How were early stone tools made, and what can they tell us about the development of human cognition? This question lies at the basis of archaeological research on human origins and evolution, and the present volume fulfils a growing need among advanced students and researchers working in this field. The individual chapters by a range of leading international scholars approach stone knapping from a multidisciplinary perspective that embraces psychology, physiology, behavioural biology and primatology as well as archaeology. The skills and behaviour of humans and their primate relatives are key parts of the enquiry. The result is a better understanding of early human engagement with the material world and the complex actions required for the creation of stone tools. The book contains many illustrations and is extensively referenced, and provides a landmark contribution in this field.

"A Companion to African-American Studies" is an exciting and comprehensive re-appraisal of the history and future of African American studies.
Contains original essays by expert contributors in the field of African-American Studies
Creates a groundbreaking re-appraisal of the history and future of the field
Includes a series of reflections from those who established African American Studies as a bona fide academic discipline
Captures the dynamic interaction of African American Studies with other fields of inquiry.

Attempting to cut a path between the usual alternatives of social constructionist and naturalist approaches to the body, this collection turns to both the biological and the social sciences as a starting point for an adequate critique of the body. moving. The volume then blends seminal essays with new and original pieces to offer a cultural analysis and more. 40 photos. 10 figures.

As portals to the supernatural realm that creates and animates the universe, caves have always been held sacred by the peoples of Mesoamerica. From ancient times to the present, Mesoamericans have made pilgrimages to caves for ceremonies ranging from rituals of passage to petitions for rain and a plentiful harvest. So important were caves to the pre-Hispanic peoples that they are mentioned in Maya hieroglyphic writing and portrayed in the Central Mexican and Oaxacan pictorial codices. Many ancient settlements were located in proximity to caves. This volume gathers papers from twenty prominent Mesoamerican archaeologists, linguists, and ethnographers to present a state-of-the-art survey of ritual cave use in Mesoamerica from Pre-Columbian times to the present. Organized geographically, the book examines cave use in Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya region. Some reports present detailed site studies, while others offer new theoretical understandings of cave rituals. As a whole, the collection validates cave study as the cutting edge of scientific investigation of indigenous ritual and belief. It confirms that the indigenous religious system of Mesoamerica was and still is much more terrestrially focused that has been generally appreciated.

This introductory text provides students for the first time with an historical and international analysis of the development of anti-racism. Drawing on sources from around the world, the author explains the roots and describes the practice of anti-racism in Western and non-Western societies from Britain and the United States to Malaysia and Peru.

Topics covered include:

* the historical roots of anti-racism
* race issues within organisations
* the practice of anti-racism
* the politics of backlash.

This lively, concise book will be an indispensable resource for all students interested in issues of race, ethnicity and in contemporary society more generally.

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart's own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system-whether it's called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism-to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history-one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life-Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

** WINNER OF THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE 2021 ** 'Beautiful, evocative, authoritative.' Professor Brian Cox 'Important reading not just for anyone interested in these ancient cousins of ours, but also for anyone interested in humanity.' Yuval Noah Harari Kindred is the definitive guide to the Neanderthals. Since their discovery more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals have metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. Rebecca Wragg Sykes uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Palaeolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Much of what defines us was also in Neanderthals, and their DNA is still inside us. Planning, co-operation, altruism, craftsmanship, aesthetic sense, imagination, perhaps even a desire for transcendence beyond mortality. Kindred does for Neanderthals what Sapiens did for us, revealing a deeper, more nuanced story where humanity itself is our ancient, shared inheritance.

Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory is a unique collection that integrates two increasingly key areas of social and cultural research: the body and ethnography. * Breaks new ground in an area of study that continues to be a central theme of debate and research across the humanities and social sciences* Draws on ethnography as a useful means of exploring our everyday social and cultural environments* Constitutes an important step in developing two key areas of study, the body and ethnography, and the relationship between them* Brings together an international and multi--disciplinary team of scholars

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, "Muslim Cool." Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim-displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the 'hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between "Black" and "Muslim." Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are "foreign" to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested-critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Political anthropology has long been among the most vibrant subdisciplines within anthropology, and work done in this area has been instrumental in exploring some of the most significant issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including (post)colonialism, development and underdevelopment, identity politics, nationalism/transnationalism, and political violence. In"The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique "readers will find a remarkable collection of classic and contemporary articles on the subject.

Following on from her landmark book on politics and anthropology, in this volume Joan Vincent provides a sweeping historical and theoretical introduction to the field. Selected readings from figures such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Edmund Leach, Victor Turner, Eric Wolf, Benedict Anderson, Talal Asad, Michael Taussig, Jean and John Comaroff, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak are enriched by Vincent's headnotes and suggestions for further reading. "The Anthropology of Politics "will prove an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and instructors alike.

This authoritative and innovative reader collects twenty-seven articles that are essential for a thorough, comparative, and theoretically-informed approach to the study of race and ethnicity. The international coverage includes the US, UK, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa, with a focus on contemporary problems and emerging theoretical issues. Topics include ethnic conflict, migration, citizenship, identity, genocide, transnationalism, and ethnic justice. An introductory essay gives an account of race and ethnicity in contemporary society.

The contributors are leading theorists and empirical researchers from around the world. This outstanding collection provides a much-needed international perspective on the current trends, the theoretical base, and the future of racial and ethnic studies.

Racist Culture offers an anti-essentialist and non-reductionist account of racialized discourse and racist expression. Goldberg demonstrates that racial thinking is a function of the transforming categories and conceptions of social subjectivity throughout modernity. He shows that rascisms are often not aberrant or irrational but consistent with prevailing social conceptions, particularly of the reasonable and the normal.

He shows too how this process is being extended and renewed by categories dominant in present day social sciences: "the West"; "the underclass"; and "the primitive". This normalization of racism reflected in the West mirrors South Africa an its use and conception of space.

Goldberg concludes with an extended argument for a pragmatic, antiracist practice.

The research presented in this volume analyzes the impact of ethnic change and religious traditions on local, national, and regional identities. Case studies include the Bru population in Laos/Vietnam, hill tribe populations without citizenship in northern Thailand, the Lua also in northern Thailand, the Pakistani community in Penang, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Leke religious movement in Thailand/Myanmar, political Islam in Indonesia, Sufi Muslims in Thailand, pluralism in Penang, the Preah Vihear dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, and hero cult worship in Lan Na. Historians and social anthropologists variously tackle these issues of identity and integration within the kaleidoscope of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures that make up Southeast Asia.

Consideration of the body as a subject for study has increased in recent years with new technologies, forms of modification, debates about obesity and issues of age being brought into focus by the media. Drawing on contemporary culture, Body Studies: The Basics introduces readers to the key concerns and debates surrounding the study of the sociological body, cutting across disciplines to cover topics which include:

• Nature vs. Culture: how we build and transform our bodies
• Conformity and resistance in bodily practice
• Issues of body image beauty, diet, exercise and age
• Sporting bodies and the pursuit of ideals
• Enfreakment, disability and monstrosity
• Cyborgs and virtual online bodies

With further reading signposted throughout, this accessible book is essential reading for anyone studying the body through the lens of sociology, cultural studies, sports studies, media studies and gender studies; and all those with an interest in how the physical body can be a social construct."

Written by one of America's leading philosophers, "Race and Social Justice" provides a powerful analysis of the enduring problems of race and social justice in American life. McGary examines African American alienation and exploitations, black reparations, collective responsibility, affirmative action, race and I. Q., police discretion, racial integration and racial separatism, the underclass question, and the logic of interracial coalitions. The volume is marked by its interdisciplinary approach, depending on work in African American history and literature as well as recent work by legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists who have wrestled with race and racism.

African American philosophers have challenged the position that the African American experience cannot serve as a source of philosophical illumination. Philosophers like Anthony Appiah, Bernard Boxill, Bill Lawson, Michele Moody-Adams, Adrian Piper, and Laurence Thomas have employed traditional analytical methods in their examinations, while others like Leonard Harris, Lewis Gordon, Frank Kirkland, Lucius Outlaw, Cornel West, and Naomi Zack have embraced methodologies that are more characteristic of the Continental and Post Modern methodologies. These authors, each in their own way, have started a dialoge that has now worked its way into the pages of academic journals and onto the programs of philosophy conferences and meetings." Race and Social Justice" joins and extends these discussions, providing essential reading for anyone with an interest in this field of debate and study.

This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. It walks readers through a New York Puerto Rican Community and describes the five varieties of Spanish and English that constitute the community's bilingual and multi-dialectal repertoire, the four major communication patterns that predominate in the homes of twenty families with children, and the syntactic features and discourse strategies of so-called "Spanglish."

Ever since Darwin and The Descent of Man , the existence of humans has been attributed to our intelligence and adaptability. But in Catching Fire , renowned primatologist Richard Wrangham presents a startling alternative: our evolutionary success is the result of cooking. In a ground-breaking theory of our origins, Wrangham shows that the shift from raw to cooked foods was the key factor in human evolution. When our ancestors adapted to using fire, humanity began. Once our hominid ancestors began cooking their food, the human digestive tract shrank and the brain grew. Time once spent chewing tough raw food could be sued instead to hunt and to tend camp. Cooking became the basis for pair bonding and marriage, created the household, and even led to a sexual division of labour. Tracing the contemporary implications of our ancestors' diets, Catching Fire sheds new light on how we came to be the social, intelligent, and sexual species we are today. A pathbreaking new theory of human evolution, Catching Fire will provoke controversy and fascinate anyone interested in our ancient origins- or in our modern eating habits.

In this well-written ethnography, Christine Eber weaves together the critical issues of gender relations, religious change, domestic violence, and drinking in highland Chiapas. . . . This is a fine ethnography that is a must-read for all interested in gender relations in contemporary Latin America. It is also one of the best current discussions on the little-studied phenomenon of religious change in Mexico. . . . Eber also provides a wonderful model of how to write a readable ethnography that treats its subjects with dignity and respect and honestly integrates the trials and tribulations of the ethnographer in the process.-Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"Women and Alcohol is a book worth reading. . . . The book's informal tone and interesting topic make it appealing to a wide audience, including casual readers and undergraduate classes. Furthermore, Eber's cross-cultural insight into alcohol dependency is relevant not only for anthropologists but also for health care professionals and others who deal with substance abuse."-Latin American Indian Literatures JournalHealing roles and rituals involving alcohol are a major source of power and identity for women and men in Highland Chiapas, Mexico, where abstention from alcohol can bring a loss of meaningful roles and of a sense of community. Yet, as in other parts of the world, alcohol use sometimes leads to abuse, whose effects must then be combated by individuals and the community. In this pioneering ethnography, Christine Eber looks at women and drinking in the community of San Pedro Chenalho to address the issues of women's identities, roles, relationships, and sources of power. She explores various personal and social strategies women use to avoid problem drinking, including conversion to Protestant religions, membership in cooperatives or Catholic Action, and modification of ritual forms with substitute beverages. The book's women-centered perspective reveals important data on women and drinking not reported in earlier ethnographies of Highland Chiapas communities. Eber's reflexive approach, blending the women's stories, analyses, songs, and prayers with her own and other ethnographers' views, shows how Western, individualistic approaches to the problems of alcohol abuse are inadequate for understanding women's experiences with problem and ritual drinking in a non-Western culture.In a new epilogue, Christine Eber describes how events of the last decade, including the Zapatista uprising, have strengthened women's resolve to gain greater control over their lives by controlling the effects of alcohol in the community.

A groundbreaking analysis of one of the most significant collections of African art in the United States The collection of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is among the most comprehensive in the United States, featuring works in all media from across the continent dating from antiquity to today. This handsome volume, the product of a groundbreaking collaboration between the museum's curators and conservators, supported by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, presents highlights from the collection-some never before published-alongside new scientific analysis and imaging. Six chapters detail both the historiographical and technical concerns at play in collecting and conserving African art. The result promises to deepen our understanding of the art in the dynamics of their original communities and as they appear now in a museum context. Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Koreans in Japan are a barely known minority, not only in the West but also within Japan itself. This pioneering study analyses these relations in the context of the particular conditions and constraints that Koreans face in Japanese society.
The contributors cover a wide range of topics, including: the legal and social status of Koreans in Japan; the history of Korean colonial displacement and postcolonial division during the Cold War; ethnic education; and women's self-expression. These studies serve to reveal the highly resilient and diverse reality of this minority group, whilst simultaneously highlighting the fact that - despite recent improvement - legal, social and economic constraints continue to exist in their lives.

This is the first account of the Lapita peoples, the common ancestor of the Polynesians, Micronesians, and Austronesian-speaking Melanesians who over the last 4000 years colonized the islands of the Pacific, including New Zealand and territories as far afield as Fiji and Hawaii. Its purpose is to provide answers to some of the most puzzling archaeological and anthropological questions: who were the Lapita peoples? what was their history? how were they able to travel such great distances? and why did they do so? Recent discoveries (several by the author of this book) have begun at last to yield a coherent picture of these elusive peoples.

