Recent Faculty Publications
Human-Environment Interactions: Current and Future Directions
Eduardo S. Brondízio, Emilio F. Moran
2013 Springer
Human-environment interaction (HEI) provides a framework that brings together scholarship sharing both disciplinary depth and interdisciplinary scope to examine past, present, and future social and environmental change in different parts of the world. This volume brings senior and junior scholars together, and in so doing connects these historically influential traditions to new and cutting-edge approaches that give us a glimpse into current and future trends in interdisciplinary science of human-environment interaction. The volume offers a microcosm of contemporary HEI research in terms of thematic, theory and methodology, level of analysis, and regional coverage.
Drawing on research from eleven countries across four continents, the 16 chapters in the volume bring perspectives from various specialties in anthropology and human ecology, institutional analysis, historical and political ecology, geography, archaeology, and land change sciences. The four sections of the volume reflect complementary approaches to HEI: health and adaptation approaches, land change and landscape management approaches, institutional and political-ecology approaches, and historical and archaeological approaches.
Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach, Second Edition
Andrea Wiley, John Allen
June, 2012 Oxford University Press
An ideal core text for introductory courses, Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach, Second 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 on specific conditions and then expand their analysis to include evolutionary, historical, and cross-cultural perspectives on how these issues 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.
NEW TO THIS EDITION:- "Anthropologists in Action" examples show how various anthropologists address real-world health issues. Streamlined overview of infectious diseases, with less historical and biological detail. Further consideration of the ways in which climate change is already influencing human health.
Casting the Net Wide: Papers in Honor of Glynn Isaac and His Approach to Human Origins Research
edited by Jeanne Sept and David Pilbeam
January, 2012 David Brown Book Co.
This collection of essays and tributes to Glynn Isaac marks the 26th anniversary of Glynns premature death on October 5th, 1985. These contributions document the work of many of Glynn's colleagues students and collaborators, and reflect their continuing respect for a great scholar.304p (Oxbow Books in association with the American School of Prehistoric Research, 2011)
Muslim Families in Global Senegal
Beth Buggenhagen
January, 2012 IU Press
"A lively, insightful, and important study of exchange practices between Senegal and a circuit of global trade. The innovative focus is on the meanings, not the social and economic functions, of exchange." —Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University
Senegalese Murid migrants have circulated cargo and currency through official and unofficial networks in Africa and the world. Muslim Families in Global Senegal focuses on trade and the transmission of enduring social value though cloth, videos of life-cycle rituals, and religious offerings. Highlighting women's participation in these networks and the financial strategies they rely on, Beth Buggenhagen reveals the deep connections between economic profits and ritual and social authority. Buggenhagen discovers that these strategies are not responses to a dispersed community in crisis, but rather produce new roles, wealth, and worth for Senegalese women in all parts of the globe.
Artifacts from the Craig Mound at Spiro, Oklahoma
by April K. Sievert with J. Daniel Rogers; contribution by Javier Urcid
November, 2011 Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press. Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology, no. 49
Spiro, a site on the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma, is integral to understanding the Mississippian Period (AD 900-1500) in the eastern U.S. Spiro, as a site devastated by looting in the 1930s, served as a test case in the development of state-level legislation to protect antiquities and brought artifact looting into the public eye. This monograph documents and describes more than 20,000 artifacts from Spiro’s Craig Mound held at the Smithsonian Institution. With links to other major Mississippian sites such as Cahokia, artifacts from the Craig Mound have become nearly legendary in the annals of 20th century archaeology for their state of preservation, workmanship, and the images they offer about ceremonial life and creative expression of people poised on the edges of the Plains at the eve on contact.
Becoming An Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death
Anya Peterson Royce
November, 2011 SUNY Press
Becoming An Ancestor: The Isthmus Zapotec Way of Death, just published by SUNY Press, is the latest book by Anya Peterson Royce, Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. Described as "powerful and beautifully written" and a "model of ethnographic research and presentation," this book documents the communcal and invidivual responses to death by the Isthmus Zapotec of Juchitán and traces the ways in which these beliefs and actions cut across many domains of Zapotec culture. This is an ethnography of death, what the Isthmus Zapotec of Juchitán believe about it, how they commemorate it, and how they grieve.
