By Nancy Scheper-Hughes (NHC Fellow, 1989–90) When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives … Continued
Edited by Benjamin Kahan (NHC Fellow, 2016–17) Heinrich Kaan's fascinating work—part medical treatise, part sexual taxonomy, part activist statement, and part anti-onanist tract—takes us back to the origins of sexology. He links the sexual instinct to the imagination for the first time, creating what Foucault called "a unified field of sexual abnormality." Kaan's taxonomy consists … Continued
Edited by Bruce Kapferer (NHC Fellow, 2004–05) As corporate practices are becoming more fused with state processes, the state itself is increasingly taking on a corporate structure, as well as a more overt oligarchic character. Evidence of this can be seen in the growing domination of political organizations and institutions by close-knit social groups (familial … Continued
By Shepard Krech, III (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 1993–94; 2000–01) Before the massive environmental change wrought by the European colonization of the South, hundreds of species of birds filled the region's flyways in immeasurable numbers. Before disease, war, and displacement altered the South's earliest human landscape, Native Americans hunted and ate birds and made tools and … Continued
By Helen E. Ullrich (NHC Fellow, 1987–88)
By Mieko Nishida (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) São Paulo, Brazil, holds the largest number of Japanese descendants outside Japan, and they have been there for six generations. Japanese immigration to Brazil started in 1908 to replace European immigrants to work in São Paulo’s expanding coffee industry. It peaked in the late 1920s and early 1930s as … Continued
Edited by James L. Peacock (NHC Fellow, 2003–04), Patricia M. Thornton, and Patrick B. Inman In response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and war in Afghanistan, the Fulbright New Century Scholars program brought together social scientists from around the world to study sectarian, ethnic, and cultural conflict within and across national borders. As … Continued
By Isidore Okpewho (NHC Fellow, 1997–98) Using stories he collected from narrators from the old West African kingdom of Benin, the author shows how the present mirrors the past in both folklore and political reality, suggesting that African states fail to create a level playing field for the plural identities within their borders, leaving marginalized … Continued
By Brad Weiss (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) For young men in urban Tanzania, barbershops are sites of the struggle to earn a living amid economic crisis. With names like Brooklyn Barber House and Boyz II Men, these workplaces are also nodes in an explosion of popular culture that appropriates images drawn from the global circulation of … Continued
By Thomas W. Laqueur (Trustee; NHC Fellow, 2000–01) The Greek philosopher Diogenes said that when he died his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge. Why should he or anyone else care what became of his corpse? In The Work of the Dead, acclaimed cultural historian Thomas Laqueur examines why humanity … Continued