Biological anthropology is a diverse field, with countless research methods and techniques in different sub-disciplines. This book takes a critical perspective to the current state of the field, exploring theory and practice in paleoanthropology, bioarchaeology, and ecology. Contributors challenge how evidence is discovered, collected and interpreted, and explain that researchers gain insights by de-familiarizing themselves from well-known methods and taking a different perspective - 'making the familiar strange'. The book covers how researchers' biases and assumptions affect the interpretation of topics such as human evolution and population movements; race, health, and disability; bodies and embodiment; and landscapes and ecology. A final chapter includes a critical assessment of new thinking about technology, in addition to the multilayered and complex nature of both research questions and evidence. This is an insightful text for researchers and graduate students in anthropology, biology, ecology, history and philosophy of science.

"Bones of Contention" is a behind-the-scenes look at the search for human origins. Analyzing how the biases and preconceptions of paleoanthropologists shaped their work, Roger Lewin's detective stories about the discovery of Neanderthal Man, the Taung Child, Lucy, and other major fossils provide insight into this most subjective of scientific endeavors. The new afterword looks at ways in which paleoanthropology, while becoming more scientific
in many ways, remains contentious.
"[An] un-put-downable book."--John Gribbon, "Times Educational Supplement"
"Not just another 'stones and bones' account of human evolution. It is Lewin's thesis, amply demonstrated, that paleoanthropology is the most subjective of sciences because it engages the emotions of virtually everyone; and since the evidence is scrappy, interpretation is everything. . . . A splendid, stirring, and eye-opening account, to be devoured."--"Kirkus Reviews," starred review
"[Lewin shows] 'how very unscientific the process of scientific inquiry can be.'. . . "Bones of Contention" is . . . serious intellectual history."--Edward Dolnick, "Wall Street Journal"
"[Lewin] documents his thesis in persuasive detail. . . . The reader is carried along by the power of Mr. Lewin's reporting."--Robert Wright, "New York Times Book Review"

According to most social scientists, the advent of a global media village and the rise of liberal democratic government would diminish ethnic and national identity as a source of political action. Yet the contemporary world is in the midst of an explosion of identity politics and often violent ethnonationalism.
This volume examines cases ranging from the well-publicized ethnonationalism of Bosnia and post-Apartheid South Africa to ethnic conflicts in Belgium and Sri Lanka. Distinguished international scholars including John Comaroff, Stanley J. Tambiah, and Ernesto Laclau argue that continued acceptance of imposed ethnic terms as the most appropriate vehicle for collective self-identification and social action legitimizes the conditions of inequality that give rise to them in the first place.
This ambitious attempt to explain the inadequacies of current approaches to power and ethnicity forges more realistic alternatives to the volatile realities of social difference.

The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. "A Hideous Monster of the Mind" reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism.

From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences.

In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, "A Hideous Monster of the Mind" offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

This innovative portrait of student life in an urban high school focuses on the academic success of African-American students, exploring the symbolic role of academic achievement within the Black community and investigating the price students pay for attaining it. Signithia Fordham's richly detailed ethnography reveals a deeply rooted cultural system that favors egalitarianism and group cohesion over the individualistic, competitive demands of academic success and sheds new light on the sources of academic performance. She also details the ways in which the achievements of sucessful African-Americans are "blacked out" of the public imagination and negative images are reflected onto black adolescents. A self-proclaimed "native" anthropologist, she chronicles the struggle of African-American students to construct an identity suitable to themselves, their peers, and their families within an arena of colliding ideals. This long-overdue contribution is of crucial importance to educators, policymakers, and ethnographers.

