Exploring the structure, motives, and meanings of humor in everyday life
In Engaging Humor, Elliott Oring asks essential questions concerning humorous expression in contemporary society, examining how humor works, why it is employed, and what its messages might be. This provocative book is filled with examples of jokes and riddles that reveal humor to be a meaningful--even significant--form of expression.Oring scrutinizes classic Jewish jokes, frontier humor, racist cartoons, blonde jokes, and Internet humor. He provides alternate ways of thinking about humorous expressions by examining their contexts--not just their contents. He also shows how the incongruity and absurdity essential to the production of laughter can serve serious communicative ends.
Engaging Humor examines the thoughts that underlie jokes, the question of racist motivation in ethnic humor, and the use of humor as a commentary on social interaction. The book also explores the relationship between humor and sentimentality and the role of humor in forging national identity. Engaging Humor demonstrates that when analyzed contextually and comparatively, humorous expressions emerge as communications that are startling, intriguing, and profound.
A unique study of an Andean community’s water rituals and the extraordinary document describing how they should be performed
In the dry season in the Andes, water from springs, lakes, reservoirs, and melting glaciers feeds irrigation canals that have sustained communities for thousands of years. Managing and maintaining these water infrastructures is essential, and in 1921, in the village of San Pedro de Casta, Peru, local authorities recorded their ritual canal-cleaning duties in a Spanish-language document called the Entablo. It is only the second book (along with the Huarochirí Manuscript) ever seen by scholars in which an Andean community explains its customs and ritual laws in its own words.
Sarah Bennison offers a critical introduction to the Entablo, a Spanish transcription of the document, and an English translation. Among its other revelations, the Entablo delves into the use of khipu boards, devices that meld the traditional knotted strings known as khipus with a written alphabet. Only in the Entablo do we learn that there were multiple khipu boards associated with a single canal-cleaning ritual, or that there were separate khipu records for men and women. The Entablo manuscript furnishes unparalleled insights into Andean rituals, religion, and community history at a historical moment when rural highland communities were changing rapidly.
Entangled Objects threatens to dislodge the cornerstone of Western anthropology by rendering permanently problematic the idea of reciprocity. All traffic, and commerce, whether economic or intellectual, between Western anthropologists and the rest of the world, is predicated upon the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations between the West and the indigenous peoples it has colonized for centuries.
Drawing on his work on contemporary postcolonial Pacific societies, Nicholas Thomas takes up three issues central to modern anthropology: the cultural and political dynamics of colonial encounters, the nature of Western and non-Western transactions (such as the gift and the commodity), and the significance of material objects in social life. Along the way, he raises doubts about any simple “us/them” dichotomy between Westerners and Pacific Islanders, challenging the preoccupation of anthropology with cultural difference by stressing the shared history of colonial entanglement.
Thomas integrates general issues into a historical discussion of the uses Pacific Islanders and Europeans have made of each other’s material artifacts. He explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century islanders, and visitors from the time of the Cook voyages up to the present day, have fashioned identities for themselves and each other by appropriating and exchanging goods. Previous writers have explored museums and the tribal art market, but this is the first book to concentrate on the distinct interests of European collectors and the islanders. In its comparative scope, its combination of historical and ethnographic scholarship, and its subversive approach to anthropological theory and traditional understandings of colonial relationships, Entangled Objects is a unique and challenging book. It will be tremendously interesting to all those working in the fields of cultural studies, from history to literature.
Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific case studies analyze and engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity.
This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic opportunity, agricultural policy, and food security, the chapters in this book explore a range of issues and ways of thinking about harm to people and their ecologies.
Because environmental justice is often understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed around North American examples, these fresh case studies will enrich both southern African history and global environmental studies. Environment, Power, and Justice expands conceptions of environmental justice and reveals discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and social change.
Contributors:
Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island’s most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t’u (or “nativist”) literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. At the heart of the book are close readings of the work of the hsiang-t’u writer Hwang Chun-ming and the New Cinema filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. Key figures in Taiwan’s assertion of a national identity separate and distinct from China, both artists portray in vibrant detail daily life on the island. Through Hwang’s and Hou’s work and their respective artistic movements, Yip explores “the imagining of a nation” on the local, national, and global levels. In the process, she exposes a perceptible shift away from traditional models of cultural authenticity toward a more fluid, postmodern hybridity—an evolution that reflects both Taiwan’s peculiar multicultural reality and broader trends in global culture.
