What is black culture? Does it have an essence? What do we lose and gain by assuming that it does, and by building our laws accordingly? This bold and provocative book questions the common presumption of political multiculturalism that social categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are defined by distinctive cultural practices.

Richard Ford argues against law reform proposals that would attempt to apply civil rights protections to "cultural difference." Unlike many criticisms of multiculturalism, which worry about "reverse discrimination" or the erosion of core Western cultural values, the book's argument is primarily focused on the adverse effects of multicultural rhetoric and multicultural rights on their supposed beneficiaries.

In clear and compelling prose, Ford argues that multicultural accounts of cultural difference do not accurately describe the practices of social groups. Instead these accounts are prescriptive: they attempt to canonize a narrow, parochial, and contestable set of ideas about appropriate group culture and to discredit more cosmopolitan lifestyles, commitments, and values.

The book argues that far from remedying discrimination and status hierarchy, "cultural rights" share the ideological presuppositions, and participate in the discursive and institutional practices, of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Ford offers specific examples in support of this thesis, in diverse contexts such as employment discrimination, affirmative action, and transracial adoption.

This is a major contribution to our understanding of today's politics of race, by one of the most distinctive and important young voices in America's legal academy.

Just over one hundred and thirty years ago Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), developed remarkably accurate conclusions about man's ancestry, based on a review of general comparative anatomy and psychology in which he regarded sexual selection as a necessary part of the evolutionary process. But the attention of biologists turned to the more general concept of natural selection, in which sexual selection plays a complex role that has been little understood. This volume significantly broadens the scope of modern evolutionary biology by looking at this important and long neglected concept of great importance.

In this book, which is the first full discussion of sexual selection since 1871, leading biologists bring modern genetic theory and behavior observation to bear on the subject. The distinguished authors consider many aspects of sexual selection in many species, including man, within the context of contemporary evolutionary theory and research. The result is a remarkably original and well-rounded view of the whole concept that will be invaluable especially to students of evolution and human sexual behavior. The lucid authority of the contributors and the importance of the topic will interest all who share in man's perennial fascination with his own history.

The book will be of central importance to a wide variety of professionals, including biologists, anthropologists, and geneticists. It will be an invaluable supplementary text for courses in vertebrate biology, theory of evolution, genetics, and physical anthropology. It is especially important with the emergence of alternative explanations of human development, under the rubric of creationism and doctrines of intelligent design.

Hailed as a breakthrough in the understanding of human evolution, "The History and Geography of Human Genes" offers the first full-scale reconstruction of where human populations originated and the paths by which they spread throughout the world. By mapping the worldwide geographic distribution of genes for over 110 traits in over 1800 primarily aboriginal populations, the authors charted migrations and devised a clock by which to date evolutionary history. This monumental work is now available in a more affordable paperback edition without the myriad illustrations and maps, but containing the full text and partial appendices of the authors' pathbreaking endeavor.

This is the road from climate change to primate change.

PRIMATE CHANGE is a wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history – from primate to transhuman – Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition.

In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the ‘Anthropocene’, or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world we inhabit, the ways of living that we have been building have, as if under the cover of darkness, been transforming our bodies and altering the expression of our DNA, too.

Primate Change beautifully unscrambles the complex architecture of our modern human bodies, built over millions of years and only starting to give up on us now.

This is the first detailed study of an eyewitness account (attributed to Lucian of Samosata) of the Holy City of Hierapolis in northern Syria. This text, which is presented both in the original Greek and in translation, is one of the most important literary sources for a religion of the Roman Near East in its native setting. The introduction and commentary for the first time combine literary-historical, philological, textual, and archaeological approaches.

Widely regarded as one of the rare eminent scientists who is also a graceful writer, Ian Tattersall here takes up some of the most controversial questions in evolutionary history in this superb collection of essays. Tattersall stresses that living creatures, including humans, are not finely engineered organisms with every component perfectly adapted to their function. We are - on the contrary - jury-rigged, improvised beings, owing as much to chance as to adaptation. And this is true of all living creatures. Leading the reader around the world and into the far reaches of the past, Tattersall shows us what the science of human evolution is about and what it is up against - from the sparsity of evidence to the pressures of religious fundamentalism. The fundamental questions of our origins - and our evolutionary future - find new life in this extraordinary book, full of delightful stories, scientific wisdom, and fresh insight

This edition assembles the major essays on race and imperialism written by Nancy Cunard in the 1930s and 1940s. As a British expatriate living in France, and as a politically-engaged poet, editor, publisher, and journalist, Nancy Cunard devoted much of her energy to the cause of racial justice.This Broadview edition contextualizes Cunard's writings on race in terms of the relations among modernism, gender, and empire. It includes a range of contemporaneous documents that place her essays in dialogue with other European writers and with the work of writers of the African diaspora.

