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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology
The keystone of U.S. security in East Asia, Okinawa is a troubled symbol of resistance and identity. Ambivalence about the nature of Okinawan identity lies behind relations between Japan, the United States, and Okinawa today. Fully one-fifth of Okinawa's land is occupied by a foreign military power (the United States), and Okinawans carry a disproportionate responsibility for Japanese and U.S. security in the region. It thus figures prominently in the re-examination of key questions such as the nature of Japan, including the debate over Japanese 'purity' and the nature of Japanese colonialism. Yet underneath the rhetoric of the 'Okinawa problem' lies a core question: who are Okinawans? In contrast to approaches that homogenize Okinawan cultural discourse, this perceptive historical ethnography draws attention to the range of cultural and social practices that exist within contemporary Okinawa. Matthew Allen's narrative problematizes both the location of identity and the processes involved in negotiating identities within Okinawa. Using the community on Kumejima as a focus, the author describes how people create and modify multitextured and overlapping identities over the course of their lives. Allen explores memory, locality and history; mental health and shamanism; and regionalism and tourism in his richly nuanced study. His chapter on the Battle of Okinawa, which opens the book, is a riveting, fresh analysis of the battle in history and memory. His analysis of yuta (shamans) opens new terrain in rethinking the relationship between the traditional and the modern. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and historical research, Allen argues that identity in Okinawa is multivocal, ambivalent, and still very much 'under construction.' With its interdisciplinary focus, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians alike will find this book an important source for understanding broad questions of identity formation in the contexts of national, ethnic, cultural, historical and economic experience.
Although participation and empowerment constitute prominent ideals in international development cooperation, most development interventions are still patronizing and conducted in a top-down manner. This book argues that one reason for the unsuccessful implementation of participation and empowerment relates to the cultures and internal structures of development organizations. A theoretical model explicates how organizational culture influences an organization's approach to participatory development. This model is applied to an ethnographic case-study of a South African development organization.
This volume highlights new directions in the study of social identities in past populations. Building on the field-defining research in Bioarchaeology and Identity in the Americas, contributors expand the scope of the subject regionally, theoretically, and methodologically. This collection moves beyond the previous focus on single aspects of identity by demonstrating multi-scalar approaches and by explicitly addressing intersectionality in the archaeological record.Case studies in this volume come from both New World and Old World settings, including sites in North America, South America, Asia, and the Middle East. The communities investigated range from early Holocene hunter-gatherers to nineteenth-century urban poor. Contributors broaden the concept of identity to include disability or health status, age, social class, religion, occupation, and communal and familial identities. In addition to combining bioarchaeological data with oral history and material artifacts, they use new methods including social network analysis and more humanistic approaches in osteobiography. Bioarchaeology and Identity Revisited offers updated ways of conceptualizing identity across time and space.A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global Perspectives, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen
When courts lifted their school desegregation orders in the 1990sOCodeclaring that black and white students were now integrated in America's public schoolsOCoit seemed that a window of opportunity would open for Latinos, Asians, and people of other races and ethnicities to influence school reform efforts. However, in most large cities the multiethnic moment passed, without leading to greater responsiveness to burgeoning new constituencies." Multiethnic Moments" examines school systems in four major U.S. citiesOCoBoston, Denver, Los Angeles, and San FranciscoOCoto uncover the factors that worked for and against ethnically-representative school change. More than a case study, this book is a concentrated effort to come to grips with the multiethnic city as a distinctive setting. It utilizes the politics of education reform to provide theoretically-grounded, empirical scholarship about the broader contemporary politics of race and ethnicityOCoemphasizing the intersection of interests, ideas, and institutions with the differing political legacies of each of the cities under consideration."
Psychiatrists define cruelty to animals as a psychological problem or personality disorder. Legally, animal cruelty is described by a list of behaviors. In Just a Dog, Arnold Arluke argues that our current constructs of animal cruelty are decontextualized-imposed without regard to the experience of the groups committing the act. Yet those who engage in animal cruelty have their own understandings of their actions and of themselves as actors. In this fascinating book, Arluke probes those understandings and reveals the surprising complexities of our relationships with animals. Just a Dog draws from interviews with more than 250 people, including humane agents who enforce cruelty laws, college students who tell stories of childhood abuse of animals, hoarders who chronically neglect the welfare of many animals, shelter workers who cope with the ethics of euthanizing animals, and public relations experts who use incidents of animal cruelty for fundraising purposes. Through these case studies, Arluke shows how the meaning of \u0022cruelty\u0022 reflects and helps to create identities and ideologies.
To be human is to be curious. And one of the things we are most
curious about is how we came to be who we are--how we evolved over
millions of years to become creatures capable of inquiring into our
own evolution.
Through a close examination of four Melanesian religious traditions, Whitehouse identifies a set of recurrent interconnections between styles of religious transmission, systems of memory, and patterns of political association. He argues that these interconnections may shed light on a variety of general problems in history, archaeology, and social theory.