"Nicole Constable has produced a splendid sequel to her much-praised "Maid to Order in Hong Kong. Constable's sensitive ethnography and her international scope insures that we see every Filipino and Chinese woman as a thinking, feeling person, and every American man who is her pen pal and sometimes future husband as far more than a mere cartoon character. "Romance on a Global Stage wonderfully complicates the genderings and globalizings of power and emotions."--Cynthia Enloe, author of "Bananas, Beaches and Bases

"The rise of feminism in North America has been paralleled by a growth in marriages between Western men and women from the global periphery. Constable's fascinating study explores the multiple desires at work, revealing the anti-feminist reason and feminist surprises in these global romances."--Aihwa Ong, author of "Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America

"Constable adds a new map to the cartographies of desire in this nuanced and fresh account of 'mail-order marriage.' Her original work carefully attends to emotion, sex, and political economy, offering a complex account of gender, marriage, and globalization."--Carole S. Vance, author of "Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality

"This innovative and compassionate work maps new formations of desire in the context of globalization. Constable breaks through the stereotypes about transnational pen-pal marriages to enable us to see, in an ethnographically detailed way, how agency and desire are shaped by uneven economic development and how cyber-technologies figure in the production of new global imaginaries."--Ann Anagnost, author of "National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power inModern China

"Constable is a talented and perceptive anthropologist who has mastered the use of the web both as a research tool and a topic of research. Her sensible and timely examination of transnational marriages of American men with women from the Philippines and China relentlessly debunks commonly-held tales about submissive (or manipulative) Asian women and wealthy (or abusive) American men."--Jean-Paul Dumont, author of "Visayan Vignettes: Ethnographic Traces of a Philippine Island

"Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader" delineates the prevailing concerns and considerations, principles and practices, concepts and categories that fall under the rubric of "multiculturalism". The contributors spell out what they take multiculturalism to be committed to as much as what it is against. The themes analyzed, include the relations between self and other, selves and others; between knowledge, power, pedagogy, and empowerment; between disciplinary definition and canonical confinement; between meaning, ambiguity, and representation; between history and multiple intersecting histories, reason and rationalities; and between culture domination, resistance, and self-assertion.

Filled with insight, provocative in its conclusions, "A'aisa's Gifts" is a groundbreaking ethnography of the Mekeo of Papua New Guinea and a valuable contribution to anthropological theory. Based on twenty years' fieldwork, this richly detailed study of Mekeo esoteric knowledge, cosmology, and self-conceptualizations recasts accepted notions about magic and selfhood. Drawing on accounts by Mekeo ritual experts and laypersons, this is the first book to demonstrate magic's profound role in creating the self. It also argues convincingly that dream reporting provides a natural context for self-reflection. In presenting its data, the book develops the concept of "autonomous imagination" into a new theoretical framework for exploring subjective imagery processes across cultures.

'The West' has a unique civilization, a powerful 'front' - modernity, liberty, democracy, affluence. This volume offers critical perspectives from both 'inside' and 'outside' the cultural and intellectual frontiers of the Western project.

The primary focus is on analysing racism and changing ethnicities in Europe and the US in the context of new forms of global dislocation, economic recession, the resurgence of neo-Fascism, and a widespread sense of the crisis of Western modernity. The chapters assess the value of Marxist perspectives and newer approaches that take 'modernity' and 'postmodernity' as frameworks for analysis. They also explore how European identities have been continually reconstructed by a cultural repression of the 'non-Western', whether through colonial discourses, the denial of Asian, Islamic, Judaic and African influences or the effects of Eurocentric conceptions of subjectivity in the psychiatric disciplining of ethnic minorities.

The chapters are written by some of the most original and influential writers in the field: they include Michel Wieviorka, Howard Winant, Robert Miles, Robert Young, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Sallie Westwood, Ali Rattansi and Cathie Lloyd.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that every immigrant to the United States "became American", by choice and with deliberate speed. Yet, as Special Sorrows shows us, this is simply untrue. In this compelling revisionist study, Matthew Frye Jacobson reveals tenacious attachments to the Old World and explores the significance of homeland politics for Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on Yiddish, Polish, and English-language sources, Jacobson discovers the influence of nationalist ideologies in the overt political agendas of such ethnic associations as the Knights of Zion and the Polish Falcons, as well as in newspapers, vernacular theater, popular religion, poetry, fiction, and festivals both religious and secular. In immigrant communities, he finds that nationalism was a powerful component of popular sensibility. A captivating example of Jacobson's thesis is immigrant reaction to American intervention in Cuba. Masculinist/militarist strains of nationalist culture met with the keen impulse to aid a subjugated people. The three national groups, laden with memories of their own subjugation, found an unlikely outlet in the Caribbean. But when the U.S. war for Cuban liberation was followed by a crusade for Philippine subjugation, immigrants faced a dilemma: some condemned the American empire rich in Old World parallels; others dismissed the Filipinos as racial "others" and embraced the glories of conquest. In effect, the crucible of American imperialism was vital to many immigrants' Americanization, in the sense of passionate participation in national politics, pro or con. This work answers the call of scholars to recover the fullexperience of these immigrants. It adds to the tapestry of America's turn-of-the-century political culture and restores an essential transnational dimension to questions of ethnic identity and behavior.

An internationally known dancer, choreographer, and gifted anthropologist, Katherine Dunham was born to a black American tailor and a well-to-do French Canadian woman twenty years his senior. This book is Dunham's story of the chaos and conflict that entered her childhood after her mother's early death. In stark prose, she tells of growing up in both black and white households and of the divisions of race and class in Chicago that become the harsh realities of her young life. A riveting narrative of one girl's struggle to transcend the painful confusions of a family and culture in turmoil, Dunham's story is full of the clarity, candor, and intelligence that lifted her above her troubled beginnings.

In many Mediterranean countries we observe newcomers to the political arena: new forms of social networking, growing opposition, and protest articulated by local communities or locally active social movements. In this special issue we present fresh research on localized practices of resistance by protest groups, solidarity initiatives, and cultural projects, which have arisen in the wake of the 2008 crisis. Based on ethnological fieldwork, the volume offers insights into the media-based protest against the commodification of the historic Marseille district Panier (Philip Cartelli); urban gardening in Ljubljana as a practice opposing the growing neoliberal market economy (Saa Poljak Istenic); and the movement Genuino Clandestino, a solidarity network of small-scale farmers in Italy (Alexander Koensler). Three case studies deal with social movement in Greece: a solidarity network in Volos, where citizens developed an alternative exchange and trading system (Andreas Streinzer); grassroots mobilizations as resistant practices in the inner urban neighbourhood of Exarchia in Athens (Monia Cappuccini); and finally rural solidarity networks on the Peloponnese peninsula (James Verinis). A comparative discussion of Mediterranean protest movements (Jutta Lauth Bacas and Marion Naser-Lather) identifies underlying common features in these clearly different, yet relatable practices of protest: among others, the major role of face-to-face interaction and mutual trust.

In "Balinese Worlds," Fredrik Barth proposes a new model for anthropological analysis of complex civilizations that is based on a fresh, synthetic account of culture and society in North Bali and one that takes full notice of individual creativity in shaping the contours of this dynamic culture.
In this detailed ethnography of the Northern district of Buleleng, Barth rejects mainstream anthropological generalizations of Bali as a cultural system of carefully articulated parts. Instead--drawing on many sources, including the sociology of knowledge, interactional analysis, postmodern thought, and his own exceptionally varied field experience--Barth presents a new model that actually generates variation. Barth's innovative analysis of Balinese life highlights both the constructive and the disorganizing effects of individual action, the constant flux of interpretation, and the powerful interaction of memory and social relationships, and knowledge as a cultural resource.
"Balinese Worlds" is a unique contribution not only to Balinese studies but also to the theory and methods of the anthropology of complex societies.

What makes humans unique? What makes us the most successful animal species inhabiting the Earth today? Most scientists agree that the key to our success is the unusually large size of our brains. Our large brains gave us our exceptional thinking capacity and led to humans' other distinctive characteristics, including advanced communication, tool use, and walking on two legs. Or was it the other way around? Did the challenges faced by early humans push the species toward communication, tool use, and walking and, in doing so, drive the evolutionary engine toward a large brain? In this provocative new book, Craig Stanford presents an intriguing alternative to this puzzling question--an alternative grounded in recent, groundbreaking scientific observation. According to Stanford, what made humans unique was meat. Or, rather, the desire for meat, the eating of meat, the hunting of meat, and the sharing of meat.

