In this provocative work, Sophia Heller challenges the assumption that we cannot be without myth, that myth is necessary to vital, soulful living. Indeed, Heller argues, we have been living in a world without myth for a long time. The Absence of Myth examines the loss of a religious mode of being-in-the-world and demonstrates how theorists who insist on the presence of myth deny its historical …

Demonstrating how practitioners in the emerging field of cultural epidemiology describe human health, communicate with diverse audiences, and intervene to improve health and prevent disease, this book uses textual and statistical portraits of disease to describe interdisciplinary collaborations. Interpreting epidemiology as a cultural practice helps to reveal the ways in which measurement, caus…

Biological anthropologists face an array of ethical issues as they engage in fieldwork around the world. In this volume human biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, and primatologists confront their involvement with, and obligations to, their research subjects, their discipline, society, and the environment. Those working with human populations explore such issues as who speaks for a group, …

This book is about personal names, something of abiding interest to specialists and lay readers alike. Over a million people have checked the American Name Society website since 1996, for instance. Many philosophers and linguists suggest that names are 'just' labels, but parents internationally are determined to get their children's names 'right'. Personal names may be given, lost, traded, stol…

The development of populations over time, and, on longer timescales, the evolution of species, are both influenced by a complex of interacting, underlying processes. Computer simulation provides a means of experimenting within an idealised framework to allow aspects of these processes and their interactions to be isolated, controlled, and understood. In this book, computer simulation is used to…

n this fresh, literate, and biting critique of current thinking on some of today's most important and controversial topics, leading anthropologists take on some of America's top pundits. This absorbing collection of essays subjects such popular commentators as Thomas Friedman, Samuel Huntington, Robert Kaplan, and Dinesh D'Souza to cold, hard scrutiny and finds that their writing is often misle…

Looks at campaign and election reform and legal issues on campaign fund raising, including the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 and the Bipartisan Compaign Reform Act of 2002, with a chronology and profiles of key figures. This book lives up to its series title. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence and ending with the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, coverage includes the Ele…

This volume examines television families in the context of family theory and research, and situates TV family analysis in a conceptual framework reflecting the experience of family life. For students and scholars in media studies, family communication and family studies.

This multi-author book covers tourism and development issues from less developed societies and countries from around the world, with chapters on specific regions and more specific themes that emerge from the interaction of tourism with such societies. Chapters include studies from SouthAfrica, India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Ecuador, Oceania and the Caribbean.

The making and consuming of tourism takes place within a complex social milieu, with competing actors drawing into the ???product??? peoples??? history, culture and lifestyles. Culture and people thus become part of the tourism product. The implications are not fully understood, though the literature ranges the arguments along a continuum with culture being described on one hand as vulnerable a…