Over the course of the past thirty years, there has been an explosion of work on sexuality, both conceptually and methodologically. From a relatively limited, specialist field, the study of sexuality has expanded across a wide range of social sciences. Yet as the field has grown, it has become apparent that a number of leading edge critical issues remain.

This theory-building book explores some of the areas in which there is major and continuing debate, for example, about the relationship between sexuality and gender; about the nature and status of heterosexuality; about hetero- and homo-normativity; about the influence and intersection of class, race, age and other factors in sexual trajectories, identities and lifestyles; and about how best to understand the new forms of sexuality that are emerging in both rich world and developing world contexts.

With contributions from leading and new scholars and activists from across the globe, this book highlights tensions or flash-points in contemporary debate, and offers some innovative ways forward in terms of thinking about sexuality both theoretically and with respect to policy and programme development. An extended essay by Henrietta Moore introduces the volume, and an afterword by Jeffrey Weeks offers pointers for the future.

The contributors bring together a range of experiences and a variety of disciplinary perspectives in engaging with three key themes of sexual subjectivity and global transformations, sexualities in practice, and advancing new thinking on sexuality in policy and programmatic contexts. It is of interest to students, researchers and activists in sexuality, sexual health and gender studies, especially those working from public health, sociological and anthropological perspectives.

In Sharing the Burden of Sickness, Jonathan Roberts examines the history of the healing cultures in Accra, Ghana. When people are sick in Accra, they can pursue a variety of therapeutic options. West African traditional healers, spiritual healers from the Islamic and Christian traditions, Western clinical medicine, and an open marketplace of over-the-counter medicine provide ample means to promote healing and preventing sickness. Each of these healing cultures had a historical point of arrival in the city of Accra, and Roberts tells the story of how they intertwined and how patients and healers worked together in their struggle against disease. By focusing on the medical history of one place, Roberts details how urban development, colonization, decolonization, and independence brought new populations to the city, where they shared their ideas about sickness and health. Sharing the Burden of Sickness explores medical history during important periods in Accra's history. Roberts not only introduces readers to a wide range of ideas about health but also charts a course for a thoroughly pluralistic culture of healing in the future, especially with the spread of new epidemics of HIV/AIDS and ebola.

As a group, western diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, allergies and mental health problems constitute one of the major problems facing humans at the beginning of the 21st century, particularly as they extend into poorer countries. An evolutionary perspective has much to offer standard biomedical understandings of western diseases. At the heart of this approach is the notion that human evolution occurred in circumstances very different from the modern affluent western environment and that, as a consequence, human biology is not adapted to the contemporary western environment. Written with an anthropological perspective and aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduates taking courses in the ecology and evolution of disease, Tessa Pollard applies and extends this evolutionary perspective by analysing trends in rates of western diseases and providing a new synthesis of current understandings of evolutionary processes, and of the biology and epidemiology of disease.

In this fully revised and updated edition, the editors have integrated a completely new set of contributions from the leading researchers in the field to describe the latest research in evolutionary medicine, providing a fresh summary of this rapidly expanding field 10 years after its predecessor was first compiled. It continues to adopt a broad approach to the subject, drawing on medically relevant research from evolutionary genetics, human behavioural ecology, evolutionary microbiology (especially experimental evolution of virulence and resistance), the evolution of aging and degenerative disease, and other aspects of biology or medicine where evolutionary approaches make important contributions. Evolution in Health and Disease describes how evolutionary thinking gives valuable insights and fresh perspectives into human health and disease, establishing evolutionary biology as an essential complementary science for medicine. Integrating evolutionary thought into medical research and practice helps to explain the origins of many medical conditions, including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, asthma, allergies, other autoimmune diseases, and aging. It also provides life-saving insights into the evolutionary responses of pathogens to antibiotics, vaccinations, and other human interventions. Why are we vulnerable to disease? Why are our bodies not better designed? Are unpleasant surprises in store as we use more antibiotics and vaccines? Why do we respond to inappropriately to so many modern conditions? How do cancers evolve? Why must we grow old? The book discusses answers to these and many other questions while suggesting new approaches to treatment and research. This research-level text is suitable for graduate-level students and researchers in the fields of evolutionary (Darwinian) medicine, evolutionary biology, anthropology, developmental biology, and genetics. It will also be of relevance and use to medical researchers and doctors.

