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"In this book, David MacDougall, one of the leading ethnographic filmmakers and film scholars of his generation, builds upon the ideas from his widely praised Transcultural Cinema and argues for a new conception of how visual images create human knowledge in a world in which the value of seeing has often been eclipsed by words. In ten chapters, MacDougall explores the relations between photographic images and the human body-the body of the viewer...

This is the ninth volume of Babel und Bibel, an annual of ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament, and Semitic studies. The principal goal of the annual is to reveal the inherent relationship between Assyriology, Semitics, and biblical studies-a relationship that our predecessors comprehended and fruitfully explored but that is often neglected today. The title Babel und Bibel is intended to point to the possibility of fruitful collaboration among the...

Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent books include French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton), and Making PCR, A Story of Biotechnology. The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern,...

"When the head of the Human Genome Project and a former President of the United States both assure us that we are all, regardless of race, genetically 99.9% the same, the clear implication is that racial differences among us are superficial. The concept of race, many would argue, is an inadequate map of the physical reality of human variation. In short, human races are not biologically valid categories, and the very ideas of race and racial differences...

Contributors to this volume address a current methodological crisis in anthropology today by turning to the methods promoted by Sidney W. Mintz, who has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history for several decades and was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique "globalization studies." Essays by leading anthropologists and historians collected here present case studies of Latin America,...

In this first-person tale of archaeological adventure in the tropical forest, Jeffrey Quilter tells the story of his excavation of Rivas, a great ceremonial center at the foot of the Talamanca Mountain range, which flourished between A.D. 900 and 1300, and its fabled gold-filled cemetery, the Panteón de La Reina. Beginning with the 1992 field season and ending with the last excavations in 1998, Quilter discusses Rivas' builders and users, theories...

Debates about the possibility of an open culture - or indeed about the possibility of an open debate about the openness of culture - often turn on questions of standards. But since no benchmark can be absolute, judgement is a proliferation of comparisons. Through a series of case studies in everyday and academic comparison (literature, history, politics, philosophy), Haun Saussy calls out the typical vices of comparison and proposes ways to unseat...

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter...