Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Anthropology

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century - but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them.

How did Africans become "Blacks" in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make Blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of Blackness in law.

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities - those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means - and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism.

Based in the idea that social phenomena are best studied through the lens of different disciplinary perspectives, Empty Churches studies the growing number of individuals who no longer affiliate with a religious tradition. Coeditors Jan Stets, a social psychologist, and James Heft, a historian of theology, bring together leading scholars in the fields of sociology, developmental psychology, gerontology, political science, history, philosophy, and pastoral theology.

For more than 15 years, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of a cabal of powerful military-industrialists, and more.

In 2007, the X Prize Foundation announced that it would give $10 million to anyone who could build a safe, mass-producible car that could travel one hundred miles on the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas. The challenge attracted more than one hundred teams from all over the world, including dozens of amateurs. Many designed their cars entirely from scratch, rejecting decades of thinking about what a car should look like.

A Southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In Killers of the Dream, her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation—the intricate system of taboos—that undergirded Southern society.

Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures.

Are taxi drivers in today's era of the ride-hail app performing care work akin to domestic and household labor? Drawing on interviews with drivers, labor organizers, and members of licensing commissions, as well as case law and other published resources, Spent Behind the Wheel is a must for listeners interested in critical studies of technological change and the gig economy, showing how drivers' capacities are drained for the benefit of riders, corporations, and the maintenance of the racial state.

This book presents the latest research on status generalization in a variety of settings, examining new interventions for its negative effects. Drawing from research in sociology, social psychology, education, organizations, mental health, and other fields, the book connects to several bodies of research that include stigma and stereotyping, exchange and power, and organizations. With its balanced, multidisciplinary approach to the challenges of social hierarchies and expectations, Unequals is an essential volume for all interested in status processes and inequalities.

At least 200,000 people have died in Mexico's so-called drug war, and the worst suffering has been in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. How did it get so bad? After three decades studying that question, Howard Campbell doesn't believe there is any one answer. A rigorous yet moving account, Downtown Juárez is informed by the sex workers, addicts, hustlers, bar owners, human smugglers, migrants, and down-and-out workers struggling to survive in an underworld where horrifying abuses have come to seem like the natural way of things.

Journey without End chronicles the years-long journey of "extracontinentales"—African and South Asian migrants moving through Latin America, toward the United States. Based on five years of collaborative research between a journalist and an anthropologist, this book makes a narrative-driven critique of how state-level immigration policy fails extracontinental migrants.

Anxious Eaters shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs—which is also why they tend to fail. Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters.

From the first steps of our prehistoric ancestors, to the development of complex languages, to the intricacies of religions and cultures across the world, diverse factors have shaped the human species as we know it. Anthropology strives to untangle this fascinating web of history to work out who we were in the past, what that means for human beings today, and who we might be tomorrow.