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The Anatomy of the Case Study (PDF)
by Kevin Myers Gary ThomasThis sharp, stimulating title provides a structure for thinking about, analysing and designing case study. It explores the historical, theoretical and practical bones of modern case study research, offering to social scientists a framework for understanding and working with this form of inquiry. Using detailed analysis of examples taken from across the social sciences Thomas and Myers set out, and then work through, an intricate typology of case study design to answer questions such as: How is a case study constructed? What are the required, inherent components of case study? Can a coherent structure be applied to this form of inquiry? The book grounds complex theoretical insights in real world research and includes an extended example that has been annotated line by line to take the reader through each step of understanding and conducting research using case study.
Anatomy of the Superhero Film
by Larrie DudenhoefferThis book addresses what a superhero body can do by developing several “x-rays” of the superbody’s sensoria, anatomic structures, internal systems, cellular organizations, and orthotic, chemical, or technological enhancements. In short, these x-rays offer what we might describe as a metamorpho-physiological approach to the superheroes in feature films, theatrical cartoon shorts, and Netflix television series. This approach examines the ways in which the “substance” of superheroes, which includes their masks, costumes, chevrons, weapons, and auras, extends into the diegetic environment of the film, transgressing it, transforming it, and corporealizing it, making it emblematic of the shape, dimensions, contours, and organismic workings of one or more of our major organs, members, orifices, fluids, or cell clusters. Thus the superhero film, as this study claims, works to make us more aware of the mutability, adaptability, modifiability, and virtual capabilities of our own flesh.
Anatomy of the Superhero Film
by Larrie DudenhoefferThis book addresses what a superhero body can do by developing several “x-rays” of the superbody’s sensoria, anatomic structures, internal systems, cellular organizations, and orthotic, chemical, or technological enhancements. In short, these x-rays offer what we might describe as a metamorpho-physiological approach to the superheroes in feature films, theatrical cartoon shorts, and Netflix television series. This approach examines the ways in which the “substance” of superheroes, which includes their masks, costumes, chevrons, weapons, and auras, extends into the diegetic environment of the film, transgressing it, transforming it, and corporealizing it, making it emblematic of the shape, dimensions, contours, and organismic workings of one or more of our major organs, members, orifices, fluids, or cell clusters. Thus the superhero film, as this study claims, works to make us more aware of the mutability, adaptability, modifiability, and virtual capabilities of our own flesh.
The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998) (Routledge Revivals)
by Mike PincombeThis title was first published in 2001. Is there such a thing as "Tudor literature"? The question is the theme that binds the essays in this collection. Scholars from around the world address the question of whether there is a sense of continuity in the literature of the Tudor century. The volume begins by looking at early Tudor writers, such as Thomas More, and then moves on to look at Elizabethan poetry and prose, ending by covering the late Tudor dramas, and Shakespeare.
The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998) (Routledge Revivals)
by Mike PincombeThis title was first published in 2001. Is there such a thing as "Tudor literature"? The question is the theme that binds the essays in this collection. Scholars from around the world address the question of whether there is a sense of continuity in the literature of the Tudor century. The volume begins by looking at early Tudor writers, such as Thomas More, and then moves on to look at Elizabethan poetry and prose, ending by covering the late Tudor dramas, and Shakespeare.
The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime
by Adrian RaineAdrian Raine is one of the world's leading authorities on the minds of the violent, the criminal, the dangerous, the unstable. An Anatomy of Violence is the culmination of his life's work so far, offering the latest answers to some of the most difficult questions: what are the causes of violence? Can it be treated? And might it one day be stopped?Are some criminals born, not made? What causes violence and how can we treat it? An Anatomy of Violence introduces readers to new ways of looking at these age-old questions. Drawing on the latest scientific research, Adrian Raine explains what it reveals about the brains of murderers, psychopaths and serial killers. While once it was thought upbringing explained all, and subsequently explanations shifted to genetics, Raine goes to great pains to explain that anti-social behaviour is complex, and based on the interaction between genetics and the biological and social environment in which a person is raised. But the latest statistical evidence between certain types of biological and early behavioural warning signs is also very strong. Through a series of case studies of famous criminals, Raine shows how their criminal behaviour might be explained on the basis of these new scientific discoveries. But the conclusions point to a host of philosophical and moral issues. What are the implications for our criminal justice system? Should we condemn and punish individuals who have little or no control over their behaviour? Should we act preemptively with people who exhibit strong biological predispositions to becoming dangerous criminals? These are among the thorny issues we can no longer ignore as our understanding of criminal behaviour grows.Praise for Adrian Raine's The Psychopathology of Crime: 'An extremely informative, thoughtful and illuminating book ... a tour de force', David P Farrington, Psychological Medicine Adrian Raine is the Richard Perry University Professor in the Departments of Criminology, Psychiatry, and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. For the past 35 years, his research has focused on the neurobiological and biosocial bases of antisocial and violent behavior, and ways to both prevent and treat it in both children and adults.
