This book invites readers on a journey through time, to explore the multifaceted history of Central Asia. Through transcontinental passages such as the Silk Road, the book provides links among the major civilizations of China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean, which in turn influences the characteristics of the region and beyond. For over seven thousand years, Central Asian residents have left a record of distinguished cultural artifacts. Like creators and innovators of any age or period, they sought to respond as creatively as possible to the necessities of their societies as a whole, and those of their individual patrons. In doing so they have given us a timeless source through which we can detect the dynamic stages of their creativity throughout history, as well as the breadth of our own rich cultural and artistic heritage.

As a field, anthropology brings an explicit evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior. Each of anthropology's four main subfields - sociocultural, biological, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology--acknowledges that Homo sapiens has a long evolutionary history that must be acknowledged if one is to know what it means to be a human being (What is Anthropology?).

The papers in this volume embody the view of anthropology explicit in the above statement. Behavioral ecology explains human behavior through the application of evolutionary theory in ecological context. It focuses on how behavior is influenced by the constraints of reproduction and resources acquisition. As a result, its purview is a wide swath of anthropology, especially economic anthropology. Human behavior varies through the life course, and humans make choices or exhibit behavioral variation depending on the costs, benefits, and constraints of local socioeconomic contexts. Pan-human conscious and unconscious processes generate these ???decisions???, because over evolutionary time scales they produced, on average, behavior that increased the relative reproductive success of their bearers. Behavioral ecology examines these adaptive behavioral responses to local conditions.

The volume??'s papers demonstrate behavioral ecology's maturation as a subfield of anthropology. They demonstrate the breadth of problems that can be gainfully addressed within the paradigm and the richness of specific hypotheses and data that this perspective can generate. The papers also show how behavioral ecology conceptually integrates the core of biological anthropology with the other subdisciplines by providing a common frameworkfor investigating and understanding basic economic questions.

The Day of the Dead is the most important annual celebration in Oaxaca, Mexico. Skillfully combining textual information and photographic imagery, this book begins with a discussion of the people of Oaxaca, their way of life, and their way of looking at the world. It then takes the reader through the celebration from the preparations that can begin months in advance through to the private gatherings in homes and finally to the cemetery where the villagers celebrate together - both the living and the dead. The voices in the book are of those people who have participated in the Day of the Dead for as long as they can remember. There are no ghosts here. Only the souls of loved ones who have gone to the Village of the Dead and who are allowed to return once a year to be with their family. Very readable and beautifully illustrated, this book provides an extensive discussion of the people of Oaxaca, their way of life and their beliefs, which make the Day of the Dead logical and easily comprehensible.

The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data - brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology - the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body - this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors' shared interest in 'the body' and visualising technologies.

Jeanette Edwards is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England (2000); co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (2nd edition, 1999); co-editor of European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology (2009); and coeditor, with Harvey and Wade, of Anthropology and Science (2007).

Penelope Harvey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester and co-Director of CRESC (ESRC Centre for Research on Socio- Cultural Change). She has done ethnographic research in Peru, Spain and the UK, and published on engineering practice, state formation, information technologies and the politics of communication.

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His publications include Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997); Music, Race and Nation (2000); Race, Nature and Culture (2002); and Race and Sex in Latin America (2009).

Jerome Braun, known for his writings in interdisciplinary social science, an approach he calls pragmatic critical theory, here provides a book that discusses issues relevant to the moral underpinnings of democratic society, including issues of social evolution and of culture and personality. This book returns critical theory to its roots in both psychology and the social sciences. It shows some of the relationships between equality in a political and social sense and personal identity that either relates well to such equality, or rebels against it. All this reflects processes of social and cultural influence that involve not only random change but also processes of social and cultural evolution that themselves have effects regarding potentials for self-fulfillment and even public morality. This book provides a framework to help one study the interaction between individual aspirations and social opportunities.

This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Psychology (particularly in the areas of Psychology of Personality and Cultural Psychology), Sociology (especially those interested in Sociology of Alienation and Sociology of Culture, as well as Sociology of Mental Health), Anthropology (particularly in the area of Psychological Anthropology), Cultural Studies, and Social Theory in general.

In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the "spirited modernities" that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.

Kirsten W. Endres is a Senior Research Fellow and Head of Research Group at Department II, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale. Her monograph, "Performing the Divine: Mediums, Markets and Modernity in Urban Vietnam" (2011), examines the flourishing of urban spirit mediumship as part of the recent revival of popular religion in Vietnam.

Andrea Lauser is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Georg-August-University, Gottingen, Germany. She is a member of and lecturer in a new area studies network "Dynamics of Religion in Southeast-Asia," composed of the Southeast Asia departments of Hamburg, Berlin, Muenster, Heidelberg and Gottingen, and funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

This book concerns the Beijing Hutong and changing perceptions of space, of social relations and of self, as processes of urban redevelopment remove Hutong dwellers from their traditional homes to new high-rise apartments. It addresses questions of how space is humanly built and transformed, classified and differentiated, and most importantly how space is perceived and experienced. This study elaborates and expands Lefebvre's "trialectic" of space on a theoretical level. The ethnography presented is a conversation with Tim Ingold's argument about "empty space". This research employs the ethnographic technique of participant-observation to secure a finely textured, detailed and micro-social account of local experience. Then, these micro-social insights are contextualized within macro-social structures of Chinese modernism by speaking to geographical concerns, orientalism and history.

The notion of "natural law" has repeatedly furnished human beings with a shared grammar in times of moral and cultural crisis. Stoic natural law, for example, emerged precisely when the Ancient World lost the Greek polis, which had been the point of reference for Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophy. In key moments such as this, natural law has enabled moral and legal dialogue between peoples and traditions holding apparently clashing world-views. This volume revisits some of these key moments in intellectual and social history, partly with an eye to extracting valuable lessons for ideological conflicts in the present and perhaps near future. The contributions to this volume discuss both historical and contemporary schools of natural law. Topics on historical schools of natural law include: how Aristotelian theory of rules paved the way for the birth of the idea of "natural law"; the idea's first mature account in Cicero's work; the tension between two rival meanings of "man's rational nature" in Aquinas' natural law theory; and the scope of Kant's allusions to "natural law." Topics on contemporary natural law schools include: John Finnis's and Germain Grisez's "new natural law theory"; natural law theories in a "broader" sense, such as Adolf Reinach's legal phenomenology; Ortega y Gasset's and Scheler's "ethical perspectivism"; the natural law response to Kelsen's conflation of democracy and moral relativism; natural law's role in 20th century international law doctrine; Ronald Dworkin's understanding of law as "a branch of political morality"; and Alasdair Macintyre's "virtue"-based approach to natural law. "

Religion and the Social Order

Peruvians Dispersed presents an anthropological study of transnational migration to the United States, Spain, Japan and Argentina. Karsten Paerregaard spent a total of one year living with Peruvian migrants in four continents which allowed him to make ethnographic in-depth descriptions of Peru's many migrant communities and at the same time discuss how immigration and labor market policies in the Global North both thwart and spur migration from the Global South. The book also offers an innovative contribution to the methodological debate about multi-sited field research, which in recent years has become prominent among scholars studying processes of globalization, transnationalism and multiculturalism. Because of the wide span of social groups in Peru that migrate and the global dispersion of Peruvians in America, Asia and Europe; the study of the Peruvian migration offers a unique opportunity to rethink current attempts to theorize transnational and diasporic migration and develop the methodological and analytical framework for a global ethnography.

This study explores Hollywood's invention of Britain through the adaptation of its literature. Utilizing Derrida's Margins of Philosophy , texts by Gilles Deleuze and his work with Felix Guattari, this text identifies the future of British and Anglophone literary and cultural studies as a group of citations appropriated for American ends.

Based on a detailed ethnography, this book explores the promises and expectations of tourism in Cuba, drawing attention to the challenges that tourists and local people face in establishing meaningful connections with each other. Notions of informal encounter and relational idiom illuminate ambiguous experiences of tourism harassment, economic transactions, hospitality, friendship, and festive and sexual relationships. Comparing these various connections, the author shows the potential of touristic encounters to redefine their moral foundations, power dynamics, and implications, offering new insights into how contemporary relationships across difference and inequality are imagined and understood.

