FACT: “In 1975, the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC, later the Autism Society of America,) lobbied to include autism as one of the developmental disabilities covered under the Education for All Handicapped Act. They succeeded. The bill, later revised and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, entitled children with autism and other developmental disabilities to a ‘free, appropriate, public education.’ The NSAC also demanded autism’s inclusion in the Developmental Disabilities Act, a bill authorizing services and support. . . .”

Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder
by Chloe Silverman

Autism has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years, thanks to dramatically increasing rates of diagnosis, extensive organizational mobilization, journalistic coverage, biomedical research, and clinical innovation. Understanding Autism, a social history of the expanding diagnostic category of this contested illness, takes a close look at the role of emotion—specifically, of parental love—in the intense and passionate work of biomedical communities investigating autism.

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, we will publish an ethnography of hackers from Biella Coleman. So it is fairly serendipitous that I found her introductory post to a series of articles she is writing for the Concurring Opinions blog (well serendipitous in the sense that her editor sent me the link . I hope you will check our her posts over the next month.

I would like to thank Danielle Citron for the invitation to pen some thoughts here on Concurring Opinions, and letting an anthropologist enter this legal arena. For my first post, I thought I would ease in slowly and give a taste of my work on hackers, geeks, and digital activism along with some of the themes and issues I will likely explore over the month.

Being there are not a whole lot of anthropologists of my ilk ( as I like to joke, I am an “arm chair anthropologist” who sits in front of her computer to study the high tech digerati of the west), I often get asked how or why I came to the study hackers, many people assuming that I had some hacker relative in my life or was myself a budding young hacker, both of which were not the case. Fitting to this blog, I got to hackers via the law. In 1997, when my friend—an avid free software developer—found out I had a keen but personal interest in patents and access to medicine, he sat me down to tell be about this legal concept called the “copyleft.” It was one of those moments that I still remember so vividly as I was nothing but floored, astonished, excited, and puzzled, especially when I learned of the full depth and extent of this legal alternative that had been dreamed up, not by lawyers, but by geeks and hackers.

Read more here: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2012/01/anthropological-introductions.html

We invite you to browse and download two new catalogs featuring great books by great authors.

In the religion catalog you can check out the Lives of Great Religious Books series with books by Garry Wills, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., and Martin E. Marty. You will also find new books from Robert Wuthnow, Paula Fredriksen, Mark Chaves, Leora Batnitzky, Peter Schäfer and Timothy Matovina – just to name a few.

Follow the link to the religion catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/rel12.pdf

In the anthropology catalog look for new books by Chloe Silverman, Peter Benson, Junko Kitanaka, Stephen J. Collier, Duana Fullwiley, and Marcia C. Inhorn. Forthcoming this May are books by Partha Chatterjee, Thomas Blom Hansen, and a book by Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. Be the first to check them out in the catalog.

Follow the link to the anthropology catalog:
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/anthro12.pdf

Both catalogs have many more new titles and your favorites now in paperback. Enjoy browsing.

Kristen Ghodsee’s “Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria” has won the 2011 John D. Bell Memorial Book Prize from the Bulgarian Studies Association. This award is established for the most outstanding recent scholarly book within any area of Bulgarian studies.

“Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion.

Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region’s state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women’s embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks’ new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria’s Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.”

This is the most recent in a slew of prizes for “Muslim Lives,” which has also won the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize, the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

Congratulations to Kristen Ghodsee, whose book Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria has been awarded the 2011 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Sciences. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography in the previous calendar year.” Ghodsee’s book explores gender roles and reconfigurations in a post-Communist Bulgarian community.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe also won the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology and the 2010 Heldt Prize.

The Society for the Anthropology of Europe, part of the American Anthropological Association, has announced that Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria by Kristen Ghodsee is the winner of the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.

According to their web site, “The William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology honors the best book published annually in Europeanist anthropology as determined by a panel comprising SAE senior members, chaired by the Society’s President-elect.”

People who follow such things, may be interested to learn that another PUP book won this same prize last year: The Empire of Trauma by Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman.

FACT: Tree resins were among the earliest additives to wine. Ancient humans made several intuitive leaps that lead to this development: if a tree oozed resin to heal a cut in its bark, then applying resin to a human wound should serve to cure it, and, by extension, drinking a wine laced with a tree resin could both help to treat internal maladies and prevent the dreaded “wine disease.”

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern

The history of civilization is, in many ways, the history of wine. This book is the first comprehensive and up-to-date account of the earliest stages of vinicultural history and prehistory, which extends back into the Neolithic period and beyond. Elegantly written and richly illustrated, Ancient Wine opens up whole new chapters in the fascinating story of wine and the vine by drawing upon recent archaeological discoveries, molecular and DNA sleuthing, and the texts and art of long-forgotten peoples.

Patrick McGovern takes us on a personal odyssey back to the beginnings of this consequential beverage when early hominids probably enjoyed a wild grape wine. We follow the course of human ingenuity in domesticating the Eurasian vine and learning how to make and preserve wine some 7,000 years ago. Early winemakers must have marveled at the seemingly miraculous process of fermentation. From success to success, viniculture stretched out its tentacles and entwined itself with one culture after another (whether Egyptian, Iranian, Israelite, or Greek) and laid the foundation for civilization itself. As medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society. As an evocative symbol of blood, it was used in temple ceremonies and occupies the heart of the Eucharist. Kings celebrated their victories with wine and made certain that they had plenty for the afterlife. (Among the colorful examples in the book is McGovern’s famous chemical reconstruction of the funerary feast—and mixed beverage—of “King Midas.”) Some peoples truly became “wine cultures.”