"Political clientelism" is a term used to characterize the
contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in
Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political
favors. Javier Auyero critically deploys the notion in "Poor
People's Politics" to analyze the political practices of the
Peronist Party among shantytown dwellers in contemporary Argentina.
Histories of American Physical Anthropology in the Twentieth Century chronicles the history of physical anthropology or, as it is now known, biological anthropology from its professional origins in the late 1800 up to its modern transformation in the late 1900s. In this edited volume, 13 contributors trace the development of people, ideas, traditions, and organizations that contributed to the advancement of this branch of anthropology that focuses today on human variation and human evolution. Designed for upper level undergraduate students, graduate students, and professional biological anthropologists, this book provides a brief and accessible history of the biobehavioral side of anthropology in America."
Race and racism are interconnected historically and in the modern world. This connection is related to changing social, political, and economic conditions that impact how we think of others and ourselves. Race and racism are also connected to biological discoveries that justify how we think of others and ourselves. The main focus of this book is the examination of these connections. It is argued that while both race and racism are social constructions, the justification for racism changed as the definition and attributes of races were modified to correspond with new developments in biology and genetics. Whereas biological discoveries are one side of this construction, changing social situations represent the other. That is, racism also responds to changing social, political, and economic conditions that alter its justification. In addition, scientific constructions of race are impacted by social factors that serve to direct the "scientific disclosures" on human diversity. These factors form the context for the intricate relationship between race and racism.
The Ethnic Composition of Tswana Tribes
This book offers fresh insights into the complex and various ways in which international frontiers influence cultural identities. Ten anthropological case studies describe specific international borders in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, and bring out the importance of boundary politics, and the diverse forms that it may take. As a contribution to the wider theoretical debates about nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization, it will interest students and scholars in anthropology, political science, international studies and modern history.
Anthropologists are increasingly pressurised to formulate field
methods for teaching. Unlike many hypothesis-driven ethnographic
texts, this book is designed with the specific needs of the
anthropology student and field researcher in mind, with particular
emphasis on the core anthropological method: long term participant
observation. "Anthropological Practice" explores fieldwork
experiences unique to anthropology, and provides the context by
which to explain and develop practice-based and open-ended
methodology. It draws on dialogues with over twenty established and
younger anthropologists, whose fieldwork spans the late 1960s to
the present day, taking place in locations as diverse as Europe,
India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, North and
South America.
Human Population Biology is a careful integration of the social and biological sciences, drawing on anthropology, biology, human ecology and medicine to provide a comprehensive understanding of how our species adapts to natural and man-made environments. The book's chapters fall into five parts. In Part I, techniques to adapt and apply large-scale demographic methods to smaller populations, particularly important for studying non-Western populations, are presented. In Part II, the relationship of medical genetics to human adaptability and patterns of disease epidemiology in small, non-Western populations are discussed. In Part III work capacity, climatic stress and nutrition are covered. In Part IV methods for growth assessment and prediction are presented and ageing is addressed. The final section, Part V, presents integrated case studies of human adaptation to high altitude, and patterns of modernization and stress resulting from cultural change.
Ninety percent of the indigenous population in the Americas live in the Andean and Mesoamerican nations of Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala. Recently indigenous social movements in these countries have intensified debate about racism and drawn attention to the connections between present-day discrimination and centuries of colonialism and violence. In "Histories of Race and Racism," anthropologists, historians, and sociologists consider the experiences and representations of Andean and Mesoamerican indigenous peoples from the early colonial era to the present. Many of the essays focus on Bolivia, where the election of the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, sparked fierce disputes over political power, ethnic rights, and visions of the nation. The contributors compare the interplay of race and racism with class, gender, nationality, and regionalism in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru. In the process, they engage issues including labor, education, census-taking, cultural appropriation and performance, mestizaje, social mobilization, and antiracist legislation. Their essays shed new light on the present by describing how race and racism have mattered in particular Andean and Mesoamerican societies at specific moments in time. Contributors
A group of contributors highlight advances made in paleopathology and demography through the analyses of historic cemeteries. These advancements include associations of documentary evidence with skeletal evaluations, insights into history gained through the use of skeletal analyses when no documentation exists and applications of new evaluative techniques. Provides a glimpse into the problems faced by researchers embarking on the excavation and/or analysis of historic human remains.
