Биология
Различные книги в жанре БиологияKinship and Beyond
The genealogical model has a long-standing history in Western thought. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which assumptions about the genealogical model—in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge-making in domains well beyond what is normally labeled “kinship.” The detailed ethnographic work and analysis included in this text explores how these assumptions have been built into our understandings of race, personhood, ethnicity, property relations, and the relationship between human beings and non-human species. The authors explore the influences of the genealogical model of kinship in wider social theory and examine anthropology’s ability to provide a unique framework capable of bridging the “social” and “natural” sciences. In doing so, this volume brings fresh new perspectives to bear on contemporary theories concerning biotechnology and its effect upon social life.
European Kinship in the Age of Biotechnology
Interest in the study of kinship, a key area of anthropological enquiry, has recently reemerged. Dubbed ‘the new kinship’, this interest was stimulated by the ‘new genetics’ and revived interest in kinship and family patterns. This volume investigates the impact of biotechnology on contemporary understandings of kinship, of family and ‘belonging’ in a variety of European settings and reveals similarities and differences in how kinship is conceived. What constitutes kinship for different publics? How significant are biogenetic links? What does family resemblance tell us? Why is genetically modified food an issue? Are ‘genes’ and ‘blood’ interchangeable? It has been argued that the recent prominence of genetic science and genetic technologies has resulted in a ‘geneticization’ of social life; the ethnographic examples presented here do show shifts occurring in notions of ‘nature’ and of what is ‘natural’. But, they also illustrate the complexity of contemporary kinship thinking in Europe and the continued interconnectedness of biological and sociological understandings of relatedness and the relationship between nature and nurture.
Transgressive Sex
Sex is often regarded as a dangerous business that must be rigorously controlled, regulated, and subjected to rules. Sexual acts that defy acceptable practices may be seen as variously defiling, immoral, and even unnatural. They may challenge and subvert both cultural preconceptions and the social order in a politics of sexual transgression that threatens to transform permissible boundaries and restructure bodily engagements. This collection of essays explores acts of sexual transgression that have the power to reconfigure perceptions of bodily intimacy and the social norms of interaction. Considering issues such as domestic violence, child prostitution, health and sex, teenage sex, and sex with animals across a range of settings from contemporary Oceania, the Pacific, South Africa, and southeast Asia to Euro-America, this book should interest all those who question the «naturalness» of sex, including public health workers, clinical practitioners and students of sex, sexuality, and gender in the humanities and social sciences.
Hierarchy
Louis Dumont's concept of hierarchy continues to inspire social scientists. Using it as their starting point, the contributors to this volume introduce both fresh empirical material and new theoretical considerations. On the basis of diverse ethnographic contexts in Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East they challenge some current conceptions of hierarchical formations and reassess former debates – of post-colonial and neo-colonial agendas, ideas of «democratization» and «globalization,» and expanding market economies – both with regard to new theoretical issues and the new world situation.
Impotent Warriors
From September 1990 to June 1991, the UK deployed 53,462 military personnel in the Gulf War. After the end of the conflict anecdotal reports of various disorders affecting troops who fought in the Gulf began to surface. This mysterious illness was given the name “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS). This book is an investigation into this recently emergent illness, particularly relevant given ongoing UK deployments to Iraq, describing how the illness became a potent symbol for a plethora of issues, anxieties, and concerns. At present, the debate about GWS is polarized along two lines: there are those who think it is a unique, organic condition caused by Gulf War toxins and those who argue that it is probably a psychological condition that can be seen as part of a larger group of illnesses. Using the methods and perspective of anthropology, with its focus on nuances and subtleties, the author provides a new approach to understanding GWS, one that makes sense of the cultural circumstances, specific and general, which gave rise to the illness.
Pursuits of Happiness
Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being—defined as “the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society”—and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.
Enduring Socialism
Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.
Politics of Innocence
Based on thorough ethnographic fieldwork in a refugee camp in Tanzania this book provides a rich account of the benevolent “disciplining mechanisms” of humanitarian agencies, led by the UNHCR, and of the situated, dynamic, indeterminate, and fluid nature of identity (re)construction in the camp. While the refugees are expected to behave as innocent, helpless victims, the question of victimhood among Burundian Hutu is increasingly challenged, following the 1993 massacres in Burundi and the Rwandan genocide. The book explores how different groups within the camp apply different strategies to cope with these issues and how the question of innocence and victimhood is itself imbued with ambiguity, as young men struggle to recuperate their masculinity and their political subjectivity.
Class, Contention, and a World in Motion
Prevailing scholarship on migration tends to present migrants as the objects of history, subjected to abstract global forces or to concrete forms of regulation imposed by state and supra state organizations. In this volume, by contrast, the focus is on migrants as the subjects of history who not only react but also act to engage with and transform their worlds. Using ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, contributors question how and why particular forms of political struggle and collective action may, or indeed may not, be carried forward in the context of geographic and social border crossings. In doing so, they bring the dynamic relationship between class, gender, and culture to the forefront in each distinctive migration setting.
Berlin, Alexanderplatz
A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers’ offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a ‘future’ under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.