A proliferation of press headlines, social science texts and "ethical" concerns about the social implications of recent developments in human genetics and biomedicine have created a sense that, at least in European and American contexts, both the way we treat the human body and our attitudes towards it have changed. This volume asks what really happens to social relations in the face of new types of transaction - such as organ donation, forensic identification and other new medical and reproductive technologies - that involve the use of corporeal material. Drawing on comparative insights into how human biological material is treated, it aims to consider how far human bodies and their components are themselves inherently "social." The case studies - ranging from animal-human transformations in Amazonia to forensic reconstruction in post-conflict Serbia and the treatment of Native American specimens in English museums - all underline that, without social relations, there are no bodies but only "human remains." The volume gives us new and striking ethnographic insights into bodies as sociality, as well as a potentially powerful analytical reconsideration of notions of embodiment. It makes a novel contribution, too, to "science and society" debates.

An annotated filmography of more than 3,000 entries each focusing on the film's Hispanic content, connection, or characters. Four separate indexes, more than 6,000 cross references, and as many film reviews make this work an invaluable reference tool for students, scholars, and individuals interested in studying silver screen stereotyping. This work completes Richard's three-volume documentation of how the domestic and international film industry contributed to stereotyping America's Hispanic community by detailing the contemporary return of the despicable Hispanic character. Employing the broadest conceptual framework to include any individual of Spanish ancestry, this volume outlines how the film industry has homogenized the Latin, the Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and anyone from Mexico, Central/South America or the Caribbean nations into a despicable Spic (an ethnic enemy) whose negative traits/character have been conditioned by his national origins. The return of the negative image is due to a variety of reasons, and one thing is for certain--it has been profitable for filmmakers. There is no other such reference work presently in print that represents the definitive collection of films with Hispanic themes and connections in any language.

This book explores the knowledge, work and life of Pacific coastal populations from the Pacific Northwest to Panama. Center stage in this volume is the knowledge people acquire on coastal and marine ecosystems. Material and aesthetic benefits from interacting with the environment contribute to the ongoing building of coastal cultures. The contributors are particularly interested in how local knowledge -either recently generated or transmitted along generations- interfaces with science, conservation, policy and artistic expression. Their observations exhibit a wide array of outcomes ranging from resource and human exploitation to the magnification of cultural resilience and coastal heritage. The interdisciplinary nature of ethnobiology allows the chapter authors to have a broad range of freedom when examining their subject matter. They build a multifaceted understanding of coastal heritage through the different lenses offered by the humanities, social sciences, oceanography, fisheries and conservation science and, not surprisingly, the arts. Coastal Heritage and Cultural Resilience establishes an intimate bond between coastal communities and the audience in a time when resilience of coastal life needs to be celebrated and fortified.

Crude Domination is an innovative and important book about a critical topic - oil. While there have been numerous works about petroleum from 'experience-far' perspectives, there have been relatively few that have turned the 'experience-near' ethnographic gaze of anthropology on the topic. Crude Domination does just this among more peoples and more places than any other volume. Its chapters investigate nuances of culture, politics and economics in Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia as they pertain to petroleum. They wrestle with the key questions vexing scholars and practitioners alike: problems of the economic blight of the resource curse, underdevelopment, democracy, violence and war. Additionally they address topics that may initially appear insignificant - such as child witches and lionmen, fighting for oil when there is no oil, reindeer nomadism, community TV - but which turn out on closer scrutiny to be vital for explaining conflict and transformation in petro-states. Based upon these rich, new worlds of information, the text formulates a novel, domination approach to the social analysis of oil.

The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process - one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the overall tourism experience. It is for this reason, the authors argue, that special attention should be given to how expectations constitute and sustain tourism. The case studies presented here explore what fuels desires to visit particular places, when and how enchantment with tourist destinations begins, and to what degree expectations inform the actual experience of place. Careful attention is paid as to how the imagination of the visitors inspires the imagination of the hosts, and vice-versa, how tourists and host communities actively imagine, re-imagine, and shape each other's lives. This realization, it is argued, has profound consequences, not solely for academic analysis, but for all those who participate in and work within the tourism industry.

With contributions from 70 experienced practitioners from around the world, this second edition of the authoritative Handbook of Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology provides a solid foundation in both the practical and ethical components of forensic work. The book weaves together the discipline's historical development; current field methods for analyzing crime, natural disasters, and human atrocities; an array of laboratory techniques; key case studies involving legal, professional, and ethical issues; and ideas about the future of forensic work--all from a global perspective. This fully revised second edition expands the geographic representation of the first edition by including chapters from practitioners in South Africa and Colombia, and adds exciting new chapters on the International Commission on Missing Persons and on forensic work being done to identify victims of the Battle of Fromelles during World War I. The Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology provides an updated perspective of the disciplines of forensic archaeology and anthropology.

This work examines both the emergence of African literature and its institutionalization within nationalist African academies. Amoko analyzes the relationship between such institutions of literature and the processes of nationalist legitimization and between colonial and postcolonial school cultures and national cultures.

Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the "trial communities" produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.

Astronomers around the world are pointing their telescopes toward the heavens, searching for signs of intelligent life. If they make contact with an advanced alien civilization, how will humankind respond? In thinking about first contact, the contributors to this volume present new empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Archaeologists and astronomers explore the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, using scientific insights to estimate such elusive factors as the longevity of technological societies. Sociologists present the latest findings of novel surveys, tapping into the public's attitudes about life beyond Earth to show how religion and education influence beliefs about extraterrestrials. Scholars from such diverse disciplines as mathematics, chemistry, journalism, and religious studies offer innovative solutions for bridging the cultural gap between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, while recognizing the tremendous challenges of communicating at interstellar distances. At a time when new planets are being discovered around other stars at an unprecedented rate, this collection provides a much needed guide to the human impact of discovering we are not alone in the universe.

Explores research in economic anthropology. This title examines topics such as rethinking the informal economy; specialization, exchange and power in small-scale societies and chiefdoms; and, approaches to prehistoric economies.

The constant flow of people, ideas, and commodities across the Atlantic propelled the development of a public sphere and a transnational urban imaginary, influencing national and international cultural and political intersections and innovations. The contributors in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World explore the multiple ways in which a growing urban consciousness was integrated into the more cosmopolitan and transnational creation of an Atlantic public sphere. Wide-ranging, this volume brings together research using a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from social history to literary studies, and from indigenous studies and Africana studies to theatre history.

A professor of nursing, expert in multicultural health care and social services, describes the basic attitudes and beliefs of 15 important ethnic and religious groups in America and shows how these traits can affect behavior during illness or during social work interventions. Sensitive to problems of stereotyping, each chapter on an immigrant group provides some information about its homeland and population in the United States and then discusses the culture's modes of communication, its socioeconomic status, chief complaints, traditional family system, religious beliefs, views toward the elderly, child-rearing practices, culturally based health beliefs and practices, dietary patterns, characteristics relating to morbidity and mortality, beliefs about death and dying, physical assessment, and sources for further reading. The introduction points to a few key sources for continuing information about the care of multicultural patients and clients.

Internet activism is playing a crucial role in the democratic reform happening across many parts of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this study offers an in-depth examination of the workings of the Internet at the local level. In fact, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia's electronic governance laboratory. The author explores its field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, civil servants, politicians, online journalists and other social agents struggle over how the locality is to be governed at the dawn of the 'Information Era'. Drawing on the field theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester School of political anthropology, this study challenges the unquestioned predominance of 'network' and 'community' as the two key sociation concepts in contemporary Internet studies. The analysis extends field theory in four new directions, namely the complex articulations between personal networking and social fields, the uneven diffusion and circulation of new field technologies and contents, intra- and inter-field political crises, and the emergence of new forms of residential sociality.

This volume is a collection of papers from the British Sociological Association conference, Worlds of the Future. The central themes of the conference were ethnicity and nationalism in the contemporary world. Older discourses on national sovereignty and statehood are evaluated in terms of their validity within a world increasingly defined by transnational integration and global economic competition.

The Syrian state's rhetoric of Arab nationalism left little room for the official recognition of minority identities in pre-war Syria. Yet in practice, the state continually engaged with the Druze and other minorities to reinforce its legitimacy, often through cultural policy. Uncovering this neglected aspect of pre-war Syrian politics, Kastrinou explores the cultural politics of marriage in Syria, primarily among the Druze, to reveal how practical rituals of marriage inform sectarian and national identity formation.Challenging the assumed inherence of sectarianism and Druze endogamy, the book provides an historical and ethnographic account of political power and its relation to social control in Syria. It demonstrates the centrality of the body to Druze cosmology and how ritual performances of birth, marriage and death maintain and negotiate sectarian cohesion. Connecting these struggles to national and international politics, Kastrinou examines how both the Syrian government and the European Union have sponsored marriage-themed dance performances in Syria, each leveraging its cultural importance to legitimise their own policy goals. The book establishes marriage as a pervasive idiom for the construction of collective identity in Syria, which is appropriated by individuals, sects, states and intergovernmental organizations alike. Its conclusions are relevant to scholars of Middle East studies, sectarianism, anthropology and politics.

In Everyday Conceptions of Emotion, prominent anthropologists, linguists and psychologists come together for the first time to discuss how emotions are conceptualised by people of different cultures and ages, speaking different languages. Anger, fear, jealousy and emotion itself are concepts that are bound up with the English language, embedded in a way of thinking, acting and speaking. At the same time, the metaphors underlying such concepts are often similar across languages, and children of different cultures follow common developmental pathways. The book thus discusses the interplay of social and cultural factors that humans share in their development of an understanding of the affective side of their lives. For researchers interested in emotion, development of concepts and language, cultural and linguistic influences on psychological processes.

Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines-from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond-have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. "Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action" argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Few issues have provoked as much controversy over the last decade as illegal immigration. While some argue for the need to seal America's borders and withdraw all forms of social and governmental support for illegal migrants and their children, others argue for humanitarian treatment--including legalization--for people who fill widely acknowledged needs in American industry and agriculture and have left home-country situations of economic hardship or political persecution. The study of illegal immigration necessarily confronts a broad range of migrants--from the familiar border crossers to those who enter illegally and overstay their visas, to the many unrecognized refugees who enter the country to seek protection under U.S. asylum law. The subject also demands attention to American society's responses to these newcomers--responses that often focus on limited elements of a complex issue.

A comprehensive, up-to-date review of this volatile subject, this book provides an accessible, balanced introduction to the subject. Covering the full range of illegal immigrants from Mexican border crossers to Central American refugees, illegal Europeans, and smuggled Chinese, the book considers the kind of work the migrants do and the public response to them. The work is divided into four parts: Concepts, Policies, and Numbers; The Migrants and Their Work; The Responses; and Illegal Immigration in Perspective.

This volume takes stock of the current status of the comparatively new discipline of `Anthropological Demography', and discusses its major methods, its main strengths, and its chief limitations. It includes contributions from both mainstream demographers and foremost anthropologists, all stressing the necessity of a shared agenda for each discipline to progress successfully and avoid marginalization. While the unique research and personal satisfaction afforded by `participant observation' is described, the book also highlights the potential contribution to the understanding of demographic events of much more than the field methods of traditional anthropology. In particular, it stresses the insights possible from qualitative focus group interviews, from longitudinal studies and from a greater interest in `armchair' anthropology, in which demographers complement their quantitative findings with qualitative information and understanding gleaned from a careful reading of the anthropological literature, in the form of both ethnographies and anthropological theories. In addition, it stresses the larger world of the ideal anthropological demographer: a world that includes the cultural context of course, but also takes into account the historical and political forces that condition so much individual behaviour. But the book is also a critical venture. It includes therefore considerable discussion of the common limits of the purely anthropological approach for understanding demographic events and processes, especially from a larger policy perspective, at the same time as it emphasizes the crucial role of the anthropological approach to designing policy that is potentially effective as well as socially and culturally sensitive. It reiterates the often complementary role of anthropological demography and also discusses some specific questions in demographic research which it does not as yet seem to have the capacity to illuminate. The book is aimed primarily at demographers wishing to broaden their research agenda and deepen their understanding of demographic behaviour, but it also hopes to convert mainstream anthropologists to take a more active interest in demographic issues. Both disciplines, after all, have a common intense interest in the kind of life and death issues that they can fruitfully explore together or by using one another's research methods.

