Ethnography familiarizes readers with ethnographic research and writing traditions through detailed discussions of ethnography's history, exploratory design, representational conventions, and standards of evaluation. Responding to the proliferation of ethnography both within and outside of academia, in this book, Anthony Kwame Harrison grounds ethnographic practices within the anthropological principles of cultural awareness, thick description, and embodied understanding. At the same time, the book introduces new frameworks for grasping ethnography's simultaneous strategic and improvisational imperatives, as well as for appreciating its experimental conventions of social science and humanistic research reporting. Central to this process, Ethnography introduces the concept of ethnographic comportment-defined as an historically informed politics of position that impacts ethnographers' conduct and disposition-which serves as a standard for gauging and engaging ethnography throughout the text. Part research primer, writing guide, and assessment handbook, Ethnography provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to one of the richest and most expansive traditions of qualitative research.

In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," Darwin's second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the first printing of the first edition (1871), not previously available in paperback.

The work is divided into two parts. Part One marshals behavioral and morphological evidence to argue that humans evolved from other animals. Darwin shoes that human mental and emotional capacities, far from making human beings unique, are evidence of an animal origin and evolutionary development. Part Two is an extended discussion of the differences between the sexes of many species and how they arose as a result of selection. Here Darwin lays the foundation for much contemporary research by arguing that many characteristics of animals have evolved not in response to the selective pressures exerted by their physical and biological environment, but rather to confer an advantage in sexual competition. These two themes are drawn together in two final chapters on the role of sexual selection in humans.

In their Introduction, Professors Bonner and May discuss the place of "The Descent" in its own time and relation to current work in biology and other disciplines.

Articles included: Emotional Geography. Authenticity, Embodiment and Cultural Heritage; Anniversaries and Jubilees. Changing Celebratory Customs in Modern Times; The Meaning of Weaving. Textiles in a Museum Magazine; Contested Modernities. Politics, Culture and Urbanisation in Portugal: A Case Study from the Greater Lisbon Area; The Outsiders Gaze as Part of the Methodological Toolkit?; Reflections on the Research Project the "Musikantenstadl"; The Camino de Santiago. The Interplay of European Heritage and New Traditions.

'Ethnologia Europaea' has set itself the task of breaking down not only the barriers which divide research into Europe from general ethnology, but also the barriers between the various national schools within the continent. With this manifesto 'Ethnologia Europaea' was started in 1969. Since then, it has acquired a central position in the international co-operation between ethnologists in the various European countries, in the East as well as in the West. It is, however, a journal of topical interest, not only for ethnologists, but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies.

In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship's owners to file an insurance claim for their lost "cargo." Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today's finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

Through an intensive examination of photographs and engravings from European, Peruvian, and U.S. archives, Deborah Poole explores the role visual images and technologies have played in shaping modern understandings of race. "Vision, Race, and Modernity" traces the subtle shifts that occurred in European and South American depictions of Andean Indians from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and explains how these shifts led to the modern concept of "racial difference." While Andean peoples were always thought of as different by their European describers, it was not until the early nineteenth century that European artists and scientists became interested in developing a unique visual and typological language for describing their physical features. Poole suggests that this "scientific" or "biological" discourse of race cannot be understood outside a modern visual economy. Although the book specifically documents the depictions of Andean peoples, Poole's findings apply to the entire colonized world of the nineteenth century.

Poole presents a wide range of images from operas, scientific expeditions, nationalist projects, and picturesque artists that both effectively elucidate her argument and contribute to an impressive history of photography. "Vision, Race, and Modernity" is a fascinating attempt to study the changing terrain of racial theory as part of a broader reorganization of vision in European society and culture.

The Ontogeny of Information is a critical intervention into the ongoing and perpetually troubling nature-nurture debates surrounding human development. Originally published in 1985, this was a foundational text in what is now the substantial field of developmental systems theory. In this revised edition Susan Oyama argues compellingly that nature and nurture are not alternative influences on human development but, rather, developmental products and the developmental processes that produce them. Information, says Oyama, is thought to reside in molecules, cells, tissues, and the environment. When something wondrous occurs in the world, we tend to question whether the information guiding the transformation was pre-encoded in the organism or installed through experience or instruction. Oyama looks beyond this either-or question to focus on the history of such developments. She shows that what developmental "information" does depends on what is already in place and what alternatives are available. She terms this process "constructive interactionism," whereby each combination of genes and environmental influences simultaneously interacts to produce a unique result. Ontogeny, then, is the result of dynamic and complex interactions in multileveled developmental systems. The Ontogeny of Information challenges specialists in the fields of developmental biology, philosophy of biology, psychology, and sociology, and even nonspecialists, to reexamine the existing nature-nurture dichotomy as it relates to the history and formation of organisms.

Though a seemingly stable concept in ethnological work, "family" as a lived reality took and takes on innumerable forms shaped by economic pressures, mobility and attendant social transformations, and biotechnical interventions. The case studies in this special issue focus on the ways in which social actors seek to concretize as well as control what family could or should be. While (bio-)technological innovation proves vital to fulfill traditional imaginaries of a nuclear family, communication technology is a key to keep transnationally situated families in contact. Still, transnational work opportunities conflict with traditional imaginaries of the wholesome families and impact particularly women seeking to cross both borders and established family norms. Popular genealogy as a hobby and passion uncovers evidence that counters established narratives: instead of long-term sedentary family lineages, evidence of migration muddies the waters. Family metaphor, finally, serves, in one of the case studies, as vocabulary to materialize imaginary kinship ties among nuns. The five case studies are complemented by four commentaries, exploring paths along which these themes can be developed further.

Prejudices and stereotypes are as ancient as mankind. Why do we think we can deduce someone's characteristics by their appearance? This book is based on the contested theory of Italian doctor Lombroso on the heredity of criminality. Lombroso stated that criminal behaviour is a part of human nature. He wanted to prove some forms of criminality are hereditary. Facial features, corporal constitution...as a basis to stigmatise people. But how do we deal with appearance these days, in a multicultural society? Do we still presume 'other' features are 'suspicious'? Is there such a thing as a 'born criminal'? This book also pays attention to phenomena such as physical anthropology, craniometry and phrenology.

This chronicles the interrelation of gender, class and race which shaped British imperialism and, subsequently, its bloody dismantling.

"With Respect to Sex" is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India, individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships between local and global, sexual and moral, economies.
This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in gender, queer, and sexuality studies.

Introduces key terms, concepts, debates, and histories for Disability Studies Keywords for Disability Studies aims to broaden and define the conceptual framework of disability studies for readers and practitioners in the field and beyond. The volume engages some of the most pressing debates of our time, such as prenatal testing, euthanasia, accessibility in public transportation and the workplace, post-traumatic stress, and questions about the beginning and end of life. Each of the 60 essays in Keywords for Disability Studies focuses on a distinct critical concept, including "ethics," "medicalization," "performance," "reproduction," "identity," and "stigma," among others. Although the essays recognize that "disability" is often used as an umbrella term, the contributors to the volume avoid treating individual disabilities as keywords, and instead interrogate concepts that encompass different components of the social and bodily experience of disability. The essays approach disability as an embodied condition, a mutable historical phenomenon, and a social, political, and cultural identity. An invaluable resource for students and scholars alike, Keywords for Disability Studies brings the debates that have often remained internal to disability studies into a wider field of critical discourse, providing opportunities for fresh theoretical considerations of the field's core presuppositions through a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