The Indian diaspora is one of the largest and most significant in the world today with between nine and twelve million people of Indian origin living outside South Asia. With successive waves of migration over the last two hundred years to almost every continent, it has assumed increasing self-consciousness and importance.
Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora examines the Indian diaspora in Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, Trinidad, Australia, the US, Canada and the UK and addresses the core issues of demography, economy, culture and future development. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the crucial relationship between culture and economy in the diaspora over time.
This book will appeal to all those interested in transnational communities, migration, ethnicity and racial studies, and South Asia.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203398297

Through a close examination of four Melanesian religious traditions, Whitehouse identifies a set of recurrent interconnections between styles of religious transmission, systems of memory, and patterns of political association. He argues that these interconnections may shed light on a variety of general problems in history, archaeology, and social theory.

This pathbreaking book is the first to provide a rigorous and comprehensive examination of Internet culture and consumption. A rich ethnography of Internet use, the book offers a sustained account not just of being online, but of the social, political and cultural contexts which account for the contemporary Internet experience. From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media -- including websites, email and chat -- the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a comprehensive approach to new media. It points to the future direction of Internet research, proposing a detailed agenda for comparative ethnographic study of the cultural significance and effects of the Internet in modern society. Clearly written for the non-specialist reader, it offers a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds. An innovative tie-in with the book's own website provides copious illustrations amounting to over 2,000 web-pages that bring the material right to your computer.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer combines extensive field research with historical inquiry to produce a dramatic study of a minority people in Russia, the Khanty (Ostiak) of Northwest Siberia. Although First Nations, indigenous peoples, have often been victims of expansionist state-building, Balzer shows that processes of acquiring ethnic identity can involve transcending victimhood. She brings Khanty views of their history and current life into focus, revealing multiple levels of cultural activism. She argues that anthropological theory and practice can derive from indigenous insights, and should help indigenous peoples.

Balzer brings to life the saga of the Khanty over several centuries. She analyzes trends in Siberian ethnic interaction that strongly affected minority lives: colonization, Christianization, revitalization, Sovietization, and regionalization. These processes incorporate suprastate and state politics, including recent devastations stemming from the energy industry's land thefts. Balzer documents changes that might seem to foreshadow the demise of indigenous ethnicity. Yet the final chapters reveal ways some Khanty have preserved cultural values and dignity in crisis. Khanty identity has varied with the politics of individuals, groups, and generations. It has been shaped by recent grass-roots mobilization, ecological activism, and religious revival, as well as older historical memory, language-based solidarity, and loyalty to a homeland. "The Tenacity of Ethnicity" demonstrates how at each historical turn, Siberian experiences shed new light on old debates concerning colonialism, conversion, revitalization, ethnicity, and nationalism. This volume will be important for political scientists, historians, and regional specialists, as well as anthropologists and sociologists.

Is TV news racist? If the purpose of local news is to cover individual communities and to present issues of interest and concern to local audiences, why are local newscasts so similar in markets around the country? These are the questions that motivated Heider's research, leading to the development of this book. Recognizing that local news is the outlet through which most people get their news, Heider ventured into the local television newsrooms in two moderate-size, culturally diverse U.S. markets to observe the news process. In this report, he uses his insider's perspective to examine why local television news coverage of people of color does not occur in more meaningful ways.
Heider examines the perceptions of racism and ethnicity, and addresses such dichotomies as "white" news (content determined by white managers) being delivered by non-white news anchors, thus giving the appearance of "non-white" news. He also considers how coverage of minorities influences viewers' perceptions of their minority neighbors. Heider then sets forth a new theoretical concept--incognizant racism--as a way of explaining how news workers consistently ignore news in significant portions of the communities they cover.
This contribution to the minorities and media discussion provides important insights into the newsroom decision-making process and the sociology and structure of newsrooms. It is required reading for all who are involved in news reporting, mass communication, media and minority studies, and cultural issues in today's society.

Microsatellites are short stretches of repeated DNA that show exceptional variability in humans and most other species. This variability has made microsatellites the genetic marker of choice for most applications, including genetic mapping and studies of the evolutionary connections between species and populations. This book brings together an international group of scientists currently working in microsatellites. They detail the molecular processes that have given rise to microsatellite DNA, and then describe the various ways in which the potential of microsatellites is being harnessed in medical genetics, behavioural and evolutionary biology, and ecology.

