|
|
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Customs & folklore > Customs
What do eggs, flour, and milk have in common? They form the basis
of waffles, of course, but these staples of breakfast bounty also
share an evolutionary function: eggs, seeds (from which we derive
flour by grinding), and milk have each evolved to nourish
offspring. Indeed, ponder the genesis of your breakfast, lunch, or
dinner, and you'll soon realize that everything we eat and drink
has an evolutionary history. In Dinner with Darwin, join Jonathan
Silvertown for a multicourse meal of evolutionary gastronomy, a
tantalizing tour of human taste that helps us to understand the
origins of our diets and the foods that have been central to them
for millennia--from spices to spirits. A delectable concoction of
coevolution and cookery, gut microbiomes and microherbs, and both
the chicken and its egg, Dinner with Darwin reveals that our
shopping lists, recipe cards, and restaurant menus don't just
contain the ingredients for culinary delight. They also tell a
fascinating story about natural selection and its influence on our
plates--and palates. Digging deeper, Silvertown's repast includes
entrees into GMOs and hybrids, and looks at the science of our
sensory interactions with foods and cooking--the sights, aromas,
and tastes we experience in our kitchens and dining rooms. As is
the wont of any true chef, Silvertown packs his menu with eclectic
components, dishing on everything from Charles Darwin's intestinal
maladies to taste bud anatomy and turducken. Our evolutionary
relationship with food and drink stretches from the days of cooking
cave dwellers to contemporary creperies and beyond, and Dinner with
Darwin serves up scintillating insight into the entire, awesome
span. This feast of soup, science, and human society is one to
savor. With a wit as dry as a fine pinot noir and a cache of
evolutionary knowledge as vast as the most discerning connoisseur's
wine cellar, Silvertown whets our appetites--and leaves us hungry
for more.
In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie G. Murphy asks: 'what
would law be like if we organized it around the value of Christian
love, and if we thought about and criticized law in terms of that
value?'. This book brings together leading scholars from a variety
of disciplines to address that question. Scholars have given
surprisingly little attention to assessing how the central
Christian ethical category of love - agape - might impact the way
we understand law. This book aims to fill that gap by investigating
the relationship between agape and law in Scripture, theology, and
jurisprudence, as well as applying these insights to contemporary
debates in criminal law, tort law, elder law, immigration law,
corporate law, intellectual property, and international relations.
At a time when the discourse between Christian and other world
views is more likely to be filled with hate than love, the
implications of agape for law are crucial.
***NOW IN PAPERBACK*** School violence has become our new American
horror story, but it also has its roots in the way it comments on
western values with respect to violence, shame, mental illness,
suicide, humanity, and the virtual. Beyond Columbine: School
Violence and the Virtual offers a series of readings of school
shooting episodes in the United States as well as similar cases in
Finland, Germany, and Norway, among others and their relatedness.
The book expands the author's central premise from her earlier book
Failure to Hold, which explores the hidden curriculum of American
culture that is rooted in perceived inequality and the shame, rage,
and violence that it provokes. In doing so, it goes further to
explore the United States' outdated perceptual apparatus based on a
reflective liberal ideology and presents a new argument about
proprioception: the combined effect of a sustained lack of thought
(non-cognitive) in action that is engendered by digital media and
virtual culture. The present interpretation of the virtual is not
limited to video games but encompasses the entire perceptual field
of information sharing and media stylization (e.g., social
networking, television, and branding). More specifically, American
culture has immersed itself so thoroughly in a digital world that
its violence and responses to violence lack reflection to the point
where it confuses data with certainty. School-related violence is
presented as a dramatic series of events with Columbine as its
pilot episode.
East African, notably, Ethiopian, cuisine is perhaps the most well
known in the States. This volume illuminates West, southern, and
Central African cuisine as well to give students and other readers
a solid understanding of how the diverse African peoples grow,
cook, and eat food and how they celebrate special occasions and
ceremonies with special foods. Readers will also learn about
African history, religions, and ways of life plus how African and
American foodways are related. For example, cooking techniques such
as deep frying and ingredients such as peanuts, chili peppers,
okra, watermelon, and even cola were introduced to the United
States by sub-Sahara Africans who were brought as slaves. Africa is
often presented as a monolith, but this volume treats each region
in turn with representative groups and foodways presented in
manageable fashion, with a truer picture able to emerge. It is
noted that the boundaries of many countries are imposed, so that
food culture is more fluid in a region. Commonalities are also
presented in the basic format of a meal, with a starch with a sauce
or stew and vegetables and perhaps some protein, typically cooked
over a fire in a pot supported by three stones. Representative
recipes, a timeline, glossary, and evocative photos complete the
narrative.
Symposion is the Greek word for 'drinking together'-the social
institution of reclining on couches and enjoying the pleasures of
wine, sex, and song. Although the Greeks learned the rituals of
communal drinking from the Near East, they turned them into a way
of life entirely their own, such that for the male revellers they
were elevated into a conception of euphrosyne (bliss), the highest
form of pleasure. The symposion became a focal point of Greek
aristocratic art and culture in the archaic age, proclaimed in
poetry and the visual arts, while its structures affected the Greek
attitude to life in all its aspects, from the perception of
politics, society, philosophy, and psychology, to attitudes towards
sexuality, death, and religion. Even when the symposion began to
lose its dominance in the classical democratic city state, it was
never abandoned, but continued throughout the Hellenistic age and
was transmitted through trade and cultural contact to the
Etruscans, the Romans, and throughout the Mediterranean. One of the
longest surviving works from antiquity is an encyclopaedia of Greek
drinking customs compiled in the third century AD, and we can still
trace the remnants of this sympotic culture today: the story of
Greek pleasure thus lies both at the heart of antiquity and of the
western history and conception of pleasure, and even now continues
to resonate down the ages. Oswyn Murray's research on ancient Greek
drinking customs, beginning in 1983, ignited a major new field of
research in archaeology, art history, Greek literature, and Greek
history and established him as an expert in the field. This volume
consolidates his unrivalled contribution by gathering together the
numerous essays on sympotic subjects that he has written over a
span of thirty years, and charting half a lifetime of thought on a
theme on which he has had a shaping influence.
Our understandings of both ageing and spirituality are changing
rapidly in the twenty-first century, and grasping the significance
of later life spirituality is now crucial in the context of
extended longevity. Spiritual Dimensions of Ageing will inform and
engage those who study or practise in all fields that relate to the
lives of older people, especially in social, psychological and
health-related domains, but also wherever the maintenance and
development of spiritual meaning and purpose are recognised as
important for human flourishing. Bringing together an international
group of leading scholars across the fields of psychology,
theology, history, philosophy, sociology and gerontology, the
volume distils the latest advances in research on spirituality and
ageing, and engages in vigorous discussion about how we can
interpret this learning for the benefit of older people and those
who seek to serve and support them.
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in
different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It
highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender,
power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate
combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that
go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such
blends in different societies and continents developed from
trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters,
adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking
Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the
globe brought about by food and cooking.
Climate Change and the Media brings together an international group
of scholars to discuss one of the most important issues in human
history: climate change. Since public understanding of the issue
relies heavily on media coverage, the media plays a pivotal role in
the way we address it. This edited collection - the first scholarly
work to examine the relationship between climate change and the
media - examines the changing nature of media coverage around the
world, from the USA, the UK, and Europe, to China, Australasia, and
the developing world. Chapters consider the impact of public
relations and fictional programming, the relationship between
public understanding and media coverage, and the impact of the
media industries themselves on climate change. At a time when
governments must take action to alleviate the catastrophic risk
that climate change poses, this collection expertly details the
pivotal role the media plays in this most fundamental of issues.
Within popular culture, death is not the end, but instead a space
where the dead can exert agency whilst entertaining the consumer.
Popular culture enables the dead to be consumed by the living on a
mass global scale, actively engaging them with issues of mortality.
