Social Science Anthropology

Perché ci sentiamo sempre stanchi? Perché facciamo fatica ad addormentarci o ci svegliamo di continuo? Come possiamo aiutare il corpo a riposare?

Antonella Viola ci introduce ai ritmi circadiani, ovvero le oscillazioni delle funzioni di tipo fisico e comportamentale che seguono il più antico e meraviglioso orologio del mondo: l’alternanza di luce e buio. Il sonno, la temperatura corporea, la fame, le difese immunitarie e persino il dolore sono tutti soggetti a questo ascendente.

The size and stability of the American middle class were once the envy of the world. But changes unleashed in the 1960s pitted Americans against one another politically in new and destructive ways. These battles continued to rage from that day to now, while everyone has fallen behind economically except the wealthy. Right-wing culture warriors blamed the decline on the moral shortcomings of "other" Americans - black people, feminists, gays, immigrants, union members - to court a fearful white working- and middle-class base with ever more bitter "us vs. them" politics.

Un viaggio nel mondo dell'antropologia attraverso dieci parole – essere, convivere, comunicare, dove e quando, crescere, specchiarsi, rappresentarsi, donare, credere, nutrirsi –, per avvicinarsi a una disciplina che può aiutarci a interpretare il rimescolamento sempre più rapido della realtà cui stiamo assistendo e comprendere meglio ciò che accade nelle nostre città, strade e vite. L'antropologia culturale, nata come studio delle culture dei popoli lontani dall'Occidente, oggi ha allargato il suo campo di azione fino a occuparsi del qui e ora.

「直観力」「やる気」「リスク評価」……感情や情動は生命の進化がもたらした究極の能力だ！最先端の「感情神経科学」が明らかにした、感情や情動の驚くべき世界。

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».

Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without, on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own, and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview.

Useful for academic and recreational archaeologists alike, this book identifies and describes more than 200 projectile points and stone tools used by prehistoric Native American Indians in Texas. The authors also demonstrate how factors such as environment, locale, and type of artifact combine to produce a portrait of theses ancient cultures.

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?

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a 500-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar" - or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar". A decade in the making, this audiobook unfolds as a series of cronicas - a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease.

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.

Overlooking the Border continues the dialogue surrounding the social history of Jerusalem. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book juxtaposes Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives about the past with contemporary museum exhibits, street plaques, tourism, and real estate projects that are reshaping the city since the decline of the peace process and the second intifada. As sites of memory, Jerusalem's homes, streets, and natural areas form the setting for emotionally charged narratives about belonging and rights to place.

The Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928, is an icon of architectural modernism and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Behind the Glass tells the true story of the large family connected to it, who rose to prominence through industrial textile manufacturing. The book traces the transformations in the life of the family, from their roots in a Jewish ghetto to part of the wealthy bourgeoisie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to adaptation in interwar independent Czechoslovakia and flight in the face of Nazi invasion.

Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.

From the family to the workplace to the marketplace, every facet of our lives is shaped by cooperative interactions. Yet everywhere we look, we are confronted by proof of how difficult cooperation can be - snarled traffic, polarized politics, overexploited resources, social problems that go ignored. The benefits to oneself of a free ride on the efforts of others mean that collective goals often are not met. But compared to most other species, people actually cooperate a great deal. Why is this?

東京の都市化・近代化を進めたといわれる関東大震災(大正12年/1923年)は、実は人々に過去への郷愁や土地への愛着を呼び起こす契機となった。

In Trust in a Polarized Age, political philosopher Kevin Vallier offers a powerful counter-narrative to the prevailing sense of hopelessness that dogs the American political landscape. In an unapologetic defense of liberalism that synthesizes political philosophy and empirical trust research, Vallier restores faith in our power to reduce polarization and rebuild social and political trust.

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.

Il 27 dicembre 1831 un brigantino inglese, la Beagle, salpa da Devonport, al comando del capitano Fitz Roy, con a bordo Charles Darwin, a quell'epoca ventiduenne. Scopo della spedizione era completare il rilevamento della Patagonia e della Terra del Fuoco, ispezionare le coste del Cile, del Perù e di alcune isole del Pacifico ed eseguire una serie di misure di longitudine attorno al mondo.

During the early twentieth century, the American government’s standing expectation was that Native Americans should be adopting Western customs. In the face of that prospect, anthropologist and musicologist Frances Densmore sought to preserve Native American culture—particularly as it was expressed through music. In her extensive writings on Native American lifestyles, music, and history, Densmore opened a window onto American experiences that had been obscured by stereotypes, and encouraged a better appreciation of the varied traditions of tribes nationwide.

Why are behaviors associated with masculinity increasing the risk of illness, injury, and premature death among young men? What makes these men vulnerable to substance misuse, interpersonal violence, and suicide? How can recovery look like? This book draws on more than eight years of recurrent ethnographic fieldwork in urban South Africa to answer these globally urgent questions from a systems perspective.