In an era of globalization characterized by widespread migration and cultural contacts, psychologists, counselors, and other mental health professionals face a unique challenge: how does one practice successfully when working with clients from so many different backgrounds? Gielen, Draguns, and Fish argue that an understanding of the general principles of multicultural counseling is of great importance to all practitioners. The lack of this knowledge can have several negative consequences during therapy, including differences in expectations between counselor and client, misdiagnosis of the client s concerns, missed non-verbal cues, and the client feeling that she has been misunderstood. This volume focuses on the general nature of cultural influences in counseling rather than on counseling specific ethnic groups. Counseling practices from all over the world, not just those of Western society, are explored. Bringing together the work of a diverse group of international experts, the editors have compiled a volume that is not only concise and teachable, but also an essential guidebook for all mental-health professionals."

During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology, starting with ancient medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement or possibly reconfiguration of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning of plasticity to contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility and intervention.

The Domestication of Humans explains the alternative to the African Eve model by attributing human modernity, not to a speciation event in Africa, but to the unintended self-domestication of humans. This alternative account of human origins provides the reader with a comprehensive explanation of all features defining our species that is consistent with all the available evidence. These traits include, but are not limited to, massive neotenisation, numerous somatic changes, susceptibility to almost countless detrimental conditions and maladaptations, brain atrophy, loss of oestrus and thousands of genetic impairments. The teleological fantasy of replacement by a 'superior' species that has dominated the topic of modern human origins has never explained any of the many features that distinguish us from our robust ancestors. This book explains all of them in one consistent, elegant theory. It presents the most revolutionary proposal of human origins since Darwin. Although primarily intended for the academic market, this book is perfectly suitable for anyone interested in how and why we became the species that we are today.

The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology provides a contemporary overview of the key themes in medical anthropology. In this exciting departure from conventional handbooks, compendia and encyclopedias, the three editors have written the core chapters of the volume, and in so doing, invite the reader to reflect on the ethnographic richness and theoretical contributions of research on the clinic and the field, bioscience and medical research, infectious and non-communicable diseases, biomedicine, complementary and alternative modalities, structural violence and vulnerability, gender and ageing, reproduction and sexuality. As a way of illustrating the themes, a rich variety of case studies are included, presented by over 60 authors from around the world, reflecting the diverse cultural contexts in which people experience health, illness, and healing. Each chapter and its case studies are introduced by a photograph, reflecting medical and visual anthropological responses to inequality and vulnerability. An indispensible reference in this fastest growing area of anthropological study, The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology is a unique and innovative contribution to the field.

Vulnerability is a fundamental aspect of existence, giving rise to the need for care in various forms. Yet we are not all vulnerable in the same way, and not all vulnerabilities are equally recognised or cared for. This transdisciplinary volume considers how vulnerability and care are shaped by relations of power within contemporary contexts of war, development, environmental degradation, sexual violence, aging populations and economic precarity. It proposes that care for vulnerable populations or individuals is inseparable from other political processes of recognition, welfare, healthcare and security, whilst also exploring vulnerability as a shared, generative condition that makes caring possible. Ethnographic and narrative accounts of vulnerable life and caring relations in various geographical regions - including Japan, Uganda, Micronesia, Iraq, Mexico, the UK and the US - are interspersed with perspectives from philosophy, International Relations, social and cultural theory, and more, resulting in a compelling series of intellectual exchanges, creative frictions and provocative insights.

"A Companion to Forensic Anthropology" presents the most comprehensive assessment of the philosophy, goals, and practice of forensic anthropology currently available, with chapters by renowned international scholars and experts.Presents the most comprehensive assessment of the philosophy, goals, and practice of forensic anthropology available, with chapters by a wide range of renowned international scholars and experts Highlights the latest advances in forensic anthropology research, as well as the most effective practices and techniques used by professional forensic anthropologists in the fieldIllustrates the development of skeletal biological profiles and offers important new evidence on statistical validation of these analytical methods.Evaluates the goals and methods of forensic archaeology, including the preservation of context at surface-scattered remains, buried bodies and fatal fire scenes, and recovery and identification issues related to large-scale mass disaster scenes and mass grave excavation.

Why do people single out gold, sapphires, diamonds, and other minerals as particularly "precious"? What makes precious minerals "precious"? Drawing from ethnographic and cross-cultural research, this collection of anthropological essays and case studies answers these questions by exploring humans' multifaceted relationships with the minerals they deem "precious." The Anthropology of Precious Minerals addresses the entanglement of humans and minerals, with a particular focus on the practices of scrappers, miners, and hunters as they work to extract value. The editors draw from history, archaeology, and ethnography, and remind us that "preciousness" must always be understood in relation to complex cultural, political-economic, and semiotic systems of value.