“No one is better qualified to sift through the widely scattered clues [to the origins of winemaking] than McGovern, a skilled scientific sleuth who wields the most powerful tools of modern chemistry in his search for the roots of ancient wines.”—J. Madeleine Nash, Time Magazine

“A rich treasury of lore on viticulture. . . . McGovern’s book will likely remain a standard in every serious wine-lover’s library for a long time. To that achievement–and to glorious wine itself—let us raise our glasses high.”—Laurence A. Marschall, Natural History

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7591.pdf

FACT: Among the slaughtered remains found in the Drakensberg Mountains is a now-extinct giant buffalo Pelovoris antiquus, which weighed almost 2000 kilograms and whose modern-day (smaller) descendant is one of the most dangerous game animals in Africa (Milo1998).

A Cooperative Species:
Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
by Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis

In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis—pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior—show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers.

Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the coevolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, A Cooperative Species provides a compelling and novel account of how humans came to be moral and cooperative.

“Bowles and Gintis stress that cooperation among individuals who are only distantly related is a critical distinguishing feature of the human species. They argue forcefully that the best explanation for such cooperation is altruism. Many will dispute this claim, but it deserves serious consideration.”—Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate in Economics

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9474.pdf

Religion Dispatches Magazine Online’s Lauri Lebo has a good suggestion for what to do this coming Saturday when, according to Harold Camping, true believers will ascend to heaven while the rest of the Earth heads towards destruction: throw a party!

Apparently many atheists (and believers who don’t think the Rapture is coming in two days) have decided to ring in the purported end of the world with a celebration.  Lebo has a few tips for a successful judgement day bash, including appropriate drinks to serve (such as the “Death in the Afternoon,” a Hemingway favorite) and what time to start your festivities (6 p.m. is allegedly when the Rapture will begin).

Interestingly enough, the reported information about the rapture includes not just a specific start time, but a prophesy that there will be “a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth.” If this sounds familiar, it may be because historically earthquakes have figured into the apocalyptic predictions of many civilizations. Read Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology, and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur with Dawn Burgess to find out more!

(And please, be careful with that absinthe!)

WHO OWNS THE BODY, AND WHEN DOES IT DIE?

(Excerpt from a forthcoming article)

by Colin Dayan, author of The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

The Supreme Court recently ruled that Henry Skinner, a Texas inmate sentenced to die for killing his girlfriend and her two sons nearly twenty years ago, can ask to test evidence from the scene of the crime—knives, fingernail clippings, blood and hairs, etc.—that might prove his innocence. Texas prosecutors had always refused to consent to the testing. But remedying the violation of Skinner’s civil rights by granting such a request does not mean that the tests will actually be carried out. All it does is add the support of federal civil rights law to the post-trial DNA testing issue. And there is no guarantee that any results will exculpate him. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her opinion, “they might further incriminate Skinner.”

Now, another prisoner on death row has raised questions, not about whether his civil rights have been violated, but about his rights to dispose of his own body—after execution. Christian Longo, in Oregon, guilty of murdering his wife and three children, wants to donate his organs after his execution. The state says he can’t. Who owns the corpse? Does a person who is to be executed have no right to property, even his own body?

*A full version of this piece is forthcoming in Law, Culture, and Humanities, Volume 7, Issue 2 (June 2011).

Can’t get enough baseball? This week’s book giveaway, Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos by Alan Klein, will help fill the gap.

From 1985 to 1994 there existed a significant but unheralded experiment in professional baseball. For ten seasons, the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos) were the only team in professional sports to represent two nations. Playing in the storied Mexican League (an AAA affiliate of major league baseball), the “Tecos” had home parks on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Laredo, Texas and in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. In true border fashion, Mexican and American national anthems were played before each game, and the Tecos were operated by interests in both cities. Baseball on the Border is the story of the rise and unexpected demise of this surprising team. Anyone with an interest in baseball will be enlightened & entertained by this informative book.

“Read this book, enjoy the characterizations of the players, managers, and administrators … listen to the crowd cheer for their home town heroes, and pause to think, as Klein paints the picture with a masters stroke, of what this [book] can tell us about transnational relations and the impact of sport.”–Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler, authors of Backboards and Blackboards

“The book is very well written. . . . It contributes greatly to the literature on the cultural basis of sport, to our understanding of the manner in which cultural inventions reflect national identity and processes, and substantiates an important insight to the idea that sport may provide a window to ongoing social change.”–Carlos Velez-Ibañez, American Anthropologist

Everyone who LIKES us on our Facebook Page is automatically entered in our weekly book giveaways.

Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos by Alan Klein

The language of winning is so ingrained in the culture that we Americans don’t even notice it. Does all this competition make us happier? Of course not. Listen along as Francesco Duina, author of Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession, joins David Phillippi on the Office Hours podcast. Their lively discussion touches on subjects from popular culture ranging from sports to children to celebrities, including why it makes sense for Budweiser to crown itself “The King of Beers” while the Danish brand Carlsberg is happier to be “Probably the Best Beer in the World.”