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The centrality of food in life, and the importance of food as life, is undeniable. As a source of biological substrates, personal pleasure and political power, food is and has been an enduring requirement of human biological, social and cultural existence. In recent years, interest in food has increased across the academic, public and popular spheres, fuelled by popular media’s constant play on the role of food and body size, and food and cooking, as a mass spectacle for TV audiences. In Food,...

Focusing on contemporary issues such as drug use and AIDS, drug testing and law-enforcement concerns, this text has strong historical and sociological foundations to put the material into perspective for students. Short, concise chapters allow instructors flexibility in dividing the material into reading assignments. There is coverage of all current treatments, allowing students to understand the relationship between the problem and the treatment, and easy-to-follow material on the physiological...

"China was turned into a nation of opium addicts by the pernicious forces of imperialist trade". This study systematically questions this assertion on the basis of abundant archives from China, Europe and the US, showing that opium had few harmful effects on either health or longevity, that most smokers used it in moderate quantities without any fatal "loss of control", and that the substance was prepared and appreciated in highly complex rituals with in-built constraints on excessive use. In a...

The goal of Drugs, a Healthy Understanding is to transmit to students a healthier understanding of drug use and abuse and to give them a definite knowledge of the consequences of drug abuse. To achieve this goal and encourage student education, I have compiled the data and information in aneasy-to-understand and user-friendly manner.

The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself. To understand why it took France so long to react to the AIDS crisis, this work analyzes the intersections of three discourses - the literary, the medical and the political - and traces the origin of French attitudes about AIDS to 19th century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity and sexuality.

Based on seventeen months of ethnographic research among Indonesian eldercare workers in Japan and Indonesia, this book is the first ethnography to research Indonesian care workers’ relationships with the cared-for elderly, their Japanese colleagues, and their employers. Through the notion of intimacy, the book brings together sociological and anthropological scholarship on the body, migration, demographic change, and eldercare in a vivid account of societal transformation. Placed against the...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) will soon be the most frequently diagnosed chronic condition among children, surpassing asthma. Yet research shows that ADHD can't be that prevalent. ADHD, a problem once thought to affect a small percentage of children, has exploded into one of the most misdiagnosed psychiatric conditions. Now doctors and Big Pharma are targeting children and adults worldwide to get the diagnosis and take medications that will, they say, transform their lives. In...