In this timely and well-argued book, author Philip Nicholson offers a provocative explanation of the force and place of race in modern history, showing that race and nation have a linked history. Using the deliberately ironic metaphor of the double helix, the author shows the close historical connection of race and nation as each interrelates with the other in shaping and carrying social and institutional practices over many centuries.

Five themes recur throughout the work: modernity is built on the twin pillars of race and nation;

national instability, rivalry, and imperial conquest -- outside of dynastic, religious, or feudal disputes -- evoke differential (i.e., racial) human social categories, loyalties, and mythologies;

racial vilification emerges out of material and cultural expropriation;

racial degradation is typically the inverse projection of dominant national normative values, beliefs, or ideals; and

race and nation share in the twists and turns of modern history and are inseparably linked and interdependent.

Developed as a question-and-answer field research report into the status of Buraku people in Japan today, this text also looks at the wider issues of prejudice as found within Japanese society, from old people to women, ethnicity and nationality.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of separatist sentiments among national minorities in many industrial societies, including the United Kingdom. In 1997, the Scottish and Welsh both set up their own parliamentary bodies, while the tragic events in Northern Ireland continued to be a reminder of the Irish problem. These phenomena call into question widely accepted social theories which assume that ethnic attachments in a society will wane as industrialization proceeds. This book presents the social basis of ethnic identity, and examines changes in the strength of ethnic solidarity in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to its value as a case study, the work also has important comparative implications, for it suggests that internal colonialism of the kind experienced in the British Isles has its analogues in the histories of other industrial societies. Hechter examines the unexpected persistence of ethnicity in the politics of industrial societies by focusing on the British Isles. Why do many of the inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland continue to maintain an ethnic identity opposed to England? Hechter explains the salience of ethnic identity by analyzing the relationships between England, the national core, and its periphery, the Celtic fringe, in the light of two alternative models of core-periphery relations in the industrial setting. These are a "diffusion" model, which predicts that intergroup contact leads to ethnic homogenization, and an "internal colonial" model, in which such contact heightens distinctive ethnic identification. His findings lend support to the internal colonial model, and show that, although industrialization did contribute to a decline in interregional linguistic differences, it resulted neither in the cultural assimilation of Celtic lands, nor in the development of regional economic equality. The study concludes that ethnic solidarity will inevitably emerge among groups which are relegated to inferior positions in a cultural division of labor. This is an important contribution to the understanding of socioeconomic development and ethnicity.

When the golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a "Caublinasian," affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created in a world still perceived in terms of "black" and "white." This book is about ordinary lives facing similar dilemmas of racial identity, of belonging and not belonging. It tells the stories of six women of mixed African/ African Caribbean and white European heritage to show how the often painful experience of being a stranger in two cultures can be named and celebrated. Jayne Ifekwunigwe explores the cultural and historical roots of the popular discourses of race. She analyzes the problem of theorizing mixed racial and/or cultural identity in a global context, always relating it to the real-life experiences of these women.

Whether initiating girls or healing cattle, bringing rain or protesting taxation, many in Africa share a vision of a world where the cultural, symbolic and cosmic categories of "male" and "female" serve, through ritual, to both re-image and transform the world. This book introduces recent gender theory to the analysis of African ethnography, exp loring the ways in which ideational gender categories permeate African systems of thought and ritual practices.;Thus, the book provides a framework with which to evaluate previous ethnographic material on Africa. In addition, it presents a broad range of new case studies - of hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists and pastoralists - revealing the varied and complex ways in which African ideas and ideals of what it means to be "male" and "female" broadly inform and give meaning to a wide range of transformative rituals.

Multicultural States challenges the national frames of reference of the debates which surround questions of ethnicity, race and cultural difference by investigating contemporary theories, policies and practices of cultural pluralism across eight countries with historical links in British colonialism: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Ireland and Britain.
Written as history, theory, autobiography and political polemic, Multicultural States combines general theoretical discussions of the principles of cultural pluralism, nationalism, and minority identities with informative studies of specific local histories and political conflicts.

