Complexities
Subtitle: beyond nature & nurture
By: edited by Susan McKinnon & Sydel Silverman.
Contributors: McKinnon, Susan, 1949-; Silverman, Sydel.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 330
ISBN-13: 9780226500249; 9780226500232
Subjects: Anthropology; Physical anthropology; Anthropological linguistics; Anthropology, Prehistoric
Description: "Recent Years Have Seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from disease to morality - not to mention the presumed characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality - can be explained by reference primarily to genetics and our evolutionary past." "Complexities mobilizes experts from several fields of anthropology - cultural, archaeological, linguistic, and biological - to offer a compelling challenge to the resurgence of reductive theories of human biological and social life. This book presents evidence to contest such theories and to provide a multifaceted account of the complexity and variability of the human condition. Charting a course that moves beyond any simple opposition between nature and nurture, Complexities argues that a nonreductive perspective has important implications for how we understand and foster human potential. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman; title: Epigenesis, brain plasticity, and behavioral versatility : alternatives to standard evolutionary psychology models / Kathleen R. Gibson; title: Do humans have innate mental structures? : some arguments from linguistics / William A. Foley; title: The eye of the beholder : how linguistic categorization affects "natural" experience / Eve Danziger; title: Reassessing male aggression and dominance : the evidence from primatology / Katherine C. MacKinnon and Agustín Fuentes; title: On kinship and marriage : a critique of the genetic and gender calculus of evolutionary psychology / Susan McKinnon; title: Surveying a cultural "waistland" : some biological poetics and politics of the female body / Mary Orgel, Jacqueline Urla, and Alan Swedlund; title: Denaturalizing gender in prehistory / Lynn Meskell; title: Context and complexity in human biological research / Thomas Leatherman and Alan Goodman; title: Alzheimer's disease : a tangled concept / Margaret Lock; title: The molecular revolution in medicine : promise, reality, and social organization / Karen-Sue Taussig; title: Barbarism, old and new : denaturalizing the rhetoric of warfare / Mary H. Moran; title: Language standardization and the complexities of communicative practice / John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz; title: Blood and belonging : long-distance nationalism and the world beyond / Nina Glick Schiller.