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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology > General
In departing from the traditional stance taken by anthropologists,
who study 'others' ethnographically, this timely book explores
forms of self-inscription on the part of both the ethnographer and
those 'others' who are studied. Informed by developments in
postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism, this is an original
contribution to the growing dialogue across disciplinary
boundaries. The chapters build upon recent reconsiderations of the
uses and meaning of personal narrative to examine the ways in which
selves and social forms are culturally constituted through
biographical genres. Ethnic autobiography, self-reflexivity in
ethnography, and native ethnography raise provocative questions
about a range of issues for the contemporary scholar: authenticity
of voice; ethnographic authority; and the degree to which
autoethnography constitutes resistance to hegemonic bodies of
discourse. Examined here in a variety of cultural and political
contexts, writing about the self offers challenging insights into
the construction and transformation of identities and cultural
meanings.
This volume contains 71 revised refereed papers, including seven invited surveys, presented during the Third European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL '95, held in Granada, Spain in June 1995. Originally AL was concerned with applying biologically inspired solutions to technology and with examining computational expertise in order to reproduce and understand life processes. Despite its short history, AL now is becoming a mature scientific field. The volume reports the state of the art in this exciting area of research; there are sections on foundations and epistemology, origins of life and evolution, adaptive and cognitive systems, artificial worlds, robotics and emulation of animal behavior, societies and collective behavior, biocomputing, and applications and common tools.
This fascinating ethnography provides unique insights into the history, politics, ideology, and daily life of North Koreans living in Japan. Because Sonia Ryang was raised in this community, she was able to gain unprecedented access and to bring her personal knowledge to bear on this closed society. In addition to providing a valuable view of the experience of ethnic minorities in what is believed to be an implacably homogeneous culture, Ryang offers a rare and precious glimpse into North Korean culture and the transmission of tradition and ideology within it.Through Chongryun, its own umbrella organization, this community directs its commercial, political, social, and educational affairs, including running its own schools and teaching children about North Korea as their fatherland and Kim Il Sung and his son as their leaders. Despite the oppression and ethnic discrimination directed toward the North Korean community, Ryang depicts Koreans not as a persecuted population, but as ordinary residents whose lives are full of complexities. Although they are highly insulated within their community's boundaries, many--especially of the younger generation--are integrated into Japanese society. They are serious about commitments to North Korea yet dedicated to their lives in Japan. Examining these and other complexities, Ryang explores how, over three generations, individuals and the community reconcile such conflicts and cope with changing attitudes and approaches toward Japanese society and Korean culture.
Three recent and highly dramatic national events have shattered the complacency of many Americans about progress, however fitful, in race relations in America. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the Million Man March of Louis Farrakhan have forced everyone to reconsider their assumptions about race and racial relations.The Thomas-Hill hearings exposed the complexity and volatility of perceptions about race and gender. The sight of jubilant Blacks and despondent Whites reacting to the O.J. Simpson verdict shook our confidence in shared assumptions about equal protection under the law. The image of hundreds of thousands of Black men gathering in Washington in defense of their racial and cultural identity angered millions of Whites and exposed divisions within the Black community.These events were unfolding at a time when there seemed to be considerable progress in fighting racial discrimination. On the legal side, discrimination has been eliminated in more and more arenas, in theory if not always in practice. Economically, more and more blacks have moved into the middle class, albeit while larger numbers have slipped further back into poverty. Intellectually, figures like Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Patricia J. Williams are playing a central role as public intellectuals.In the face of these disparate trends, it is clear that Americans need to rethink their assumptions about race, racial relations, and inter-racial communication. "Color * Class * Identity" is the ideal tool to facilitate this process. It provides a richly textured selection of readings from Du Bois, Cornel West, Derrick Bell, and others, as well as a range of responses to the particular controversies that are now dividing us."Color * Class * Identity" furthers these debates, showing that the racial question is far more complex than it used to be; it is no longer a simple matter of Black versus White and racial mistrust. A landmark anthology that will help advance understanding of the present unease, not just between Black and White, but within each community, this book will be useful in a broad range of courses on contemporary U.S. society.
The theory of evolution has been most successful explaining the emergence of new species in terms of their morphological traits. Ethologists teach that behaviors, too, qualify as first-class phenotypic features, but evolutionary accounts of behaviors have been much less satisfactory. In part this is because maturational "programs" transforming genotype to phenotype are "open" to environmental influences affected by behaviors. Further, many organisms are able to continue to modify their behavior, i.e., learn, even after fully mature. This creates an even more complex relationship between the genotypic features underlying the mechanisms of maturation and learning and the adapted behaviors ultimately selected.A meeting held at the Santa Fe Institute during the summer of 1993 brought together a small group of biologists, psychologists, and computer scientists with shared interests in questions such as these. This volume consists of papers that explore interacting adaptive systems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. About half of the articles are classic, seminal references on the subject, ranging from biologists like Lamarck and Waddington to psychologists like Piaget and Skinner. The other half represent new work by the workshop participants. The role played by mathematical and computational tools, both as models of natural phenomena and as algorithms useful in their own right, is particularly emphasized in these new papers. In all cases, the prefaces help to put the older papers in a modern context. For the new papers, the prefaces have been written by colleagues from a discipline other than the paper's authors, and highlight, for example, what a computer scientist can learn from a biologist's model, or vice versa. Through these cross-disciplinary "dialogues" and a glossary collecting multidisciplinary connotations of pivotal terms, the process of interdisciplinary investigation itself becomes a central theme.
Since it first appeared, Power and Prejudice has been hailed as a bold, pioneering work dealing with one of the central and most controversial issues of our time?the relationship between racial prejudice and global conflict. Powerfully written and based on documents from archives on several continents, this award-winning book convincingly demonstrates that the racial issue, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called ?the problem of the twentieth century,? has profoundly influenced most major developments in international politics and diplomacy.Lauren begins with a thought-provoking discussion of the heavy burden of history's pattern of conquest and slavery wherin skin color identified master and slave, conqueror and conquered. He then examines bitter twentieth-century conflicts over race, including immigration exclusion and the ?Yellow Peril,? the ?Final Solution? of the Holocaust, decolonization, the impact of the Cold War on the civil rights movement, and the global struggle against racial prejudice. In this new edition, Lauren adds dimensions about Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, exploring the racial dimensions of immigration exclusion and warfare. He contributes significant new material about international issues regarding indigenous peoples around the world, including self-determination, sovereignty, and discrimination. And finally, he examines the dramatic events surrounding the end of apartheid in South Africa.Eloquent, provocative, and informed by first-rate scholarship, the insights of this highly original work will appeal to general readers as well as to students and scholars from a broad range of disciplines.
This book is an attempt to apply ecological theories of competition and niche overlap to explain instances of ethnic collective action that occurred in American society around the turn of the nineteenth century. It uses event-history methods of analysis to explore models of racial and ethnic confrontations, riots, violence, protest marches, and other forms of public and collective activity organized around ethnic and racial boundaries. My research strategy which I develop in the pages that follow involved a constant interchange with my research group of graduate students, undergraduates, and colleagues.
It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work on race in America. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of this dilemma by viewing the issues of race as they are now, not as they were a generation or so ago.
An ethnographic exploration of the rise of new forms of leadership
at community and national levels with islanders are synthesising
traditional and Western models.
First published in 1981, On Becoming Human presents a unique theory of human origins, an original explanation of how early hominids evolved from their ape-like primate ancestors. Professor Nancy M. Tanner's book integrates the data on chimpanzee behaviour with the available information on early phases of human evolution. The result is a model by which we can more accurately reconstruct the lifeways of the early hominids and better understand the rapid transition from ape to early human. By an innovative use of conventional data and a fresh perspective on traditional anthropological approaches, Professor Tanner, in her first book, has developed a powerful new theory of human origins by which we can understand the actual dynamics of becoming human.
All over Europe, asylum-seekers, immigrants and minorities are increasingly finding themselves under violent attack. Who are the perpetrators? What are their motives? To what extent are right-wing or neo-Nazi organizations involved? How do the authorities and the police respond? What are the roles of the media, the public opinion and anti-racist movements? What can be done to stop the violence? These are questions addressed in this volume by some of Europe's leading experts on racism and racist violence.
This analysis of the causes of racial and ethnic conflict in American cities between 1877-1914 presents evidence that suggests that the explanation for ethnic unrest is to be found in competition processes.