We live in a world surrounded by remarkable cultural achievements of human kind. Almost every day we hear of new innovations in technology, in medicine and in the arts which remind us that humans are capable of remarkable creativity. But what is human creativity? The modern world provides a tiny fraction of cultural diversity and the evidence for human creativity, far more can be seen by looking back into prehistory. The book examines how our understanding of human creativity can be extended by exploring this phenomenon during human evolution and prehistory. The book offers unique perspectives on the nature of human creativity from archaeologists who are concerned with long term patterns of cultural change and have access to quite different types of human behaviour than that which exists today. It asks whether humans are the only creative species, or whether our extinct relatives such as Homo habilis and the Neanderthals also displayed creative thinking. It explores what we can learn about the nature of human creativity from cultural developments during prehistory, such as changes in the manner in which the dead were buried, monuments constructed, and the natural world exploited. In doing so, new light is thrown on these cultural developments and the behaviour of our prehistoric ancestors. By examining the nature of creativity during human evolution and prehistory these archaeologists, supported by contributions from psychology, computer science and social anthropology, show that human creativity is a far more diverse and complex phenomena than simply flashes of genius by isolated individuals. Indeed they show that unless perspectives from prehistory are taken into account, our understanding of human creativity will be limited and incomplete.

This book recreates the lost world of the hominid species that lived and flourished for around one million years before, and in some cases after, the evolution of modern humans some 200,000 years ago. It also investigates how, when, where and why the modern human species appeared and in due course became dominant. These are the subjects of as much heated controversy among as they are of considerable interest to anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists and numerous others.Making use of a wide range of evidence the book considers issues in evolutionary archaeology such as how far can the early australopithecines, parathropines, Homo erectus, and the neanderthals be seen as populations on the way to being human, or as distinct, unique species? How far can these species be said to have cultural characteristics and what can be said of their social organization, group structures and adaptive strategies? How do these compare with ape communities then and now, and with those of the earliest modern humans? And do those behavioural comparisons provide a key to hominid evolution? Answering these questions leads the author not only toward a rational account of modern human origins, but toward an explanation of the origins and evolutionary role of cognition, communication and language - of the knowledge that gives our species its name.Written in non-technical language, Humans Before Humanity may be expected to have a significant scientific impact and to be of very wide interest indeed.The paperback edition contains a guide to further reading by chapter, which also outlines current developments in the field.

Detours of Decolonization examines three seemingly disparate and high profile events in postcolonial India that captured nation and transnational/diasporic interest since the 1990s: the emergence of the Indian homosexual, the new trans/national heterosexual woman, lesbian suicides, marriage and kinship contracts in small towns around India and the simultaneous evolution of the modern homophobia and lesbian NGOs. These events demonstrate the material, political, and cultural contexts within which postcolonial subjects negotiate their lived experiences within moments of decolonization and recolonization.

Violent conflicts rooted in ethnicity have erupted all over the world. Since the Cold War ended and a new world order has failed to emerge, political leaders in countries long repressed by authoritarianism, such as Yugoslavia, have found it easy to mobilize populations with the ethnic rallying cry. Thus, the worldwide shift to democratization has often resulted in something quite different from effective pluralism.
This volume of essays assembles a diverse array of approaches to the problems of ethnic conflict, with researchers and scholars using pure theory, comparative case studies, and aggregate data analysis to approach the complex questions facing today's leaders. How do we keep communal conflicts from deteriorating into sustained violence? What models can we follow to promote peaceful secession? What effect does--or should--ethnic conflict have on foreign policy?

When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a "Caublinasian", affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created. This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms 'Black' or 'White'.
This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

This text challenges the national frames of reference of the debates which surround questions of ethnicity, race and cultural difference by investigating contemporary theories, policies and practices of cultural pluralism across eight countries with historical links in British colonialism: the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Ireland and Britain. Written as history, theory, autobiography and political polemic, the book combines general theoretical discussions of the principles of cultural pluralism, nationalism, and minority identities with informative studies of specific local histories and political conflicts. Seeking to identify common problems and precepts in the postcolonial era, the contributors discuss such issues as political versus cultural constructions of nationhood in the USA and Australia; communalism and colonialism in India; Irish sectarianism and identity politics; ethnic nationalism in post-apartheid South Africa; British multiculturalism as a "heritage" industry; multicultural law and education in Canada and New Zealand; and refugees, migrancy and identity in a global cultural economy.

Focusing on the daily concerns and routine events of people in the past, Investigating the Ordinary argues for a paradigm shift in the way southeastern archaeologists operate. Instead of dividing archaeological work by time periods or artifact types, the essays in this volume unite separate areas of research through the theme of the everyday. Ordinary activities studied here range from flint-knapping to ceremonial crafting, from subsistence to social gatherings, and from the Paleoindian period to the nineteenth century. Contributors demonstrate that attention to everyday life can help researchers avoid overemphasizing data and jargon and instead discover connections between the people of different eras. This approach will also inspire archaeologists with ways to engage the public with their work and with the deep history of the southeastern United States.

In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, race relations are surrounded with taboos defined by the politically correct concepts of what Ray Honeyford calls the race relations lobby. This lobby, championed by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has a vested interest in depicting the United Kingdom as a society rotten with endemic racism, and its ethnic minorities as victims doomed to failure. An outgrowth of the Race Relations Act of 1976, the Commission was founded in response to worthy concerns about race and patterned after its American prototype, the Congress of Racial Equality. Its constant demands for increased powers have only increased with the coming into power of the New Labour Party. That makes Ray Honeyford's critique all the more urgent. Honeyford exposes the policies and practices of the Commission to public view, encouraging informed debate about its need to exist. The CRE possesses considerable legal powers-powers which seriously undermine the great freedoms of association, contract, and speech as-sociated with the United Kingdom. Without denying the presence of racial prejudice, Honeyford shows that the picture of the United Kingdom as a divisive nation is a serious misrepresentation. Placing the CRE in its historical and political context, Honeyford outlines its powers, and analyzes its formal investigations in the fields of education, employment, and housing. He also examines its publicity machine and its effect on public and educational libraries. He points out the danger of uncritically replicating the American experience. According to Honeyford, Americans have replaced a melting-pot notion of society, with all citizens loyal to a national ideal, with a "tossed-salad" concept which encourages the creation of self-conscious, separate, and aggressive ethnic groups, each claiming special access to the public purse, and having little regard for national cohesion and individual liberties.

This book explores the development of hybrid corn, the history of eugenics, human genetics, the nature-nurture debate, the origins of the Marxian concept of proletarian science, the shift in the meaning of "fitness" in evolutionary theory, the practice of normal science in Nazi Germany, and the making and selling of science textbooks. While the topics are diverse, a common theme unites them -- each explores links between biological science, social power, and public policy.

Racial identity theories have been in the psychological literature for nearly thirty years. Unlike most references to racial identity, however, Thompson and Carter demonstrate the value of integrating "RACE" and "IDENTITY" as systematic components of human functioning. The editors and their contributors show how the infusion of racial identity theory with other psychological models can successfully yield more holistic considerations of client functioning and well-being. Fully respecting the mutual influence of personal and environmental factors to explanations of individual and group functioning, they apply complex theoretical notions to real-life cases in psychological practice.
These authors contend that race is a pervasive and formidable force in society that affects the development and functioning of individuals and groups. In a recursive fashion, individuals and groups influence and, indeed, nurture the notion of race and societal racism. Arguing that mental health practitioners are in key, influential positions to pierce this cycle, the authors provide evidence of how meaningful change can occur when racial identity theory is integrated into interventions that attempt to diminish the distress people experience in their lives. The interventions illustrated in this volume are applied in various contexts, including psychotherapy and counseling, supervision, family therapy, support groups, and organizational and institutional environments.
This book can serve the needs and interests of advanced-level students and professionals in all mental health fields, as well as researchers and scholars in such disciplines as organizational management and forensic psychology. It can also be of value to anyone interested in the systematic implementation of strategies to overcome problems of race.

Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the [previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more. As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author. The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

This work offers a study of the second largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan: the Hazaras. Largely Shi'ia by religion and Farsi-speaking, they traditionally inhabited Central Afghanistan, although were scattered across the country and into neighbouring countries as a result of the war. The Hazaras have recently become into a more influential position within the country's social fabric because its tribally-based pyramidal structure has been disrupted. As well as studying this group, this book also confronts the subject of an Afghan sense of national identity, a concept crucial to the resolution of Afghanistan's crises.

The rise of new religious movements has raised important questions about our understanding of race, ethnicity and the lives of Black minority communities in the West. This revealing study examines the ideas and organization of new Islamic, Hindu and other movements, such as those revived in fight-wing black nationalism. It considers the creation of new "traditions" and new ethnicities in these movements and explores how ideas of purity, pollution, the body, sexuality, and gender are key themes in their "liberation". This book considers the relationship between right-wing and progressive social movements, and examines the influence on these movements of new globally organized communications technologies.

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human-from our technological skills and sociality to our thirst for exploration. DeSilva uses early human evolution to explain the instinct that propels a crawling infant to toddle onto two feet, differences between how men and women tend to walk, physical costs of upright walking, including hernias, varicose veins and backache, and the challenges of childbirth imposed by a bipedal pelvis. And he theorises that upright walking may have laid the foundation for the traits of compassion, empathy and altruism that characterise our species today and helped us become the dominant species on this planet.

Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more.
As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author.
The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.

Ethnic and Racial Consciousness is a completely revised version of the highly acclaimed first edition published in 1988. At that time no one expected the former Yugoslavia would break up with the brutal slaughter of neighbour by neighbour. Few would have predicted the horrific massacres in Rwanda and Burundi which have led to accusations of genocide. The ending of the cold war has been followed by struggles in the former Soviet Union in which one group has struggled for dominance and the other for independence. Ethnic conflict is now one of the main threats to peace in the contemporary world. This new edition offers an up-to-date introduction to the many issues surrounding our definition and understanding of ethnic and racial difference, racism and discrimination in general.

Racial identity theories have been in the psychological literature for nearly thirty years. Unlike most references to racial identity, however, Thompson and Carter demonstrate the value of integrating "RACE" and "IDENTITY" as systematic components of human functioning. The editors and their contributors show how the infusion of racial identity theory with other psychological models can successfully yield more holistic considerations of client functioning and well-being. Fully respecting the mutual influence of personal and environmental factors to explanations of individual and group functioning, they apply complex theoretical notions to real-life cases in psychological practice.
These authors contend that race is a pervasive and formidable force in society that affects the development and functioning of individuals and groups. In a recursive fashion, individuals and groups influence and, indeed, nurture the notion of race and societal racism. Arguing that mental health practitioners are in key, influential positions to pierce this cycle, the authors provide evidence of how meaningful change can occur when racial identity theory is integrated into interventions that attempt to diminish the distress people experience in their lives. The interventions illustrated in this volume are applied in various contexts, including psychotherapy and counseling, supervision, family therapy, support groups, and organizational and institutional environments.
This book can serve the needs and interests of advanced-level students and professionals in all mental health fields, as well as researchers and scholars in such disciplines as organizational management and forensic psychology. It can also be of value to anyone interested in the systematic implementation of strategies to overcome problems of race.

This volume is a study of the loss and reconstruction of collective and personal identities in ethnic migrant communities. Focusing on the Bosnian and Croatian communities in Western Australia, Dona Kolar-Panov documents the social and cultural changes that affected these diasporic groups on the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. She describes the migrant audience's daily emcounter with the media images of destruction and atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, and charts the implications the continuous viewing of the real and excessive violence had on the awakening of their ethno-national consciousness. The author presents an insight into how migrant cultures are shaped and changed through the reception and assimilation of images seen on video and television screens. Using the combination of close and semiotic analysis of videotexts with an informed account of social, political and historical contexts, the author recalls the complex relationships between ethnicity, technology and the reconstruction of identity.

The novelist Joseph Conrad expressed a great truth when he said: "The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future," Our evolutionary history of noble acts and foul deeds, leading to survival and reproduction, guarantees that we understand the most essential facets of our physical and social environment. The nature of our struggles--our lusts, our fears, our objectivity, our irra-tionality--lies embedded in our cellular DNA and the neurons of our mind, there to play itself out much like it did in the past and much like it will in the future. Many have seen the links between our minds and the universe, the common thread of our existence and the inevitability of our loves and hates. This book includes many demonstrations that our nature has been on the minds and lips of many--poets, play-wrights, philosophers, historians, novelists, kings, slaves, religious leaders, and the great-est of knaves. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Arthur Schopenhauer, from Aldous Huxley to Arthur Conan Doyle, from Aristotle to William Shakespeare, the truths about our-selves have come tumbling out. Reflecting on their thoughts we see ourselves. The universal nature of our being reflects our common origins and our bittersweet destiny. In A Sociobiology Compendium, Del Thiessen mines the richness of biological inves-tigations of human behavior, comparing current views of human behavior with expres-sions by non-scientists who have, in one way or another, touched the evolutionary strings of men and women. He begins each section with a brief account of biological notions of human behavior. The book shows in astonishing ways how the earlier thoughts of men and women from all cultures anticipate the biological observations about our being. A Sociobiology Compendium will be engaging reading for all psychologists, sociologists, and biologists.