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Every natural symbol - derived from blood, breath or excrement - carries a social meaning and this work focuses on the ways in which any one culture makes its selections from body symbolism. Each person treats their body as an image of society and the author examines the varieties of ritual and symbolic expression and the patterns of social ritual in which they are embodied.Natural Symbols is a book about religion and it concerns our own society at least as much as any other. It has stimulated new insights into religious and political movements and has provoked re-appraisals of current progressive orthodoxies in many fields. As a classic, it represents a work of anthropology in its widest sense, exploring themes such as the social meaning of natural symbols and the image of the body in society which are now very much in vogue in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.In this reissue and with a new Introduction, Natural Symbols will continue to appeal to all students of anthropology, sociology and religion.

\"The cinema has often showcased the muscular male body, most notably in genres invoking classical Greco-Roman culture, whether peplum, epic or sword-and-sorcery. This book reassesses the classically-inflected action film as a significant cinematic form, often marginalized in media studies, that transcends such reductive labels as camp or kitsch. The focus is on the depiction of heroic masculinity, often characterized as reactionary or fascist, yet far more varied and contradictory, especially in relation to femininity and non-whiteness. These diverse representations of masculinity offer a major contribution to debates on maleness within and beyond academia that has been largely unexplored. In particular, Hercules in his many incarnations is one of the most important mythopoetic figures, on a par with King Arthur, Robin Hood, Tarzan and James Bond, informing popular cultural interpretations of manliness and the exaggerated male form\"-- Provided by publisher.

Gua Sireh, located in western Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo), is known for its rock art. The cave houses hundreds of charcoal drawings depicting people, often with headdresses, knives and other accoutrements. Here, we present direct radiocarbon dates and pigment characterizations from charcoal drawings of two large (>75 cm), unique Gua Sireh human figures (anthropomorphs). To our knowledge, these are the first chronometric ages generated for Malaysian rock art, providing insights into the social contexts of art production, as well as the opportunities and challenges of dating rock art associated with the Malay/Austronesian diasporas in Southeast Asia more generally. Previous archaeological excavations revealed that people occupied Gua Sireh from around 20,000 years ago to as recently as AD 1900. The site is within Bidayuh territory, and these local Indigenous peoples recall the cave's use as a refuge during territorial violence in the early 1800s. The age of the drawings, dated between 280 and 120 cal BP (AD 1670 to 1830), corresponds with a period of increasing conflict when the Malay elites controlling the region exacted heavy tolls on the local hill tribes. We discuss rock art production at Gua Sireh in this context of frontier conflict and Bidayuh resistance.

Rigorously determined peak oxygen uptake is internationally recognized as the criterion measure of youth cardiorespiratory fitness. The assessment and interpretation of children's and adolescents' peak oxygen uptake and the relationship of the measure with other health-related variables are well documented. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the prediction of peak oxygen uptake from field performance tests in young people. However, coupled with ratio-scaling of data and the raising of clinical red flags, these practices risk clouding our understanding of youth cardiorespiratory fitness and its relationship with current and future health. We believe these methods have the potential to mislead clinical practice and misguide recommendations for the promotion of youth cardiovascular health. We discuss relevant scientific evidence and interpretations that have emerged from predicting youth cardiorespiratory fitness from performance test scores. We argue that children deserve to have health care founded on evidence-based science and not on myths and misconceptions.

This series is dedicated to classical studies in general. The featured essays primarily examine topics relating to the ancient world from the fields of literary, visual, media, theatre, religious, and cultural studies. There is a particular emphasis on the application of modern theories, e.g. in the sphere of anthropology, performativity and narrativity; interdisciplinary comparisons; the mythical/ritual and iconic poetics of texts and images; and the reception of classical material in this context.

Modern medicine has often struggled to grasp the cultural aspects of interpersonal care. The medical humanities, on the other hand, have struggled to grasp the embodied, intimate character of care. In a recent appeal to the medical humanities, Julia Kristeva et al argue that care can be a point of crossing between these two ‘ontological domains’. They evoke the myth of Cura, referring to previous utilisations by such diverse thinkers as Heidegger and Kleinman, as well as Kristeva’s previous work. This study adds to these bodies of work by using the original text from Hyginus in much greater detail. Textual analysis, theoretical discussions and autotheoretical work unpack care as (1) a fundamental aspect of the human condition, (2) a holding-together of different domains of knowledge, (3) a withholding from these domains and (4) the site of intimate knowledge that both ‘ontological domains’ struggle to grasp.

The network has become a dominant form of contemporary thought, its constitutive metaphor reinvented during the explosion of networked techniques - the Internet and planetary telecommunications networks. It seems to draw the invisible infrastructure of contemporary society. The figure of the network tends to define the ways in which thought works, being ubiquitous in all disciplines, from biology to sociology, from law to computer science, etc., for the hidden structure of the complexity of today's society is the network that dominates and shapes it. The network itself produces social change, being conceived as a technique that provides connection and as a political-moral operator that provides meaning and is identified with a social and democratic revolution. In contemporary society everything is networked, from transport to energy, from telecommunications to information technology, even human relations have become 'networks'. The network, as the explanatory structure of the contemporary capitalist system, constitutes the 'new morphology of our societies', converging towards a 'meta-network of capitals', as the new figure ofpower, with the whole planet caught in its net, leading to the suppression of state control over society and the economy and the destruction of the sovereign nation state through the destruction of hierarchies.

Liritzis, I.; Westra, A., and Miao, C., 2019. Disaster geoarchaeology and natural cataclysms in world cultural evolution: An overview. Journal of Coastal Research, 35(6), 1307–1330. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Human records of short-term, catastrophic, geological processes, mainly in coastal or fluvial environments, and related phenomena in historic and prehistoric times have to be considered as functions of event intensities and impacts (and damages) caused on ancient human settlements and lives. Catastrophic events, such as, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and the collapse of ancient cultures, in particular, those allied to the birth of myths and legends, are the subject of long-lasting, vivid debate. Longer-term, more-or-less consecutive, geological processes and climatic fluctuations have a more pronounced effect on human history. Historical accounts provide many descriptions about cultural evolution in a recurrent manner. The geoarchives (geology, sedimentology, and geomorphology) and the human record (archaeology and history) are considered documentary evidence of these past events. Astronomical causes have introduced severe phenomena (warming, heavy precipitation, monsoons, droughts) imposed on ancient societies, including catastrophic meteor impact. Terrestrial upheavals and astronomical impacts have introduced a nonlinear character of a quasiperiodic nature in transforming human cultural evolution and reshaping the earth's surface. The transient nature of geological, geophysical, and proxy climatic indices, as well as, astronomical phenomena within the solar system, exhibit a wide spectrum of quasiperiodic frequencies as variable and effective environmental factors, which, in addition to anthropogenic factors, reshape the human context. Several conspicuous examples have been reported on mythological deluges and their relation to natural catastrophes. The Anthropocene sea level rise and climatic episodes have had a decisive and prominent role on coastlines and human settlements. Alluvial sediments, sedimentary deposits, and land modifications have drastic effects on settlements. These effects were memorized as floods, deluges, and fallen sky. World examples of disasters derived from the coastal Mediterranean, the Great Flood of Gun-Yu in China, and those from South America, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East and others, were critically assessed with scientific methods.