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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics
This important collection of Margaret Pelling's essays brings
together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor
and Stuart England - including a number published here for the
first time. They show that - then as now - health and medical care
were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart
era. Margaret Pelling's book brings this vital dimension of the
early modern world in from the periphery of specialist study to the
heart of the concerns of social, economic and cultural
historians.
Using data collected from 105 households in Sonora, Mexico, the author combines detailed ethnographic research with quantitative analyses of income, diet, and nutritional status to examine the dietary patterns of residents who "cook and cope among the cacti." Employing a new analytical concept of "available income" - which can differ greatly from total income and provide valuable insight into why people eat what they do - the work explores a variety of social and cultural factors that affect food expenditure and consumption. Home production of food and the extent to which women are employed outside of the home are just two of the many variables discussed that influence available income and how it is used. But even among groups with similar available incomes, variables of ethnicity, prestige, nutritional knowledge, and the desire for consumer goods come into play.
The major significance of the German naturalist-physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) as a topic of historical study is the fact that he was one of the first anthropologists to investigate humankind as part of natural history. Moreover, Blumenbach was, and continues to be, a central figure in debates about race and racism. How exactly did Blumenbach define race and races? What were his scientific criteria? And which cultural values did he bring to bear on his scheme? Little historical work has been done on Blumenbach's fundamental, influential race work. From his own time till today, several different pronouncements have been made by either followers or opponents, some accusing Blumenbach of being the fountainhead of scientific racism. By contrast, across early nineteenth-century Europe, not least in France, Blumenbach was lionized as an anti-racist whose work supported the unity of humankind and the abolition of slavery. This collection of essays considers how, with Blumenbach and those around him, the study of natural history and, by extension, that of science came to dominate the Western discourse of race.
This text is a practical application of Foucault's archaeological and genealogical methods to the study of illness and modernity. It unravels the complex relationships that exist between the various types of discourses which have been engaged in the vast field of "psychosomatic" research since the early decades of the 20th century. From medicine and psychiatry to psychology and the social sciences, Monica Greco explores what the history of these different disciplines contributes to what we understand by the term "psychosomatic". She analyses how the study of psychosomatic illness can transform the way we think of illness, subjectivity and the ethics and politics of health, thus revealing the complex phenomenon of psychosomatics in all its ethical and political ramifications.
In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, race relations are surrounded with taboos defined by the politically correct concepts of what Ray Honeyford calls the race relations lobby. This lobby, championed by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has a vested interest in depicting the United Kingdom as a society rotten with endemic racism, and its ethnic minorities as victims doomed to failure. An outgrowth of the Race Relations Act of 1976, the Commission was founded in response to worthy concerns about race and patterned after its American prototype, the Congress of Racial Equality. Its constant demands for increased powers have only increased with the coming into power of the New Labour Party. That makes Ray Honeyford's critique all the more urgent. Honeyford exposes the policies and practices of the Commission to public view, encouraging informed debate about its need to exist. The CRE possesses considerable legal powers-powers which seriously undermine the great freedoms of association, contract, and speech as-sociated with the United Kingdom. Without denying the presence of racial prejudice, Honeyford shows that the picture of the United Kingdom as a divisive nation is a serious misrepresentation. Placing the CRE in its historical and political context, Honeyford outlines its powers, and analyzes its formal investigations in the fields of education, employment, and housing. He also examines its publicity machine and its effect on public and educational libraries. He points out the danger of uncritically replicating the American experience. According to Honeyford, Americans have replaced a melting-pot notion of society, with all citizens loyal to a national ideal, with a "tossed-salad" concept which encourages the creation of self-conscious, separate, and aggressive ethnic groups, each claiming special access to the public purse, and having little regard for national cohesion and individual liberties.
In its assessment of the current "state of play" of ethnographic practice in social anthropology, this volume explores the challenges that changing social forms and changing understandings of "the field" pose to contemporary ethnographic methods. These challenges include the implications of the remarkable impact social anthropology is having on neighboring disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, human geography and linguistics, as well as the potential 'costs' of this success for the discipline. Contributors also discuss how the ethnographic method is influenced by current institutional contexts and historical "traditions" across a range of settings. Here ethnography is featured less as a methodological "tool-box" or technique but rather as a subject on which to reflect.
'Endlessly fascinating and full of surprises. Easily one of my books of the year' BILL BRYSON The myth-busting science behind our modern attitudes to exercise: what our bodies really need, why it matters, and its effects on health and wellbeing. In industrialized nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise. We are hardwired for moderate exertion throughout each day, not triathlons or treadmills. Drawing on over a decade of high-level scientific research and eye-opening insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman explains precisely how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance; and points the way towards more enjoyable and physically active living in the modern world. 'Myth-busting, illuminating, brilliant - Lieberman will completely change the way you think about your body' Professor ALICE ROBERTS, presenter of Our Incredible Human Journey
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.
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.