Artists, designers and researchers are increasingly seeking new ways to understand and explore the creative and practical significance of the senses. This ground-breaking book brings art and design into the field of sensory studies providing a clear introduction to the field and outlining important developments and new directions. A compelling exploration of both theory and practice, Sensory Arts and Design brings together a wide variety of examples from contemporary art and design which share a sensory dimension in their development or user experience. Divided into three parts, the book examines the design applications of new technology with sensing capacities; the role of the senses in creating new imaginative environments; and the significance of the senses within different cultural practices. The thirteen chapters cover a highly diverse range of issues - from the urban environment, architecture and soundscapes to gustatory art, multisensory perception in painting, music and drawing, and the relationship between vision and smell. Initiated by Insight, a research group at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts -widely recognised as a center of research excellence - the project brings together a team of experts from Britain, Europe and North America. This timely book is destined to make a significant contribution to the scholarly development of this emerging field. An important read for students and scholars in sensory studies, design, art, and visual culture.

This examination of the emergence of nationalism in Lithuania, looks specifically at the Lithuanian national movement, known as Sajudis, and its approach towards the citizenship rights of national minorities. The study concentrates on the period between 1988 and 1993 when the national majority and minorities began forming and debating citizenship rights. The Lithuanian situation is analyzed not just according to the letter of the law but also, more importantly, with respect to how these laws were implemented and how the minorities responded to them.

What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity? In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed 'traditions' of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film. The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the 'Other', and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from Amazonia, Indonesia, Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia, this volume shows how bodily presentation plays a fundamental role in contemporary identity politics in tension with encompassing national and global stereotypes, which may in turn both constrain and empower local traditions.

Providing a cultural and holistic analysis of African American food preferences, anthropologist Eric Bailey shows us how black Americans generally perceive health, body image, food, dieting, physical fitness, and exercise. Like the majority of Americans overall, black Americans are becoming more overweight and obese than ever before. So, too, they are seeing the consequences - heart attacks, strokes, hypertension, and Type II diabetes at earlier and earlier ages. Bailey offers a new cultural diet for black Americans and a way to work together collectively to not only understand this critical health issue, but also to establish a lifestyle strategy that will be both effective and manageable. This work will interest not only general readers, but also students and scholars in health and medicine, psychology and health psychology, nursing and social work. Views on celebrity black Americans who have fought battles against their weight, a review of soul food cookbooks and the cultural history of black American cuisine, and a critique of the lack of corporate America's marketing of health and fitness programs and items to the black American community are spotlighted. book also includes an overview of federally funded diet and fitness programs for black Americans that have seen some success.

"Arguably, Vieda Skultans is the most prominent contemporary Latvian social anthropologist...One of the best assets of this book is its introduction. In its 15 lucid and condensed pages, Skultans summarizes her intellectual journey and contextualizes the articles presented in the collection, thus providing readers with a highly efficient guide to the themes that hold the book together." . Journal of Baltic Studies

"If anthropologists want to attend to wider audiences and adjoining disciplinary perspectives, this book is an inspiring example of how anthropology can be both challenged and enriched by such dialogue. Few have managed this with Skultans's dexterity or determination." . JRAI

"This volume brings together for the first time many of Skultans's important, even ground-breaking essays on psychiatry, religion and culture. It is a gift for those of us working in the field." . Tanya Luhrmann, University of Chicago

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language."