Books in the Body, Commodity, Text series

Suitable for historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars of cultural studies, this book explores Haya ways of constructing and inhabiting their community, and examines the forces that shape and transform these practices over time.

Over the years, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. This book includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science.

Advances earlier studies on medicine's social diversity and regional variations to expose significant differences in the presumptions and decisions that affect patients' lives, and marks a dramatic development in both the study of medicine and in science studies generally.

Examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa. This work shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times.

Suitable for historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars of cultural studies, this book explores Haya ways of constructing and inhabiting their community, and examines the forces that shape and transform these practices over time.

An ethnography of Ayurvedic medicine which argues the ills it cures are largely effects of postcolonial identity.

Analyses how Victorians used the pathology of disease to express deep-seated anxieties about a rapidly industrialising England's relationship to the material world. Drawing on medicine, literature, political economy, sociology, anthropology, and popular advertising, the author explores the industrial logic of disease.

Reveals how unmarried Jewish women are explicitly valued as reproductive resources in Israel, whether they are encouraged to donate eggs for married Jewish women when undergoing their own fertility treatments, privileged as surrogate mothers in Israel's surrogacy legislation, or encouraged to reproduce autonomously via reproductive technologies.

Explores the fashioning and refashioning of modern Chinese subjectivity as it relates to the literal and figurative body of the nation. This book contains essays that reveal the particular temporality of the modern Chinese nation-state.

An investigation of the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses linking ideas about disease to Chinese identity, beginning in the eighteenth century.

Includes nine sections organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. This title features articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, and spirit possession.

Presents an ethnographic account of how a particular diagnostic technology, the computed tomographic (CT) scanner, shapes social relations and intellectual activities in and beyond the CT Suite, the unit where CT images are made and interpreted within the diagnostic radiology department of a large teaching hospital.

Examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing from the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, this volume investigates the relations between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups.

Shows how new forms of desire, pleasure, anxiety and curiosity emerged as capitalist reforms advanced in post-Maoist China.

Challenges prevailing assumptions regarding the notorious difficulty of curing anorexia nervosa. This title reveals how the therapies participate unwittingly in culturally dominant ideals of gender, individualism, physical fitness, and family life that have contributed to the dramatic increase in the incidence of anorexia since the 1970s.

A theoretical account of how spirit mediums mediate the Thai experience of capitalist modernity.

Cultural history of the relationship between labor and the city in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh

Investigates how childbirth became medicalized in Africa. Featuring stories about autopsies and bicycles, obstetric surgery and male initiation, this title reveals how concerns about strange objects and procedures fashioned the hybrid social world of colonialism and its aftermath in Mobutu's Zaire.