“Mr. Allan Burns, I am here to tell you an example, the example of the Hunchbacks.” So said Paulino Yamá, traditionalist and storyteller, to Allan Burns, anthropologist and linguist, as he began one story that found its way into this book.
Paulino Yamá was just one of several master storytellers from the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico from whom Burns learned not only the Mayan language but also the style and performance of myths, stories, riddles, prayers, and other forms of speech of their people. The result is An Epoch of Miracles, a wonderfully readable yet thoroughly scholarly set of translations from the oral literature of the Yucatec Maya, an important New World tradition never before systematically described.
An Epoch of Miracles brings us over thirty-five long narratives of things large, small, strange, and “regular” and as many delightful short pieces, such as bird lore, riddles, and definitions of anteaters, rainbows, and other commonplaces of the Mayan world. Here are profound narratives of the Feathered Serpent, the mighty Rain God Chac and his helpers, and the mysterious cult of the Speaking Cross. But because these are modern, “Petroleum Age” Maya, here too are a discussion with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and a greeting to former president Richard Nixon.
All pieces are translated ethnopoetically; examples of several genres are presented bilingually. An especially valuable feature is the indication of performance style, such as pauses and voice quality, given with each piece.
Rediscovering an early scientific challenge to racism
This is the first paperback edition of the only English-language translation of the Haitian scholar Anténor Firmin's The Equality of the Human Races, a foundational text in critical anthropology first published in 1885 when anthropology was just emerging as a specialized field of study. Marginalized for its "radical" position that the human races were equal, Firmin's lucid and persuasive treatise was decades ahead of its time. Arguing that the equality of the races could be demonstrated through a positivist scientific approach, Firmin challenged racist writings and the dominant views of the day. Translated by Asselin Charles and framed by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban's substantial introduction, this rediscovered text is an important contribution to contemporary scholarship in anthropology, pan-African studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies.
In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman’s voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. In Erotic Triangles, Henry Spiller draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities.
Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men’s sense of freedom—as a triangle, Spiller connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lévi-Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, Spiller ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.
Eskimo Essays introduces the reader to important aspects of the ideology and practice of the Yup’ik Eskimos of western Alaska, past and present. The essays point the way toward a fuller recognition of how Yup’ik Eskimos differ from the popular Western image of the Eskimo that was born largely without reference to Yup’ik reality. By describing the reality of Yup’ik life, Eskimo Essays extends our understanding of Esimos in general and Yup’ik Eskimos in particular.
Ann Fienup-Riordan argues that Western observers have simultaneously naturalized Eskimos as paragons of simplicity and virtue and Western imperialism. This process has often ignored Eskimo concepts of society, history, and personhood. An original assumption of similarity to Western society has profoundly affected the current Euro-American view of Eskimo history and action. Non-natives have taken an idealized Western individual, dressed that person up in polar garb, and then assumed they understood the garment’s maker. The result is a presentation of Eskimo society that often tells us more about the meaning we seek in our own. Moreover, modern Eskimos have risen to the challenge and to some extent become what we have made them.
Bridging the gap between informed scholarships and popular concepts, Fienup-Riordan provides a compelling and fresh presentation of Yup’ik life—cosmology, the missionary experience, attitudes toward conservation, Eskimo art, the legal system, warfare, and ceremonies.
Drawing on social science, science studies, linguistics, popular and expressive culture, and social and intellectual history, the writers of E.T. Culture unsettle the boundaries of science, magic, and religion as well as those of technological and human agency. They consider the ways that sufferers of “unmarked” diseases such as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome come to feel alien to both the “healthy” world and the medical community incapable of treating them; the development of alien languages like Klingon; attempts to formulate a communications technology—such as that created for the spaceship Voyager—that will reach alien beings; the pilgrimage spirit of UFO seekers; the out-of-time experiences of Nobel scientists; the embrace of the alien within Japanese animation and fan culture; and the physical spirituality of the Raëlian religious network.
Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Richard Doyle, Joseph Dumit, Mizuko Ito, Susan Lepselter, Christopher Roth, David Samuels
Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.
Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.
