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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology > General
This book explores the development of hybrid corn, the history of eugenics, human genetics, the nature-nurture debate, the origins of the Marxian concept of proletarian science, the shift in the meaning of "fitness" in evolutionary theory, the practice of normal science in Nazi Germany, and the making and selling of science textbooks. While the topics are diverse, a common theme unites them -- each explores links between biological science, social power, and public policy.
This translation of a major work in Mexican anthropology argues that Mesoamerican civilization is an ongoing and undeniable force in contemporary Mexican life. For Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, the remaining Indian communities, the "de-Indianized" rural mestizo communities, and vast sectors of the poor urban population constitute the Mexico profundo. Their lives and ways of understanding the world continue to be rooted in Mesoamerican civilization. An ancient agricultural complex provides their food supply, and work is understood as a way of maintaining a harmonious relationship with the natural world. Health is related to human conduct, and community service is often part of each individual's life obligation. Time is circular, and humans fulfill their own cycle in relation to other cycles of the universe. Since the Conquest, Bonfil argues, the peoples of the Mexico profundo have been dominated by an "imaginary Mexico" imposed by the West. It is imaginary not because it does not exist, but because it denies the cultural reality lived daily by most Mexicans. Within the Mexico profundo there exists an enormous body of accumulated knowledge, as well as successful patterns for living together and adapting to the natural world. To face the future successfully, argues Bonfil, Mexico must build on these strengths of Mesoamerican civilization, "one of the few original civilizations that humanity has created throughout all its history."
Racial identity theories have been in the psychological literature
for nearly thirty years. Unlike most references to racial identity,
however, Thompson and Carter demonstrate the value of integrating
"RACE" and "IDENTITY" as systematic components of human
functioning. The editors and their contributors show how the
infusion of racial identity theory with other psychological models
can successfully yield more holistic considerations of client
functioning and well-being. Fully respecting the mutual influence
of personal and environmental factors to explanations of individual
and group functioning, they apply complex theoretical notions to
real-life cases in psychological practice.
Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their
attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to
writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of
people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their
explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the
editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the
previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly
rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related
to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account,
the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the
account, and more.
When Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph was published in 1995, it was acclaimed as the first comprehensive history of black women's struggles and achievements. This companion volume contains the original source materials that Ruthe Winegarten uncovered during her extensive research. Like a time capsule of black women's history, A Sourcebook includes petitions from free women of color, lawsuits, slave testimonies, wills, plantation journals, club minutes, autobiographies, ads, congressional reports, contracts, prison records, college catalogues, newspaper clippings, protest letters, and much more. In addition to the documents, a biographical section highlights the lives of women from various walks of life. The book concludes with a timeline that begins in 1777 and reaches to 1992. This wealth of original material will be a treasure trove for scholars and general readers interested in the emerging field of black women's history.
Co-written by a professor and 10 students, this book explores their attempts to come to grips with fundamental issues related to writing narrative accounts purporting to represent aspects of people's lives. The fundamental project, around which their explorations in writing textual accounts turned, derived from the editor's initial ethnographic question: "Tell me about the [previous] class we did together?" This proved to be a particularly rich exercise, bringing into the arena all of the problems related to choice of data, analysis of data, the structure of the account, the stance of the author, tense, and case, the adequacy of the account, and more. As participants shared versions of their accounts and struggled to analyze the wealth of data they had accumulated in the previous classes -- the products of in-class practice of observation and interview -- they became aware of the ephemeral nature of narrative accounts. Reality, as written in textual form, cannot capture the immense depth, breadth, and complexity of an actual lived experience and can only be an incomplete representation that derives from the interpretive imagination of the author. The final chapter results from a number of discussions during which each contributing author briefly revisited the text and -- through dialogue with others and/or the editor -- identified the elements that would provide an overall framework that represents "the big message" of the book. In this way, the contributors attempted to provide a conceptual context that would indicate ways in which their private experiences could be seen to be relevant to the broader public arenas in which education and research is engaged. In its entirety, the book presents an interpretive study of teaching and learning. It provides a multi-voiced account that reveals how problematic, turning-point experiences in a university class are perceived, organized, constructed, and given meaning by a group of interacting individuals.
This work offers a study of the second largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan: the Hazaras. Largely Shi'ia by religion and Farsi-speaking, they traditionally inhabited Central Afghanistan, although were scattered across the country and into neighbouring countries as a result of the war. The Hazaras have recently become into a more influential position within the country's social fabric because its tribally-based pyramidal structure has been disrupted. As well as studying this group, this book also confronts the subject of an Afghan sense of national identity, a concept crucial to the resolution of Afghanistan's crises.
While high school drop-out rates have steadily declined among white and African American students over the last twenty years, a constant 35 percent of Latino students continue to quit school before graduation. Troubled by both the magnitude and the constancy of the Latino drop-out rate, Harriett Romo and Toni Falbo conducted a four-year study of at-risk Latino students to determine how some defy the odds and stay in school to earn high school diplomas. This book reveals in full detail what they found. Romo and Falbo followed the school progress of 100 at-risk students in Austin, Texas, beginning in 1989 when the students were fifteen years old. Drawing on extensive interviews with the students and their parents, school records, and fieldwork in the students' schools and communities, the authors identify both the obstacles that cause many students to drop out and the successful strategies that other students and their parents pursue to ensure high school graduation. Detailed case studies allow students and parents to describe their experiences with the public schools in their own words. After presenting their findings, Romo and Falbo conclude with seven provocative and far-reaching recommendations for changes in the public schools to boost the graduation rate of at-risk Latino students. Sure to provoke lively interest and debate among all groups with a stake in schools, this book will be required reading for school administrators, teachers, parents, legislators, and community leaders in all regions with Latino student populations.
Racial identity theories have been in the psychological literature
for nearly thirty years. Unlike most references to racial identity,
however, Thompson and Carter demonstrate the value of integrating
"RACE" and "IDENTITY" as systematic components of human
functioning. The editors and their contributors show how the
infusion of racial identity theory with other psychological models
can successfully yield more holistic considerations of client
functioning and well-being. Fully respecting the mutual influence
of personal and environmental factors to explanations of individual
and group functioning, they apply complex theoretical notions to
real-life cases in psychological practice.
Before conclusions about Spanish in the United States can be drawn,
individual communities must be studied in their own contexts. That
is the goal of "Puerto Rican Discourse." One tendency of previous
work on Spanish in the United States has been an eagerness to
generalize the findings of isolated studies to all Latino
communities, but the specific sociocultural contexts in which
people -- and languages -- live often demand very different
conclusions. The results of Torres' work indicate that the Spanish
of Puerto Ricans living in Brentwood continues to survive in a
restricted context. Across the population of Brentwood -- for
Puerto Ricans of all ages and language proficiencies -- the Spanish
language continues to assume an important practical, symbolic, and
affective role.
The novelist Joseph Conrad expressed a great truth when he said: "The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future," Our evolutionary history of noble acts and foul deeds, leading to survival and reproduction, guarantees that we understand the most essential facets of our physical and social environment. The nature of our struggles--our lusts, our fears, our objectivity, our irra-tionality--lies embedded in our cellular DNA and the neurons of our mind, there to play itself out much like it did in the past and much like it will in the future. Many have seen the links between our minds and the universe, the common thread of our existence and the inevitability of our loves and hates. This book includes many demonstrations that our nature has been on the minds and lips of many--poets, play-wrights, philosophers, historians, novelists, kings, slaves, religious leaders, and the great-est of knaves. From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Arthur Schopenhauer, from Aldous Huxley to Arthur Conan Doyle, from Aristotle to William Shakespeare, the truths about our-selves have come tumbling out. Reflecting on their thoughts we see ourselves. The universal nature of our being reflects our common origins and our bittersweet destiny. In A Sociobiology Compendium, Del Thiessen mines the richness of biological inves-tigations of human behavior, comparing current views of human behavior with expres-sions by non-scientists who have, in one way or another, touched the evolutionary strings of men and women. He begins each section with a brief account of biological notions of human behavior. The book shows in astonishing ways how the earlier thoughts of men and women from all cultures anticipate the biological observations about our being. A Sociobiology Compendium will be engaging reading for all psychologists, sociologists, and biologists.
The rise of new religious movements has raised important questions about our understanding of race, ethnicity and the lives of Black minority communities in the West. This revealing study examines the ideas and organization of new Islamic, Hindu and other movements, such as those revived in fight-wing black nationalism. It considers the creation of new "traditions" and new ethnicities in these movements and explores how ideas of purity, pollution, the body, sexuality, and gender are key themes in their "liberation". This book considers the relationship between right-wing and progressive social movements, and examines the influence on these movements of new globally organized communications technologies.
"[Menchaca's] work buttresses the argument that race is alive and well and that twenty-five years of affirmative action policies have not eliminated the legacy of segregation... [This book] provides an excellent view of social relations in one place across time. Compelling and thought-provoking, the study argues for sustaining public policies that challenge racist discrimination." -- Journal of American History People of Mexican descent and Anglo Americans have lived together in the U.S. Southwest for over a hundred years, yet relations between them remain strained, as shown by recent controversies over social services for undocumented aliens in California. In this study, covering the Spanish colonial period to the present day, Martha Menchaca delves deeply into interethnic relations in Santa Paula, California, to document how the residential, social, and school segregation of Mexican-origin people became institutionalized in a representative California town. Menchaca lived in Santa Paula during the 1980s, and interviews with residents add a vivid human dimension to her book. She argues that social segregation in Santa Paula has evolved into a system of social apartness-- that is, a cultural system controlled by Anglo Americans that designates the proper times and places where Mexican-origin people can socially interact with Anglos. This first historical ethnographic case study of a Mexican-origin community will be important reading across a spectrum of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity, Latino studies, and American culture.
This volume is a study of the loss and reconstruction of collective and personal identities in ethnic migrant communities. Focusing on the Bosnian and Croatian communities in Western Australia, Dona Kolar-Panov documents the social and cultural changes that affected these diasporic groups on the fragmentation of Yugoslavia. She describes the migrant audience's daily emcounter with the media images of destruction and atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, and charts the implications the continuous viewing of the real and excessive violence had on the awakening of their ethno-national consciousness. The author presents an insight into how migrant cultures are shaped and changed through the reception and assimilation of images seen on video and television screens. Using the combination of close and semiotic analysis of videotexts with an informed account of social, political and historical contexts, the author recalls the complex relationships between ethnicity, technology and the reconstruction of identity.
Official statistics about ethnicity in advanced societies are no better than those in less developed countries. An open industrial society is inherently fluid, and it is as hard to interpret social class and ethnic groups there as in a nearly static community. In consequence, the collection and interpretation of ethnic statistics is frequently a battleground where the groups being counted contest each element of every enumeration. William Petersen describes how ethnic identity is determined and how ethnic or racial units are counted by official statistical agencies in the United States and elsewhere. The chapters in this book cover such topics as: "Identification of Americans of European Descent," "Differentiation among Blacks," "Ethnic Relations in the Netherlands," "Two Case Studies: Japan and Switzerland," and "Who is a Jew?" Petersen argues that the general public is overly impressed by assertions about ethnicity, particularly if they are supported by numbers and graphs. The flood of American writings about race and ethnicity gives no sign of abatement. "Ethnicity Counts" offers an indispensible background to meaningful interpretation of statistics on ethnicity, and will be important to sociologists, historians, policymakers, and government officials.
Ethnic tensions in Southeast Asia represent a clear threat to the
future stability of the region. David Brown's clear and systematic
study outlines the patterns of ethnic politics in:
Examines the conflict that exists between the Mohawk Warrior Movement and Canada within the context of the Mohawk nation's struggle for national self-determination. During 1990, a land dispute between the Mohawk territory of Kanehsatake and the town of Oka, Quebec, Canada took center stage in the world community, erupting into months of intense and often violent confrontation. Rooted in the historical reality of past injustices, the events of the 1990 Mohawk-Oka conflict epitomized the relationship and struggles which exists between Aboriginal nations, ethnonationalist movements, and the state. By examining the Mohawk-Oka conflict, this book tells a story of struggle and survival during the 1990 invasion by the Quebec provincial police and Canadian army into Mohawk sovereign land. The story is one of an embattled nation's struggle and aboriginal right to determine its political and economic destiny. Through extensive research of archived documents, newspapers, and interviews with leaders and members of the Mohawk Warrior Movement and other central figures in the Mohawk nation, the author demonstrates how politicized ethnicity and ideology can become significant factors in the repertoire of indigenous ethnonationalist social movements for generating and maintaining social protest. "The events described are dramatic (and tragic) and the account is compelling. The detailed exposition effectively conveys the ambivalences, ambiguities, and other complexities behind the public events. This is a story that deserves to be heard, and the analysis is insightful and persuasive". -- Robin M. Williams, Jr., Cornell University
Seen in modern perspective, the concept of national character poses fundamental problems for social science theory and research: To what extent do conditions of life in a particular society give rise to certain patterns in the personalities of its members? What are the consequences? Alex Inkeles surveys various definitions of national character, tracing developments through the twentieth century. His approach is to examine the regularity of specific personality patterns among individuals in a society. He argues that modal personality may be extremely important in determining which new cultural elements are accepted and which institutional forms persist in a society. Reviewing previous studies, Inkeles canvasses the attitudes and psychological states of different nations in an effort to discover a set of values in the United States. He concludes that, despite recent advances in the field, there is much to be done before we can have a clear picture of the degree of differentiation in the personality structure of modern nations. Until now, there were few formal definitions and discussions on national character and the limits of this field of study. This book will be of great interest to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and political theorists.