The stated aims of the Lecture Notes in Biomathematics allow for work that is "unfinished or tentative." This volume is offered in that spirit. The problem addressed is one of the classics of statistical ecology, the estimation of mortality rates from stage-frequency data, but in tackling it we found ourselves making use of ideas and techniques very different from those we expected to use, and in which we had no previous experience. Specifically we drifted towards consideration of some rather specific curve and surface fitting and smoothing techniques. We think we have made some progress (otherwise why publish?), but are acutely aware of the conceptual and statistical clumsiness of parts of the work. Readers with sufficient expertise to be offended should regard the monograph as a challenge to do better. The central theme in this book is a somewhat complex algorithm for mortality estimation (detailed at the end of Chapter 4). Because of its complexity, the job of implementing the method is intimidating. Any reader interested in using the methods may obtain copies of our code as follows: Intelligible Structured Code 1. Hutchinson and deHoog's algorithm for fitting smoothing splines by cross validation 2. Cubic covariant area-approximating splines 3. Cubic interpolating splines 4. Cubic area matching splines 5. Hyman's algorithm for monotonic interpolation based on cubic splines. Prototype User-Hostile Code 6. Positive constrained interpolation 7. Positive constrained area matching 8. The "full method" from chapter 4 9. The "simpler" method from chapter 4.
Life has shaped the Earth, and the Earth has moulded the history of life. That history, the co-evolution of our ancestors and their horne, has much to teach us about our place on the planet today. We are part of the fabric of the biosphere. As we change that fabric we would be wise to understand how our horne was built. Our planet is neither a hotel nor a colony. It is not a place which life briefly inhabits during a transient occupation. Instead, it is our horne, designed by the deeds of our ancestors and suited to our own needs. The history of life on Earth is held in the geological record, which is composed of the rocks, water and air that are available for study on the planet's surface. These rocks, the oceans and the atmosphere are not simply stores of information for the excitement of fossil hunters and geochemists, or resources to exploit without thought. Their cre ation and continued existence form an integral part of the development and management of the Earth as the horne of life."
Drawing heavily on the reminiscences of the Brownsville boys themselves, and skillfully integrating these with material from newspapers, books, and commentary of the time, Sorin creates an original and compelling picture of the communal and individual vitality that allowed an unusual and heartening social achievement.
Over ten years ago, Benjamin Fain, a physicist now living in Tel
Aviv, attempted to hold a conference on Jewish culture in Moscow,
an effort that was foiled by the KGB. Many of the participants were
eventually able to flee, most emigrating to Israel. In this book,
these distinguished scholars and others from around the world
present their personal and professional views of Jewish culture in
the Soviet Union.
This volume, a study of a transhumant cattle-raising community in Spain, is based on the extensive fieldwork at La Nava de San Miguel, a village in the province of Avila in central Spain. It shows the social and economic factors upon which the continued vitality of this mountain village is based: the use of communal summer pastures; the transhumant groups which walk the cattle to the winter pastures over the mountains; and the system of taking turns for many tasks within the village. The book analyzes the dichotomy between the more rigid organization of life within the village and the organization of life outside the village, in the transhumant group which goes to the winter pastures in Extramadura.
Traditionally, Non-Indian societies in Brazilian Amazonia - 'caboclo' - are treated by anthropologists as relics of the haphazard development of Amazonia - leftovers of the colonial enterprise and have therefore received little serious attention. This volume attempts to redress this imbalance by looking closely at the encompassing nature of peasant society in Brazilian Amazonia. The first part of the book is concerned with the concept of caboclo as it emerges in anthropological and Amazonianist disclosure. The second examines a historical 'caboclo' society (in Santarem, Para) from a broadly ethnographic viewpoint. Three different modes of peasant livelihood and their relation to the impact of the Transamazon Highway are then fully discussed, followed by a detailed examination of the 'sustainable- development' thesis using research from another part of Amazonia - the Guama River. Overall, this volume aims to examine the reasons for the relative 'invisibility' of caboclo society and to place it in a historical perspective.
Following recent events in Eastern Europe, questions surrounding
European identity seem more pressing than ever. This volume
explores, through a series of ethnographic case studies, the
construction and experience of identities in Western Europe. All of
the case studies are based on fieldwork, and in geographical scope
range from Wales to the Basque country; from Corsica to the Lake
District. The peoples they look at are similarly diverse:
nationalists and members of the Communist party; rural and urban
populations. The essays illustrate the ways in which detailed
ethnographic case studies can illuminate how identities are lived
by ordinary people.
