Social Bioarchaeology introduces the exciting and growing biosocial approach in archaeology that challenges the traditional methods of analyzing and interpreting human skeletal remains. Agarwal, Glencross and the experts assembled in this volume outline the essential components of this research...
In the Andalusian communities throughout the olive-growing region of southeastern Spain men show themselves to be primarily concerned with two problems of identity: their place in the social hierarchy, and the maintenance of their masculinity in the context of their culture.
"A cogent, attractively presented case study of a single festival in its diverse forms. It provides a lucid account of cultural change and a careful plotting of causes and influences." (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, March 2009)
Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs...
From the opening sequence, in which mid-nineteenth-century Indian fishermen hear the possibility of redemption in an old woman's madness, No Aging in India captures the reader with its interplay of story and analysis. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic work, Lawrence Cohen links a...
Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this volume approaches dementia from a variety of angles, exploring its historical, psychological, and philosophical implications. The authors employ a cross-cultural perspective that is based on ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on...
This pathbreaking book brings gender issues to archaeology for the first time, in an explicit and theoretically informed way. In it, leading archaeologists from around the world contribute original analyses of prehistoric data to discover how gender systems operated in the past.
This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-...
As physicists work toward completing a theory of the Universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The “Theory of Everything” that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: that is the...
In this erudite and gracefully written ethnography, Mariane Ferme explores the links between a violent historical and political legacy, and the production of secrecy in everyday material culture. The focus is on Mende-speaking southeastern Sierra Leone and the surrounding region. Since 1990,...
“…a valuable addition to the increasing literature on Japanese multiculturalism which has challenged the long-held homogeneous Japan thesis…A particular contribution of this … book is to illuminate the ground-level process where hybridities emerge and group...
Written in an informal style with engaging examples, this introduction to the study of language in context presents a provocative new approach to communicative practice. Emphasizing the dual status of language as linguistic system and as social fact, William Hanks offers fresh insights into the...
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role...
Over the past two decades, William Hanks has explored the dynamics of verbal interaction, and how speakers and listeners make meaning through language. With equal commitment to theory and empirical description, Hanks' writings combine analyses of linguistic form, speech processes, and...
Archaeologists have long been interested in the onset of political differentiation, and how this can be inferred from the archaeological record. Here Christine Hastorf looks at the nature of power and political diversity in the Andean region of central Peru over a thousand-year period, from AD...
The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this...
The Upper Mantaro Archaeological Research Project, a multiyear program undertaken from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, is a benchmark for a new level of quality in Andean archaeological research and has brought the theory and substance of research in the region to the attention of the...
Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical...
Charles Hirschkind's unique study explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades.
An essential aspect of what is now called the Islamic Revival, the cassette...
"In Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, Seth Holmes offers up an important and captivating new ethnography, linking the structural violence inherent in the migrant labor system in the United States to the social processes by which it becomes normalized. Drawing on five years of...
"This is not the same old culture history but a respectable compilation of recent fieldwork and analysis within a framework of innovative problem-oriented research. Joyce's introductory chapter is a synthetic tour de force." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
There has never been a single way that social life has heen organized by sex.
The ancient Greeks saw men and women as expressing varying degrees of a single sexual potential; many Native American societies considered sexual identity as something that changed and developed during a...
"This is a tremendously significant contribution to the field... It provides a new model of how social inequality first emerged in ancient societies. It provides an accessible, convincing demonstration of Judith Butler's performance theory. And it resolves some quandaries about gender...
The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth's surface and encompasses many thousands of islands, the home to numerous human societies and cultures. Among these indigenous Oceanic cultures are the intrepid Polynesian double-hulled canoe navigators, the atoll dwellers of Micronesia, the...
Were there major population collapses on Pacific Islands following first contact with the West? If so, what were the actual population numbers for islands such as Hawai‘i, Tahiti, or New Caledonia? Is it possible to develop new methods for tracking the long-term histories of island...
"Lightfoot not only adds a useful text to the study of colonial effects on the Indians of California, but fosters his arguments for the developing field of 'historical anthropology.'" - GLENN J. FARRIS, Jrnl of California & Great Basin Anthropology. "This is a...
China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-reform rural China. Enriched with many vivid anecdotes describing life in the village of Zhaojiahe in...
Today's world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China's immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world;...
The realities of the social life in China's business practices reveal an increasing divergence from the ideologies of the Chinese state. In this engaging work, Xin Liu examines the Asian economic crisis and, particularly, the rise of China as a major trading power in the region. Liu...
In this volume, four leading thinkers of our times confront the paradoxes and dilemmas attending the supposed stand-off between Islam and liberal democratic values. Taking the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammad as a point of departure, Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba...
Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform...
“Nader’s scholarly volume, though detailed, is very readable. Not only is this book a major contribution to the anthropology of law by one of its leading proponents but also one that should be considered by scholars interested in other aspects of cultural changes and development.”—Anthropos
As conflict resolution becomes increasingly important to urban and rural peoples around the globe, the value of this classic anthology of studies of process, structure, comparison, and perception of the law is acclaimed by policy makers as well as anthropologists throughout the world. The case...
Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Are nation-states being transformed by globalization into a single globalized economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis,...
Why are Malay women workers periodically seized by spirit possession on the shopfloors of modern factories? In this book, Aihwa Ong captures the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences in the lives of Malay women and their families as they make the transition from peasant society to industrial...
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily...
Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the "anthropological" problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for...
In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of...
In 1993, an American biotechnology company and a French genetics lab developed a collaborative research plan to search for diabetes genes. But just as the project was to begin, the French government called it to a halt, barring the laboratory from sharing something never previously thought of as...
A Machine to Make a Future represents a remarkably original look at the present and possible future of biotechnology research in the wake of the mapping of the human genome. The central tenet of Celera Diagnostics--the California biotech company whose formative work during 2003 is the focus of...
TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION, UPDATED AND EXPANDED
When Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics was published twenty years ago, it became an instant classic—a beautifully written study tracing the social disintegration of "Ballybran," a small village on the Dingle Peninsula in...
From Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to Joseph Conrad’s “fascination of the abomination,” humankind has struggled to make sense of human-upon-human violence. Edited by two of anthropology’s most passionate voices on this subject, Violence in War and...
Increasingly the body is a possession that does not belong to us. It is bought and sold, bartered and stolen, marketed wholesale or in parts. The professions - especially reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, and bioethics but also journalism and other cultural specialists -...
“Makes a case for ethnography as an art form. . . . A compelling, if deeply disturbing, account of women in a Brazilian shantytown.”—New York Times Book Review
Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had...