One of the major themes of human population genetics is assaying genetic variation in human populations. The ultimate goal of this objective is to understand the extent of genetic diversity and the use of this knowledge to reconstruct our evolutionary history. The discipline had undergone a revolutionary transition with the advent of molecular techniques in the 1980s. With this shift, statistical methods have also been developed to perceive the biological and molecular basis of human genetic variation. Using the new perspectives gained during the above transition, this volume describes the applications of molecular markers spanning the autosomal, Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial genome in the analysis of human diversity in contemporary populations. This is the first reference book of its kind to bring together data from these diverse sets of markers for understanding evolutionary histories and relationships of modern humans in a single volume.

Peter Worsley's studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, which got him interested in anthropology. He then went into mass education in Tanganyika, studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester, and won the Curl Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, but, in the McCarthy epoch, was banned from Africa, so went to Australia where he was again banned, this time from New Guinea, but did field-research for his Ph.D. on an Australian Aboriginal tribe. His subsequent book on 'Cargo' cults in Melanesia is now regarded as a classic, but his left-wing politics ensured that he could not get a job in anthropology, so he switched to sociology, returning to Manchester as the first Professor of Sociology, just in time to join a British Government Mission to Tanzania - and to be deeply involved in the student revolution. His book on The Third World introduced that term into the English language, while the Penguin edition of Introducing Sociology sold over half a million copies. He went to China a few months after Nixon. On retirement as Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, he taught in New York, where he wrote Knowledges.

"Given the lack of information about this population in the Westrn world, the focused materials presented in this book help build a better information base on the diverse practices and beliefs of Iranian outside their homeland." . Choice " This] first full-length study of the Iranian Muslim diaspora in Britain . . . enhances our empirical and theoretical understanding." . The Muslim World Book Review An estimated 75,000 Iranians emigrated to Britain after the 1979 revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. They are politically, religiously, socio-economically and ethnically heterogeneous, and have found themselves in the ongoing process of settlement. The aim of this book is to explore facets of this process by examining the ways in which religious traditions and practices have been maintained, negotiated and rejected by Iranians from Muslim backgrounds and how they have served as identity-building vehicles during the course of migration, in relation to the political, economic, and social situation in Iran and Britain. While the ethnographic focus is on Iranians, this book touches on more general questions associated with the process of migration, transnational societies, Diasporas, and religious as well as ethnic minorities. Kathryn Spellman received her MSc. and Ph.D. in Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she is currently an Honorary Research Fellow. She is a lecturer of sociology at Huron International University in London and Syracuse University (London Campus). Kathryn is also a Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre of Migration Studies Department at the University of Sussex.

How does one explain the poverty and marginalization of a group that lives in a remarkably successful economy and peaceful society? A native anthropologist, the author provides critical insight into the dynamics of contemporary Mauritian society. In her meticulously researched study of ethnic, gender and racial discrimination in Mauritius, she addresses debates carried out in many developing societies on subaltern identities, ethnicity, poverty and social injustice. The book therefore also offers important empirical material for scholars interested in the wider Indian Ocean region and beyond.

Entries in this dictionary focus on the people, organizations, events, and ideas that have been significant in the slightly more than two centuries of political communication in this country. The intent is to highlight those events and ideas that still have significance today--thus from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the threshold of the 21st century.

The history of political communication and how that history has repeated itself is examined in this volume. Entries arranged from A to Z, deal with freedom of the press and the major threats to freedom of the press; successful and unsuccessful political campaigns, and the changes that have occurred in political communication as well as the tradition that has emerged in the slightly more than two centuries we have been engaged in it. By offering the reader insight into the evolution of political communication as an academic field, this reference will be useful to students and scholars in the disciplines of political science, political communication, mass communication, U.S. history, and related fields, as well as academic and selected public libraries.

This book examines how Western behavioral science--which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature--holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these extraordinary dialogues as well as engaging essays exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.

Biologists and anthropologists in Japan have played a crucial role in the development of primatology as a scientific discipline. Publication of Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior under the editorship of Tetsuro Matsuzawa reaffirms the pervasive and creative role played by the intellectual descendants of Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani in the fields of behavioral ecology, psychology, and cognitive science. Matsuzawa and his colleagues-humans and other primate partners- explore a broad range of issues including the phylogeny of perception and cognition; the origin of human speech; learning and memory; recognition of self, others, and species; society and social interaction; and culture. With data from field and laboratory studies of more than 90 primate species and of more than 50 years of long-term research, the intellectual breadth represented in this volume makes it a major contribution to comparative cognitive science and to current views on the origin of the mind and behavior of humans.

This book studies the three concepts of translation, education and innovation from a Nordic and international perspective on Japanese and Korean societies. It presents findings from pioneering research into cultural translation, Japanese and Korean linguistics, urban development, traditional arts, and related fields. Across recent decades, Northern European scholars have shown increasing interest in East Asia. Even though they are situated on opposite sides of the Eurasia landmass, the Nordic nations have a great deal in common with Japan and Korea, including vibrant cultural traditions, strong educational systems, and productive social democratic economies. Taking a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach, and in addition to the examination of the three key concepts, the book explores several additional intersecting themes, including sustainability, nature, humour, aesthetics, cultural survival and social change, discourse and representation. This book offers a collection of original interdisciplinary research from the 25th anniversary conference of the Nordic Association for Japanese and Korean Studies (2013). Its 21 chapters are divided into five parts according to interdisciplinary themes: Translational Issues in Literature, Analyses of Korean and Japanese Languages, Language Education, Innovation and New Perspectives on Culture, and The Arts in Innovative Societies.

"Ambiguous Memory" examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views.

Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity.

This investigation of time and space is motivated by gaps in our current understanding: by the lack of definitions, by our failure to appreciate the nature of these entities, by our inability to pin down their properties. The author's approach is based on two key ideas: The first idea is to seek the geo-historical origins of time and space concepts. A thorough investigation of a diversified archaeological corpus, allows him to draft coherent definitions; it furthermore gives clues as to whether time and space were discovered or invented. The second idea is to define the units before trying to define space and time. The results presented here are unexpected: Time and space were not discovered in nature, but they were invented; time is not a phenomenon and space has no materiality; they are only concepts. This runs contrary to the opinion of most scientific and the philosophical authorities, although one would seek in vain for a theoretical validation of the conventional position. This book will provide much food for thought for philosophers and scientists, as well as interested general readers.

This book compiles research from leading experts in the social, behavioral, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, as well as local and global understandings of the concept, and on lived practices around the world. It contains studies focusing on ways of living, acting, and thinking which claim to favor the local and global ecological systems of which we are a part, and on which we depend for survival. The concept of sustainability as a product of concern about global environmental degradation, rising social inequalities, and dispossession is presented as a key concept. The contributors explore the opportunities to engage with questions of sustainability and to redefine the concept of sustainability in anthropological terms.

What is "too fat?" "Too thin"? Interpretations of body weight vary widely across and within cultures. Meeting weight expectations is a major concern for many people because failing to do so may incur dire social consequences, such as difficulty in finding a romantic partner or even in locating adequate employment. Without these social and cultural pressures, body weight would be only a health issue. While socially constructed standards of body weight may seem immutable, they are continuously re-created through social interactions that perpetuate or transform expectations about fatness and thinness. Understanding social constructions of body weight requires insight regarding how people develop and use constructions in their daily lives. While structural conditions and cultural environments make important contributions to weight constructions, the chapters in this book focus on the "social processes" in which people engage while they interpret, negotiate, resist, and transform cultural definitions and expectations. As such, most of the chapters in this volume borrow from and contribute to a symbolic interactionist perspective. Written by sociologists, psychologists, and nutritionists, all of the chapters in "Interpreting Weight" focus on how people construct fatness and thinness. The contributors examine different strategies used to interpret body weight, such as negotiating weight identities, reinterpreting weight, and becoming involved in weight-related organizations. Together, these chapters emphasize the many ways that people actively define, construct, and enact their fatness and thinness in a variety of settings and situations.