Results by title

For the past fifty years, science and technology—supported with billions of dollars from the U.S. government—have advanced at a rate that would once have seemed miraculous, while society's problems have grown more intractable, complex, and diverse. Yet scientists and politicians alike continue to prescribe more science and more technology to cure such afflictions as global climate change, natural resource depletion, overpopulation, inadequate health care, weapons proliferation, and economic inequality.

Daniel Sarewitz scrutinizes the fundamental myths that have guided the formulation of science policy for half a century—myths that serve the professional and political interests of the scientific community, but often fail to advance the interests of society as a whole. His analysis ultimately demonstrates that stronger linkages between progress in science and progress in society will require research agendas that emerge not from the intellectual momentum of science, but from the needs and goals of society.

As the Ice Age waned, Clovis hunter-gatherers began to explore and colonize the area now known as Colorado. Their descendents and later Paleoindian migrants spread throughout Colorado's plains and mountains, adapting to diverse landforms and the changing climate. In this new volume, Robert H. Brunswig and Bonnie L. Pitblado assemble experts in archaeology, paleoecology-climatology, and paleofaunal analysis to share new discoveries about these ancient people of Colorado.

The editors introduce the research with scientific context. A review of seventy-five years of Paleoindian archaeology in Colorado highlights the foundation on which new work builds, and a survey of Colorado's ancient climates and ecologies helps readers understand Paleoindian settlement patterns.

Eight essays discuss archaeological evidence from Plains to high Rocky Mountain sites. The book offers the most thorough analysis to date of Dent--the first Clovis site discovered. Essays on mountain sites show how advances in methodology and technology have allowed scholars to reconstruct settlement patterns and changing lifeways in this challenging environment.

Colorado has been home to key moments in human settlement and in the scientific study of our ancient past. Readers interested in the peopling of the New World as well as those passionate about the methods and history of archaeology will find new material and satisfying overviews in this book. Contributors include Rosa Maria Albert, Robert H. Brunswig, Reid A. Bryson, Linda Scott Cummings, James Doerner, Daniel C. Fisher, David L. Fox, Bonnie L. Pitblado, Jeffrey L. Saunders, Todd A. Surovell, R. A. Varney, and Nicole M. Waguespack.

As America's population ages, economic research related to the elderly becomes increasingly important to public policy.

Frontiers in the Economics in Aging directs attention to four topics: the role of retirement accounts, such as IRAs and 401(k)s in personal saving; the economics of health care; new advances in research methodology; and aging in relation to inequality. Some of the issues analyzed within these topics are the implications of rising personal retirement saving in recent years, how health and health insurance affect labor supply, and the effects of pensions on the distribution of wealth.

David Wise's lucid introduction provides an overview of each paper. In addition to this book's appeal for specialists and microeconomists, it offers immediately practical ideas and methods for shaping public policy. In fact, one of the papers in this volume, "The Taxation of Pensions: A Shelter Can Become a Trap," helped to spur new legislation that reformed laws on pension distribution.

With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the “New Economy” of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.

Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.

Contributors. Jean Comaroff, John L. Comaroff, Greg Downey, Melissa S. Fisher, Douglas R. Holmes, George E. Marcus, Siobhán O’Mahony, Aihwa Ong, Annelise Riles, Saskia Sassen, Paul A. Silverstein, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neil Smith, Caitlin Zaloom

Nineteenth-century Cincinnati was northern in its geography, southern in its economy and politics, and western in its commercial aspirations. While those identities presented a crossroad of opportunity for native whites and immigrants, African Americans endured economic repression and a denial of civil rights, compounded by extreme and frequent mob violence. No other northern city rivaled Cincinnati’s vicious mob spirit. Frontiers of Freedom follows the black community as it moved from alienation and vulnerability in the 1820s toward collective consciousness and, eventually, political self-respect and self-determination. As author Nikki M. Taylor points out, this was a community that at times supported all-black communities, armed self-defense, and separate, but independent, black schools. Black Cincinnati’s strategies to gain equality and citizenship were as dynamic as they were effective. When the black community united in armed defense of its homes and property during an 1841 mob attack, it demonstrated that it was no longer willing to be exiled from the city as it had been in 1829. Frontiers of Freedom chronicles alternating moments of triumph and tribulation, of pride and pain; but more than anything, it chronicles the resilience of the black community in a particularly difficult urban context at a defining moment in American history.

Frontiers of Screen History provides an insightful exploration into the depiction and imagination of European borders in cinema after World War II. While films have explored national and political borders, they have also attempted to identify, challenge, and imagine frontiers of another kind: social, ethnic, religious, and gendered. The book investigates all these perspectives. Its unique focus on the representation of European borders and frontiers via film is groundbreaking, opening up a new field of research and scholarly discussion. The exceptional variety of national and cultural perspectives provides a rewarding investigation of borders and frontiers.

Migration in Asia is leading to more marriages across nationalities. New patterns of migration are complicating the picture of women from poorer Asian countries migrating to marry men in more wealthy ones. The contributors to this volume explore the agency of marriage migrants, showing how migration is often more than a simple movement from home to destination but can involve return, repeated, or extended migrations, and that these transitions that can alter geographies of power in economics, nationality, or ethnicity. Together, the contributors identify this emerging diaspora and its long-term consequences for families. 

The bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government, often receiving attention in times of emergency or when it is the object of criticism from the media or politicians. Less understood is how bureaucratic institutions function in a democracy, both from an organizational perspective and as institutional participants within the political arena. Drawing on rational choice approaches, computationally intensive data and modeling techniques, and systematic empirical inquiry, this original collection of essays highlights the important role bureaucracies play in shaping public policy-making. The editors of and contributors to this volume demonstrate not only the constraints political officials face in harnessing the bureaucracy but, more important, how bureaucracies function as organizational entities in diverse contexts.

George A. Krause is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina.

Kenneth J. Meier is Charles Puryear Professor of Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.

This compilation of Dale Morgan’s  historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails. Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for serial publication in the Annals of Wyoming. He also wrote a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshone, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. Morgan biographer Richard L. Saunders introduced, edited, and further annotated this collection. His introduction includes an intellectual biography of Morgan that focuses on the place of the anthologized pieces in Morgan’s corpus. Gregory E. Smoak, a leading historian of the Shoshone, contributed an ethnohistorical essay as additional context for Morgan’s work.

Although the myth of the American frontier is largely the product of writings by men, a substantial body of writings by women exists that casts the era of western expansion in a different light. In this study of American women's writings about the West between 1830 and 1930, a European scholar provides a reconstruction and new vision of frontier narrative from a perspective that has frequently been overlooked or taken for granted in discussions of the frontier.

Brigitte Georgi-Findlay presents a range of writings that reflects the diversity of the western experience. Beginning with the narratives of Caroline Kirkland and other women of the early frontier, she reviews the diaries of the overland trails; letters and journals of the wives of army officers during the Indian wars; professional writings, focusing largely on travel, by women such as Caroline Leighton from the regional publishing cultures that emerged in the Far West during the last quarter of the century; and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts of missionaries and teachers on Indian reservations. Most of the writers were white, literate women who asserted their own kind of cultural authority over the lands and people they encountered. Their accounts are not only set in relation to a masculine frontier myth but also investigated for clues about their own involvement with territorial expansion. By exploring the various ways in which women writers actively contributed to and at times rejected the development of a national narrative of territorial expansion based on empire building and colonization, the author shows how their accounts are implicated in expansionist processes at the same time that they formulate positions of innocence and detachment.

Georgi-Findlay has drawn on American studies scholarship, feminist criticism, and studies of colonial discourse to examine the strategies of women's representation in writing about the West in ways that most theorists have not. She critiques generally accepted stereotypes and assumptions--both about women's writing and its difference of view in particular, and about frontier discourse and the rhetoric of westward expansion in general--as she offers a significant contribution to literary studies of the West that will challenge scholars across a wide range of disciplines.