Sociobiology Books - Page 6

Beyond culture

Edward Twitchell Hall

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Chapter 1: Education doesn't necessarily mean Learning 5 out of 5 stars.
50 of 62 people found this review helpful.

I read this book for the first time over 20 years ago after I graduated from college with an unrelated science major which I found loathesome and never used. I had already read "The Hidden Dimension" when working with an architect. I am not about to read this one again due to its complexity and the fact it "sunk in" then. Here are some of Hall's highlights:

Ch. 1 (The Paradox of Culture): "One wonders how many individuals who have been forced to adjust to eight-hour, nine-to-five schedules have sacrificed their creativity, and what the social and human cost of this sacrifice has been."

Ch. 3 (Consistency and Life): "He is forced into the position of thinking and feeling that anyone whose behavior is not predictable or is peculiar in any way is slightly out of his mind, improperly brought up, irresponsible, psychopathic, politically motivated to a point beyond all redemption, or just plain inferior."

Ch. 7 (Contexts, High and Low): "... in high context systems, people in places of authority are personally and truly (not just in theory) responsible for the actions of subordinates down to the lowest man. In low context systems, responsibility is diffused throughout the system and difficult to pin down ..."

Ch. 11 (Covert Culture and Action Chains): "The investigation of out-of-awareness culture can be accomplished only by actual observation of real events in normal settings and contexts. ... Culture is therefore very closely related to if not synonymous with what has been defined as "mind".

Ch. 12 (Imagery and Memory): "Our problems in education are exacerbated by eductional systems and philosophies that stress verbal facility at the expense of other important parts of man's mind ..."

Ch. 13 (Cultural and Primate Bases of Education): "One reason psychotherapy is so slow is that in order to change one thing it is necessary to alter the entire psyche, because the different parts of the psyche are functionally interrelated."

Ch. 13: Over bureaucratization: "The problem with bureaucracies is that they have to work hard and long to keep from substituting self-serving survival and growth for their original primary objective. ... Bureaucracies have no soul, no memory and no conscience."

Ch. 14 (Culture as an Irrational Force): "Since the men and women responsible for these [anthropological] studies for the most part are both well trained in Anglo-American social science methodology and well motivated, one can only assume that there is something basically wrong with the way in which social science research is often conducted."

Editorial Review:

Edward T. Hall opens up new dimensions of  understanding and perception of human experience by  helping us rethink our values in constructive ways.

The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Harvard Economic Studies) (Harvard Economic Studies)

Mancur Olson

List Price: $10.00 By: Harvard University Press Amazon Marketplace: 5 new & used starting at $15.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Somewhat dated, but still worth reading 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This book does a good job of describing the effects of financial incentives on the ability of large and small groups to organize to promote their interests. But it doesn't try to analyze the effects of non-financial incentives such as the desire for a reputation for altruism.
One of the most striking features of this book is the worldview that it criticizes. Apparently when the book was written, it was respectable to believe that special interest group politics improved democracy. This book seems to have been one of the original reasons for the shift of opinions away from that view. But from today's perspective, Olson seems a bit naive in his optimism that large governments and labor unions will serve the public interest in spite of the problems that the book describes of small interest groups with concentrated interests being more effective at lobbying than large groups with diluted interests.
His clear reasoning on his main points is still not as widely understood as it should be. But the other two books of his that I've read are better (The Rise and Decline of Nations, and Power and Prosperity).

Editorial Review:

THIS EDITION HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A NEWER EDITION

An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols

By: Thames & Hudson Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $7.62

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

People all over the world have always used symbols to express and communicate the things that mean most to them. From a country's flag, which can signify more than patriotism, to a charm bracelet, with its "portable memories," symbolism takes various forms. Familiarity with symbolism opens up levels of understanding most of us have probably never been aware of. Why, for instance, do we share a secret with the words "a little bird told me?" What is it about a horseshoe that, in the right circumstances, brings luck? Why a horse's shoe? How old is the swastika, and where has it been used as a symbol (and what was Jung getting at when he said the Nazis used it "backwards")?

In nearly 1500 entries, many of them strikingly and often surprisingly illustrated, J.C. Cooper has documented the history and evolution of symbols from pre-history to our own day. Lively, informative and often ironic, she discusses and explains an enormous variety of symbols extending from the Arctic to Dahomey, from the Iroquois to Oceania, and coming from systems as diverse as Tao, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Tantra, the ancient cult of Cybele and the Great Goddess, the Pre-Columbian religions of the Western Hemisphere and the Voodoo cults of Brazil and West Africa.

The Rebel

Albert Camus

By: Vintage Books Amazon Marketplace: 9 new & used starting at $2.95

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Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Camus eclipses nihilism and brings news of a new age! 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

I first became interested in Albert Camus after reading a quote from The Rebel online. "I rebel, therefore we exist" was the quote, and I must admit that, after reading the book, there has never been anything truer written. When I was in a bookstore a few months ago I found a copy of The Rebel, which is apparently a rare sight these days, since The Rebel is often ignored. Camus is one of the most famous writers of the 20th century, so why would one of his masterpieces be ignored?

