School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series

This volume features ten scholars from anthropology, nursing, sociology, gerontology, human geography, and other disciplines who provide ethnographic case studies exploring critical care decision-making, models of care for people with Alzheimer’s disease, the way residents cope with the limitations, indignities, and opportunities of nursing home life, the roles of family members and nursing home employees, and the formulation of assisted living.

The boundaries of life now occupy a place of central concern among biological anthropologists. Because of the centrality of the modern biological definition of life to Euro-American medicine and anthropology, the definition of life itself and its contestation exemplify competing uses of knowledge.

New insights from the Tikal excavations and epigraphic breakthroughs suggest that a thriving marketplace existed in the center of the city, that foreigners comprised a significant element of its populace, and that differences in tomb form and contents signal the changing fortunes of Tikal's rulers.

At a time of increasing globalization and worldwide vulnerability, the study of disasters has become an important focus for anthropological research-one where the four fields of anthropology are synthesized to address the multidimensionality of the effects to a community’s social structures and relationship to the environment.

Representing a new wave of thinking about material culture studies-a topic long overdue for reevaluation-the essays in this volume take a fresh look at the relationship between material culture and exchange theory and illuminate the changing patterns of cultural flow in an increasingly global economy and the cultural differences registered in “regimes of value.”

In Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors, ten field and theoretical archaeologists working in the area today offer an overview and analysis of new data and interpretations for Greater Mesopotamia during the late fifth and fourth millennia B.C.

Women and Men in the Prehispanic Southwest takes a groundbreaking look at gendered activities in prehistory and the differential access that women and men had to sources and symbols of power and prestige.

Extended conflict situations in Northern Ireland or South Africa, the local effects of the rise of multinational corporations, and conflicts in workplaces, households, and academic fields are all crucibles for the forging of identities. In this volume, the authors bring their research to bear on enduring struggles and the practices of identity within those struggles. This collection of essays explores the innermost, generative aspects of subjects as social, cultural, and historical beings and raises serious questions about long-term conflicts and sustained identities in the world today.

An exciting new cross-disciplinary field of biocultural research is emerging at the start of the twenty-first century: developmental evolutionary biology.

War in the Tribal Zone, the 1991 anthropology of war classic, is back in print with a new preface by the editors. Their timely and insightful essay examines the occurrence of ethnic conflict and violence in the decade since the idea of the "tribal zone" originally was formulated.