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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology > General
Mountain forests provide important ecological services, and essential products. This book focuses on the importance of mountain forests in Cameroon for the local people who depend most directly on them, and have often developed a wealth of indigenous knowledge on plants and sophisticated institutions for managing limited plant and animal resources. Such knowledge and institutions have often been threatened, or even destroyed, by centralization and globalization; yet there is increasing recognition that community-based institutions are the best adapted to ensuring that mountain forests continue to supply their diverse goods and services to both mountain and other people over the long-term. The book provides a useful combination of case studies on ethnobotanic analysis and cultural values of plants, community-based ecological planning for protected area management and eco-cultural tourism development. It provides an unusually useful combination of overviews and synthesis of theory and experience with in-depth case studies of montane forest-adjacent communities and protected areas. Throughout the book there are good summary tables, case study maps, and diagrams that are relevant to the themes in question. Finally, the book addresses the possible mutual benefits of indigenous knowledge and modern science, indigenous peoples and the development of eco-cultural tourism in protected areas, indigenous peoples and ecological planning in protected areas. It therefore emphasizes cooperation based on partnerships amongst indigenous people, governments and the global conservation community, in the interest of effective conservation. This is a valuable book for land managers, environmental scientists, environmental biologists, natural resource managers and students reading subjects such as geography, biology, forestry, botany and environmental science.
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!
Robert Grant Haliburton spent his last years proposing the existence of a distinctive tribal group of small stature within the Atlas Mountains and vicinity. He collected local stories and eyewitness accounts of this "dwarf people," debated critics, and published theories. These curious tales disappeared (or at least were never investigated fully) after Haliburton died, but he left an anthropological legacy that serves as a cautionary tale (or perhaps a starting point for future investigation).
A race-based oppositional paradigm has informed Chicano studies since its emergence. In this work, Sandra K. Soto replaces that paradigm with a less didactic, more flexible framework geared for a queer analysis of the discursive relationship between racialization and sexuality. Through rereadings of a diverse range of widely discussed writers-from Americo Paredes to Cherrie Moraga-Soto demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is a heretofore unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature, even in the most unlikely texts. Soto gives us a broader and deeper engagement with Chican@ representations of racialization, desire, and both inter- and intracultural social relations. While several scholars have begun to take sexuality seriously by invoking the rich terrain of contemporary Chicana feminist literature for its portrayal of culturally specific and historically laden gender and sexual frameworks, as well as for its imaginative transgressions against them, this is the first study to theorize racialized sexuality as pervasive to and enabling of the canon of Chican@ literature. Exemplifying the broad usefulness of queer theory by extending its critical tools and anti-heteronormative insights to racialization, Soto stages a crucial intervention amid a certain loss of optimism that circulates both as a fear that queer theory was a fad whose time has passed, and that queer theory is incapable of offering an incisive, politically grounded analysis in and of the current historical moment.
The Kuna of Panama, today one of the best known indigenous peoples of Latin America, moved over the course of the twentieth century from orality and isolation towards literacy and an active engagement with the nation and the world. Recognizing the fascination their culture has held for many outsiders, Kuna intellectuals and villagers have collaborated actively with foreign anthropologists to counter anti-Indian prejudice with positive accounts of their people, thus becoming the agents as well as subjects of ethnography. One team of chiefs and secretaries, in particular, independently produced a series of historical and cultural texts, later published in Sweden, that today still constitute the foundation of Kuna ethnography. As a study of the political uses of literacy, of western representation and indigenous counter-representation, and of the ambivalent inter-cultural dialogue at the heart of ethnography, Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers addresses key issues in contemporary anthropology. It is the story of an extended ethnographic encounter, one involving hundreds of active participants on both sides and continuing today.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Breaking away from traditional ethnographic accounts often limited by theoretical frameworks and rhetorical styles, Friends for Life, Friends for Death offers an insider's view into the day-to-day lives of a self-selected group of male friends within the Lunda-Ndembu society in northwestern Zambia. During his two decades of fieldwork in this region, James Pritchett followed a group of Lunda-Ndembu males, here called Amabwambu (the friends), revealing the importance of the clique both as a principal agent for receiving and interpreting information from and about the world and as a place where strategies could be hatched, tested, and applied. Viewing friendship, versus kinship, as a critical rather than peripheral element of the Lunda-Ndembu and other groups, the author offers new insights into the ways social structures are able to stay viable even in the face of radical change.
This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literature.
