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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology
This work takes a critical look at the current concept of isotopic landscapes ("isoscapes") in bioarchaeology and its application in future research. It specifically addresses the research potential of cremated finds, a somewhat neglected bioarchaeological substrate, resulting primarily from the inherent osteological challenges and complex mineralogy associated with it. In addition, for the first time data mining methods are applied. The chapters are the outcome of an international workshop sponsored by the German Science Foundation and the Centre of Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich. Isotopic landscapes are indispensable tracers for the monitoring of the flow of matter through geo/ecological systems since they comprise existing temporally and spatially defined stable isotopic patterns found in geological and ecological samples. Analyses of stable isotopes of the elements nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, strontium, and lead are routinely utilized in bioarchaeology to reconstruct biodiversity, palaeodiet, palaeoecology, palaeoclimate, migration and trade. The interpretive power of stable isotopic ratios depends not only on firm, testable hypotheses, but most importantly on the cooperative networking of scientists from both natural and social sciences. Application of multi-isotopic tracers generates isotopic patterns with multiple dimensions, which accurately characterize a find, but can only be interpreted by use of modern data mining methods.
Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory curates and collects many of the most important publications of anthropological thought spanning the last hundred years, building a strong foundation in both classical and contemporary theory. The sixth edition includes seventeen new readings, with a sharpened focus on public anthropology, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and the Anthropocene. Each piece of writing is accompanied by a short introduction, key terms, study questions, and further readings that elucidate the original text. On its own or together with A History of Anthropological Theory, sixth edition, this anthology offers an unrivalled introduction to the theory of anthropology that reflects not only its history but also the changing nature of the discipline today.
This series of essays by one of today's most original and prolific scholars on German racial policy concern three interrelated aspects of Nazi Germany: relations with "the East," "euthanasia," and extermination. The collection includes important and wholly new contributions to the German-Soviet war and other national tragedies; to the controversial question of whether the Nazi analogy has any relevance to contemporary ethical discussions; and to the contemporary historiography, including works of fiction and literary criticism, of the Holocaust.
Marriage and the Family among the Yako in South-Eastern Nigeria
Most women who elect to have cosmetic surgery want a "natural" outcome-a discrete alteration of the body that appears unaltered. Under the Knife examines this theme in light of a cultural paradox. Whereas women are encouraged to improve their appearance, there is also a stigma associated with those who do so via surgery. Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves reveal how women negotiate their "unnatural"-but hopefully (in their view) natural-looking-surgically-altered bodies. Based on in-depth interviews with 46 women who underwent cosmetic surgery to enhance their appearance, the authors investigate motivations for surgery as well as women's thoughts about looking natural after the procedures. Under the Knife dissects the psychological and physical strategies these women use to manage the expectations, challenges, and disappointments of cosmetic surgery while also addressing issues of agency and empowerment. It shows how different cultural intersections can produce varied goals and values around body improvement. Under the Knife highlights the role of deep-seated yet contradictory gendered meanings about women's bodies, passing, and boundary work. The authors also consider traditional notions of femininity and normalcy that trouble women's struggle to preserve an authentic moral self.
This book is authored by leading experts who made major discoveries in neuroteratology research focused on modeling human neural developmental disorders. Individual chapters address ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), Lesch-Nyhan disease, psychoses and schizophrenia, autism, and models of Parkinson's Disease and tardive dyskinesia. The effects of perinatal stress and agonist insults on life-long outcomes are addressed, as well as the overall effects of perinatal neurotoxins on development of specific neural phenotypic systems. The book provides a unique compendium on how perinatal insults of various types can produce effects in brain that persist throughout the life span. Researchers can derive insight into experimental approaches in this research field; clinicians can develop insights into the influences of the many noxious and seemingly innocuous substances that might influence brain development in children.
While ethnography ordinarily privileges anthropological interpretations, this book attempts the reciprocal process of describing indigenous modes of analysis. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people of New Guinea, the author examines how indigenous analysis organizes local knowledge and provides a framework for interpreting events, from first contact and colonial rule to contemporary interactions with a multinational mining company and the Indonesian state. This book highlights Yonggom participation in two political movements: an international campaign against the Ok Tedi mine, which is responsible for extensive deforestation and environmental problems, and the opposition to Indonesian control over West Papua, including Yonggom experiences as political refugees in Papua, New Guinea. The author challenges a prevailing homogenization in current representations of indigenous people, showing how Yonggom modes of analysis specifically have shaped these political movements.
This book offers a critical reading of the Anthropocene that draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic evidence to argue that the concept reproduces the modernist binary between society and nature, and forecloses a more inclusive politics around climate change. The authors challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents that constitute the ontological foundations of the period. Building on contemporary critiques of capitalism, they examine different conceptions of human-environment relationships derived from anthropology to engage with the pressing problem of global warming.
