Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Social Structures and Natural Systems
Trapped between the caricatured causalities of biological determinism and the sinister abdications of sociological relativism, socio-ecological interdisciplinarity stagnates. It has lost sight of the ambition of a long-term program and no longer works to conduct applied research on the concrete prerequisites for reliable cooperation, despite an accumulation of emergencies. The difficulty lies in the general and prolonged abandonment of necessary procedures under the influence of hidden philosophical presumptions. In the end, ecology, sociology, history, economics, agronomy, etc. are seriously handicapped by the absence of a common epistemology of comparative practice, an absence maintained by the dominant epistemology itself. Social Structures and Natural Systems seeks to demonstrate, with regard to social anthropology and ecology, a scientific compatibility of research subject to methodological requirements that are deductible from the conditions of the existence of science itself. All of this boils down to one observation: this book will be a success if, and only if, it becomes a beginning.
Chimpanzee Culture Wars
Decades later, starting in the 1980s, Japanese cultural primatology was given a second look as Euro-American primatologists began to debate amongst themselves the question of whether Homo sapiens is the only cultural animal. In the most recent chapter of this controversy, field researchers such as the Swiss primatologist Christophe Boesch have accused experimental psychologists such as Michael Tomasello of underestimating and even denying the capacity of chimpanzees for culture because they limit their studies to captive animals, brought up under cognitively debilitating conditions and tested in laboratory settings bound to favor human test subjects with whom the animals are compared. These controversies raise serious questions about what sort of laboratory culture is best for the study of primate cognition. .
Spatial Appropriations in Modern Empires, 1820-1960
This book provides fresh insights into colonial and imperial histories by focusing on spatial appropriations. Moving away from European notions of property, appropriation encompasses the many ways in which social actors consider a space as their own. This space may be physical or immaterial, public or intimate, lived or imagined. In modern empires, spatial appropriations amounted neither to a material and violent dispossession orchestrated by European or Japanese powers, nor to an ongoing and unquestioned resistance by subaltern peoples. They were rather sites of complex interactions, in which the part of each actor owed as much to “foreign” domination as to other political, social, economic and environmental factors. Cutting across common historiographical boundaries, the chapters of this book bring to light the declination and conjugation of various forms of spatial appropriation in the modern imperial age (1820-1960), taking readers on a journey from Russia to China, from the United States to South America, and from the Mediterranean world to Africa.
Anthropology and Race in Belgium and the Congo (1839-1922)
This books examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of ‘race’ structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists mainly used physical characters, like skull form and the color of hair and eyes, to delimitate ‘races’, which were believed to be permanent and existent. Their belief in a supposed racial superiority was however above all telling about their own origins and physical characters. Although it is often assumed that these ideas were subsequently transferred to the colony, the case of Belgian colon...
Sociobiology vs Socioecology
As a theory, sociobiology is opposed to socio-ecology, a discipline hampered since its birth. The indictment of the ideological intentions of the first has obscured the notion that the growing domination of the image of the “selfish gene” has obstructed the necessary rise of the second. For 40 years, a terrible force of inertia has thus frozen the global analysis of socio-ecological interactions outside the theoretical bias externally imposed on social sciences by so-called “behavioral ecology”, which amounts to a simple emanation of sociobiology. This book summarizes the methodological abuses and the illusory legitimations of a school whose sterility can no longer be concealed, but which is preparing to reinvent itself by cynically replacing its faltering laws by hijacking the recent advances in epigenetics. The authors shed light on unjustly sacrificed paths in the study of socio-ecological interactions.
Aux frontières du singe
"Le singe se présente aux chercheurs en sciences sociales comme une curiosité située aux frontières de leurs sujets d'enquêtes, tandis que les primatologues l'étudient en vue d'expliquer les processus culturels par des modèles biologiques. L'auteur repense ces deux approches et propose une anthropologie de l'animal, tout en se gardant de souscrire par principe à une équivalence entre compétences simiennes et compétences humaines. Comment les comportements des chimpanzés (alimentation, construction des nids) émergent-ils autour de ressources végétales qui intéressent aussi les hommes? Le lecteur est convié à suivre, du XIXe siècle à nos jours, l'organisation de leur coexistence dans les milieux agropastoraux du Kakandé en Guinée. Cette démarche inédite, alliant sources historiques et données issues du terrain, renouvelle aussi le débat sur les enjeux politiques et écologiques de la conservation."--Page 4 de la couverture.
Le spécimen et le collecteur
Le spécimen et le collecteur se concentre sur la première des étapes propres à toute entreprise naturaliste, celle de la collecte des spécimens. Les auteurs s’attachent à comprendre ses spécificités matérielles, intellectuelles et politiques et à cerner les enjeux de connaissance qui motivent ses protagonistes. Fouler le terrain de la collecte revient à sortir de l’ombre les savoirs et les attentes des informateurs et des intermédiaires locaux. Au fil des pages se dessinent, sur plus de deux siècles, des oppositions et des coalitions inattendues d’intérêts et d’agents hétéroclites (explorateurs et informateurs, colons et colonisés, savants et marchands...) qui entre...
Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity
A collection of essays on the foundational themes of freedom and spontaneity in Immanuel Kant's philosophy.