This book develops the sociological intersectionality between
death, the dead and popular culture by examining the agency of the
dead. Drawing upon the posthumous careers of the celebrity dead and
organ transplantation mythology in popular culture the dead are
shown to not be hampered by death but to benefit from the symbolic
and economic value they can generate. Meanwhile the fictional dead
- the Undead and the dead in crime drama - are conceptualised
through morbid sensibility and morbid space to mobilise consumer
consideration of mortality and even challenge the public wisdom
that contemporary Western society is in death denial and that death
is taboo. Death and the dead, within the parameters of popular
culture, form a palatable and normative bridge between viewers and
mortality, iterating the innate value and hidden depths of popular
culture in the study of contemporary society. This book will be of
interest to anybody who researches death, popular culture and
questions of mortality.
In this book, David Bello offers a new and radical interpretation
of how China's last dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), relied on the
interrelationship between ecology and ethnicity to incorporate the
country's far-flung borderlands into the dynasty's expanding
empire. The dynasty tried to manage the sustainable survival and
compatibility of discrete borderland ethnic regimes in Manchuria,
Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan within a corporatist 'Han Chinese'
imperial political order. This unprecedented imperial unification
resulted in the great human and ecological diversity that exists
today. Using natural science literature in conjunction with
under-utilized and new sources in the Manchu language, Bello
demonstrates how Qing expansion and consolidation of empire was
dependent on a precise and intense manipulation of regional
environmental relationships.
'Fifty years into my life journey I realise that, while I love
remote wild places and the peoples I meet there, it is in forests
that I find the greatest joy. Of all the forests that I have
explored, it is the great circumpolar Boreal forest of the North
that calls to me most. Here is a landscape where bush knowledge
really counts and where experience counts even more ... This book
has been thirty years in the making.' Out on the Land is an
absorbing exploration of, and tribute to, the circumpolar Boreal
forest of the North: its landscape, its people, their cultures and
skills, the wilderness that embodies it, and its immense beauty.
The book is vast in scope and covers every aspect of being in the
wilderness in both winter and summer (clothing, kit, skills,
cooking, survival), revealing the age-old traditions and
techniques, and how to carry them out yourself. It also includes
case studies of early explorers, as well as modern-day adventurers
who found themselves stranded in the forest and forced to work out
a way to survive. So much more than a bushcraft manual, this book
goes deeper, to the traditions and cultures that gave us these
skills, as well as focusing on the detail itself. Ray and Lars's
practical advice is wound around a deep love for the forest,
respect and admiration for the people who live there and sheer
enjoyment of the stunning scenery.
Education in Manliness explores the central educational ideal of
the Victorian and Edwardian public school. The book traces the
formulation of what Edward Thring, the most celebrated headmaster
of the era, termed 'true manliness', noting the debt to the
Platonic concept of the whole man and to Christian example, before
examining the ideal's best holistic practice at Uppingham and other
mid-Victorian schools. The central chapters follow the tilting of
manliness to the physical by the muscular Christians in the 1860s,
its distortion to Spartanism by the games masters and sporting dons
from the 1870s, and its hijacking by the advocates of esprit de
corps during the remainder of the century. The book lays bare the
total perversion of the ideal by the military imperialists in the
years up to the Great War, and traces the lifeline of holistic
education through the progressive school movement from the 1880s to
the 1970s. It then brings this up to date by comparing true
manliness with the 'wholeness' ideal of schools of the new
millennium. This book will be of great interest to scholars and
students in the fields of history of education and the theory and
practice of teaching, as well as school and university teachers,
teacher trainers and trainee teachers.
After spending a year in Tokyo, American teacher Alice Mabel Bacon
(1858-1918) became the first author to usher Western readers into
the graceful, paper-walled realm of the Japanese woman. An intimate
friend of several Japanese ladies, Bacon was privy to a domestic
world which remained closed to male visitors. This 1891 work begins
with birth and childhood, including the colourful, kimono-like
dress of infants, their ornate dolls, and their education in
handwriting, flower painting and etiquette. Trained for a lifetime
of service to her husband and his parents, the Japanese woman was
praised for her loyalty and obedience. But new Western influences,
especially on education, were challenging the old ways. Bacon
evocatively depicts Japanese women unsettled by their modern
education, yet saddled with traditional cultural expectations. With
its insight into Japan's class system, cultural history and moral
framework, this book remains an essential complement to any study
of Japanese social history.