Antropologia Sztuk Widowiskowych: Artyzm, Wirtuozeria,I Interpretacja w Perspektywie Miedzykulturowej
Anya Peterson Royce
June, 2011 Warsaw University Press
In this new translation into Polish of The Anthropology of Performing Arts (2004), Royce turns the anthropological gaze on the performing arts, attempting to find broad commonalities in performance, art, and artists across space, time, and culture. She asks general questions as to the nature of artistic interpretation, the differences between virtuosity and artistry, and how artists interplay with audience, aesthetics, and style. To support her case, she examines artists as diverse as Fokine and the Ballets Russes, Tewa Indian dancers, 17th century commedia dell'arte, Japanese kabuki and butoh, Zapotec shamans, and the mime of Marcel Marceau, adding her own observations as a professional dancer in the classical ballet tradition. Royce also points to the recent move toward collaboration across artistic genres as evidence of the universality of aesthetics. Her analysis leads to a better understanding of artistic interpretation, artist-audience relationships, and the artistic imagination as cross-cultural phenomena. Over 29 black and white photographs and drawings illustrate the wide range of Royce's cross-cultural approach. Her well-crafted volume will be of great interest to anthropologists, arts researchers, and students of cultural studies and performing arts.
Residential Burial: A Multiregional Exploration
Edited by Ron L. Adams; Stacie M. King
May, 2011 Wiley-Blackwell
People have buried the deceased below house floors and within residential areas throughout the course of human history. This volume is the first comprehensive study to try to make sense of this practice, looking at residential burials found in a variety of geographic, temporal, and social contexts. Chapters explore the many social meanings associated with the practice of burying the dead in residential contexts and highlight the themes of social memory, social reproduction, landscapes, identity, and power. Emphasis throughout these essays is on the important connections that people have with their deceased forbears and how these connections can be identified archaeologically.
Crónicas Culturales: Investigaciones de Campo a Largo Plazo en Antropología (2011)
Edited by Robert V. Kemper; Anya Peterson Royce
2011 Universidad Iberoamericana and Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social
Chronicling Cultures: Long-Term Field Research in Anthropology (2002), co-edited by Royce with Roebrt V. Kemper, has now been published in a Spanish translation, Crónicas Culturales: Investigaciones de Campo a Largo Plazo en Antropología (2011) by Universidad Iberoamericana and Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. The authors of the twelve chapters, from those with more than half a century of field research to those who have recently begun, contribute a special perspective with respect to the ongoing dialogue about how anthropologists see and understand social and cultural diversity across time and space as well as to the peculiar demands and ethical concerns of long-term field research.
Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature
Edited by Qwo-Li Driskill; Chris Finley; Brian Joseph Gilley; Scott Lauria Morgensen
March 1, 2011 University of Arizona Press
This edited collection examines the understanding of gay, lesbian, transgender, queer and Two-Spirit communities within indigenous society.
Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people "experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,"
this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in collective resistance working toward positive change.
Ancient Complexities: New Perspectives in Pre-Columbian North America
Edited by Susan M. Alt
December 31, 2010 University of Utah Press
The Human Brain Evolving: Paleoneurological Studies in Honor of Ralph L. Holloway
Douglas Broadfield, Michael Yuan, Kathy Schick, Nicholas Toth
December 24, 2010 Stone Age Institute Press
The Human Brain Evolving: Paleoneurological Studies in Honor of Ralph L. Holloway presents a range of important studies focusing on human brain evolution. Based upon a Stone Age Institute conference held at Indiana University, Bloomington, this book features many of the principal investigators in paleoneurology and related fields. Topics include theoretical concepts, studies of fossil and modern brain endocasts, genetic studies, neurological structure and development, and brain evolution and its relation to behavior. This state-of-the-art collection of papers expands our knowledge and understanding of human brain evolution, highlights current issues in the field, and suggests new avenues of inquiry for the future. Edited by Doug Broadfield, Michael Yuan, Kathy Schick, and Nicholas Toth. Hardcover, Stone Age Institute Press, 2010.
