Always contextualize. Always historicize. Always focus on the particular and the specific. These have become basic mantras in cultural anthropology, as well as the humanities in general. And with these mantras have come a deep suspi-cion of wide-ranging comparative studies, and in particular a deep suspicion of the general categories that undergird such comparative work. Terms like myt…
ocial and behavioral scientists have tended to focus on young people’suse of (both legal and illegal) psychoactive and addictive substances,largely ignoring their use of other kinds of chemicals. There are fourbroad trends in this body of research: one set of studies defines substanceuse as risky behavior, something that needs to be prevented by under-standing the determinants of use. These s…
Mr. Wang died of cancer at the Nanjing Municipal Hospital of Chinese Medicine during the wee hours of the morning on December 14, 2014. He was eighty-four years old and had been at the hospital for almost two weeks. Before coming to the hospital, he saw a series of doctors about pain in his legs and hips, but checked into the hospital when the pain increased. About five days before his death, a…
Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right and conside-red a core value in liberal democracies. However, it is also one of our time’s most contested issues, constantly claimed either to be too wide-ranging, allowing continuous repression of minority groups, or too limited – restricting dissent and democratic deli-beration. In this book we depart from conventional approaches to fr…
Sometimes animals surprise us by doing something that seems uncannily human-like.Marmosets (South American monkeys of the family Callitrichidae) are tiny, weighing only around 300–400g, and though they are primates they look entirely unlike humans, perhaps even a little more like squirrels. However, like humans they form pair bonds, and collaborate in childcare…
Entrance into the sacred heart of the Sancang forest requires a steep descent of 337 unevenly aligned, concrete steps. With every passing year, the tentacles of tree roots make further advances in their inevitable quest to reclaim the forest floor. Ka handap; ka luhur – the Sundanese (West Javan) terms for descending and ascending – I climb the steps several times a day following gibbons fr…
The implementation of these professional training courses assumed a far more engaging significance than what is commonly assumed by those who believe it their exclusive prerogative to interpret the transfer of the skills re-quired to carry out given activities. It also drew attention to the need to mod-ulate the interpretative key to the social role associated with the activities to be carried …
Sure, paleontologist and historians can make a virtue out of necessity (see, e.g.,Muir,1991; Zemon Davis,2010:5–6; Peltonen,2012; Bassi,2016), but the com-monsensical assumption is that immediate observation and interrogation of phenom-ena in their entirety are preferable—time travel would be more effective.1However,the recourse to traces is getting more frequent not only for studying the h…
Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose—and, if at all possible, cure—the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Wa…
he most important subdivisions of the province were calledprefectures; directly subordinate to the provincial governmentthere might also be smaller units called independent departmentsor subprefectures. Prefectures in turn were subdivided into xian,"counties" (or, as some authors have it, "districts"); these werethe lowest units of formal territorial a…