Download or read book Making Nature Shaping Culture written by and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For ages, farmers have domesticated plant varieties, while scientists have "made" nature through hybridization and other processes. This give and take-mediated through negotiations, persuasion, the marketplace, and even coercion-has resulted in what we call "nature" and has led to a homogenization of plant crops. Yet homogenization has led to new problems: genetic vulnerability, and the lack of systems to maintain plant germplasm of varieties no longer grown in the fields. This book addresses issues previously viewed as primarily technical concerning the germplasm debate: that is, how, what, and where to store the range of genetic materials necessary to reproduce plants. By examining Brazil, Chile, France, and the United States, the authors show how different cultures respond to the decline in genetic diversity. The findings show that the quest for uniformity in foods, agriculture, and environment eventually threatens everyone. The politicization of this debate is inevitable because the destruction of human cultural diversity goes hand in hand with the destruction of plant varietal diversity. The authors agree that responses to the controversies must involve food security, relinking of food with agriculture and the environment, revaluing traditional knowledge, and rethinking development. They stress that answers will be found not by experts acting unilaterally but through the democratization of scientific and technical exchange. Lawrence Busch is professor of sociology at Michigan State University. William B. Lacy is director of the Cooperative Extension Service at Cornell University. Jeffrey Burkhardt is a professor of agricultural economics at the Institute for Food and AgriculturalSciences at the University of Florida. Douglas Hemken is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Jubel Moraga-Rojel is professor of sociology at the Universidade Australe del Chile. Timothy Koponen is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Northwestern University and Josi de Souza Silva is with the Commission on Plant Genetic Resources at FAO in Rome.

Download or read book Human Ecology written by Frederick R. Steiner and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have always been influenced by natural landscapes, and always will be—even as we create ever-larger cities and our developments fundamentally change the nature of the earth around us. In Human Ecology, noted city planner and landscape architect Frederick Steiner encourages us to consider how human cultures have been shaped by natural forces, and how we might use this understanding to contribute to a future where both nature and people thrive. Human ecology is the study of the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on diverse fields from biology and geography to sociology, engineering, and architecture. Steiner admirably synthesizes these perspectives through the lens of landscape architecture, a discipline that requires its practitioners to consciously connect humans and their environments. After laying out eight principles for understanding human ecology, the book’s chapters build from the smallest scale of connection—our homes—and expand to community scales, regions, nations, and, ultimately, examine global relationships between people and nature. In this age of climate change, a new approach to planning and design is required to envision a livable future. Human Ecology provides architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and planners—and students in those fields— with timeless principles for new, creative thinking about how their work can shape a vibrant, resilient future for ourselves and our planet.

Download or read book Beyond Human Nature written by Jesse J Prinz and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative, revelatory tour de force, Jesse Prinz reveals how the cultures we live in - not biology - determine how we think and feel. He examines all aspects of our behaviour, looking at everything from our intellects and emotions, to love and sex, morality and even madness. This book seeks to go beyond traditional debates of nature and nurture. He is not interested in finding universal laws but, rather, in understanding, explaining and celebrating our differences. Why do people raised in Western countries tend to see the trees before the forest, while people from East Asia see the forest before the trees? Why, in South East Asia, is there a common form of mental illness, unheard of in the West, in which people go into a trancelike state after being startled? Compared to Northerners, why are people in the American South more than twice as likely to kill someone over an argument? And, above all, just how malleable are we? Prinz shows that the vast diversity of our behaviour is not engrained. He picks up where biological explanations leave off. He tells us the human story.

Download or read book Human Ecology written by Frederick Steiner and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans have always been influenced by natural landscapes, and always will be--even as we create ever-larger cities and our developments fundamentally change the nature of the earth around us. In this publication, noted city planner and landscape architect Frederick Steiner encourages us to consider how human cultures have been shaped by natural forces, and how we might use this understanding to contribute to a future where both nature and people thrive. Human ecology is the study of the interrelationships between humans and their environment, drawing on diverse fields from biology and geography to sociology, engineering, and architecture. Steiner admirably synthesizes these perspectives through the lens of landscape architecture, a discipline that requires its practitioners to consciously connect humans and their environments. After laying out eight principles for understanding human ecology, the book's chapters build from the smallest scale of connection--our homes--and expand to community scales, regions, nations, and, ultimately, examine global relationships between people and nature.