Ancestor Worship in the Diaspora Chinese and China Universes: The Making of a Collaborative Cultural Basin (ISSN)
by Khun Eng KuahKuah explores the centrality of ancestors and ancestor worship of the Chinese in the Diaspora Chinese and China universes. Building on the original work and book on “Rebuilding the Ancestral Village: Singaporeans in China”, this book goes beyond the premise of remaking the ancestral home.Ancestor worship and the ancestors, together with selected cultural practices, constitute an important aspect of the broad Chinese culture shared by these two groups of Chinese and leads to the making of a collaborative cultural basin. This book takes the audience on an ancestor worship journey to uncover the complexity of ancestors and ancestral souls crossing transnational spaces, their choices of ancestral soul homes, the significance of the lineage ancestral house and the engagement of women through food offering contesting patriarchy. It also explores the increasing role of the Mainland Chinese state in appropriating ancestor and ancestor worship as a cultural icon and during the Qingming festival as a socio-moral capital and cultural bridge to foster closer ties with the Diaspora Chinese in its attempt to bring them into its “Chinese civilizational polity”. The book also takes the audience on a photographic journey to visually experience the various rituals and the vibrancy of the ritual performances conducted during the different stage from pre-communal to communal ancestor worship.An essential read for scholars of Chinese society and religion, Chinese migration and diaspora studies.
Ancestor Worship in the Diaspora Chinese and China Universes: The Making of a Collaborative Cultural Basin (ISSN)
by Khun Eng KuahKuah explores the centrality of ancestors and ancestor worship of the Chinese in the Diaspora Chinese and China universes. Building on the original work and book on “Rebuilding the Ancestral Village: Singaporeans in China”, this book goes beyond the premise of remaking the ancestral home.Ancestor worship and the ancestors, together with selected cultural practices, constitute an important aspect of the broad Chinese culture shared by these two groups of Chinese and leads to the making of a collaborative cultural basin. This book takes the audience on an ancestor worship journey to uncover the complexity of ancestors and ancestral souls crossing transnational spaces, their choices of ancestral soul homes, the significance of the lineage ancestral house and the engagement of women through food offering contesting patriarchy. It also explores the increasing role of the Mainland Chinese state in appropriating ancestor and ancestor worship as a cultural icon and during the Qingming festival as a socio-moral capital and cultural bridge to foster closer ties with the Diaspora Chinese in its attempt to bring them into its “Chinese civilizational polity”. The book also takes the audience on a photographic journey to visually experience the various rituals and the vibrancy of the ritual performances conducted during the different stage from pre-communal to communal ancestor worship.An essential read for scholars of Chinese society and religion, Chinese migration and diaspora studies.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
by Claire Laurier DecoteauIn the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
by Claire Laurier DecoteauIn the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
by Claire Laurier DecoteauIn the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
by Claire Laurier DecoteauIn the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa
by Claire Laurier DecoteauIn the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.” In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community
by Eviatar ZerubavelGenealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives. An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity. "An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."-Science "The author examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not only kinship, but also other domains ranging from Supreme Court justices to religions. Genealogy is 'first and foremost a way of thinking' and not simply a way to represent biological ancestor-descendant relations."-CHOICE "In Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers, pulls back the curtain on the genealogical obsession. Genealogies, he argues, aren't the straightforward, objective accounts of our ancestries we often presume them to be. Instead, they're heavily curated social constructions, and are as much about our values as they are about the facts of who gave birth to whom."-The Boston Globe "Making the world seem strange is the first step to understanding it anew. Eviatar Zerubavel is a genius at doing this. Here he takes on kinship and shows us the profound, politically fraught, sometimes frightening, and often funny ways in which we take the biological fact that life creates life and fashion genealogy from it. This is a brilliant, witty, effortlessly well-informed book that anyone with ancestors or anyone who worries about ethnicity, race, and nationalism will read with pleasure and surprise."-Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley "While ancestors and relatives are genetically given, the genetics give us no clue how we should measure their relative importance to us. In this lively and well-written book, Eviatar Zerubavel avoids the aridity of technical kinship analysis and uses a personal perspective to show how humans fabricate, in the literal sense, their relatives, by a creative process of elimination and selection in the generation of rules. It is easily the most engaging introduction to kinship for the general reader that I have read, and a contribution in its own right to a wider understanding of our place in evolution."-Robin Fox, author of Kinship and Marriage and The Tribal Imagination "Kinship is a perennial staple-necessary but ordinarily dry as dust-of anthropology, sociology, and demography. In Ancestors and Relatives, Eviatar Zerubavel makes the topic new, bringing to it an encyclopedic knowledge and a powerful sociologica
Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community
by Eviatar ZerubavelGenealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives. An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity. "An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."-Science "The author examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not only kinship, but also other domains ranging from Supreme Court justices to religions. Genealogy is 'first and foremost a way of thinking' and not simply a way to represent biological ancestor-descendant relations."-CHOICE "In Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers, pulls back the curtain on the genealogical obsession. Genealogies, he argues, aren't the straightforward, objective accounts of our ancestries we often presume them to be. Instead, they're heavily curated social constructions, and are as much about our values as they are about the facts of who gave birth to whom."-The Boston Globe "Making the world seem strange is the first step to understanding it anew. Eviatar Zerubavel is a genius at doing this. Here he takes on kinship and shows us the profound, politically fraught, sometimes frightening, and often funny ways in which we take the biological fact that life creates life and fashion genealogy from it. This is a brilliant, witty, effortlessly well-informed book that anyone with ancestors or anyone who worries about ethnicity, race, and nationalism will read with pleasure and surprise."-Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley "While ancestors and relatives are genetically given, the genetics give us no clue how we should measure their relative importance to us. In this lively and well-written book, Eviatar Zerubavel avoids the aridity of technical kinship analysis and uses a personal perspective to show how humans fabricate, in the literal sense, their relatives, by a creative process of elimination and selection in the generation of rules. It is easily the most engaging introduction to kinship for the general reader that I have read, and a contribution in its own right to a wider understanding of our place in evolution."-Robin Fox, author of Kinship and Marriage and The Tribal Imagination "Kinship is a perennial staple-necessary but ordinarily dry as dust-of anthropology, sociology, and demography. In Ancestors and Relatives, Eviatar Zerubavel makes the topic new, bringing to it an encyclopedic knowledge and a powerful sociologica
Ancestors, Territoriality, and Gods: A Natural History of Religion (The Frontiers Collection)
by Ina Wunn Davina GrojnowskiThis books sets out to explain how and why religion came into being. Today this question is as fascinating as ever, especially since religion has moved to the centre of socio-political relationships. In contrast to the current, but incomplete approaches from disciplines such as cognitive science and psychology, the present authors adopt a new approach, equally manifest and constructive, that explains the origins of religion based strictly on behavioural biology. They employ accepted research results that remove all need for speculation. Decisive factors for the earliest demonstrations of religion are thus territorial behaviour and ranking, coping with existential fears, and conflict solution with the help of rituals. These in turn, in a process of cultural evolution, are shown to be the roots of the historical and contemporary religions.
Ancestral Diets and Nutrition
by Christopher CumoAncestral Diets and Nutrition supplies dietary advice based on the study of prehuman and human populations worldwide over the last two million years. This thorough, accessible book uses prehistory and history as a laboratory for testing the health effects of various foods. It examines all food groups by drawing evidence from skeletons and their teeth, middens, and coprolites along with written records where they exist to determine peoples&’ health and diet. Fully illustrated and grounded in extensive research, this book enhances knowledge about diet, nutrition, and health. It appeals to practitioners in medicine, nutrition, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, and history, and those seeking a clear explanation of what humans have eaten across the ages and what we should eat now. Features: Sixteen chapters examine fat, sweeteners, grains, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, and animal and plant sources of protein. Integrates information about diet, nutrition, and health from ancient, medieval, modern and current sources, drawing from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Provides comprehensive coverage based on the study of several hundred sources and the provision of over 2,000 footnotes. Presents practical information to help shape readers&’ next meal through recommendations of what to eat and what to avoid.
Ancestral Diets and Nutrition
by Christopher CumoAncestral Diets and Nutrition supplies dietary advice based on the study of prehuman and human populations worldwide over the last two million years. This thorough, accessible book uses prehistory and history as a laboratory for testing the health effects of various foods. It examines all food groups by drawing evidence from skeletons and their teeth, middens, and coprolites along with written records where they exist to determine peoples&’ health and diet. Fully illustrated and grounded in extensive research, this book enhances knowledge about diet, nutrition, and health. It appeals to practitioners in medicine, nutrition, anthropology, biology, chemistry, economics, and history, and those seeking a clear explanation of what humans have eaten across the ages and what we should eat now. Features: Sixteen chapters examine fat, sweeteners, grains, roots and tubers, fruits, vegetables, and animal and plant sources of protein. Integrates information about diet, nutrition, and health from ancient, medieval, modern and current sources, drawing from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Provides comprehensive coverage based on the study of several hundred sources and the provision of over 2,000 footnotes. Presents practical information to help shape readers&’ next meal through recommendations of what to eat and what to avoid.
Ancestral Future (Critical South)
by Ailton KrenakIn response to the damage caused by centuries of colonial ravaging and the current ecological, political and social crises, the leading Indigenous thinker and activist Ailton Krenak warns against the power of corporate capitalism and its destructive impact. Capitalism encroaches on every corner of the planet and orients us toward a future of promised progress, achievement and growth, but this future doesn’t exist – we just imagine it. This orientation to the future also blinds us to what exists around us, to the plants and animals with which we share the Earth and to the rivers that flow through our lands. Rivers are not just resources to be exploited by us or channels to carry away our waste, they are beings that connect us with our past. If there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, since it is already present in the here and now and in that which exists around us, in the rivers and mountains and trees that are our kin. In a spoken language that has the mark of ancestral oral wisdom, Krenak offers a new perspective that challenges and disrupts some of the assumptions that underpin Western attitudes and mentalities. His work will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the climate crisis and the worsening plight of our planet.
Ancestral Genealogies in Modern China: A Study of Lineage Organizations in Hong Kong and Mainland China (Routledge Culture, Society, Business in East Asia Series)
by Masahisa SegawaThis book explores the remarkable phenomenon of Chinese lineages – groups of people connected through patrilineal kinship ties, which have existed for centuries in China and which are currently undergoing significant revival after being suppressed in many parts of China during the cultural revolution period. The book considers how lineages and the associated networks and membership associations have developed, surveys how lineages have been studied by anthropologists and others over time in different ways, and discusses the important social functions of lineages in contemporary Hong Kong and mainland China.
Ancestral Genealogies in Modern China: A Study of Lineage Organizations in Hong Kong and Mainland China (Routledge Culture, Society, Business in East Asia Series)
by Masahisa SegawaThis book explores the remarkable phenomenon of Chinese lineages – groups of people connected through patrilineal kinship ties, which have existed for centuries in China and which are currently undergoing significant revival after being suppressed in many parts of China during the cultural revolution period. The book considers how lineages and the associated networks and membership associations have developed, surveys how lineages have been studied by anthropologists and others over time in different ways, and discusses the important social functions of lineages in contemporary Hong Kong and mainland China.
Ancestral Genomics: African American Health in the Age of Precision Medicine
by Constance B. HilliardA leading evolutionary historian offers a radical solution to racial health disparities in the United States.Constance B. Hilliard was living in Japan when she began experiencing joint pain. Her doctor diagnosed osteoarthritis—a common ailment for someone her age. But her bloodwork showed something else: Hilliard, who had never had kidney problems, appeared to be suffering from renal failure. When she returned to Texas, however, a new round of tests showed that her kidneys were healthy. Unlike the Japanese doctor, her American primary care provider had checked a box on her lab report for “African American.” As a scholar of scientific racism, Hilliard was perplexed. Why should race, which experts agree has no biological basis, matter for getting accurate test results?Ancestral Genomics is the result of Hilliard’s decade-long quest to solve this puzzle. In a masterful synthesis of evolutionary history, population genetics, and public health research, she addresses the usefulness of race as a heuristic in genomic medicine. Built from European genetic data, the Human Genome Project and other databases have proven inadequate for identifying disease-causing gene variants in patients of African descent. Such databases, Hilliard argues, overlook crucial information about the environments to which their ancestors’ bodies adapted prior to the transatlantic slave trade. Hilliard shows how, by analyzing “ecological niche populations,” a classification model that combines family and ecological histories with genetic information, our increasingly advanced genomic technologies, including personalized medicine, can serve African Americans and other people of color, while avoiding racial essentialism.Forcefully argued and morally urgent, Ancestral Genomics is a clarion call for the US medical community to embrace our multigenomic society.
Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory
by Mark EdmondsArchaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic sites had many different, frequently contradictory functions, and there may have been other uses for which no evidence survives. How can archaeologists present an effective interpetation, with the consciousness that both their own subjectivity, and the variety of conflicting views will determine their approach. Because these sites have become a focus for so much controversy, the problem of presenting them to the public assumes a critical importance. The authors do not seek to provide a comprehensive review of the archaeology of all these causewayed sites in Britain; rather they use them as case studies in the development of an archaeological interpetation.
Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscapes, Monuments and Memory
by Mark EdmondsArchaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic sites had many different, frequently contradictory functions, and there may have been other uses for which no evidence survives. How can archaeologists present an effective interpetation, with the consciousness that both their own subjectivity, and the variety of conflicting views will determine their approach. Because these sites have become a focus for so much controversy, the problem of presenting them to the public assumes a critical importance. The authors do not seek to provide a comprehensive review of the archaeology of all these causewayed sites in Britain; rather they use them as case studies in the development of an archaeological interpetation.
Ancestral House: The Black Short Story In The Americas And Europe
by Charles RowellAn anthology of 70 short stories by writers of African descent. The authors are from Europe and the Americas (about half of them from the United States), and they include Alice Walker, Hal Bennett and John Edgar Wideman.