The outbreak of numerous and simultaneous violent conflicts around the globe in the past decade resulted in immense human suffering and countless lost lives. In part, both results were aided by inactivity or by belated and often misplaced responses by the international community to the embattled groups. The apparent inability of the international community to respond firmly and purposefully to violent conflicts can be attributed partially to a general confusion and misunderstanding of the root causes of such conflicts. In some cases, the international community argued that violent conflicts could be attributed to irreconcilable ethnic differences, which, like earthquakes, are impossible to prevent or control.
At other times, the argument was that such conflicts were the results of evil leaders capable of engineering mass violent acts. Ethnic Conflict presents an interdisciplinary and comparative effort to explain the root causes of ethnic conflicts in terms of political, economic, and social common denominators that characterize all such conflicts. It seeks to dispel misplaced assumptions about violent domestic conflicts and, by providing a clearer picture of the mechanics of such conflicts, it hopes to assist in the process of conflict resolution and prevention.
Ethnicity and nationalism are pervasive features of the contemporary world, but how far is ethnicity a result of cultural differences, and how much is it in fact dependent on the practical use of, and belief in, such differences? In this book, Thomas Hylland Eriksen demonstrates that far from being an immutable property of groups, ethnicity is a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relationships. Drawing on a wide range of classic and recent studies in anthropology and sociology, Eriksen examines the relationship between ethnicity, class, gender and nationhood and more in a lucid and comprehensive manner.
A core text for all students of social anthropology and related subjects, Ethnicity and Nationalism has been a leading introduction to the field since its original publication in 1993. This new edition - expanded and thoroughly revised - is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in understanding ethnic phenomena. New topics covered include cultural property rights, the role of genetics in the public understanding of identification, commercialisation of identity, and the significance of the internet.
Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--essentialist notions of ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area.
Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.
In Ethnicity, Inc. anthropologists John L. and Jean Comaroff analyze a new moment in the history of human identity: its rampant commodification. Through a wide-ranging exploration of the changing relationship between culture and the market, they address a pressing question: Wherein lies the future of ethnicity?
Their account begins in South Africa, with the incorporation of an ethno-business in venture capital by a group of traditional African chiefs. But their horizons are global: Native American casinos; Scotland’s efforts to brand itself; a Zulu ethno-theme park named Shakaland; a world religion declared to be intellectual property; a chiefdom made into a global business by means of its platinum holdings; San “Bushmen” with patent rights potentially worth millions of dollars; nations acting as commercial enterprises; and the rapid growth of marketing firms that target specific ethnic populations are just some of the diverse examples that fall under the Comaroffs’ incisive scrutiny. These phenomena range from the disturbing through the intriguing to the absurd. Through them, the Comaroffs trace the contradictory effects of neoliberalism as it transforms identities and social being across the globe.
Ethnicity, Inc. is a penetrating account of the ways in which ethnic populations are remaking themselves in the image of the corporation—while corporations coopt ethnic practices to open up new markets and regimes of consumption. Intellectually rigorous but leavened with wit, this is a powerful, highly original portrayal of a new world being born in a tectonic collision of culture, capitalism, and identity.
Ethnocentrism in Its Many Guises gathers essays on a topic of urgent concern. Marjorie Snipes’s introduction chronicles the treatment of ethnocentrism within the discipline of anthropology. Christine Kovic decries the ethnocentrism codified in immigration law that has led to thousands of deaths at the US–Mexico border. Brandon Lundy’s and Kezia Darkwah’s ethnographic research among labor migrants in Cabo Verde demonstrates how communities undergoing immigration pressures react to outsiders in complex ways. Yeju Choi contends that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission failed to heal the wounds inflicted by a century of cultural genocide because the process did not fully engage and respect the worldview of Aboriginal peoples. Using the example of Rapa Nui, Kathleen and Daniel Ingersoll note how we project and privilege our own values when we observe other cultures and historical periods. Ayla Samli argues that both the nutritionally deficient Standard American Diet and our federal supplemental nutrition programs are limited and ethnocentric. Michael Blum explains how the Wu-Tang Clan’s music can be understood as a site of resistance against American racism.
These papers were presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) in Carrollton, Georgia.
A study of how doing field research submerged in a different culture impacts one's sense of identity.
From reviews of the first edition:
“Ethnographic Film can rightly be considered a film primer for anthropologists.”