Phantom limb pain is one of the most intractable and merciless pains ever known-a pain that haunts appendages that do not physically exist, often persisting with uncanny realness long after fleshy limbs have been traumatically, surgically, or congenitally lost. The very existence and "naturalness" of this pain has been instrumental in modern science's ability to create prosthetic technologies that many feel have transformative, self-actualizing, and even transcendent power. In Phantom Limb, Cassandra S. Crawford critically examines phantom limb pain and its relationship to prosthetic innovation, tracing the major shifts in knowledge of the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon. Crawford exposes how the meanings of phantom limb pain have been influenced by developments in prosthetic science and ideas about the extraordinary power of these technologies to liberate and fundamentally alter the human body, mind, and spirit. Through intensive observation at a prosthetic clinic, interviews with key researchers and clinicians, and an analysis of historical and contemporary psychological and medical literature, she examines the modernization of amputation and exposes how medical understanding about phantom limbs has changed from the late-19th to the early-21st century. Crawford interrogates the impact of advances in technology, medicine, psychology and neuroscience, as well as changes in the meaning of limb loss, popular representations of amputees, and corporeal ideology. Phantom Limb questions our most deeply held ideas of what is normal, natural, and even moral about the physical human body.
This passionate, intelligent commentary is an invigorating look at the implications of difference and diversity in two contrasting but simi lar societies: the United States and South Africa. Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations addresses how differences - of gender, race, culture, biology, and sexual orientation - a variously understood and acted on in both countries.
The first collection to emphasize the complex interaction between gender and postcoloniality. Most people in the world, from Africa to Asia and beyond, live in the aftermath of colonialism. Their day-to-day lives are defined by their past history as colonized peoples, often in ways that are subtle or hard to define. In Dangerous Liaisons, eminent contributors address the issues raised by the postcolonial condition, considering nationhood, history, gender, and identity from an inter-disciplinary perspective. Among the questions they address are: What are the boundaries of race and ethnicity in a diasporic world? How have women been so effectively excluded from national power? What have been the historical aftermaths of different forms of colonialism? What are the cultural and political consequences of colonial partitions of the nation-state? Representing an essential intervention, Dangerous Liaisons is a crucial guidebook for those concerned with understanding postcoloniality at the moment when it is becoming more and more widely discussed.
"Living Beings "examines the vital characteristics of social interactions between living beings, including humans, other animals and trees.Many discussions of such relationships highlight the exceptional qualities of the human members of the category, insisting for instance on their religious beliefs or creativity. In contrast, the international case studies in this volume dissect views based on hierarchical oppositions between human and other living beings. Although human practices may sometimes appear to exist in a realm beyond nature, they are nevertheless subject to the pull of natural forces. These forces may be brought into prominence through a consideration of the interactions between human beings and other inhabitants of the natural world.The interplay in this book between social anthropologists, philosophers and artists cuts across species divisions to examine the experiential dimensions of interspecies engagements. In ethnographically and/or historically contextualized chapters, contributors examine the juxtaposition of human and other living beings in the light of themes such as wildlife safaris, violence, difference, mimicry, simulation, spiritual renewal, dress and language.
This is an unusual excursion into American Indian culture history by a British social anthropologist. It examines theories of the development of different Pueblo social structures, with particular attention to Eggan. From a detailed re-analysis of the evidence and a consideration of material from the Eastern Keresan Pueblo of Cochiti, based on his own fieldwork, Dr Fox concludes that the theory that all Pueblos were derived from a common base is no longer tenable, and that a diversity of origins is more probable. Apart from its contribution to Amerindian studies, the book is of particular interest as an approach to modern culture history by a social anthropologist.
This study of the Tamil diaspora is one of the first full ethnographic studies of a postcolonial migrant community, and a major contribution to the study of migration, globalisation, identity politics and 'long distance' nationalism from an anthropological perspective. Fuglerud's study traces the history of Tamil migration, from the arrival of the economic migrants of the 1960s to the 'asylum seekers' of the mid 1980s onwards. He draws unnerving parallels between the status of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, as a beleaguered and persecuted minority waging a war of liberation, and as a displaced, marginalised and excluded refugee community. Fuglerud argues that, in the process of displacement, particular aspects of Tamil culture - marriage, dowry, chastity and ritual - acquire a heightened significance. He examines the contradictions and inconsistencies which characterise the Tamil refugee communities, and the success of revolutionary Tamil nationalism in exile, highlighting the transnational nature of identity politics.
Dr Salim, of Bagdad University, spent two years amongst the remarkable tribal peoples who inhabit the great marshes of the lower Euphrates. He describes their social and economic organization and discusses on the one hand the process by which people with bedouin traditions and values have adapted themselves to different and difficult conditions, and on the other the effects upon them of submission to the central government and the modernisation of their modes of life that has resulted from it. His account offers a fascinating study of people living in an unusual environment, and will be of value to the anthropologist and ethnologist for its precise ethnography. At the same time, as one of the few detailed studies of the changes now being wrought on such a large scale by modern economic and political forces, it has real importance for the general student of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs.
This exciting multidisciplinary collection brings together twenty-two original essays by scholars on the cutting edge of racial theory, who address both the American concept of race and the specific problems experienced by those who do not fit neatly into the boxes society requires them to check. |
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