Humans have become much taller and heavier, and experience healthier and longer lives than ever before in human history. However it is only recently that historians, economists, human biologists and demographers have linked the changing size, shape and capability of the human body to economic and demographic change. This fascinating and groundbreaking book presents an accessible introduction to the field of anthropometric history, surveying the causes and consequences of changes in health and mortality, diet and the disease environment in Europe and the United States since 1700. It examines how we define and measure health and nutrition as well as key issues such as whether increased longevity contributes to greater productivity or, instead, imposes burdens on society through the higher costs of healthcare and pensions. The result is a major contribution to economic and social history with important implications for today's developing world and the health trends of the future.

The fact that bodies decay after death has concerned humans throughout the ages. Many cultures have attempted to arrest this decay, so that bodies are preserved (or mummified) in a state as near to life as possible, but spontaneously mummified bodies are also found. Mummies are being studied increasingly to answer questions about the health, social standing and beliefs of the population from whence they came, and the lessons that they have for modern populations. Originally published in 2003, this authoritative reference work explores why people mummify bodies and the mechanisms by which they are preserved, details study methods and surveys the myriad examples that can be found worldwide, evaluates the use and abuse of mummified bodies throughout the ages, and how mummified remains can be conserved for the future. Lavishly illustrated, The Scientific Study of Mummies will be of value to all those interested in paleopathology, archaeology and anthropology.

Presents 16 case studies of ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet world. The book places ethnic conflict in the context of imperial collapse, democratisation and state building.

Studies of the customs and beliefs of barbarian peoples who migrated westwards and settled in Western Europe from the close of the Roman empire to the ninth century. The decline of the Roman Empire was compounded by the spread westwards of tribes from Eastern Europe, settling areas from which the indigenous populations had been cleared by the spread of the power of Rome; those populations themselves, notably the Celts, were pushed to the fringes of the former empire. These migrations of barbarian peoples between the fourth and ninth centuries left no historical record in the accepted sense, but it is the recovery of the customs and beliefs of these populations that forms the common purpose of the studies in this book, for during these centuries the traits and attitudes developed which are at the root of present-day Europe: feudalism, the statuslevel achieved by the merchant class, the beginnings of an ideology that led to the separation of church and state, the demise of slavery as an inefficient mode of production, the origin of national identities. The late GIORGIO AUSENDA taught at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Stress, San Marino. Contributors: GIORGIO AUSENDA, JULIAN D. RICHARDS, JOHN HINES, DAVID TURTON, ROSS BALZARETTI, DENNIS H. GREEN, SVEN SCHUETTE, DAVID N. DUMVILLE, MORTEM AXBOE, IAN N. WOOD

"Intelligence" has long been considered to be a feature unique to human beings, giving us the capacity to imagine, to think, to deceive, to make complex connections between cause and effect, to devise elaborate stategies for solving problems. However, like all our other features, intelligence is a product of evolutionary change. Until recently, it was difficult to obtain evidence of this process from the frail testimony of a few bones and stone tools. It has become clear in the last 15 years that the origins of human intelligence can be investigated by the comparative study of primates, our closest non-human relatives, giving strong impetus to the case for an "evolutionary psychology", the scientific study of the mind.

Critical Ethnography in Educational Research provides both a technical, theoretical guide to advanced ethnography - focusing on such concepts as primary data collection and system relationships - and a very practical guide for researchers interested in conducting actual studies.
Carspecken's work illustrates new developments in critical social theory and applies them to ethnographic analysis in a way which is accessible to all.

First published in 1999, this book gives an inventory of factors contributing to ethnic prejudice in seven countries and the role of formal education among them on the basis of national surveys. It appears that education is crucial in all the countries surveyed and contributes to more tolerant views of ethnic and national minorities in Western European countries, Poland and the United States. The positive effects of education, however, do not always counter the negative effects of personality characteristics and conservative values on ethnic prejudice. Moreover, the negative effects of less formal education may be reinforced by perceived economical competition of ethnic minorities and thereby further bolster prejudiced views of the less educated. This indicates that formal education alone is not sufficient to change prejudiced views. Other forms of socialization transmitting values leading to open-mindedness and the ability to secure one's economic position have to support the positive effects of formal education as well.