Contemporary feminist advocacy in human rights, international criminal law, and peace and security is gripped by the issue of sexual violence in conflict. But it hasn't always been this way. Analyzing feminist international legal and political work over the past three decades, Karen Engle argues that it was not inevitable that sexual violence in conflict would become such a prominent issue. Engle reveals that as feminists from around the world began to pay an enormous amount of attention to sexual violence in conflict, they often did so at the cost of attention to other issues, including the anti-militarism of the women's peace movement; critiques of economic maldistribution, imperialism, and cultural essentialism by feminists from the global South; and the sex-positive positions of many feminists involved in debates about sex work and pornography. The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict offers a detailed examination of how these feminist commitments were not merely deprioritized, but undermined, by efforts to address the issue of sexual violence in conflict. Engle's analysis reinvigorates vital debates about feminist goals and priorities, and spurs readers to question much of today's common sense about the causes, effects, and proper responses to sexual violence in conflict.

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.

Epicentre to Aftermath makes both empirical and conceptual contributions to the growing body of disaster studies literature by providing an analysis of a disaster aftermath that is steeped in the political and cultural complexities of its social and historical context. Drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the book highlights the political, historical, cultural, artistic, emotional, temporal, embodied and material dynamics at play in the earthquake aftermath. Crucially, it shows that the experience and meaning of a disaster are not given or inevitable, but are the outcome of situated human agency. The book suggests a whole new epistemology of disaster consequences and their meanings, and dramatically expands the field of knowledge relevant to understanding disasters and their outcomes.

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.

More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country. Arguably, German Americans form America's largest ethnic group. Yet they have a remarkably low profile today, reflecting a dramatic, twentieth-century retreat from German-American identity. In this age of multiculturalism, why have German Americans gone into ethnic eclipse--and where have they ended up? "Becoming Old Stock" represents the first in-depth exploration of that question. The book describes how German Philadelphians reinvented themselves in the early twentieth century, especially after World War I brought a nationwide anti-German backlash.

Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms--as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners.

"Becoming Old Stock" sheds light on the way German Americans used race, American nationalism, and mass culture to fashion new identities in place of ethnic ones. It is also an important contribution to the growing literature on racial identity among European Americans. In tracing the fate of one of America's largest ethnic groups, "Becoming Old Stock" challenges historians to rethink the phenomenon of ethnic assimilation and to explore its complex relationship to American pluralism.

We inherit mechanisms for survival from our primeval past; none so obviously as those involved in reproduction. The hormone testosterone underlies the organization of activation of masculinity: it changes the body and brain to make a male. It is involved not only in sexuality but in driving aggression, competitiveness, risk-taking - all elements that were needed for successful survival and reproduction in the past. But these ancient systems are carried forward into a modern world. The ancient world shaped the human brain, but the modern world is shaped by that brain. How does this world, with all its cultural, political, and social variations, deal with and control the primeval role of testosterone, which continues to be essential for the survival of the species? Sex, aggression, winning, losing, gangs, war: the powerful effects of testosterone are entwined with them all. These are the ingredients of human history, so testosterone has played a central role in our story. In Testosterone, Joe Herbert explains the nature of this potent hormone, how it operates in mammals in general and in humans in particular, what we know about its role in influencing various aspects of behaviour in men, and what we are beginning to understand of its role in women. From rape to gang warfare among youths, understanding the workings of testosterone is critical to enable us to manage its continuing powerful effects in modern 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.

What is Europe? Where is Europe? And what is Europe in the discipline of European ethnology? This issue of Ethnologic Europaea celebrates the journal's 40th birthday by looking at future paths for research on Europe. For a long time the disciplines grouped under the label of European ethnology were mainly national ethnologies. The need for European com-parisons lived more in the Sunday rhetoric of the discipline than in actual research, but with a new interest in transnational processes the perspectives have widened. The processes of economic unification also gave rise to research on facets of a Euro-pean culture, conditioned, for instance, by the administrative implementation of European economic and, increasingly, cultural policies. Local, regional and national cultural dimen-sions do not vanish in this development, of course, and neither do borders and boundaries, physical and mental. Processes of EU integration as well as globalisation may both weaken and strengthen national and regional borders, as we have seen during the last decades, but such developments call for a rethinking of Europe as a research field and also a questioning of ideas about Europe or European cultural homogeneity. The EU rhetoric about unity hides a more complex picture, where European integration and disintegration emerges in often surprising settings and forms.