Professor Kirch takes the reader back many thousands of years to the earliest evidence of the Lapita peoples. He describes the research itself and conveys the excitement of the first discoveries of Lapita settlements, tools and pottery. He then traces the remarkable cultural development and spread of the Lapita peoples across the unoccupied islands of Eastern Melanesia, Micronesia and Western Polynesia. He shows how they became the progenitors of the Polynesian and Austronesian-speaking Melanesian peoples.

The author describes Lapita sites, communities and landscapes, the development of their decorated ceramics, and their shell-tool industry. He reveals the means by which they accomplished such prodigious voyages and explains why they undertook them. He illustrates his account with specially drawn maps and with a wide range of photographs, many published for the first time.
Drawing on the latest research in archaeology, anthropology, biology and linguistics, and written in clear, non-specialized language, this is an outstanding book ofgreat importance to the history of South-East Asia and the Pacific.

The rise of the health, beauty and fitness industries in recent years has led to an increased focus on the body. Body image, gender and health are issues of long-standing concern in sociology and in youth studies, but a theoretical and empirical focus on the body has been largely missing from this field. This book explores young people's understandings of their bodies in the context of gender and health ideals, consumer culture, individualisation and image. Body Work examines the body in youth studies. It explores paradoxical aspects of gendered body work practices, highlighting the contradiction in men's increased participation in these industries as consumers alongside the re-emphasis of their gendered difference. It explores the key ways in which the ideal body is currently achieved, via muscularising practices, slimming regimes and cosmetic procedures. Coffey investigates the concept of 'health' and how it is inextricably linked both to the bodily performance of gender ideals and an increased public emphasis on individual management and responsibility in the pursuit of a 'healthy' body. This book's conceptual framework places it at the forefront of theoretical work concerning bodies, affect and images, particularly in its development of Deleuzian research. It will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in fields of youth studies, education, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, affect and body studies.

Cincinnati's East End river community has been home to generations of working-class people. This racially mixed community has roots that reach back as far as seven generations. But the community is vulnerable. Developers bulldoze "raggedy" but affordable housing to build upscale condos, even as East Enders fight to preserve the community by participating in urban development planning controlled by powerful outsiders.

This book portrays how East Enders practice the preservation of community. Drawing on more than six years of anthropological research and advocacy in the East End, Rhoda Halperin argues for redefining community not merely as a place, but as a set of culturally embedded and class-marked practices that give priority to caring for children and the elderly, procuring livelihood, and providing support for family, friends, and neighbors. These practices create the structures of community within the larger urban power structure.

Halperin uses different genres to weave the voices of East Enders throughout the book. Poems and narratives offer poignant insights into the daily struggles against impersonal market forces that work against the struggle for livelihood. This firsthand account questions commonly held assumptions about working-class people. In a fresh way, it reveals the cultural construction of marginality, from the viewpoints of both "real East Enders" and the urban power structure.

What does it mean to be white? This remains the question at large in the continued effort to examine how white racial identity is constructed and how systems of white privilege operate in everyday life. White Out brings together the original work of leading scholars across the disciplines of sociology, philosophy, history and anthropology to give readers an important and cutting-edge study of "whiteness".
This landmark collection moves beyond the personal narratives and surface discussions that have dominated the first generation of whiteness studies and brings discussion towards an actual structural analysis of racism. The essays cover such topics as the philosophy of whiteness; the belief in color blindness; the effects of white privilege; and the possibility for anti-racism. Collected together, these essays provide both a critical analysis and a path for future directions for the field.

This wide-ranging anthology of classic and newly-commissioned essays brings together the major theories of multiculturalism from a multiplicity of philosophical perspectives. Although the postmodern critique of 'grand theory' prepared the way for multiculturalism, this same critique has also threatened to leave current research on race, gender, sex, ethnicity, and class without unity or direction. By challenging the impasses of the postmodern critique, this collection serves to explore the very possibility of a grounding work in multiculturalism and diversity without resorting to the foundationalism of traditional philosophy. Essays span the major positions, including Post-Hegelian Theories of Recognition, Post-Marxism, Postcolonialism and Ethnicity, Liberalism, Analytic and Continental Feminism, Pragmatism, Critical Race Theory, and Theories of Corporeality and Sexuality.It's contributors include: Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, Lawrence Blum, Howard McGary, Robert Bernasconi, Lucius Outlaw, and Leonard Harris, among others. "Theorizing Multiculturalism" is ideal for students and researchers in social and political philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, American studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and political theory.