文化・社会人類学 — 全 下位分類

A tour de force' Alice Roberts 'Wonderful ... A remarkably comprehensive biography of the single most important thing we all share - language' Robin Dunbar The relationship between language, thought and culture is of concern to anyone with an interest in what it means to be human. The Language Puzzle explains how the invention of words at 1.6 million years ago began the evolution of human language from the ape-like calls of our earliest ancestors to our capabilities of today, with over 6000 languages in the world and each of us knowing over 50,000 words. Drawing on the latest discoveries in archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and genetics, Steven Mithen reconstructs the steps by which language evolved; he explains how it transformed the nature of thought and culture, and how we talked our way out of the Stone Age into the world of farming and swiftly into today's Digital Age. While this radical new work is not shy to reject outdated ideas about language, it builds bridges between disciplines to forge a new synthesis for the evolution of language that will find widespread acceptance as a new standard account for how humanity began.

In Living Together Across Borders, author Lynnette Arnold tells the stories of extended families living stretched between a rural Salvadoran village and the urban locations in the United States where their migrant relatives live. In this multi-sited ethnography, Arnold examines seemingly mundane conversational practices-such as sending greetings, negotiating remittances, and reminiscing together-that are central to family life across borders. Arnold underscores the consequentiality of these linguistic practices by tracing how they are shaped by and re-shape gendered and generational norms of family care, as well as how they are tied to Salvadoran histories of migration, violence, and poverty, which are powerfully influenced by U.S. economic and foreign policy. This book demonstrates that these communicative practices bring inequities between the global North and South into family life by continually reproducing distinctions between relatives in El Salvador and those living in the United States. Conversely, she examines seemingly mundane interactions including greetings, remittance negotiations, and reminiscing together. Although these relational moments of cross-border connection are fleeting, their impacts endure, laying the foundation for the ongoing material and economic provisioning necessary to family survival. Through cross-border conversations, families nurture intergenerational relations that sustain the family and convivencia (living-together) over the years despite ongoing separation.

Research into the Mesolithic has recently undergone important transformations, making it one of the most dynamic fields of archaeological research today. These changes are the result of a combination of factors: new and exciting discoveries, the impact of innovative scientific methods, and the introduction of fresh interpretative approaches. Situated within a long period defined by significant environmental, demographic, and social change, the European Mesolithic period provides key insights to answer the "big questions" in archaeology, including the deep history of migration, diversity, and adaptation. It also provides resources for elucidating answers to complex questions about human relationships, diet, economy, and identity. New theoretical approaches to the Mesolithic in Europe have expanded research into new areas such as lived experience, ritual, cosmology, art, identity, the body, and human-animal relationships. These new research questions have added important nuance, and provided a more complete understanding of the period. With contributions from leading scholars in the field and from across the continent, The Oxford Handbook of Mesolithic Europe provides the first comprehensive overview of the rich archaeology of Mesolithic Europe. Chapters on different European regions, as well as neighboring areas in North Africa and the Middle East, provide a synoptic view, with thematic chapters examining the lived experience of different kinds of landscapes and adaptations, different forms of technology, and aspects of Mesolithic life, death, ritual, cosmology, and art. The volume highlights both the significance of interdisciplinary research for the field, and the importance of combining perspectives and approaches when studying the deep past.