Based on new insights into the behavior of chimps and other great apes, our now extinct human ancestors, and existing hunting and gathering societies, Stanford shows the remarkable role that meat has played in these societies. Perhaps because it provides a highly concentrated source of protein--essential for the development and health of the brain--meat is craved by many primates, including humans. This craving has given meat genuine power--the power to cause males to form hunting parties and organize entire cultures around hunting. And it has given men the power to manipulate and control women in these cultures. Stanford argues that the skills developed and required for successful hunting and "especially" the sharing of meat spurred the explosion of human brain size over the past 200,000 years. He then turns his attention to the ways meat is shared within primate and human societies to argue that this all-important activity has had profound effects on basic social structures that are still felt today.

Sure to spark a lively debate, Stanford's argument takes the form of an extended essay on human origins. The book's small format, helpful illustrations, and moderate tone will appeal to all readers interested in those fundamental questions about what makes us human.

In "Big Thicket Legacy," Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller present the stories of people living in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Many of the storytellers were close to one hundred years old when interviewed, with some being the great-grandchildren of the first settlers. Here are tales about robbing a bee tree, hunting wild boar, plowing all day and dancing all night, wading five miles to church through a cypress brake, and making soap using hickory ashes.

What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid 1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections? Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. "Canarsie" is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.

Senses and Sensation: Critical and Primary Sources offers a comprehensive collection of key writings essential to anyone wishing to gain a critical understanding of sensory studies. The four volumes include 101 essays from leading scholars in the humanities, social sciences, arts and design, biology, psychology and the neurosciences.Drawing upon historical and contemporary texts from a wide range of sources, this set is inspired by the sensory turn in the humanities, social sciences and fine arts which has challenged the monopoly that psychology formerly held over the study of senses and sensation. It also builds upon the revolution in psychology and the neurosciences which has led to an increased emphasis on the interaction and integration of the senses, in place of the one-sense-at-a-time approach.Ordered by discipline, the volumes cover geography and anthropology, history and sociology, biology, psychology and neuroscience, and art and design. Each volume is separately introduced and the essays structured into coherent sections on specific themes.

In this absorbing history, Henry Warner Bowden chronicles the encounters between native Americans and the evangelizing whites from the period of exploration and colonization to the present. He writes with a balanced perspective that pleads no special case for native separatism or Christian uniqueness. Ultimately, he broadens our understanding of both intercultural exchanges and the continuing strength of American Indian spirituality, expressed today in Christian forms as well as in revitalized folkways.
Bowden makes a radical departure from the traditional approach. Drawing on the theories and findings of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, he presents Indian-missionary relations as a series of cultural encounters, the outcomes of which were determined by the content of native beliefs, the structure of native religious institutions, and external factors such as epidemic diseases and military conflicts, as well as by the missionaries' own resources and abilities. The result is a provocative, insightful historical essay that liberates a complex subject from the narrow perimeters of past discussions and accords it an appropriate richness and complexity. . . . For anyone with an interest in Indian-missionary relations, from the most casual to the most specialized, this book is the place to begin.--Neal Salisbury, Theology Today
If one wishes to read a concise, thought-provoking ethnohistory of Indian missions, 1540-1980, this is it. Henry Warner Bowden's history, perhaps for the first time, places the sweep of Christian evangelism fully in the context of vigorous, believable, native religions.--Robert H. Keller, Jr., American Historical Review

In growing numbers, archeologists are specializing in the analysis of excavated animal bones as clues to the environment and behavior of ancient peoples. This pathbreaking work provides a detailed discussion of the outstanding issues and methods of bone studies that will interest zooarcheologists as well as paleontologists who focus on reconstructing ecologies from bones. Because large samples of bones from archeological sites require tedious and time-consuming analysis, the authors also offer a set of computer programs that will greatly simplify the bone specialist's job.
After setting forth the interpretive framework that governs their use of numbers in faunal analysis, Richard G. Klein and Kathryn Cruz-Uribe survey various measures of taxonomic abundance, review methods for estimating the sex and age composition of a fossil species sample, and then give examples to show how these measures and sex/age profiles can provide useful information about the past. In the second part of their book, the authors present the computer programs used to calculate and analyze each numerical measure or count discussed in the earlier chapters. These elegant and original programs, written in BASIC, can easily be used by anyone with a microcomputer or with access to large mainframe computers.