It has been ignored, from what I can gather, because it is a philosophical work in which Camus pulls no punches and examines thoroughly why the excessive crime and violence of our era exist. Camus explains how, in both philosophy and politics, the reigning attitude has been one of nihilism for the past two centuries. This nihilism, being necessarily without an aim, leads to dictatorship and gross amounts of suffering for humans, no matter what principles it claims on the surface. Camus systematically destroys those who have used the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, surrealism, u.s.w., to justify their murderous plots.

Camus proposes that instead of nihilism and murder, we take to heart the ancient concepts of moderation and responsibility. Camus' destruction of modern governents and his proposals of these ancient ideas seem to have made this book unpopular. In this era of oppression, it is easy to ignore what offends us or makes us think. Camus gives the reader no choice. He must either raise a defiant fist to the giants of power, or he must give way to these minds that are utterly without scruples. I admire Camus deeply because of this--he has summed up the ideas I have been carrying around for years--but some will be deeply hurt by his comments. I leave you with a final thought: everyone is partly to blame for the state of the present and the future. You have the choice to make it either good or bad.

Editorial Review:

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he shows how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny. As old regimes throughout the world collapse, The Rebel resonates as an ardent, eloquent, and supremely rational voice of conscience for our tumultuous times.

Translated from the French by Anthony Bower.

High Points in Anthropology

By: Random House USA Inc Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $29.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A conspiracy between universities, publishers and the editor 1 out of 5 stars.
18 of 18 people found this review helpful.

I wish I could get contracted to slap together a 'greatest hits' of anthropological selections, supply some commentary more appropriate to World Book Encyclodpedia than a college text, and then charge $80 for it. Sign me up! The selections in this book cover most of the seminal thinkers in early anthropology, although as it progresses through time the criteria seems to grow more vague and seemingly random. There are no women covered in this massive tome other than Ruth Benedict and her dubious contribution of 'personality studies'; there is no mention even of Margaret Mead, let alone people like Mary Douglas. Some editorial choices seem to reflect the biases of the editors more than the canon of anthropology. For example, there is somewhere around 100 pages of text from Levi-Strauss, and a mere 10 or so from Clifford Geertz (the first essay in his Interpretation of Cultures). There are other glaring omissions based on strange logic (e.g. the choice to include a selection from Durkheim but NOT Marx or Engels, which is explained - weakly - in the introduction). The selections by Marshall Sahlins and Alfred Kroeber are probably some of the worst examples of their writing they could have found for an anthology, and will most likely turn students *off* from their work than endear them or make them curious for more. Furthermore, the editors simply do not provide the reader with the tools for analysis that are necessary to place these theorists in their proper historical and intellectual contexts. As mentioned above, the extremely brief, synoptic commentaries that serve as introductions to each piece could have been assembled by a high-school student surfing the internet. We are given an entirely-too-straight-forward, normative picture of the various authors' ideas, accomplishments and contributions to the field; we are not given any sense of the contentious nature of some of these ideas, how they were debated, criticized and elaborated upon both in the halls of academia and in the fieldwork process. A person could counter that this is simply not possible in an 'introductory'-type book, but I would refer them to Garbarino's rather thin volume 'Sociocultural theory in anthropology', which does an excellent job of this type of analysis. However, Bohannan and Glazer do include a few essays reprinted from long dead (and occasionally hard to find) journals like "Man" (such as Evans-Pritchard's latter-day rant against the application of pure scientific positivism to human societies). The end result is that, if you are assigned this book for a class (as I was), you really have no choice but to shell out the $75 or $80 because you will be hard pressed to collect all the various readings yourself at the university library. But if choice is actually a factor and you are simply looking for a comprehensive and lucid guide to anthropological theory, I would recommend Edmund Leach's "Social Anthropology" or Marvin Harris' "The Rise of Anthropological Theory". Meanwhile, if you must have a reader of the original, primary sources, this book will suffice, but there really ought to be more substance here -- espeically for the price.

Editorial Review:

A classic collection of essays in the history of anthropological thought, the new edition has been conceptually reorganized and also includes selections by modern theorists-among them Marvin Harris, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz.

Leadership

James MacGregor Burns

List Price: $19.95 By: Harpercollins Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $7.15

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

The cornerstone of leadership literature 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This is the definitive book on leadership. It is long, dense with historical facts, sparkling with insights, and is essential reading for the leadership scholar. Few other leadership books merit a place on the essential reading list for this field.

Burns's accomplishment of recognizing the taxonomy of leadership is unmatched to this day. He distinguishes, for example, intellectual leadership from executive leadership, and explains how each is forged in the "crucible" of circumstances.

Rather than serving as a "how to" guide on leadership, Burns provides the reader with a framework for understanding his or her leadership role, and the requirements that accompany each role. Finding one's own reflection in this catalog of leadership roles can be an exciting and satisfying moment for the reader.

Burns is best known for developing the concept of "transforming" leadership, or "transformational" leadership as he calls it in this book. It stands in contrast to "transactional" leadership, which holds that every leader-follower encounter is an isolated event.

Whether the reader perseveres through the whole book, or just reads the introductory chapters, he or she will be in the presence of some of the best thinking to date on leadership.

