Abstract
This paper discusses the role of ethnocentrism in the book. "Ethnocentrism" is the belief that your culture is "better" or "superior" to other cultures and that cultural standards are universal. It is often the wedge that keeps people from many cultures from blending into a cohesive unit, and in "The Spirit Catches You," it is quite common to see how the Hmong, with their culture of beliefs and superstitions, and American doctors, with their medicines and science, would clash and never see eye to eye.

From the Paper
""The Spirit Catches You" is the story of a Hmong family, the Lees, and their young daughter Lia. Lia is diagnosed with epilepsy, which the Hmong call "the spirit catches you and you fall down" disease. The story graphically illustrates two cultures that meet head on - with each one having absolutely no understanding of the other. The Hmong's entire culture is built on a series of beliefs and superstitions that they use nearly everyday to combat illness and appearance. For example, the author notes early in the book, "Although the Hmong believe that illness can be caused by a variety of sources - [...] by far the most common cause of illness is soul loss" (Fadiman 10). Thus, the Hmong use spiritual and holistic approaches to their daughter's health problems because it is all they know. The American doctors, on the other hand, want the Hmong to use American medicines and treatments, and the Hmong have no idea what these treatments are, or how they will benefit their daughter. What happens as the two cultures collide is a comedy of errors and misunderstanding, except that it is not funny, and Lia pays the price in the end."

Tags:lia, hmong, medicine

Abstract
This paper examines human culture and how intelligence is determined by biological factors. The author discusses the origins of the human brain, and how it evolved into a tool of intelligence more than two million years ago, and how societal cultures are learned and shared.

From the Paper
"According to Wolpoff, ?while a human culture cannot be linked to a particular biology, or vice versa, for humans culture is biology.? Wolpoff, 1999, p.164. This statement means that development of a culture is dependent on biologically determined factors. The most important reason for the development of culture is adaptation for survival under changing environment, which in turn requires, on the one hand, natural selection, and on the other making choices, rather than merely acting on instinct. Intelligence, needed for the purpose of making choices has been the product of biological factors. It should be noted that even though some animals such as wild dogs also live in societies, only humans have developed culture. Culture developed side by side with the evolution of certain physical features in the human species, Homo sapiens that made intelligence possible."

Tags:paleoanthropology, origins, neanderthal, dna, communication, wolpoff

Abstract
This paper discusses the skeletal changes reflected in the change from arboreal to terrestrial locomotion. The author examines the evolution of primates through lemuroides, tarsiers, monkeys, apes to humans. The paper defines the structure that differentiates humans.

From the Paper
"Primates have evolved over a period of millions of years and the ultimate in evolution is the human. Over the course of time, different primates evolved different body structures, which suited their time and their lifestyle and the ecosystem into which they fit. The prosimians and the early primates were arboreal, which over time gradually descended from the trees and developed an upright stance. This was accompanied by skeletal changes to accommodate the postural changes. Primates are distinguished from other mammals by nine general features: A generalized limb ..."

Tags:lemuroids, tariers, monkeys, apes, humans

Abstract
A thorough discussion of the history and pros and cons of cloning in general. This paper supports cloning humans to help humanity so long as the ability is not abused. Topics presented include natural clones and philosophical, physical, medical and various other issues.

From the Paper
"The word "cloning" once brought to mind a vast array of ideas and thoughts often possible only within the context of science fiction, and yet our technology has now reached a stage in which possibility has become reality. In 1996, the first successful mammalian clone was created and named Dolly - a sheep born asexually who had the exact same genetic sequence as her mother (Hawker). Recently, in 2001 a human embryo was cloned and grew to the 6 cell stage before it died (Hill). These two events have raised an enormous amount of questions surrounding the ethics and benefits of cloning. Even though cloning exists in nature (Identical Twins, bacteria, most unicellular organisms, plants not from seeds, some algae and fungi, many Invertebrates are all natural clones), there is a sense of taking evolution and nature into our own hands by cloning most especially in context to cloning human beings (Hawker). There are strong arguments both for and against cloning, but I believe cloning is only feasible to help humanity so long as it is not abused."

Tags:anthropology, clone, clones, cloning, dolly, humanity, humans, infertility, medical, nature, nurture, science, sheep, technology, vitro, vs

From the Paper
"Overpopulation is perhaps the single most pervading force of today's society. Transcending boundaries of political science, economics, sociology or any other field working with issues relevant to contemporary society, the mathematical certainty of exponential population growth is simple; By the time we begin to sense overpopulation, it is only a short time until the problem reaches mammoth and uncontrollable scale. Particularly in the third world, where resources are scarce, the imperative for action for clear. China and India are the two most heavily populated nations of the world, yet have taken radically different approaches to population control. India has maintained a strictly non-coercive population policy, and indeed the population has skyrocketed. China, on the other hand, has succeeded in curbing the population growth rate quite significantly by taking a much more proactive stance. While pragmatically effective, China's policies are so authoritarian and coercive that they lead to consequences considered simply inhuman by many."

Tags:China, India, population, third world

Abstract
This paper provides a thorough look at the Bubonic Plague, the deadly pandemic that continuously reappeared all throughout Europe until the Seventeenth century, leaving behind death, devastation, and economic disaster. The author discusses how the plague was transmitted, symptoms, the versions of the plague, the plague's impacted on religion, and how it influenced the culture of the times-literature, art, and superstitious behavior. The paper also looks at the staggering number of dead that the Black Death claimed as it swept across the European continent.

