Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach, Fourth Edition, offers an accessible and contemporary overview of this rapidly expanding field. For each health issue examined in the text, the authors first present basic biological information and then expand their analysis to include evolutionary, historical, and cross-cultural perspectives on how these issues emerged and are understood. Medical Anthropology considers how a biocultural approach can be applied to more effective prevention and treatment efforts and underscores medical anthropology's potential to improve health around the world.

This new edition of a classic book tells the story of the celebrated Ford GT40 through a remarkable array of over 850 period photographs, many of them in colour. After Ford unsuccessfully attempted to buy Ferrari, in 1963, the American car giant instead embarked on its own racing programme in a bid to beat the famous Italian marque at the world's most prestigious race, the Le Mans 24 Hours, as told in the forthcoming Hollywood movie Ford v. Ferrari. The mission was eventually accomplished: Ford's challenger in this battle, the GT40, finished 1-2-3 at Le Mans in 1966 and won for the next three years as well. This book, originally published in 1985 and redesigned in 2005, is now available again due to popular demand, with further revision to keep the information up-to-date.

Medical anthropology encompasses a wide range of perspectives as it seeks to understand human health and illness. An ideal core text for introductory courses, Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach provides a current and accessible overview of this diverse and rapidly expanding field. Working from a iocultural approach, Medical Anthropology examines the major health issues that affect most human societies, describing and synthesizing the ways in which biology, culture, health, and environment interact. It integrates up-to-date and relevant biological data with analyses of both evolutionary theory and the sociocultural conditions that often lead to major challenges to our health and survival.
Authors Andrea S. Wiley and John S. Allen first present basic biological information on a specific health condition and then extend their investigation to include evolutionary, historical, sociocultural, and political-economic perspectives. Topics covered include healers and healing; health, diet, and nutrition; child health, growth, and development; reproductive health; aging; infectious disease; behavioral disease; stress, social inequality, and race; and mental illness. Each chapter features a variety of case studies and examples--current and historical, local and global--that demonstrate how a medical anthropological perspective can shed important light on a particular health condition. In addition, the text is enhanced by numerous tables, figures, review questions, critical thinking questions, suggestions for accompanying ethnographies, and a glossary to help students better understand the material. Throughout the text, the authors consider how a biocultural anthropological approach could be applied to more effective prevention and treatment efforts. They also highlight the ways in which medical anthropology has the potential to help improve the health of populations around the world.

Contributing Authors Include John S. Allen, Frank K. Bell, John M. Cabot, And Many Others. A Publication Of The School Of Interamerican Studies.

This major work covers almost all that has been learned about the acoustics of stringed instruments from Helmholtz's 19th-century theoretical elaborations to recent electroacoustic and holographic measurements. Many of the results presented here were uncovered by the author himself (and by his associates and students) over a 20-year period of research on the physics of instruments in the violin family. Lothar Cremer is one of the world's most respected authorities on architectural acoustics and, not incidentally, an avid avocational violinist and violist. The book-which was published in German in 1981-first of all meets the rigorous technical standards of specialists in musical acoustics. But it also serves the needs and interests of two broader groups: makers and players of stringed instruments are expressly addressed, since the implications of the mathematical formulations are fully outlined and explained; and acousticians in general will find that the work represents a textbook illustration of the application of fundamental principles and up-to-date techniques to a specific problem. The first-and longest-of the book's three parts investigates the oscillatory responses of bowed (and plucked) strings. The natural nonlinearities that derive from considerations of string torsion and bending stiffness are deftly handled and concisely modeled. The second part deals with the body of the instrument. Special attention is given to the bridge, which transmits the oscillations of the strings to the wooden body and its air cavity. In this case, linear modeling proves serviceable for the most part-a simplification that would not be possible with lute-like instruments such as the guitar. The radiation of sound from the body into the listener's space, which is treated as an extension of the instrument itself, is the subject of the book's final part.

In this gustatory tour of human history, John S. Allen demonstrates that the everyday activity of eating offers deep insights into human beings' biological and cultural heritage. We humans eat a wide array of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores we eat with our minds as much as our stomachs. This thoughtful relationship with food is part of what makes us a unique species, and makes culinary cultures diverse. Not even our closest primate relatives think about food in the way Homo sapiens does. We are superomnivores whose palates reflect the natural history of our species. Drawing on the work of food historians and chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, Allen starts out with the diets of our earliest ancestors, explores cooking's role in our evolving brain, and moves on to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies. The Omnivorous Mind delivers insights into food aversions and cravings, our compulsive need to label foods as good or bad, dietary deviation from "healthy" food pyramids, and cross-cultural attitudes toward eating (with the French, bien sur, exemplifying the pursuit of gastronomic pleasure). To explain, for example, the worldwide popularity of crispy foods, Allen considers first the food habits of our insect-eating relatives. He also suggests that the sound of crunch may stave off dietary boredom by adding variety to sensory experience. Or perhaps fried foods, which we think of as bad for us, interject a frisson of illicit pleasure. When it comes to eating, Allen shows, there's no one way to account for taste.

Though we have other distinguishing characteristics (walking on two legs, for instance, and relative hairlessness), the brain and the behavior it produces are what truly set us apart from the other apes and primates. And how this three-pound organ composed of water, fat, and protein turned a mammal species into the dominant animal on earth today is the story John S. Allen seeks to tell. Adopting what he calls a "bottom-up" approach to the evolution of human behavior, Allen considers the brain as a biological organ; a collection of genes, cells, and tissues that grows, eats, and ages, and is subject to the direct effects of natural selection and the phylogenetic constraints of its ancestry. An exploration of the evolution of this critical organ based on recent work in paleo anthropology, brain anatomy and neuroimaging, molecular genetics, life history theory, and related fields, his book shows us the brain as a product of the contexts in which it evolved: phylogenetic, somatic, genetic, ecological, demographic, and ultimately, cultural-linguistic. Throughout, Allen focuses on the foundations of brain evolution rather than the evolution of behavior or cognition. This perspective demonstrates how, just as some aspects of our behavior emerge in unexpected ways from the development of certain cognitive capacities, a more nuanced understanding of behavioral evolution might develop from a clearer picture of brain evolution.