Contemporary migration involves a dramatic paradox. Although much of what is considered international or transnational migration today transforms people of a wide range of social standings in the emigration countries into laborers at the bottom social and economic ranks of the immigration countries, millions of individuals worldwide seek to migrate internationally. International Migration, Social Demotion, and Imagined Advancement argues that this paradox cannot be explained for as long as common preconceptions about immigrants? economic betterment thwart even questioning why individuals who are not threatened by famine or war willingly pursue their demotion abroad. Recognizing immigrants? decline as such, this book proposes viewing contemporary migration as socioglobal mobility. Revolving around an ethnographic study of the Albanian emigration in Greece, International Migration, Social Demotion, and Imagined Advancement finds that imaginaries of the world as a social hierarchy might lie at the roots of much of the contemporary international migration. As would-be emigrants perceive different countries in terms of distinct social stations in a global order, they resolve to put up with numerous social and material deprivations in the hope of advancing internationally. Immigrants are typically thought of as aliens in their de facto home societies, however, and that makes genuine advancement all but impossible. Erind Pajo is Assistant Researcher in Anthropology and Lecturer in Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

This bold and controversial book takes a hard look at an old subject-race relations in the Western world. Using history as a backdrop, the author illustrates how racism and ethnic chauvinism are, sadly, common. The author warns against the harm of colorthink-an excessive obsession with race and racism-and explores the impact of such thinking on race relations today. He gives no comfort to either racists or more fashionable contemporaries obsessed with the supposedly unique evils of the Western past. Racial issues, and misconceptions about race and race relations, are among the most divisive and confusing features of contemporary society. Race Relations Within Western Expansion is designed to provide an overall account of the development of the issues involved, relating them to global history and putting them squarely within the framework of the expansion of the Western world, an expansion that began much earlier than is generally realized, far back in the Middle Ages. Levine analyzes the reasons for that expansion and how it took different forms and brought many different peoples into several different sorts of contact with the West, and how these contacts, and conceptions about other peoples, changed, or remained fixed over time. He also shows the impact within Europe of pseudo-scientific racial ideologies, and criticizes contemporary misconceptions about the history of relations between European settlers and native peoples, slavery, and the age of imperial rule in Asia and Africa. It stresses the complexity and variety of those relationships rather than attempting, as is currently fashionable, to pigeonhole more and more data into fewer and fewer ideological categories. This is a necessarily controversial book, one that collides with many cherished beliefs, both traditional and contemporary, and exposes how bizarre they really are. It acidly exposes both traditional racist myths, and more recently fashionable postures that often prove little more factually based.

Plants have cultural histories, as their applications change over time and with place. Some plant species have affected human cultures in profound ways, such as the stimulants tea and coffee from the Old World, or coca and quinine from South America. Even though medicinal plants have always attracted considerable attention, there is surprisingly little research on the interface of ethnobotany and medical anthropology. This volume, which brings together (ethno-)botanists, medical anthropologists and a clinician, makes an important contribution towards filling this gap. It emphasises that plant knowledge arises situationally as an intrinsic part of social relationships, that herbs need to be enticed if not seduced by the healers who work with them, that herbal remedies are cultural artefacts, and that bioprospecting and medicinal plant discovery can be viewed as the epitome of a long history of borrowing, stealing and exchanging plants.

Elisabeth Hsu is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, where she has convened its master's courses in medical anthropology since 2001. Based on her earlier studies in biology (botany), linguistics and sinology, she has published widely on the history and anthropology of Chinese medicine.

Stephen Harris was awarded a Ph.D. in plant systematics from the University of St. Andrews in 1990. He has been the Druce Curator of Oxford University Herbaria since 1995 and has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers on genetics and systematics associated with the evolutionary consequences of plant-human interactions.

The human body contains many specialized tissues that are capable of fulfilling an incredible variety of functions necessary for our survival. This volume in the Human Cell Culture Series focuses on mesenchymal tissues and cells. The in vitro study of mesenchymal cells is perhaps the oldest form of human cell culture, beginning with the culturing of fibroblasts. Fibroblasts have long been generically described in the literature, arising from many tissue types upon in vitro cell culture. However, recent studies, many enabled by new molecular biology techniques, have shown considerable diversity in fibroblast type and function, as described within this volume. Mesenchymal tissue types that are described within include bone, cartilage, tendons and ligaments, muscle, adipose tissue, and skin (dermis). The proper function of these tissues is predominantly dependent upon the proper proliferation, differentiation, and function of the mesenchymal cells which make up the tissue. Recent advancements in primary human mesenchymal cell culture have led to remarkable progress in the study of these tissues. Landmark experiments have now demonstrated a stem cell basis for many of these tissues, and, furthermore, significant plasticity and inter-conversion of stem cells between these tissues, resulting in a great deal of contemporary excitement and controversy. Newly-developed mesenchymal cell culture techniques have even lead to novel clinical practices for the treatment of disease.

Research on health involves evaluating the disparities that are systematically associated with the experience of risk, including genetic and physiological variation, environmental exposure to poor nutrition and disease, and social marginalization. This volume provides a unique perspective - a comparative approach to the analysis of health disparities and human adaptability - and specifically focuses on the pathways that lead to unequal health outcomes. From an explicitly anthropological perspective situated in the practice and theory of biosocial studies, this book combines theoretical rigor with more applied and practice-oriented approaches and critically examines infectious and chronic diseases, reproduction, and nutrition.

All cultures are concerned with the business of childbirth, so much so that it can never be described as a purely physiological or even psychological event. This volume draws together work from a range of anthropologists and midwives who have found anthropological approaches useful in their work. Using case studies from a variety of cultural settings, the writers explore the centrality of the way time is conceptualized, marked and measured to the ways of perceiving and managing childbirth: how women, midwives and other birth attendants are affected by issues of power and control, but also actively attempt to change established forms of thinking and practice. The stories are engaging as well as critical and invite the reader to think afresh about time, and about reproduction.

The modern world is saturated with images. Scientific knowledge of the human body (in all its variety) is highly dependent on the technological generation of visual data - brain and body scans, x-rays, diagrams, graphs and charts. New technologies afford scientists and medical experts new possibilities for probing and revealing previously invisible and inaccessible areas of the body. The existing literature has been successful in mapping the impact and implications of new medical technologies and in marrying the visual and the body but thus far has focused only narrowly on particular kinds of technology or taken only a purely textual/visual (cultural studies) approach to images of the body. Combining approaches from three of the most dynamic and popular fields of contemporary social anthropology - the study of the visual, the study of the technological and the study of the human body - this volume draws these together and interrogates their intersection using insights from ethnographic approaches. Offering a fascinating and wide range of perspectives, the chapters in this volume bring an innovative focus that reflects the authors' shared interest in 'the body' and visualising technologies.

Jeanette Edwards is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is author of Born and Bred: Idioms of Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies in England (2000); co-author of Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception (2nd edition, 1999); co-editor of European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology (2009); and coeditor, with Harvey and Wade, of Anthropology and Science (2007).

Penelope Harvey is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester and co-Director of CRESC (ESRC Centre for Research on Socio- Cultural Change). She has done ethnographic research in Peru, Spain and the UK, and published on engineering practice, state formation, information technologies and the politics of communication.

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His publications include Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997); Music, Race and Nation (2000); Race, Nature and Culture (2002); and Race and Sex in Latin America (2009).

Folk, alternative and complementary health care practices in contemporary Western society are currently experiencing a renaissance, albeit with features that are unique to this historical moment. At the same time biomedicine is under scrutiny, experiencing a number of distinct and multifaceted crises. In this volume the authors draw together cutting edge cross-cultural, interdisciplinary research in Britain and Ireland, focusing on exploring the role and significance of healing practices in diverse local contexts, such as the use of crystals, herbs, cures and charms, potions and lotions.

Ronnie Moore currently Lectures in Medical Anthropology and Sociology in the Departments of Sociology and Public Health Medicine and Epidemiology at University College Dublin. Ronnie's research interests include health disparities; health, conflict and ethnic identity; and conflict theory.

Stuart McClean is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Stuart's research interests include the resurgence of alternative medicine and healing practices in Western societies, the role of creative arts in health, and the global dimensions surrounding health.

This series aims to update major areas of biological psychiatry and summarize important research conducted since the 1980s. It also highlights recent approaches that allow researchers to quantify normal and abnormal brain functions at a high level of precision.

