Social Anthropology

While death is a natural event, modern end-of-life experiences are shaped by new medical, demographic, and cultural trends. People who are dying are kept alive, sometimes against their will or the will of their family, with powerful medications, machines, and "heroic measures".

Twins Talk is an ethnographic study of identical twins in the United States, a study unique in that it considers what twins have to say about themselves, instead of what researchers have written about them. It presents, in the first person, the grounded and practical experiences of twins as they engage, both individually and together, the "who am I" and "who are we" questions of life. Here, the twins themselves are the stars.

Where fresh water appears to be abundant and generally accessible, chronic pollution may be relatively ignored as a public issue. Yet there are those whose lives, livelihoods, and traditions are touched directly by the destructive albeit essential relationship between humans and water.

We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers. Why? What are we really hungry for? In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today's global food and lifestyle culture. How are 21st-century innovations and pressures are redefining people's needs and desires? How does "foodie" culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression?

Politics of the Womb proves that there can be broken babies and breaking mothers; it rips away the romanticism around uterus transplants, warns of genetic theft and "designer babies", and points to the human element being sacrificed, as artificial reproduction uses, reuses, and recycles the woman. Pinki Virani combines investigation with analysis to question those who lead the worldwide onslaught on the woman’s womb in the name of babies, and squarely confronts what has become the business of baby-making by a chain of suppliers that manufactures on demand.

From a 2017 Pulitzer-winning newspaperman, an unsentimental ode to America's heartland as seen in small-town Iowa—a story of reinvention and resilience, environmental and economic struggle, and surprising diversity and hope.

Bronislaw Malinowski's seminal work, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, delves into the intricate dynamics of sexuality and societal control within primitive cultures. Published in 1927, this ethnographic study challenges prevailing Victorian notions of sexuality and sheds light on the nuanced ways in which indigenous societies navigate and regulate sexual behaviors. Malinowski's immersive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands enables him to provide a rich anthropological account, exploring the role of rituals, customs, and taboos in shaping sexual practices.

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私たちの仕事はどう変わる? アフターコロナを生き抜く地図!

At its core, American Disgust wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing, yet fundamental, aspect of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally, politically, and theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual, societal, and planetary levels.

Перфекционист, Самоотверженный помощник, Звезда на сцене, Чувствительный индивидуалист, Наблюдательный мыслитель, Преданный лояолист, Вечный ребенок, Могущественный бунтарь, Отстраненный миротворец. По мнению автора, практически каждого человека можно отнести к одному из перечисленных выше типов характера. Что это за типы и как они влияют на наше мировосприятие? Согласно исследованиям, проведенным Энтони Фаликовски, в процессе взросления человек теряет связь со своим высшим "Я" и попадает под власть эго.

Warum wollen wir wie besessen bestimmte Dinge haben, sind aber gelangweilt, wenn wir sie bekommen? Warum verwandelt sich die Leidenschaft von Verliebten so schnell in Desinteresse? Die Antwort liegt in einem Hormon in unserem Gehirn: Dopamin. Es ist die Quelle unseres Verlangens und lässt uns für einen kurzen Nervenkitzel alles riskieren. Dabei ist es die Aussicht auf etwas Neues, die uns antreibt, nicht die Erfüllung. Dopamin ist der Grund, warum wir forschen und entdecken, aber auch der Ursprung von Verschwendung, Risiko und Sucht.

Nuestros huesos son los testigos silenciosos de las vidas que llevamos. Nuestras historias están grabadas en su médula. Basándose en sus años de investigación y en su notable experiencia, la antropóloga forense de renombre mundial Sue Black nos lleva a un viaje de redescubrimiento, una visita guiada por el esqueleto humano que nos explica cómo la historia de la vida de cada persona se revela en sus huesos, a los que ella llama «los últimos centinelas de nuestra vida mortal que dan testimonio de cómo la hemos vivido».

Prehistoric World Cultures provides a broad overview of world prehistory while highlighting significant events, developments, and cultures through time. Organized chronologically and geographically, it gives students a clear understanding of changes through time from the evolution of our species to the development of complex civilizations.

La historia evolutiva del ser humano es relativamente reciente, nace en el S. XIX con la teoría de la evolución de Darwin, además ha tenido que sortear no pocos obstáculos doctrinales, ha tenido que chocar con los más aferrados dogmas religiosos y con las teorías científicas más reaccionarias.

When the Smithsonian’s Hall of Physical Anthropology opened in 1965 it featured 160 Andean skulls affixed to a wall to visualize how the world’s human population had exploded since the birth of Christ. Through a history of Inca mummies, a preHispanic surgery called trepanation, and Andean crania like these, Empires of the Dead explains how “ancient Peruvians” became the single largest population in the Smithsonian and many other museums in Peru, the Americas, and beyond.

If, in this Age of Misinformation, you find yourself exhausted by the divisiveness, sickened by the dissent, poisoned by the discord, you are not alone. Of, by, and for the Hanged Man is a memoir equal parts hilarity and vulnerability, but just as important, it is a declaration for navigating our post-truth world. Author A.M. Pfeffer has chronicled this journey into an uproarious and riveting blueprint specific to discovering a "Hanged Man" inside each of us.

At first glance, the events in this book may seem equal parts science fiction and legal thriller. Unfortunately, this is a true story of blinding greed, cruel deceit, unfortunate circumstance, and powerful human tragedy. It has villains and heroes, but it does not yet have a good ending. It is the story of asbestos in America.

Sarah Forbes was in graduate school when she stumbled upon a museum dedicated to...sex. The anthropology student hesitated when her boyfriend suggested that she apply for a job, but apply she did, and it wasn't long before a part-time position at New York's Museum of Sex led to a gig as the museum's curator. That was over 12 years ago. Now Sarah - a married mother of two - proudly sports her title as Curator of Sex.

Nothing that God created is the source of our human temptation. To the contrary! The human body is the crown of God's creation—consummated by his declaration that it was good. That God's people are unable to view the body without sinning is not an indictment of the body itself, but of the immaturity of the post-modern evangelical mind.

Who lived in Texas over a thousand years ago? In Porch Talk, John Erickson and his archaeologist friend Doug Boyd investigate this question while explaining the art and science of archaeology for middle listeners. On the Perryton ranch, John and his friends unearthed a ghost town that dated back to around 1300 CE. For more than twenty years, they worked together on this and other prehistoric sites, sharing a fascination for the ancient people who occupied the area. How did these people work, play, and survive?