For anthropologists and social scientists working in North and
South America, the past few decades have brought considerable
change as issues such as repatriation, cultural jurisdiction, and
revitalization movements have swept across the hemisphere. Today
scholars are rethinking both how and why they study culture as they
gain a new appreciation for the impact they have on the people they
study. Key to this reassessment of the social sciences is a
rethinking of the concept of borders: not only between cultures and
nations but between disciplines such as archaeology and cultural
anthropology, between past and present, and between anthropologists
and indigenous peoples.
Financial collapses--whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market--are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In "Liquidated," Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers' approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as "the best and the brightest," investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, "Liquidated" reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.
This volume presents 10 papers from the 6th Annual Conference of the British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology, held at the University of Bristol in September 2004. Contents: 1) Climatic influences on craniofacial variability in modern humans (Mallett, X.D.G.); 2) Canopy height utilisation and trauma in three species of cercopithecoid monkeys (Chapman, C., Legge, S.S. and Johns S.E.); 3) Developmental stress and its morphological correlates (Buckley, C.); 4) Teeth and diet: what more is there? Teeth as markers for population history (Zakrzewski, S.R.); 5) Tracing change. Childhood diet at the Anglo-Saxon Blackgate Cemetery, Newcastle upon Tyne, England (Macpherson, P.M., Chenery, C.A., Chamberlain, A.T.); 6) Growth in modern Western children: A representative sample? (Clegg, M.); 7) Tuberculosis at Spitalfields, London: an initial insight into medieval urban living (Gray Jones, A. & Walker, D.); 8) Klippel-Feil syndrome: Examples from two skeletal collections of Alaskan Natives (Legg, S.S.); 9) The specificity of palaeopathological diagnosis: A case of bilateral Scapholunate Advanced Collapse in a Romano-British skeleton from Ancaster (Roberts, A.M. & Robson Brown, K.); 10) A zooarchaeological contribution to Biological Anthropology: Working towards a better understanding of cut marks and butchery (Seetah, K.).
A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University This book on bilingual education policy represents a multidimensional and longitudinal study of ""policy processes"" as they play out on the ground (a single school in Los Angeles), and over time (both within the same school, and also within the state of Georgia). In order to reconstruct this complex policy process, Anderson impressively marshals a great variety of forms of ""discourse."" Most of this discourse, of course, comes from overheard discussions and spontaneous interviews conducted at a particular school-the voices of teachers and administrators. Such discourse forms the heart of her ethnographic findings. Yet Anderson also brings an ethnographer's eye to national and regional debates as they are conducted and represented in different forms of media, especially newspapers and magazines. She then uses the key theoretical concept of ""articulation"" to conceptually link these media representations with local school discourse. The result is an illuminating account of how everyday debates at a particular school and media debates occurring more broadly mutually inform one another. Reviews: Anderson's timely, methodologically sophisticated, and compelling account surrounding the politics of bilingual education moves beyond instrumental notions of policy to advance the idea that mandates are themselves resources that may be vigorously contested as contending parties vie for inclusion in the schooling process. Her work artfully demonstrates how improving schooling for all children is inseparable from a larger, much-needed discussion of what we as a polity believe about whether and how we are interconnected, together with who should and does have a voice in the policy making and implementation process. -Angela Valenzuela, Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author of Subtractive Schooling and Leaving Children Behind Anderson shows the gap between clear-cut assumptions and ideologies informing education policy and legislation on language and immigration, and the complications that arise for teachers when they actually implement language legislation in the classroom. She also illustrates assumptions about language and being American, as these are both debated and shared by each ""side"" of the language and immigration debates in California and Georgia. Her chapter on California's Proposition 227 is a particular eye-opener, demonstrating in detail the embedding of local identities and oppositions in these debates. Above all, she makes quite clear the complex, often contradictory, web of relations among politics, language, race, and cultural citizenship. --Bonnie Urciuoli, Professor, Hamilton College, author of Exposing Prejudice
In many societies and for many people, religiosity is only incidentally connected with texts or theologies, church or mosque, temple or monastery. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic work among people for whom religion is not principally a matter of faith, doctrine, or definition, Michael Jackson turns his attention to those situations in life where we come up against the limits of language, our strength, and our knowledge, yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-in-the-world, to new ways of connecting with others. Through sixty-one beautifully crafted essays based on sojourns in Europe, West Africa, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, and taking his cue from Wallace Stevens's late poem, "Of Mere Being," Jackson explores a range of experiences where "the palm at the end of the mind" stands "beyond thought," on "the edge of space," "a foreign song." Moments of crisis as well as everyday experiences in cafes, airports, and offices disclose the subtle ways in which a single life shades into others, the boundaries between cultures become blurred, fate unfolds through genealogical time, elective affinities make their appearance, and different values contend.
"I'm going to break the ashes," yelled one daily drinker to another as their paths crossed early in the morning in the Sri Lankan village Michele Ruth Gamburd calls Naeaegama. The drinker's cryptic comment compared the warming power of alcohol in the form of his first shot of kasippu, the local moonshine with the rekindled heat of a kitchen fire. As the adverse effects of globalization have brought poverty to many areas of the world, more people, particularly men, have increased their use and abuse of alcohol. Despite Buddhist prohibitions against the consumption of mind-altering substances, men in Naeaegama are drinking more, at a younger age, and the number of problem drinkers has begun to grow. In Breaking the Ashes, Gamburd explores the changing role of alcohol. Her account is populated with lively characters, many of whom Gamburd has known since visiting the village for the first time as a child. In wonderfully clear prose Gamburd offers readers an understanding of the cultural context for social and antisocial alcohol consumption, insight into everyday and ceremonial drinking in Naeaegama, and an overview of the production of illicit alcohol. Breaking the Ashes includes a discussion of the key economic aspects that fuel conflicts between husbands and wives, moonshine-makers and police. Addressing Western and indigenous ways to conceptualize and treat alcohol dependence, Gamburd explores the repercussions at the family as well as the community level of alcohol's abuse."
In "Territories of Difference," Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book "Encountering Development," analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia's Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN's visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement's struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today. Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government's policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements' efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity "hot-spot" from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. "Territories of Difference" is Escobar's effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.
For Native peoples of California, the abalone found along the state's coast have remarkably complex significance as food, spirit, narrative symbol, tradable commodity, and material with which to make adornment and sacred regalia. The large mollusks also represent contemporary struggles surrounding cultural identity and political sovereignty. "Abalone Tales," a collaborative ethnography, presents different perspectives on the multifaceted material and symbolic relationships between abalone and the Ohlone, Pomo, Karuk, Hupa, and Wiyot peoples of California. The research agenda, analyses, and writing strategies were determined through collaborative relationships between the anthropologist Les W. Field and Native individuals and communities. Several of these individuals contributed written texts or oral stories for inclusion in the book. Tales about abalone and their historical and contemporary meanings are related by Field and his coauthors, who include the chair and other members of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe; a Point Arena Pomo elder; the chair of the Wiyot tribe and her sister; several Hupa Indians; and a Karuk scholar, artist, and performer. Reflecting the divergent perspectives of various Native groups and people, the stories and analyses belie any presumption of a single, unified indigenous understanding of abalone. At the same time, they shed light on abalone's role in cultural revitalization, struggles over territory, tribal appeals for federal recognition, and connections among California's Native groups. While California's abalone are in danger of extinction, their symbolic power appears to surpass even the environmental crises affecting the state's vulnerable coastline.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Crucible of Conflict is an ethnographic and historical study of Hindu castes, matrilineal family structure, popular religious traditions, and ethnic conflict. It is also the first full-length ethnography of Sri Lanka's east coast, an area that suffered heavily in the 2004 tsunami and that is of vital significance to the political future of the island nation. Since the bitter guerrilla war for an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka broke out in 1983, the easternmost region of the island has emerged as a strategic site of conflict. Dennis B. McGilvray argues that any long-term resolution of the ethnic conflict must accommodate this region, in which Sinhalese Buddhists, Tamil Hindus, and Tamil-speaking Muslims are each a significant share of the population. McGilvray explores the densely populated farming and fishing settlements in this coastal zone, focusing on the Tamil and Muslim inhabitants of an agricultural town in the Ampara District. Drawing on fieldwork conducted over more than thirty years as well as on Tamil and Dutch historical sources, he describes the regional dominance of a non-Brahmin matrilineal caste of thirteenth-century Kerala origin. The Muslims, who acquired dowry lands and matrilineal family patterns through local intermarriages, have in the twentieth century emerged from Hindu caste domination and are now the Tamil Hindus' political and economic equals. Crucible of Conflict offers a uniquely detailed account of Muslim kinship and community organization in eastern Sri Lanka, as well as a comparison of Tamil and Muslim practices and institutions. McGilvray concludes with an analysis of the interethnic tensions and communal violence that have intensified in recent years.
Traveling back and forth between the Guatemalan highlands and
Providence, Rhode Island, the author followed the migration paths
of a community of K'iche' Indians, often acting as a courier to
bring news and photographs to families. As several said to the
author, "Now you have lived with your own skin what we have gone
through, only you can leave at any time."
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