—Choice
“This is an interesting and useful book about what it means to be ethnographic and how this might affect ethnographic filmmaking for the better. It obviously belongs in all departments of anthropology, and most ethnographic filmmakers will want to read it.”
—Ethnohistory
Even before Robert Flaherty released Nanook of the North in 1922, anthropologists were producing films about the lifeways of native peoples for a public audience, as well as for research and teaching. Ethnographic Film (1976) was one of the first books to provide a comprehensive introduction to this field of visual anthropology, and it quickly became the standard reference.
In this new edition, Karl G. Heider thoroughly updates Ethnographic Film to reflect developments in the field over the three decades since its publication, focusing on the work of four seminal filmmakers—Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch. He begins with an introduction to ethnographic film and a history of the medium. He then considers many attributes of ethnographic film, including the crucial need to present "whole acts," "whole bodies," "whole interactions," and "whole people" to preserve the integrity of the cultural context. Heider also discusses numerous aspects of making ethnographic films, from ethics and finances to technical considerations such as film versus video and preserving the filmed record. He concludes with a look at using ethnographic film in teaching.
According to the people of the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. While conducting research among these Muedans, anthropologist Harry G. West made a revealing discovery—for many of them, West’s efforts to elaborate an ethnographic vision of their world was itself a form of sorcery. In Ethnographic Sorcery, West explores the fascinating issues provoked by this equation.
A key theme of West’s research into sorcery is that one sorcerer’s claims can be challenged or reversed by other sorcerers. After West’s attempt to construct a metaphorical interpretation of Muedan assertions that the lions prowling their villages are fabricated by sorcerers is disputed by his Muedan research collaborators, West realized that ethnography and sorcery indeed have much in common. Rather than abandoning ethnography, West draws inspiration from this connection, arguing that anthropologists, along with the people they study, can scarcely avoid interpreting the world they inhabit, and that we are all, inescapably, ethnographic sorcerers.
In his commentary, Fabian reconstructs his meeting with the healer Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel, in which the two discussed the ritual that Kahenga performed to protect Fabian’s home from burglary. Fabian reflects on the expectations and terminology that shape his description of Kahenga’s ritual and meditates on how ethnographic texts are made, considering the settings, the participants, the technologies, and the linguistic medium that influence the transcription and translation of a recording and thus fashion ethnographic knowledge. Turning more directly to Kahenga—as a practitioner, a person, and an ethnographic subject—and to the questions posed to him, Fabian reconsiders questions of ethnic identity, politics, and religion. While Fabian hopes that emerging anthropologists will share their fieldwork through virtual archives, he does not suggest that traditional ethnography will disappear. It will become part of a broader project facilitated by new media.
Contributors. Eve Darian-Smith, Howard J. De Nike, Elizabeth Faier, James M. Freeman, Robert T. Gordon, Carol J. Greenhouse, Nguyen Dinh Huu, Carroll McC. Lewin, Elizabeth Mertz, Philip C. Parnell, Nancy Ries, Judy Rosenthal, Kay B. Warren, Stacia E. Zabusky
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Detailed reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important center of the prehistoric world
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, thousands of earthen platform mounds dotted the landscape of eastern North America. Only a few of the mound sites have survived the ravages of time and the devastation of pilferers; one of these valuable monuments is Etowah, located near Cartersville in northern Georgia. Over a period of more than 100 years, excavations of the site’s six mounds, and in particular Mound C, have yielded a wealth of artifacts, including marble statues, copper embossed plates, ceremonial items, and personal adornments. These objects indicate an extensive trading network between Mississippian centers and confirm contact with Spanish conquistadores near Etowah in the mid-1500s.
Adam King has analyzed the architecture and artifacts of Etowah and deduced its vital role in the prehistory of the area. He advances a plausible historical sequence and a model for the ancient town's complex political structure. The chiefdom society relied upon institutional social ranking, permanent political offices, religious ideology, a redistribution of goods and services, and the willing support of the constituent population. King reveals strategies used by the paramount chiefs to maintain their sources of power and to control changes in the social organization. Elite alliances did not necessarily involve the extreme asymmetry of political domination and tribute extraction. King's use of ceramic assemblages recovered from Etowah to determine the occupation history and the construction sequence of public facilities (mounds and plazas) at the center is significant.
This fresh interpretation of the Etowah site places it in a contemporary social and political context with other Mississippian cultures. It is a one-volume sourcebook for the Etowah polity and its neighbors and will, therefore, command an eager audience of scholars and generalists.
Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa. From Senegal to Sierra Leone, Portuguese, including “New Christians” who reverted to Judaism while living in western Africa, thrived where riverine and caravan networks linked many African groups.
Portuguese and their Luso-African descendants contended with French, Dutch, and English rivals for trade in gold, ivory, slaves, cotton textiles, iron bars, cowhides, and other African products. As the Atlantic slave trade increased, French and Franco-Africans and English and Anglo-Africans supplanted Portuguese and Luso-Africans in many African places of trade.
Eurafricans in Western Africa follows the changes that took root in the eighteenth century when French and British colonial officials introduced European legal codes, and concludes with the onset of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when suppression of the slave trade and expanding commerce in forest and agricultural commodities again transformed circumstances in western Africa.
Professor George E. Brooks’s outstanding history of these vital aspects of western Africa is enriched by his discussion of the roles of the women who married or cohabited with European traders. Through accounts of incidents and personal histories, which are integrated into the narrative, the lives of these women and their children are accorded a prominent place in Professor Brooks’s fascinating discussion of this dynamic region of Africa.
This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves.
“The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded.
It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.…
Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.”
Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin.
From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis
What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.
Bottom-up case studies, drawn from the perspective of ordinary Africans’ experiences with state bureaucracies, structures, and services, reveal how citizens and states define each other.
This volume examines contemporary citizens’ everyday encounters with the state and democratic processes in Africa. The contributions reveal the intricate and complex ways in which quotidian activities and experiences—from getting an identification card (genuine or fake) to sourcing black-market commodities to dealing with unreliable waste collection—both (re)produce and (re)constitute the state and democracy. This approach from below lends gravity to the mundane and recognizes the value of conceiving state governance not in terms of its stated promises and aspirations but rather in accordance with how people experience it.
Both new and established scholars based in Africa, Europe, and North America cover a wide range of examples from across the continent, including
Everyday State and Democracy in Africa demonstrates that ordinary citizens’ encounters with state agencies and institutions define the meanings, discourses, practices, and significance of democratic life, as well its distressing realities.
Contributors:
Modern Rome is a city rife with contradictions. Once the seat of ancient glory, it is now often the object of national contempt. It plays a significant part on the world stage, but the concerns of its residents are often deeply parochial. And while they live in the seat of a world religion, Romans can be vehemently anticlerical. These tensions between the past and the present, the global and the local, make Rome fertile ground to study urban social life, the construction of the past, the role of religion in daily life, and how a capital city relates to the rest of the nation.
Michael Herzfeld focuses on Rome’s historic Monti district and the wrenching dislocation caused by rapid economical, political, and social change. Evicted from Eternity tells the story of the gentrification of Monti—once the architecturally stunning home of a community of artisans and shopkeepers now displaced by an invasion of rapacious real estate speculators, corrupt officials, dithering politicians, deceptive clerics, and shady thugs. As Herzfeld picks apart the messy story of Monti’s transformation, he ranges widely over many aspects of life there and in the rest of the city, richly depicting the uniquely local landscape of globalization in Rome.
Few things come more naturally to us than sex—or so it would seem. Yet to a chimpanzee, the sexual practices and customs we take for granted would appear odd indeed. He or she might wonder why we bother with inconveniences like clothes, why we prefer to make love on a bed, and why we fuss so needlessly over privacy. Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior invites us into the thought-experiment of imagining human sex from the vantage point of our primate cousins, in order to underscore the role of evolution in shaping all that happens, biologically and behaviorally, when romantic passions are aroused.
Peter Gray and Justin Garcia provide an interdisciplinary synthesis that draws on the latest discoveries in evolutionary theory, genetics, neuroscience, comparative primate research, and cross-cultural sexuality studies. They are our guides through an exploration of the patterns and variations that exist in human sexuality, in chapters covering topics ranging from the evolution of sex differences and reproductive physiology to the origins of sexual play, monogamous unions, and the facts and fictions surrounding orgasm.
Intended for generally curious readers of all stripes, this up-to-date, one-volume survey of the evolutionary science of human sexual behavior explains why sexuality has remained a core fascination of human beings throughout time and across cultures.
