Stanley Ulijaszek - Böcker

Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book includes case studies from across the Asia and Pacific regions -Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. When Culture Impacts Health offers conceptual, methodological and practical insights into understanding and successfully mediating cultural influences to address old and new public health issues including safe water delivery, leprosy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and body image. It contains useful methodological tools - how to map cultural consensus, measure wealth capital, conduct a cultural economy audit, for example. It provides approaches for discerning between ethnic and racial constructs and for conducting research among indigenous peoples. The book will be indispensible for culture and health researchers in all regions.

Discusses global application of case descriptions Demonstrates how a cultural approach to health research enriches and informs our understanding of intractable public health problems Covers methods and measurements applicable to a variety of cultural research approaches as well as actual research results Case studies include medical anthropology, cultural epidemiology, cultural history and social medicine perspectives

During the last three decades, obesity has emerged as a big public health issue in affluent societies. A number of academic and policy approaches have been taken, none of which has been very effective. Most of the academic research, whether biological, epidemiological, social-scientific, or in the humanities, has focused on the individual, and on his or her response to external incentives.The point of departure taken here is that institutions matter a great deal too, and especially the normative environment of the nation state. In brief, the argument is that obesity is a response to stress, and that some types of welfare regimes are more stressful than others. English-speaking market-liberal societies have higher levels of obesity, and also higher levels of labour and product market competition, which induce uncertainty and anxiety. The studies presented here investigate this hypothesis, utilising a variety of disciplines, and the concluding contribution by the editors presents strong statistical evidence for its validity at the aggregate level. The hypothesis has an important bearing on public health policy and, indirectly, on economic policy more generally. It indicates that important drivers of obesity arise from the interaction between the external 'shock' of falling food prices and the enduring normative assumptions that govern society as a whole.If obesity is determined in part by inflexible norms and institutions, it may not be easy to counter it by focused interventions. Distinctive societal policy norms like an attachment to individualism (which national communities embrace with some conviction) may have harmful social spillovers which are rarely taken into account.

The Human Sciences address problems in nature and society that often require coordinated approaches of several scientific disciplines and scholarly research, embracing the social and biological sciences, and history. When we wish, for example, to understand how some sub-populations and not others come to be vulnerable, why a disease spreads in one part of a population and not another, or which gene variants are transmitted across generations, then a remarkable range of disciplinary perspectives need to be brought together, from the study of institutional structures, cultural boundaries, and social networks down to the micro-biology of cellular pathways, and gene expression. The need to explain and address differential impacts of pressing contemporary issues like AIDS, ageing, social and economic inequalities, and environmental change, are well-known cases in point. Population concepts, models, and evidence lie at the core of approaches to all of these problems, if only because accurate differentiation and identification of groups, their structures, constituents, and relations between sub-populations, are necessary to specify their nature and extent. The study of population thus draws both on statistical methodologies of demography and population genetics and sustained observation of the ways in which populations and sub-populations are formed, maintained, or broken up in nature, in the laboratory, and in society. In an era in which research needs to operate on multiple levels, population thinking thus provides a common ground for communication and critical thought across disciplines.Population in the Human Sciences addresses the need for review and assessment of the framework of interdisciplinary population studies. Limitations to prevailing postwar paradigms like the Evolutionary Synthesis and Demographic Transition were becoming evident by the 1970s. Subsequent decades have witnessed an immense expansion of population modelling and related empirical inquiry, with new genetic developments that have reshaped evolutionary, population, and developmental biology. The rise of anthropological and historical demography, and social network analysis, are playing major roles in rethinking modern and earlier population history. More recently, the emergence of sub-disciplines like biodemography and evolutionary anthropology, and growing links between evolutionary and developmental biology, indicate a growing convergence of biological and social approaches to population.

How do the media represent obesity and eating disorders? How are these representations related to one another? And how do the news media select which scientific findings and policy decisions to report? Multi-disciplinary in approach, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media presents critical new perspectives on media representations of obesity and eating disorders, with analyses of print, online, and televisual media framings. Exploring abjection and alarm as the common themes linking media framings of obesity and eating disorders, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media shows how the media similarly position these conditions as dangerous extremes of body size and food practice. The volume then investigates how news media selectively cover and represent science and policy concerning obesity and eating disorders, with close attention to the influence of pre-existing framings alongside institutional and moral agendas. A rich, comprehensive analysis of media framings of obesity and eating disorders - as embodied conditions, complex disorders, public health concerns, and culturally significant phenomena - this volume will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences and all those interested in understanding cultural aspects of obesity and eating disorders.

