic work through educational socialisation complicate, obfuscate, and enrich Chineseness? Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology on relative and relational sociocultural positions, Mu and Pang assess how historical, contemporary, and ongoing changes across social spaces of family, school, and community come to shape the intergenerational educational, cultural, and social reproduction of Chinese diasporic populations. The two authors engage in an in-depth analysis of the identity work, educational socialisation, and resilience building of young Chinese Australians and Chinese Canadians in the ever-changing lived world. The authors look particularly at the tensions and dynamics around the participants' life and educational choices; the meaning making out of their Chinese bodies in relation to gender, race, and language; and the sociological process of resilience that enculturates them into a system of dispositions and positions required to bounce back from structural constraints.

The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"-an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers-is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity. Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers-recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children-could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"-with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations-is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.

It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work on race in America. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of this dilemma by viewing the issues of race as they are now, not as they were a generation or so ago.

A 120-page paperback book that describes the French-Acadian, or Cajun, people with the accuracy and dignity to which they are entitled contrary to the shallow, stereotyping manner in which they have been depicted by many of the news media. This controversial book sets the record straight about the Cajun people and their culture. Illustrated with maps and photos.

The past few years have seen a revolution in our ability to map whole genome DNA from ancient humans. With the ancient DNA revolution, combined with rapid genome mapping of present human populations, has come remarkable insights into our past. This important new data has clarified and added to our knowledge from archaeology and anthropology, helped resolve long-existing controversies, challenged long-held views, and thrown up some remarkable surprises. The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations existing today are mixes of ancient ones, as well as in many cases carrying a genetic component from Neanderthals, and, in some populations, Denisovans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what the genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial 'purity', or even deep and ancient divides between peoples. Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should celebrate our rich diversity, and recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA. What will we discover next?

Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe examines the cultural aspects of food and eating among the Southern Bantu, taking as its starting point the bold statement 'nutrition as a biological process is more fundamental than sex'. When it was first published in 1932, with a preface by Malinowski, it laid the groundwork for sociological theory of nutrition. Richards was also among the first anthropologists to establish women's lives and the social sphere as legitimate subjects for anthropological study.

Originally published as Negotiating Language, Constructing Race, 1998, in the series titled Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 79, sociologist Nirmala Srirekam PuruShotam discusses language as a social phenomenon, focusing specifically on the configuration of nation in Singapore. Annotat

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

The term "Caucasian" is a curious invention of the modern age. Originating in 1795, the word identifies both the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains region as well as those thought to be "Caucasian." Bruce Baum explores the history of the term and the category of the "Caucasian race" more broadly in the light of the changing politics of racial theory and notions of racial identity. With a comprehensive sweep that encompasses the understanding of "race" even before the use of the term "Caucasian," Baum traces the major trends in scientific and intellectual understandings of "race" from the Middle Ages to the present day.

Baum's conclusions make an unprecedented attempt to separate modern science and politics from a long history of racial classification. He offers significant insights into our understanding of race and how the "Caucasian race" has been authoritatively invented, embraced, displaced, and recovered throughout our history.

"Peking Man," a cave man once thought a great hunter who had first tamed fire, was actually a composite of the gnawed remains of some fifty women, children, and men unfortunate enough to have been the prey of the giant cave hyena. Researching the famous fossil site of Dragon Bone Hill in China, scientists Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon retell the story of the cave's unique species of early human, Homo erectus. Boaz and Ciochon take readers on a gripping scientific odyssey. New evidence shows that Homo erectus was an opportunist who rode a tide of environmental change out Africa and into Eurasia, puddle-jumping from one gene pool to the next. Armed with a shaky hold on fire and some sharp rocks, Homo erectus incredibly survived for over 1.5 million years, much longer than our own species Homo sapiens has been on Earth. Tell-tale marks on fossil bones show that the lives of these early humans were brutal, ruled by hunger and who could strike the hardest blow, yet there are fleeting glimpses of human compassion as well. The small brain of Homo erectus and its strangely unchanging culture indicate that the species could not talk. Part of that primitive culture included ritualized aggression, to which the extremely thick skulls of Homo erectus bear mute witness. Both a vivid recreation of the unimagined way of life of a prehistoric species, so similar yet so unlike us, and a fascinating exposition of how modern multidisciplinary research can test hypotheses in human evolution, Dragon Bone Hill is science writing at its best.

Yanagita Kunio (1872-1962) is widely known as the founder of folklore studies in Japan, and his achievement in presenting a systematic framework for the discipline is highly valued amongst academic writings. However, many of his ideas still need to be examined, and in recent years there has been a renewal of interest in his works, especially among scholars of intellectual history. This re-evaluation of his achievements is generally attributable to the current view that Yanagita retained an independent position as an intellectual struggling to solve the various problems that dominated Japan in the years of great change from Meiji and Taisho to Showa. First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Each family has its secrets, ones that shape family communication and relationships in a way generally unknown to the outsider and often the family itself. Autoethnographers, students of these relationships, confront many silences in their attempts to understand these social worlds. Now issued as a Routledge Education Classic Edition, Accidental Ethnography delves into this shadowy world of pain and loss in the hopes of finding productive, ethical avenues for transforming the secret lives of families into powerful narratives of hope. It merges autoethnographic method with the therapeutic power of storytelling to heal family wounds. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in the field of qualitative research and on his own research journey since the publication of the original edition.