This collection addresses the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions.

This book was the first detailed, comprehensive study of Bush Mekeo culture and society.

Verslag van een onderzoek naar de waarden die Nederlanders écht belangrijk vinden, en de veranderingen die in dat waardenpatroon sedert 1981 zijn opgetreden.

The Chambri of Papua New Guinea are well known as being the "Tchambuli" of Margaret Mead's influential work, Sex and Temperament, in which she described them as people among whom, in contrast to Western society, women dominated over men. In this book, the authors analyze Mead's data and present original material to reveal that Mead misinterpreted the Chambri situation. In fact, Chambri women neither dominate men, nor vice versa. They use this reformulated interpretation to discuss the relevance of the Chambri case for the understanding of gender relations in Western society today, showing that male dominance is not inevitable. At the same time, they use their knowledge of cultural alternatives to clarify Western feminist objectives.

This 1988 book was the first full-length study ever to be published on the subject of sign language as a means of communication among Australian Aborigines. Based on fieldwork conducted over a span of nine years, the volume presents a thorough analysis of the structure of sign languages and their relationship to spoken languages.

Drawing on an ethnographic study of a remote farming community in the Auvergne, Dr Reed-Danahay challenges conventional views about the operation of the French school system. She demonstrates how parents and children subvert and resist the ideological messages of the teachers, and describes the ways in which a sense of local difference is sustained and valued, through a complex interplay of schooling and family life. This book explores the role played by history, identity, and power in local responses to a national institution. A significant contribution to the anthropology of education, this book offers fresh insights into the ways in which French culture is transmitted to the coming generation. Dr Reed-Danahay also provides lucid and critical discussions of sociological theories on education, including those of Bourdieu.

An anthropological study of this cohesive group which prefers to struggle against modern civilization than change a traditional way of life

This book is about violence in the Brazilian city of Sao Luis. It describes how people think about and negotiate dangerous encounters - vital and disturbing experiences that, when they go wrong, yield moral failure, humiliation, and death. Brazilians, like people elsewhere, worry about the perils of coming face-to-face with the wrong person, at the wrong time, under the wrong circumstances. The book discusses two conceptually linked forms of perilous face-to-face encounters: Carnival, a bacchanalian festival, and briga, a potentially lethal street confrontation. When playing becomes fighting, Carnival's samba, fueled by the controlled venting of dangerous passions, gives way to the explosive pas de deux of the street fight. Sao-luisenses tell vivid, sometimes terrifying, stories of verbal and physical confrontations. Their narratives, based on cultural models of Carnivals and brigas, highlight the vulnerability of the self to humiliation by others and the vulnerability of moral controls to one's own hostile emotions. The book argues that this double sense of social and psychological vulnerability is a product of Brazilian interpersonal relations, which are profoundly marked by the arbitrary exercise of power and the stifling of resentment in subordinates. Culture here consists not of shared symbols but of shared quandaries. The author suggests that Brazilian street fighting is an alarm bell - an inarticulate representation of pressing but poorly understood social and psychological dilemmas. Violence in Sao Luis may therefore be a desperate attempt to understand and come to grips with the very resentment, rooted in the city's harsh social transactions, that engenders it.

This is a new, revised edition of a highly acclaimed and widely used general introduction to social anthropology, first published in 1976. In a clear, lively, and entertaining fashion, it offers teachers and students a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to social anthropology, combining British structural-functionalism with the leading ideas of Marx, Freud and Lévi-Strauss, and joining forces with historians, political scientists, and psychologists. One of his particuair concerns is to reveal how insights from 'traditional' cultures illuminate what we take for granted in contemporary industrial and post-industrial society. He shows how, in the pluralist world in which we all now live, those who study 'other' cultures ultimately learn about themselves. This is the relevance of social anthropology today.

This book represents a major critique of the way Malthusian thinking has influenced capitalist development policy in the modern period, as well as in the past. Taking an historical and comparative view, it highlights the strategic role of Malthusian ideas in the defence of capitalist political economy when confronted by struggles for equality and human progress. The leading historical example the author takes offers a major reassessment of the origins of the Irish Famine. His contemporary case study focuses on the Green Revolution, which the author analyses in terms of a broad Western strategy of capitalist agricultural development in the face of peasant insurgency. He examines how Malthusian arguments portrayed agricultural modernization as a humanitarian attempt to forestall a food crisis in the developing world when, in reality, he argues the agenda was to defer land reform and bolster existing rural class structures. Finally, the book examines how the political economy of underdevelopment is currently being obscured by alarm over the environmental impact of over-population, and how such Malthusian concerns represent the poor, not as victims of capitalist development, but as perpetrators of environmental destruction.

Akos Ostor's work is an interpretive study of cultural forms and meaning in the social relations of everyday life in Vishnupur, India. Culture and Power considers basic issues of anthropology, problems in the study of social categories and concepts and the social reality, the impact of the West on India.

Thomas Sheridan's study of the municipio of Cucurpe, Sonora, offers new insight into the ability of peasants to respond to ecological and political change. In order to survive as small rancher-farmers, the CucurpeAos battle aridity and one another in a society characterized by sharp economic inequality and long-standing conflict over the distribution of land and water. Sheridan has written an ethnography of resource control, one that weds the approaches of political economy and cultural ecology in order to focus upon both the external linkages and internal adaptations that shape three peasant corporate communities. He examines the ecological and economic constraints which scarce and necessary resources place upon households in Cucurpe, and then investigates why many such households have formed corporate communities to insure their access to resources beyond their control. Finally, he identifies the class differences that exist within the corporate communities as well as between members of those organizations and the private ranchers who surround them. "Where the Dove Calls" (the meaning of "Cucurpe" in the language of the Opata Indians), an important contribution to peasant studies, reveals the household as the basic unit of Cucurpe society. By viewing Cucurpe's corporate communities as organizations of fiercely independent domestic units rather than as expressions of communal solidarity, Sheridan shows that peasants are among the exploiters as well as the exploited. CucurpeAos struggle to maintain the autonomy of their households even as they join together to protect corporate grazing lands and irrigation water. Any attempt to weaken or destroy that independence is met with oppositionthat ranges from passive resistance to violence.