Books published by AltaMira Press

Offers professionals within the field of cultural resource management (CRM) practical advice on dealing with traditional cultural properties (TCPs).

A study of Alaskan indigenous communities. It explores the relationship between land and education. It reveals how Euro-American institutions attempt to redefine indigenous understandings of land and spirituality to make them conform to those in the dominant society. It proposes educational agendas that are components of native sovereignty.

Description, based upon research evidence from the Near East and elsewhere, of the change in the gendered division of labor during the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

Reinventing the Museum gathers 35 seminal articles reflecting over 100 years of dialogue within the museum community about what it means to be a high-quality, relevant institution. Important reading for museum professionals, students, and anyone interested in museums and their development.

Reflects the various changes in the study of gender and archaeology. This title covers issues such as sexuality studies, the body, children, and feminist pedagogy. It also covers the roles of women and men in such areas as human origins, the sexual division of labor, kinship and other social structures, state development, and ideology.

This text provides a foundational understanding of the writing process associated with innovative forms of ethnographic writing. It offers advice, examples, and exercises for every step in the ethnographic writng process, including field observations, notes, narrative development, and editing.

Methodists to Congregationalists, Church of God to the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel - the story of religion in the US is in part the story of its paradoxical religious organizations. This text brings coherence to the shifting picture of 200 years of American religious history.

In the United States, racial status and identity has historically been defined by the White majority. This title shows that race is a major organizing principle. Using census data on Blacks, White Ethnics and Nonblack Minorities, it deconstructs majority/minority classifications to reveal the multiplicity of identities surrounding each group.

Unpublished book manuscript and related correspondence by famous symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer concerning the work of George Herbert Mead, the founder of symbolic interactionism. Includes an introduction and notes by Thomas J. Morrione.

Presents essays on the intersections of money and religion. This book investigates how money moves and how it affects religious organizational behavior. It explores how attitudes toward money have altered over time.

Illustrates the power of symbols in human societies. This textbook is suitable for courses that define fundamental concepts in religion, cultural anthropology, communication, and art.

Examines personal and organizational networks that exist between members in US immigrant religious communities and individuals and religious institutions left behind. This title examines how religious remittances flow between home and host communities, how they affect religious practices in both settings, and how influences change over time.

Focuses on the rites of giving birth from a cross-cultural perspective. This book describes the many customs surrounding birth through infancy, such as attitudes and techniques in childbirth, the influence of societal factors that differentiate Western from non-Western maternal birthing positions, the art of midwifery, and customs and beliefs.

Lays emphasis on performing arts, attempting to find broad commonalities in performance, art, and artists across space, time, and culture.

Practitioners in the animal welfare field, law enforcement circles, and social services arena have often maintained that childhood cruelty to animals is a forerunner to violence against people. Does this behavior serve as a red flag?

Offers an analysis of globalization and the lethal explosiveness that characterizes the world order. This work investigates global processes and political forces that determine networks of crime, commerce and terror, and reveals the economic, social and cultural fragmentation of transnational networks.

From the exodus of early modern humans to the growth of African diasporas, Africa has had a long and complex relationship with the outside world. This book attempts to outline internal geographic, environmental, sociopolitical and economic factors over the long period of modern human history, to find their commonalities and development over time.

Ettore Gnocchi, the famed postmodern theorist, has been murdered at his own dinner party. To find out who killed Gnocchi, the detective Solomon Hunter must first explore postmodernism itself. What is it? Who are Baudrillard, Foucault, and Habermas, and what do they think? Why does any of this matter, anyway?

An examination of social memory developed within communities from the perspective of anthropology. Many case studies from around the world.

Offers students and practitioners an introduction to important methods from ethnography and interviews to surveys and community mapping.

Religions_whatever else they may be_are configurations of cultural information reproduced across space and time. Beginning with this seemingly obvious fact of religious transmission, Harvey Whitehouse goes on to construct a testable theory of how religions are created, passed on, and changed. At the center of his theory are two divergent 'modes of religiosity: ' the imagistic and the doctrinal

Examines the contributions of anthropologists to general economic theory. This book challenges our understanding of human economies in the expanding global systems of interaction, with models and analyses from cross-cultural research. It is suitable for anthropologists, economists, economic historians, and political economists.

Offers definitions for the terms that museum workers need to know. This book contains chapters which includes exercises. It is suitable for the classroom or for novice museum workers.

This collection examines new psychological evidence for the modal theory and attempts to synthesize this theory with other theories of cognition and religion.

This work follows the evolution of the pattern book houses and how they represented the notion of home and community in American historical memory. The book also includes illustrations of such communities.

Reveals the social inequalities that often represent significant threats to the health and well being of the poor, ethnic minorities, and women. This book defines an anthropology of policy concerned with decision-making and the impact of health policy on human lives. It is of interest to researchers and practitioners in medical anthropology.

What does it take to lead the 21st-century museum? Balancing a head for business and working from the heart guided by passion! This is the message Sherene Suchy discovered in her work with more than 80 international museum directors whose thoughts and experiences ground this book on change management in 21st-century cultural organizations.

Displays a range of work on the complex relationship between humans and the environment. This book is suitable for scholars and non-academics interested in the relation between our species and its biotic and built environments. It is designed for classroom use in anthropology.

Explores various methods and techniques used to prepare, protect, and analyze artifacts once they are in the lab. This book outlines the basic principles of identification, classification, quantification, data manipulation, and analysis. It draws from 16th century Spanish sites in the Americas to show the hows and whys of archaeological lab work.