Ethnic and Racial Consciousness is a completely revised version of the highly acclaimed first edition published in 1988. At that time no one expected the former Yugoslavia would break up with the brutal slaughter of neighbour by neighbour. Few would have predicted the horrific massacres in Rwanda and Burundi which have led to accusations of genocide. The ending of the cold war has been followed by struggles in the former Soviet Union in which one group has struggled for dominance and the other for independence. Ethnic conflict is now one of the main threats to peace in the contemporary world. This new edition offers an up-to-date introduction to the many issues surrounding our definition and understanding of ethnic and racial difference, racism and discrimination in general.
Racial Subjects heralds the next wave of writing about race and moves discussions about race forward as few other books recently have. Arguing that racism is best understood as exclusionary relations of power rather than simply as hateful expressions, David Theo Goldberg analyzes contemporary expressions of race and racism. He engages political economy, culture, and everyday material life against a background analysis of profound demographic shifts and changing class formation and relations. Issues covered in Racial Subjects include the history of changing racial categories over the last two hundred years of U.S. census taking, multiculturalism, the experience of being racially mixed, the rise of new black public intellectuals, race and the law in the wake of the O. J. Simpson verdict, relations between blacks and Jews, and affirmative action.
Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists,
literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays
in " Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of
Nationality" investigate the linkages between agency and race for
what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity
and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied
forms of political and economic domination through a subnational
ideology of racial and cultural redemption.
Building on the work of anthropologists, historians, sociologists,
literary critics, and feminist philosophers of science, the essays
in " Women Out of Place: the Gender of Agency and Race of
Nationality" investigate the linkages between agency and race for
what they reveal about constructions of masculinity and femininity
and patterns of domesticity among groups seeking to resist varied
forms of political and economic domination through a subnational
ideology of racial and cultural redemption.
In examining Asian American ethnicity and communication, William Gudykunst begins by summarizing the cultural characteristics of Asian cultures that affectAsian Americans' communication. Next, he looks at Asian American immigration patterns, ethnic institutions, and family patterns, as well as at how ethnic and cultural identities influence Asian Americans' communication. The author focuses on how communication is similar and different among Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, and Vietnamese Americans. Where applicable, similarities and differences in communication between Asian Americans and European Americans are also examined. Gudykunst concludes with a discussion of the role of communication in Asian immigrants' acculturation to the United States.
"A provocative and powerful collection of eclectic writings on the central moral issue of our times". -- Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation "Double Exposure delivers a double dose of smart writing, controlled anger, and devasting common sense". -- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed This book provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of the major topics surrounding our country s most troublesome and seemingly intractable social problem: the intersection of race and poverty. The sixty-three contributions -- by some of the nation's leading thinkers and activists (Nathan Glazer, Roger Wilkins, Senator Bill Bradley, Brent Staples, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Manning Marable, Howard Winant, Benjamin DeMott, Max Frankel, Herbert Gans, Henry Hampton, Julian Bond, and many others), representing a variety of disciplines and backgrounds -- are organized under seven key topics: affirmative action; the "permanence of racism" thesis; the use and utility of racial and ethnic categories; multiculturalism; immigration; the "underclass" debate; and democracy/equality.
Working from the premise that the white race has been socially constructed, this volume is a call for the disruption of white conformity and the formation of a New Abolitionism to dissolve it. In a time when white supremicist thinking seems to be gaining momentum, this text brings together voices ranging from tenured university professors to skinheads and prison inmates to discuss the "white question" in America. Through popular culture, current events, history and personal life stories, the essays analyze the forces that hold the white race together - and those that promise to tear it apart. When a critical mass of people come together who, though they look white, have ceased to act white, the white race, so the text argues, will undergo fission and former whites will be able to take part in building a new human community. |
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