Download or read book After Nature written by Jedediah Purdy and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic

Download or read book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

Download or read book Culture Making written by Andy Crouch and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book he unpacks how culture works and gives us tools to partner with God's own making and transforming of culture.

Download or read book Nature Performed written by Bronislaw Szerszynski and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2004-04-02 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together contributions from scholars across the humanities. A wide-ranging exploration of the interface between performance and nature. Examines the use and usefulness of ideas of ‘performance’ for understanding human-nature relationships. Draws on different disciplines and intellectual traditions and on different conceptions of ‘performance’ and ‘nature’. Contributions are rooted in real-world contexts and problems, explored through detailed ethnographic work. Explores domains as diverse as allotments and bioinvasion, fox hunting and green politics. Makes a distinctive contribution to the ‘cultural turn’ in environmental research.

Download or read book Beyond Human Nature How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind written by Jesse J. Prinz and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A loud counterblast to the fashionable faith of our times: that human nature is driven by biology . . . urgent and persuasive.”—Sunday Times (London) In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible.

Download or read book Uphill Against Water written by Peter Carrels and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Uphill against Water, Peter Carrels examines the history of Missouri River water development projects in general and describes the struggle over one of the largest of those projects, South Dakota?s Oahe irrigation project, in detail. Opposition to the Oahe project was intense and well organized. After four years of bitter competition, an energetic and resourceful grassroots group, United Family Farmers, wrested control of the Oahe conservancy district board, a government agency that had been an ardent supporter of the irrigation project. That political triumph led to the only victory in the West by a grassroots group over the Bureau of Reclamation and the irrigation and business establishment.

Download or read book Re Shaping Culture and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah written by Şennur Bakırtaş and published by Transnational Press London. This book was released on 2023-02-07 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most fascinating, rapidly developing, and difficult areas of literary and cultural studies today is postcolonialism. Focused on postcolonialism and designed especially for those studying postcolonial studies, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah introduces key subject areas of concern such as culture and identity in a clear accessible and organised fashion. It provides an overview of the development of postcolonialism as a discipline and takes a close look at its important authors, Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and their selected oeuvres, Fury, Midnight’s Children, By the Sea and Memory of Departure. With a palimpsestic analysis of culture and identity as crucial features of postcolonial texts, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah argues how postcolonialism functions in allowing the formation of a new perspective on the contemporary world. Besides, it offers an alternative perspective on their works, one that promotes the importance of the issue of postcolonial agency. This book will prove invaluable to anyone studying English Language and Literature, Migration Studies, and Cultural Studies. Contents Introduction: the borders of culture and identity A critical approach to culture and identity under the light of postcolonial theory The contributons of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie to postcolonial literature Non- homes in postcolonial culture (Un)belonging postcolonial identity Conclusion: towards a new understanding of culture and identity Bibliography

Download or read book Making Nature written by Melinda Baldwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making "Nature" is the first book to chronicle the foundation and development of Nature, one of the world's most influential scientific institutions. Now nearing its hundred and fiftieth year of publication, Nature is the international benchmark for scientific publication. Its contributors include Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, and Stephen Hawking, and it has published many of the most important discoveries in the history of science, including articles on the structure of DNA, the discovery of the neutron, the first cloning of a mammal, and the human genome. But how did Nature become such an essential institution? In Making "Nature," Melinda Baldwin charts the rich history of this extraordinary publication from its foundation in 1869 to current debates about online publishing and open access. This pioneering study not only tells Nature's story but also sheds light on much larger questions about the history of science publishing, changes in scientific communication, and shifting notions of "scientific community." Nature, as Baldwin demonstrates, helped define what science is and what it means to be a scientist.

Download or read book Cultural and Spiritual Significance of Nature in Protected Areas written by Bas Verschuuren and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural and spiritual bonds with ‘nature’ are among the strongest motivators for nature conservation; yet they are seldom taken into account in the governance and management of protected and conserved areas. The starting point of this book is that to be sustainable, effective, and equitable, approaches to the management and governance of these areas need to engage with people’s deeply held cultural, spiritual, personal, and community values, alongside inspiring action to conserve biological, geological, and cultural diversity. Since protected area management and governance have traditionally been based on scientific research, a combination of science and spirituality can engage and empower a variety of stakeholders from different cultural and religious backgrounds. As evidenced in this volume, stakeholders range from indigenous peoples and local communities to those following mainstream religions and those representing the wider public. The authors argue that the scope of protected area management and governance needs to be extended to acknowledge the rights, responsibilities, obligations, and aspirations of stakeholder groups and to recognise the cultural and spiritual significance that ‘nature’ holds for people. The book also has direct practical applications. These follow the IUCN Best Practice Guidelines for protected and conserved area managers and present a wide range of case studies from around the world, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas.