Although several kinds of production units developed, households were the most persistent units of production in spite of massive social change and the reorientation of pottery production to the tourist market. Entrepreneurial workshops, government-sponsored workshops, and workshops attached to tourist hotels developed more recently but were short-lived, whereas pottery-making households extended deep into the nineteenth century. Through this continuity and change, intermittent crafting, multi-crafting, and potters' increased management of economic risk also factored into the development of the production organization in Ticul.
Illustrated with more than 100 images of production units, The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community is an important contribution to the understanding of ceramic production. Scholars with interests in craft specialization, craft production, and demography, as well as specialists in Mesoamerican archaeology, anthropology, history, and economy, will find this volume especially useful.
This book is an intellectual tour de force: a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Melvin Konner tells the compelling and complex story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain.
All study of our evolution starts with one simple truth: human beings take an extraordinarily long time to grow up. What does this extended period of dependency have to do with human brain growth and social interactions? And why is play a sign of cognitive complexity, and a spur for cultural evolution? As Konner explores these questions, and topics ranging from bipedal walking to incest taboos, he firmly lays the foundations of psychology in biology.
As his book eloquently explains, human learning and the greatest human intellectual accomplishments are rooted in our inherited capacity for attachments to each other. In our love of those we learn from, we find our way as individuals and as a species. Never before has this intersection of the biology and psychology of childhood been so brilliantly described.
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," wrote Dobzhansky. In this remarkable book, Melvin Konner shows that nothing in childhood makes sense except in the light of evolution.
In an intellectually engaging narrative that mixes science and history, theories and personalities, Pat Shipman asks the question: Can we have legitimate scientific investigations of differences among humans without sounding racist?
Through the original controversy over evolutionary theory in Darwin's time; the corruption of evolutionary theory into eugenics; the conflict between laboratory research in genetics and fieldwork in physical anthropology and biology; and the continuing controversies over the heritability of intelligence, criminal behavior, and other traits, the book explains both prewar eugenics and postwar taboos on letting the insights of genetics and evolution into the study of humanity.
In one sense, human heads function much like those of other mammals. We use them to chew, smell, swallow, think, hear, and so on. But, in other respects, the human head is quite unusual. Unlike other animals, even our great ape cousins, our heads are short and wide, very big brained, snoutless, largely furless, and perched on a short, nearly vertical neck. Daniel E. Lieberman sets out to explain how the human head works, and why our heads evolved in this peculiarly human way.
Exhaustively researched and years in the making, this innovative book documents how the many components of the head function, how they evolved since we diverged from the apes, and how they interact in diverse ways both functionally and developmentally, causing them to be highly integrated. This integration not only permits the head’s many units to accommodate each other as they grow and work, but also facilitates evolutionary change. Lieberman shows how, when, and why the major transformations evident in the evolution of the human head occurred. The special way the head is integrated, Lieberman argues, made it possible for a few developmental shifts to have had widespread effects on craniofacial growth, yet still permit the head to function exquisitely.
This is the first book to explore in depth what happened in human evolution by integrating principles of development and functional morphology with the hominin fossil record. The Evolution of the Human Head will permanently change the study of human evolution and has widespread ramifications for thinking about other branches of evolutionary biology.
Focusing on the struggles and quandaries of everyday life, Jackson touches on matters at the core of anthropology—the state, violence, exile and belonging, labor, indigenous rights, narrative, power, home, and history. He is particularly interested in the gaps that characterize human existence, such as those between insularity and openness, between the things over which we have some control and the things over which we have none, and between ourselves and others as we talk past each other, missing each others’ meanings. Urging a recognition of the limits to which human existence can be explained in terms of cause and effect, he suggests that knowing why things happen may ultimately be less important than trying to understand how people endure in the face of hardship.
Contributors. Geraldine Barnes, Alexandra Cook, David Culpin, John Greene, Suzanne Kiernan, Christa Knellwolf, Adrian Mitchell, Lisa O’Connell, David Paxman, Ali Uzay Peker, Glynis Ridley, Nicholas Rogers, Walter Veit
Expected Miracles explores the world of surgeons from their own perspective—how they perceive themselves, their work, colleagues, and communities. Recognizing that surgery is an art, a craft, a science, and a business, Joan Cassell offers, through poignant, painful, and thrilling descriptions, a vivid portrayal of the culture of surgery.
