Drama and Power in a Hunting Society

Drama and Power in a Hunting Society
Author: Anne Chapman
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1982-11-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780521238847

The Selk'nam people, now virtually extinct, are a classic example of hunting societies. The book is based on the author's field work among the last surviving 'pure' Selk'nam, as well as an exhaustive review of the previous literature.

Defacement

Defacement
Author: Michael T. Taussig
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1999
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804732000

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

Mimesis and Alterity

Mimesis and Alterity
Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2018-05-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351853864

In this ambitious and accomplished work, Taussig explores the complex and interwoven concepts of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. The book moves from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, to the fable of colonial ‘first contact’ and the alleged mimetic power of ‘primitives’. Twenty years after the original publication, Taussig revisits the work in a new preface which contextualises the impact of Mimesis and Alterity. Drawing on the ideas of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer and ethnographic accounts of the Cuna, Taussig demonstrates how the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism and the idea of alterity has become increasingly unstable. Vigorous and unorthodox, this cross-cultural discussion continues to deepen our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre

The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre
Author: John Russell Brown
Publisher: Oxford Illustrated History
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780192854421

A scholarly look at 4,500 years of theater, beginning with its Greek origins and concluding with a study of theater since 1970.

Constructing Frames of Reference

Constructing Frames of Reference
Author: Lewis R. Binford
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520303407

Many consider Lewis Binford to be the single most influential figure in archaeology in the last half-century. His contributions to the "New Archaeology" changed the course of the field, as he argued for the development of a scientifically rigorous framework to guide the excavation and interpretation of the archaeological record. This book, the culmination of Binford's intellectual legacy thus far, presents a detailed description of his methodology and its significance for understanding hunter-gatherer cultures on a global basis. This landmark publication will be an important step in understanding the great process of cultural evolution and will change the way archaeology proceeds as a scientific enterprise. This work provides a major synthesis of an enormous body of cultural and environmental information and offers many original insights into the past. Binford helped pioneer what is now called "ethnoarchaeology"—the study of living societies to help explain cultural patterns in the archaeological record—and this book is grounded on a detailed analysis of ethnographic data from about 340 historically known hunter-gatherer populations. The methodological framework based on this data will reshape the paradigms through which we understand human culture for years to come.

Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research

Key Issues in Hunter-Gatherer Research
Author: Linda J. Ellanna
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000324850

Hunter-gatherer research has experienced enormous expansion over the past three decades. In the late 1950s less than a score of anthropologists were actively engaged in issue-oriented studies of foraging populations. Since then, the number of active researchers has grown into the hundreds.This book offers the most up-to-date anthology of papers on hunter-gatherer research and contains possibly the most comprehensive bibliography on hunter-gatherers ever published. It will be essential reading for all students of hunter-gatherer societies.

Creatures of Fashion

Creatures of Fashion
Author: John Soluri
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2024-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469675730

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe's houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world." From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

The Case for Work

The Case for Work
Author: Jean-Philippe Deranty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2024-10-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192887165

The modern work ethic is in crisis. The numerous harms and injustices harboured by current labour markets and work organisations, combined with the threat of mass unemployment entailed in rampant automation, have inspired a strong “post-work” movement in the theoretical humanities and social sciences, echoed by many intellectuals, journalists, artists and progressives. Against this widespread temptation to declare work obsolete, The Case for Work shows that our paltry situation is critical precisely because work matters. It is a mistake to advocate a society beyond work on the basis of its current organisation. In the first part of the book, the arguments feeding into the “case against work” are located in the long history of social and political thought. This comprehensive, genealogical inquiry highlights many conceptual and methodological issues that continue to plague contemporary accounts. The second part of the book makes the “case for work” in a positive way through a dialectical argument. The very feature of work that its critics emphasise, namely that it is a realm of necessity, is precisely what makes it the conduit for freedom and flourishing, provided each member of society is in a position to face this necessity in conditions that are equal and just.

Guts and Brains

Guts and Brains
Author: Wil Roebroeks
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2007
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789087280147

The human brain and its one hundred billion neurons compose the most complex organ in the body and harness more than 20% of all the energy we produce. Why do we have such large and energy-demanding brains, and how have we been able to afford such an expensive organ for thousands of years? Guts and Brains discusses the key variables at stake in such a question, including the relationship between brain size and diet, diet and social organization, and large brains and the human sexual division of labor. Showcasing how small changes in the diet of early hominins came to have large implications for the behavior of modern humans, this interdisciplinary volume provides an entry for the reader into understanding the development of both early primates and our own species.