From the Paper
"The Black Death was a time of death and destruction to all of society and its surroundings during the Fourteenth Century and beyond. According to Chester David Rail, "The sudden onset of human plague in southeastern Europe and the Middle East in the winter of 1346-1347 seems to have marked the beginning of the plague", Rail, 11. The Black Plague was a deadly pandemic continuously reappearing all throughout Europe until the Seventeenth century, leaving behind death, devastation, and economic disaster. The Black Death, also known as the Black Plague or the Bubonic Plague, originated in the Thirteenth century. The disease originally was transmitted from rat to rat and from rat to man by the bite of rat-fleas. ?Bubonic plague may be transmitted from place to place by imported fleas, which are carried by people "in their baggage or in merchandise", Wilson , 2. Constant travel and trade by Europeans with other countries exposed Europe to the plague. Its symptoms were exhibited by buboes, which are hard, painful, swellings of lymphatic glands usually affecting the groin area or under the armpits and around the neck."

Tags:bubonic, great, pandemic, plague, pneumonic, septicemic, europe, religious, persecution, superstition, jews, transmission

Abstract
This paper begins by analysing the creation of medicine as a bounded system. A bounded system is one circumscribed from the rest of the world, where cultural elements of patient?s symptoms are treated only as indicators of biological and empirical fact. It looks at how medical anthropology, by revealing the cultural framework and social networks that mediate and relate to medical discourse, removes medicine from its position as a bounded system. It attempts to emphasise how this task is inter-dependent with that of understanding medicine as several kinds of enterprise. It also examines the multiplicity of other forms of medical knowledge in the world.

From the Paper
"There is a great deal of difficulty in understanding medicine in the way one would understand other anthropological phenomenon. As Good (1994:2) notes ?disease is paradigmatically biological; it is what we mean by Nature and its impingement on our lives.? Yet, disease is also culturally constituted, as ethnographic examples later will demonstrate. A further difficulty is that by emphasising the social and cultural aspects of biomedicine, there is a risk of caricature; people will assume by revealing biomedicines construction as a category we mean to deny biomedicine's great uses. Indeed, the seemingly all-powerful status of biomedicine, its rapid spread and advancement, constitutes one of the greatest boundaries to appreciating its cultural construction."

Tags:knowledge, power, bounded, system

Abstract
This paper uses Foucault?s work on biopower and governmentality to analyse chronic pain as a resistance to power/knowledge formations that express themselves in terms of control over the body. It attempts to analyse chronic pain by using three different notions of resistance. It looks at how chronic pain causes a contraction of the social world especially in situations of biomedical practice when the moral decision ?it?s all in your head? can often be made by doctors. It examines how this process resists speech (and thus resocialisation) by analysing the dialectical tension this resistance has with the stress, rage and the impulse that drives us to unsettle or confound the fixed order of things. It then explores the resistance that people have to the pain that they feel followed by rage for order.

From the Paper
"Chronic pain confounds many of the concepts and methods used for its analysis, in part because of the privileging of certain spheres of analysis. This is noticeable in a set of assumptions that are part of both biomedical and western philosophical theory. This set of assumptions assumes a divide between mind and body; it assumes that diseases are universal biological or pyschophysiological entities resulting from somatic lesions and dysfunctions. These can produce signs of symptoms, and one must decode the cultural elements of patients systems in terms of their underlying somatic referents. If the symptoms do not fit this mould, then one is denied illness in the biomedical model."

Tags:torture, mind, body, foucalt, biopower, governmentality

Abstract
This paper examines two ethnographies relating to shamanic activity, Desjarlais? (1994) "Body and Emotions" and Taussig?s (1987), "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man". It attempts to show through their review how the literature on shamanism often proves more instructive in understanding the discourses of Otherness in anthropological and other writings. It also looks at what the physiological understandings of trance bring to our understandings of shamanism.

Outline
Shamans for Sale, a Dia(bolical?)lectical Image
A Short History of Emotion
The Fracturing of the World
Magia Pinta

From the Paper
"In the late 1980's, Desjarlais did fieldwork among the Yolmo Sherpa, a Tibetan people living in the Helambu region of north central Nepal. During the year he was in the region, he was apprenticed the veteran healer Meme. During this time, Desjarlais also underwent trance states. He does not claim these to be a photographic equivalent of the shaman's own trance state, rather, he emphasises the degree to which the healing process is grounded in the everyday physical movements of life, what one could term habitus . This is not directly accessible through discourse or exegesis - rather, it could be thought of as an unspoken archive, of sedimented, embodied history. Paralleling Desjarlais? analysis, this essay will first briefly examine the habitus from which Desjarlais analysis stems."

Tags:ecstasy, embodiment, healing, surrealism, trance

Abstract
The historical and intellectual background of inter-war Europe is mentioned and the formation of the Vienna Circle explained. The main aims and philosophies of the Circle are discussed - the main philosophy being logical positivism which is explained that any conclusive or meaningful statement must be based on observation and experimental evidence. Any assertion that is impossible to prove or disprove is scientifically useless. Problems with this are mentioned and the nature of scientific knowledge discussed.

From the Paper
"In order to properly discuss the Vienna Circle I must first briefly describe the social, scientific and philosophical situations that led to its formation and greatly influenced the views of its supporters. I will then outline the reasons for its formation, its general philosophy (one of empiricism and logical positivism) and some of the ideas put forward by its members regarding the nature of scientific knowledge. Many problems (both practical and semantic) arose from new ideas of what constituted "scientific knowledge" and I shall try and discuss these before concluding."

Tags:empiricism, experimental, feigl, frank, godel, moritz, schlick, theory, wittgenstein