Frontiers of Citizenship is an engagingly-written, innovative history of Brazil's black and indigenous people that redefines our understanding of slavery, citizenship, and the origins of Brazil's 'racial democracy'. Through groundbreaking archival research that brings the stories of slaves, Indians, and settlers to life, Yuko Miki challenges the widespread idea that Brazilian Indians 'disappeared' during the colonial era, paving the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. Focusing on the postcolonial settlement of the Atlantic frontier and Rio de Janeiro, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably inclusive nationhood. She demonstrates that to understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.
What happens when a seemingly rational state becomes paranoid and delusional? The Encrypted State engages in a close analysis of political disorder to shed new light on the concept of political stability. The book focuses on a crisis of rule in mid-20th-century Peru, a period when officials believed they had lost the ability to govern and communicated in secret code to protect themselves from imaginary subversives. The Encrypted State engages the notion of sacropolitics-the politics of mass group sacrifice-to make sense of state delusion. Nugent interrogates the forces that variously enable or disable organized political subjection, and the role of state structures in this process. Investigating the role of everyday cultural practices and how affect and imagination structure political affairs, Nugent provides a greater understanding of the conditions of state formation, and failure.
This book breaks new ground by offering neuroscientific insights into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD has emerged as the model mental disorder for studying the effect of the environment on human biological systems, especially the brain. The authors - who range from skilled basic scientists to experienced diagnosticians and therapists - are leaders in the recent surge of biological investigation into this distressing and disabling condition.
This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired children and their families, the screening and sanctifying of the body as part of the bereavement and commemoration of fallen soldiers, and the discourse of the chosen body as it surfaces during terrorist attacks, military socialization, war, and the peace process.
From 1998 through 2013, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs sought to develop a casino in Cascade Locks, Oregon. This prompted objections from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who already operated a lucrative casino in the region. Brook Colley's in-depth case study unravels the history of this disagreement and challenges the way conventional media characterizes intertribal casino disputes in terms of corruption and greed. Instead, she locates these conflicts within historical, social, and political contexts of colonization. Through extensive interviews, Colley brings to the forefront Indigenous perspectives on intertribal conflict related to tribal gaming. She reveals how casino economies affect the relationship between gaming tribes and federal and state governments, and the repercussions for the tribes themselves. Ultimately, Colley's engaging examination explores strategies for reconciliation and cooperation, emphasizing narratives of resilience and tribal sovereignty.
In the early twentieth century, people in the southwestern Pacific nation of Vanuatu experienced rapid population decline, while in the early twenty-first century, they experienced rapid population growth. From colonial governance to postcolonial sovereignty, Moral Figures shows that despite attempts to govern population size and birth, reproduction in Vanuatu continues to exceed bureaucratic economization through Ni-Vanuatu insistence on Indigenous relationalities. Through her examination of how reproduction is made public, Alexandra Widmer demonstrates how population sciences have naturalized a focus on women's fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women's land access and broader social relations of reproduction. Widmer draws on oral histories with retired village midwives and massage healers on the changes to care for pregnancy and birth, as well as ethnographic research in a village outside the capital of Port Vila. Locating the Pacific Islands in global histories of demographic science and the medicalization of birth, the book presents archival material in a way that emphasizes bureaucratic practices in how colonial documents attempted to render Indigenous relationalities of reproduction governable. While demographic imaginaries and biomedical practices increasingly frame fertility control as an investment in the reproductive health of individual bodies, the Ni-Vanuatu worlds presented in Moral Figures show that relationships between people, land, knowledge, kin, and care make reproduction a distributed and assisted process.
"Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader" delineates the prevailing concerns and considerations, principles and practices, concepts and categories that fall under the rubric of "multiculturalism". The contributors spell out what they take multiculturalism to be committed to as much as what it is against. The themes analyzed, include the relations between self and other, selves and others; between knowledge, power, pedagogy, and empowerment; between disciplinary definition and canonical confinement; between meaning, ambiguity, and representation; between history and multiple intersecting histories, reason and rationalities; and between culture domination, resistance, and self-assertion.
Barbara Gornicka presents a sociological investigation - both historical and contemporary - into the problems surrounding naked bodies. She draws on her own participation in a nudist swimming club and goes on to study the often very complex and paradoxical emotions that have been associated with nakedness in the Western world for centuries. The book provides answers not only to why we find exposing our naked bodies shameful, but also why we find it sexual and erotic in the first place. It looks beneath taboos surrounding nakedness today and offers a theoretical explanation for their development over time. On the basis of her historical analysis, the author demonstrates that it was not until the late nineteenth or twentieth century that we began to see nudity as erotic.
