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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics
An anthropomorphic study of the black population in the United States, based on a study conducted in 1920.
In the first book on Aztec dance in the United States, Ernesto Colin combines cultural anthropology, educational theory, and postcolonial theory to create an innovative, interdisciplinary, long-term ethnography of an Aztec dance circle and makes a case for the use of the metaphor of palimpsest as an ethnographic research tool.
Social cohesion is the outcome of the social and physiological processes through which individuals become linked into social systems. These linkages, as they occur in social relationships and are found in small group interactions, are the common focus of this collection of essays. The volume begins with an exploration of social relationships as regulators of physiology and behavior. Other essays investigate issues such as dominance, ideological constraints on evolutionary theory, social cohesion in dyadic groups, social relationships as determinants of emotion and physiology, biosociology and stratification in the works of Emile Durkheim, and the phenomenon of hemispheric lateralization of function in relation to social comparison processes and social roles.
Bryan Sykes brings together a world-class set of contributors to debate just what the links between genes, language, and the archaeological record can tell us about human evolution. The eight lively essays offer widely differing opinions, pose more questions than they offer answers, eschew jargon, and pursue controversy. Guaranteed to fascinate anyone who has ever wondered how the fossil record, the incredible diversity of human language, and our genetic inheritance might combine to give a glimpse of human origins.
On October 30, 1990, Germany was formally reunified through an extension of the legal, political, and economic structures of West Germany into the former German Democratic Republic. For East Germans this transformation has been a challenging process. Former values, orientations, and standards have been subject to severe scrutiny as reunification has affected virtually every area of life. Staab analyzes the development from the divided to the unified Germany and asks to what extent East Germans have adopted a national identity in line with that of the West Germans. He examines such identity markers as attitudes toward territory, economics, ethnicity, mass culture, and civic-political activity. Identifying a significant range of commonalities, he also finds striking features of mutually exclusive areas working to prevent a shared national identity. Scholars and other researchers dealing with German politics and contemporary history, political sociology, and nationalism will be interested in this book.
What is a human being? Philosophical anthropology has approached this question with unusual sophistication, experimentalism, and subtlety. This volume explores the philosophical anthropologies of Scheler, Gehlen, Plessner, and Blumenberg in terms of their relevance to contemporary theories of nature, naturalism, organic life, and human affairs.
This book discusses fundamental discourses relating to health in Africa arising out of the consequences of endemic diseases in Africa. It identifies, explains and illustrates the contexts, challenges and efforts to combat these diseases. The book provides a unique comparative analysis of African contexts of health, thereby not ignoring the global contexts of health within which Africa exists. It follows a macro-analytic stance about health in Africa framed around significant/pressing issues. "Discourse of disease" is part of a profound sociological discourse of health in Africa, which provides a framework for students, academics and healthcare practitioners to understand the states of health and healthcare in Africa.
Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.
In late 20th-century Europe, both national and regional loyalties have retained a surprising strength and topicality, despite the advance of supra-national integration. This volume addresses some specific aspects of this phenomenon that lay at the centre of the interdisciplinary work of the first "European Forum" of the European University Institute in Florence during the academic year 1993/1994. It aims at contributing to a better understanding of the origins and the nature of territorially-based identities in Europe, and it also offers some analysis of current problems arising at various levels of the relationships between regional, national and international structures. The contributions to this volume refer to three major fields of historical and contemporary research: the study of the factors that constitute "territorially-based imagined communites"; the analysis of the mechanisms by which particular group interests (social, political or cultural) are "translated" into narratives of regional or national identity; and an enquiry into the relationship between national and regional identities.
The melting pot is a myth, according to Fernandez, who shows that the United States is and always has been a "banquet of cultures." As he argues, the best way to deal with the more than 20 million new immigrants since 1965 is to accept, recognize, and eagerly explore the differences among the American people. Fernandez seeks to forge a positive national consensus based on two building blocks. First, the nation's many ethnic groups can be a powerful source of unprecedented economic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Secondly, the nation's many ethnic groups offer a way to erase the black/white dichotomy which, masks the shared injustices of millions of European, Asian, African, Native, and Latino Americans. This is a provocative analysis of how we arrived at our current ethnic and racial dilemmas and what can be done to move beyond them. Scholars and students of American immigration and social policy as well as concerned citizens will find the book equally rewarding.
