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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General
Few things tell us more of a nation's general well-being than the development of the life-expectancy of its citizens; the rising standards of health that they come to demand; and how evenly that improvement is shared throughout society. Helen Jones examines the record of twentieth-century Britain in these respects. She has much heartening progress to record - yet stark inequalities remain. Her book is thus both a review of, and contribution to, the current debates over gender, class and ethnic inequalities in standards of health in Britain today.
Reviews of Not Saussure and The Explicit Animal: Not Saussure - 'I greatly enjoyed it...' - Bernard Bergonzi 'The Explicit Animal - '...his books are genuine contributions to professional debate...' - Stephen R.L. Clarke, Times Literary Supplement;Newton's Sleep examines the complementary roles of science and art in human life. Science has been criticised for being at best useful but spiritually derelict, and art for attempting to answer the spiritual needs of humankind while ignoring the material needs of millions who live in want. Newton's Sleep deals with the charges that science is spiritually empty and that art fails in its civilising mission by relating these aspects of human culture to the physical and metaphysical hungers of an explicit animal who lives in both the Kingdom of Means and the Kingdom of Ends. 'Tallis can, and frequently does, write extremely well. He also writes with considerable passion...Tallis...is perhaps best seen as an exceptionally interesting and broad-minded heir to Huxley, preaching the cause of the Church Scientific...' Richard Webster
Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.
From medieval times until today Germany has been a cocktail of very different peoples and cultural groups. The components of the 'cocktail' have changed, but not Germany's character as such. The many cultural divides have often led to conflict, once even to genocide, but surprisingly often cooperation, or at least peaceful coexistence, has been the characteristic feature. Against the background of a graphic historical survey the author analyzes the factors which have made cooperation possible, or conversely, have produced conflicts.
From its discovery in the Columbia River shallows three years ago, reporter Roger Downey has chronicled the epic adventures of the skeleton called "Kennewick Man": first as pretext for a media feeding-frenzy, then as centerpiece of a legal circus pitting celebrated scientists against Native Americans, the Corps of Engineers, and the Clinton White House, finally, at the long last, as object of rational scientist study. The saga of Kennewick Man offers abundant opportunity to explore todays rapidly changing scientific theories about how the Americans first came to be settled, and by whom. But it also casts light on the divisions within the fields of anthropology and archaeology concerning the role of politics and race in the pursuit of scientific goals, what constitutes ethical procedure in dealing with ancient remains, and the very purpose and direction of the scientific enterprise itself.
This volume examines the creation of forms of individual and group identity in Taiwan, the relationship between these forms of identity, and patterns of Taiwanese religion, politics, and culture. The contributors explore the Taiwanese sense of self, attempting to discern how Taiwanese identify themselves as individuals and as collectivities. Ranging from the local to the national level and within the larger Chinese cultural and religious universe, these essays explore the complex nature of identity/role and the processes of identity formation which have shaped Taiwan's multi-leveled past and its many faceted present.
This supplement focuses on the NBA with particular reference to pay and performance. In-depth analyses of positional pay variations, player negotiations, supply and demand and econometric models of pay and performance seek to give a much clearer picture of why, how and when pay is awarded in the sports industry and particularly in the NBA. The volume concludes with a retrospective of the 1995 All-Star Players.
Korean Americans are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States. Although they share many similar cultural characteristics with other Asian Americans, the Korean Americans are unique in terms of their strong ethnic attachment, extensive participation in Christian churches, heavy involvement in self-employed small businesses, wide geographic dispersion in settlement, and the emergence of the 1.5 generation phenomenon. This book answers the following questions for the student or interested reader: * Who are the Korean people? * Why did they come to the United States? * How did they adapt to their new country? * How are they received by the majority of Americans? * What are their accomplishments, problems, and contributions to American society? Other special features include: * An extensive coverage on the ethnic background (history, language, religion, customs, and other cultural heritage) of Korean Americans. * Current statistical data on Korean immigration to the United States. * A comprehensive analysis of socioeconomic characteristics of Korean Americans as compared with those of other minority groups. * A succinct analysis of the unique characteristics of Korean Americans. * Effective use of personal narratives. In 1970 there were about 70,000 Korean Americans-the number grew tenfold to about 790,000 in 1990. The Korean American population is now estimated at well over a million, and demographic projections indicate that the number will reach about three million by the year 2030. Korean Americans are thus among the new groups of Americans to become another integral part of the American history of cultural pluralism and ethnic diversity. Examined are the most significant areas of Korean American's adaptation-economic adjustment, sociocultural adaptation, family life, ethnic associations, intergroup relations, and psychological adjustment. In each area of adaptation, positive attainment as well as the problems of adjustment are analyzed in light of current theories and empirical research. The book concludes with a discussion of the unique characteristics of Korean Americans and their impact on society.
Precarious office friendships and email romance; delicate status politics; multiple femininities and masculinities; changing employment practices and career pathways; temporal and spatial practices of regulation, detection and slipping free - these analytical themes comprise the core of Tomoko Kurihara's ethnography, "Japanese Corporate Transition in Time and Space." A skillful analysis of the subtleties of language and embodiment discloses the various knowledges and practices that reinforce and subvert ideology and culture within the workplace community. This fieldstudy brings the work of continental theorists Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau into conversation with the anthropology of Japan. It is a significant contribution to the new specialist areas in anthropology, of organizations, and of management practices.
Hardbound. Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary series, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history, and English. Papers focus on the intersection of interpretive critical theory, qualitative inquiry, culture, media, history, biography and social structure. This international research publication creates a space for the study of those global cultural practices and cultural forms that shape the meanings of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender in the contemporary world.
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.
We are nothing in an absolute sense. We are only what we have been-more exactly, what we remember we were. So begins the latest book by one of Europe's most influential modern sociologists, Franco Ferrarotti. In The Temptation to Forget, Ferrarotti examines how many in the waning years of the 20th century are attempting to forget or reinvent history to serve the purposes of ethnic, racial, or religious separation. Ferrarotti focuses on anti-Semitism and its re-emergence among the Skinheads of the 1980s to draw parallels to how the Holocaust has been reinterpreted/forgotten, and to analyze the implications of this for relations with other ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. Ethnic cleansing may be a new term, but, as Ferrarotti illustrates, it has a long heritage in thought and action. This book will make for provocative reading among professional sociologists and students of contemporary social issues.
How far back can you trace your family tree? Most people cannot go beyond their great-great-grandparents. The oldest written records recount only our most recent past. The farther back in time we go, the fewer the surviving traces. How can we know about the lives of our ancestors who lived 30,000 - or 300,000 - or 3 million years ago? In The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins, Piero and Alberto Angela address the many difficulties and challenges in assembling a truly complete picture of human evolution. In tracing our origins, different "documents" and "evidence" must be used: rock sediments, footprints, and fossils that were petrified in the folds of the earth over the course of millennia but have become the object of scientific study only in recent decades. To piece together the intriguing puzzle of human origins it is necessary to study all clues that are made available by multidisciplinary research, including paleontology, bio-chemistry, geology, genetics, physics, and climatology. Like so many Sherlock Holmeses, researchers seek all possible clues and analyze them meticulously in hopes of being able to reconstruct the past. Just as a cigarette butt, a hair, or a button may provide the key to identifying the "culprit" in a detective story, so can the layer of a fossil, the way a rock has been chipped, or the detail of a joint offer important information on the life, appearance, and behavior of our ancestors. These pieces are few and fragmentary, ranging from the footprints left in volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago by hominids who walked exactly as we do, to a "Y" pattern on molars and mitochondrial DNA. But they all provide information on the diet, diseases, hunting techniques, and art of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, the Neanderthal, and the first Homo sapiens sapiens. Written in an accessible but authoritative style, this study includes many lively reconstructions of the everyday life of our earliest ancestors based on the most reliable data. The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins makes available to a wide audience a unique look inside the exciting world of research into the study of the beginnings of human life on earth.
This book studies the cheap printed literature which was read in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and the cultures of its audience. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to a little-known topic, pursuing comparisons with other regions such as Brittany and Scotland. By addressing questions such as language shift and the unique social configuration of Ireland in this period, it adds a new dimension to the growing body of studies of popular culture in Europe.
This project is an attempt to bring together the many fragments of history concerning the Yoruba religious community and their rise to prominence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries.
One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell's Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell's work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory - from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change - the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.
What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.
Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.
The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of 'race'. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for 'race', a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933-1974) and the production of academic literature on 'race' in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.
For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.
This book is Lash's most comprehensive statement in social and cultural theory. It is a book addressed to sociologists and philosophers, to students of urban life, modern languages, cultural studies and the visual arts. Alongside the Enlightenment has emerged another modernity. This second modernity has - in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of progress, order, homogeneity and cognition - initiated a different rationality of uncertainty, transience, experiment, and the unknowable. This second, this other modernity, is present in notions of 'difference' and 'reflexivity' so central to the contemporary world-view. The logic, however, of such notions can, itself, lead to the same unhappy abstraction of the first modernity. What is forgotten, Scott Lash argues, is the dimension of the ground. This book consists of explorations into this ground: as place, community, belonging, sociality, tradition, life-world; as symbol, sensation, in the tactile character of the sign. The book addresses the other modernity's forgotten ground. The first and second modernities co-existed in a state of irresolvable tension along the history of western industrial capitalism. This is thrown into crisis, Lash argues, with the turn of the twenty-first century emergence of the global information culture. What are the implications of this explosion of first and second modernities into today's technological culture? When the previously existing third space of difference is exploded into the general indifference of information and communication flows? How might we lead our lives in an age in which difference - and indeed the ground itself - become primarily a matter for memory, for mourning?
AMIDST THE OTHER religious, political, and technological changes in seventeenth-century England, the ready availability of printed books was the most significant sign of the disappearance of old ways of thinking. The ability to read granted new independence as the interactions between reader, text, and author moved from the public forums of church and court to the privacy and solitude of the home. Privacy and Print proposes that the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right, as the very core of individuality, is connected in a complex fashion with the history of reading. Cecile M. Jagodzinski attempts to recover the experience of readers past by examining representations of reading and readers (especially women) in five genres of seventeenth-century literature: devotional books, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama, and the novel. The discussion ranges from the published letters of Charles I and John Donne to Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister and Margaret Cavendish's literary activities. The author examines how the resulting shifts in religious and literary practices due to the printed book influenced the development of the literary canon. She also addresses women's ambiguous roles in print culture, trying to pinpoint how privacy became gendered in the early modern period. Debates about privacy and individualism still rage in today's computerized society. Jagodzinski's important and well-written book speaks to these present-day concerns and offers a historical example of the effect of new technologies on popular culture.
It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.
Although the Israeli state subscribes to the principles of administrative fairness and equality for Jews and Arabs before the law, the reality looks very different. Focusing on Arab land loss inside Israel proper and the struggle over development resources, this study explores the interaction between Arab local authorities, their Jewish neighbors, and the agencies of the national government in regard to developing local and regional industrial areas. The author avoids reduction to simple models of binary domination, revealing instead a complex, multi-dimensional field of relations and ever-shifting lines of political maneuver and confrontation. He examines the prevailing concept of ethnic traditionalism and argues that the image of Arab traditionalism erects imaginary boundaries around the Arab localities, making government incursion disappear from view, while underpinning and rationalizing the exclusion of the Arab towns from development planning. Moreover, he shows how images of environmental protection mesh with and support such exclusion. The study includes a chronology of events, tables, maps, and photographs. This revised paperback edition with a new epilogue brings accounts of Arab land loss and struggles for economic development up to date. The author also deals with the challenges of life and research in Israel and examines the possibilities of sharing the land as the homeland of both Jews and Palestinians. |
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