Social Anthropology

Thousands of people die in drug-related violence every year in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, adjacent to El Paso, Texas, has become the most violent city in the Mexican drug war. Much of the cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine consumed in the United States is imported across the Mexican border, making El Paso/Juárez one of the major drug-trafficking venues in the world.

What makes the English English? Is it their eccentricity, their passionate love (or, indeed, hatred) of Marmite - or is it something less easily defined? Beginning at the top of a muddy Gloucestershire slope at the Cooper's Hill cheese-rolling contest and traversing a landscape of lawns and queues, coastlines and sporting arenas, Ben Fogle takes us on a journey through the peculiarly English.

Revised to stimulate and engage an undergraduate student audience, Richard Feinberg's updated account of Anuta opens with a chapter on his varied experiences when he initially undertook fieldwork in this tiny, isolated Polynesian community in the Solomon Islands. He explores dominant cultural features, including language, kinship, marriage, politics, and religion topics that align with subject matter covered in introductory anthropology courses.

In this fascinating and vivid account, Peter M. Gardner takes us along with him on his anthropological field research trips. Usually, the author's family is there, too, either with him in the field or somewhere nearby. Family adventures are part of it all. Travel into the unknown can be terrifying yet stimulating, and Gardner describes his own adventures, sharing medical and travel emergencies, magical fights, natural dangers, playful friends, and satisfying scientific discoveries.

It's a common complaint that a presidential candidate's style matters more than substance and that the issues have been eclipsed by mass-media-fueled obsession with a candidate's every slip, gaffe, and peccadillo. This audiobook explores political communication in American presidential politics, focusing on what political insiders call "message". Message, Michael Lempert and Michael Silverstein argue, is not simply an individual's positions on the issues but the craft used to fashion the creature the public sees as the candidate.

This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

Wandering the Wards provides a detailed and unflinching ethnographic examination of life within the contemporary hospital. It reveals the institutional and ward cultures that inform the organization and delivery of everyday care for one of the largest populations within them: people living with dementia who require urgent unscheduled hospital care. Drawing on five years of research embedded in acute wards in the UK, the authors follow people living with dementia through their admission, shadowing hospital staff as they interact with them during and across shifts.

Discover the fascinating details of life under the pharaohs—and their extraordinary legacy—in this comprehensive guide to Egypt's ancient civilization.

While millions of believers around the world are finding their understanding of Christianity to be outdated and untenable, Matthew Distefano has managed to paint the gospel in such a way that even an atheist could appreciate its beauty. Rather than a message of rapture, or rewards and reprisals, Distefano presents the good news of what God has done in history to stem the tide of our own violence and evil - inviting us into a whole new way of living and being in this world.

Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology recounts the rich history of the fossil site that gave the world the first evidence of the extinction of several mammalian species, including the American mastodon. Big Bone Lick has played many roles: nutrient source, hallowed ground, salt mine, health spa, and a rich trove of wonders. Stanley Hedeen presents a comprehensive narrative of Big Bone Lick from its geological formation forward, explaining why the site attracted animals, regional tribespeople, European explorers and scientists, and eventually American pioneers.

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.

Das erste Sachhörbuch des Bestsellerautors: die Menschheitsgeschichte von Tastaturen über Hotdogs bis zur Schönheit des Sonnenuntergangs in der Review. John Green verbindet sein eigenes Leben mit den großen Fragen der Menschheit: Was hat ein Teddybär mit Macht und Ohnmacht zu tun oder das Googeln mit unserer Endlichkeit? Mit seinem Blick für Seltsames, Wichtiges und Überraschendes bewertet John Green die menschengemachte Gegenwart auf einer Skala von 1 bis 5. Das Anthropozän ist das aktuelle Erdzeitalter, in dem wir den Planeten grundlegend verändern.

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive. Through in-depth interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Fitzgerald examines what it means to do scientific research in the ambiguous terrain of autism research, a field marked by shifting horizons of uncertainty and ambivalence.

"Menschen sind halt so..." Der Mensch ist von Natur aus egoistisch und faul. Generell ist er darauf aus, den größten Nutzen für sich selbst herauszuschlagen und bringt seine beste Leistung nur unter Konkurrenzdruck. So zumindest die herrschende Meinung in Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik - mit weitreichenden Folgen, die wir alle zu spüren bekommen: zum Beispiel in der verfehlten Bildungs- und Sozialpolitik oder in einer zunehmend kontrollierten Arbeitswelt. Das Menschenbild im Kapitalismus ist nichts weiter als eine von der Wirtschaft verbreitete Mär.

"Why do we do what we do?" This may seem like a simple question at first; in practice however, the closer we examine where our decisions come from, the less intention and independent reasoning we find. Instead, we find primitive instincts and ideas that are often based on nothing more than the imagination of someone who has been dead for centuries.

David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.

Richard Parker delivers a provocative and eye-opening look at the most explosive and controversial state in America, where everything is bigger, bolder - and is shaping the future of America. Americans today are reckoning with a new Texas - that love-it-or-hate-it giant slice of America that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented change from the Civil War to the election of George W. Bush and the Iraq War.

With the increasing demand for midwives among U.S. women, reproductive rights activists are lobbying to loosen restrictions that deny legal access to homebirth options. In Pushing for Midwives, Christa Craven presents a nuanced history of women's reproductive rights activism in the U.S. She also provides an examination of contemporary organizing strategies for reproductive rights in an era increasingly driven by "consumer rights".

Democrat to Deplorable takes a deep look at the nine million Democrats who proudly switched parties to vote for President Donald Trump. These voters feel the cold edge of the culture war more than any other group, and this book captures their experiences and the current zeitgeist. Based on a national survey, in-depth interviews, and a personal narrative, Democrat to Deplorable is the definitive book which explores and explains the current cultural climate leading to President Donald Trump, Trumpism, and the New Right.

On a Thursday in November of 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return - arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.