Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Anthropology - Physical

This book takes an innovative approach to representational practices within contemporary art and anthropology. Traditionally the anthropology of art has tended to focus on the interpretation of tribal artifacts, but has not considered the impact such art could have on its own ways of making and presenting work. The potential for the contemporary art scene to suggest innovative representational practices has been similarly ignored. This book challenges the reluctance that exists within anthropology to pursue alternative strategies of research, creation and exhibition, and argues that...

Forms of plural marriage, or polygamy, are practiced within most of the world's cultures and religions. The amazing variation, versatility and adaptability of polygamy underscore that it is not just an exotic non-Western practice, but also exists in modern Western societies.

Polygamy: A Cross-Cultural Analysis provides an examination and analysis of historical and contemporary polygamy. It outlines polygamy's place in anthropological theory and its rich socio-cultural diversity in countries ranging from the US and UK to Malaysia, India, regions of Africa and Tibet.The book...

Anthropology today seems to shy away from the big, comparative questions that ordinary people in many societies find compelling. Questions of Anthropology brings these issues back to the centre of anthropological concerns. Individual essays explore birth, death and sexuality, puzzles about the relationship between science and religion, questions about the nature of ritual, work, political leadership and genocide, and our personal fears and desires, from the quest to control the future and to find one's "true" identity to the fear of being alone. Each essay starts with a question...

Around the world, asbestos-related diseases are on the increase. Meanwhile, in many newly-industrializing and developing countries, asbestos use continues unabated. This book, based on anthropological fieldwork in the UK, India and South Africa, explores people's understandings of their illness, risk, compensation and regulation, contrasting these personal and community narratives with formal medical and legal understandings.

Linda Waldman shows how the domination of medical and legal framings of risk and disease over those of workers, sufferers and activists can narrow the...

It is hard to believe that the pursuit of artificial intelligence is not a phenomenon of the twentieth century. For over three hundred years, the boundaries between bodies and machines - the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate - have been passionately explored. These explorations, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth and increasing during the nineteenth century, have been all but forgotten, lost beneath the commotion of the modern day world. This book retrieves these lost histories, giving voice to the hopes, dreams, and fears of philosophers, medical...

Daily rhythms are a ubiquitous feature of living systems. Generally, these rhythms are not just passive consequences of cyclic fluctuations in the environment, but instead originate within the organism. In mammals, including humans, the master pacemaker controlling 24-hour rhythms is localized in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus (SCN). This circadian clock is responsible for the temporal organization of a wide variety of functions, ranging from sleep and food intake, to physiological measures such as body temperature, heart rate and hormone release. Moreover, accumulating...

Cancer is a transnational condition involving the unprecedented flow of health information, technologies, and people across national borders. Such movement raises questions about the nature of therapeutic citizenship, how and where structurally vulnerable populations obtain care, and the political geography of blame associated with this disease. This volume brings together cutting-edge anthropological research carried out across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, representing low-, middle- and high-resource countries with a diversity of national health care systems....

During the last decade, a significant number of scientific studies have supported the use of human scent as a biometric tool and indicator of the presence, or absence, of an individual at a crime scene. These findings even extend to conducting scent identification line-ups with suspects. Human Scent Evidence focuses on some of these recent advances in the use of human scent as forensic evidence and as an identifier. Topics include:

• Various theories of human odor production
• The variability, stability, and persistence of human scent
• Historical...

Current Laboratory Methods in Neuroscience Research is a research manual for both students and seasoned researchers. It focuses on commonly-used techniques employedin neuroscience research, presented in a simple, step-by-step manner for laboratory use. The manual also offers a "blueprint" for bench-to-bedside research designed to facilitate multidisciplinary neuroscience pursuits. Sections include coverage of neurohistological techniques, in vitro preparations, leukocyte isolation and application in neuroscience, standard laboratory nucleic acid and protein detections,...

During the past years there has been rapid progress in the understanding of how early life stress impacts psychopathology in children. The first two parts of this book present the basic principles of brain development and describe the most important neuronal systems.This includes systems involved in emotion processing, cognitive control, and social processes.Thesefirst two general sectionsare followed by an overview about recent research on various neuronal and psychiatric disorders, where environmental exposures and altered brain development play an important role: sleep, autism, ADHD and...