Etwa 3 Milliarden Genbausteine umfaAt das Erbgut des Menschen, an dessen EntschlA1/4sselung Forscher in aller Welt arbeiten. VerstAndlich und aktuell informiert dieses Buch A1/4ber die wichtigsten Forschungsprojekte und ihre Ergebnisse. Es zeigt, welche Hoffnungen in die medizinische Anwendung der Genforschung sich bislang erfA1/4llt haben, wo Gentests und Gentherapien heute mAglich sind oder wo sie in naher Zukunft entwickelt werden kAnnen. Eine kritische Diskussion gilt der Frage nach der Patentierung von Genen und der mAglichen Diskriminierung von Personen und Volksgruppen durch Gentests. An ausgewAhlten Beispielen wird schlieAlich gezeigt, wie sich mit Hilfe der Gene ein Blick zurA1/4ck in die Evolution tun lAAt. Ein ausfA1/4hrliches Glossar mit der ErklArung wichtiger Fachbegriffe schlieAt das Buch ab.

"Each of the essays in this volume deals with various facets of his work, and all of them should be read." . American Anthropologist "This book offers a unique insight into the influence of one of the discipline's most important theorists. James and Allen are thoughtful editors . . . their respect produces the best form of criticism in fourteen essays by British, and other European, anthropologists . . . This is intriguing and stimulating reading . . . Mauss's work receives careful attention in this book which is helpful, incisive, and broadly significant to anthropology." . JRAI Marcel Mauss, successor of Emile Durkheim and one-time teacher of Claude Levi-Strauss, continues to inspire social scientists across various disciplines. Only selected texts of Mauss's work have been translated into English, but of these, some, as for instance his "Essay on the Gift," have proved of key significance for the development of anthropology internationally. Wendy James has taught at the University of Khartoum and has research experience in the Sudan and Ethiopia. She is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. After studying classics and medicine N. J. Allen qualified in Social Anthropology at Oxford, undertaking fieldwork in Nepal. He is currently Reader in the Social Anthropology of South Asia at the University of Oxford.

Critically but sympathetically interrogating Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's analysis of the logic of sovereign power, this volume draws attention to the multiple zones of exclusion in and through which contemporary international politics constitutes itself.

Beginning from the margins and peripheries of world politics, this book emphasises the colonial processes through which contemporary "third world" spaces of exception have been shaped and particular bodies made susceptible to the conditions of "bare life." The authors contend that these bodies inhabit a variety of spaces or "zones of indistinction" that include political detainees, refugees, asylum-seekers, poor migrants, sweatshop workers, and unassimilated indigenous populations. These are the "expendable bodies" that the territorial and market-driven logic of current international relations simultaneously produces, polices and excludes. Focussing on the locally and socio-historically specific ways that sovereign power works, the individual chapters provide the volume with a wide geographical reach. Drawing on diverse approaches, this text constitutes an important intervention in critical international relations, providing grounded theory and sophisticated analyses of how contemporary international relations works through the production of ?exceptions?.

Bringing together a range of internationally-renowned scholars, International Relations and States of Exception will be of vital interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Critical Theory and Postcolonial Studies.

In a strategy deliberately counter to many earlier texts which focus on social aspects of death and dying this book will not examine death through the social prism of US or British culture alone. Drawing only on material from a single society gives readers the misleading impression of a universal experience. As a text in the sociology of death and dying this volume examines culture-specific images and experiences of death in three major western societies - Australia, Britain and the USA.

Analysing Practical and Professional Texts focuses on texts as constituents of human usage, showing how written documents and other 'texts' are integral to social organization. It reveals social organization itself to be not only textually-mediated in nature, but also textually-constituted, showing how texts - professional, technical or otherwise - as well as various social-scientific methodologies employ the resources of ordinary language. Theoretically sophisticated and illustrated with empirical examples, this book will be of interest not only to those with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, but also to social scientists and anthropologists concerned with text analysis, textual sense and the 'linguistic turn' in the methods of their own disciplines.

