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.

For over twenty years, A History of Anthropological Theory has provided a strong foundation for understanding anthropological thinking, tracing how the discipline has evolved from its origins to the present day. The sixth edition of this important text offers substantial updates throughout, including more balanced coverage of the four fields of anthropology, an entirely new section on the Anthropocene, and significantly revised discussions of public anthropology, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. Written in accessible prose and enhanced with illustrations, key terms, and study questions in each section, this text remains essential reading for those interested in studying the history of anthropology. On its own or used with the companion volume, Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, sixth edition, this text provides comprehensive coverage in a flexible and easy-to-use format for teaching in the anthropology classroom.

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

Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyzes the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today's Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip-hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, fifty-two women--northern and southern, young and old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina--share their courageous personal stories of working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement. The testimonies gathered here present a sweeping personal history of SNCC: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; the 1963 March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the movements in Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power and antiwar activism. Since the women spent time in the Deep South, many also describe risking their lives through beatings and arrests and witnessing unspeakable violence. These intense stories depict women, many very young, dealing with extreme fear and finding the remarkable strength to survive. The women in SNCC acquired new skills, experienced personal growth, sustained one another, and even had fun in the midst of serious struggle. Readers are privy to their analyses of the Movement, its tactics, strategies, and underlying philosophies. The contributors revisit central debates of the struggle including the role of nonviolence and self-defense, the role of white people in a black-led movement, and the role of women within the Movement and the society at large. Each story reveals how the struggle for social change was formed, supported, and maintained by the women who kept their "hands on the freedom plow." As the editors write in the introduction, "Though the voices are different, they all tell the same story--of women bursting out of constraints, leaving school, leaving their hometowns, meeting new people, talking into the night, laughing, going to jail, being afraid, teaching in Freedom Schools, working in the field, dancing at the Elks Hall, working the WATS line to relay horror story after horror story, telling the press, telling the story, telling the word. And making a difference in this world."

Presents 16 case studies of ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet world. The book places ethnic conflict in the context of imperial collapse, democratisation and state building.

In this innovative study, Professor Tahar Labib seeks to understand how the 'Other' is viewed in Arab culture, and vice versa. "Imagining The Arab Other" examines how Turks, Europeans, Christians and Iranians have been represented in the arts, opinions and cultures of the Arab world. Conversely, it also explores the intellectual representation of 'The Arab' in other cultures. It demonstrates the central role of the Catholic Church in ascribing to the Arab peoples a set of characteristics associated with the 'Other'. Labib places this survey in the context of theoretical debates, started by Edward Said's 'Orientalism', on the construction of 'Other'. With its diversity of perspectives, "Imagining The Arab Other" offers a new way of understanding of identity and cultural difference in the Middle East, one which goes beyond the Orientalist / Occidentalist paradigm.

Full Contributors:
Ellis Cashmore, Staffordshire University, Michael Banton, University of Bristol, James Jennings, University of Massachusetts, Barry Troyna, University of Warwick, Pierre Van Den Berghe, University of Washington, Heribert Adam, Simon Fraser University, Molefi Kete Asanti, Temple University, Philadelphia, Stephanie Athey, Stetson University, Carl Bagley, Staffordshire University, Kingsley Bolton, University of Hong Kong, Roy L Brooks, San Diego Law School, Richard Broome, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Bonnie G Campodonico, Santa Clara University, Robin Cohen, University of Warwick, James W Covington, University of Tampa, Guy Cumberbatch, Aston University, John A Garcia, University of Arizona, Ian Hancock, University of Texas, Michael Hechter, University of Arizona / Oxford University, Gita Jaraj, Freelance Writer, Robert Kerstein, University of Tampa, Zeus Leonardo, University of California, Peter McLaren, University of California, Eugene McLaughlin, Open University, Robert Miles, University of Glasogow, Kogila Moodley, University of British Columbia, Marshall Murphree, University of Zimbabwe, Timothy J Lukes, Santa Clara Univeristy, George Paton, Aston University, Peter Ratcliffe, University of Warwick, Amy I Shepper, University of South Florida, John Solomos, University of Southampton, Stuart D Stein, University of the West of England, Betty Lee Sung, City College of New York, Roy Todd, University of Leeds, Steven Vertovec, University of Warwick, Robin Ward, Formerly of Nottingham Trent University, Loretta Zimmerman, University of Portland

The aim of this book is to provide a new insight on Neanderthal behaviour using the data recovered in level J of Romani rockshelter (north-eastern Spain). Due to the sedimentary dynamics that formed the Romani deposit, the occupation layers are characterized by a high temporal resolution, which makes it easier to interprete the archaeological data in behavioural terms. In addition, the different analytical domains(geoarchaeology, lithic technology, zooarchaeology, taphonomy, anthracology, palaeontology) are addressed from a spatial perspective that is basic to understand human behaviour, but also to evaluate the behavioural inferences in the framework of the archaeological formation processes. "

Human liberation has become an epochal challenge in today's world, requiring not only emancipation from oppressive structures but also from the oppressive self. This book seeks to rethink knowledge vis-a-vis familiar themes such as human interest, critical theory and cosmopolitanism.

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity.In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

"This collection of ten essays is the latest major work to call for renewed attention to the topic of kinship], especially with respect to contemporary questions of how cultures relate to nature... It] is a welcome addition to the ongoing revival of kinship, and will stimulate further debate among its many participants." Ethnobiology Letters

The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model-in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission-structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled "kinship." The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology's ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the "social" and "natural" sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.

Sandra Bamford is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Papua New Guinea and the West, with an emphasis on kinship, gender, landscape, environmentalism, globalization, and biotechnology. In addition to having authored several journal articles and book chapters, her most recent publications include: "Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology" (University of California Press, 2006) and "Embodying Modernity and Postmodernity: Ritual, Praxis and Social Change in Melanesia" (Carolina Academic Press, 2007).

James Leach is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Published works include "Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea" (2003), "Reite Plants: An Ethnobotanical Study in Tok Pisin and English" (2010, with Porer Nombo), and "Recognising and Translating Knowledge, " 2012 "Anthropological Forum" Special Issue, ed with R. Davis).

A Times/Sunday Times Book of the Year DISCOVER HOW LIFE REALLY WORKS - ON EARTH AND IN SPACE 'A wonderfully insightful sidelong look at Earthly biology' Richard Dawkins 'Crawls with curious facts' Sunday Times _________________________ We are unprepared for the greatest discovery of modern science. Scientists are confident that there is alien life across the universe yet we have not moved beyond our perception of 'aliens' as Hollywood stereotypes. The time has come to abandon our fixation on alien monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing. Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like. This is the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space. _________________________ 'An entertaining, eye-opening and, above all, a hopeful view of what - or who - might be out there in the cosmos' Philip Ball, author of Nature's Patterns 'A fascinating insight into the deepest of questions: what might an alien actually look like' Lewis Dartnell, author of Origins 'If you don't want to be surprised by extraterrestrial life, look no further than this lively overview of the laws of evolution that have produced life on earth' Frans de Waal, author of Mama's Last Hug

Today's world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China's immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People's Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification. As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist years from the present age of the People's Republic, which appears on the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.

This collection of original essays by scholars from a diverse range of fields, examines issues of race in a variety of historical and geographical settings, ranging from classical Greece to the contemporary Americas, Europe and Asia. The authors provide an important perspective on race both in its theoretical origins and in its actual appearances while paying close attention to the ways in which the study of race itself has been carried on or ignored by various disciplines.

Argues that the struggle over income, wealth, status and privilege-inequality-has been the principal, defining issue in human history and provides a novel framework for understanding inequality today Whereas President Barack Obama declared inequality as the defining issue of our time, in The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality, Jon D. Wisman claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history's unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, Wisman re-interprets economic history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in history, this book is novel in two other respects: First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behaviour, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or more specifically, Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Second, this book accords central importance to ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically inadequately addressed by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality's explosion over the past forty years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites' persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase. Sweeping and provocative, Jon D. Wisman presents a fresh perspective on why economic inequality exists and how its dynamics have shaped human history.

In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.

Marit Melhuus is Professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. Her earlier work has been on issues of gender, morality and change in Latin America, and her publications include "Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas. Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery" (co-edited with Kristi Anne Stolen, Verso, 1996). Her current research concerns biotechnology, kinship, and law, and she has published numerous articles on these questions. Recent publications include "Holding Worlds Together: Ethnographies of Truth and Belonging" (co-edited with Marianne Lien, Berghahn, 2007) and "La Norvege, vues de l'interieur, " a special issue of Ethnologie francaise (jointly edited with Sophie Chevalier and Marianne Lien, 2009).

Jon P. Mitchell is Reader in anthropology at the University of Sussex. His main ethnographic research was conducted in Malta, covering themes of ritual and religion, politics and the state, history, memory and modernity, and popular culture. His publications include "Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta" (Routledge, 2002), "Powers of Good and Evil: Social Transformation and Popular Belief" (jointly edited with Paul Clough, Berghahn, 2002), "Modernity in the Mediterranean" (edited special issue of Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2002), "Human Rights in Global Perspective" (jointly edited with Richard Ashby Wilson, Routledge, 2003). His current research focuses on the religious origins of secular charity.

Helena Wulff is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her research interests focus on expressive forms of culture in a transnational perspective, with a recent interest in writing and Irish literature as cultural process and form. Among her latest publications are "Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland" (2008, Berghahn), "The Emotions: A Cultural Reader" (editor, 2007, Berg), and "Ballet across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers" (Berg, 1998, reprinted 2001). She is also Editor of "Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, " the Journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists."

Drawing on ethnographic research, Living Sharia examines the role of sharia in the sociopolitical processes of contemporary Malaysia. The book traces the contested implementation of Islamic family and criminal laws and sharia economics to provide cultural frameworks for understanding sharia among Muslims and non-Muslims. Timothy Daniels explores how the way people think about sharia is often entangled with notions about race, gender equality, nationhood, liberal pluralism, citizenship, and universal human rights. He reveals that Malaysians' ideas about sharia are not isolated from-nor always opposed to-liberal pluralism and secularism. Living Sharia will be of interest to scholars as well as to policy makers, consultants, and professionals working with global NGOs.

"Richly illustrated catalog accompanied the renovated exhibition at Harvard's Peabody Museum. Like the exhibition, the catalog is divided into three parts: the age of encounter between indigenous and Spanish peoples; the classic Maya; and cultural survival in the contemporary world among the highland Maya of Guatemala, the Kuna people of Panama, and Amazonian societies. The authors present their own synthetic treatments of these subjects, supported by well-selected testimony from the actors themselves, such as Hernando Cortâes, Sahagâun's informants as presented by The Broken Spears, and recorded testimony from contemporary indigenous peoples"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Human settlement has often centered around coastal areas and waterways. Until recently, however, archaeologists believed that marine economies did not develop until the end of the Pleistocene, when the archaeological record begins to have evidence of marine life as part of the human diet. This has long been interpreted as a postglacial adaptation, due to the rise in sea level and subsequent decrease in terrestrial resources. Coastal resources, particularly mollusks, were viewed as fallback resources, which people resorted to only when terrestrial resources were scarce, included only as part of a more complex diet.

Recent research has significantly altered this understanding, known as the Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) model. The contributions to this volume revise the BSR model, with evidence that coastal resources were an important part of human economies and subsistence much earlier than previously thought, and even the main focus of diets for some Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherer societies.

With evidence from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, this volume comprehensively lends a new understanding to coastal settlement from the Middle Paleolithic to the Middle Holocene.

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

In the last decade, a dramatic increase in overweight individuals and obesity has been reported in both developed and underdeveloped countries. Noncommunicable diseases, as well as type 2 diabetes and obesity are one of the most common causes of long-term disability, especially cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is still the leading cause of death in the industrialised world. Accumulating evidence over the last 50 years indicates that exercise may postpone or counteract, at least partially, the debilitating consequences of CVD and prevent complications provoked by the inactive state. Today, we can conclude that lack of physical activity or lack of a physically active lifestyle is clearly an overall high health risk. Societal indicators of reductions in human energy expenditure and increases in sedentary behavior during the past several decades are particularly striking. By the year 2000, the human race reached a sort of historical landmark; for the first time in human evolution, the number of adults with excess weight surpassed the number of those who were underweight. Excess adiposity/body weight is now widely recognised as one of today's leading health threats. Although obesity during childhood is indicated as a complex disorder, the prevalence of overweight and obese children is continually growing globally. This has become a concern to public health, as overweight and obesity during childhood tracks into adulthood and is associated with short- and long-term adverse health outcomes. A number of research articles in this monograph provide interesting and innovating practical suggestions, applications, and directions for some future research. The researched phenomena include: the first physical movements of life recognised as fetal movements and a mother's physiological states; potential differences in cardiovascular fitness between schoolchildren from urban and rural areas, with respect to their age and gender; evidence for the 5-year regular sport exercise effect of on muscle contractile properties in children; trend changes of physical abilities of school children; the effects of linear and change-of-direction speed training methods on the sprint performance of young adults; the relationship between sports experience and performance scores on a health-related physical fitness test among female university freshmen; the application of sports activities that improve the level of upper extremity motor abilities in people with spinal cord injuries; theoretical frameworks supporting learning-inclusive environment details; basic approaches for the inclusion of people with disabilities in community recreation programs; the relation between health and fitness characteristics by Special Olympic athletes competing as cross-country skiers; the relations between physical activity and/or physical exercise and body composition characteristics in the working-age population of both genders; evidence- based information about the effects of sedentary behavior on physiological function in humans; new facts resulting from numerous clinical and epidemiological studies about the effects of physical activity, and reducing the risk of breast and prostate cancer; and information about the connection between physical activity and cognition across the human life span. Finally, the last chapter examines the opinion of the elderly about the impact of physical activity in some segments concerning the quality of life of people living in the Third Age.

In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.

When analyzed in multilingual contexts, English is often treated as an entity that is separable from its linguistic environment. It is often the case, however, that multilinguals use English in hybrid and transcultural ways. This book explores how multilingual East Africans make use of English as a local resource in their everyday practices by examining a range of domains, including workplace conversation, beauty pageants, hip hop and advertising. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality, the author uses discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to demonstrate the range of linguistic and cultural hybridity found across these domains, and to consider the constraints on hybridity in each context. By focusing on the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found, the book illustrates how multilinguals respond to the tension between local identification and dominant conceptualizations of English as a language for global communication.