In order to understand today's Russia and former Soviet republics, it is vital to consider their socialist past. Caroline Humphrey, one of anthropology's most highly regarded thinkers on a number of topics including consumption, identity, and ritual, is the ideal guide to the intricacies of post-Soviet culture. The Unmaking of Soviet Life brings together ten of Humphrey's best essays, which cover, geographically, Central Russia, Siberia, and Mongolia; and thematically, the politics of locality, property, and persons.Bridging the strongest of Humphrey's work from 1991 to 2001, the essays do a great deal to demystify the sensational topics of mafia, barter, bribery, and the new shamanism by locating them in the lived experiences of a wide range of subjects. The Unmaking of Soviet Life includes a foreword and introductory paragraphs by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries that precede each essay.

This book follows Dr Hopkins in her journey from physician to healer. After spending the first 20 years of her career providing excellent diagnostic acumen, she realized that the drugs had limited longterm efficacy. As a rheumatologist, challenging patients filled her day however her scientific mind started to look at why so many people were suffering. why in a country of such wealth people were so sick. the data started supporting what she was seeing everyday. Chronically ill patients, autoimmune diseases increasing, and patients spending much of their life and resources trying to get better. in 1988, a pregnancy was complicated by severe Spina Bifida. After losing the child, she began her journey into the land of wellness without drugs. How could the medical community in 1988 not know about the importance of folic acid, a simple vitamin easily accessible. Were our foods no longer adequate sources of nutrition. Why was knowledge of any vitamin or mineral not part of the armamentarium used to bridge people to wellness. Were we just relying on a corrupted food change, watching morbid obesity in our country reach 36%, and liver disease start affecting our adolescent population with many of them having adult diseases in their teen years. Liver transplants from fatty liver, gallbladder disease and type 2 diabetes now plague our population under the age of 20. Chronic diseases that reflect our diet and life styles will be over 50% in the next decade. Like global warming, we can no longer afford to practice medicine the old way, namely, if you have a symptom, I have a drug that will cover up that symptom. We must now teach our your physicians to question WHY would anyone have these symptoms. This is my journey. In 1916, just over 100 years ago, the Flexnor report demanded the closing of most medical schools in the country. The US was facing a world war, starvation and the beginning of the flu season. Infections such has small pox, cholera, the plague, measles, influenza consumed the attention of the medical community. Scientific method was the cornerstone of learning in Paris and Germany. In order to bring our standards up to those in Europe, all naturopathic schools were closed in the USA. Simon FLexnor, MD felt that the USA should take the lead in the world for solving these problems. With the HOPKINS university, and Dr John Welsh, they established the blueprint for research of vaccines and medications. The AMA and the Rockfeller family backed the change from naturopathy to allopathy. Now a century later, we need a new paradigm to address the pandemic of chronic disease that plague people with access to food, clean water, waste management and vaccines. Why is everyone so sick. The pandemic of 2020 has highlighted the dire health of so many in the USA with obesity rates at 40% of the population and vitamin D deficiency, which I will say is a level below 50, is probably close to 90%. It is time that the educators restructure the medical school curriculum to introduce nutrition and lifestyle medicine into the curriculum. Like global warming, we can no longer wait.

Three policemen tell the horrifying stories of what they had done during the apartheid years ”“ how, where and whom they had tortured. They don’t try to negate their part in the events and in fact have taken a great risk in telling their stories.

In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings. Lee Bernstein explores the forc

This riveting sequel to My Bloody Life traces Reymundo Sanchez's struggle to create a “normal” life outside the Latin Kings, one of the nation's most notorious street gangs, and to move beyond his past. Sanchez illustrates how the Latin King motto “once a king, always a king” rings true and details the difficulty and danger of leaving that life behind. Filled with heart-pounding scenes of his backslide into drugs, sex, and violence, Once a King, Always a King recounts how Sanchez wound up behind bars and provides an engrossing firsthand account of how the Latin Kings are run from inside the prison system. Harrowing testaments to Sanchez's determination to rebuild his life include his efforts to separate his family from gang life and his struggle to adapt to marriage and the corporate world. Despite temptations, nightmares, regressions into violence, and his own internal demons, Sanchez makes an uneasy peace with his new life. This raw, powerful, and brutally honest memoir traces the transformation of an accomplished gangbanger into a responsible citizen.

This book examines the forces that shape psychoactive drug use. The approach, informed by poststructuralist semiotics, culture, phenomenology and contemporary theories of affect, illuminates the connections between drugs, bodies, space, economy and crime.

The contributors to Cocaine analyze the contemporary production, transit, and consumption of cocaine throughout the Americas and the illicit economy's entanglement with local communities. Based on in-depth interviews and archival research, these essays examine how government agents, acting both within and outside the law, and criminal actors seek to manage the flow of illicit drugs to both maintain order and earn profits. Whether discussing the moral economy of coca cultivation in Bolivia, criminal organizations and drug traffickers in Mexico, or the routes cocaine takes as it travels into and through Guatemala, the contributors demonstrate how entire ways of life are built around cocaine commodification. They consider how the authority of state actors is coupled with the self-regulating practices of drug producers, traffickers, and dealers, complicating notions of governance and of the relationships between economic and moral economies. The collection also outlines a more progressive drug policy that acknowledges the important role drugs play in the lives of those at the urban and rural margins. Contributors. Enrique Desmond Arias, Lilian Bobea, Philippe Bourgois, Anthony W. Fontes, Robert Gay, Paul Gootenberg, Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Thomas Grisaffi, Laurie Kain Hart, Annette Idler, George Karandinos, Fernando Montero, Dennis Rodgers, Taniele Rui, Cyrus Veeser, Autumn Zellers-León