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Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment
A research focus on hazards, risk perception and risk minimizing strategies is relatively new in the social and environmental sciences. This volume by a prominent scholar of East African societies is a powerful example of this growing interest. Earlier theory and research tended to describe social and economic systems in some form of equilibrium. However recent thinking in human ecology, evolutionary biology, not to mention in economic and political theory has come to assign to "risk" a prominent role in predictive modeling of behavior. It turns out that risk minimalization is central to the understanding of individual strategies and numerous social institutions. It is not simply a periphera...
Seeking a Richer Harvest
Subsistence intensification, innovation and change have long figured prominently in explanations for the development of social complexity among foragers and horticulturalists. This set of global case studies re-examines the ‘subsistence question’ in light of recent research. It contrasts traditional approaches with recent archaeological research that presents human driven strategies for power, prestige, and status as causes of subsistence intensification.
As Pastoralists Settle
Throughout the world's arid regions, and particularly in northern and eastern Africa, formerly nomadic pastoralists are undergoing a transition to settled life. This reference shows that although pastoral settlement is often encouraged by international development agencies and national governments, the social, economic and health consequences of sedentism are not inevitably beneficial.
Divination and Healing
Divination is an important feature of cultures all over the world. While some may still question the efficacy of divination systems, they continue to serve their communities by diagnosing ailments, prescribing healing treatments, and solving problems. Yet despite their universality, there are relatively few comprehensive studies of divination systems. This volume seeks to fill this gap regarding the use of divination in healing. Here some of the world’s leading authorities draw on their own fieldwork and participation in ritual to present detailed case studies, demonstrating that divination rituals can have therapeutic effects. As the contributors examine the systems of knowledge that divi...
Case Studies in Human Ecology
This volume was developed to meet a much noted need for accessible case study material for courses in human ecology, cultural ecology, cultural geography, and other subjects increasingly offered to fulfill renewed student and faculty interest in environmental issues. The case studies, all taken from the journal Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Jouma~ represent a broad cross-section of contemporary research. It is tempting but inaccurate to sug gest that these represent the "Best of Human Ecology." They were selected from among many outstanding possibilities because they worked well with the organization of the book which, in turn, reflects the way in which courses in human ecology are oft...
Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa
A scholarly volume devoted to an understanding of contemporary nomadic and pastoral societies in the Middle East and North Africa. This volume recognizes the variable mobile quality of the ways of life of these societies which persist in accommodating the ‘nation-state’ of the 20th and 21st century but remain firmly transnational and highly adaptive. Composed of four sections around the theme of contestation it includes examinations of contested authority and power, space and social transformation, development and economic transformation, and cultures and engendered spaces.
Migration in Africa
This book introduces readers to the age of intra-African migration, a period from the mid-19th century onward in which the center of gravity of African migration moved decisively inward. Most books tend to zoom in on Africa’s external migration during the earlier intercontinental slave trades and the more recent outmigration to the Global North, but this book argues that migration within the continent has been far more central to the lives of Africans over the course of the last two centuries. The book demonstrates that only by taking a broad historical and continent-wide perspective can we understand the distinctions between the more immediate drivers of migration and deeper patterns of c...
Emerging Orders in the Sudans
This book explores the emergent character of social orders in Sudan and South Sudan. It provides vivid insights into multitudes of ordering practices and their complex negotiation. Recurring patterns of exclusion and ongoing struggles to reconfigure disadvantaged positions are investigated as are shifting borders, changing alliances and relationships with land and language. The book takes a careful and close look at institutional arrangements that shape everyday life in the Sudans, probing how social forms have persisted or changed. It proposes reading the post-colonial history of the Sudans as a continuous struggle to find institutional orders valid for all citizens. The separation of Sudan...
Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology
This second edition of Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology arrives at just the right time, as new advances in science increasingly affect anthropologists of all stripes. Lawrence Kuznar begins by reviewing the basic issues of scientific epistemology in anthropology as they have taken shape over the life of the discipline. He then describes postmodern and other critiques of both science and scientific anthropology, and he concludes with stringent analyses of these debates. This new edition brings this important text firmly into the 21st century; it not only updates the scholarly debates but it describes new research techniques—such as computer modeling systems—that could not have been imagined just a decade ago. In a field that has become increasingly divided over basic methods of reasearch and interpretation, Kuznar makes a powerful argument that anthropology should return to its roots in empirical science.
