Unifying Biology
The Evolutionary Synthesis and Evolutionary Biology
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
Princeton University Press
Unifying Biology offers a historical reconstruction of one of the most important yet elusive episodes in the history of modern science: the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. For more than 70 years after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, it was hotly debated by biological scientists. It was not until the 1930s that opposing theories were finally refuted and a unified Darwinian evolutionary theory came to be widely accepted by biologists. Using methods gleaned from a variety of disciplines, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis argues that the evolutionary synthesis was part of the larger process of unifying the biological sciences.
At the same time that scientists were working toward a synthesis between Darwinian selection theory and modern genetics, they were, according to the author, also working together to establish an autonomous community of evolutionists. Smocovitis suggests that the drive to unify the sciences of evolution and biology was part of a global philosophical movement toward unifying knowledge. In developing her argument, she pays close attention to the problems inherent in writing the history of evolutionary science by offering historiographical reflections on the practice of history and the practice of science. Drawing from some of the most exciting recent approaches in science studies and cultural studies, she argues that science is a culture, complete with language, rituals, texts and practices. Unifying Biology offers not only its own new synthesis of the history of modern evolution, but also a new way of ``doing history.''
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis is assistant professor of history at the University of Florida.
Why We Eat What We Eat
The Psychology of Eating
Elizabeth D. Capaldi, Editor
American Psychological Association
Eating is arguably the most fundamental of human activities. In Western societies, in particular, there is great interest in diet, health and food preferences. Why We Eat What We Eat translates the latest research results on the psychology of eating for health and psychology professionals as well as lay readers.
This volume explores the shift in eating research from the search for bodily signals that trigger hunger to a focus on eating patterns emerging from a learning process based on life experience. This new book offers hope that healthful eating patterns can be learned. The volume proposes models for normal eating behavior and discusses how and why eating deviates from these norms.
Leading investigators in the field present their findings on four factors that influence how our eating patterns develop:
- physiological factors, including those factors leading to taste aversions.
- developmental factors, starting with the effects of a pregnant woman's choices on her child's later food preferences.
- biological factors, including genetics and the search for internal cues that prompt eating factors.
- cultural factors, including the powerful influence of family and social norms.
Why We Eat What We Eat explores how these factors interact to shape our individual eating preferences and discusses the implications of this research for practitioners. The volume also compares the eating patterns of the nonobese and the obese person and discusses the short-term satiety factors that ensures consumption of a variety of foods.
Why We Eat What We Eat expands on themes in the well-received volume Taste, Experience, and Feeding and makes the information accessible to a wider audience. It will be of value to anyone interested in eating and its psychological aspects: health psychology researchers and practitioners, physicians, pediatricians, nutritionists, educators, students and parents.
Elizabeth D. Capaldi is professor of psychology at the University of Florida. She has contributed 60 chapters, articles and reviews and is co-editor of Taste, Experience, and Feeding. Dr. Capaldi currently serves on the governing board of the Psychonomic Society and on the board of directors of the American Psychological Society, of which she is also secretary.
The Cheyenne
John H. Moore
Blackwell Publishers
This book provides a history and ethnography of the Cheyenne people from their prehistoric origins north of the Great Lakes to their present life on the reservations in Oklahoma. It is based on archaeological, material, historical and linguistic evidence and draws vividly on the oral traditions of the Cheyenne themselves.
After an investigation of Cheyenne origins, the author describes their settlement, around 500 B.C. on the plains of North Dakota. Here they hunted buffalo and antelope on foot, and gradually developed the means to cultivate the often arid ground. In a reverse of the typical European pattern, the reintroduction of the horse in the 16th and 17th centuries allowed the Cheyenne to revert from settled horticultural communities to nomadic hunters across the American midwest.
The author describes the early French and British contacts with the Cheyenne and the beginnings of trade and Indian-settler politics. Early contacts were largely peaceful and it was not until after independence, and when the Cheyenne became involved in the intricacies of the Civil War, that full-scale conflict broke out between them and the U.S. Federal army. The tragic massacre of Cheyenne women and children at Sand Creek was avenged two decades later at the Battle of Little Big Horn --- but the scale and swiftness of federal retaliation served ultimately to accelerate the driving of the Cheyenne from their traditional lands to reservations in the south.
The author provides a detailed account of reservation life and shows how the dance ceremonies and oral traditions have largely survived the Cheyenne's enforced removal from their long-held homelands. He concludes with a critical examination of contemporary Cheyenne life and of the mixed results of the often inept intrusions of state and federal bureaucracies.
This is a vivid and readable history and ethnography of one of the most prominent of the American Indian peoples.
John H. Moore is chairman and professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. An expert in kinship and demography, he has written more than 50 scholarly books and articles, mostly about the Cheyenne. He was recently elected chair of the Anthropology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Women of Belize
Gender and Change in Central America
by Irma McClaurin
Rutgers University Press
``Provides a vivid and evocative portrait of the dynamics of gender and the evolution of women's consciousness in this small, but very complex, multiethnic society. McClaurin's own voice throughout the book is eloquent and subtle, always attentive to both the private and the public implications of the women's words.''
Daphne Patal, author of Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories
This engaging ethnography is set in the remote district of Toledo, Belize, Central America, where three women weave personal stories about the events in their lives. Each describes her experiences of motherhood, marriage, family illness, emigration, separation, work or domestic violence that led her to recognize gender inequality and then to do something about it. All three challenge the culture of gender at home and in the larger community.
Zola, an East Indian woman without primary school education, invents her own escape from a life of subordination by securing land, then marries the man she's lived with since the age of 14 --- but on her terms. Evelyn, a 39-year-old Creole woman, has raised eight children virtually alone, yet she remains married ``out of habit.'' A keen entrepreneur, she has run a restaurant, a store and a sewing business, and now she owns a mini-mart attached to her home. Rose, a Garifuna woman, is a mother of two whose husband left when she would not accept his extra-marital affairs. While she ekes out a survival in the informal economy, she gets spiritual comfort from her religious beliefs, love and music, and the two children.
The voices of these ordinary Belizean women fill the pages of this book. Irma McClaurin reveals the historical circumstances, cultural beliefs and institutional structures that have rendered women in Belize socially disenfranchised and economically dependent upon men. She shows how some ordinary women, through participation in women's grassroots groups, have found the courage to change their lives. Drawing upon her own experiences as a black woman in the United States, and relying upon cross-cultural data about the Caribbean and Latin America, she explains the specific way gender is constructed in Belize.
Irma McClaurin is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. She has published three books of poetry and is currently working on a biography of journalist Leanita McClain.
Vietnam Protest Theatre
The Television War on Stage
Nora M. Alter
The escalation of the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s unleashed worldwide protest. Playwrights produced works that grappled with the complexities of post-imperialist politics and with the problems of creating effective political theatre for a generation for whom the war was chiefly an event seen on the evening news. The ephemeral theatre these writers created, today little-known and rarely studied, provides an important window on a complex moment in culture and history.
In part one, Alter discusses American examples of the genre, such as MacBird and Viet Rock, as well as representative works from England, Austria, Germany and France, where plays about the Vietnam War often served as the occasion for critiques of these nations' current politics or their imperialist pasts.
In part two, she investigates several theoretical issues raised by Vietnam protest theatre involving the ``other,'' power and submission, ``subjective imperialism'' and the mediation effects of both television and theatrical performance.
Nora M. Alter is assistant professor of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida.