What we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food.From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating introduces listeners to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rules that shape our meals.W...

This fascinating book—part ethnography, part memoir—traces Japan’s vibrant café society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan’s coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White’s book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been centr...

What we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food.From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity, Ways of Eating introduces readers to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rules that shape our meals.Wur...

First published in 1986, this book proposes and illustrates a new approach to the comparative analysis of educational policy, based on anthropological and historical inquiry. It reviews the transitions of Western countries, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China and in doing so investigates cultural ideas of human potential and how they inform social and economic goals of education. An analysis of the problems and emerging patterns in developing countries reveals how and why the meaning...

Assembling Japan focuses on Japan’s modernization as a long-term process that is reliant on changing technology and that has led to the nation’s full engagement with the global system. This process forms a complex field of tensions, full of interesting dynamisms and synergies that can be best understood through the book’s methodology: anthropological analysis combined with historical contextualization.The approaches in this collection are manifold. Some chapters examine the...

This volume makes available a wide variety of cultural perspectives on education and on economic and social progress. Contributors focus on three main questions, the answers to which are vital for understanding the needs of both national policy and personal fulfilment in widely differing cultures. The contributors examine the concept of the self that underlies the idea of virtue which facilitates learning in Japan, the Confucian-style bonding between generations in Chinese society and the ...

The contemporary legal landscape is no longer a rigid hierarchy composed of limited and complacent behemoths, but rather an ecosystem, filled with a wide variety of players that facilitate disruption and revolution and jostle for clients' attention with agility and innovation. This includes - but is certainly not limited to - entities such as technology companies, consultants, alternative legal service providers, and paraprofessionals. Law firms are not the only ones in this environment th...

By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development--for both rich and poor--in the twenty-first century.Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious t...

Why is it so many of us lack contentment, despite all the wealth and freedoms we enjoy?The past two centuries delivered individual and political freedoms that promised unprecedented opportunities for personal fulfilment. Yet citizens of affluent countries are encouraged to pursue lives of consumerism, endless choice and the pleasures of the body.Clive Hamilton argues that the paradox of modern consumer life is that we are deprived of our inner freedom by our very pursuit of...

This fascinating introduction to the intersection between religion, neuroscience, and moral philosophy asks: Can there be a Buddhism without karma, nirvana, and reincarnation that is compatible with the rest of knowledge?If we are material beings living in a material world—and all the scientific evidence suggests that we are—then we must find existential meaning, if there is such a thing, in this physical world. We must cast our lot with the natural rather than the...

Sociology: A Complete Introduction is designed to give you everything you need to succeed, all in one place. It covers the key areas that students are expected to be confident in, outlining the basics in clear, jargon-free English and providing added-value features like summaries of key experiments and even lists of questions you might be asked in your seminar or exam.The text is split into four parts, with an emphasis throughout on understanding and treating all concepts ...

A noted philosopher proposes a naturalistic (rather than supernaturalistic) way to solve the "really hard problem": how to live in a meaningful way—how to live a life that really matters—even as a finite material being living in a material world.If consciousness is "the hard problem" in mind science—explaining how the amazing private world of consciousness emerges from neuronal activity—then "the really hard problem," writes Owen Flanagan in this provocative book, ...