Praise for the first edition . . . "A welcome addition to the growing sociological literature that looks beyond the circumstances of victims for the solutions to various social problems." --Contemporary Sociology "A clear articulation of a number of historical, spatial, and international perspectives on race relations. The new and novel focus provides fresh insights into a field that has found the development of a unified theory elusive." --International Social Science Review Challenging the popularly held view that racism is disappearing as a social phenomenon, the second edition of Impacts of Racism on White Americans reexamines the questions proposed by its first edition and notes that one decade later little has changed. This stimulating collection of original papers focuses on the new ways in which white Americans act out racism and weighs the advantages and disadvantages that whites experience from racism. Drawing on evidence from the social and behavioral sciences, this timely revision argues that racism is essentially a problem of European Americans and that most whites do not benefit from racism in the long term. In addition, this volume holds that racism cannot be eliminated until it is viewed as a white problem that seriously compromises the quality of life. The concluding chapter of the first edition, which summarized the major insights and findings of that edition, has been reprinted and in the final chapter of this new edition, editors Benjamin P. Bowser and Raymond G. Hunt expand on recommendations and clearly illustrate how far we've come, and most important, how far we have to go. Sure to follow the success of its first edition, Impacts of Racism on White Americans will make a major contribution to our understanding of the impacts of racism while providing students and professionals in race/ethnic studies, sociology, urban studies, and social psychology with thought-provoking, quality material.
In this thoroughly revised fourth edition, with ten new chapters, the editors provide thought-provoking discussions on the importance of ethnicity in different cultural and social contexts. The authors focus especially on changing ethnic and national identities, on migration and ethnic minorities, on ethnic ascription versus self-definitions, and on shifting ethnic identities and political control. The international group of scholars examines ethnic identities, conflicts and accommodations around the globe, in Africa (including Zaire and South Africa), Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, the United States, Thailand, and the former Yugoslavia. It will serve as an excellent text for courses in race & ethnic relations, and anthropology and ethnic studies.
In Iran, folksongs are part of folklore and offer an intimate portrait of a vanishing era. They are also 'the voice' of ordinary people, providing a medium to express emotions, opinions and concerns. This book is based on folksongs collected over a 50-year period among the Boir Ahmad tribal people in the Zagros Mountains of West Iran. Erika Friedl has recorded, transcribed and translated more than 600 lyrics from a Lur community, and her analysis of the folksongs provides an intimate portrait of local people's attitudes, attachments, fears and desires. From songs of love, sex and mourning, to lyrics discussing beauty, infatuation and the community's violent tribal history, Friedl's solid understanding of the cultural background, lifestyle and worldview of these people lets her add ethnographic details that illuminate the deep meaning of the texts. In this way, Friedl goes far beyond a translation of words: she sheds light on a culture where beliefs, critical evaluation of circumstances and philosophical tenets are shown to be integral to each song's message. Based on fieldwork that began in 1965, Erika Friedl's research on the folklore in Boir Ahmad represents the best-documented modern folklore compendium on an Iranian tribe. This new book will be important for future generations of scholars, including ethnographers, Iranists, linguists, ethnomusicologists and those researching Persian literature and cultures of the Middle East.
In Contours of Culture the authors discuss the uses of various ethnographic methods in the study of culture, drawing on their field research with an opera company, Welsh artists, and classes on the popular Brazilian martial art capoeira. In their practical research and in the research of other scolars, they encounter complex problems and themes that often require new ways of organizing and conceiving cultural material, and even new ways of giving expression to phenomena that are only partially understood. This book is not only about the inherent complexities involved in ethnography; it is also about the kinds of opportunities available to researchers immersed in this complexity and how they might grasp cultural settings in their entirety.
This book examines how the social and cultural paradigms of contemporary Israel are articulated through the body. To construct a panoramic view of how the Israeli body is chosen, regulated, cared for, and ultimately made perfect, the author draws upon some twenty years of ethnographic research in Israel in a range of subjects. These include premarital and prenatal screening, the regulation of the body and its imagery among appearance-impaired children and their families, the screening and sanctifying of the body as part of the bereavement and commemoration of fallen soldiers, and the discourse of the chosen body as it surfaces during terrorist attacks, military socialization, war, and the peace process.
Within the United Kingdom questions about the relevance of
educational research and its relationship to policy have recently
been the centre of a prolonged, public and sometimes acrimonious
debate.
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.
Australopithecus species have been the topic of much debate in palaeoanthropology since Raymond Dart described the first species, Australopithecus africanus, in 1925. This volume synthesizes the geological and paleontological context of the species in East and South Africa; covers individual sites, such as Dikika, Hadar, Sterkfontein, and Malapa; debates the alpha taxonomy of some of the species; and addresses questions regarding the movements of the species across the continent. Additional chapters discuss the genus in terms of sexual dimorphism, diet reconstruction using microwear and isotopic methodologies, postural and locomotor behavior, and ontogeny.
The 150th anniversary of the discovery of the famous Neanderthal fossils gave reason for an international and interdisciplinary symposium in Bonn/Germany. The present book arose from this congress and focuses on multiple aspects of archaeological investigation on Neanderthal lifeways. In-depth studies of top-ranking scientists provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of contemporary research on our Pleistocene relatives. Examinations and debates are embedded in a variety of regions and time frames. Chronology, subsistence, land use, and cultural adaptations among late Neanderthals form the major trajectories of the book. The wide range of approaches involved, leads to an increasing understanding of the facets of and the variability of Neanderthal behavioural patterns. The present volume is complemented by a paleontologically orientated publication of the same congress (edited by Gerd-Christian Weniger and Silvana Condemi). |
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