Download or read book Not By Genes Alone written by Peter J. Richerson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-06-20 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. While we are similar to other mammals in many ways, our behavior sets us apart. Our unparalleled ability to adapt has allowed us to occupy virtually every habitat on earth using an incredible variety of tools and subsistence techniques. Our societies are larger, more complex, and more cooperative than any other mammal's. In this stunning exploration of human adaptation, Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd argue that only a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can explain these unique characteristics. Not by Genes Alone offers a radical interpretation of human evolution, arguing that our ecological dominance and our singular social systems stem from a psychology uniquely adapted to create complex culture. Richerson and Boyd illustrate here that culture is neither superorganic nor the handmaiden of the genes. Rather, it is essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion. Drawing on work in the fields of anthropology, political science, sociology, and economics—and building their case with such fascinating examples as kayaks, corporations, clever knots, and yams that require twelve men to carry them—Richerson and Boyd convincingly demonstrate that culture and biology are inextricably linked, and they show us how to think about their interaction in a way that yields a richer understanding of human nature. In abandoning the nature-versus-nurture debate as fundamentally misconceived, Not by Genes Alone is a truly original and groundbreaking theory of the role of culture in evolution and a book to be reckoned with for generations to come. “I continue to be surprised by the number of educated people (many of them biologists) who think that offering explanations for human behavior in terms of culture somehow disproves the suggestion that human behavior can be explained in Darwinian evolutionary terms. Fortunately, we now have a book to which they may be directed for enlightenment . . . . It is a book full of good sense and the kinds of intellectual rigor and clarity of writing that we have come to expect from the Boyd/Richerson stable.”—Robin Dunbar, Nature “Not by Genes Alone is a valuable and very readable synthesis of a still embryonic but very important subject straddling the sciences and humanities.”—E. O. Wilson, Harvard University

Download or read book Beyond Nature and Culture written by Philippe Descola and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gives to anthropological reflection a new starting point and will become the compulsory reference for all our debates in the years to come.” —Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the French edition Beyond Nature and Culture has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Philippe Descola shows this essential difference to be not only a Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies” —animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. “A compelling and original account of where the nature-culture binary has come from, where it might go—and what we might imagine in its place.” —Somatosphere “The most important book coming from French anthropology since Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie Structurale.” —Bruno Latour, author of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “Descola’s challenging new worldview should be of special interest to a wide range of scientific and academic disciplines from anthropology to zoology . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Download or read book Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology written by R. Jon McGee and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 1053 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social and cultural anthropology and archaeology are rich subjects with deep connections in the social and physical sciences. Over the past 150 years, the subject matter and different theoretical perspectives have expanded so greatly that no single individual can command all of it. Consequently, both advanced students and professionals may be confronted with theoretical positions and names of theorists with whom they are only partially familiar, if they have heard of them at all. Students, in particular, are likely to turn to the web to find quick background information on theorists and theories. However, most web-based information is inaccurate and/or lacks depth. Students and professionals need a source to provide a quick overview of a particular theory and theorist with just the basics—the "who, what, where, how, and why," if you will. In response, SAGE Reference plans to publish the two-volume Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Features & Benefits: Two volumes containing approximately 335 signed entries provide users with the most authoritative and thorough reference resource available on anthropology theory, both in terms of breadth and depth of coverage. To ease navigation between and among related entries, a Reader's Guide groups entries thematically and each entry is followed by Cross-References. In the electronic version, the Reader's Guide combines with the Cross-References and a detailed Index to provide robust search-and-browse capabilities. An appendix with a Chronology of Anthropology Theory allows students to easily chart directions and trends in thought and theory from early times to the present. Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of each entry and a Master Bibliography at the end guide readers to sources for more detailed research and discussion.

Download or read book From Neurons to Neighborhoods written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2000-11-13 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.