Despite the centrality of migration in our contemporary world, scholarship on mobility and health frequently separates migrants according to legal status, country of origin, destination, or health concern. Yet people on the move and health systems face challenges and opportunities that transcend these boundaries, including border fortification, neoliberal agendas, and climate change. This volume explores these epistemic borders, recognizing the necessity of a new conversation about migration and health. Each of the empirically grounded chapters introduces readers to pressing questions of migration and health in diverse social, political, and geographical settings.
This reader offers some of the most important writing to date from the science of COVID-19 and what science says about its spread and social implications. The readings have been carefully selected, introduced, and interpreted for an introductory or graduate student readership by a distinguished medical sociology and political science team. While some of the early science was inaccurate, lacking sufficient data, or otherwise incomplete, the author team has selected the most important and reliable early work for teachers and students in courses on medical sociology, public health, nursing, infectious diseases, epidemiology, anthropology of medicine, sociology of health and illness, social aspects of medicine, comparative health systems, health policy and management, health behaviors, and community health. Global in scope, the book tells the story of what happened and how COVID-19 was dealt with. Much of this material is in clinical journals, normally not considered in the social sciences, which are nonetheless informative and authoritative for student and faculty readers. Their selection and interpretation for students makes this concise reader an essential teaching source about COVID-19. An accompanying online resource on the book's Routledge web page will update and evolve by providing links to new readings as the science develops.
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.
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.
This intercultural communication text reader brings together the many dimensions of ethnic and cultural identity and shows how they are communicated in everyday life. Introducing and applying key concepts, theories, and approaches_from empirical to ethnographic_a wide variety of essays look at the experiences of African Americans, Asians, Asian Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans, as well as many cultural groups. The authors also explore issues such as gender, race, class, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, and inter- and intra-ethnic identity. Sites of analysis range from movies and photo albums to beauty salons and Deadhead concerts.
The role of antioxidants and other nutritional agents in disease prevention is a widely discussed subject, attracting attention from professionals in all areas of medicine. This often-debated and rapidly evolving area of medicine could have important implications for how diseases are treated.
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.
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.
With the use of crack on the rise in American cities, there is more need than ever to understand the biological, environmental, and social factors behind cocaine addiction, as well as the pharmacological properties of cocaine that make it such an addictive drug. The Neurobiology of Cocaine Addiction helps clinicians and researchers analyze research findings and their relevance to the clinical treatment of cocaine dependency. To do this, it looks at the whole spectrum of cocaine use, from trends in cocaine-involved deaths, hospital emergencies, arrests, and treatment admissions to the specific impact the drug has on brain function. The book reports on important findings from positron emission tomography (PET) and a "binge" pattern cocaine administration mode. This will enable you to improve your understanding of how cocaine alters the pleasure/reward system of the brain and creates new instinctual needs that displace the inherent instinctual needs of hunger and sex.By reading The Neurobiology of Cocaine Addiction, you will sharpen your knowledge of the basic actions of cocaine, the factors related to daily cocaine use, the neurobiological basis of addictive diseases, and drug-induced alterations in normal physiology. You will also learn about: the coexistence of cocaine and heroin addiction cocaine's disruption of the endogenous opioid system QEEG and how it can play a potentially useful role in drug development and planning hypotheses of sensitization in the pathophysiology of cocaine dependence factors that predict daily cocaine use among patients in a methadone maintenance program abnormalities in brain function that persist for up to six months after last cocaine use patterns of cocaine use the importance of prospective data analysis and the limitations of a self-selective study groupClinicians, researchers, psychiatrists, and other professionals in chemical dependency and narcotics rehabilitation will turn the last page of The Neurobiology of Cocaine Addiction with a better understanding of cocaine's addictive qualities and the characteristics of the individuals who become addicted to it. You will see what headway has been made in research at some of the nation's top laboratories, but you will also see what remains to be done. Hopefully, you will find where you can make a contribution either at the practical level, the research level, or both.
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.
Science and Homosexualities is the first anthology by historians of science to examine European and American scientific research on sexual orientation since the coining of the word "homosexual" almost 150 years ago. This collection is particularly timely given the enormous scientific and popular interest in biological studies of homosexuality, and the importance given such studies in current legal, legislative and cultural debates concerning gay civil rights. However, scientific and popular literature discussing the biology of sexual orientation have been short-sighted in representing it as objective, new scientific work. This volume demonstrates that the quest for the biological "cause" of homosexuality and other sexualities is as old as the term itself. These essays explore the active role experimental subjects played in shaping scientific theories of homosexuality and cultural perceptions of sexuality and sexual identity. Finally this anthology studies the way in which this doctor-patient interaction shaped not only scientific theories of homosexuality, but also cultural perceptions and self-identities as well. Contributors include: Garland E. Allen, Erin G. Carlston, Julian Carter, Alice D. Dreger, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Margaret Gibson, Stephanie Kenen, Hubert Kennedy, Harry Oosterhuis, James Steakley, Richard Pillard, Jennifer Terry
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.
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. |
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