Social Science Anthropology

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the lies behind ‘"incel" culture.

Tracing the migrations of the Denisovans and their interbreeding with Neanderthals and early human populations in Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, Andrew Collins and Greg Little explore how the new mental capabilities of the Denisovan-Neanderthal and Denisovan-human hybrids greatly accelerated the flowering of human civilization over 40,000 years ago. They show how the Denisovans displayed sophisticated advances, including precision-machined stone tools and jewelry, tailored clothing, celestially-aligned architecture, and horse domestication.

As news reports of the horrific December 2004 tsunami in Asia reached the rest of the world, commentators were quick to seize upon the disaster as proof of either God’s power or God’s nonexistence, asking over and over, How could a good and loving God - if such exists - allow such suffering? In The Doors of the Sea, David Bentley Hart speaks at once to those skeptical of Christian faith and to those who use their Christian faith to rationalize senseless human suffering.

In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision - especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate.

After receiving a doctorate in medicine, Le Bon travelled in Europe, North Africa, and Asia and wrote several books on anthropology and archaeology. His interests later shifted to natural science and social psychology. Gustave Le Bon is best known for his seminal work Crowd Psychology where he describes the psychological effects in various group settings. In Psychology of Peoples written in 1894 he utilizes his anthropological knowledge and cross-references it with social psychology.

In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses listeners into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities.

Nigger: it is arguably the most consequential social insult in American history, though, at the same time, a word that reminds us of “the ironies and dilemmas, tragedies and glories of the American experience.” In this tour de force, distinguished Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy - author of the highly acclaimed Race, Crime, and the Law - “put[s] a tracer on nigger”, to identify how it has been used and by whom, while analyzing the controversies to which it has given rise.

Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. The human brain, and its evolutionary journey, is unlike anything else in history. In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes listeners through that far-reaching journey. He also tackles the question of where the brain will take us next, exploring the burgeoning con­cepts of epigenetics and new technologies like CRISPR.

A Degree in a Book: Anthropology dives deep into the study of human culture and societies. Discover the impact of language on understanding how different societies approach family and kinship and how different cultures are studied, as well as how anthropology is used in our everyday lives—applied anthropology. Including theories from Herodotus to Malinowski and Durkeim to de Waal, this accessible guide covers all the major strands of anthropology that are studied today.

In the summer of 2022, Lee Berger lost 50 pounds in order to wriggle though impossibly small openings in the Rising Star cave complex in South Africa—spaces where his team has been unearthing the remains of Homo naledi, a proto-human likely to have coexisted with Homo sapiens some 250,000 years ago. Lead researcher Berger had never made his way into the dark, cramped, dangerous underground spaces where many of the naledi fossils had been found. Now he was ready to do so. Once inside the cave, Berger made shocking new discoveries that expand our understanding of this early hominid.

Renowned linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick first went to study the tiny jungle village of Gapun in New Guinea over 30 years ago to document how it was that their native language, Tayap, was dying. But you can't study a language without settling in among the people, understanding how they speak every day, and even more, how they live. This book takes us inside the village as Kulick came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of 200 people, carved out like a cleft in the middle of a swamp, in the middle of a tropical rainforest.

In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time - the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the US.

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the 16th century or the 18th century. This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social sciences and in recent natural science literature. In the view of some proponents of natural-scientific perspectives, race has a biological - and not just a purely social-dimension.

Bizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives. From The Hot Zone to The Demon in the Freezer and beyond, Richard Preston's best selling works have mesmerized readers everywhere by showing them strange worlds of nature they never dreamed of.

Con la misma prosa inteligente, fresca, y provocadora, Harari vuelve a librerías con un nuevo título, 21 lecciones para el siglo XXI, en el que examina algunas de las cuestiones más urgentes de nuestro presente. El hilo dorado que recorre este estimulante nuevo libro es el desafío de mantener nuestro enfoque colectivo e individual frente al constante y desorientador cambio que estamos viviendo ¿Somos aún capaces de entender el mundo que hemos creado?

Celebrated historian and cultural critic Ronald Sanders offers a compelling and ideology-shattering history of racial prejudice and myth as shaped by political, religious, and economic forces from the 14th Century to the present day. Written with clear-eyed vigor, Sanders draws on a broad history of art, psychology, politics, and religion to inform his striking and soundly reasoned assertions.

It's on the television, in the papers, and in our minds. Every day we're bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is - financial collapse, unemployment, growing poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. But the rarely acknowledged reality is that our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented. By almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive.

This provocative and panoramic book shows listeners what they can learn from their ancestors, and how the unwavering ability of prehistoric people to survive and thrive can continue into the present.

In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science--and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. A new preface shows how this witty, playful, and daring book has revolutionized our understanding of sexuality.

Is the archeologist who discovers a lost tomb a sort of hero - or a villain? If someone steals a relic from a museum and returns it to the ruin it came from, is she a thief? Craig Childs's riveting new book is a lyrical ghost story - an intense, impassioned investigation into the nature of the past and the things we leave behind. We visit lonesome desert canyons and fancy Fifth Avenue art galleries, journey throughout the Americas, Asia, the past and the present. The result is a brilliant book about man and nature, remnants and memory, a dashing tale of crime and detection.