This book provides a detailed examination of the demographic behavior of families during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a sample of fourteen villages in five different regions of Germany. It is based on the reconstituted family histories of vital events (births, deaths and marriages) compiled by genealogies for the entire populations of these villages. The book applies the type of micro-level analysis possible with family reconstitution data for the crucial period leading to and encompassing the early stages of the demographic transition, including the initial onset of the decline of fertility to low modern levels. The analysis explores many aspects of demographic behavior which have been largely ignored by previous macro-level investigations of the demographic transition. These include infant and child mortality, maternal mortality, marriage, marital dissolution, bridal pregnancy and illegitimacy. The core of the study, however, deals with marital reproduction, examining the modernization of reproductive behavior in terms of the transition from a situation of natural fertility to one characterized by pervasive family limitation.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brazil ranked second only to the United States in the number of reported cases of AIDS. Because Brazil's extensive poverty and inequality, its fragile economic situation, and its limited network of health services, the scarce prevention/intervention resources targeted only the most visible at risk populations -- gay men, sailors, prostitutes, and street children. Virtually forgotten were Brazil's hidden drug users, as well as the tens of millions of individuals living in the country's thousands of favelas, or shantytowns, which are a characteristic part of almost every Brazilian city. In Sex, Drugs, and HIV/AIDS in Brazil the authors examine the emergence of AIDS in Brazil, its linkages to drug use and the sexual culture, and its epidemiology in such populations as cocaine users, "street children," and male transvestite prostitutes. Special attention is focused on an HIV/AIDS community outreach program established in Rio de Janeiro, which represented the first such prevention/intervention program in all of Brazil targeting indigent cocaine users. This 6-year initiative was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, and carried out by the authors of this book. The research combines anthropological, sociological, and biological perspectives; all data were gathered through empirical and ethnographic techniques.

This book follows people living with dementia through their admission, shadowing hospital staff as they interact with them during and across shifts. In a major contribution to the tradition of hospital ethnography, it provides a valuable analysis of the organisation and delivery of routine care, and everyday interactions at the bedside, that reveal the powerful continuities and durability of ward cultures of care, and their impacts on people living with dementia.

Despite France and Belgium sharing and interacting constantly with similar culinary tastes, music and pop culture, access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies are strikingly different. Discrimination written into French law acutely contrasts with non-discriminatory access to ART in Belgium. The contributors of this volume are social scientists from France, Belgium, England and the United States, representing different disciplines: law, political science, philosophy, sociology and anthropology. Each author has attempted, through the prism of their specialties, to demonstrate and analyse how and why this striking difference in access to ART exists.

How much influence does culture have on a mother's reactions to pregnancy loss? At what stage is a fetus attributed with human status? How does this affect the mother's reactions to the loss of a baby?
Contemporary, historical and oral-history accounts from regions as diverse as rural North India, urban America, South Africa and Northern Ireland, provide a fascinating insight into the experience and management of miscarriage across a number of different cultures. The authors explore how the social, technological and medical context in which miscarriages occur can affect the ways in which women experience such an event.
In the West, advances in medical technology, a low infant-mortality rate and a low birth rate have raised expectations as to the successful outcome of each pregnancy. In addition, the early confirmation of pregnancy makes consequent pregnancy loss -- which might have gone unnoticed or unconfirmed in the past -- all the more difficult for mothers in the West. Yet, mourning rituals and behaviour at a pregnancy loss, which may be elaborate in some societies, are generally considered to be inappropriate in many Western societies. Differing social beliefs regarding the causes of miscarriage, preventative measures and curative treatments are also examined.
Medical anthropologists, sociologists and health professionals will all find this book fascinating reading.

How much influence does culture have on a mother's reactions to pregnancy loss? At what stage is a fetus attributed with human status? How does this affect the mother's reactions to the loss of a baby?
Contemporary, historical and oral-history accounts from regions as diverse as rural North India, urban America, South Africa and Northern Ireland, provide a fascinating insight into the experience and management of miscarriage across a number of different cultures. The authors explore how the social, technological and medical context in which miscarriages occur can affect the ways in which women experience such an event.
In the West, advances in medical technology, a low infant-mortality rate and a low birth rate have raised expectations as to the successful outcome of each pregnancy. In addition, the early confirmation of pregnancy makes consequent pregnancy loss -- which might have gone unnoticed or unconfirmed in the past -- all the more difficult for mothers in the West. Yet, mourning rituals and behaviour at a pregnancy loss, which may be elaborate in some societies, are generally considered to be inappropriate in many Western societies. Differing social beliefs regarding the causes of miscarriage, preventative measures and curative treatments are also examined.
Medical anthropologists, sociologists and health professionals will all find this book fascinating reading.

This open access edited book brings together new research on the mechanisms by which maternal and reproductive health policies are formed and implemented in diverse locales around the world, from global policy spaces to sites of practice. The authors - both internationally respected anthropologists and new voices - demonstrate the value of ethnography and the utility of reproduction as a lens through which to generate rich insights into professionals' and lay people's intimate encounters with policy. Authors look closely at core policy debates in the history of global maternal health across six different continents, including: Women's use of misoprostol for abortion in Burkina Faso The place of traditional birth attendants in global maternal health Donor-driven maternal health programs in Tanzania Efforts to integrate qualitative evidence in WHO maternal and child health policy-making Anthropologies of Global Maternal and Reproductive Health will engage readers interested in critical conversations about global health policy today. The broad range of foci makes it a valuable resource for teaching in medical anthropology, anthropology of reproduction, and interdisciplinary global health programs. The book will also find readership amongst critical public health scholars, health policy and systems researchers, and global public health practitioners.

The emergence of Zika virus in 2015 challenged conventional ideas of mosquito-borne diseases, tested the resilience of health systems and embedded itself within local sociocultural worlds, with major implications for environmental, sexual, reproductive and paediatric health. This book explores this complex viral epidemic and situates it within its broader social, epidemiological and historical context in Latin America and the Caribbean. The chapters include a diverse set of case studies from scholars and health practitioners working across the region, from Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, the United States and Haiti. The book explores how mosquito-borne disease epidemics (not only Zika but also chikungunya, dengue and malaria) intersect with social change and health governance. By doing so, the authors reflect on the ways in which situated knowledge and social science approaches can contribute to more effective health policy and practice for mosquito-borne disease threats in a changing world. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com , has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The etiology of the Wimbum people in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon is described through an examination of the way in which the meanings of key concepts, used to interpret and explain illness and other forms of misfortune, are continually being produced and reproduced in the praxis of everyday communication. During the course of numerous dialogues, witchcraft, a highly ambivalent force, gradually emerges as the prime mover. As destructive cannibals or respectable elders the witches are the ultimate cause of all significant illness, misfortune and death, and as diviners they are also the ultimate judges who apportion moral responsibility. Even the ancestors and the traditional gods turn out to be fronts behind which the witches hide their activities.The study is on three levels: a medical anthropological exploration of explanations of illness and misfortune; a detailed ethnography of traditional African cosmology and witchcraft; and an examination of recent theoretical issues in anthropology such as the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the possibility of dialogical or postmodern ethnography.

This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe? Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various writings-spun from diverse situations and global locations-proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times. A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.

I am pleased to respond to the wish of the Editors, Drs A. Czeizel, H. G. Benk mann and H. W. Goedde and write the Foreword to this book "Genetics ofthe Hun garian population." This book represents the result of a fruitful international scientif ic cooperation, an endeavour that has been forged and sustained in the midst of a number of difficulties. It bears ample testimony to the fact that the pursuit of science transcends national boundaries and barriers and to what can be achieved through international cooperation. It has now become possible, among other things, to present a more meaningful characterization of the different ethnic groups than had been hitherto possible, thanks to the major advances in the study of human biology through the application of a wide variety of concepts and techniques. Several new disciplines, in particular, ecogenetics, pharmacogenetics and molecular biology have come into being and are flourishing. At the risk of stating the obvious, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the trends and place of migration and urbanization that we are witnessing today are such, that, before long, differences between different human gene pools may be substantially diminished, if not entirely obliterated. This book, therefore, is timely: it provides valuable information on who the Hungarians are, where they come from and where they are heading, in short, their past, present and future, in addition to presenting a broad perspective of some aspects of current research in biomedical sciences in Hungary."

Biotech Juggernaut: Hope, Hype, and Hidden Agendas of Entrepreneurial BioScience relates the intensifying effort of bioentrepreneurs to apply genetic engineering technologies to the human species and to extend the commercial reach of synthetic biology or "extreme genetic engineering." In 1980, legal developments concerning patenting laws transformed scientific researchers into bioentrepreneurs. Often motivated to create profit-driven biotech start-up companies or to serve on their advisory boards, university researchers now commonly operate under serious conflicts of interest. These conflicts stand in the way of giving full consideration to the social and ethical consequences of the technologies they seek to develop. Too often, bioentrepreneurs have worked to obscure how these technologies could alter human evolution and to hide the social costs of keeping on this path. Tracing the rise and cultural politics of biotechnology from a critical perspective, Biotech Juggernaut aims to correct the informational imbalance between producers of biotechnologies on the one hand, and the intended consumers of these technologies and general society, on the other. It explains how the converging vectors of economic, political, social, and cultural elements driving biotechnology's swift advance constitutes a juggernaut. It concludes with a reflection on whether it is possible for an informed public to halt what appears to be a runaway force.