In the Foreword to Culture and Agriculture, distinguished anthropologist John W. Bennett writes Dr. Schusky's book is welcome. It marks a point of maturity for anthropology's interest in agriculture, a distillation of decades of research and thought on the most important survival task facing humankind, the production of food. Although applauded by a specialist in the field, Schusky's book is specifically written for the general reader who is interested in agriculture. It offers a historical overview of the two major periods of agriculture--the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred when humans initally domesticated plants and animals, and the Neoclaric Revolution, which began the introduction of fossil fuel into agriculture in the twentieth century. Culture and Agriculture dramatizes the extensive changes that are occurring in modern agriculture due to the intensified use of fossil energy. The book details how the overdependence on fossil energy, with its looming exhaustion, is a major cause of pessimism about food production. The book also addresses the possible solutions to this scenario--conservation steps, an increase in the mix of solar energy, and an emphasis on human labor--which hold out hope for the future. Part I introduces the discovery or domestication of plants and animals (the Neolithic), along with the later use of irrigation, in order to show that most agricultural development, until the twentieth century, occurred between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. Part II presents a brief survey of agricultural history which demonstrates that hunger had more to do with inequity in the social system than in the amounts of food produced. Agricultural history also emphasizes how little change occurred in agriculture from 5,000 years ago until the twentieth century, when the use of fossil energy revolutionized food production. In assessing the future of agricultural development, Schusky underscores the importance of economic and political policies that emphasize equity in distribution of wealth and government services. This book should appeal to the general reader interested in agriculture, rural sociology, or anthropology.
The editors and their contributors explore the world from a pluralistic perspective. There are several models proposed and used by authors that could serve as a framework for multicultural and diversity programs in both education and the workplace. The implementation of programs which target the workplace and specific strategies for success are identified. The international implications of globalization and the need for international as well as "at home" experiences are addressed by several authors. Regional research-based programs and strategies, in particular academic disciplines to promote pluralism, are explored from the university perspective. These models, strategies, and research findings should prove to be most useful for individuals seeking to implement programs to promote pluralism.
This book addresses how skeletons can inform us about behavior by describing skeletal lesions in the Gombe chimpanzees, relating them to known life histories whenever possible, and analyzing demographic patterns in the sample. This is of particular interest to both primatologists and skeletal analysts who have benefited from published data on a smaller, earlier skeletal sample from Gombe. The Gombe skeletal collection is the largest collection of wild chimpanzees with known life histories in existence, and this work significantly expands the skeletal sample from this long-term research site (49 chimpanzees). The book explores topics of general interest to skeletal analysts such as demographic patterns, which injuries leave signs on the skeleton, and rates of healing, and discusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the patterning of lesions. The book presents the data in a narrative style similar to that employed in Dr. Goodall's seminal work The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Readers already familiar with the Gombe chimpanzees are likely to appreciate summaries of life events correlated to observable skeletal features. The book is especially relevant at this time to remind primate conservationists of the importance of the isolated chimpanzee population at Gombe National Park as well as the availability of the skeletons for study, both within the park itself as well as at the University of Minnesota.
Asian Indians figure prominently among the educated, middle class
subset of contemporary immigrants. They move quickly into
residences, jobs, and lifestyles that provide little opportunity
with fellow migrants, yet they continue to see themselves as a
distinctive community within contemporary American society. In Life
Lines Bacon chronicles the creation of a community--Indian-born
parents and their children living in the Chicago metropolitan
area--bound by neither geographic proximity, nor institutional
ties, and explores the processes through which ethnic identity is
transmitted to the next generation.
This is a multifaceted approach to understanding one of the nation's largest ethnic communities. Blea incorporates community social history, physical, psychological, and spiritual space. The book strives to teach the student how to do research in an ethnic community. It also describes what is already understood about those communities and defines the nature of the 25 year old discipline of Chicano studies. The use of the Chicana feminist perspective lends not only a gender role analysis, but also demonstrates the structure and function of the balance of personal and social control within the context of the community.
The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors - both researchers and practitioners - touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.
For many years, it has been known that when rats and mice are given a reduced amount of food, their life span is increased and they remain healthy and vigorous at advanced ages. What is the reason for this change in the usual pattern of
aging? The evidence is overwhelming that the life extension results
from a slowing of aging processes. And the factor responsible is
the decrease in caloric intake. The obvious question: How does this
factor work? A good question - and the reason that research on the
anti-aging action of caloric restriction is today one of the most
studied research areas in biological gerontology. For it is felt
that if the biological mechanisms of the anti-aging action of
caloric restriction can be uncovered, we would gain an
understanding of the basic nature of aging processes, which would,
in turn, yield possible interventions in human aging. This book
aims to provide the growing number of researchers in this field
(faculty, postdoctoral trainees, and graduate students) with a
detailed knowledge of what is known about caloric restriction
within the frame of gerontology, as well as insights on future of
this field.
With a foreword by Richard E. Vander Ross In recent years, dramatic increases in racial intermarriage have given birth to a generation who refuse to be shoehorned into neat, pre-existing racial categories. Energized by a refusal to allow mixed-race people to be rendered invisible, this movement lobbies aggressively to have the category multiracial added to official racial classifications. While applauding the self-awareness and activism at the root of this movement, Jon Michael Spencer questions its ultimate usefulness, deeply concerned that it will unintentionally weaken minority power. Focusing specifically on mixed-race blacks, Spencer argues that the mixed-race movement in the United States would benefit from consideration of how multiracial categories have evolved in South Africa. Americans, he shows us, are deeply uninformed about the tragic consequences of the former white South African government's classification of mixed-race people as Coloured. Spencer maintains that a multiracial category in the U.S. could be equally tragic, not only for blacks but formultiracials themselves. Further, splintering people of color into such classifications of race and mixed race aggravates race relations among society's oppressed. A group that can attain some privilege through a multiracial identity is unlikely to identify with the lesser status group, blacks. It may be that the undoing of racial classification will come not by initiating a new classification, but by our increased recognition that there are millions of people who simply defy easy classification.
**A Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller** Out now: The bestselling book from the creator of the wildly popular science YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell, a gorgeously illustrated deep dive into the immune system that will change how you think about your body forever. Please note: the originally supplied fixed format edition of the eBook has now been replaced to address difficulties experienced by some readers. Please delete the previous version from your device and download the new edition. __________ 'A truly brilliant introduction to the human body's vast system for fighting infections and other threats' JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars 'Reads as if it's a riveting sci-fi novel . . . a delightful treat for the curious' TIM URBAN, creator of Wait But Why __________ You wake up and feel a tickle in your throat. Your head hurts. You're mildly annoyed as you get the kids ready for school and dress for work yourself. Meanwhile, an utterly epic war is being fought, just below your skin. Millions are fighting and dying for you to be able to complain as you drink your cup of tea and head out the door. So what, exactly, IS your immune system? Second only to the human brain in its complexity, it is one of the oldest and most critical facets of life on Earth. Without it, you would die within days. In Immune, Philipp Dettmer, the brains behind the most popular science channel on YouTube, takes readers on a journey through the fortress of the human body and its defences. There is a constant battle of staggering scale raging within us, full of stories of invasion, strategy, defeat, and noble self-sacrifice. In fact, in the time you've been reading this, your immune system has probably identified and eradicated a cancer cell that started to grow in your body. Each chapter delves deeply into an element of the immune system, including defences like antibodies and inflammation as well as threats like viruses, bacteria, allergies and cancer, as Dettmer reveals why boosting your immune system is actually nonsense, how parasites sneak their way past your body's defences, how viruses - including the coronavirus - work, and what goes on in your wounds when you cut yourself. Enlivened by engaging full-colour graphics and immersive descriptions, Immune turns one of the most intricate, interconnected, and confusing subjects - immunology - into a gripping adventure through an astonishing alien landscape. Challenging what you know and think about your own body and how it defends you against all sorts of maladies and how it might also eventually be your own downfall, Immune is a vital and remarkably fun crash course in what is arguably, and increasingly, the most important system in the body. __________
This unique book applies concepts from the field of anthropology to clinical settings to result in a powerful and dynamic model/theory of clinical anthropology. These clinical settings could include hospitals, police and probation situations, individual and marriage and family counseling, as well as cross-cultural issues, governmental policy, and other instances of educational delivery of concepts and behaviors that allow individuals/groups to reduce stress and move toward personal/group health. In addition to appealing to anthropology and other social/behavioral science scholars, this book will be useful to clinicians of many specialities within Western biomedicine including physicians, nurses, and health care administrators. |
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