Shepard Forman - Böcker

For years, anthropology has brought the lives and beliefs of "exotic" peoples to audiences in the West. Diagnosing America: Anthropology and Public Engagement reveals the power of anthropological description and analysis when applied to social, economic, and political problems in the contemporary United States and demonstrates the urgent need for this work. Debunking the notion of anthropology as a "value-free" science, the authors argue forcefully for an anthropology expressly committed to cultural pluralism and democratic participation. At the same time, individual essays demonstrate the applicability of standard anthropological methods to the study of contemporary U.S. society and culture as they investigate contested values, community politics, middle-class economics, and workplace culture or describe the psychophysiological stress effects of exclusion on African- Americans and the coping mechanisms of Mexican-Americans along the border. Diagnosing America and the challenging "Statement to the Profession" that concludes it call for anthropologists to reach beyond the parochialism of their own discipline and to engage history, economics, sociology, and the policy sciences. It will be of interest to scholars in each of these fields who are concerned with the study and resolution of contemporary social problems in the United States and to students of American culture in this country and abroad. Shepard Forman is Director of the International Affairs Program of the Ford Foundation and a former Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan.

Cooperating for Peace and Security attempts to understand - more than fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, seven years after 9/11, and in the aftermath of the failure of the United Nations (UN) reform initiative - the relationship between US security interests and the factors that drove the evolution of multilateral security arrangements from 1989 to the present. Chapters cover a range of topics - including the UN, US multilateral cooperation, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), nuclear nonproliferation, European and African security institutions, conflict mediation, counterterrorism initiatives, international justice and humanitarian cooperation - examining why certain changes have taken place and the factors that have driven them and evaluating whether they have led to a more effective international system and what this means for facing future challenges.