The present volume brings together a range of case studies of myth
making and myth breaking in east Europe from the nineteenth century
to the present day. In particular, it focuses on the complex
process through which memories are transformed into myths. This
problematic interplay between memory and myth-making is analyzed in
conjunction with the role of myths in the political and social life
of the region. The essays include cases of forging myths about
national pre-history, about the endorsement of nation building by
means of historiography, and above all, about communist and
post-communist mythologies. The studies shed new light on the
creation of local and national identities, as well as the
legitimization of ideologies through myth-making. Together, the
contributions show that myths were often instrumental in the vast
projects of social and political mobilization during a period which
has witnessed, among others, two world wars and the harsh
oppression of the communist regimes.
Radical changes in our understanding of health and healthcare are
reshaping twenty-first-century personhood. In the last few years,
there has been a great influx of public policy and biometric
technologies targeted at engaging individuals in their own health,
increasing personal responsibility, and encouraging people to
"self-manage" their own care. One Blue Child examines the emergence
of self-management as a global policy standard, focusing on how
healthcare is reshaping our relationships with ourselves and our
bodies, our families and our doctors, companies, and the
government. Comparing responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand
and the Czech Republic, Susanna Trnka traces how ideas about
self-management, as well as policies inculcating self-reliance and
self-responsibility more broadly, are assumed, reshaped, and
ignored altogether by medical professionals, asthma sufferers and
parents, environmental activists, and policymakers. By studying
nations that share a commitment to the ideals of neoliberalism but
approach children's health according to very different cultural,
political, and economic priorities, Trnka illuminates how
responsibility is reformulated with sometimes surprising results.
This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International
Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights.
Authors are international experts in their fields, and the book
contains the most up-to-date information on the issue of genital
cutting of infants and children from medical, legal, bioethical,
and human rights perspectives.
Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century,
when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind
young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this
groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular
view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing
that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young
girls to sit still and work with their hands. Interviews with 1,800
elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls'
hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and
Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers
disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because
many village families depended on selling such goods. When
factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding
died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away,
Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the
social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.
Dali is a small region on a high plateau in Southeast Asia. Its
main deity, Baijie, has assumed several gendered forms throughout
the area's history: Buddhist goddess, the mother of Dali's founder,
a widowed martyr, and a village divinity. What accounts for so many
different incarnations of a local deity? Goddess on the Frontier
argues that Dali's encounters with forces beyond region and nation
have influenced the goddess's transformations. Dali sits at the
cultural crossroads of Southeast Asia, India, and Tibet; it has
been claimed by different countries but is currently part of Yunnan
Province in Southwest China. Megan Bryson incorporates
historical-textual studies, art history, and ethnography in her
book to argue that Baijie provided a regional identity that enabled
Dali to position itself geopolitically and historically. In doing
so, Bryson provides a case study of how people craft local
identities out of disparate cultural elements and how these local
identities transform over time in relation to larger historical
changes-including the increasing presence of the Chinese state.
Food: The Key Concepts presents an exciting, coherent and
interdisciplinary introduction to food studies for the beginning
reader. Food Studies is an increasingly complex field, drawing on
disciplines as diverse as Sociology, Anthropology and Cultural
Studies at one end and Economics, Politics and Agricultural Science
at the other. In order to clarify the issues, Food: The Key
Concepts distills food choices down to three competing
considerations: consumer identity; matters of convenience and
price; and an awareness of the consequences of what is consumed.
The book concludes with an examination of two very different future
scenarios for feeding the world's population: the technological
fix, which looks to science to provide the solution to our future
food needs; and the anthropological fix, which hopes to change our
expectations and behaviors. Throughout, the analysis is illustrated
with lively case studies. Bulleted chapter summaries, questions and
guides to further reading are also provided.
Contents: 1. Cultural Creativity on Stage 2. Rituals of Concheros Indians in Mexico 3. Christian Pilgrimages to Walsingham 4. Rituals in Shrines in Benin and Nigeria 5. Bullfighting in Cordoba 6. The Performance of the Welsh National Eisteddfod 7. Television in Bali and Ballet Performance
|
|