Disability Policy and the Media: A Stealth Civil Rights Movement Bypasses the Press and Defies Conventional Wisdom

The Americans with Disabilities Act was pushed through Congress with far less attention from the media than has accompanied other major civil rights bills. This was part of a deliberate and unconventional strategy by disability rights lobbyists who believed that media portrayals of disability were so cliched that journalists would impede, not further, the public's understanding of disability rights issues. Despite the success of the strategy, there is a price to pay for having been a 'stealth' civil rights movement: Now that the law is in place, disabled people face a backlash from Americans who neither understand the ADA nor the need for civil rights protection for disabled people.     

Urban Growth in the 1990s: Is City Living Back?

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during prior post–war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three main trends: (1) cities with strong human capital bases grew faster than cities without skills, (2) people moved to warmer, drier places, and (3) cities built around the automobile replaced cities that rely on public transportation. Although the negative impact of population density diminished slightly in the 1990s, there is no real evidence for a return to large, dense cities.     

The Linkage of Data Describing Overlapping Geographical Units

Abstract

This article examines advanced ages at death in a historical population in northern Sweden between 1780 and 1900. The source material used is a set of data files from the Demographic Data Base at Umeå University supplemented with the search tool Indiko. The belief that the Sami died at very old ages was tested, and life tables and values of remaining life expectancies at older ages were calculated. The information of the age at death was analysed using a model containing four levels of certainty. The analysis reveals that the Sami did not live to extreme ages. The analysis also reveals large differences between the parishes concerning extreme longevity and correctness of age at death.     

The ‘Social Construction’ of David Schneider as ‘A Giant of Anthropology’

David Schneider is widely regarded as one of the great anthropologists of our times. This article questions this opinion. First it shows that his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap evidences ethnographic insensitivity, particularly on the matter of an alleged ignorance of physiological paternity, thus calling into question his supposed concern with getting at native understandings. The alleged ignorance forms the ethnographic basis for his later critique of established kinship studies. This, plus his ignorance of lexical marking, invalidates the critique. Even worse is his study of American kinship and its related theory of culture, both consisting mostly of top-of-the-head impressions unrelated to specific operations.     

Understanding the Great War by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker

14–18: U nderstanding T he G reat W ar . By Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker.     

Marxist/Feminist Models in the New Guinea Highlands

ABSTRACT The widespread existence of men's houses in Highland New Guinea raises the question as to the existence of the nuclear family in this area. We know that in some cases (e.g. the ‘Sambiah’) a married couple co‐reside, despite the fear of the woman's alleged pollution. In others there may be symbolic isolation of the nuclear family, e.g. by subclassification in kin terminology. The matter is especially important in current kinship studies, wherein Marxist and ‘radical’ feminist models of sociality, which tend to see the nuclear family as a sort of Western aberration, abound.