"We have come to expect that an emergent disease, once the initial hysteria it sparks has died down, will either be eradicated by money and medicine, or it will settle into the prosaic landscape of ordinary maladies with attendant routines, inconveniences, and bureaucratic exasperations. In Africa, AIDS has not followed either pathway. This outstanding collection of essays takes explicit aim at the tensions that this 'non-resolution' has generated in the world region that has felt the greatest impact of the disease: eastern and southern Africa. In these papers, we see vividly how the potential death warrant that AIDS presents to couples, households, children, has institutionalized new forms of social stigma and, at the same time, new levels of collective resilience and courage." . Caroline Bledsoe, Northwestern University

"This volume brings together some of the best, most thoughtful scholarship on AIDS in Africa. The essays are grounded in the troubling economic realities and intimate moral politics of daily life amid widespread existential angst. Together they offer novel insights into contemporary African social processes and experiences. Paying careful attention to the ways people create and tend to local moral worlds, Dilger and Luig have made a compelling, important book." . Julie Livingston, Rutgers University

" This book offers] a set of reports on how a whole range of issues in daily social life in Africa have been shaped by the presence of AIDS. Even more powerfully, these chapters about experience in the age of AIDS tell us about how ordinary people have re-created their social and cultural worlds under the threat of a new disease, and also in the face of extremely challenging economic conditions...an extremely valuable book." . Steven Feierman, University of Pennsylvania

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been addressed and perceived predominantly through the broad perspectives of social and economic theories as well as public health and development discourses. This volume however, focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the transformation of social and moral orders in African societies, which have been increasingly marginalised in the context of global modernity.

Hansjorg Dilger is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. Between 1995 and 2003, he carried out long-term fieldwork on AIDS and social relationships in rural and urban Tanzania. He is the author of Living with Aids. Illness, Death and Social Relationships in Africa. An Ethnography (Campus, 2005 in German). His recent research has focused on histories of social and religious inequality and the growing presence of Christian and Muslim schools in Dar es Salaam.

Ute Luig Ute Luig is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. She has conducted long-term field work in Uganda, Ivory Coast and Zambia on gender, AIDS, religion and modernity. She is co-editor of Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). At present she is involved in a project analysing the role of Buddhism in the reconciliation process in Cambodia after the civil war."

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow."

Complex patterns of acculturation are revealed in the most comprehensive ethnographic study of contemporary French immigrants in the United States. Written by a French-born American anthropologist who has insider status among French Americans, "The French in the United States" offers a fresh look at the histories and experiences of French immigrants. In the foreign-born generation, a high degree of social integration into American society co-exists with the maintenance of a French identity which manifests itself in the areas of language, culture, and perceptions. The French heritage does not usually endure past the second generation, however, because its maintenance within the family is not adequately supported by collective efforts, due to a lack of cohesiveness among French-born individuals who have become permanent immigrants.

A number of factors account for the foregoing: the small number of French natives in the United States, their scattered geographical distribution, the absence of spatially defined communities populated by direct immigrants from France, and a very high rate of intermarriage. Another important factor is the primarily individual nature of migration from France to this country since the last half of the 20th century, and a highly developed sense of self-direction in those who stay permanently. Their French identity must be regarded as cultural rather than ethnic: it is tied to a distant homeland, rather than to a group with territorial, institutional, and organizational identity in the United States. Lindenfeld delves into the makings of this French identity and distinguishes French immigrants from other Americans.

This volume is based on the Field Museum of Natural History Spring System atics Symposium held in Chicago on May 11, 1991. The financial support of Ray and Jean Auel and of the Field Museum is gratefully acknowledged. When we teach or write, we present only those elements that support our arguments. We avoid all weak points of our debate and all the uncer tainties of our models. Thus, we offer hypotheses as facts. Multiauthored books like ours, which simultaneously advocate and question diverse views, avoid the pitfalls and lessen the impact of indoctrination. In this volume we analyze the anthropological and biological disagreements and the positions taken on the origins of modern humans, point out difficultieswith the inter pretations, and suggest that the concept of the human origin can be explained only when we first attempt to define Homo sapiens sapiens. One of the major controversies in physical anthropology concerns the geographic origin of anatomically modern humans. It is undisputed, due to the extensive research of the Leakeys and their colleagues, that the family Hominidae originated in Africa, but the geographic origin of Homo sapiens sapiens is less concretely accepted. Two schools of thought existon this topic."

Over the centuries, researchers have found bones and artefacts proving that modern humans have existed for millions of years. Mainstream science, however has suppressed these facts. Prejudices based on current scientific theory act as a 'knowledge filter', giving us a picture of prehistory that is largely inaccurate. This book reveals this hidden history.

With contributions from 70 experienced practitioners from around the world, this second edition of the authoritative Handbook of Forensic Archaeology and Anthropology provides a solid foundation in both the practical and ethical components of forensic work. The book weaves together the discipline's historical development; current field methods for analyzing crime, natural disasters, and human atrocities; an array of laboratory techniques; key case studies involving legal, professional, and ethical issues; and ideas about the future of forensic work--all from a global perspective. This fully revised second edition expands the geographic representation of the first edition by including chapters from practitioners in South Africa and Colombia, and adds exciting new chapters on the International Commission on Missing Persons and on forensic work being done to identify victims of the Battle of Fromelles during World War I. The Handbook of Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology provides an updated perspective of the disciplines of forensic archaeology and anthropology.

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

"A valuable resource for teaching and research alike, Other People's Anthropologies rethinks canonical accounts of the discipline's history." . Anthropos

"The collection is a very welcome addition to the growing but still inadequate number of books and articles on world anthropologies. It is clearly written with concise chapters that give the reader a sense of the richness, diversity, commonalities and potentials of anthropology in the world today. Although the value goes beyond the classroom, this volume should be of interest particularly to those teaching anthropological theory who want to increase students' awareness of the significant anthropological scholarship beyond the so-called 'center'." . Anthropology News

"At last A volume that exposes the ethnocentric underbelly of Anglo-American anthropology. The practice and history of anthropology is far more interesting and engaging than most English-speakers know. This volume, combining reflective essays from prominent scholars and cutting-edge work by younger anthropologists will change the way many think of anthropology." . Robert Gordon

Anthropological practice has been dominated by the so-called "great" traditions (Anglo-American, French, and German). However, processes of decolonization, along with critical interrogation of these dominant narratives, have led to greater visibility of what used to be seen as peripheral scholarship. With contributions from leading anthropologists and social scientists from different countries and anthropological traditions, this volume gives voice to scholars outside these "great" traditions. It shows the immense variety of methodologies, training, and approaches that scholars from these regions bring to anthropology and the social sciences in general, thus enriching the disciplines in important ways at an age marked by multiculturalism, globalization, and transnationalism.

Aleksandar Bo kovi is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade (Serbia) and Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). His research areas include ethnicity and nationalism, popular culture, and he has also published widely on the history and theory of anthropology. In recent years, he published on anthropology in former Yugoslavia (Anthropology Today, 2005), Brazil (Dialectical Anthropology, 2005), South Africa (with Ilana van Wyk, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2005), and "world anthropologies" (Anthropos, 2007). Bo kovi? is the author or editor of several books, including, most recently, Myth, Politics, Ideology (Belgrade, 2006)."

What counts as ethnography and what counts as good ethnography are both highly contested. This volume brings together chapters presenting a diversity of views on some of the current issues and practices in ethnographic methodology. It does not try to present a single coherent view but, through its heterogeneity, illustrates the strengths and impact of the debate. The collection includes chapters on the ethnographic research process; the use of photographic diaries; the idea of toleration in the research process; and the personal aspects of research. It has chapters that question generalisation; perceive ethnography as a potential form of surveillance; analyse the notion of display in ethnography; critique the way culture is commonly theorised; and examine the possibilities of comparative ethnographic work. It also includes and exchange of views between Martyn Hammersley and Barbara Korth on partisan research.

Through an examination of the critical junctures in postcolonial Sri Lankan politics, this book refines and advances our understanding of the dynamics underpinning violent and nonviolent "ethnic" conflict. It enables us to understand how the ebb and flow of relations within ethnic groups affects relations between groups, for good or for ill.

All cultures are concerned with the business of childbirth, so much so that it can never be described as a purely physiological or even psychological event. This volume draws together work from a range of anthropologists and midwives who have found anthropological approaches useful in their work. Using case studies from a variety of cultural settings, the writers explore the centrality of the way time is conceptualized, marked and measured to the ways of perceiving and managing childbirth: how women, midwives and other birth attendants are affected by issues of power and control, but also actively attempt to change established forms of thinking and practice. The stories are engaging as well as critical and invite the reader to think afresh about time, and about reproduction.

..".an overdue first step in recognizing that men's role in contemporary human reproduction - from their gametes to their psyches - has been a neglected realm of scientific and scholarly pursuit." . Robert D. Nachtigall, M.D., Institute for Health and Aging, University of California, San Francisco

Extensive social science research, particularly by anthropologists, has explored women's reproductive lives, their use of reproductive technologies, and their experiences as mothers and nurturers of children. Meanwhile, few if any volumes have explored men's reproductive concerns or contributions to women's reproductive health: Men are clearly viewed as the "second sex" in reproduction. This volume argues that the marginalization of men is an oversight of considerable proportions, and thereby seeks to break the silence surrounding men's thoughts, experiences, and feelings about their reproductive lives. It sheds new light on male reproduction from a cross-cultural, global perspective, focusing not only upon men in Europe and America but also those in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Both heterosexual and homosexual, married and unmarried men are featured in this volume, which assesses concerns ranging from masculinity and sexuality to childbirth and fatherhood. Thus, men are brought back into the equation, as reproductive partners, progenitors, fathers, nurturers, and decision-makers.

Marcia C. Inhorn is William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. She is also the past-president of the Society for Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. A specialist on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Muslim Middle East, she is the author or editor of six books on the subject.

Tine Tjornhoj-Thomsen is a Social Anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has done extensive research into infertility, reproductive technologies and kinship in Denmark. In 1998 she received a prize for the work relating to her PhD thesis, Stories of Coming into Being: Childlessness, Procreative Technologies and Kinship in Denmark.

Helene Goldberg is a Social Anthropologist whose research on male infertility in Israel has won several prizes. She is associated with the Department of Health Development in Guldborgsund, Denmark, where she focuses on health behavior and lifestyle illnesses.

Maruska la Cour Mosegaard is a Social Anthropologist and has recently finished research on homosexual fatherhood in Denmark. She is currently working at KVINFO, the Danish Center of Information on Women and Gender Research. She is coauthor of a children's book that introduces the various ways children today come into being in single-parent, heterosexual, and homosexual families; it will appear in December 2008 in both Danish and Swedish."

A one-stop resource that provides the most frequently needed information on the human genome What are the genes that manke-up the human genome, what do the genes do when they are acting properly, and what happens when these genes are damaged? Designed for today's reader who demands quick answers to a wide range of questions, The Human Genome Sourcebook is intended to offer the non-specialist an accessible but detailed guide to the genome. The information it provides is given context: namely, the basic scientific principles of genome research, the new knowledge unearthed or created by this research, and the social and ethical implications of this knowledge. The Human Genome Sourcebook is organized in several sections to simplify the location of pertinent information: an extensive section that comprises an in-depth catalogue of human genes listed according to the roles they play in life; a chapter that relates genetic diseases to the specific genes that cause the disease; a detailed glossary giving readers a deeper understanding of genetic terms and concepts; an overview or roadmap of the physical layout of the genome sections. provides both information as well as the tools necessary to access that information.. Provides in-depth information on the relationships between our genes and all aspects of our daily lives. Addresses health issues that are related to genetic abnormalities

In Human Cloning a panel of distinguished philosophers, medical ethicists, religious thinkers, and social critics tackle the thorny problems raised by the now real possibility of human cloning. In their wide ranging reviews, the distinguished contributors critically examine the major arguments for and against human cloning, probe the implications of such a procedure for society, and critically evaluate the "Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission." The debate includes both religious and secular arguments, as well as an outline of the history of the cloning debate and a discussion of human cloning's impact on our sense of self and our beliefs about the meaning of life.

Hardbound. The series as a whole recognises that the nature of ethnography is contested, and takes this to be a sign of its strength and vitality. This second volume in the series focuses on debates and developments in methodology and the many ways in which ethnographic work interacts with education. The contributions to this volume are diverse and challenging. They indicate that ethnography is a rich field that has much to offer the study of education. Particular chapters are concerned with access to research sites, critical ethnography, text construction, dilemmas of researching different ethnic groups and or researching children, the influence of the researcher, writing ethnography, ethno-drama, and the concept of triangulation.