This monograph is about the ecology and population dymanics of a group of cattle and goat herders in the northern Kalahari Desert of the Ngamiland district of Botswana. Although the Herero arrived in the region less than a century ago as destitute refugees, these staunchly traditional Bantu speakers have established themselves as a prominent and prosperous tribe in a pocket of the Kalahari previously occupied almost exclusively by !Kung-speaking foragers. Their rise to economic prominence in Botswana has been accompanied by dramatic decreases in mortality and increases in fertility, and a resurgence of tribal ethnicity. The demographic data were collected through intense ethnographic interviews of over 700 Herero living in North-Western Botswana. Studies such as this one illustrate the trade-offs between large-scale censuses that traditional demographers are comfortable with and small qualitative studies familiar to anthropologists and sociologists. Statistics from large national or regional studies that blur distinctions among genetically, historically and economically different groups may not reveal much about the processes that generated them because differences within groups ar

Walking west on 46th Street in Manhattan, just three blocks from Rockefeller Center, one passes Brazilian restaurants, the office of New York's Brazilian newspaper, a Brazilian travel agency, a business that sends remittances and wires flowers to Brazil, and a store that sells Brazilian food products, magazines, newspapers, videos, and tapes. These businesses are the tip of an ethnic iceberg, an unseen minority estimated to number some 80,000 to 100,000 Brazilians in the New York metropolitan area alone. Despite their numbers, the lives of these people remain largely hidden to scholars and the public alike. Now Maxine L. Margolis remedies this neglect with a fascinating and accessible account of the lives of New York's Brazilians.

Showing that these immigrants belie American stereotypes, Margolis reveals that they are largely from the middle strata of Brazilian society: many, in fact, have university educations. Not driven by dire poverty or political repression, they are fleeing from chaotic economic conditions that prevent them from maintaining amiddle-class standard of living in Brazil. But despite their class origin and education, with little English and no work papers, many are forced to take menial jobs after their arrival in the United States. "Little Brazil" is not an insentient statistical portrait of this population writ large, but a nuanced account that captures what it is like to be a new immigrant in this most cosmopolitan of world cities.

The objective of this book is to review the impact of genetic variation on risk of human disease at the different major levels of organization: cells, individuals, families, and populations. The volume begins with a discussion of sources and rates of mutation which ultimately give rise to the vast amount of extant genetic variation. This is followed by presentations of current understanding of how genetic variation is maintained within and among populations. The volume ends with discussions of the implications of such variation for understanding the evolution of our species. This collection gives an unusually broad treatment of the subject, with chapters from some of the leading workers in the field. James Neel's chapter on human consanguinity effects and M. Otake's on the genetic effects of radiation associated with the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs should be singled out for special emphasis. As an up-to-date overview of ongoing research, this work will be of interest to a wide range of workers in the fields of human population genetics, evolution, and epidemiology.

Dr Schildkrout probes questions of ethnicity, religion, cultural change and the African national identity in this study of the immigrant community of Kumasi, Ghana's second largest city. She compares first- and second-generation immigrants - those born in their rural homelands, and those born in Ghana - in terms of their orientation to politics, to kinship, and to community participation. The author explores the meaning of ethnic identity for rural- and urban-born immigrants, and establishes certain generalizations about ethnicity based on these comparisons. The book discusses the issues of migration, particularly interregional migration; the position of the 'stranger'; questions of cultural change in modern Africa; the 'generational gap' in the African context; the questions of citizenship and national identity in Africa today, and the emergence of new identities, regional, national and religious. This book has importance not only as a local case study that gives a full description of West African urban life, but also as a theoretical reconsideration of ethnicity that has application outside the African context.

In this study, Peter Fry describes and analyses spirit-mediumship amongst a community of Zezuru people living near Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). He examines the belief system which underpins spirit-mediumship and the basis of the mediums' authority. He pays special attention to the way in which religious beliefs are used politically in specific social situations ranging from village disputes to issues of national importance. Instead of portraying the spirits and their mediums as a fixed and stable hierarchy, Peter Fry stresses the dynamics of a religious system which changes over time in relation to changing external factors and to the ability of individual competing mediums to build up followings by responding to and moulding consensus. The book makes comparisons between the religious systems of the Zezuru and the Valley Korekore, both subgroups of Shona-speaking peoples, and concludes by discussing the role of Zezuru mediums in the context of the confrontation between black and white nationalisms. The spirit-mediums, opposed structurally to the white mission churches, are seen as vehicles of black cultural nationalism in the area.