Conversations About Anthropology Sociology

Conversations About Anthropology & Sociology include the following 5 wide-ranging Ideas Roadshow Conversations featuring leading experts. This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books. Each book is broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled - A Conversation with master violinmaker, acoustician and MacArthur Fellow Joseph Curtin. This wide-ranging conversation explores Curtin’s long quest to characterize the sound of a Stradivari violin and the rigorous series of double-blind tests he and his colleagues developed to probe whether or not professional musicians can really tell the difference between a Stradivari and a modern violin. This thought-provoking book also examines violin acoustics and how acoustic science can be married to the art of violin making while merging time-honoured techniques with new materials and design. II. In the Cards - A Conversation with Fred Gitelman, world-champion bridge player and co-founder of Bridge Base Online. This comprehensive conversation provides behind-the-scenes insights into the world of professional bridge, the psychological stress of top-flight competition, how the human mind can compute amazing feats of memory, bridge in schools, coaching Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and more. III. Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact - A Conversation with Mark Maslin, Professor of Geography at University College London. This in-depth conversation explores Mark Maslin’s research on the Anthropocene which according to his definition began when human impacts on the planet irrevocably started to change the course of the Earth’s biological and geographical trajectory, leading to climate change, loss of biodiversity, deforestation, and more. IV. The Joy of Mathematics - A Conversation with Ian Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and bestselling science and science fiction writer. For Ian Stewart, mathematics is far more than dreary arithmetic, while mathematical thinking is one of the most important—and overlooked—aspects of contemporary society. This conversation explores what mathematics is and why it’s worth doing, symmetry, networks and patterns, the relationship between logic and proof, the role of beauty in mathematical thinking, the future of mathematics, linking mathematical oscillations to animal gaits, how to deal with the peculiarities of the mathematical community, and much more. V. On Atheists and Bonobos - A Conversation with primatologist Frans de Waal, the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory. Frans de Waal is renowned for his work on the behaviour and social intelligence of primates. This thought-provoking conversation examines fascinating questions such as: Are we born with an innate sense of “the good”? Do we learn from others what is “wrong”? Does religion determine, or is it a result of, morality? and more. Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy. Ideas Roadshow offers an expanding series of Ideas Roadshow Collections, visit our website: https://ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow/ for further details.

The Contested Commons explores the theme of common environmental resources from the dual perspectives of economics and anthropology, with a focus on developing countries. Contributed readings written by senior scholars in the fields of Economics, Anthropology, and Sociology Looks at the challenges of interdisciplinary work in the social sciences, illustrating the variation in approaches/methodology Focuses on economic security, ecological sustainability, identity formation, and participatory decision-making, particularly in the developing world

The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, and the place of language in the social life of communities. Promoting a broad vision of the subject, spanning a range of disciplines from linguistics to biology, from psychology to sociology and philosophy, this authoritative handbook is an essential reference guide for students and researchers working on language and culture across the social sciences.

Harvey Sacks's early death in 1975 robbed the social sciences of one of its most original thinkers. Although he published relatively little in his lifetime, his lectures and papers were enormously influential in sociology and sociolinguistics, and they played a major role in the development of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. The recent publication of Sacks's Lectures on Conversation has provided an excellent opportunity for a wide-ranging reassessment of his contribution. In this new book, David Silverman provides a clear introduction to Sacks's work and reassesses its value for sociology, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Using a variety of examples, he explains Sacks's ideas on method, language and talk-interaction. He argues that Sack's work offers a highly original perspective on language and social life and raises fundamental questions for the social sciences--questions which, after more than twenty years, remain vitally important and largely unanswered. Written in a lively and accessible way, this book will be of particular interest to students of sociology, sociolinguistics, social theory and method, but it will also be of interest to students and researchers in anthropology, psychology, and related disciplines.

The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

This book is a socio-historical analysis of rationalism as a worldview -- that guides many of our actions in concrete everyday life -- and as a philosophy -- that guides our epistemological understanding of the reality around us. It explores the multifaceted manifestations of the idea in the Enlightenment philosophy, modern sociological theorising and in post-structural standpoints. The volume also critiques rationality from feminist, subaltern and post-colonial perspectives. Finally, it delves into the multilayered sociological significances of rationalisation of different domains of life. Transdisciplinary in scope and with essays by foremost scholars in the field, this volume will be a major intervention across the humanities and the social sciences. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, gender studies, political science, cultural anthropology, education, and religious studies.

In Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism, Sagar Singh draws on anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, religious studies, literature, and the study of mysticism, among other disciplines, to arrive at an understanding of love that is free from theoretical biases. Utilizing data from South Asia, India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Europe, Singh newly defines tourism, tourism anthropology, tourism studies, and ecotourism. This book is an indispensable guide to all involved and interested in tourism. For more information, check out A Conversation with Sagar Singh: Rethinking the Anthropology of Love and Tourism.

Cultural anthropologists can be an intellectually adventurous crowd: open—even eager—to building bridges across disciplines in the name of understanding human behavior and the human experience more broadly. In this first-of-its-kind book, Caroline Brettell explores the cross-disciplinary conversations that have engaged cultural anthropologists both past and present. Brettell highlights a handful of conversations between the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and history, geography, literature, biology, psychology and demography on the other. She also pinpoints how these exchanges address three enduring issues of anthropological concern: the temporal and the spatial dimensions of human experience; the scientific and the humanistic dimensions of the anthropological enterprise; and the individual and the group/population as units of analysis in research. Anthropological Conversations offers detailed accounts of particular ethnographic methodologies and findings (and the theoretical trends informing them) as a means of grasping the big-picture issues. Brettell clearly shows that, by engaging with other fields, cultural anthropologists have been able to think more deeply about what they mean by culture; through this book, she invites readers to continue the conversation.