"The Sociology of Healthcare, Second Edition "explores the impact of current social changes on health, illness and healthcare, and provides an overview of the fundamental concerns in these areas. This new edition features a brand new chapter entitled 'End of Life' which will help health and social care workers to respond with confidence to one of the most difficult and challenging areas of care. The 'End of Life' chapter includes information on changing attitudes to death, theories of death and dying, and palliative care. All chapters have been thoroughly updated to address diversity issues such as gender, ethnicity and disability. In addition, expanded and updated chapters include 'Childhood and Adolescence' and 'Health Inequalities'.

The text is further enhanced through the use of case studies that relate theory to professional practice, and discussion questions to aid understanding. Links to websites direct the reader to further information on health, social wellbeing and government policies. This book is essential reading for all students of healthcare including nursing, medicine, midwifery and health studies and for those studying healthcare as part of sociology, social care and social policy degrees.

"In an age when health policy follows an individualist model of "personal responsibility" this book by Alan Clarke demonstrates with a vast array of evidence, just how much there is such a thing as society. An excellent overall book."
Dr. Stephen Cowden, Senior Lecturer in Social Work, Coventry University

This volume of "Political Power and Social Theory" addresses some of the most pressing questions of our times, from the origins and meaning of the war in Iraq to the transnational politics of immigration to the impact of race on labor organization to the historical underpinnings of corporate power. With careful attention to historical detail, with a keen eye for the value of inter-disciplinary social science inquiry, and with a view to various countries around the globe, this research annual once again unveils the complex dynamics of key contemporary and historical dilemmas that motivate citizens and scholars alike to struggle for a better future.

Exploring the contemporary sources, scope and intensity of nationality conflicts in the context of a disintegrating Soviet Empire, the authors address themselves to the resurgence of ethnicity and nationalism within the former Soviet imperium, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and China, and the consquences of perestroika and glasnost. Kumar Rupesinghe has also written "Conflict Resolution in Uganda" and "Ethnic Conflicts and Human Rights". Olga Vorkunova is also the author of "Konflikti v 'Tretem Mire' i Zapad" (conflict in the "Third World" and the West) and "Skandinavia i Mezhdunarodnie Konflikti" (Scandinavia and international conflict).

Studies of the military that deal with the actual experience of troops in the field are still rare in the social sciences. In fact, this ethnographic study of an elite unit in the Israeli Defense Force is the only one of its kind. As an officer of this unit and a professional anthropologist, the author was ideally positioned for his role as participant observer. During the eight years he spent with his unit he focused primarily on such notions as "conflict", "the enemy", and "soldiering" because they are, he argues, the key points of reference for "what we are" and "what we are trying to do" and form the basis for interpreting the environment within which armies operate. Relying on the latest anthropological approaches to cognitive models and the social constructions of emotion and masculinity, the author offers an in-depth analysis of the dynamics that drive the men's attitudes and behavior, and a rare and fascinating insight into the reality of military life.

Through in-depth analysis of advertisements, politics and group-based practices, this book analyses the complex local, regional, and national historical developments related to the making of the Indian consumer across a century of global involvement. In assessing the nationalist discourse, debates on the morality of consumption and public and private spheres, the book demonstrates how the Indian consumer was both imagined and informed and how the politics of consumption formed the consumer society in India. Shedding new light on consumer cultures in India, the book will be of interest to academics from interdisciplinary fields such as anthropology, history, geography, sociology, South Asian studies and area studies, popular and visual cultures.

Russell Keat presents a theoretical challenge to extensions of the market domain and the introduction of commercially modelled forms of organization in areas such as broadcasting, the arts and academic research. Drawing on Walzer's pluralistic conception of social goods, and MacIntyre's account of social practices, he argues that cultural activities of this kind, and the institutions within which they are conducted, can best make their distinctive contributions to human well being when protected from the damaging effects of an unbounded market.

Each family has its secrets, ones that shape family communication and relationships in a way generally unknown to the outsider and often the family itself. Autoethnographers, students of these relationships, confront many silences in their attempts to understand these social worlds. It is often the accidental slip, the spontaneous discussion, the offhanded comment that opens this terrain of secrets to the conscientious storyteller. Accidental Ethnography delves into this shadowy world of pain and loss in the hopes of finding productive, ethical avenues for transforming the secret lives of families into powerful narratives of hope. It merges autoethnographic method with the therapeutic power of storytelling to heal family wounds. Poulos's lyrical text will appeal to those in ethnography, interpersonal communication, and family relationships alike.

"This fascinating and informative collection of twenty-two mostly original essays showcases feminist German Studies at its finest ... Decentering Germany in our own scholarly work will help us to further challenge the settled definitions of gender and Germanness which this volume so splendidly details." . Women in German

Cultural Studies have been preoccupied with questions of national identity and cultural representations. At the same time, feminist studies have insisted upon the entanglement of gender with issues of nation, class, and ethnicity. Developments in the wake of German unification demand a reassessment of the nexus of gender, Germanness and nationhood. The contributors to this volume pursue these strands of the cultural debate in German history, literature, visual arts, and language over a period of three hundred years in sections devoted to History and the Canon, Visual Culture, Germany and Her "Others," and Language and Power.

Written by one of the most eminent scholars in the field, Ethnographies of Reason is a unique book in terms of the studies it presents, the perspective it develops and the research techniques it illustrates. Using concrete case study materials throughout, Eric Livingston offers a fundamentally different, ethnographic approach to the study of skill and reasoning. At the same time, he addresses a much neglected topic in the literature, illustrating practical techniques of ethnomethodological research and showing how such studies are actually conducted. The book is a major contribution to ethnomethodology, to social science methodology and to the study of skill and reasoning more generally.

God and Gaia explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It argues that a Gaian approach to the ecological crisis involves rebalancing human and more-than-human influences on Earth by reviving the ecological agency of local and indigenous human communities, and of nonhuman beings. Present-day human ecological influences on Earth have been growing at pace since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when modern humans adopted a machine cosmology in which humans are the sole intelligent agency. The resultant imbalance between human and Earthly agencies is degrading the species diversity of ecosystems, causing local climate changes, and threatens to destabilise the Earth as a System. Across eight chapters this ambitious text engages with traditional cosmologies from the Indian Vedas and classical Greece to Medieval Christianity, with case material from Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Great Britain. It discusses concepts such as deep time and ancestral time, the ethics of genetic engineering of foods and viruses, and holistic ecological management. Northcott argues that an ontological turn that honours the differential agency of indigenous humans and other kind, and that draws on sacred traditions, will make it is possible to repair the destabilising impacts of contemporary human activities on the Earth System and its constituent ecosystems. This book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, history, and cultural and religious studies.

The notion that intelligence is somehow related to race is a notoriously tenacious issue in America. Anthropologist Alexander Alland provides the most comprehensive overview of the recent history of research on race and IQ, offering critiques of the biological determinism of Carlton Coon, Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz, William Shockley, Michael Levin, and others. This reasoned, authoritative history also explains the basis of evolutionary genetics for the general reader, concluding that biologically, “race” cannot explain human variation. Written in a lively, conversational style, Alland imparts real, substantive scientific arguments, cuts through the ideological posturing and jargon that so often characterizes discussions about race, and shows us a more nuanced and scientifically valid way to understand the diversity that is the human condition.

In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in culture-bound psychiatric syndromes. A spate of new papers has been published on well known and less familiar syndromes, and there have been a number of attempts to put some order into the field of inquiry. In a review of the literature on culture-bound syndromes up to 1969 Yap made certain suggestions for organizing thinking about them which for the most part have not received general acceptance (see Carr, this volume, p. 199). Through the seventies new descriptive and conceptual work was scarce, but in the last few years books and papers discussing the field were authored or edited by Tseng and McDermott (1981), AI-Issa (1982), Friedman and Faguet (1982) and Murphy (1982). In 1983 Favazza summarized his understanding of the state of current thinking for the fourth edition of the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, and a symposium on culture-bound syndromes was organized by Kenny for the Eighth International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology. The strong est impression to emerge from all this recent work is that there is no substantive consensus, and that the very concept, "culture-bound syndrome" could well use some serious reconsideration. As the role of culture-specific beliefs and prac tices in all affliction has come to be increasingly recognized it has become less and less clear what sets the culture-bound syndromes apart."

The use of food to negotiate status is found in all human societies. Here, for the first time, a single book brings together contributions from different disciplines to investigate, from ethological and anthropological perspectives, behavior that appears to have biological roots such as the tendency to seek status through the medium of food. It explores the limits that our biological heritage places on cultural expressions of such behavior, as well as the multiplicity of ways in which biologically based tendencies can be transformed by culture. Finally, it addresses the impact of status-seeking on nutritional programs in developing countries.

Food preferences and tastes are among the fundamentals affecting human existence; the sociocultural, physiological and neurological factors involved have therefore been widely researched and are well documented. However, information and debate on these factors are scattered across the academic literature of different disciplines. In this volume cross-disciplinary perspectives are brought together by an international team of contributors that includes socialand biological anthropologists, ethologists and ethnologists, psychologists, neurologists and zoologists in order to provide access to the different specialisms on the topic.

Each family has its secrets, ones that shape family communication and relationships in a way generally unknown to the outsider and often the family itself. Autoethnographers, students of these relationships, confront many silences in their attempts to understand these social worlds. It is often the accidental slip, the spontaneous discussion, the offhanded comment that opens this terrain of secrets to the conscientious storyteller. Accidental Ethnography delves into this shadowy world of pain and loss in the hopes of finding productive, ethical avenues for transforming the secret lives of families into powerful narratives of hope. It merges autoethnographic method with the therapeutic power of storytelling to heal family wounds. Poulos's lyrical text will appeal to those in ethnography, interpersonal communication, and family relationships alike.

The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of the southeastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s,they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the last fifteen years, Arakmbut survival has been under threat from a goldrush that has attracted hundreds of colonists onto their territories. This trilogy of books traces the ways in which the Arakmbut overcome the dangers that surround them: their mythology and cultural strength; their social flexibility; and their capacity to incorporate non-indigenous concepts and activities into their defence strategies. Each area is punctuated by the constant presence of the invisible spirit, which provides a seamless theme connecting the books to each other. The death of a shaman in 1980 had an enormous spiritual and political consequences for one of the Arakmbut communities, resulting in a shift in its social organization from comparative hierarchy to a more egalitarian system. The author uses this case as an illustration to challenge the idea that indigenous peoples live in fossilized, static worlds. He shows that political activities in conjunction with shamanic communication with the spirit world provide the impetus and context for change. Buy all three volumes for 20% discount

Citizenship implies exclusion of non-members. Migrations, processes and policies of first admission and incorporation of ethnically and culturally diverse newcomers are among the most hotly contested political issues, especially in a world of gross inequalities. This comparative and interdisciplinary collection sees distinguished moral and political philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists from America, Australia and Europe criticize existing institutions and increasingly restrictive policies and look for alternatives more in line with principles and constitutions of liberal democratic welfare states.

This book explores ethnographic studies of diagnostic work in diverse settings. Switching attention from product ('diagnosis') to process ('diagnosing'), it reveals the importance of collaborative, socio-material, technologically augmented practices, exploring the potential of the multi-disciplinary studies presented to inform innovation.

Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of "Homo sapiens" as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul.

At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.

The essays in this volume present contemporary anthropological perspectives on Chinese kinship, its historical complexity and its modern metamorphoses. The collection draws particular attention to the reverberations of larger socio-cultural and politico-economic processes in the formation of sociality, intimate relations, family histories, reproductive strategies and gender relations - and vice-versa. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic material from the late imperial period and from contemporary Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, from northern and southern regions as well as from rural and urban settings, the volume provides unique insights into the historical and spatial diversities of the Chinese kinship experience. This emphasis on diversity challenges the classic 'lineage paradigm' of Chinese kinship and establishes a dialogue with contemporary anthropological debates about human kinship reflecting on the emergence of radically new family formations in the Euro-American context. Chinese Kinship will be of interest to anthropologists and sinologists, as to historians and social scientists in general.