Coffee CultureLocal Experiences, Global Connections
Catherine M. Tucker
December 13, 2010 Routledge
"The Anthropology of Stuff" is part of a new Series dedicated to innovative, unconventional ways to connect undergraduate students and their lived concerns about our social world to the power of social science ideas and evidence. Our goal with the project is to help spark social science imaginations and in doing so, new avenues for meaningful thought and action. Each "Stuff" title is a short (100 page) "mini text" illuminating for students the network of people and activities that create their material world.
From the coffee producers and pickers who tend the plantations in tropical nations, to the middlemen and processors, to the consumers who drink coffee without ever having to think about how the drink reached their hands, here is a commodity that ties the world together. This is a great little book that helps students apply anthropological concepts and theories to their everyday lives, learn how historical events and processes have shaped the modern world and the contexts of their lives, and how consumption decisions carry ramifications for our health, the environment, the reproduction of social inequality, and the possibility of supporting equity, sustainability and social justice.
The Amazon Várzea: The Decade Past and the Decade Ahead
Pinedo-Vasquez, M.; Ruffino, M.L.; Padoch, C.; Brondízio, E.S. (Eds.)
December 2, 2010 Springer
This book takes a multi-disciplinary and critical look at what has changed over the last ten years in one of the world's most important and dynamic ecosystems, the Amazon floodplain or várzea. It also looks forward, assessing the trends that will determine the fate of environments and people of the várzea over the next ten years and providing crucial information that is needed to formulate strategies for confronting these looming realities.
The volume includes the latest research and analysis from a broad range of scientists who know the várzea best. It is dedicated to the memory of José Márcio Ayres, one of Brazil's greatest natural scientists and a pioneer in várzea research and conservation
Re-imagining Milk: Cultural and Biological Perspectives
Andrea S. Wiley
November 8, 2010 Routledge
Written explicitly for undergraduates, Re-imagining Milk demonstrates how a particular commodity can be used to illustrate ethnocentric beliefs about the universal goodness of milk; biological variation in human populations; political and economic processes that inform dietary policies, nutrition education, and current trends in globalization; the utility of a biocultural approach to the study of food; the cultural construction of a commodity that is consumed by many students on a daily basis, or if not, certainly is one that students "know" they "should" consume daily.
Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine
Sarah D. Phillips
November 5, 2010 Indiana University Press
Sarah D. Phillips examines the struggles of disabled persons in Ukraine and the other former Soviet states to secure their rights during the tumultuous political, economic, and social reforms of the last two decades. Through participant observation and interviews with disabled Ukrainians across the social spectrum—rights activists, politicians, students, workers, entrepreneurs, athletes, and others—Phillips documents the creative strategies used by people on the margins of postsocialist societies to assert claims to "mobile citizenship." She draws on this rich ethnographic material to argue that public storytelling is a powerful means to expand notions of relatedness, kinship, and social responsibility, and which help shape a more tolerant and inclusive society.
Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities
Edited by Anne-Maria Makhulu, Beth Buggenhagen and Stephen Jackson
November 1, 2010 University of California Press
The description of Africa as a continent in perpetual crisis, ubiquitous in the popular media and in policy and development circles, is at once obvious and obfuscating. This collection by leading ethnographers moves beyond the rhetoric of African crisis to theorize people's everyday practices under volatile conditions not of their own making. From Ghanaian hiplife music to the U.S. "diversity lottery" in Togo, from politicos in Côte d'Ivoire to squatters in South Africa, the essays in Hard Work, Hard Times uncover the imaginative ways in which African subjects make and remake themselves and their worlds, and thus make do, get by, get over, and sometimes thrive.
Contributors: Beth A. Buggenhagen, Stephen Jackson, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Mike McGovern, Charles Piot, Dorothea E. Schulz, and Jesse Weaver Shipley
available electronically: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/24b027x0
Human Evolutionary Biology
Michael P. Muehlenbein
July, 2010 Cambridge University Press
Wide-ranging and inclusive, this text provides an invaluable review of an expansive selection of topics in human evolution, variation and adaptability for professionals and students in biological anthropology, evolutionary biology, medical sciences and psychology. The chapters are organized around four broad themes, with sections devoted to phenotypic and genetic variation within and between human populations, reproductive physiology and behavior, growth and development, and human health from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. An introductory section provides readers with the historical, theoretical and methodological foundations needed to understand the more complex ideas presented later. Two hundred discussion questions provide starting points for class debate and assignments to test student understanding.
Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan
Marvin D. Sterling
June 8, 2010 Duke University Press Books
An important center of dancehall reggae performance, sound clashes are contests between rival sound systems: groups of emcees, tune selectors, and sound engineers. In World Clash 1999, held in Brooklyn, Mighty Crown, a Japanese sound system and the only non-Jamaican competitor, stunned the international dancehall community by winning the event. In 2002, the Japanese dancer Junko Kudo became the first non-Jamaican to win Jamaica's National Dancehall Queen Contest. High-profile victories such as these affirmed and invigorated Japan's enthusiasm for dancehall reggae. In Babylon East, the anthropologist Marvin D. Sterling traces the history of the Japanese embrace of dancehall reggae and other elements of Jamaican culture, including Rastafari, roots reggae, and dub music.
Sterling provides a nuanced ethnographic analysis of the ways that many Japanese involved in reggae as musicians and dancers, and those deeply engaged with Rastafari as a spiritual practice, seek to reimagine their lives through Jamaican culture. He considers Japanese performances and representations of Jamaican culture in clubs, competitions, and festivals; on websites; and in song lyrics, music videos, reggae magazines, travel writing, and fiction. He illuminates issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class as he discusses topics ranging from the cultural capital that Japanese dancehall artists amass by immersing themselves in dancehall culture in Jamaica, New York, and England, to the use of Rastafari as a means of critiquing class difference, consumerism, and the colonial pasts of the West and Japan. Encompassing the reactions of Jamaica's artists to Japanese appropriations of Jamaican culture, as well as the relative positions of Jamaica and Japan in the world economy, Babylon East is a rare ethnographic account of Afro-Asian cultural exchange and global discourses of blackness beyond the African diaspora.
Environmental Social Science: Human - Environment interactions and Sustainability
Emilio F. Moran
February 16, 2010 Wiley-Blackwell
Environmental Social Science offers a new synthesis of environmental studies, defining the nature of human-environment interactions and providing the foundation for a new cross-disciplinary enterprise that will make critical theories and research methods accessible across the natural and social sciences.
- Makes key theories and methods of the social sciences available to biologists and other environmental scientists
- Explains biological theories and concepts for the social sciences community working on the environment
- Helps bridge one of the difficult divides in collaborative work in human-environment research
- Includes much-needed descriptions of how to carry out research that is multinational, multiscale, multitemporal, and multidisciplinary within a complex systems theory context
African Market Women: Seven Life Stories from Ghana
Gracia Clark
February 12, 2010 Indiana University Press
Teaching Environmental Literacy
Across Campus and Across the Curriculum
Edited by Heather L. Reynolds, Eduardo S. Brondizio, and Jennifer Meta Robinson
December 28, 2009 Indiana University Press
To prepare today's students to meet growing global environmental challenges, colleges and universities must make environmental literacy a core learning goal for all students, in all disciplines. But what should an environmentally literate citizen know? What teaching and learning strategies are most effective in helping students think critically about human-environment interactions and sustainability, and integrate what they have learned in diverse settings? Educators from the natural and social sciences and the humanities discuss the critical content, skills, and affective qualities essential to environmental literacy. This volume is an invaluable resource for developing integrated, campus-wide programs to prepare students to think critically about, and to work to create, a sustainable society.
The Cutting Edge: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Human Origins
Kathy Schick, Nicholas Toth
December 16, 2009 Stone Age Institute Press
This book focuses on innovative new approaches to the archaeological evidence for protohuman behavior found in the Early Stone Age, based on a recent international conference held at the Stone Age Institute. Major researchers in the field present important new findings from a range of well-preserved archaeological sites and critical experimental archaeological investigations. Topics include: early stone artifact assemblage variability at Gona, Ethiopia and at Koobi Fora, Kenya; early human presence in North Africa; technological strategies and patterns at Peninj, Tanzania; the Oldowan industries from Sterkfontein Cave, South Africa ; flaking accidents and knapping skills at Hadar, Ethiopia; hominin transport of stone at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania; a critical examination of the early occupation of India; new methods for quantifying stone tool cutting efficiency in the Oldowan and Acheulean; evidence for early occupation Eurasia, with particular attention to early sites in Spain, as well as early hominin presence in China in the Nihewan Basin; a comparative experimental study of Oldowan artifacts made by novices and by expert toolmakers; and experimental zooarchaeology with regard to the anatomical patterning of butchery marks.
