The Cannibal Within offers an evolutionary account of the propensity of human beings, in extreme circumstances to eat other human beings, despite the strong Western taboo against such practices. What sets this volume apart from the large body of literature on cannibalism, both popular and anthropological, is the underlying premise: cannibalism as an alternative to starvation is tacitly condoned by the same biological morality that would condemn cannibalism of other sorts in non-threatening situations. Deep as the taboos may be, the survival instinct runs even deeper. The title of the book reflects the author's belief that cannibalism is not a pathology that erupts in psychotic individuals, but is a universal adaptive strategy that is evolutionarily sound. The cannibal is within all of us, and cannibals are within all cultures, should the circumstances demand cannibalism's appearance and usage. Petrinovich's work is rich in historical detail, and rises to a level of theoretical sophistication in addressing a subject too often dealt with in sensationalist terms. The major instances in which survival cannibalism has occurred convinced the author that there is a consistent pattern and a uniform regularity of order in which different kinds of individuals are consumed. In considering who eats whom, when, and under what circumstances, this regularity appears, and it is consistent with what would be expected on the basis of evolutionary or Darwinian theory. In short, he concludes that starvation cannibalism is not a manifestation of the chaotic, psychotic behavior of individuals who are driven to madness, but reveals underlying characteristics of evolved human beings. Lewis Petrinovich is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology of the University of California, Riverside and is currently a resident of Berkeley, California.

The Cannibal within

History

Petrinovich, Lewis

Americas

Aldine Transaction

Childhood Socialization

This collection of authoritative studies portrays how the basic agencies of socialization transform the newborn human organism into a social person capable of interacting with others. Socialization differs from one society to another and within any society from one segment to another. Childhood Socialization samples some of that variation, giving the reader a glimpse of socialization in contexts other than those with which he or she is likely to be familiar. In the years since publication of the first edition of this book in 1988, childhood has become a territory open to broader sociological investigation. In this revised edition, Gerald Handel has selected and gathered new contributions that analyze the agents of socialization, including family, school, and peer group, and explore the influences of television and gender. The balance of classical studies and more recent work reflecting changes in the family structure renews the centrality of this anthology for courses in the social psychology of children up to adolescence. The book is divided into nine "Socialization, Individuation, and the Self"; "Historical Changes in Attitudes Toward Children"; "Families as Socialization Agents"; "Daycare and Nursery School as Socialization Agents"; "Schools as Socialization Agents"; "Peer Groups as Socialization Agents"; "Television and its Influence"; "Gender Socialization"; and "Social Stratification and Inequality in Socialization." While socialization continues on into the adolescent and adult years, childhood socialization is primary, essential in creating the human person and in shaping the identity, outlook, skills, and resources of the evolving person. Childhood Socialization is a dynamic volume that will be of continuing interest to students and scholars of family studies, sociology, psychology, and modern culture.

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

In Constructing Social Problems, the authors propose that social problems be conceived as the claimsmaking activities of individuals or groups regarding social conditions they consider unjust, immoral, or harmful and that should be addressed. This perspective, as the authors have formulated it, conceives of social problems as a process of interaction that produces social problems as social facts in society. The authors further propose that this process and the social facts it produces are the data to be researched for the sociology of social problems. This volume will be of interest to those concerned with the discipline of sociology, especially its current theoretical development and growth.

Constructing Social Problems

Malcolm Spector

Information Technologies and Social Orders (Communication and Social Order)

The history of human society, as Carl Couch recounts it in his speculative final book, is a history of successive, sometimes overlapping information technologies used to process the varied symbolic representations that inform particular social contexts. Couch departs from earlier "media" theorists who ignored these contexts in order to concentrate on the technologies themselves. Here, instead, he adopts a consistent theory of interpersonal and intergroup relations to depict the essential interface between the technologies and the social contexts. He emphasizes the dynamic and formative capacities of such technologies, and places them within the major institutional relations of societies of any size. Social orders are viewed in these pages as inherently and reflexively shaped by the information technologies that participants in the institutions use to carry out their work. The manuscript was nearly complete in draft at the time of Couch's death. He has left a bold, synthetic statement, reclaiming the common ground of sociology and communication studies and articulating the indispensability of each for the other. With admirable scope, across historical epochs and cultures, he shows in detail the transformative power of information technologies. While the author hopes that a humane vision comes with each technological advance, he nonetheless describes the numerous instances of mass brutality and oppression that have resulted from the oligarchic control of those technologies. Couch's theory and substantive analysis speak directly to the interests of historians, sociologists, and communication scholars. In its review, Contemporary Sociology said: "The volume is full of smart insights and valuable information, a fitting final effort for a scholar of great distinction."

Science & Math

David Maines

Technology

Political corruption has traditionally been presented as a phenomenon characteristic of developing countries, authoritarian regimes, or societies in which the value system favored tacit patrimony and clientelism. Recently, however, the thesis of an inverse correlation between corruption and economic and political development (and therefore democratic "maturity") has been frequently and convincingly challenged. Countries with a long democratic tradition, such as the United States, Belgium, Britain, and Italy, have all experienced a combination of headline-grabbing scandals and smaller-scale cases of misappropriation.  In Corrupt Exchanges, primary research on Italian cases (judicial proceedings, in-depth interviews, parliamentary documents, and press databases), combined with a cross-national comparison based on a secondary analysis of corruption in democratic systems, is used to develop a model to analyze corruption as a network of illegal exchanges. The authors explore in great detail the structure of that network, by examining both the characteristics of the actors who directly engage in the corruption and the resources they exchange. These processes of degeneration have caused a crisis in the dominant paradigm in both academic and political considerations of corruption.  The book is organized around the analysis of the resources that are exchanged and of the different actors who take part. Politicians in business, illegal brokers, Mafia members, protected entrepreneurs, and party-appointed bureaucrats exchange resources on the illegal market, altering the institutional system of interactions between the state and the market. In this complex web of exchanges, bonds of trust are established that allow the corrupt exchange to thrive. The book will serve both as a theoretical approach to a political problem of large bearing on democratic institutions and a descriptive warning of a system in peril.

Corrupt Exchanges

Porta, Donatella Della

Counseling and the Therapeutic State (Social Problems and Social Issues)

This book examines the nature and scope of counselling and psychotherapeutic practice in modern society. Although this entails a close analysis of the social organization of counselling within medicine, psychology and the helping professions, the book also looks at the persistence of the therapeutic ethos within American and Western culture more generally (that is, within the context of families, communities, schools, churches, the courts, and the mass media). In order to understand the rise and continuing persistence of the therapeutic welfare state, with its guiding concepts and metaphors of sickness, disease, syndrome, pathology, addiction and self-esteem, one must understand that the rise to prominence of medicine occurred concomitant to the broader transformation of western societies from agricultural to industrial (manufacturing-based) to postindustrial (information- and service-based) economies. Late industrialization and the postindustrial era, with its emphasis on service rather than manufacturing, produces a range of "experts" modelling themselves after the primordial professional classes of physicians and lawyers. The proliferation and continuing expansion of psychotherapeutic practice in modern society is a reflection of the power of the professional discourses of medicine and the assumptions of the disease model, which suggests that persons ought to "seek professional help" for even minor disturbances in their lives. This ideological hegemony works by turning greater and greater numbers of average citizens into "patients" or "clients" as they accept the assumptions of the disease model and turn to various "physicians of the

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Building Community Capacity (Modern Applications of Social Work Series)

This book focuses on a gap in current social work practice theory: community change. Much work in this area of macro practice, particularly around "grassroots" community organizing, has a somewhat dated feel to it, is highly ideological in orientation, or suffers from superficiality, particularly in the area of theory and practical application. Set against the context of an often narrowly constructed "clinical" emphasis on practice education, coupled with social work’s own current rendering of "scientific management," community practice often takes second or third billing in many professional curricula despite its deep roots in the overall field of social welfare. Drawing on extensive case study data from three significant community-building initiatives, program data from numerous other community capacity-building efforts, key informant interviews, and an excellent literature review, Chaskin and his colleagues draw implications for crafting community change strategies as well as for creating and sustaining the organizational infrastructure necessary to support them. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of a variety of professional disciplines including sociology, urban planning, psychology, and social work. Building Community Capacity takes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to a subject of wide and current concern: the role of neighborhood and community structures in the delivery of human services or, as the authors put it, "a place where programs and problems can be fitted together." Social work scholars and students of community practice seeking new conceptual frameworks and insights from research to inform novel community interventions will find much of value in Building Community Capacity.

Building Community Capacity

Chaskin, Robert J.

Venkatesh, Sudhir

Brown, Prudence

Vidal, Avis

This volume fills a research gap of striking proportions by exploring the contingencies that mediate the crimes perpetrated on those who are themselves perpetrators. The notion that violence is something that happens only to law-abiding citizens is both widely held and inaccurate. The disproportionate share of victims of crime are, in reality, themselves involved in crime. Yet existing scholarship has failed to explore the contingencies that mediate offenses like drug robbery—from the forces that inspire it, to the methods used to select targets, to the means employed to generate compliance, down to the tactics used to thwart retaliatory attempts after the crime has ended. Given that predatory behavior between and among offenders ultimately spreads to society at large (the "contagion effect"), a research gap of striking proportions has emerged. The imprudence of robbing other criminals is widely assumed. Yet criminologists paradoxically observe that a major benefit of robbing fellow criminals is that they cannot report the offense to the authorities. Why, then, should offenders elect to reduce their odds of getting arrested at the cost of enhancing their chances of getting killed? Drawing on candid interviews with the perpetrators, Jacobs attempts to answer such questions and fill this gap in the research agenda of criminology. The result is a narrative that explores the world of street-corner drugs from the vantage point of those who actually commit these high-risk crimes. It also introduces serious ethical issues that criminology and law enforcement tend to gloss over or ignore entirely. This work is innovative and troubling at the same time. It takes a theme that Hollywood films have explored in greater depth than social science, and restores it as a crucial part of the ethnography of crime.

Robbing Drug Dealers: Violence beyond the Law (Modern Applications of Social Work Series)

Jacobs, Bruce

Abortion, Motherhood, and Mental Health: Medicalizing Reproduction in the United States and Great Britain (Social Problems and Social Issues)

Whatever reproductive choices women make--whether they opt to end a pregnancy through abortion or continue to term and give birth--they are considered to be at risk of suffering serious mental health problems. According to opponents of abortion in the United States, potential injury to women is a major reason why people should consider abortion a problem. On the other hand, becoming a mother can also be considered a big risk. This fine, well-balanced book is about how people represent the results of reproductive choices. It examines how and why pregnancy and its various outcomes have come to be discussed this way. The author's interest in the medicalization of reproduction--its representation as a mental health problem--first arose in relation to abortion. There is a very clear contrast between the construction of women who have abortions, implied by moralized argument against abortion, and the construction that results when the case against abortion focuses on its effects on women's mental health. Lee argues that claims that connect abortion with mental illness have been limited in their influence, but this is not to suggest that they have not become a focus for discussion and have had no impact. The limits to such claims about abortion do not, by any means, suggest limits to the process of the medicalization of pregnancy more broadly, that is, a process of demedicalization. The final theme of Ellie Lee's book is the selective medicalization of reproduction. Centering on the claim that abortion can create a post abortion syndrome, the author examines the "medicalization" of the abortion problem on both sides of the Atlantic. Lee points to contrasts in legal and medical dimensions of the abortion issue that make for some important differences, but argues that in both the United States and Great Britain, the post-abortion-syndrome claim constitutes an example of the limits to medicalization and the return to the theme of motherhood as a psychological ordeal. Lee makes the case for looking to the social dimensions of mental health problems to account for and understand debates about what makes women ill. Ellie Lee is research fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton, Highfield, United Kingdom.

Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health: Medicalizing Reproduction in the US and Britain (Social Problems & Social Issues)

Ellie Lee

Global Aging and Challenges to Families (The Life Course and Aging)

The recent explosion in population aging across the globe represents one of the most remarkable demographic changes in human history. There is much concern about population aging and its consequences for nations, for governments, and for individuals. It has often been noted that population aging will inevitably affect the economic stability of most countries and the policies of most state governments. What is less obvious, but equally important, is that population aging will profoundly affect families. Who will care for the growing numbers of tomorrow's very old members of societies? Will it be state governments? The aged themselves? Their families? The purpose of this volume is to examine consequences of global aging for families and intergenerational support, and for nations as they plan for the future. Four remarkable social changes during the past fifty years are highlighted: (1) Extension of the life course: A generation has been added to the average span of life over the past century; (2) Changes in the age structures of nations: Most nations today have many more elders, and many fewer children, than fifty years ago; (3) Changes in family structures and relationships: Some of these differences are the result of trends in family structure, notably higher divorce rates and the higher incidence of childbearing to single parents; (4) Changes in governmental responsibilities: In the last decade, governmental responsibility appears to have slowed or reversed as states reduce welfare expenditures. How will families respond to twenty-first-century problems associated with population aging? Will families indeed be important in the twenty-first century, or will kinship and the obligations across generations become increasingly irrelevant, replaced by "personal communities"? This volume goes a considerable distance to answer these critical issues for the twenty-first century. Vern L. Bengtson is an AARP/University Chair in Gerontology and Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California. Ariela Lowenstein is associate professor and head, Department of Aging Studies, University of Haifa, Israel.

Global Aging and Challenges to Families (Life Course and Aging)

Ariela Lowenstein Vern L. Bengtson

Parenting & Relationships

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