Social Science Anthropology

Written by a leading dermatologist, The Blue Man and Other Stories of the Skin provides a compelling and accessible introduction to the life of our largest organ, while also recounting the author’s experiences with memorable patients he has treated who suffer from mysterious skin conditions. Robert Norman begins by highlighting the qualities of the skin, tracing the history of its conditions and diseases, then examining the cultural, social and psychological impact of both color and irregularity.

In this fascinating book, Terry O'Connor explores a distinction that is deeply ingrained in much of the language that we use in zoology, human-animal studies, and archaeology - the difference between wild and domestic. For thousands of years, humans have categorized animals in simple terms, often according to the degree of control that we have over them, and have tended to see the long story of human-animal relations as one of increasing control and management for human benefit.

Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of globalization, and suggests ways that other researchers can follow up on his ideas. Many of them continue to do so. For anthropologists, the book offered new ways of thinking about how communities are affected by globalization.

In her original and controversial 2005 book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Saba Mahmood examines the women's mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt as part of a wider turn to religious fervor integral to the broader Islamic revival of the twenty-first century. Mahmood's research suggests that in choosing to embrace the norms of their faith, these pious Muslim women are not limiting, but rather affirming, themselves.

In 2009's Liquidated, anthropologist Karen Z. Ho takes the tools of ethnographic research, which are traditionally used to study distant societies, and instead uses them to dissect the culture of high finance on New York's famous Wall Street. Through close observation of the daily lives of the bankers working there, and the beliefs, rituals, and timeframes that define them, Ho uncovers a distinct culture in which she finds the ultimate causes of the financial crises of recent times.

In this very anecdotal audio you will discover a unique fusion of thinking by these two established and respected specialists from different fields. One thing that is common to their thinking is that the main resource of the future is people. Learning how to manage the people resource, and bring the best out of them.

Marriages break up en masse, friends and family have bust-ups that seem irretrievable, business relationships break-up, neighbours go to war and so too do nations. Ninety nine times out of one hundred it is because of a lack of communication or a communication breakdown. Do you remember sitting in the classroom at school and studying mathematics? Or English or Physics.

In his 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel, American geography professor and environmental historian Jared Diamond looks to answer the question of why human history unfolded differently on different continents, and why power and wealth became distributed as they are.

Published in 1990, The Anti-Politics Machine is American anthropologist James Ferguson's first book. It discusses international development projects: how they are conceived, researched, and put into practice. Importantly, it also looks at what these projects actually achieve. Ferguson is critical of the idea of development and argues that the process does not take enough account of the daily realities of the communities it is intended to benefit.

In this powerful classic, the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues that though the “flight from God” is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in an extremely dangerous situation with the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of faith, Picard says, a man had to make a conscious decision to separate himself from the world of faith. Today, the world, not just the individual, is in flight, and men must extricate themselves from modernity and make a deliberate decision to find and affirm faith.

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.

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

El ingenio de Millás y la sabiduría de Arsuaga unidos para contar la vida como la mejor de las historias.

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?

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.

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.

This classic essay from Jon Krakauer is now available as an unabridged audiobook download. This essay is also included in the Classic Krakauer collection. From the best-selling author of Missoula and Into the Wild: a selection of the singular investigative journalism that made Krakauer famous, covering topics from avalanches on Mt. Everest to a volcano in Washington state; from a wilderness therapy program for teens to an extraordinary cave in New Mexico so unearthly that is used by NASA to better understand Mars.

Drawn from the work of StoryCorps, the largest and most ambitious private oral history project in American history, comes this tapestry of the stories Americans have been sharing from their lives to leave behind to their loved ones.

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.

Es ist eine Frage, die sich Menschen seit Tausenden von Jahren stellen: Woher kommen wir? Nach Antworten suchen Fachleute auch in unserer DNA – und hier decken sie einige Sensationen auf. Im Erbgut von Homo sapiens befinden sich nämlich Abschnitte, die gar nicht von den Ahnen unserer Spezies stammen. Neandertaler, Denisovianer und weitere, noch unbekannte Vettern der Gattung Homo haben sich offenbar mit unseren Vorfahren gepaart und so zu unserem Genom beigetragen. Und auch unsere jüngere evolutionäre Vergangenheit hat markante Spuren in unseren Genen hinterlassen.