Understanding Gregory Bateson

Understanding Gregory Bateson
Author: Noel G. Charlton
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2008-05-08
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780791474525

Introduction to Gregory Bateson’s unique perspective on the relationship of humanity to the natural world.

Africa as a Living Laboratory

Africa as a Living Laboratory
Author: Helen Tilley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 2011-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226803473

'Africa as a Living Laboratory' is a study of the relationship between imperialism and scientific expertise - environmental medical, racial and anthropological - in the colonization of British Africa.

Anatomists of Empire

Anatomists of Empire
Author: Ross L Jones
Publisher: Australian Scholarly Publishing
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-04-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1925984702

The 20th-century anatomists Grafton Elliot Smith, Frederic Wood Jones and Arthur Keith travelled the globe collecting, cataloguing and constructing morphologies of the biological world with the aim of weaving these into a new vision of bio-ecology that links humans to their deep past as well as their evolutionary niche. They dissected human bodies and scrutinised the living, explaining for the first time the intricacies of human biology. They placed the body in its environment and gave it a history, thus creating an ecological synthesis in striking contrast to the model of humanity that they inherited as students. Their version of human development and history profoundly influenced public opinion as they wrote prolifically for the press; they published bestsellers on human origins and evolution; they spoke eloquently at public meetings and on the radio. They wanted their anatomical insight to shape public policy. And by changing popular views of race and environment, they moulded attitudes as to what it meant to be human in a post-Darwinian world—thus providing a potent critique of racism.

Darwin's Coat-tails

Darwin's Coat-tails
Author: David Paul Crook
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780820481388

We all know that Darwin's theory played a vital role in genetic engineering. This book explores the social origins, showing people how metaphorically sat upon "coat-tails" to further their own campaigns, who in the end try to justify everything starting from capilatism right down to the World War II. This book provides essays that will enhance our knowledge about the way we look at genetic engineering.

The Spiritual in the Secular

The Spiritual in the Secular
Author: Patrick Harries
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1467435856

David Livingstone's visit to Cambridge in 1857 was seen as much as a scientific event as a religious one. But he was by no means alone among missionaries in integrating mission with science and other fields of research. Rather, many missionaries were remarkable, pioneering polymaths. This collection of essays explores the ways in which late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to Africa contributed to various academic disciplines, such as linguistics, ethnography, social anthropology, zoology, medicine, and many more. This volume includes an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven chapters that analyze missionary research and its impact on knowledge about African contexts. Several themes emerge, including many missionaries' positive views of indigenous discourses and the complicated relationship between missionaries and professional anthropologists. Contributors: John Cinnamon Erika Eichholzer Natasha Erlank Deborah Gaitskell Patrick Harries Walima T. Kalusa John Manton David Maxwell John Stuart Dmitri van den Bersselaar Honoré Vinck

Religious Entanglements

Religious Entanglements
Author: David Maxwell
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2022-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299337502

Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa. Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities. Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.