Following recent events in Eastern Europe, questions surrounding
European identity seem more pressing than ever. This volume
explores, through a series of ethnographic case studies, the
construction and experience of identities in Western Europe. All of
the case studies are based on fieldwork, and in geographical scope
range from Wales to the Basque country; from Corsica to the Lake
District. The peoples they look at are similarly diverse:
nationalists and members of the Communist party; rural and urban
populations. The essays illustrate the ways in which detailed
ethnographic case studies can illuminate how identities are lived
by ordinary people.
This is a long-term ethnographic study of the Hahalis Welfare Society (a Bougainville movement which worked for many years to maintain and reform traditional practices and to retain a degree of autonomy in a world of rapid political change and economic dependency). The study points beyond the established cargo-cult theory in anthropology and expands the concept of culture as an outcome of historical practice, conscious analysis, human passions and political struggle. The dialectical relationship between traditional and contemporary forms of power as described through Buka experience breaks down Western categorical barriers that seem to isolate the past from the present, the personal from the political and the local form the global. The narrative explores these themes against the background of colonial and post-colonial government, missionisation, politics of ritual, litigation and legitimacy, and the Bougainville assertion of independence.
On the whole, the debates surrounding the issues of breast-feeding
- often reflecting ethnographic and ill-informed medical and
demographic approaches - have failed to treat the deeper issues.
The significance of breast-feeding reaches far beyond its
biological function; in fact, the authors of this volume argue,
there is nothing natural' about breast-feeding itself. On the
contrary, attitudes and practices are socially determined, and
breast-feeding has to be seen as an essential element in the
cultural construction of sexuality.
The Galapagos Islands are one of the world's premiere nature attractions, home to unique ecosystems widely thought to be untouched and pristine. Historical Ecology and Archaeology in the Galapagos Islands reveals that the archipelago is not as isolated as many imagine, examining how centuries of human occupation have transformed its landscape. This book shows that the island chain has been a part of global networks since its discovery in 1535 and traces the changes caused by human colonization. Central to this history is the sugar plantation Hacienda El Progreso on San Cristobal Island. Here, zooarchaeological and archaeobotanical evidence documents the introduction of exotic species and landscape transformations, and material evidence attests that inhabitants maintained connections to the outside world for consumer goods. Beyond illuminating the human history of the islands, the authors also look at the impact of visitors to Galapagos National Park today, raising questions about tourism's role in biological conservation, preservation, and restoration.
The culture of contemporary medicine is the object of investigation in this book; the meanings and values implicit in biomedical knowledge and practice and the social processes through which they are produced are examined through the use of specific case studies. The essays provide examples of how various facets of 20th century medicine, including edu cation, research, the creation of medical knowledge, the development and application of technology, and day to day medical practice, are per vaded by a value system characteristic of an industrial-capitalistic view of the world in which the idea that science represents an objective and value free body of knowledge is dominant. The authors of the essays are sociologists and anthropologists (in almost equal numbers); also included are papers by a social historian and by three physicians all of whom have steeped themselves in the social sci ences and humanities. This co-operative endeavor, which has necessi tated the breaking down of disciplinary barriers to some extent, is per haps indicative of a larger movement in the social sciences, one in which there is a searching for a middle ground between grand theory and attempts at universal explanations on the one hand, and the context-spe cific empiricism and relativistic accounts characteristic of many historical and anthropological analyses on the other."
This book concerns the use of the drug qat in North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic), a country lying on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. However, because this substance is so interwoven into the fabric of society and culture, it is also necessarily about Yemen itself. The history and culture of South Arabia are still relatively unknown to the rest of the world, and the drug qat, so widely used there, is equally unknown. Thus, the material we present here should be of interest to all of those concerned with drug use, those who wish to understand more about Yemen and the Middle East, and to the Yemenis themselves. Another purpose is to develop some general understandings about sub stance uses and their effects which are less clouded by the mass hysteria and political considerations which often obscure drug issues in our own society. Examination of drug-use patterns in a country where millions of people are users on a regular basis, and where there has been familiarity with the drug for several hundred years, offers an opportunity to achieve perspectives not possible in countries with different attitudes and without such histories. I am not sanguine about the prospects of our abilities to learn from others or from the past, but I do not think we should abandon hope of doing so." |
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