Cassell has entered a realm where laypersons are usually horizontal, naked, and anesthetized. Using the central metaphor of the surgical "miracle," she illuminates the drama of the operating room, where surgeons and patients alike expect heroic performance. She takes us backstage to overhear conversations about patients, families, and colleagues, observe operations, eavesdrop on gossip about surgeons’ performances, and examine the values, behavior, and misbehavior of surgeons at work.
Said one Chief of Surgery, "You couldn’t have a good surgeon who didn’t believe in the concept of the Hero." Following this lead, Cassell explores the heroic temperament of those who perform surgical "miracles" and finds that the demands and pressures of surgical practice require traits that in other fields, or in personal interactions, are often regarded as undesirable. She observes, "surgeons must tread a fine line between courage and recklessness, confidence and hubris, a positive attitude and a magical one." This delicate balance and frequent imbalance is portrayed through several character sketches. She contrasts the caring attention and technical mastery of The Exemplary Surgeon with the theatrical posturing of The Prima Donna and the slick showiness and questionable morals of The Sleazy Surgeon.
She also identifies the attributes that surgeons admire in each other. They believe that only peers can really evaluate each other, and, while doctors might not speak negatively about colleagues in public, the community of surgeons exerts considerable pressure on its members to perform competently.
Unlike "doctor-bashing" chronicles, Expected Miracles seeks to understand the charismatic authority of surgeons, its instability, and its price-to surgeons and to patients.
Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean that today’s increasingly transnational culture—exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations—is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event— insite a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on the city of Miami as one of a number of transnational “cultural corridors” and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.
Back by popular demand and new in paperback, this spirited collection of nearly twenty papers celebrates the 450th anniversary of Hernando de Soto’s epic expedition across the Southeast and West.
Originally presented at two symposia conducted by the University Museum at the University of Arkansas, the collection offers an array of viewpoints and diverse approaches to de Soto scholarship. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, museum curators, and folklorists all contribute to this lively debate on the Spanish explorer and his travels.
The book focuses on research that challenges traditional interpretation of de Soto’s entrada and travel route, particularly after the expedition crossed the Mississippi River. David H. Dye hypothesizes a route across the river and the alluvial plain by linking the narrative accounts with geography and archaeological knowledge. Phyllis A. Morse asserts that the Parkin site is the location of the capital of Casqui, one of the polities visited by de Soto. Charles M. Hudson repostulates his version of the expedition route, which in 1988 severely challenged the De Soto Commission theory of 1939. Ann M. Early redraws the trail in the uplands of the Ouachita Mountains And Frank E. Schambach tests the possibility that the expedition wandered through Caddoan territory in east Texas after de Soto’s death.
Several chapters examine the Native Americans whom de Soto and his expedition encountered in their journey; other contributions provide a fresh look at the chronicles of the expedition that have survived. What emerges is a redrawn map of de Soto’s exploration—and a deeper understanding of the impact of European contact on the New World.
In the 1920s and 1930s there were adventures to be lived and fortunes to be made by strong young men in the outback of Australia and the gold fields of New Guinea. This is the diary of five years spent in hot pursuit—not of honor and glory, but of excitement and riches—by one such adventurer, Michael "Mick" Leahy, his brothers Jim and Pat, and friends Mick Dwyer and Jim Taylor. Leahy and his associates explored the unknown interior of New Guinea, seeking gold and making contact for the first time with the aborigines of the interior mountains and valleys.
White man was unknown to these often cannibalistic, always dangerous, aborigines who thought the seekers of yellow in the streams slightly mad, and thus easy prey. The chronicles of their explorations and their hundreds of photographs brought news of these native peoples to the outside world. In doing so, they changed forever our understanding of the human landscape of New Guinea, and carved a place in history for these explorers who, braving the environment in search of gold, found people.
Lydon shows how the photographic portrayals of the Aboriginal residents of Coranderrk changed over time, reflecting various ideas of the colonial mission—from humanitarianism to control to assimilation. In the early twentieth century, the images were used on stereotypical postcards circulated among the white population, showing what appeared to be compliant, transformed Aboriginal subjects. The station closed in 1924 and disappeared from public view until it was rediscovered by scholars years later. Aboriginal Australians purchased the station in 1998, and, as Lydon describes, today they are using the Coranderrk photographic archive in new ways, to identify family members and tell stories of their own.
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