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By Subject: Anthropology (General)

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• eBook available May 2011

  The 1926/27 Soviet Polar Census Expeditions

  Anderson, D. G. (ed)

  In 1926/27 the Soviet Central Statistical Administration initiated several yearlong expeditions to gather primary data on the whereabouts, economy and living conditions of all rural peoples living in the Arctic and sub-Arctic at the end of the Russian civil war. Due partly to the enthusiasm of local geographers and ethnographers, the Polar Census grew into a massive ethnological exercise, gathering not only basic demographic and economic data on every household but also a rich archive of photographs, maps, kinship charts, narrative transcripts and museum artifacts. To this day, it remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of a rural population anywhere. The contributors to this volume – all noted scholars in their region – have conducted long-term fieldwork with the descendants of the people surveyed in 1926/27. This volume is the culmination of eight years’ work with the primary record cards and was supported by a number of national scholarly funding agencies in the UK, Canada and Norway. It is a unique historical, ethnographical analysis and of immense value to scholars familiar with these communities’ contemporary cultural dynamics and legacy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  24 Bars to Kill

  Hip Hop, Aspiration, and Japan's Social Margins

  Armstrong, A. B.

  The most clearly identifiable and popular form of Japanese hip-hop, “ghetto” or “gangsta” music has much in common with its corresponding American subgenres, including its portrayal of life on the margins, confrontational style, and aspirational “rags-to-riches” narratives. Contrary to depictions of an ethnically and economically homogeneous Japan, gangsta J-hop gives voice to the suffering, deprivation, and social exclusion experienced by many modern Japanese. 24 Bars to Kill offers a fascinating ethnographic account of this music as well as the subculture around it, showing how gangsta hip-hop arises from widespread dissatisfaction and malaise.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available July 2010

  Abortion in Asia

  Local Dilemmas, Global Politics

  Whittaker, A. (ed)

  The issue of abortion forces a confrontation with the effects of poverty and economic inequalities, local moral worlds, and the cultural and social perceptions of the female body, gender, and reproduction. Based on extensive original field research, this provocative collection presents case studies from Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. It includes powerful insight into the conditions and hard choices faced by women and the circumstances surrounding unplanned pregnancies. It explores the connections among poverty, violence, barriers to access, and the politics and strategies involved in abortion law reform. The contributors analyze these issues within the broader conflicts surrounding women's status, gender roles, religion, nationalism and modernity, as well as the global politics of reproductive health.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available August 2013

  About the Hearth

  Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North

  Anderson, D. G., Wishart, R. P., & Vaté, V. (eds)

  Due to changing climates and demographics, questions of policy in the circumpolar north have focused attention on the very structures that people call home. Dwellings lie at the heart of many forms of negotiation. Based on years of in-depth research, this book presents and analyzes how the people of the circumpolar regions conceive, build, memorialize, and live in their dwellings. This book seeks to set a new standard for interdisciplinary work within the humanities and social sciences and includes anthropological work on vernacular architecture, environmental anthropology, household archaeology and demographics.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology Museum Studies Heritage Studies

• April 2008

  Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag

  Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity

  Feldman, J.

  Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Jewish Studies Memory Studies Travel and Tourism

• December 2001

  Academic Anthropology and the Museum

  Back to the Future

  Bouquet, M. (ed)

  The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicization of culture, finds its counterpart in the growing interest by social scientists in material culture, much of which is to be found in museums. Not surprisingly, anthropologists in particular are turning their attention again to museums, after decades of neglect, during which fieldwork became the hallmark of modern anthropology - so much so that the "social" and the "material" parted company so radically as to produce a kind of knowledge gap between historical collections and the intellectuals who might have benefitted from working on these material representations of culture. Moreover it was forgotten that museums do not only present the "pastness" of things. A great deal of what goes on in contemporary museums is literally about planning the shape of the future: making culture materialize involves mixing things from the past, taking into account current visions, and knowing that the scenes constructed will shape the perspectives of future generations. However, the (re-)invention of museum anthropology presents a series of challenges for academic teaching and research, as well as for the work of cultural production in contemporary museums - issues that are explored in this volume.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2008

  An Academic Skating on Thin Ice

  Worsley, P.

  Peter Worsley’s studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, and it was here that he developed a keen interest in anthropology. He work in mass education in Tanganyika and then studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester University. Banned from re-entering Africa, Worsley went to Australia where he was banned once more, this time from New Guinea, yet he did succeed in completing field-research for his Ph.D. on an Australian Aboriginal tribe.

  His subsequent book on ‘Cargo’ cults in Melanesia is now regarded as a classic, but his left-wing politics ensured that he could not get a job in anthropology, so he switched to sociology, on his return to Manchester.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• June 2005

  Aesthetics in Performance

  Formations of Symbolic Construction and Experience

  Hobart, A. & Kapferer, B. (eds)

  In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the “logic” of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2017

  Affective States

  Entanglements, Suspensions, Suspicions

  Laszczkowski, M. & Reeves, M. (eds)

  In recent years, political and social theory has been transformed by the heterogeneous approaches to feeling and emotion jointly referred to as ‘affect theory’. These range from psychological and social-constructivist approaches to emotion to feminist and post-human perspectives. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and ethnographic contexts—from engineering in the Andes to household rituals in rural China, from South African land restitution to migrant living in Moscow, and from elections in El Salvador to online and offline surveillance among political refugees from Uzbekistan and Eritrea—the chapters in this volume interrogate this ‘affective turn’ through the lens of fine-grained ethnographies of the state. The volume enhances the anthropological understanding of the various ways through which the state comes to be experienced as a visceral presence in social life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• July 1996

  African Crossroads

  Intersections between History and Anthropology in Cameroon

  Fowler, I. & Zeitlyn, D. (eds)

  Cameroon is characterized by an extraordinary geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity. This collection of essays by eminent historians and anthropologists summarizes three generations of research in Cameroon that began with the collaboration of Phyllis Kaberry and E. M. Chilver soon after the Second World War and continues to this day. The idea for this book arose from a concern to recognize the continuing influence of E. M. Chilver on a wide variety of social, historical, political and economic studies. The result is a volume with a broad historical scope yet one that also focuses on major contemporary theoretical issues such as the meaning and construction of ethnic identities and the anthropological study of historical processes.

  For more information on this title and related publications, go to
  http://lucy.ukc.ac.uk/Chilver/index.html

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• February 2022

  Afropolitan Horizons

  Essays toward a Literary Anthropology of Nigeria

  Hannerz, U.

  Nigeria is a country shaped by internal diversity and transnational connections, past and present. Leading Nigerian writers from Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have portrayed these Nigerian issues, and have also written about some of the momentous events in Nigerian history. Afropolitan Horizons discusses their work alongside other novelists and commentators, as well as describing the ways in which Nigeria has appeared in foreign news reporting. It is all interwoven with the author’s own anthropological field research in a town in Central Nigeria.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies Anthropology of Religion

• July 2021

  After Corporate Paternalism

  Material Renovation and Social Change in Times of Ruination

  Straube, C.

  In this ethnographic study of post-paternalist ruination and renovation, Christian Straube explores social change at the intersection of material decay and social disconnection in the former mine township Mpatamatu of Luanshya, one of the oldest mining towns on the Zambian Copperbelt. Touching on topics including industrial history, colonial town planning, social control and materiality, gender relations and neoliberal structural change, After Corporate Paternalism offers unique insights into how people reappropriate former corporate spaces and transform them into personal projects of renovation, fundamentally changing the characteristics of their community.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Sociology

• eBook available February 2018

  After Difference

  Queer Activism in Italy and Anthropological Theory

  Heywood, P.

  Queer activism and anthropology are both fundamentally concerned with the concept of difference. Yet they are so in fundamentally different ways. The Italian queer activists in this book value difference as something that must be produced, in opposition to the identity politics they find around them. Conversely, anthropologists find difference in the world around them, and seek to produce an identity between anthropological theory and the ethnographic material it elucidates. This book describes problems faced by an activist "politics of difference," and issues concerning the identity of anthropological reflection itself—connecting two conceptions of difference whilst simultaneously holding them apart.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available April 2010

  After the Cult

  Perceptions of Other and Self in West New Britain (Papua New Guinea)

  Jebens, H.

  In many parts of the world the “white man” is perceived to be an instigator of globalization and an embodiment of modernity. However, so far anthropologists have paid little attention to the actual heterogeneity and complexity of “whiteness” in specific ethnographic contexts. This study examines cultural perceptions of other and self as expressed in cargo cults and masked dances in Papua New Guinea. Indigenous terms, images, and concepts are being contrasted with their western counterparts, the latter partly deriving from the publications and field notes of Charles Valentine. After having done his first fieldwork more than fifty years ago, this “anthropological ancestor” has now become part of the local tradition and has thus turned into a kind of mythical figure. Based on anthropological fieldwork as well as on archival studies, this book addresses the relation between western and indigenous perceptions of self and other, between “tradition” and “modernity,” and between anthropological “ancestors” and “descendants.” In this way the work contributes to the study of “whiteness,” “cargo cults” and masked dances in Papua New Guinea.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• April 2011

  After the Event

  The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan

  Feuchtwang, S.

  Two of the most destructive moments of state violence in the twentieth century occurred in Europe between 1933 and 1945 and in China between 1959 and 1961 (the Great Leap famine). This is the first book to bring the two histories together in order to examine their differences and to understand if there are any similar processes of transmission at work. The author expertly ties in the Taiwanese civil war between Nationalists and Communists, which included the White Terror from 1947 to 1987, a less well-known but equally revealing part of twentieth-century history. Personal and family stories are told, often in the individual’s own words, and then compared with the public accounts of the same events as found in official histories, commemorations, school textbooks and other forms of public memory. The author presents innovative and constructive criticisms of social memory theories in order to make sense both of what happened and how what happened is transmitted.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)

• March 2020

  After the Pink Tide

  Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America

  Gold, M. & Zagato, A. (eds)

  The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• June 2023

  Against Better Judgment

  Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives

  McKearney, P. & Evans, N. H. A. (eds)

  Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

• eBook available December 2016

  Against Exoticism

  Toward the Transcendence of Relativism and Universalism in Anthropology

  Kapferer, B. & Theodossopoulos, D. (eds)

  Anthropology begins in the encounter with the ‘exotic’: what stands outside of—and challenges—conventional or established understandings. This volume confronts the distortions of orientalism, ethnocentrism, and romantic nostalgia to expose exoticism, defined as the construction of false and unsubstantiated difference. Its aim is to re-found the importance of the exotic in the development of anthropological knowledge and to overcome methodological dualisms and dualistic approaches.


  Chapters look at the risk of exoticism in the perspectivist approach, the significant exotic corrective of Lévi-Strauss vis-à-vis an imperializing Eurocentrism, our nostalgic relationship with the ethnographic record, and the attempts of local communities to readapt previous exoticized referents, renegotiate their identity, and ‘counter-exoticize.’ This volume demonstrates a range of approaches that will be valuable for researchers and students seeking to effectively establish comparative methodological frameworks that transcend issues of relativism and universalism.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• December 2008

  Against Machismo

  Young Adult Voices in Mexico City

  Ramirez, J.

  Based on fieldwork conducted among middle-class university students primarily at the national university (UNAM) in Mexico City, this study explores gender relations as reflected in the words macho and machismo. The author concludes that the students use them to denote aspects of their families of origin that they consider unfavorable and aspects of the cultural past that they wish to leave behind in their own lives. In capturing the lively and revealing conversations of these young voices, the author offers a compelling analysis of how gender concepts and identities are changing in contemporary Mexico City.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available March 2021

  Agent of Change

  The Deposition and Manipulation of Ash in the Past

  Roth, B. J. & Adams, E. C. (eds)

  Ash is an important and yet understudied aspect of ritual deposition in the archaeological record of North America. Ash has been found in a wide variety of contexts across many regions and often it is associated with rare or unusual objects or in contexts that suggest its use in the transition or transformation of houses and ritual features. Drawn from across the U.S. and Mesoamerica, the chapters in this volume explore the use, meanings, and cross-cultural patterns present in the use of ash. and highlight the importance of ash in ritual closure, social memory, and cultural transformation.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• June 2015

  Aging and the Digital Life Course

  Prendergast, D. & Garattini, C. (eds)

  Across the life course, new forms of community, ways of keeping in contact, and practices for engaging in work, healthcare, retail, learning and leisure are evolving rapidly. Breaking new ground in the study of technology and aging, this book examines how developments in smart phones, the internet, cloud computing, and online social networking are redefining experiences and expectations around growing older in the twenty-first century. Drawing on contributions from leading commentators and researchers across the world, this book explores key themes such as caregiving, the use of social media, robotics, chronic disease and dementia management, gaming, migration, and data inheritance, to name a few.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available May 2009

  Alarming Reports

  Communicating Conflict in the Daily News

  Arno, A.

  News stories provide an essential confirmation of our ideas about who we are, what we have to fear, and what to do about it: a marketplace of ideas, shopped by rational citizen decision makers but also a shared resource for grounding our contested narratives of identity in objective reality. News as a fundamental social process comes into being not when an event takes place or when a report of the event is created but when that report becomes news to someone. As it moves off the page into the community, news discovers - through its interpretations - its reality in the lives of the consumers. This book explores the path of news as it moves through the tangled labyrinth of social identities and asserted interests that lie beyond the page or screen. The language and communication-oriented study of news promises a salient area of investigation, pointing the way to an expansion, if not a redefinition of basic anthropological ideas and practices of ethnography, participant observation, and “the field” in the future of anthropological research.

  Subjects: Media Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• September 2023

  Alfred Cort Haddon

  A Very English Savage

  Walsh, C.

  An innovative account of one of the least-understood characters in the history of anthropology.

  Using previously overlooked, primary sources Ciarán Walsh argues that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists, set out to revolutionize anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. His book regards most of what has been written about Haddon in the past as a form of disciplinary folklore shaped by a theory of scientific revolutions.

  The main action takes place in Ireland, where Haddon adopted the persona of a very English savage in a new form of performed photo-ethnography that constituted a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology.

  From the Introduction:

  Alfred Cort Haddon was written out of the story of anthropology for the same reasons that make him interesting today. He was passionately committed to the protection of simpler societies and their civilisations from colonists and their supporters in parliament and the armed forces.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• eBook available August 2018

  All or None

  Cooperation and Sustainability in Italy's Red Belt

  Sánchez Hall, A.

  At once a social history and anthropological study of the world’s oldest voluntary collective farms, All or None is a story of how landless laborers joined together in Ravenna, Italy to acquire land, sometimes by occupying private land in what they called a “strike in reverse,” and how they developed sophisticated land use plans, based not only on the goal of profit, but on the human value of providing work where none was available. It addresses the question of the viability of cooperative enterprise as a potential solution for displaced workers, and as a more humane alternative to capitalist agribusiness.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2021

  Almost, but Not Quite Bored in Pula

  An Anthropological Study of the Tapija Phenomenon in Northwest Croatia

  Matošević, A.

  Based on interviews and fieldwork conducted among residents of Pula, a coastal city in Northwestern Croatia, this study explores various aspects of a local feeling of boredom. This is mirrored in the term tapija, a word of Turkish origin describing a property deed, and in Pula’s urban slang it has morphed from its original sense describing a set of affective states into one of lameness, loneliness, unwillingness, and irony. Combining lively conversations with a significant bibliography of the topic, the result is a compelling local anthropological study of boredom in a wider historical and global context.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available September 2019

  Ambiguous Childhoods

  Peer Socialisation, Schooling and Agency in a Zambian Village

  Clemensen, N.