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

"This book...presents a powerful case for anthropology that provides a full and whole account of the contemporary world, as well as some dilemmas...Taken together, the different approaches and case studies presented in this volume amount to an important and refreshing perspective...showing how contemporary social anthropology, with [its] 'interdisciplinary turn', offers explanations that can help us understand the interplay of culture, society, biology, genetics, and ecology." * JRAI "...provides some fine examples of ways that anthropology can capture and hold valuable ground in the borderlands between scientific and humanistic inquiry..an excellent volume...remarkable...for its systematic use of examples such as ethnomedicine, landscape studies, and cognitive anthropology to demonstrate the immensely rich ways in which a cultural orientation can meet various kinds of science." * Reviews in Anthropology Given the broad reach of anthropology as the science of humankind, there are times when the subject fragments into specialisms and times when there is rapprochement.Rather than just seeing them as reactions to each other, it is perhaps better to say that both tendencies co-exist and that it is very much a matter of perspective as to which is dominant at any moment. The perspective adopted by the contributors to this volume is that some anthropologists have, over the last decade or so, been paying considerable attention to developments in the study of social and biological evolution and of material culture, and that this has brought social, material cultural and biological anthropologists closer to each other and closer to allied disciplines such as archaeology and psychology. A more eclectic anthropology once characteristic of an earlier age is thus re-emerging. The new holism does not result from the merging of sharply distinguished disciplines but from among anthropologists themselves who see social organization as fundamentally a problem of human ecology, and, from that, of material and mental creativity, human biology, and the co-evolution of society and culture.It is part of a wider interest beyond anthropology in the origins and rationale of human activities, claims and beliefs, and draws on inferential or speculative reasoning as well as 'hard' evidence. The book argues that, while usefully borrowing from other subjects, all such reasoning must be grounded in prolonged, intensive and linguistically-informed fieldwork and comparison. David Parkin is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, All Souls College, having held the chair from 1996-2008. He was previously from 1964 to 1996 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. From February 2010 to October 2011 he was Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. He works in Eastern Africa among Muslims and non-Muslims on religion, healing, language, human bodily intelligence, and material culture. His books include Sacred Void (CUP 1991), Islamic prayer across the Indian Ocean (with Stephen Headley) (Curzon Press, 2000), The politics of cultural performance (with Lionel Caplan and Humphrey Fisher) (Berghahn Books, 1996) and Bush base, forest farm (with E.Croll) (Routledge 1992). Stanley Ulijaszek is Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Oxford, and was previously at the University of Cambridge. Current research interests include human evolutionary nutrition, and biocultural determinants of nutritional health in transitional economies of Eastern Europe and the Pacific. He has conducted research in Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, Poland, the UK, Australia, Bangladesh, Nepal and India. His books include Human Energetics in Biological Anthropology; Nutritional Anthropology; Prospects and Perspectives (with Simon Strickland).

Most people have some dissatisfaction or concern about body weight, fatness, or obesity, either personally or professionally. This book shows how the popular understanding of obesity is often at odds with scientific understandings, and how misunderstandings about people with obesity can further contribute to the problem. It describes, in an approachable way, interconnected debates about obesity in public policy, medicine and public health, and how media and social media engage people in everyday life in those debates. In chapters considering body fat and fatness, genetics, metabolism, food and eating, inequality, blame and stigma, and physical activity, this book brings separate domains of obesity research into the field of complexity. By doing so, it aids navigation through the minefield of misunderstandings about body weight, fatness, and obesity that exist today, after decades of mostly failed policies and interventions.

This timely and innovative book examines the roots, diverse forms, and international spread of mukbang, the phenomenon of digital eating which began in South Korea in 2008.In mukbang, creators known as ‘broadcast jockeys’ (or mukbangers) consume a variety of foods, often in huge quantities, for an online audience. Through an analysis of the practice of mukbang, this book critically explores how the ever-growing use and integration of digital technologies is shaping understandings, experiences, and engagements with food. It outlines the pursuit of meaning and meaning making during broadcasted mealtimes, bite after bite. The book takes the dual lens of anthropology and performance to make sense of mukbang, its evolutions, and its ongoing transformations. To give equal emphasis to all aspects of the practice during its examination, the book uses performance categories to frame its analysis. There are lights, cameras, and endless spectacular consumption. The diversity of mukbang is brought together and elaborated upon; a robust showtime menu of noisy ASMR, colour-coded meal spreads, competitive eating, and more, await.This significant and cohesive volume will be of pivotal interest to students, scholars, and academics of media studies, food studies, tourism, marketing, food and beverage management, public health, as well as those involved in the practice of mukbang, whether as a performer or viewer.

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

The transition in anthropological and biomedical research methods over the past 50 years, from anthropometric and craniometric measurements to large-scale microarray genetic studies has resulted in continued revision of opinions and ideas relating to the factors and forces that drive human variation. Human Variation:From the Laboratory to the Field brings together the contributions of 22 scientists working in four continents to identify and address challenges imposed by variability. It reviews the way we examine and analyze human variation, paying specific attention to genetics, growth and development, and physiology. In presenting new evidence and findings, it also discusses current developments in methodology and analytical techniques, detailing both field and laboratory approaches, and looking at how the two perspectives complement each other.In bridging that gap between laboratory trials and studies of the human in context, this book covers a number of interesting research areas including — Human adaptation to natural and artificial light, including variations in circadian photosensitivity and effects of light on GI activity Cold tolerance and lifestyle in modern society Genetics of body weight and obesity Human adaptability to emotional and intellectual mental stresses Geography, migration, climate, and environmental plasticity as contributors to human variation Impact of natural environmental stressors including pollution on physiological and morphological processesThis book is the latest volume in a series of works from the Society for the Study of Human Biology (SSHB), which for half a century has advanced and promoted research in the biology of human populations in all of its branches including human viability, genetics, human adaptability, and ecology, and evolution. It holds two scientific meetings a year. This volume represents work presented during its most recent gathering.

How do the media represent obesity and eating disorders? How are these representations related to one another? And how do the news media select which scientific findings and policy decisions to report? Multi-disciplinary in approach, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media presents critical new perspectives on media representations of obesity and eating disorders, with analyses of print, online, and televisual media framings. Exploring abjection and alarm as the common themes linking media framings of obesity and eating disorders, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media shows how the media similarly position these conditions as dangerous extremes of body size and food practice. The volume then investigates how news media selectively cover and represent science and policy concerning obesity and eating disorders, with close attention to the influence of pre-existing framings alongside institutional and moral agendas. A rich, comprehensive analysis of media framings of obesity and eating disorders - as embodied conditions, complex disorders, public health concerns, and culturally significant phenomena - this volume will be of interest to scholars and students across the social sciences and all those interested in understanding cultural aspects of obesity and eating disorders.

The transition in anthropological and biomedical research methods over the past 50 years, from anthropometric and craniometric measurements to large-scale microarray genetic studies has resulted in continued revision of opinions and ideas relating to the factors and forces that drive human variation. Human Variation:From the Laboratory to the Field brings together the contributions of 22 scientists working in four continents to identify and address challenges imposed by variability. It reviews the way we examine and analyze human variation, paying specific attention to genetics, growth and development, and physiology. In presenting new evidence and findings, it also discusses current developments in methodology and analytical techniques, detailing both field and laboratory approaches, and looking at how the two perspectives complement each other.In bridging that gap between laboratory trials and studies of the human in context, this book covers a number of interesting research areas including — Human adaptation to natural and artificial light, including variations in circadian photosensitivity and effects of light on GI activity Cold tolerance and lifestyle in modern society Genetics of body weight and obesity Human adaptability to emotional and intellectual mental stresses Geography, migration, climate, and environmental plasticity as contributors to human variation Impact of natural environmental stressors including pollution on physiological and morphological processesThis book is the latest volume in a series of works from the Society for the Study of Human Biology (SSHB), which for half a century has advanced and promoted research in the biology of human populations in all of its branches including human viability, genetics, human adaptability, and ecology, and evolution. It holds two scientific meetings a year. This volume represents work presented during its most recent gathering.

Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.

Human biological fertility was considered a important issue to anthropologists and colonial administrators in the first part of the 20th century, as a dramatic decline in population was observed in many regions. However, the total demise of Melanesian populations predicted by some never happened; on the contrary, a rapid population increase took place for the second part of the 20th century. This volume explores relationships between human fertility and reproduction, subsistence systems, the symbolic use of ideas of fertility and reproduction in linking landscape to individuals and populations, in Melanesian societies, past and present. It thus offers an important contribution to our understanding of the implications of social and economic change for reproduction and fertility in the broadest sense.