This volume chronicles the history of Catholic parishes in such major cities as Boston, Chicago, Detriot, New York and Philadelphia, linking their unique place in the urban landscape to the course of 20th-century American race relations. In portraits of parish life, the book examines the contacts and conflicts between Euro-American Catholics and their African-American neighbours. By tracing the transformation of a church, its people and the nation, the book illuminates the enormous impact of religious culture on modern American society.

The impact of the U.S. immigration and legal systems on children and youth In the United States, millions of children are undocumented migrants or have family members who came to the country without authorization. The unique challenges with which these children and youth must cope demand special attention. Illegal Encounters considers illegality, deportability, and deportation in the lives of young people-those who migrate as well as those who are affected by the migration of others. A primary focus of the volume is to understand how children and youth encounter, move through, or are outside of a range of legal processes, including border enforcement, immigration detention, federal custody, courts, and state processes of categorization. Even if young people do not directly interact with state immigration systems-because they are U.S. citizens or have avoided detention-they are nonetheless deeply affected by the reach of the government in its many forms. Contributors privilege the voices and everyday experiences of immigrant children and youth themselves. By combining different perspectives from advocates, service providers, attorneys, researchers, and young immigrants, the volume presents rich accounts that can contribute to informed debates and policy reforms. Illegal Encounters sheds light on the unique ways in which policies, laws, and legal categories shape so much of daily life for young immigrants. The book makes visible the burdens, hopes, and potential of a population of young people and their families who have been largely hidden from public view and are currently under siege, following their movement through complicated immigration systems and institutions in the United States.

"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.

In the 1980s, George Marcus spearheaded a major critique of cultural anthropology, expressed most clearly in the landmark book Writing Culture, which he coedited with James Clifford. Ethnography through Thick and Thin updates and advances that critique for the late 1990s. Marcus presents a series of penetrating and provocative essays on the changes that continue to sweep across anthropology. He examines, in particular, how the discipline's central practice of ethnography has been changed by "multi-sited" approaches to anthropology and how new research patterns are transforming anthropologists' careers. Marcus rejects the view, often expressed, that these changes are undermining anthropology. The combination of traditional ethnography with scholarly experimentation, he argues, will only make the discipline more lively and diverse.

The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Marcus shows how ethnographers' tradition of defining fieldwork in terms of peoples and places is now being challenged by the need to study culture by exploring connections, parallels, and contrasts among a variety of often seemingly incommensurate sites. The second part illustrates this emergent multi-sited condition of research by reflecting it in some of Marcus's own past research on Tongan elites and dynastic American fortunes. In the final section, which includes the previously unpublished essay "Sticking with Ethnography through Thick and Thin," Marcus examines the evolving professional culture of anthropology and the predicaments of its new scholars. He shows how students have increasingly been drawn to the field as much by such powerful interdisciplinary movements as feminism, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies as by anthropology's own traditions. He also considers the impact of demographic changes within the discipline--in particular the fact that anthropologists are no longer almost exclusively Euro-Americans studying non-Euro-Americans. These changes raise new issues about the identities of anthropologists in relation to those they study, and indeed, about what is to define standards of ethnographic scholarship.

Filled with keen and highly illuminating observations, "Ethnography through Thick and Thin" will stimulate fresh debate about the past, present, and future of a discipline undergoing profound transformations.

This reprint of a collection of articles addresses the challenges that European ethnology is facing. Representing a variety of localities, they give new insights and perspectives to the importance of doing empirical fieldwork and of seeing the emergence of new patterns as well as the remaking of old ones.