Intended as a supplement to women's studies, human ecology, medical anthropology, or Pacific anthropology courses. LIVES ON THE LINE examines women's issues in Butaritari, an equatorial Pacific atoll 15 kilometers long and a few hundred meters wide. This case study shows how the constraints of ecology and teh contingencies of history weave through patterns of human activity on Butaritari Atoll.

Lives On The Line: Women and Ecology On A Pacifc Atoll

Politics & Social Sciences

Brewis, Alexandra

Social Sciences

Wadsworth Publishing

Human Story

SturtzSreetharan, Cindi

Wutich, Amber

Knudson, Kelly

Stojanowski, Christopher

New York : W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The Human Story is the first general anthropology textbook written by award-winning scholars and teachers from all four of the discipline's subfields. In each chapter, the authors weave perspectives from cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology into an engaging narrative, inviting students to think anthropologically about themselves and the world around them.?By emphasizing contemporary research from a diverse cast of anthropologists, the authors provide students with a uniquely holistic, balanced, and up-to-date view of the discipline. To provide students with the most effective possible learning experience, a dynamic media package features a Norton Illumine Ebook with animations and Anthropology in 3D models.

The Human Story: An Introduction to Anthropology

W.W.Norton&Company

How well-intentioned public health efforts can be unwitting but powerful drivers of stigma.
Stigma is a dehumanizing process, a method of shaming and blaming that is embedded in our beliefs about who does and does not have value within society. In Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting, medical anthropologists Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich explore another side of the issue: the startling fact that well-intentioned public health campaigns can create new and sometimes damaging stigma, even when they are successful. 
Brewis and Wutich present a novel, synthetic argument about how stigmas act as a massive driver of global disease and suffering, killing or sickening billions every year. They focus on three of the most complex, difficult-to-fix global health efforts: bringing sanitation to all, treating mental illness, and preventing obesity. They explain how and why humans so readily stigmatize, how this derails ongoing public health efforts, and why this process invariably hurts people who are already at risk. They also explore how new stigmas enter global health so easily and consider why destigmatization is so very difficult. Finally, the book offers potential solutions that may be able to prevent, challenge, and fix stigma. Stigma elimination, Brewis and Wutich conclude, must be recognized as a necessary and core component of all global health efforts.
Drawing on the authors' keen observations and decades of fieldwork, Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting combines a wide array of ethnographic evidence from around the globe to demonstrate conclusively how stigma undermines global health's basic goals to create both health and justice.

Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health

Anthropology

Johns Hopkins University Press

Review\nThis engaging book . . . fills a significant gap in the literature by providing a wake-up call to scholars and practitioners unfamiliar with the topic. And it reminds me that we should all be working together to avoid any unintended consequences of promoting health.\nLazy, Crazy, and Disgusting is an impeccably researched, collaborative, thought-provoking, and boundary-breaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in public health, medicine, and anthropology.\nBrewis and Wutich provide a very useful primer on stigma, which gives a succinct explanation of what stigma is in relation to global health, its different forms, and how stigmatization intersects with other population-level and individual-level effects. As an important topic for students of medicine, global health, and ethics, Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting would be a useful recommended text.\nBrewis and Wutich's book offers a rigorous analysis of how public global health efforts can create and reinforce stigma . . . This book is recommended for anyone with a general interest in global public health, [and for] undergraduate and postgraduate students from health-related disciplines including medical sociology. This book should be considered by health practitioners, scholars and public health professionals when designing and implementing health-related interventions.\nThe global perspective and illuminating detail in Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting bring the social, cultural and structural elements of stigma into focus for the reader . . . This text is both academic and accessible, making it an engrossing read for those interested in medicine and public health, anthropology and sociology. I would argue it is also incredibly relevant to those who experience, resist or perpetuate stigma: each and every one of us.\nThe book provides an accessible, synthetic, and critical examination of the health effects of shame and stigma, one that was already long overdue when the book was published in 2019. That was before the onset of the current pandemic. The topic is of even more pressing concern now, when the public's health depends so much on the behavior of individuals.\nThe best thing about this book is that it is relatable on personal, institutional, and global levels. The book provides a timely contribution to the state of global health, especially the process of stigmatizing people with infectious disease.\nThis is a social justice–informed and critically important book for students, scholars, professionals, and policy makers in public health, medical anthropology, health-related social work, and health justice.\nProviding a fresh look at the classic social science concept of stigma, this book adds to the literature on why humans so readily stigmatize while touching on the ways in which interventions designed to address a particular health problem may inadvertently contribute to further stigmatization and worsen health outcomes. Interesting, timely, and lucid, this provocative book makes an important contribution. 
―Andrea S. Wiley, Indiana University, Bloomington, coauthor of Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach\nDespite the growing interest in global mental health, the issue of stigma deserves much more attention than it gets from medical social scientists and health providers. The approach here is highly original and important. I believe there is a wide scholarly and student audience for this teachable book. 
―Peter J. Brown, Emory University, coauthor of Foundations of Global Health: An Interdisciplinary Reader\nThis is a magnificent, highly engaging, and ethnographically informed examination of the fateful intersection of stigma and public health. It underscores, through multiple cases, the vital lessons of social science about the adverse consequences of shaming as a means of pushing people, especially the poor and marginalized, to fit socially accepted standards of appearance and behavior. 
―Merrill Singer, University of Connecticut, coauthor o

Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery

Review\n"While this accessible and empathic ethnography of a cohort of bariatric surgery patients describes the extremes of obesity and of body transformation, it speaks to our wider struggle with weight control and disordered eating. The authors present a sophisticated anthropological analysis of the social, economic, political, and psychological consequences of being “fat” in the US, yet they never lose sight of the voices of the patient-participants and their hopes and challenges through their bariatric surgery journey. Extreme Weight Loss is a must-read for anyone concerned with the body, stigma, and surveillance in the 21st century." -- Tina Moffat, co-editor of Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective: Past Meets Present\n"Extreme Weight Loss is that rare book that tells us not only about its subject, but also serves as a prism through which to view some of the cultural patterns that characterize a society. For anyone interested in women undergoing bariatric surgery and the clinical settings in which this takes place, this ethnographic study is jam-packed with rich, nuanced detail. The authors take us on a journey into a culture where, despite contemporary rhetoric on valuing all bodies, thinness ideals remain intractable, fat bodies continue to be pathologized, and the ability to lose weight – or not – is a moral status. The bariatric patients described here are not victims: they are deeply aware of the ways in which they are circumscribed by cultural ideals that render them unwell and unworthy. The real power of this book is in what we learn about why these women submit to the judgement, surveillance, and intervention that our society imposes on those deemed unfit. This is a story not just about body weight, but about the ways in which we weigh down those who don’t fit." -- Jodi O'Brien, editor of Encyclopedia of Gender and Society\n"Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich offer an effective and affecting ethnographic account of what it means to undergo extreme weight loss. The analysis is presented thematically, describing the medicalization of obesity, the stigmatization of fat bodies, and the restrictions on daily life that surgery imposes on patients." ― Medical Anthropology Quarterly\n"Extreme Weight Loss is a good read, providing important ethnographic insight into the world of a US bariatric surgery clinic and people's experience of passing through it. Readers from many backgrounds will learn about the material realities of fatness and weight loss surgery, as well as the reconfiguration of identity that is involved in the process of trying to conform to societal norms." ― Sociology of Health and Illness\n"The book is a valuable addition to the rich body of writing on the complex status of body weight in human societies. The study features as a part of the authors Sarah Trainer’s, Alexandra Brewis’ and Amber Wutich’s sustained research engagement with the themes of social inequality, obesity, and stigma in the context of global public health." ― Anthropology Book Forum\nA study that explores patients’ perspectives on a life-altering surgery\nBariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications.\nDrawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming.\nExtreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair sta

Trainer, Sarah

NYU Press

A study that explores patients' perspectives on a life-altering surgery Bariatric surgery rates around the world have increased exponentially over the past decade. In Extreme Weight Loss, anthropologists Sarah Trainer, Alexandra Brewis, and Amber Wutich provide us with an inside look at how patients experience this medical procedure, as well as its far-reaching and complex personal implications. Drawing on patient interviews, survey data, and more, Trainer, Brewis, and Wutich explore why people decide to undergo bariatric surgery, and how that decision transforms their lives. They show, in painstaking detail, how the journey to weight loss is can be at once painful and liberating, dispiriting and self-affirming. Extreme Weight Loss explores questions about which bodies are treated as though they belong in modern societies, and which bodies are treated as unwanted. It considers how people challenge and manage these unfair standards, illuminating what it means to be large-bodied in America's diet-obsessed culture.

Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)

Review\n"This book makes two important contributions – one to scholarship and one to pedagogy. On scholarship, this excellent comparative ethnography examines the avoirdupois pandemic at the ground level – real people, making decisions about what to eat and how that's causing the world to get fatter. On pedagogy, the authors’ discussion of the methods they used for collecting and analyzing their ethnographic data is the best I’ve seen. Every student of ethnography should read this book." -- H. Russell Bernard, Arizona State University and University of Florida\n"Fat in Four Cultures is an extraordinary work of coordinated cross-cultural comparative ethnographic research about a common health issue in the contemporary world. This talented group of medical anthropologists show that fat is not an individual medical risk factor, but rather an entanglement of complex social, economic, psychological, and health-related issues. This is a landmark contribution to the anthropological study of obesity as well as a detailed guide of how team-based anthropological research should be organized." -- Peter J. Brown, Emory University\nTraits that signal belonging dictate our daily routines, including how we eat, move, and connect to others. In recent years, "fat" has emerged as a shared anchor in defining who belongs and is valued versus who does not and is not. The stigma surrounding weight transcends many social, cultural, political, and economic divides. The concern over body image shapes not only how we see ourselves, but also how we talk, interact, and fit into our social networks, communities, and broader society. 
Fat in Four Cultures is a co-authored comparative ethnography that reveals the shared struggles and local distinctions of how people across the globe are coping with a bombardment of anti-fat messages. Highlighting important differences in how people experience "being fat," the cases in this book are based on fieldwork by five anthropologists working together simultaneously in four different sites across the globe: Japan, the United States, Paraguay, and Samoa. 
Through these cases, Fat in Four Cultures considers what insights can be gained through systematic, cross-cultural comparison. Written in an eye-opening and narrative-driven style, with clearly defined and consistently used key terms, this book effectively explores a series of fundamental questions about the present and future of fat and obesity.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Hardin, Jessica

Diets & Weight Loss

University of Toronto Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brewis, Alexandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brewis, Alexandra

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brewis, Alexandra. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lives On The Line: Women and Ecology On A Pacifc Atoll

Human Story

The Human Story: An Introduction to Anthropology

Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health

Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health

Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery

Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery

Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)

Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight (Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom)