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The term "folkbiology" refers to people's everyday understanding of the biological world—how they perceive, categorize, and reason about living kinds. The study of folkbiology not only sheds light on human nature, it may ultimately help us make the transition to a global economy without irreparably damaging the environment or destroying local cultures. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together the work of researchers in anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, biology, and philosophy of science. The issues covered include: Are folk taxonomies a first-order approximation to classical scientific taxonomies, or are they driven more directly by utilitarian c...
As increasing numbers of social anthropologists use a computer for wordprocessing, interest in other applications inevitably follows, Computer Applications in Social Anthropology covers research activities shared by all social anthropologists and introduces new methods for organizing and interpreting data. Lucidly written, and sympathetic to the particular needs of social anthropologists, it will be of immense value to researchers and professionals in anthropology, development studies and sociology
A founder of and leading thinker in the field of modern ethnobiology looks at the widespread regularities in the classification and naming of plants and animals among peoples of traditional, nonliterate societies--regularities that persist across local environments, cultures, societies, and languages. Brent Berlin maintains that these patterns can best be explained by the similarity of human beings' largely unconscious appreciation of the natural affinities among groupings of plants and animals: people recognize and name a grouping of organisms quite independently of its actual or potential usefulness or symbolic significance in human society. Berlin's claims challenge those anthropologists ...
Rapid and complex social change is of urgent concern to all human societies, but how can researchers do justice both to the objective complexities of causal relations and to subjective experiences of different types of change? The present volume focuses upon cases of 'accelerating change' – including Russia, Iran, South Africa and Turkey – and examines some of the theoretical issues involved in conceptualizing social change and transformation and the methods for their study. The fifteen essays in this collection will be of interest to all students of history and the social sciences; and especially to students of social anthropology, sociology and development studies.
Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-Western Cultures consists of about 25 essays dealing with the environmental knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Thai, and Andean views of nature and the environment, among others, the book includes essays on Environmentalism and Images of the Other, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Worldviews and Ecology, Rethinking the Western/non-Western Divide, and Landscape, Nature, and Culture. The essays address the connections between nature and culture and relate the environmental practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both environmental history and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Arising initially from a conference, the papers published here have been integrated into book form to provide information on human activities and the tropical rainforest in the past and present, and on the possible future of the rainforest, in a unique way. Other books have considered some, but not all, of these themes; however, none has stressed the continuity of change over time and its possible outcome for the people of the forest as well as for the forest itself. Because of the approach taken, this book should appeal across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Indeed a prime aim has been to suggest that rainforest, because of its complexity and the complexity of people-rainforest relationships throughout time, deserves study from a broad perspective. This book poses more questions than answers about the rainforest and it is hoped that it will encourage readers to think about the rainforest in a wider way than hitherto. This book is aimed at geographers (physical and human), social anthropologists, archaeologists, pedologists, foresters and tropical botanists and will be of value to graduates of various disciplines setting out to research the rainforest.