Situated at the intersection of natural science and philosophy, Our Genes explores historical practices, investigates current trends, and imagines future work in genetic research to answer persistent, political questions about human diversity. Readers are guided through fascinating thought experiments, complex measures and metrics, fundamental evolutionary patterns, and in-depth treatment of exciting case studies. The work culminates in a philosophical rationale, based on scientific evidence, for a moderate position about the explanatory power of genes that is often left unarticulated. Simply put, human evolutionary genomics - our genes - can tell us much about who we are as individuals and as collectives. However, while they convey scientific certainty in the popular imagination, genes cannot answer some of our most important questions. Alternating between an up-close and a zoomed-out focus on genes and genomes, individuals and collectives, species and populations, Our Genes argues that the answers we seek point to rich, necessary work ahead.

This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level. The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a 'genealogical nationalism' as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state. Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written.

In this gripping ethnography, Jeffrey J. Sallaz goes behind the scenes of the global casino industry to investigate the radically different worlds of work and leisure he found in identically designed casinos in the United States and South Africa. Seamlessly weaving political and economic history with his own personal experience, Sallaz provides a riveting account of two years spent working among both countries' casino dealers, pit bosses, and politicians. While the popular imagination sees the Nevada casino as a hedonistic world of consumption, "The Labor of Luck" shows that the "Vegas experience" is made possible only through a variety of systems regulating labor, capital, and consumers, and that because of these complex dynamics, the Vegas casino cannot be seamlessly picked up and replicated elsewhere. Sallaz's fresh and path-breaking approach reveals how neo-liberal versus post-colonial forms of governance produce divergent worlds at the tables, and how politics, profits, and pleasure have come together to shape everyday life in the new economy.

A Times/Sunday Times Book of the Year DISCOVER HOW LIFE REALLY WORKS - ON EARTH AND IN SPACE 'A wonderfully insightful sidelong look at Earthly biology' Richard Dawkins 'Crawls with curious facts' Sunday Times _________________________ We are unprepared for the greatest discovery of modern science. Scientists are confident that there is alien life across the universe yet we have not moved beyond our perception of 'aliens' as Hollywood stereotypes. The time has come to abandon our fixation on alien monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing. Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution - which applies throughout the universe - Cambridge zoologist Dr Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like. This is the story of how life really works, on Earth and in space. _________________________ 'An entertaining, eye-opening and, above all, a hopeful view of what - or who - might be out there in the cosmos' Philip Ball, author of Nature's Patterns 'A fascinating insight into the deepest of questions: what might an alien actually look like' Lewis Dartnell, author of Origins 'If you don't want to be surprised by extraterrestrial life, look no further than this lively overview of the laws of evolution that have produced life on earth' Frans de Waal, author of Mama's Last Hug

Healthcare issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. Both the central and the state governments have responded to criticisms of health care inaccessibility by including it as a part of its developmental policies in the last two decades. Given this context, the contributors to this volume explore how the health care system is structured in India; the role of the state, market, private, and corporate sector in health care; the distribution of basic health care facilities by the state across caste, class, gender, and spatial locations; the implications of increasing clinical trials and use of pharmaceuticals in terms of cost, exclusion, and ethicality; how globalization created opportunities or built hurdles for democratizing health care facilities; and the critical role of communities in the new health care system. This edited volume thus provides a holistic narrative that explains the politics of health care access in terms of distribution, utilization, and outcomes as well as the context in which health inequalities are reproduced which is critical not only to our scholarly understanding of health care but to informing the development of health care policy in India at a critical juncture.