Editorial Review:

One of America's leading historians on the role of leadership in American history.

Interpersonal conflict

Joyce L Hocker

By: W. C. Brown Co Amazon Marketplace: 1 new & used starting at $598.78

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Wonderful Book for Anyone 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This book is for anyone wanting to know how to communicate in a more effective manner with a loved one or a friend. The book gives the reader various scenerarios and lays the ground work for the evolution of your being. It is very easy to read. It is not boring. The authors have done a good job by writing this book.

Solid Research-Based Strategies 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

My students like this book, and so do I. I particularly like the concrete planning strategies, which can be helpful to anyone struggling to manage conflict. This book is one that I use to teach, but it changes my own behaviors along the way.

Good information that put me to sleep 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I purchased this book for a communication class that I took this summer. The information in the book was good but it is written like a medical journal and put me to sleep. It took me a long time to get through the material. If you have a hard time concentrating and staying awake while reading, good luck to you.

Editorial Review:

Written for the Interpersonal Conflict or Conflict Management course, this textbook examines the central principles of effective conflict management in all types of contexts--from romantic relationships to the workplace. With its combination of up-to-date research and examples, students will have both a theoretical and a practical foundation in conflict management.

A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis

David M. Friedman

List Price: $26.00 By: Free Press Amazon Marketplace: 26 new & used starting at $4.48

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Whether enemy or ally, demon or god, the source of satisfaction or the root of all earthly troubles, the penis has forced humanity to wrestle with its enduring mysteries. Here, in an enlightening and entertaining cultural study, is a book that gives context to the central role of the penis in Western civilization.

A man can hold his manhood in his hand, but who is really gripping whom? Is the penis the best in man -- or the beast? How is man supposed to use it? And when does that use become abuse? Of all the bodily organs, only the penis forces man to confront such contradictions: something insistent yet reluctant, a tool that creates but also destroys, a part of the body that often seems apart from the body. This is the conundrum that makes the penis both hero and villain in a drama that shapes every man -- and mankind along with it.

In A Mind of Its Own, David M. Friedman shows that the penis is more than a body part. It is an idea, a conceptual but flesh-and-blood measuring stick of man's place in the world. That men have a penis is a scientific fact; how they think about it, feel about it, and use it is not. It is possible to identify the key moments in Western history when a new idea of the penis addressed the larger mystery of man's relationship with it and changed forever the way that organ was conceived of and put to use. A Mind of Its Own brilliantly distills this complex and largely unexamined story.

Deified by the pagan cultures of the ancient world and demonized by the early Roman church, the organ was later secularized by pioneering anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci. After being measured "scientifically" in an effort to subjugate some races while elevating others, the organ was psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. As a result, the penis assumed a paradigmatic role in psychology -- whether the patient was equipped with the organ or envied those who were. Now, after being politicized by feminism and exploited in countless ways by pop culture, the penis has been medicalized. As no one has before him, Friedman shows how the arrival of erection industry products such as Viagra is more than a health or business story. It is the latest -- and perhaps final -- chapter in one of the longest sagas in human history: the story of man's relationship with his penis.

A Mind of Its Own charts the vicissitudes of that relationship through its often amusing, occasionally alarming, and never boring course. With intellectual rigor and a healthy dose of wry humor, David M. Friedman serves up one of the most thought-provoking, significant, and readable cultural works in years.

Learning from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studuies

Robert S. Weiss

List Price: $27.95 By: Free Press Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $7.70

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best introduction to qualitative interviewing 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Learning From Strangers is the best introduction to how to do qualitative interviewing that I know of, and it's one of two books that I assign in my course on qualitative research methods (the other is Corrine Glesne's Becoming Qualitative Researchers). It is very readable, but also deeply insightful and informed by Weiss's many years of interviewing. The most valuable part of the book, and one thing that sets it apart from most other books on qualitative interviewing, is that it includes lengthy excerpts from actual interview transcripts, with Weiss's detailed commentary on what worked well and what didn't. The book also has excellent advice on developing interview questions, selecting interviewees, analyzing interview data, and writing the final report.

Editorial Review:

Drawing on Weiss's thirty years' experience interviewing and teaching others, Learning from Strangers is the definitive work on qualitative research interviewing. The author of many successful books, Dr. Weiss provides examples and running commentary on how each interaction either inhibits or promotes trust and alliance. Used as a reference, handbook, or text, this book is appropriate for novices and professionals.

All our kin: strategies for survival in a Black community

Carol B Stack

By: Harper & Row Amazon Marketplace: 5 new & used starting at $4.31

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

All Our Kin is the chronicle of a young white woman's sojourn into The Flats, an African-American ghetto community, to study the support system family and friends form when coping with poverty. Eschewing the traditional method of entry into the community used by anthropologists -- through authority figures and community leaders -- she approached the families herself by way of an acquaintance from school, becoming one of the first sociologists to explore the black kinship network from the inside. The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex. Universally considered the best analysis of family and kinship in a ghetto black community ever published, All Our Kin is also an indictment of a social system that reinforces welfare dependency and chronic unemployment. As today's political debate over welfare reform heats up, its message has become more important than ever.