Time, Consumption and Everyday Life: Practice, Materiality and Culture
Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann, Richard Wilk
October 27, 2009 Berg Publishers
Has material civilization spun out of control, becoming too fast for our own well-being and that of the planet? This book confronts these anxieties and examines the changing rhythms and temporal organization of everyday life. How do people handle hurriedness, burn-out and stress? Are slower forms of consumption viable?
This volume brings together international experts from geography, sociology, history, anthropology and philosophy. In case studies covering the United States, Asia, and Europe, contributors follow routines and rhythms, their emotional and political dynamics, and show how they are anchored in material culture and everyday practice. Running themes of the book are questions of coordination and disruption; cycles and seasons; and the interplay between power and freedom, and between material and natural forces. The result is a volume that brings studies of practice, temporality and material culture together to open up a new intellectual agenda.
Customizing Indigeneity: Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru
Shane Greene
May 28, 2009 Stanford University Press
How do vision quests, river locations, and warriors relate to indigenous activism? For the Aguaruna, an ethnic group at the forefront of Peru's Amazonian Movement, incorporating practices and values they define as customary allows them to shape their own experience as modern indigenous subjects. As Shane Greene reveals, this customization centers on the complex articulation of meaningful social practices, cultural logics, and the political economy of specialized production and consumption.
Following decades of engagement with and resistance to state-mandated missionary education, land-titling, and international advocacy networks, the Aguaruna have faced numerous constraints in pursuit of their own political projects. Based on first-hand fieldwork, Customizing Indigeneity provides a new theoretical language for the politics of indigeneity. Documenting the dynamic between historical constraints and cultural creativity, this work provides a fresh perspective on indigenous people's agency within evolving structures of inequality, while simultaneously challenging common assumptions about scholarly engagement with marginalized populations.
Tales from Maliseet Country: The Maliseet Texts of Karl V. Teeter
Philip LeSourd
May 15, 2009 University of Nebraska Press
During the summer of 1963, Harvard linguist Karl V. Teeter traveled along the Saint John River, the great thoroughfare of Native New Brunswick, Canada, with his principal Maliseet consultant, Peter Lewis Paul. Together they recorded a series of tales from Maliseet elders whom Paul regarded as among the best Maliseet storytellers born before 1900, including Charles Laporte, Matilda Sappier, Solomon Polchies, William Saulis, and Alexander Sacobie. Paul also contributed eleven narratives of his own.
Tales from Maliseet Country presents the transcripts and translations of the texts Teeter collected, together with one tale recorded by linguist Philip S. LeSourd in 1977. The stories range from chronicles of shamanistic activity and mysterious events of the distant past, through more conventionally historical narratives, to frankly fictional yarns, fairy tales with roots in European traditions, and personal accounts of subsistence activities and reservation life. This entertaining and revealing volume testifies to the rich heritage of the Maliseets and the enduring vibrancy of their culture today.
Featuring a bilingual format, with Maliseet and English on facing pages, this is the first extensive collection to be published in the Maliseet language, a member of the far-flung Algonquian family spoken in New Brunswick. The volume is also the first to provide full phonemic transcriptions, including the notation of accentual contrasts, of the Maliseet tales. An authoritative introduction provides a guide to interpreting the texts.
The Sufi Journey of Baba Rexheb
Frances Trix
February 27, 2009
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced.
Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times.
You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains
Laura L. Scheiber, Bonnie J. Clark
December 30, 2008 University Press of Colorado
Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains combines history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography to take a closer look at the relationships between land and people in this unique North American region.
Focusing on long-term change, this book considers ethnographic literature, archaeological evidence, and environmental data spanning thousands of years of human presence to understand human perception and construction of landscape. The contributors offer cohesive and synthetic studies emphasizing hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
Using landscape as both reality and metaphor, Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains explores the different and changing ways that people interacted with place in this transitional zone between the Rocky Mountains and the eastern prairies.
The contemporary archaeologists working in this small area have chosen diverse approaches to understand the past and its relationship to the present. Through these ten case studies, this variety is highlighted but leads to a common theme - that the High Plains contains important locales to which people, over generations or millennia, return. Providing both data and theory on a region that has not previously received much attention from archaeologists, especially compared with other regions in North America, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature.
Contributors include: Paul Burnett, Oskar Burger, Minette C. Church, Philip Duke, Kevin Gilmore, Eileen Johnson, Mark D. Mitchell, Michael R. Peterson, and Lawrence Todd.
Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach
Andrea S. Wiley, John S. Allen
August 14, 2008 Oxford University Press, USA
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.
Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation
Sarah D. Phillips
June 3, 2008 Indiana University Press
Amazonian Caboclo and the Acai Palm: Forest Farmers in the Global Market
Eduardo S. Brondizio
May 30, 2008 New York Botanical Garden Press
This title is volume 16 of Advances of Economic Botany. This remarkable monograph tells the story of the boom in the açaí ( Euterpe oleracea Mart.) fruit economyfrom a rural staple to a chic health food delicacy in national and international marketsand examines the development of the production systems and commodity chains required to supply the burgeoning demand for this fruit. It also carefully reconsiders the contested and stigmatized history of the social identity of caboclos.
The Amazonian caboclos who inhabit the Amazonian estuarine floodplains are, in a very real sense, forest farmers. They have been transforming their forest environment, sometimes imperceptibly, for generations. The boom in açaí provides an invaluable window through which the society, ecological knowledge, and economic life of those who produce the fruit can be viewed.
Charles Peters, editor of the Advances in Economic Botany series, comments, “Author Eduardo S. Brondizio’s treatment of caboclos and açaí sets a new standard in the study of people and plants. His monograph goes beyond description to provide key insights into why things unfolded the way they did in the Amazon estuary and what this means for the future forests and farmers of the region. For that reason, this is an important work.”
Brondizio’s research contributes greatly to the broader understanding of rural development, globalization, and the role of small-scale farmers and local resources in the sustainable development of Amazonia.
Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World
Frances Trix, John Walbridge, Linda Walbridge
April 29, 2008 Palgrave Macmillan
Muslim Voices and Lives in the Contemporary World tells the stories of eleven remarkable people in the Islamic world, with each account written by an American scholar who came to know that person well. From a religious musician in Pakistan who sings the sufferings of the saints and hopes to bring reconciliation to his country, to a visual artist from a traditional family in Egypt who wants her work to speak to the whole world, to the son of one of the greatest Shi'ite scholars of Iraq who was murdered trying to restore peace in his city, to an Afghan aid agency manager who works to help her people in unstable times, these stories counter some of the misconceptions of Muslim women and men that exist in the Western world. These lively and memorable accounts are distinguished by their immediacy, depth, variety, and breadth and are sure to resonate.
Changing Forests: Collective Action, Common Property, and Coffee in Honduras
Catherine M. Tucker
April 3, 2008 Springer
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, "Changing Forests" explores how the indigenous Lenca community of La Campa, Honduras, has conserved and transformed their communal forests through the experiences of colonialism, opposition to state-controlled logging, and the recent adoption of export-oriented coffee production. It merges political ecology, collective-action theories, and institutional analysis to study how the people and forests have changed through socioeconomic and political transitions. It studies the complex, often contradictory relationships between the people and their natural resources to understand why forest cover endures.
The discussion of social and forest transformations in La Campa focuses on the past three decades, but the context for understanding the Lenca people and their forest use stretches over 500 years. Although the historical record has many gaps, the initial conditions for human-forest relationships were established in the colonial period, when La Campa was founded and processes of conquest ruptured the social fabric. "Changing Forests" therefore encompasses three broad phases: (1) the premodern period, which considers historic perturbations in western Honduras from the period of colonialism into the middle of the twentieth century; (2) the period of state-led logging and intervention in La Campa, which caused major degradation in forest cover; and (3) the recent period in which export coffee production transformed property rights, and people’s perceptions of the forest gained new conservationist and economic dimensions. Each phase entails perspectives and experiences that influenced human use of forests, and shaped subsequent transformations.
Growing social heterogeneity, population growth, and market integration present challenges for sustainable forest management, but satellite images show that forest cover has expanded since the community prohibited logging in 1987. The indigenous people have created a watershed reserve and agroforestry cooperatives, and maintain forests as part of a resilient livelihood strategy.
La Campa has been recognized by the Honduran government for its forest conservation efforts.
The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India
Pravina Shukla
December 26, 2007 Indiana University Press
Because clothing, food, and shelter are basic human needs, they provide excellent entries to cultural values and individual aesthetics. Everyone gets dressed every day, but body art has not received the attention it deserves as the most common and universal of material expressions of culture. The Grace of Four Moons aims to document the clothing decisions made by ordinary people in their everyday lives. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in the city of Banaras, India, Pravina Shukla conceptualizes and realizes a total model for the study of body art--understood as all aesthetic modifications and supplementations to the body. Shukla urges the study of the entire process of body art, from the assembly of raw materials and the manufacture of objects, through their sale and the interactions between merchants and consumers, to the consumer's use of objects in creating personal decoration.
Human Adaptability: An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology
Emilio F. Moran
December 25, 2007 Westview Press
Designed to help students understand the multiple levels at which human populations respond to their surroundings, this essential text offers the most complete discussion of environmental, physiological, behavioral, and cultural adaptive strategies available. Among the unique features that make Human Adaptability outstanding as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals are a complete discussion of the development of ecological anthropology and relevant research methods; the use of an ecosystem approach with emphasis on arctic, high altitude, arid land, grassland, and tropical rain forest environments; an extensive bibliography on ecological anthropology; and a comprehensive glossary of technical terms.
Entirely new to the third edition are chapters on urban sustainability and methods of spatial analysis, with enhanced emphasis throughout on the role of gender in human-adaptability research and on global environmental issues as they affect particular ecosystems. In addition, brand-new sections in each chapter guide students to websites that provide access to relevant material, complement the text’s coverage of biomes, and suggest ways to become active in environmental issues.
Breathing Life into Fossils: Taphonomic Studies in Honor of
C.K. (Bob) Brain
Travis Pickering, Kathy Schick, Nicholas Toth
August 30, 2007 Stone Age Institute Press
Taphonomy, the study of the processes leading to the fossilization of organic remains, is one of the most important avenues of inquiry in human origins research. Breathing Life into Fossils: Taphonomic Studies in Honor of C.K. (Bob) Brain is a major contribution to taphonomic studies in paleoanthropology and natural history. This book emanates from a Stone Age Institute conference celebrating the life and career of naturalist Bob Brain, a pioneer in bringing taphonomic perspectives to human evolutionary studies. Contributions by leading researchers provide a state-of-the-art look at the maturing field of taphonomy and the unique perspectives it provides to research into human origins. This important volume reveals approaches taken to the study of bone accumulations at prehistoric sites in Africa, Eurasia, and America, and provides fascinating insights into patterns produced by carnivores, by hunter-gatherers, and by our early human ancestors.
The Myth of Syphilis: The Natural History of Treponematosis in North America
Edited by Mary Lucas Powell and Della Collins Cook
April 30, 2005 University Press Of Florida
Exploring the long-standing question of the origins of syphilis, this book proposes a new understanding of the dynamic interactions of disease and culture in the New World. It brings together a complete picture of the diverse pathological evidence of a bacterial disease--treponematosis--manifest in the North American archaeological record at the time of Christopher Columbus's first journey, and it presents a strong argument against the earlier identification of modern venereal syphilis with indigenous North American treponemal disease.
For almost 500 years, native North Americans have been blamed for "giving the world syphilis" and by implication accused of sexual immorality. Contributors to this volume identify and investigate the origins and various manifestations of all ranges of treponemal diseases across the continent and show that the true picture of disease evolution is both different and far more interesting than past scholarship suggests. They summarize current archaeological and historical information from a variety of regions and times, both before and after 1492, and consider closely the specific question of whether evidence exists for the presence of the venereal form of treponemal disease that would be equivalent to venereal syphilis that ravaged 16th-century Europe. Their investigation challenges the unequivocal identification of all pre-Columbian treponemal disease as venereal syphilis and shows that endemic treponemal disease was present at varying levels throughout North America for at least two millennia before the late 15th-century trans-Atlantic voyages of discovery.