  Growing up with social and economic upheaval in the peripheries of global neoliberalism, children in rural Zambia are presented with diverging social and moral protocols across homes, classrooms, church halls, and the streets. Mostly unmonitored by adults, they explore the ambiguities of adult life in playful interactions with their siblings and kin across gender and age. Drawing on rich linguistic-ethnographic details of such interactions combined with observations of school and household procedures, the author provides a rare insight into the lives, voices, and learning paths of children in a rural African setting.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies Educational Studies

• eBook available May 2012

  Ambiguous Pleasures

  Sexuality and Middle Class Self-Perceptions in Nairobi

  Spronk, R.

  Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a ‘modern’ identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an ‘African’ identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• eBook available December 2016

  America Observed

  On an International Anthropology of the United States

  Dominguez, V. & Habib, J. (eds)

  There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond.  Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• July 2014

  Americans in Tuscany

  Charity, Compassion, and Belonging

  Trundle, C.

  Since the time of the Grand Tour, the Italian region of Tuscany has sustained a highly visible American and Anglo migrant community. Today American women continue to migrate there, many in order to marry Italian men. Confronted with experiences of social exclusion, unfamiliar family relations, and new cultural terrain, many women struggle to build local lives. In the first ethnographic monograph of Americans in Italy, Catherine Trundle argues that charity and philanthropy are the central means by which many American women negotiate a sense of migrant belonging in Italy. This book traces women’s daily acts of charity as they gave food to the poor, fundraised among the wealthy, monitored untrustworthy recipients, assessed the needy, and reflected on the emotional work that charity required. In exploring the often-ignored role of charitable action in migrant community formation, Trundle contributes to anthropological theories of gift giving, compassion, and reflexivity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• March 2023

  Amnesia Remembered

  Reverse Engineering a Digital Artifact

  Aycock, J.

  Our modern culture is increasingly expressed in the form of digital artifacts, yet archaeology is in its infancy when it comes to researching and understanding them. The study and reverse engineering of digital artifacts is no longer the exclusive domain of computer scientists. Presented by way of analogy to the process of archaeological fieldwork familiar to readers, the 1986 Electronic Arts game Amnesia is used as a vehicle to explain the procedure and thought process required to reverse engineer a digital artifact. As a go-to reference to learn how to begin studying the digital, Amnesia is shown to be a multi-layered artifact with a complex backstory; through it, topics in data compression, copy protection, memory management, and programming languages are covered.

  Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2018

  Animism beyond the Soul

  Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge

  Swancutt, K. & Mazard, M. (eds)

  How might we envision animism through the lens of the ‘anthropology of anthropology’? The contributors to this volume offer compelling case studies that demonstrate how indigenous animistic practices, concepts, traditions, and ontologies are co-authored in highly reflexive ways by anthropologists and their interlocutors. They explore how native epistemologies, which inform anthropological notions during fieldwork, underpin the dialogues between researchers and their participants. In doing so, the contributors reveal ways in which indigenous thinkers might be influenced by anthropological concepts of the soul and, equally, how they might subtly or dramatically then transform those same concepts within anthropological theory.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2012

  Animism in Rainforest and Tundra

  Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia

  Brightman, M., Grotti, V. E., & Ulturgasheva, O. (eds)

  Amazonia and Siberia, classic regions of shamanism, have long challenged ‘western’ understandings of man’s place in the world. By exploring the social relations between humans and non-human entities credited with human-like personhood (not only animals and plants, but also ‘things’ such as artifacts, trade items, or mineral resources) from a comparative perspective, this volume offers valuable insights into the constitutions of humanity and personhood characteristic of the two areas. The contributors conducted their ethnographic fieldwork among peoples undergoing transformative processes of their lived environments, such as the depletion of natural resources and migration to urban centers. They describe here fundamental relational modes that are being tested in the face of change, presenting groundbreaking research on personhood and agency in shamanic societies and contributing to our global understanding of social and cultural change and continuity.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2011

  The Annoying Difference

  The Emergence of Danish Neonationalism, Neoracism, and Populism in the Post-1989 World

  Hervik, P.

  The Muhammad cartoon crisis of 2005−2006 in Denmark caught the world by surprise as the growing hostilities toward Muslims had not been widely noticed. Through the methodologies of media anthropology, cultural studies, and communication studies, this book brings together more than thirteen years of research on three significant historical media events in order to show the drastic changes and emerging fissures in Danish society and to expose the politicization of Danish news journalism, which has consequences for the political representation and everyday lives of ethnic minorities in Denmark.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available October 2011

  Anthropologies of Education

  A Global Guide to Ethnographic Studies of Learning and Schooling

  Anderson-Levitt, K. M. (ed)

  Despite international congresses and international journals, anthropologies of education differ significantly around the world. Linguistic barriers constrain the flow of ideas, which results in a vast amount of research on educational anthropology that is not published in English or is difficult for international readers to find. This volume responds to the call to attend to educational research outside the United States and to break out of “metropolitan provincialism.” A guide to the anthropologies and ethnographies of learning and schooling published in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Slavic languages, Japanese, and English as a second language, show how scholars in Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere adapt European, American, and other approaches to create new traditions. As the contributors show, educators draw on different foundational research and different theoretical discussions. Thus, this global survey raises new questions and casts a new light on what has become a too-familiar discipline in the United States.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2015

  Anthropology & Philosophy

  Dialogues on Trust and Hope

  Liisberg, S., Pedersen, E. O., Dalsgård, A. L. (eds)

  The present book is no ordinary anthology, but rather a workroom in which anthropologists and philosophers initiate a dialogue on trust and hope, two important topics for both fields of study. The book combines work between scholars from different universities in the U.S. and Denmark. Thus, besides bringing the two disciplines in dialogue, it also cuts across differences in national contexts and academic style. The interdisciplinary efforts of the contributors demonstrate how such a collaboration can result in new and challenging ways of thinking about trust and hope. Reading the dialogues may, therefore, also inspire others to work in the productive intersection between anthropology and philosophy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• eBook available October 2014

  Anthropology and Nostalgia

  Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (eds)

  Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Theory and Methodology

• eBook available October 2014

  Anthropology Now and Next

  Essays in Honor of Ulf Hannerz

  Eriksen, T. H., Garsten, C. & Randeria, S. (eds)

  The scholarship of Ulf Hannerz is characterized by its extraordinary breadth and visionary nature. He has contributed to the understanding of urban life and transnational networks, and the role of media, paradoxes of identity and new forms of community, suggesting to see culture in terms of flows rather than as bounded entities. Contributions honor Hannerz’ legacy by addressing theoretical, epistemological, ethical and methodological challenges facing anthropological inquiry on topics from cultural diversity policies in Europe to transnational networks in Yemen, and from pottery and literature to multinational corporations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available March 2016

  The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility

  Dolan, C. & Rajak, D. (eds)

  The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility explores the meanings, practices, and impact of corporate social and environmental responsibility across a range of transnational corporations and geographical locations (Bangladesh, Cameroon, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, India, Peru, South Africa, the UK, and the USA). The contributors examine the expectations, frictions and contradictions the CSR movement is generating and addressing key issues such as  the introduction of new forms of management, control, and discipline through ethical and environmental governance or the extent to which corporate responsibility challenges existing patterns of inequality rather than generating new geographies of inclusion and exclusion.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• August 2011

  The Anthropology of Empathy

  Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies

  Hollan, D. W. & Throop, C. J. (eds)

  Exploring the role of empathy in a variety of Pacific societies, this book is at the forefront of the latest anthropological research on empathy. It presents distinct articulations of many assumptions of contemporary philosophical, neurobiological, and social scientific treatments of the topic. The variations described in this book do not necessarily preclude the possibility of shared existential, biological, and social influences that give empathy a distinctly human cast, but they do provide an important ethnographic lens through which to examine the possibilities and limits of empathy in any given community of practice.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• September 2023

  An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange

  Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

  Copeman, J., Chau, L. M., Cook, J., Long, N. J. & Marsden, M.(eds)

  Dialogues, encounters and interactions through which particular ways of knowing, understanding and thinking about the world are forged lie at the centre of anthropology. Such ‘intellectual exchange’ is also central to anthropologists’ own professional practice: from their interactions with research participants and modes of pedagogy to their engagements with each other and scholars from adjacent disciplines. This collection of essays explores how such processes might best be studied cross-culturally. Foregrounding the diverse interactions, ethical reasoning, and intellectual lives of people from across the continent of Asia, the volume develops an anthropology of intellectual exchange itself.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2023

  Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism

  Mendes Correia and the Porto School of Anthropology

  Ferraz de Matos, P.

  A major contribution to the history of European anthropology, this book highlights the Porto School of Anthropology and analyses the work of its main mentor, Mendes Correia (1888-1960). It goes beyond a Portuguese focus to present a wider comparative analysis in which the colonial empire, knowledge of origins, ethnic identity and cultural practices all receive special attention. The analysis takes into account the fact that nationalism, as associated with an ethno-racial paradigm, decisively influenced discourse and scientific and political practices.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2019

  The Anti-Social Contract

  Injurious Talk and Dangerous Exchanges in Northern Mongolia

  Højer, L.

  Set in a remote district of villagers and nomadic pastoralists in the northernmost part of Mongolia, this book introduces a local world where social relationships are cast in witchcraft-like idioms of mistrust and suspicion. While the apparent social breakdown that followed the collapse of state socialism in Mongolia often implied a chaotic lack of social cohesion, this ethnography reveals an everyday universe where uncertain relations are as much internally cultivated in indigenous Mongolian perceptions of social relatedness, as they are externally confronted in postsocialist surroundings of unemployment and diminished social security.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2014

  Arab Spring

  Uprisings, Powers, Interventions

  Fosshagen, K. (ed)

  The events of the Arab Spring presented a dramatic reconstitution of politics and the public sphere through their aesthetic and performative uses of public space. Mass demonstrations have become a new global political form, grounded in the localization of globalizing processes, institutions, and relationships. This volume delves beneath the seemingly chaotic nature of events to explore the structural dynamics underpinning popular resistance and their support or suppression. It moves beyond what has usually been defined as Arab Spring nations to include critical views on Bahrain, the Palestinian territories, and Turkey. The research and analysis presented explores not just the immediate protests, but also the historical realization, appropriation, and even institutionalization of these critical voices, as well as the role of international criminal law and legal exceptionalism in authorizing humanitarian interventions. Above all, it questions whether the revolutions have since been hijacked and the broad popular uprisings already overrun, suppressed, or usurped by the upper classes.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2018

  Archaeogaming

  An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games

  Reinhard, A.

  A general introduction to archeogaming describing the intersection of archaeology and video games and applying archaeological method and theory into understanding game-spaces.

  “[T]he author’s clarity of style makes it accessible to all readers, with or without an archaeological background. Moreover, his personal anecdotes and gameplay experiences with different game titles, from which his ideas often develop, make it very enjoyable reading.”—Antiquity

  Video games exemplify contemporary material objects, resources, and spaces that people use to define their culture. Video games also serve as archaeological sites in the traditional sense as a place, in which evidence of past activity is preserved and has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology, and which represents a part of the archaeological record.

  From the introduction:
  Archaeogaming, broadly defined, is the archaeology both in and of digital games…  As will be described in the following chapters, digital games are archaeological sites,  landscapes, and artifacts, and the game-spaces held within those media can also be understood archaeologically as digital built environments containing their own material culture… Archaeogaming does not limit its study to those video games that are set in the past or that are treated as “historical games,” nor does it focus solely on the exploration and analysis of ruins or of other built environments that appear in the world of the game. Any video game—from Pac-Man to Super Meat Boy—can be studied archaeologically.

  Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Heritage Studies Anthropology (General)

• March 2002

  The Archaeology of Tribal Societies

  Parkinson, W. A. (ed)

  Anthropological archaeologists have long attempted to develop models that will let them better understand the evolution of human social organization. In our search to understand how chiefdoms and states evolve, and how those societies differ from egalitarian 'bands', we have neglected to develop models that will aid the understanding of the wide range of variability that exists between them. This volume attempts to fill this gap by exploring social organization in tribal - or 'autonomous village' - societies from several different ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological contexts - from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period in the Near East to the contemporary Jivaro of Amazonia.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2022

  Arctic Abstractive Industry

  Assembling the Valuable and Vulnerable North

  Mason, A. (ed)

  Through diverse engagements with natural resource extraction and ecological vulnerability in the contemporary Arctic, contributors to this volume apprehend Arctic resource regimes through the concept of abstraction. Abstraction refers to the creation of new material substances and cultural values by detaching parts from existing substances and values. The abstractive process differs from the activity of extractive industries by its focus on the conceptual resources that conceal processes of exploitation associated with extraction. The study of abstraction can thus help us attune to the formal operations that make appropriations of value possible while disclosing the politics of extraction and of its representation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies

• eBook available January 2023

  The Art of Fate Calculation

  Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng

  Homola, S.

  From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

• eBook available July 2019

  Articulate Necrographies

  Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead

  Panagiotopoulos, A. & Espírito Santo, D. (eds)

  Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies Literary Studies

• eBook available November 2018

  Artifak

  Cultural Revival, Tourism, and the Recrafting of History in Vanuatu

  DeBlock, H.

  In Vanuatu, commoditization and revitalization of culture and the arts do not necessarily work against each other; both revolve around value formation and the authentication of things. This book investigates the meaning and value of (art) objects as commodities in differing states of transit and transition: in the local place, on the market, in the museum. It provides an ethnographic account of commoditization in a context of revitalization of culture and the arts in Vanuatu, and the issues this generates, such as authentication of actions and things, indigenized copyright, and kastom disputes over ownership and the nature of kastom itself.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Museum Studies

• eBook available October 2020

  Aspirations of Young Adults in Urban Asia

  Values, Family, and Identity

  Westendorp, M., Remmert, D. & Finis, K. (eds)

  Comparing first-person ethnographic accounts of young people living, working, and creating relationships in cities across Asia, this volume explores their contemporary lives, pressures, ideals, and aspirations. Delving into topical issues such as education, social inequality, family pressures, changing values, precarious employment, and political discontent, the book explores how young people are pushing boundaries and imagining their future. In this way, they explore and create the identities of their local and global surroundings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• June 2013

  Astonishment and Evocation

  The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology

  Strecker, I. & Verne, M. (eds)

  All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• eBook available January 2023

  At Home in a Nursing Home

  An Ethnography of Movement and Care in Australia

  Zhang, A. R. Y.

  Focusing on contemporary ideas about how aged care is provided, this book poses the question: How can people who are aged and frail live out the final phase of their lives with dignity? In seeking answers, the author examines what it means to be ‘at home’ in residential care in a novel and compassionate way. In an ethnographic study of how elderly residents can be given the right care, this book provides a new route into the bodily realities of ageing. It is a vital contribution to the search for alternative approaches to aged care provision.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• August 2000

  At Home in the Hills

  Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders

  Gray, J. N.

  To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2015

  At Home in the Okavango

  White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging

  Gressier, C.

  An ethnographic portrayal of the lives of white citizens of the Okavango Delta, Botswana, this book examines their relationships with the natural and social environments of the region. In response to the insecurity of their position as a European-descended minority in a postcolonial African state, Gressier argues that white Batswana have developed cultural values and practices that have allowed them to attain high levels of belonging. Adventure is common for this frontier community, and the book follows their safari lifestyles as they construct and perform localized identities in their interactions with dangerous wildlife, the broader African community, and the global elite via their work in the nature-tourism industry.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2019

  At Home on the Waves

  Human Habitation of the Sea from the Mesolithic to Today

  King, T. J. & Robinson, G. (eds)

  Contemporary public discourses about the ocean are routinely characterized by scientific and environmentalist narratives that imagine and idealize marine spaces in which humans are absent. In contrast, this collection explores the variety of ways in which people have long made themselves at home at sea, and continue to live intimately with it. In doing so, it brings together both ethnographic and archaeological research – much of it with an explicit Ingoldian approach – on a wide range of geographical areas and historical periods.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2019

  Atlantic Perspectives

  Places, Spirits and Heritage

  Balkenhol, M., Blanes, R. L., & Sarró, R. (eds)

  Focusing on mobility, religion, and belonging, the volume contributes to transatlantic anthropology and history by bringing together religion, cultural heritage and placemaking in the Atlantic world. The entanglements of these domains are ethnographically scrutinized to perceive the connections and disconnections of specific places which, despite a common history, are today very different in terms of secular regimes and the presence of religion in the public sphere. Ideally suited to a variety of scholars and students in different fields, Atlantic Perspectives will lead to new debates and conversations throughout the fields of anthropology, religion and history.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

• eBook available July 2018

  An Australian Indigenous Diaspora

  Warlpiri Matriarchs and the Refashioning of Tradition

  Burke, P.

  Some indigenous people, while remaining attached to their traditional homelands, leave them to make a new life for themselves in white towns and cities, thus constituting an “indigenous diaspora”. This innovative book is the first ethnographic account of one such indigenous diaspora, the Warlpiri, whose traditional hunter-gatherer life has been transformed through their dispossession and involvement with ranchers, missionaries, and successive government projects of recognition. By following several Warlpiri matriarchs into their new locations, far from their home settlements, this book explores how they sustained their independent lives, and examines their changing relationship with the traditional culture they represent.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available April 2021

  Authenticity and Authorship in Pacific Island Encounters

  New Lives of Old Imaginaries

  Mageo, J. & Knauft, B. (eds)

  The insular Pacific is a region saturated with great cultural diversity and poignant memories of colonial and Christian intrusion. Considering authenticity and authorship in the area, this book looks at how these ideas have manifested themselves in Pacific peoples and cultures. Through six rich complementary case studies, a theoretical introduction, and a critical afterword, this volume explores authenticity and authorship as “traveling concepts.” The book reveals diverse and surprising outcomes which shed light on how Pacific identity has changed from the past to the present.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• June 1998

  Autonomy

  Life Cycle, Gender, and Status among Himalayan Pastoralists

  Rao, A.

  The question of individuality in non-European, and especially South Asian societies is a controversial one. Studies in anthropology and psychology undertaken in recent years on concepts of person and self approach the problem by concentrating on ideologies; the question of practice remains largely neglected. This is the first study to examine the individual-dividual debate empirically from the - emic - perspective of decision making, observed over a two-year period among the Bakkarwal, Himalayan Muslim pastoralists. Of particular significance is the fact that the author bases her approach on the life cycle and on gender and status differences.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2018

  Back to the Postindustrial Future

  An Ethnography of Germany's Fastest-Shrinking City

  Ringel, F.

  How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• July 2002

  Bali and Beyond

  Case Studies in the Anthropology of Tourism

  Yamashita, S.

  Based on field research carried out over two decades, the author surveys the development of the anthropology of tourism and its significance, using case studies drawn from Indonesia, New Guinea and Japan. He argues that tourism, once seen as rather peripheral by anthropologists, has to be treated as a phenomenon of major importance, both because the size of the flows of people and capital involved, and because it is one of the major sites in which the meeting and hybridization of culture takes place. Tourism, he suggests, leads not to the destruction of local cultures, as many critics have implied, but rather to the emergence of new cultural forms.

  The central part of the book presents a detailed case-study of the island of Bali in Indonesia. It traces the development of tourism there during the colonial period, and the ways in which "Balinese traditional culture" was developed first by western artists and scholars in the colonial period, and more recently by Balinese government officials in the guise of "cultural tourism." The general theme of the "presentation of tradition" is also discussed in relation to Toraja funerals in the Indonesian province of Sulawesi, western visitors to the Sepik River in Papua-New-Guinea, and the small city of Tono in northern Japan which has become a center for the study of folk-lore.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2018

  Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes

  Angé, O.

  Despite the pervasiveness of barter across societies, this mode of transaction has largely escaped the anthropologist’s gaze. Drawing on data from fairs in the Argentinean Andes, this book addresses a local modality of barter known as cambio. Bringing out its embeddedness within religious celebrations, it argues that cambio is practiced as a sacrifice to catholic figures and local ancestors, thereby challenging a widespread view of barter as a non-monetary form of commodity exchange. This ethnography of Andean barter considers processes of value creation, both economic and subjective, to further our understanding of how social groups create themselves through economic exchanges.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available November 2019

  Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City

  Fahy, J.

  Becoming Vaishnava in an Ideal Vedic City centers on a growing multinational community of ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) devotees in Mayapur, West Bengal. While ISKCON’s history is often presented in terms of an Indian guru ‘transplanting’ Indian spirituality to the West, this book focusses on the efforts to bring ISKCON back to India. Paying particular attention to devotees’ failure to consistently live up to ISKCON’s ideals and the ongoing struggle to realize the utopian vision of an ‘ideal Vedic city’, this book argues that the anthropology of ethics must account for how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• December 2001

  Bedouin Century

  Education and Development among the Negev Tribes in the Twentieth Century

  Abu-Rabia, A.

  The Bedouin in the Negev region have undergone a remarkable change of life style in the course of the 20th century: within a few generations they changed from being nomads to an almost sedentary and highly educated population. The author, who is a Bedouin himself and has worked in the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture as Superintendent of the Bedouin Educational Schools in the Negev for many years, offers the first in-depth study of the development of Bedouin society, using the educational system as his focus.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• June 2013

  Bedouin of Mount Sinai

  An Anthropological Study of their Political Economy

  Marx, E.

  The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• May 2014

  Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia

  Mühlfried, F.

  The highland region of the republic of Georgia, one of the former Soviet Socialist Republics, has long been legendary for its beauty. It is often assumed that the state has only made partial inroads into this region, and is mostly perceived as alien. Taking a fresh look at the Georgian highlands allows the author to consider perennial questions of citizenship, belonging, and mobility in a context that has otherwise been known only for its folkloric dimensions. Scrutinizing forms of identification with the state at its margins, as well as local encounters with the erratic Soviet and post-Soviet state, the author argues that citizenship is both a sought-after means of entitlement and a way of guarding against the state. This book not only challenges theories in the study of citizenship but also the axioms of integration in Western social sciences in general.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Development Studies

• eBook available May 2016

  Being and Becoming

  Embodiment and Experience among the Orang Rimba of Sumatra

  Elkholy, R.

  For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra – and tropical foragers in general – life in the forest engenders a kind of “connectedness” that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• eBook available January 2019

  Being Bedouin Around Petra

  Life at a World Heritage Site in the Twenty-First Century

  Bille, M.

  Petra, Jordan became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1985, and the semi-nomadic Bedouin inhabiting the area were resettled as a consequence. The Bedouin themselves paradoxically became UNESCO Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage in 2005 for the way in which their oral traditions and everyday lives relate to the landscape they no longer live in. Being Bedouin Around Petra asks: How could this happen? And what does it mean to be Bedouin when tourism, heritage protection, national discourse, an Islamic Revival and even New Age spiritualism lay competing claims to the past in the present?

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Heritage Studies

• eBook available May 2017

  Being Godless

  Ethnographies of Atheism and Non-Religion

  Blanes, R. L. & Oustinova-Stjepanovic, G. (eds)

  Drawing on ethnographic inquiry and the anthropological literature on doubt and atheism, this volume explores people's reluctance to pursue religion. The contributors capture the experiences of godless people and examine their perspectives on the role of religion in their personal and public lives. In doing so, the volume contributes to a critical understanding of the processes of disengagement from religion and reveals the challenges and paradoxes that godless people face.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available October 2013

  Being Human, Being Migrant

  Senses of Self and Well-Being

  Grønseth, A. S. (ed)

  Migrant experiences accentuate general aspects of the human condition. Therefore, this volume explores migrant’s movements not only as geographical movements from here to there but also as movements that constitute an embodied, cognitive, and existential experience of living “in between” or on the “borderlands” between differently figured life-worlds. Focusing on memories, nostalgia, the here-and-now social experiences of daily living, and the hopes and dreams for the future, the volume demonstrates how all interact in migrants’ and refugees’ experience of identity and quest for well-being.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2018

  Being-Here

  Placemaking in a World of Movement

  Lems, A.

  Exploring the lifeworlds of Halima, Omar and Mohamed, three middle-aged Somalis living in Melbourne, Australia, the author discusses the interrelated meanings of emplacement and displacement as experienced in people’s everyday lives. Through their experiences of displacement and placemaking, Being-Here examines the figure of the refugee as a metaphor for societal alienation and estrangement, and moves anthropological theory towards a new understanding of the crucial existential links between Sein (Being) and Da (Here).

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies

• April 2012

  The Benefit of the Gift

  Social Organization and Expanding Networks of Interaction in the Western Great Lakes Archaic

  Hill, M. A.

  Archaeological data from the Late Archaic (4000-2000 years ago) in the Western Great Lakes are analyzed to understand the production and movement of copper and lithic exchange materials. Also considered in this volume are access to and benefits from exchange networks, as well as social changes accompanying the development of extensive, continental scale, exchange systems of interaction in this period.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2010

  Berlin, Alexanderplatz

  Transforming Place in a Unified Germany

  Weszkalnys, G.

  A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers’ offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a ‘future’ under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2021

  The Best We Share

  Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena

  Brumann, C.

  The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study, the book links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been inconsistently applied. As the most ambitious study of the World Heritage arena so far, this volume dissects the inner workings of a prominent global body, demonstrating the power of ethnography in the highly formalised and diplomatic context of a multilateral organisation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• September 2023

  Between the Forest and the Road

  The Waorani Struggle for Living Well in the Ecuadorian Oil Circuit

  Bravo Díaz, A.

  During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations. For the Waorani living along the oil roads, living well has taken many pathways. Notably, they have developed new spatial organizations as they move between several houses, and navigate between the economy of the market and the economy of the forest.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

• October 2011

  Beyond Conversion and Syncretism

  Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800-2000

  Lindenfeld, D. & Richardson, M. (eds)

  The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available July 2020

  Beyond Filial Piety

  Rethinking Aging and Caregiving in Contemporary East Asian Societies

  Shea, J., Moore, K., & Zhang, H. (eds)

  Known for a tradition of Confucian filial piety, East Asian societies have some of the oldest and most rapidly aging populations on earth. Today these societies are experiencing unprecedented social challenges to the filial tradition of adult children caring for aging parents at home. Marshalling mixed methods data, this volume explores the complexities of aging and caregiving in contemporary East Asia. Questioning romantic visions of a senior’s paradise, chapters examine emerging cultural meanings of and social responses to population aging, including caregiving both for and by the elderly. Themes include traditional ideals versus contemporary realities, the role of the state, patterns of familial and non-familial care, social stratification, and intersections of caregiving and death. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, policy, archival, and media data, the authors trace both common patterns and diverging trends across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and Korea.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• February 2015

  Beyond the Lens of Conservation

  Malagasy and Swiss Imaginations of One Another

  Keller, E.

  The global agenda of Nature conservation has led to the creation of the Masoala National Park in Madagascar and to an exhibit in its support at a Swiss zoo, the centerpiece of which is a mini-rainforest replica. Does such a cooperation also trigger a connection between ordinary people in these two far-flung places? The study investigates how the Malagasy farmers living at the edge of the park perceive the conservation enterprise and what people in Switzerland see when looking towards Madagascar through the lens of the zoo exhibit. It crystallizes that the stories told in either place have almost nothing in common: one focuses on power and history, the other on morality and progress. Thus, instead of building a bridge, Nature conservation widens the gap between people in the North and the South.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available May 2021

  Beyond the Veil

  Reflexive Studies of Death and Dying

  Thamann, A. & Christodoulaki, K. M. (eds)

  Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available January 2020

  Big Capital in an Unequal World

  The Micropolitics of Wealth in Pakistan

  Armytage, R.

  Following the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of the elite in Pakistan. In doing so, it reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2021

  Bigger Fish to Fry

  A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples

  Sutton, D. E.

  What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• October 2016

  Biomedical Entanglements

  Conceptions of Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Society

  Herbst, F. A.

  Biomedical Entanglements is an ethnographic study of the Giri people of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the indigenous population’s interaction with modern medicine. In her fieldwork, Franziska A. Herbst follows the Giri people as they circulate within and around ethnographic sites that include a rural health center and an urban hospital. The study bridges medical anthropology and global health, exploring how the ‘biomedical’ is imbued with social meaning and how biomedicine affects Giri ways of life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available March 2009

  Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development

  Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century

  O'Kane, D. & Hepner, T. R. (eds)

  Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the “African country that works,” Eritrea’s apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the “high modernist” style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961–1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2020

  Birds of Passage

  Hunting and Conservation in Malta

  Falzon, M.-A.

  Bird migration between Europe and Africa is a fraught journey, particularly in the Mediterranean, where migratory birds are shot and trapped in large numbers. In Malta, thousands of hunters share a shrinking countryside. They also rub shoulders with a strong bird-protection and conservation lobby. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book traces the complex interactions between hunters, birds and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the dynamics and politics of bird conservation. Birds of Passage looks at the practice and meaning of hunting in a specific context, and raises broader questions about human-wildlife interactions and the uncertain outcomes of conservation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available August 2014

  Blood and Fire

  Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor

  Kasmir, S. & Carbonella, A. (eds)

  Based on long-term fieldwork, six vivid ethnographies from Colombia, India, Poland, Spain and the southern and northern U.S. address the dwindling importance of labor throughout the world. The contributors to this volume highlight the growing disconnect between labor struggles and the advancement of the greater common good, a phenomenon that has grown since the 1980s. The collection illustrates the defeat and unmaking of particular working classes, and it develops a comparative perspective on the uneven consequences of and reactions to this worldwide project. Blood and Fire charts a course within global anthropology to address the widespread precariousness and the prevalence of insecure and informal labor in the twenty-first century.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available January 2013

  Blood and Kinship

  Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present

  Johnson, C. H., Jussen, B., Sabean, D. W., & Teuscher, S. (eds)

  The word “blood” awakens ancient ideas, but we know little about its historical representation in Western cultures. Anthropologists have customarily studied how societies think about the bodily substances that unite them, and the contributors to this volume develop those questions in new directions. Taking a radically historical perspective that complements traditional cultural analyses, they demonstrate how blood and kinship have constantly been reconfigured in European culture. This volume challenges the idea that blood can be understood as a stable entity, and shows how concepts of blood and kinship moved in both parallel and divergent directions over the course of European history.

  Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)

• August 2007

  Blood and Oranges

  Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece

  Lawrence, C. M.

  A compelling account of the intersection of globalization and neo-racism in a rural Greek community, this book describes the contradictory political and economic development of the Greek countryside since its incorporation into the European Union, where increased prosperity and social liberalization have been accompanied by the creation of a vulnerable and marginalized class of immigrant laborers. The author analyzes the paradoxical resurgence of ethnic nationalism and neo-racism that has grown in the wake of European unification and addresses key issues of racism, neoliberalism and nationalism in contemporary anthropology.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available August 2020

  Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure

  Remembering Ghosts on the Margins of History

  Surface-Evans, S., Garrison, A. E. & Supernant, K. (eds)

  What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies Heritage Studies

• May 2005

  Bodies of Evidence

  Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus

  Sant Cassia, P.

  In the course of hostilities between Greek and Turkish Cypriots between 1963 and 1974, over 2000 persons, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, went "missing" in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean with a population distribution of 80% Greeks and 18% Turks. This represents a significant number for a population of only 600,000. Few bodies have been recovered; most will probably not be. All are still mourned by their surviving friends and relatives. The conflict has still not been resolved and the memories are still alive.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• November 2009

  The Body in Asia

  Turner, B. & Yangwen, Z. (Eds.)

  The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures. The various works produced by Asian scholars remain largely unknown to Western academic debates even though Asia is home to a host of rich body cultures and religions. The peoples of Asia have experienced colonization, decolonization, and now globalization, all of which make the ‘body in Asia’ a rewarding field of research. This unique volume brings together a number of scholars who work on East, Southeast and South Asia and presents original and cutting edge research on the body in various Asian cultures.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available April 2017

  Border Aesthetics

  Concepts and Intersections

  Schimanski, J. & Wolfe, S. F. (eds)

  Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.

  Subjects: Literary Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2013

  Border Encounters

  Asymmetry and Proximity at Europe's Frontiers

  Lauth Bacas, J. & Kavanagh, W. (eds)

  Among the tremendous changes affecting Europe in recent decades, those concerning political frontiers have been some of the most significant. International borders are being opened in some regions while being redefined or reinforced in others. The social relationships of those living in these borderland regions are also changing fundamentally. This volume investigates, from a local, ground-up perspective, what is happening at some of these border encounters: face-to-face interactions and relations of compliance and confrontation, where people are bargaining, exchanging goods and information, and maneuvering beyond state boundaries. Anthropological case studies from a number of European borderlands shed light on the questions of how, and to what extent, the border context influences the changing interactions and social relationships between people at a political frontier.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies

• eBook available November 2019

  Born a Slave, Died a Pioneer

  Nathan Harrison and the Historical Archaeology of Legend

  Mallios, S.

  Spectacular recent discoveries from the Nathan Harrison cabin site offer new insights and perspectives into the life of this former slave and legendary California homesteader.

  “In many ways, it is a quintessential American story because of the fact that slavery was the American story.”—Julia A. King, St. Mary’s College of Maryland

  Few people in the history of the United States embody ideals of the American Dream more than Nathan Harrison. His is a story with prominent themes of overcoming staggering obstacles, forging something-from-nothing, and evincing gritty perseverance. In a lifetime of hard-won progress, Harrison survived the horrors of slavery in the Antebellum South, endured the mania of the California Gold Rush, and prospered in the rugged chaos of the Wild West.

  From the introduction:
  According to dozens of accounts, Harrison would routinely greet visitors to his remote Southern California hillside property with the introductory quip, “I’m N——r Nate, the first white man on the mountain.” This is by far the most common direct quote in all of the extensive Harrison lore. If it is possible to get past current-day shock and outrage over the inflammatory racial epithet, one can begin to contextualize and appreciate the ironic humor, ethnic insight, and dualistically crafted identities Harrison employed in this profound statement.

  Subjects: Archaeology Heritage Studies History (General) Anthropology (General)

• November 2003

  The Bounded Field

  Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley

  Stacul, J.

  Regionalism is one of the most debated issues in contemporary western Europe. Yet why the region, rather than the nation state, can have such a strong appeal for the construction of social and political identity remains largely unexplored. Drawing on data collected in the mountainous Trentino region of northern Italy, the author investigates how ideas about village boundaries and private property form the background against which regionalist ideologies are understood. In suggesting that ideas about regionalism largely reflect views about private property, he provides an alternative to theories of nationalism that overlook the articulation between official ideologies and discourses at the local level.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• April 1999

  Braving the Street

  The Anthropology of Homelessness

  Glasser, I. & Bridgman, R.

  As homelessness continues to plague North America and also becomes more widespread in Europe, anthropologists turn their attention to solving the puzzle of why people in some of the most advanced technological societies in the world are found huddled in a subway tunnel, squatting in a vacant building, living in a shelter, or camping out in an abandoned field or on a beach. Anthropologists have a long tradition of working in poverty subcultures and have been able to contribute answers to some of the puzzles of homelessness through their ability to enter the culture of the homeless without some of the preconceptions of other disciplines.

  The authors, anthropologists from the U.S.A. and Canada, offer us an analysis of homelessness that is grounded in anthropological research in North America and throughout the world. Both have in-depth experience through working in communities of the homeless and present us withthe results of their own work and with that of their colleagues.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2019

  Brazilian Steel Town

  Machines, Land, Money and Commoning in the Making of the Working Class

  Mollona, M.

  Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getúlio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city’s economy, and consequently its citizen’s lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest industrial complex in Latin America. Although the glory days of the CSN have long passed, the company still controls life in Volta Redonda today, creating as much dispossession as wealth for the community. Brazilian Steel Town tells the story of the people tied to this ailing giant – of their fears, hopes, and everyday struggles.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available May 2015

  Breaking Boundaries

  Varieties of Liminality

  Horvath, A., Thomassen, B., & Wydra, H. (eds)

  Liminality has the potential to be a leading paradigm for understanding transformation in a globalizing world. As a fundamental human experience, liminality transmits cultural practices, codes, rituals, and meanings in situations that fall between defined structures and have uncertain outcomes. Based on case studies of some of the most important crises in history, society, and politics, this volume explores the methodological range and applicability of the concept to a variety of concrete social and political problems.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2016

  Breaking Rocks

  Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa

  Trapido, J.

  Based on fieldwork in Kinshasa and Paris, Breaking Rocks examines patronage payments within Congolese popular music, where a love song dedication can cost 6,000 dollars and a simple name check can trade for 500 or 600 dollars. Tracing this system of prestige through networks of musicians and patrons – who include gangsters based in Europe, kleptocratic politicians in Congo, and lawless diamond dealers in northern Angola – this book offers insights into ideologies of power and value in central Africa’s troubled post-colonial political economy, as well as a glimpse into the economic flows that make up the hidden side of the globalization.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2008

  'Brothers' or Others?

  Propriety and Gender for Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt

  Fábos, A. H.

  Muslim Arab Sudanese in Cairo have played a fundamental role in Egyptian history and society during many centuries of close relations between Egypt and Sudan. Although the government and official press describes them as "brothers" in a united Nile Valley, recent political developments in Egypt have underscored the precarious legal status of Sudanese in Cairo. Neither citizens nor foreigners, they are in an uncertain position, created in part through an unusual ethnic discourse which does not draw principally on obvious characteristics of difference. This rich ethnographic study shows instead that Sudanese ethnic identity is created from deeply held social values, especially those concerning gender and propriety, shared by Sudanese and Egyptian communities. The resulting ethnic identity is ambiguous and flexible, allowing Sudanese to voice their frustrations and make claims for their own uniqueness while acknowledging the identity that they share with the dominant Egyptian community.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2018

  Burgundy

  The Global Story of Terroir

  Demossier, M.

  “Demossier’s engrossing analysis of Burgundy—the wine, the place, the brand—should be imbibed (pun intended!) on many levels—and slowly, for best appreciation.”—foodanthro.com

  Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, this book explores the professional, social, and cultural world of Burgundy wines, the role of terroir (the environmental factors that affect a crop's character), and its transnational deployment in China, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand.

  It demystifies the terroir ideology by providing a unique long-term ethnographic analysis of what lies behind the concept. While the Burgundian model of terroir has gone global by acquiring UNESCO world heritage status, its very legitimacy is now being challenged amongst the vineyards where it first took root.

  From the introduction:
  Superficially then, Burgundy might appear to be simply acquiring recognition for its unchanging landscape, tradition and culture. Yet, for all the power of its rich local identity, folklore and culture which is broadcast to the world, there hides underneath the comforting blanket of this seamless place, untouched by change or conflict, a far more complex reality. Burgundy’s listing as a World Heritage landscape emphasises its international reputation as a traditional and historical site of wine production and opens a new chapter in the production and marketing of its quality, differentiation and authenticity. It is also about readjusting Burgundy and the grands crus in response to a changing global market and the shifting kaleidoscope of world wine values.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition Cultural Studies (General)

• August 2015

  Bush Bound

  Young Men and Rural Permanence in Migrant West Africa

  Gaibazzi, P.

  Whereas most studies of migration focus on movement, this book examines the experience of staying put. It looks at young men living in a Soninke-speaking village in Gambia who, although eager to travel abroad for money and experience, settle as farmers, heads of families, businessmen, civic activists, or, alternatively, as unemployed, demoted youth. Those who stay do so not only because of financial and legal limitations, but also because of pressures to maintain family and social bases in the Gambia valley. ‘Stayers’ thus enable migrants to migrate, while ensuring the activities and values attached to rural life are passed on to the future generations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• December 2001

  Cameroon's Tycoon

  Max Esser's Expedition and its Consequences

  Chilver, E. M. & Röschenthaler, U. (eds)

  Max Esser was an adventurous young merchant banker, a Rhinelander, who became the first managing director of the largest German plantation company in Cameroon. This volume gives a vivid account of the antecedents and early stages as experienced and described by Esser. In 1896 he ventured, with the explorer Zintgraff, into the hinterland to seek the agreement of Zintgraff's old ally, the ruler of Bali, for the provision of laborers for his projected enterprise. The consequences, many optimistically unforeseen, are illustrated with the help of contemporary materials. Esser's account is preceded by a look at his and his family's connections, added to by an account of newspaper campaigns against him, and completed by an examination of his Cameroon collection, which he gave to the Linden Museum in Stuttgart.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available September 2021

  The Camino de Santiago

  Curating the Pilgrimage as Heritage and Tourism

  Murray, M.

  Pilgrimage, as a global activity linked to the sacred, speaks to the special significance of persons, places and events. This book relates these sentiments to the curatorship of the Camino de Santiago that comprises a lattice of European pilgrimage itineraries converging at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. The detailed analysis focuses on the management of pilgrimage settings as heritage and tourism linked to the shrine of Saint James and gives particular attention to investment guidelines, land use planning regulations, environmental stewardship, information dissemination and museology.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2020

  Can Academics Change the World?

  An Israeli Anthropologist's Testimony on the Rise and Fall of a Protest Movement on Campus

  Shokeid, M.

  Moshe Shokeid narrates his experiences as a member of AD KAN (NO MORE), a protest movement of Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University, who fought against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, founded during the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). However, since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin and the later obliteration of the Oslo accord, public manifestations of dissent on Israeli campuses have been remarkably mute. This chronicle of AD KAN is explored in view of the ongoing theoretical discourse on the role of the intellectual in society and is compared with other account of academic involvement in different countries during periods of acute political conflict.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Jewish Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies

• eBook available April 2013

  Capricious Borders

  Minority, Population, and Counter-Conduct Between Greece and Turkey

  Demetriou, O.

  Borders of states, borders of citizenship, borders of exclusion. As the lines drawn on international treaty maps become ditches in the ground and roaming barriers in the air, a complex state apparatus is set up to regulate the lives of those who cannot be expelled, yet who have never been properly ‘rooted’. This study explores the mechanisms employed at the interstices of two opposing views on the presence of minority populations in western Thrace: the legalization of their status as établis (established) and the failure to incorporate the minority in the Greek national imaginary. Revealing the logic of government bureaucracy shows how they replicate difference from the inter-state level to the communal and the personal.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2018

  Capturing Quicksilver

  The Position, Power, and Plasticity of Chinese Medicine in Singapore

  Smith, A. A.

  Since the turn of the century Singapore has sustained a reputation for both austere governance and cutting-edge biomedical facilities and research. Seeking to emphasize Singapore’s capacity for “modern medicine” and strengthen their burgeoning biopharmaceutical industry, this image has explicitly excluded Chinese medicine – despite its tremendous popularity amongst Singaporeans from all walks of life, and particularly amongst Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority. This book examines the use and practice of Chinese medicine in Singapore, especially in everyday life, and contributes to anthropological debates regarding the post-colonial intersection of knowledge, identity, and governmentality, and to transnational studies of Chinese medicine as a permeable, plural, and fluid practice.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2018

  Cash Transfers in Context

  An Anthropological Perspective

  Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. & Piccoli, E. (eds)

  Marginal in status a decade ago, cash transfer programs have become the preferred channel for delivering emergency aid or tackling poverty in low- and middle-income countries. While these programs have had positive effects, they are typical of top-down development interventions in that they impose on local contexts standardized norms and procedures regarding conditionality, targeting, and delivery. This book sheds light on the crucial importance of these contexts and the many unpredicted consequences of cash transfer programs worldwide - detailing how the latter are used by actors to pursue their own strategies, and how external norms are reinterpreted, circumvented, and contested by local populations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2021

  Cattle Poetics

  How Aesthetics Shapes Politics in Mursiland, Ethiopia

  Eczet, J.-B.

  Loving cows, then killing them. The relation with cattle in Mursi country is shaped by the dichotomy between the value given to it during life and the death imposed upon it. The killing of cattle may be brief and inflicted with few words, but it is preceded by a series of intense aesthetic practices, such as body painting and adornments, colour poetics, poems and oratory art. This book investigates the link between the nurturing and killing of cattle with Mursi daily life and finds that these rituals cut across pastoralism, social organisation and politics in forming the very fabric of Mursi society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies

• May 2006

  Centering the Margin

  Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands

  Horstmann, A. & Wadley, R. L. (eds)

  In a completely new approach to borders and border crossing, this volume suggests a re-conceptualization of the nation in Southeast Asia. Choosing an actor approach, the individual chapters in this volume capture the narratives of minorities, migrants and refugees who inhabit and cross borders as part of their everyday life. They show that people are not only constrained by borders; the crossing of borders also opens up new options of agency. Making active use of these, border-crossing actors construct their own live projects on the border in multiple ways against the original intention of the nation-state. Based on their intimate knowledge of the interaction of communities, anthropologists from Europe, the USA, Japan and Southeast Asia provide a vivid picture of the effects of state policies at the borders on these communities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• November 2012

  Central America in the New Millennium

  Living Transition and Reimagining Democracy

  Burrell, J. L. & Moodie, E. (eds)

  Most non-Central Americans think of the narrow neck between Mexico and Colombia in terms of dramatic past revolutions and lauded peace agreements, or sensational problems of gang violence and natural disasters. In this volume, the contributors examine regional circumstances within frames of democratization and neoliberalism, as they shape lived experiences of transition. The authors—anthropologists and social scientists from the United States, Europe, and Central America—argue that the process of regions and nations “disappearing” (being erased from geopolitical notice) is integral to upholding a new, post-Cold War world order—and that a new framework for examining political processes must be accessible, socially collaborative, and in dialogue with the lived processes of suffering and struggle engaged by people in Central America and the world in the name of democracy.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2009

  Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-east Africa

  Volume I: Ethiopia and Kenya

  Schlee, G. & Watson, E. E. (eds)

  Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in northeast Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention is paid to the impact of modern weaponry, new technologies, religious conversion, food and land shortages, international borders, civil war, and displacement on group identities. Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, historians and geographers, these volumes provide a significant account of a society profoundly shaped by identity politics and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of conflict and war, and forms of alliance and peacemaking, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of this troubled region.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2009

  Changing Identifications and Alliances in North-east Africa

  Volume II: Sudan, Uganda, and the Ethiopia-Sudan Borderlands

  Schlee, G. & Watson, E. E. (eds)

  Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in north-east Africa. These volumes provide an interdisciplinary account of the nature and significance of ethnic, religious, and national identity in north-east Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention is paid to the impact of modern weaponry, new technologies, religious conversion, food and land shortages, international borders, civil war, and displacement on group identities. Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, historians and geographers, these volumes provide a significant account of a society profoundly shaped by identity politics and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of conflict and war, and forms of alliance and peacemaking, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of this troubled region.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2006

  Changing Properties of Property

  Benda-Beckmann, K. von, Benda-Beckmann, F. von & Wiber, M. (eds)

  As an important contribution to debates on property theory and the role of law in creating, disputing, defining and refining property rights, this volume provides new theoretical material on property systems, as well as new empirically grounded case studies of the dynamics of property transformations. The property claimants discussed in these papers represent a diverse range of actors, including post-socialist states and their citizens, those receiving restitution for past property losses in Africa, Southeast Asia and in eastern Europe, collectives, corporate and individual actors. The volume thus provides a comprehensive anthropological analysis not only of property structures and ideologies, but also of property (and its politics) in action.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2023

  Chicanery

  Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960

  Gray, G., Munro, D. & Winter, C.

  Academic appointments can bring forth unexpected and unforeseen contests and tensions, cause humiliation and embarrassment for unsuccessful applicants and reveal unexpected allies and enemies. It is also a time when harsh assessments can be made about colleagues’ intellectual abilities and their capacity as a scholar and fieldworker. The assessors’ reports were often disturbingly personal, laying bare their likes and dislikes that could determine the futures of peers and colleagues. Chicanery deals with how the founding Chairs at Sydney, the Australian National University, Auckland and Western Australia dealt with this process, and includes accounts of the appointments of famous anthropologists such as Raymond Firth and Alexander Ratcliffe-Brown.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present Theory and Methodology

• eBook available March 2020

  The Children of Gregoria

  Dogme Ethnography of a Mexican Family

  Kristensen, R. & Adeath Villamil, C.

  The Children of Gregoria portrays a struggling Mexico, told through the story of the Rosales family. The people entrenched in the violent communities that the Rosales belong to have been discussed, condemned, analyzed, joked about and cheered, but rarely have they been seriously listened to. This book highlights their voices and allows them to tell their own stories in an accessible, literary manner without prejudice, persecution or judgment.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Media Studies

• eBook available October 2017

  Children of the Camp

  The Lives of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

  Grayson, C.-L.

  Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. A significant number have settled in camps in neighboring countries, where children were born and raised. Based on in-depth fieldwork, this book explores the experience of Somalis who grew up in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. This original study carefully considers how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Sociology

• eBook available March 2016

  Choreographies of Landscape

  Signs of Performance in Yosemite National Park

  Ness, S. A.

  As an international ecotourism destination, Yosemite National Park welcomes millions of climbers, sightseers, and other visitors from around the world annually, all of whom are afforded dramatic experiences of the natural world. This original and cross-disciplinary book offers an ethnographic and performative study of Yosemite visitors in order to understand human connection with and within natural landscapes. By grounding a novel “eco-semiotic” analysis in the lived reality of parkgoers, it forges surprising connections, assembling a collective account that will be of interest to disciplines ranging from performance studies to cultural geography.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• November 2012

  Christian Politics in Oceania

  Tomlinson, M. & McDougall, D. (eds)

  The phrase “Christian politics” evokes two meanings: political relations between denominations in one direction, and the contributions of Christian churches to debates about the governing of society. The contributors to this volume address Christian politics in both senses and argue that Christianity is always and inevitably political in the Pacific Islands. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji, the authors argue that Christianity and politics have redefined each other in much of Oceania in ways that make the two categories inseparable at any level of analysis. The individual chapters vividly illuminate the ways in which Christian politics operate across a wide scale, from interpersonal relations to national and global interconnections.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2016

  'City of the Future'

  Built Space, Modernity and Urban Change in Astana

  Laszczkowski, M.

  Astana, the capital city of the post-Soviet Kazakhstan, has often been admired for the design and planning of its futuristic cityscape. This anthropological study of the development of the city focuses on every-day practices, official ideologies and representations alongside the memories and dreams of the city’s longstanding residents and recent migrants. Critically examining a range of approaches to place and space in anthropology, geography and other disciplines, the book argues for an understanding of space as inextricably material-and-imaginary, and unceasingly dynamic – allowing for a plurality of incompatible pasts and futures materialized in spatial form.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2011

  Civilizations Beyond Earth

  Extraterrestrial Life and Society

  Vakoch, D. A. & Harrison, A. A. (eds)

  Astronomers around the world are pointing their telescopes toward the heavens, searching for signs of intelligent life. If they make contact with an advanced alien civilization, how will humankind respond? In thinking about first contact, the contributors to this volume present new empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Archaeologists and astronomers explore the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, using scientific insights to estimate such elusive factors as the longevity of technological societies. Sociologists present the latest findings of novel surveys, tapping into the public’s attitudes about life beyond Earth to show how religion and education influence beliefs about extraterrestrials. Scholars from such diverse disciplines as mathematics, chemistry, journalism, and religious studies offer innovative solutions for bridging the cultural gap between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, while recognizing the tremendous challenges of communicating at interstellar distances. At a time when new planets are being discovered around other stars at an unprecedented rate, this collection provides a much needed guide to the human impact of discovering we are not alone in the universe.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Archaeology

• eBook available October 2019

  Claiming Homes

  Confronting Domicide in Rural China

  Bruckermann, C.

  Chinese citizens make themselves at home despite economic transformation, political rupture, and domestic dislocation in the contemporary countryside. By mobilizing labor and kinship to make claims over homes, people, and things, rural residents withstand devaluation and confront dispossession. As a particular configuration of red capitalism and socialist sovereignty takes root, this process challenges the relationship between the politics of place and the location of class in China and beyond.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2010

  Class, Contention, and a World in Motion

  Lem, W. & Gardiner Barber, P. (eds)

  Prevailing scholarship on migration tends to present migrants as the objects of history, subjected to abstract global forces or to concrete forms of regulation imposed by state and supra state organizations. In this volume, by contrast, the focus is on migrants as the subjects of history who not only react but also act to engage with and transform their worlds. Using ethnographic examples from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, contributors question how and why particular forms of political struggle and collective action may, or indeed may not, be carried forward in the context of geographic and social border crossings. In doing so, they bring the dynamic relationship between class, gender, and culture to the forefront in each distinctive migration setting.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2017

  Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance

  Anthropologies of Sound and Movement

  Chrysagis, E. & Karampampas, P. (eds)

  Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2011

  Collective Terms

  Race, Culture, and Community in a State-Planned City in France

  Epstein, B. S.

  The banlieue, the mostly poor and working-class suburbs located on the outskirts of major cities in France, gained international media attention in late 2005 when riots broke out in some 250 such towns across the country. Pitting first- and second-generation immigrant teenagers against the police, the riots were an expression of the multiplicity of troubles that have plagued these districts for decades. This study provides an ethnographic account of life in a Parisian banlieue and examines how the residents of this multiethnic city come together to build, define, and put into practice their collective life. The book focuses on the French ideal of integration and its consequences within the multicultural context of contemporary France. Based on research conducted in a state-planned ville nouvelle, or New Town, the book also provides a view on how the French state has used urban planning to shore up national priorities for social integration. Collective Terms proposes an alternative reading of French multiculturalism, suggesting fresh ways for thinking through the complex mix of race, class, nation, and culture that increasingly defines the modern urban experience.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2013

  Colonial Collecting and Display

  Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

  Wintle, C.

  In the late-nineteenth century, British travelers to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands compiled wide-ranging collections of material culture for scientific instruction and personal satisfaction. Colonial Collecting and Display follows the compelling history of a particular set of such objects, tracing their physical and conceptual transformation from objects of indigenous use to accessioned objects in a museum collection in the south of England. This first study dedicated to the historical collecting and display of the Islands' material cultures develops a new analysis of colonial discourse, using a material culture-led approach to reconceptualize imperial relationships between Andamanese, Nicobarese, and British communities, both in the Bay of Bengal and on British soil. It critiques established conceptions of the act of collecting, arguing for recognition of how indigenous makers and consumers impacted upon "British" collection practices, and querying the notion of a homogenous British approach to material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

  Subjects: Museum Studies History (General) Anthropology (General)

• February 2013

  The Colours of the Empire

  Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism

  Matos, P. F. de

  The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available December 2007

  Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty

  Blatterer, H.

  Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imagination and neglected as an area of sociological investigation, something that has been noted by sociologists over the last four decades. Going beyond the overwhelmingly psychological literature, this book draws on original qualitative research and theories of social recognition and thus presents a first step towards filling an important gap in our understanding of the meaning of adulthood.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2022

  Communication

  A House Seen from Everywhere

  Klyukanov, I. E.

  Focusing on the scientific study of communication, this book is a systematic examination. To that end, the natural, social, cultural, and rational scientific perspectives on communication are presented and then brought together in one unifying framework of the semiotic square, showing how all four views are interconnected. The question of whether the study of communication can be considered a unique science is addressed. It is argued that communication is never separate from any object of study and thus we always deal with its manifestations, captured in the four scientific perspectives discussed in the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2013

  Communities of Complicity

  Everyday Ethics in Rural China

  Steinmüller, H.

  Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• November 1996

  Communities of Faith

  Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island

  Buckser, A.

  Most studies of modern religious change have viewed it as a process of secularization in which the advance of science and technology discredits religious beliefs and destroys religious institutions. Yet religion has stubbornly failed to expire in the West, and in some places is undergoing a resurgence. This book reconsiders secularization theory through a case study of arural island in Denmark where, in the late nineteenth century, a series of powerful religious awakenings electrified its population, dividing it into several large and intense Lutheran movements. After examining the history and social structure of those Protestant groups and revealing their cultural and ideological complexity, the author concludes that the secularization theory is inadequate and that an anthropological approach, focusing on religion's role in creating identity and community for its members, offers much better insight into religious processes.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2018

  Competing Power

  Landscapes of Migration, Violence and the State

  Halstead, N.

  Drawing from ethnographic material based on long-term research, this volume considers competing forms of power at micro- and macro-levels in Guyana, where the local is marked by extensive migration, corruption, and differing levels of violence. It shows how the local is occupied and re-occupied by various powerful and powerless people and entities (“big ones” and “small ones”), and how it becomes the site of intense power negotiations in relation to external ideas of empowerment.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available December 2018

  Conceptualizing the World

  An Exploration across Disciplines

  Jordheim, H. & Sandmo, E. (eds)

  What is—and what was—“the world”? Though often treated as interchangeable with the ongoing and inexorable progress of globalization, concepts of “world,” “globe,” or “earth” instead suggest something limited and absolute. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume concerns itself with this central paradox: that the complex, heterogeneous, and purportedly transhistorical dynamics of globalization have given rise to the idea and reality of a finite—and thus vulnerable—world. Through studies of illuminating historical moments that range from antiquity to the era of Google Earth, each contribution helps to trace the emergence of the world in multitudinous representations, practices, and human experiences.

  Subjects: History (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2007

  Consuming the Inedible

  Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice

  MacClancy, J., Henry, C. Jeya & Macbeth, H. (eds)

  Everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners. This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences - biological, mineral, social or spiritual - of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• June 2015

  Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe

  Colonialist and Nationalist Impulses

  Rountree, K. (ed)

  Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• June 2011

  Contested Mediterranean Spaces

  Ethnographic Essays in Honour of Charles Tilly

  Kousis, M., Selwyn, T. & Clark, D. (Eds)

  
  

  Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)

• January 2010

  Contested Nationalism

  Serb Elite Rivalry in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s

  Caspersen, N.

  "Only unity saves the Serbs" is the famous call for unity in the Serb nationalist doctrine. But even though this doctrine was ideologically adhered to by most of the Serb leaders in Croatia and Bosnia, disunity characterized Serb politics during the Yugoslav disintegration and war. Nationalism was contested and nationalist claims to homogeneity did not reflect the reality of Serb politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Serb politics and challenges widespread assumptions regarding the Yugoslav conflict and war. It finds that although Slobodan Milosevic played a highly significant role, he was not always able to control the local Serb leaders. Moreover, it adds to the emerging evidence of the lack of importance of popular attitudes; hardline dominance was generally based on the control of economic and coercive resources rather than on elites successfully "playing the ethnic card." It moves beyond an assumption of automatic ethnic outbidding and thus contributes toward a better understanding of intra-ethnic rivalry in other cases such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, Nagorno-Karabakh and Rwanda.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• April 2023

  Contesting Moralities

  Roma Identities, State and Kinship

  Sarafian, I.

  Roma identities have often been presented in literature as collectively constructed and in opposition to those who are not Roma. Contesting Moralities challenges these preconceptions about Roma identification by disentangling the binaries between Roma and non-Roma, state and non-state, public and private. It explores topics resonating in contemporary Romani studies that are in need of further exploration through individual perspectives, including history, activism, kinship, childhood, and gender hierarchies. The book paints a complex picture of inequality and how it is negotiated amid conflicting, ambiguous and contradictory regimes of power and moral demands, including those of state and kin.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2016

  Contextualizing Disaster

  Button, G. V. & Schuller, M. (eds)

  Contextualizing Disaster offers a comparative analysis of six recent "highly visible" disasters and several slow-burning, "hidden," crises that include typhoons, tsunamis, earthquakes, chemical spills, and the unfolding consequences of rising seas and climate change. The book argues that, while disasters are increasingly represented by the media as unique, exceptional, newsworthy events, it is a mistake to think of disasters as isolated or discrete occurrences. Rather, building on insights developed by political ecologists, this book makes a compelling argument for understanding disasters as transnational and global phenomena.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

• eBook available February 2023

  Continental Encampment

  Genealogies of Humanitarian Containment in the Middle East and Europe

  Knudsen, A. J. & Berg, K. G. (eds)

  During the past decade, Syria’s displacement crisis has made the Middle East one of the world’s foremost refugee-hosting regions. The measures to prevent refugees and migrants from leaving the region, and returning those who do, has made the region a zone of containment where millions remain displaced. The volume explores responses to mass migration and traces the genealogy of humanitarian containment from the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the first refugee camps to the present-day displacement ‘crises’ and the re-bordering of Europe.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

• eBook available January 2018

  Contrarian Anthropology

  The Unwritten Rules of Academia

  Nader, L.

  Analyzing the workings of boundary maintenance in the areas of anthropology, energy, gender, and law, Nader contrasts dominant trends in academia with work that pushes the boundaries of acceptable methods and theories. Although the selections illustrate the history of one anthropologist’s work over half a century, the wider intent is to label a field as contrarian to reveal unwritten rules that sometimes hinder transformative thinking and to stimulate boundary crossing in others.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)

• January 2007

  Conversations on the Beach

  Fishermen's Knowledge, Metaphor and Environmental Change in South India

  Hoeppe, G.

  Already on the margins of an agrarian society, the marine fisherfolk of the South Indian state of Kerala are faced with a severe environmental problem: overfishing. The actions of trawlers and industrial fishing ships, it seems, have caused the resources on which they depend to dwindle rapidly. Yet what may appear to be a clear-cut case of cause, effect and responsibility turns out to be a complex issue. Local perceptions of the environment are deeply enmeshed with notions of morality, the self and people's understanding of their place in society. Overfishing is one of several environmental issues that bring into focus parallel knowledges, giving rise to contradictory views on what the problems are, whether changes are good or bad, and how they are to be remedied. As the fisherfolk confront the state, a discourse develops on what is innate to the environment, or "natural", and on what its malleability entails.

  Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Hindus and Muslims in a coastal village, this book explores the fisherfolk's environmental knowledge, its transformation in a period of rapid socio-economic and political change as well as its role in dealing with the state and the science - putatively universal and objective - upon which the state's policies are claimed to be based. The book emphasises conversation as a cultural process, metaphors and figurative speech in the investigation of knowledge, as well as the use and limits of memory in conceptualising environmental change.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• November 2009

  Conversion After Socialism

  Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union

  Pelkmans, M. (ed)

  The large and sudden influx of missionaries into the former Soviet Union after seventy years of militant secularism has been controversial, and the widespread occurrence of conversion has led to anxiety about social and national disintegration. Although these concerns have been vigorously discussed in national arenas, social scientists have remained remarkably silent about the subject. This volume’s focus on conversion offers a novel approach to the dislocations of the postsocialist experience. In eight well researched ethnographic accounts the authors analyze a range of missionary encounters as well as aspects of conversion and "anti-conversion" in different parts of the region, thus challenging the problematic idea that religious life after socialism involved a simple "revival" of repressed religious traditions. Instead, they unravel the unexpected twists and turns of religious dynamics, and the processes that have challenged popular ideas about religion and culture. The contributions show how conversion is rooted in the disruptive qualities of the new "capitalist experience" and document its unsettling effects on the individual and social level.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• December 2007

  Coping with Distances

  Producing Nordic Atlantic Societies

  Baerenholdt, J. O.

  The Nordic Atlantic area has seen remarkable examples of social formations in areas that many would perceive as too remote to allow the construction of functioning communities. But through innovations, networking and the formation of identities people have coped with distances, thus continuously rebuilding societies in Northern Norway, Iceland, the Faroes, and Greenland. Living conditions in the Nordic Atlantic are so extreme that one might ask whether the notion of society is applicable under these circumstances. The author argues that, yes, there is a meaningful way of comprehending these social formations, which is through the spatial and temporal practices that produce, reproduce, stabilize, destabilize and change them. He introduces the concept of coping, which means neither mastering nor adapting but relates to in-between strategies and tactics reflected in practices of securing people’s way of life under conditions that are never totally under their control.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Travel and Tourism

• July 1996

  Coping with Tourists

  European Reactions to Mass Tourism

  Boissevain, J. (ed)

  Once content to sunbathe and follow guides and established itineraries, tourists are increasingly seeking authentic culture. This is taking them into the private areas and zones to which the locals retire in order to escape the tourist gaze, creating tensions between the two groups. Based on recent anthropological field studies, this book describes how European communities dependant on tourism have been affected by the commoditization of their culture and explores the ways they cope with the constant attention of outsiders. The collection demonstrates both varied and skillful ways in which individuals and communities react to and cope with the impact of decades of mass tourism on their lives and values, thus throwing new light onto questions of identity, boundary maintenance and cultural adjustment.

  Subject: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2021

  Cosmic Coherence

  A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination

  Matthews, W.

  Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2023

  Cosmopolitan Refugees

  Somali Migrant Women in Nairobi and Johannesburg

  Ripero-Muñiz, N.

  Exploring the dynamics of identity formation processes in diasporic spaces, this book analyses how gender, cultural and religious practices are renegotiated in a situation of displacement. The author presents the comparative case study of Somali migrant women in Nairobi and Johannesburg:  two cosmopolitan urban hubs in the global South. The book is based on and includes ethnographic observations in Nairobi and Johannesburg, first-person accounts of migration journeys across the African continent and women’s reflections on what it means to be a Somali woman today.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available June 2022

  The Cracked Art World

  Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland

  Rush, K.

  This book presents a nuanced view of Northern Ireland, a place at once deeply mired in its past and seeking to forge a new future for itself as a ‘post-post-conflict’ place within the context of a changing United Kingdom, a disintegrating Europe, and a globalized world. This is a Northern Ireland that is conflicted, segregated, and marginalized within modern Europe, but also hopeful and forward looking, seeking to articulate for itself a new place in the contemporary world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2021

  Crafting Chinese Memories

  The Art and Materiality of Storytelling

  Swancutt, K. (ed)

  Through an interdisciplinary conversation with contributors from social anthropology, religious studies, film studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and history, Crafting Chinese Memories is a novel book which addresses how works of art shape memories, and offers new ways of conceptualising storytelling, memory-making, art, and materiality. It explores the memories of artists, filmmakers, novelists, storytellers, and persons who come to terms with their own histories even as they reveal the social memories of watershed events in modern China.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Memory Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available April 2012

  Crafting 'The Indian'

  Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment

  Kalshoven, P. T.

  In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies

• June 2013

  Creating a Nation with Cloth

  Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora

  Addo, P.-A.

  Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation— fonua—which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the “multi-territorial nation,” the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2016

  Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

  Action Research in Higher Education

  Levin, M. & Greenwood, D. J.

  Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• June 2023

  Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

  Anthropological Perspectives

  Halbmayer, E. & Goletz, A. (eds)

  Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• July 2003

  Creative Land

  Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea

  Leach, J.

  What is creative in kinship? How are people connected to places? James Leach answers these questions through formulating “creativity” as an integral part of kinship on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The book contains a new critique of the genealogical model of kinship, suggesting that this model prevents us from grasping the way generative relations, including those to land and place, constitute persons on the Rai Coast. Analytic attention is focused upon the life cycle, marriage, exchange and artistic production as the activities in which substantial connection is generated. The argument, made in relation to detailed ethnography, yields a fresh perspective on the connections people trace to each other.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2016

  Creativity in Transition

  Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe

  Svašek, M. & Meyer, B. (eds)

  In an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity, the dynamics of cultural production and the very notion of creativity are in transition. Exploring creative practices in various settings, the book does not only call attention to the spread of modernist discourses of creativity, from the colonial era to the current obsession with ‘innovation’ in neo-liberal capitalist cultural politics, but also to the less visible practices of copying, recycling and reproduction that occur as part and parcel of creative improvization.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available February 2020

  Credit and Debt in an Unequal Society

  Establishing a Consumer Credit Market in South Africa

  Schraten, J.

  South Africa was one of the first countries in the Global South that established a financialized consumer credit market. This market consolidates rather than alleviates the extreme social inequality within a country. This book investigates the political reasons for adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order. The book addresses sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and legal scholars interested in the interaction of economy and law in contemporary market societies.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

• March 2014

  Creole Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

  Knörr, J.

  Contributing to identity formation in ethnically and religiously diverse postcolonial societies, this book examines the role played by creole identity in Indonesia, and in particular its capital, Jakarta. While, on the one hand, it facilitates transethnic integration and promotes a specifically postcolonial sense of common nationhood due to its heterogeneous origins, creole groups of people are often perceived ambivalently in the wake of colonialism and its demise, on the other. In this book, Jacqueline Knörr analyzes the social, historical, and political contexts of creoleness both at the grassroots and the State level, showing how different sections of society engage with creole identity in order to promote collective identification transcending ethnic and religious boundaries, as well as for reasons of self-interest and ideological projects.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available April 2018

  A Creole Nation

  National Integration in Guinea-Bissau

  Kohl, C.

  Despite high degrees of cultural and ethnic diversity as well as prevailing political instability, Guinea-Bissau’s population has developed a strong sense of national belonging. By examining both contemporary and historical perspectives, A Creole Nation explores how creole identity, culture, and political leaders have influenced postcolonial nation-building processes in Guinea-Bissau, and the ways in which the phenomenon of cultural creolization results in the emergence of new identities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available April 2009

  Crisis of the State

  War and Social Upheaval

  Kapferer, B. & Bertelsen, B. E. (eds)

  Analyzing both historical contexts and geographical locations, this volume explores the continuous reformation of state power and its potential in situations of violent conflict. The state, otherwise understood as an abstract and transcendent concept in many works on globalization in political philosophy, is instead located and analyzed here as an embedded part of lived reality. This relationship to the state is exposed as an integral factor to the formation of the social – whether in Africa, the Middle East, South America or the United States. Through the examination of these particular empirical settings of war or war-like situations, the book further argues for the continued importance of the state in shifting social and political circumstances. In doing so, the authors provide a critical contribution to debates within a broad spectrum of fields that are concerned with the future of the state, the nature of sovereignty, and globalization.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2022

  Critical Public Archaeology

  Confronting Social Challenges in the 21st Century

  Westmont, V. C. (ed)

  Critical approaches to public archaeology have been in use since the 1980s, however only recently have archaeologists begun using critical theory in conjunction with public archaeology to challenge dominant narratives of the past. This volume brings together current work on the theory and practice of critical public archaeology from Europe and the United States to illustrate the ways that implementing critical approaches can introduce new understandings of the past and reveal new insights on the present. Contributors to this volume explore public perceptions of museum interpretations as well as public archaeology projects related to changing perceptions of immigration, the working classes, and race.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) History (General)

• December 2005

  Crossing European Boundaries

  Beyond Conventional Geographical Categories

  Stacul, J., Moutsou, C., & Kopnina, H. (eds)

  At the turn of the millennium the state of Europe is fluid and contested, yet how this affects the everyday lives of European peoples and the ways they experience the social world they live in remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon ethnographic information from diverse European settings, this volume points to the contradictions that the project of a "Europe without boundaries" involves. In illustrating how the removal of political boundaries can create other boundaries, the articles in this volume provide alternatives to recent theorising on complexity, which takes little account of human agency.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  Crossing Histories and Ethnographies

  Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste

  Roque, R. & Traube, E. G. (eds)

  The key question for many anthropologists and historians today is not whether to cross the boundary between their disciplines, but whether the idea of a disciplinary boundary should be sustained. Reinterpreting the dynamic interplay between archive and field, these essays propose a method for mutually productive crossings between historical and ethnographic research. It engages critically with the colonial pasts of indigenous societies and examines how fieldwork and archival studies together lead to fruitful insights into the making of different colonial historicities. Timor-Leste’s unusually long and in some ways unique colonial history is explored as a compelling case for these crossings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Sociology

• eBook available July 2022

  Crossroads of Heritage and Religion

  Legacy and Sustainability of World Heritage Site Moravian Christiansfeld

  Damsholt, T., Melchior, M. R., Petterson, C., & Reeh, T., (eds)

  Looking at the crossroads between heritage and religion through the case study of Moravian Christiansfeld, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in July 2015, this anthology reaches back to the eighteenth century when the church settlement was founded, examines its legacy within Danish culture and modern society, and brings this history into the present and the ongoing heritagization processes. Finally, it explores the consequences of the listing for the everyday life in Christiansfeld and discusses the possible and sustainable futures of a religious community in a World Heritage Site.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2011

  Crude Domination

  An Anthropology of Oil

  Behrends, A., Reyna, S. P. & Schlee, G. (eds)

  Crude Domination is an innovative and important book about a critical topic – oil. While there have been numerous works about petroleum from ‘experience-far’ perspectives, there have been relatively few that have turned the ‘experience-near’ ethnographic gaze of anthropology on the topic. Crude Domination does just this among more peoples and more places than any other volume. Its chapters investigate nuances of culture, politics and economics in Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia as they pertain to petroleum. They wrestle with the key questions vexing scholars and practitioners alike: problems of the economic blight of the resource curse, underdevelopment, democracy, violence and war. Additionally they address topics that may initially appear insignificant – such as child witches and lionmen, fighting for oil when there is no oil, reindeer nomadism, community TV – but which turn out on closer scrutiny to be vital for explaining conflict and transformation in petro-states. Based upon these rich, new worlds of information, the text formulates a novel, domination approach to the social analysis of oil.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• July 2023

  Cryptopolitics

  Exposure, Concealment, and Digital Media

  Bernal, V., Pype, K., & Rodima-Taylor, D. (eds)

  Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, “cryptopolitics,” are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on African societies, Cryptopolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media toconsider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• eBook available February 2012

  The Cult and Science of Public Health

  A Sociological Investigation

  Dew, K.

  In contemporary manifestations of public health rituals and events, people are being increasingly united around what they hold in common—their material being and humanity. As a cult of humanity, public health provides a moral force in society that replaces ‘traditional’ religions in times of great diversity or heterogeneity of peoples, activities and desires. This is in contrast to public health’s foundation in science, particularly the science of epidemiology. The rigid rules of ‘scientific evidence’ used to determine the cause of illness and disease can work against the most vulnerable in society by putting sectors of the population, such as underrepresented workers, at a disadvantage. This study focuses on this tension between traditional science and the changing vision articulated within public health (and across many disciplines) that calls for a collective response to uncontrolled capitalism and unremitting globalization, and to the way in which health inequalities and their association with social inequalities provides a political rhetoric that calls for a new redistributive social programme. Drawing on decades of research, the author argues that public health is both a cult and a science of contemporary society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

• January 2004

  Cultivating Arctic Landscapes

  Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North

  Anderson, D. G. & Nuttall, M. (eds)

  In the last two decades, there has been an increased awareness of the traditions and issues that link aboriginal people across the circumpolar North. One of the key aspects of the lives of circumpolar peoples, be they in Scandinavia, Alaska, Russia, or Canada, is their relationship to the wild animals that support them. Although divided for most of the 20th Century by various national trading blocks, and the Cold War, aboriginal people in each region share common stories about the various capitalist and socialist states that claimed control over their lands and animals. Now, aboriginal peoples throughout the region are reclaiming their rights.

  This volume is the first to give a well-rounded portrait of wildlife management, aboriginal rights, and politics in the circumpolar north. The book reveals unexpected continuities between socialist and capitalist ecological styles, as well as addressing the problems facing a new era of cultural exchanges between aboriginal peoples in each region.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• June 2004

  Culture and Politics

  Identity and Conflict in a Multicultural World

  Pinxten, R. & Verstraete, G. & Longman, C. (eds)

  With "race" being discredited as a rallying cry for populist movements because of the atrocities committed in its name during World War II, "culture" has been adopted by right-wing groups instead, but used in the same exclusionary manner as racism was. This volume examines the essentialism, which is implicit in racial theories and re-emerges in the ideological use of cultural identity in new rightist movements, and presents case studies from different parts of the world where researchers were confronted with racism and worked out ways of coping with it.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2017

  Culture Change and Ex-Change

  Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism in Bena, Eastern Highlands, Papua New Guinea

  Knapp, R.

  How is cultural change perceived and performed by members of the Bena Bena language group, who live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea? In her analysis, Knapp draws upon existing bodies of work on ‘culture change’, ‘exchange’ and ‘person’ in Melanesia but brings them together in a new way by conjoining traditional models with theoretical approaches of the new Melanesian ethnography and with collaborative, reflexive and reverse anthropology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

• January 2001

  Culture, Creation, and Procreation

  Concepts of Kinship in South Asian Practice

  Böck, M. & Rao, A. (eds)

  As reproduction is seen as central to kinship and the biological link as the primary bond between parents and their offspring, Western perceptions of kin relations are primarily determined by ideas about "consanguinity," "genealogical relations," and "genetic connections." Advocates of cultural constructivism have taken issue with a concept that puts so much stress on heredity as being severely biased by western ideas of kinship. Ethnosociologists in particular developed alternative systems using indigenous categories. This symbolic approach has, however, been rejected by some scholars as plagued by the problems of the analytical separation of ideology from practice, of largely overlooking relations of domination, and of ignoring the questions of shared knowledge and choice. This volume offers a corrective by discussing the constitution of kinship among different communities in South Asia and addressing the relationship between ideology and practice, cultural models, and individiual strategies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• March 2014

  Culture, Suicide, and the Human Condition

  Honkasalo, M.-L. & Tuominen, M. (eds)

  Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection is that suicide should not be understood as a separate realm of pathological behavior but as a form of human action. As such it is always dependent on the decision that the individual makes in a cultural, ethical and socio-economic context, but the context never completely determines the decision. This book also argues that cultural narratives concerning suicide have a problematic double function: in addition to enabling the community to make sense of self-inflicted death, they also constitute a blueprint depicting suicide as a solution to common human problems.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• February 2006

  Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation

  Nowotny, H. (ed)

  Underlying the current dynamics of technological developments, their divergence or convergence and the abundance of options, promises and risks they contain, is the quest for innovation, the contributors to this volume argue. The seemingly insatiable demand for novelty coincides with the rise of modern science and the onset of modernity in Western societies. Never before has the Baconian dream been so close to becoming reality: wrapped into a globalizing capitalism that seeks ever expanding markets for new products, artifacts and designs and new processes that lead to gains in efficiency, productivity and profit. However, approaching these developments through a wider historical and cultural perspectives, means to raise questions about the plurality of cultures, the interaction between "hardware" and "software" and about the nature of the interfaces where technology meets with economic, social, legal, historical constraints and opportunities. The authors come to the conclusion that inside a seemingly homogenous package and a seemingly universal quest for innovation many differences remain.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2016

  Cutting and Connecting

  'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange

  Myhre, K. C. (ed)

  Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today’s Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• March 2013

  Cyberidentities At War

  The Moluccan Conflict on the Internet

  Bräuchler, B.

  Conflicting parties worldwide increasingly use the Internet in a strategic way, and struggles carried out on a local level achieve a new dimension. This new kind of medialization results in a conflict’s expansion into global cyberspace. Based on ethnographic research on the online activities of Christian and Muslim actors in the Moluccan conflict (1999–2003), this study investigates processes of identity construction, community building and evolving conflict dynamics on the Internet. In contributing to conflict and Internet research, this study paves the way for a new cyberanthropology. A newly added epilogue outlines the directions in which the situation in the Moluccas has continued and discusses the advances and developments of theoretical and methodological concerns presented in the 2005 German edition.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available November 2013

  Dance Circles

  Movement, Morality and Self-fashioning in Urban Senegal

  Neveu Kringelbach, H.

  Senegal has played a central role in contemporary dance due to its rich performing traditions, as well as strong state patronage of the arts, first under French colonialism and later in the postcolonial era. In the 1980s, when the Senegalese economy was in decline and state fundingwithdrawn, European agencies used the performing arts as a tool in diplomacy. This had a profound impact on choreographic production and arts markets throughout Africa. In Senegal, choreographic performers have taken to contemporary dance, while continuing to engage with neo-traditional performance, regional genres like the sabar, and the popular dances they grew up with. A historically informed ethnography of creativity, agency, and the fashioning of selves through the different life stages in urban Senegal, this book explores the significance of this multiple engagement with dance in a context of economic uncertainty and rising concerns over morality in the public space. 

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2007

  Dancing At the Crossroads

  Memory and Mobility in Ireland

  Wulff, H.

  Dancing at the crossroads used to be young people's opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, "dancing at the crossroads" also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies

• eBook available October 2012

  Dancing Cultures

  Globalization, Tourism and Identity in the Anthropology of Dance

  Neveu Kringelbach, H. & Skinner, J. (eds)

  Dance is more than an aesthetic of life – dance embodies life. This is evident from the social history of jive, the marketing of trans-national ballet, ritual healing dances in Italy or folk dances performed for tourists in Mexico, Panama and Canada. Dance often captures those essential dimensions of social life that cannot be easily put into words. What are the flows and movements of dance carried by migrants and tourists? How is dance used to shape nationalist ideology? What are the connections between dance and ethnicity, gender, health, globalization and nationalism, capitalism and post-colonialism? Through innovative and wide-ranging case studies, the contributors explore the central role dance plays in culture as leisure commodity, cultural heritage, cultural aesthetic or cathartic social movement.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2012

  Dark Trophies

  Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War

  Harrison, S.

  Many anthropological accounts of warfare in indigenous societies have described the taking of heads or other body parts as trophies. But almost nothing is known of the prevalence of trophy-taking of this sort in the armed forces of contemporary nation-states. This book is a history of this type of misconduct among military personnel over the past two centuries, exploring its close connections with colonialism, scientific collecting and concepts of race, and how it is a model for violent power relationships between groups.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)

• December 2004

  Day of the Dead

  When Two Worlds Meet in Oaxaca

  Haley, S. & Fukuda, C.

  The Day of the Dead is the most important annual celebration in Oaxaca, Mexico. Skillfully combining textual information and photographic imagery, this book begins with a discussion of the people of Oaxaca, their way of life, and their way of looking at the world. It then takes the reader through the celebration from the preparations that can begin months in advance through to the private gatherings in homes and finally to the cemetery where the villagers celebrate together — both the living and the dead. The voices in the book are of those people who have participated in the Day of the Dead for as long as they can remember. There are no ghosts here. Only the souls of loved ones who have gone to the Village of the Dead and who are allowed to return once a year to be with their family. Very readable and beautifully illustrated, this book provides an extensive discussion of the people of Oaxaca, their way of life and their beliefs, which make the Day of the Dead logical and easily comprehensible.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• August 2016

  Deadly Contradictions

  The New American Empire and Global Warring

  Reyna, S. P.

  As US imperialism continues to dictate foreign policy, Deadly Contradictions is a compelling account of the American empire. Stephen P. Reyna argues that contemporary forms of violence exercised by American elites in the colonies, client state, and regions of interest have deferred imperial problems, but not without raising their own set of deadly contradictions. This book can be read many ways: as a polemic against geopolitics, as a classic social anthropological text, or as a seminal analysis of twenty-four US global wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras.
   

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2013

  The Death of the Big Men and the Rise of the Big Shots

  Custom and Conflict in East New Britain

  Martin, K.

  In 1994, the Pacific island village of Matupit was partially destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This study focuses on the subsequent reconstruction and contests over the morality of exchanges that are generative of new forms of social stratification. Such new dynamics of stratification are central to contemporary processes of globalization in the Pacific, and more widely. Through detailed ethnography of the transactions that a displaced people entered into in seeking to rebuild their lives, this book analyses how people re-make sociality in an era of post-colonial neoliberalism without taking either the transformative power of globalization or the resilience of indigenous culture as its starting point. It also contributes to the understanding of the problems of post-disaster reconstruction and development projects.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available December 2003

  Death of the Father

  An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority

  Borneman, J. (ed)

  The death of authority figures like fathers or leaders can be experienced as either liberation or loss. In the twentieth century, the authority of the father and of the leader became closely intertwined; constraints and affective attachments intensified in ways that had major effects on the organization of regimes of authority. This comparative volume examines the resulting crisis in symbolic identification, the national traumas that had crystallized around four state political forms: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and East European Communism. The defeat of Imperial and Fascist regimes in 1945 and the implosion of Communist regimes in 1989 were critical moments of rupture, of "death of the father." What was the experience of their ends, and what is the reconstruction of those ends in memory?

  This volume represents is the beginning of a comparative social anthropology of caesurae: the end of traumatic political regimes, of their symbolic forms, political consequences, and probable futures.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present Memory Studies

• eBook available May 2017

  Death of the Public University?

  Uncertain Futures for Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy

  Wright, S. & Shore, C. (eds)

  Universities have been subjected to continuous government reforms since the 1980s, to make them ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘efficient’ and aligned to the predicted needs and challenges of a global knowledge economy. Under increasing pressure to pursue ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, many universities are struggling to maintain their traditional mission to be inclusive, improve social mobility and equality and act as the ‘critic and conscience’ of society. Drawing on a multi-disciplinary research project, University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanisation (URGE), this collection analyses the new landscapes of public universities emerging across Europe and the Asia-Pacific, and the different ways that academics are engaging with them.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• November 2016

  Death, Materiality and Mediation

  An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland

  Graham, B.

  In Death, Materiality and Mediation, Barbara Graham analyzes a diverse range of objects associated with remembrance in both the public and private arenas through ethnography of communities on both sides of the Irish border. In doing so, she explores the materially mediated interactions between the living and the dead, revealing the physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual roles of the dead in contemporary communities. Through this study, Graham expands the concept of materiality to include narrative, song, senses, emotions, ephemera and embodied experience. She also examines how modern practices are informed by older beliefs and folk religion.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Anthropology of Religion

• December 2002

  Defiance and Compliance

  Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo

  El-Kholy, H.A.

  The gap between rich and poor is widening in most countries, putting more pressure on women in particular who often find themselves with the ultimate responsibility to provide for their families, especially their children, in the face of economic and political discrimination. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews in four low-income neighborhoods in Cairo, this book offers rich, novel and intimate data relating to poor women's lives and everyday forms of resistance to gender inequalities in the labor market and at home. In contrast to the common stereotype of Middle Eastern women as totally oppressed and devoid of agency, this study shows the complex and diverse ways in which low-income women devise strategies to contest existing gender arrangements and improve their situation. It is a significant contribution to current debates about poverty, gender, power, and resistance.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2022

  Defining and Measuring Diversity in Archaeology

  Another Step Toward an Evolutionary Synthesis of Culture

  Eren, M. I. & Buchanan, B. (eds)

  Calculating the diversity of biological or cultural classes is a fundamental way of describing, analyzing, and understanding the world around us. Understanding archaeological diversity is key to understanding human culture in the past. Archaeologists have long experienced a tenuous relationship with statistics; however, the regular integration of diversity measures and concepts into archaeological practice is becoming increasingly important. This volume includes chapters that cover a wide range of archaeological applications of diversity measures. Featuring studies of archaeological diversity ranging from the data-driven to the theoretical, from the Paleolithic to the Historic periods, authors illustrate the range of data sets to which diversity measures can be applied, as well as offer new methods to examine archaeological diversity.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• June 2021

  Delta Life

  Exploring Dynamic Environments where Rivers Meet the Sea

  Krause, F. & Harris, M. (eds)

  Proposing a series of innovative steps towards better understanding human lives at the interstices of water and land, this volume includes eight ethnographies from deltas around the world. The book presents ‘delta life’ with intimate descriptions of the predicaments, imaginations and activities of delta inhabitants. Conceptually, the collection develops ‘delta life’ as a metaphor for approaching continual and intersecting sociocultural, economic and material transformations more widely. The book revolves around questions of hydrosociality, volatility, rhythms and scale. It thereby yields insights into people’s lives that conventional, hydrological approaches to deltas cannot provide.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2018

  Democracy Struggles

  NGOs and the Politics of Aid in Serbia

  Vetta, T.

  Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the “associational revolution” in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country’s “transition” through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2019

  Democracy's Paradox

  Populism and its Contemporary Crisis

  Kapferer, B. & Theodossopoulos, D. (eds)

  Does populism indicate a radical crisis in Western democratic political systems? Is it a revolt by those who feel they have too little voice in the affairs of state or are otherwise marginalized or oppressed? Or are populist movements part of the democratic process?

  Bringing together different anthropological experiences of current populist movements, this volume makes a timely contribution to these questions. Contrary to more conventional interpretations of populism as crisis, the authors instead recognize populism as integral to Western democratic systems. In doing so, the volume provides an important critique that exposes the exclusionary essentialisms spread by populist rhetoric while also directing attention to local views of political accountability and historical consciousness that are key to understanding this paradox of democracy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• eBook available October 2017

  Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia

  Transitioning to an Alternative World System

  Baer, H. A.

  As global economic and population growth continues to skyrocket, increasingly strained resources have made one thing clear: the desperate need for an alternative to capitalism. In Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia, Hans Baer outlines the urgent need to reevaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. Democatic eco-socialism, as he terms it, is a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• January 2009

  Developing Skill, Developing Vision

  Practices of Locality at the Foot of the Alps

  Grasseni, C.

  Many people feel that the impact of technology and the pressure of the market economy on alpine communities leads to a loss of biodiversity, authenticity and cultural diversity, affecting animal husbandry, local food production, social networks and traditions. It is undeniable that "progress," "development" and "integration" are transforming working routines, recipes for dairy production and patterns of communication in rural communities. This book explores the many tensions at the core of present local practices and debates in the Italian Alps, highlighting the many transformations undergone within skilled practice and cultural heritage as a result of commoditization, professionalization and technification, with a special focus on the ways in which this also means, quite literally, changing one's vision of locality: of the landscape, of local products and of local animals.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• September 2015

  Developmentality

  An Ethnography of the World Bank-Uganda Partnership

  Sande Lie, J. H.

  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the World Bank and a Ugandan ministry, this book critically examines how the new aid architecture recasts aid relations as a partnership. While intended to alter an asymmetrical relationship by fostering greater recipient participation and ownership, this book demonstrates how donors still seek to retain control through other indirect and informal means. The concept of developmentality shows how the World Bank’s ability to steer a client’s behavior is disguised by the underlying ideas of partnership, ownership, and participation, which come with other instruments through which the Bank manipulates the aid recipient into aligning with its own policies and practices.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• October 2011

  Diasporic Generations

  Memory, Politics, and Nation among Cubans in Spain

  Berg, M. L.

  Interpretations of the background to the Cuban diaspora – a political revolution and the subsequent radical transformation of the society and economy towards socialism – are politicised and highly contested. The Miami-based Cuban diaspora has had extraordinary success in putting its case high on the US political agenda and in capturing world media attention, but in the process the multiplicity of experiences within the diaspora has been overshadowed. This book gives voice to diasporic Cubans living in Spain, the former colonial ruler of Cuba. By focusing on their lived experiences of displacement, the book brings to light imaginative, narrative re-creations of the nation from afar. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the Cuban diaspora in Spain consists of three diasporic generations, generated through distinct migratory experiences. This constitutes an important step forward in understanding the dynamics of memory-making and social differentiation within diasporas, and in appreciating why people within the same diaspora engage in different modes of transnational practices and homeland relations.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available November 2017

  Difference and Sameness as Modes of Integration

  Anthropological Perspectives on Ethnicity and Religion

  Schlee, G. & Horstmann, A. (eds)

  What does it mean to “fit in?” In this volume of essays, editors Günther Schlee and Alexander Horstmann demystify the discourse on identity, challenging common assumptions about the role of sameness and difference as the basis for inclusion and exclusion. Armed with intimate knowledge of local systems, social relationships, and the negotiation of people’s positions in the everyday politics, these essays tease out the ways in which ethnicity, religion and nationalism are used for social integration.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available April 2012

  Differentiating Development

  Beyond an Anthropology of Critique

  Venkatesan, S. & Yarrow, T. (eds)

  Over the last two decades, anthropological studies have highlighted the problems of ‘development’ as a discursive regime, arguing that such initiatives are paradoxically used to consolidate inequality and perpetuate poverty. This volume constitutes a timely intervention in anthropological debates about development, moving beyond the critical stance to focus on development as a mode of engagement that, like anthropology, attempts to understand, represent and work within a complex world. By setting out to elucidate both the similarities and differences between these epistemological endeavors, the book demonstrates how the ethnographic study of development challenges anthropology to rethink its own assumptions and methods. In particular, contributors focus on the important but often overlooked relationship between acting and understanding, in ways that speak to debates about the role of anthropologists and academics in the wider world. The case studies presented are from a diverse range of geographical and ethnographic contexts, from Melanesia to Africa and Latin America, and ethnographic research is combined with commentary and reflection from the foremost scholars in the field.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• September 2021

  Digital Archives and Collections

  Creating Online Access to Cultural Heritage

  Müller, K.

  Museums and archives all over the world digitize their collections and provide online access to heritage material. But what factors determine the content, structure and use of these online inventories? This book turns to India and Europe to answer this question. It explains how museums and archives envision, decide and conduct digitization and online dissemination. It also sheds light on born-digital, community-based archives, which have established themselves as new actors in the field. Based on anthropological fieldwork, the chapters in the book trace digital archives from technical advancements and postcolonial initiatives to programming alternatives, editing content, and active use of digital archives.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• June 2014

  Dignity for the Voiceless

  Willem Assies's Anthropological Work in Context

  Salman, T., Marti i Puig, S., & Haar, G. van der (eds)

  Willem Assies died in 2010 at the age of 55. The various stages of his career as a political anthropologist of Latin American illustrate how astute a researcher he was. He had a keen eye for the contradictions he observed during his fieldwork but also enjoyed theoretical debate. A distrust of power led him not only to attempt to understand “people without voice” but to work alongside them so they could discover and find their own voice. Willem Assies explored the messy, often untidy daily lives of people, with their inconsistencies, irrationalities, and passions, but also with their hopes, sense of beauty, solidarity, and quest for dignity. This collection brings together some of Willem Assies’s best, most fascinating, and still highly relevant writings.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available October 2019

  Disaster Upon Disaster

  Exploring the Gap Between Knowledge, Policy and Practice

  Hoffman, S. M. & Barrios, R. E. (eds)

  A consistent problem that confronts disaster reduction is the disjunction between academic and expert knowledge and policies and practices of agencies mandated to deal with the concern. Although a great deal of knowledge has been acquired regarding many aspects of disasters, such as driving factors, risk construction, complexity of resettlement, and importance of peoples’ culture, very little has become protocol and procedure. Disaster Upon Disaster illuminates the numerous disjunctions between the suppositions, realities, agendas, and executions in the field, goes on to detail contingencies, predicaments, old and new plights, and finally advances solutions toward greatly improved outcomes.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology

• April 2003

  Discerning Palates of the Past

  An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Crop Cultivation and Plant Usage in India

  Reddy, S. N.

  This book analyzes the agricultural and pastoral infrastructure of the Mature and Late Harappan cultures (ca. 2500-1700 BC) of northwest India. The economic role of drought-resistant millet crops is reconstructed using ethnographic studies of crop processing, palaeoethnobotany, and carbon isotope analysis. Reddy reveals that simply recovering crop seeds from archaeological contexts does not confirm local crop cultivation, and she suggests that agricultural production of millet crops for human food and for animal fodder may have been economically interwoven in the Harappan civilization. New directions are provided for discerning archaeologically how pastoralism and agriculture may be integrated in complex economic systems.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2008

  The Discipline of Leisure

  Embodying Cultures of 'Recreation'

  Coleman, S. & Kohn, T. (eds)

  The burgeoning social scientific study of tourism has emphasized the effects of the post-industrial economy on travel and place. However, this volume takes some of these issues into a different area of leisure: the spare-time carved out by people as part of their everyday lives - time that is much more intimately juxtaposed with the pressures and influences of work life, and which often involves specific bodily practices associated with hobbies and sports. An important focus of the book is the body as a site of identity formation, experience, and disciplined recreation of the self. Contributors examine the ways rituals, sports, and forms of bodily transformation mediate between contemporary ideologies of freedom, choice and self-control.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2013

  Distributed Objects

  Meaning and Mattering after Alfred Gell

  Chua, L. & Elliott, M. (eds)

  One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Literary Studies

• eBook available July 2005

  Documenting Transnational Migration

  Jordanian Men Working and Studying in Europe, Asia and North America

  Antoun, R.

  Most studies on transnational migration either stress assimilation, circulatory migration, or the negative impact of migration. This remarkable study, which covers migrants from one Jordanian village to 17 different countries in Europe, Asia, and North America, emphasizes the resiliency of transnational migrants after long periods of absence, social encapsulation, and stress, and their ability to construct social networks and reinterpret traditions in such a way as to mix the old and the new in a scenario that incorporates both worlds. Focusing on the humanistic aspects of the migration experience, this book examines questions such as birth control, women’s work, retention of tribal law, and the changing attitudes of migrants towards themselves, their families, their home communities, and their nation. It ends with placing transnational migration from Jordan in a cross-cultural perspective by comparing it with similar processes elsewhere, and critically reviews a number of theoretical perspectives that have been used to explain migration.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• December 2002

  The Domain of Constant Excess

  Plural Worship at the Munnesvaram Temples in Sri Lanka

  Bastin, R.

  The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that has occurred largely between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus is marked by a degree of religious tolerance that sees both communities worshiping together. This study describes one important site of such worship, the ancient Hindu temple complex of Munnesvaram. Standing adjacent to one of Sri Lanka's historical western ports, the fortunes of the Munnesvaram temples have waxed and waned through the years of turbulence, violence and social change that have been the country's lot since the advent of European colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Bastin recounts the story of these temples and analyses how the Hindu temple is reproduced as a center of worship amidst conflict and competition.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2014

  Domesticating Youth

  Youth Bulges and their Socio-political Implications in Tajikistan

  Roche, S.

  Most of the Muslim societies of the world have entered a demographic transition from high to low fertility, and this process is accompanied by an increase in youth vis-à-vis other age groups. Political scientists and historians have debated whether such a “youth bulge” increases the potential for conflict or whether it represents a chance to accumulate wealth and push forward social and technological developments. This book introduces the discussion about youth bulge into social anthropology using Tajikistan, a post-Soviet country that experienced civil war in the 1990s, which is in the middle of such a demographic transition. Sophie Roche develops a social anthropological approach to analyze demographic and political dynamics, and suggests a new way of thinking about social change in youth bulge societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2011

  The Dream in Islam

  From Qur'anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration

  Edgar, I. R.

  The war in the Middle East is marked by a lack of cultural knowledge on the part of the western forces, and this book deals with another, widely ignored element of Islam—the role of dreams in everyday life. The practice of using night dreams to make important life decisions can be traced to Middle Eastern dream traditions and practices that preceded the emergence of Islam. In this study, the author explores some key aspects of Islamic dream theory and interpretation as well as the role and significance of night dreams for contemporary Muslims. In his analysis of the Islamic debates surrounding the role of “true” dreams in historical and contemporary Islamic prophecy, the author specifically addresses the significance of Al-Qaeda and Taliban dream practices and ideology. Dreams of “heaven,” for example, are often instrumental in determining Jihadist suicidal action, and “heavenly” dreams are also evidenced within other contemporary human conflicts such as Israel–Palestine and Kosovo–Serbia. By exploring patterns of dreams within this context, a cross-cultural, psychological, and experiential understanding of the role and significance of such contemporary critical political and personal imagery can be achieved.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available May 2018

  Dreams Made Small

  The Education of Papuan Highlanders in Indonesia

  Munro, J.

  For the last five decades, the Dani of the central highlands of West Papua, along with other Papuans, have struggled with the oppressive conditions of Indonesian rule. Formal education holds the promise of escape from stigmatization and violence. Dreams Made Small offers an in-depth, ethnographic look at journeys of education among young Dani men and women, asking us to think differently about education as a trajectory for transformation and belonging, and ultimately revealing how dreams of equality are shaped and reshaped in the face of multiple constraints.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2021

  Dressing Up

  Menswear in the Age of Social Media

  Bluteau, J. M.

  What does men’s fashion say about contemporary masculinity? How do these notions operate in an increasingly digitized world? To answer these questions, author Joshua M. Bluteau combines theoretical analysis with vibrant narrative, exploring men’s fashion in the online world of social media as well as the offline worlds of retail, production, and the catwalk. Is it time to reassess notions of masculinity? How do we construct ourselves in the online world, and what are the dangers of doing so? From the ateliers of London to the digital landscape of Instagram, Dressing Up re-examines the ways men dress, and the ways men post.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• December 2001

  Drinking

  Anthropological Approaches

  Garine, I. & V. de (eds)

  Over the last decades quite a few studies have been devoted to drinking. Most of these were concerned with alcohol and written by social anthropologists. This book presents multidisciplinary aspects of the ingestion of liquids at large, addressing many of the overt and covert meanings of drinking: from satisfying biological needs to communicating with humans and the hereafter, attempting to reach a differential emotional state or seeking good health and longevity through the ingestion of appropriate beverages. It includes papers from both biological and social scientists and covers a fair range of societies from rural and urban environments, and in continents and countries ranging from Europe, Africa, and Latin America to Malaysia and the Pacific.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2022

  Durable Solutions

  Challenges with Implementing Global Norms for Internally Displaced Persons in Georgia

  Funke, C.

  Focusing on Georgia, this book presents a theoretical and empirical study on the implementation of durable solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Building on extensive field research, it describes and explains the considerable problems which Georgia faces in establishing global norms, as well as the ongoing hardship that IDPs experience. Importantly, the book reveals the simultaneous progress and setbacks in implementing durable solutions. Successfully combining approaches from humanistic studies, international relations, and organizational sociology, this book explains the interaction of norms and actors at and among three societal levels: the international, national, and local.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available November 2013

  Durkheim in Dialogue

  A Centenary Celebration of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

  Hausner, S. L. (ed)

  One hundred years after the publication of the great sociological treatise, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this new volume shows how aptly Durkheim¹s theories still resonate with the study of contemporary and historical religious societies. The volume applies the Durkheimian model to multiple cases, probing its resilience, wondering where it might be tweaked, and asking which aspects have best stood the test of time. A dialogue between theory and ethnography, this book shows how Durkheimian sociology has become a mainstay of social thought and theory, pointing to multiple ways in which Durkheim¹s work on religion remains relevant to our thinking about culture.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2013

  Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts

  Riley, A.T., Pickering, W.S.F., & Watts Miller, W. (eds)

  Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians’ engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work. The first five chapters consider Durkheim’s own exploration of art; the remaining six look at other Durkheimian thinkers, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Maurice Halbwachs, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille. The contributors—scholars from a range of theoretical orientations and disciplinary perspectives—are known for having already produced significant contributions to the study of Durkheim. This book will interest not only scholars of Durkheim and his tradition but also those concerned with aesthetic theory and the sociology and history of art.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available October 2022

  Dynamics of Identification and Conflict

  Anthropological Encounters

  Hoehne, M. V., Gabbert, E. C., & Eidson, J. R. (eds)

  Dealing with the dynamics of identification and conflict, this book uses theoretical orientations ranging from political ecology to rational choice theory, interpretive approaches, Marxism and multiscalar analysis. Case studies set in Africa, Europe and Central Asia are grouped in three sections devoted to pastoralism, identity and migration. What connects all of these anthropological explorations is a close focus on processes of identification and conflict at the level of particular actors in relation to the behaviour of large aggregates of people and to systemic conditions.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Refugee and Migration Studies

• March 2004

  An Earth-colored Sea

  'Race', Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World

  Vale de Almeida, M.

  Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, "race", culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite – or hybrid – nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.

  Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2015

  Ecological Migrants

  The Relocation of China's Ewenki Reindeer Herders

  Xie, Y.

  Reindeer-herding Ewenki hunters have lived in the forests of China’s Greater Khingan Range for over three hundred years. They have sustained their livelihoods by collecting plants and herbs, hunting animals and herding reindeer. This ethnography details changing Ewenki ways of life brought first by China’s modernization and development policies and more recently by ecological policies that aim to preserve and restore the badly damaged ecologies of western China. Xie reflects on modernization and urbanization in China through this study of ecological migration policies and their effects on relocated Aoluguya Ewenki hunters.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2020

  Ecological Nostalgias

  Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals

  Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (eds)

  Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Cultural Studies (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available July 2016

  Economic Citizenship

  Neoliberal Paradoxes of Empowerment

  Sa'ar, A.

  With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism, Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• February 2015

  Economy and Ritual

  Studies of Postsocialist Transformations

  Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

  According to accepted wisdom, rational practices and ritual action are opposed. Rituals drain wealth from capital investment and draw on a mode of thought different from practical ideas. The studies in this volume contest this view. Comparative, historical, and contemporary, the six ethnographies extend from Macedonia to Kyrgyzstan. Each one illuminates the economic and ritual changes in an area as it emerged from socialism and (re-)entered market society. Cutting against the idea that economy only means markets and that market action exhausts the meaning of economy, the studies show that much of what is critical for a people’s economic life takes place outside markets and hinges on ritual, understood as the negation of the everyday world of economising.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• October 2015

  Economy for and Against Democracy

  Hart, K. (ed)

  Political constitutions alone do not guarantee democracy; a degree of economic equality is also essential. Yet contemporary economies, dominated as they are by global finance and political rent-seekers, often block the realization of democracy. The comparative essays and case studies of this volume examine the contradictory relationship between the economy and democracy and highlight the struggles and visions needed to make things more equitable. They explore how our collective aspirations for greater democracy might be informed by serious empirical research on the human economy today. If we want a better world, we must act on existing social realities.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2018

  Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era

  Carrier, J. G. (ed)

  Corporate scandals since the 1990s have made it clear that economic wrongdoing is more common in Western societies than might be expected. This volume examines the relationship between such wrong-doing and the neoliberal orientations, policies, and practices that have been influential since around 1980, considering whether neoliberalism has affected the likelihood that people and firms will act in ways that many people would consider wrong. It furthermore asks whether ideas of economic right and wrong have become so fragmented and localized that collective judgement has become almost impossible.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2018

  Edges, Fringes, Frontiers

  Integral Ecology, Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainability in Guyana

  Henfrey, T. B.

  Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among multiple modes of environmental understanding and decision-making allows the Wapishana to navigate socio-ecological complexity successfully in ways that reconcile short-term material needs with long-term maintenance and enhancement of the resource base.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2022

  Edible People

  The Historical Consumption of Slaves and Foreigners and the Cannibalistic Trade in Human Flesh

  Siefkes, C.

  While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices. These are highly important for the history of the slave trade and for understanding the colonialist history of Africa.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• June 2006

  The Education of Nomadic Peoples

  Current Issues, Future Perspectives

  Dyer, C.

  Educational provision for nomadic peoples is a highly complex, as well as controversial and emotive, issue. For centuries, nomadic peoples educated their children by passing on from generation to generation the socio-cultural and economic knowledge required to pursue their traditional occupations. But over the last few decades, nomadic peoples have had to contend with rapid changes to their ways of life, often as a consequence of global patterns of development that are highly unsympathetic to spatially mobile groups. The need to provide modern education for nomadic groups is evident and urgent to all those concerned with achieving Education For All; yet how they can be included is highly controversial. This volume provides a series of international case studies, prefaced by a comprehensive literature review and concluding with an end note drawing themes together, that sets out key issues in relation to educational services for nomadic groups around the world.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Development Studies Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available September 2018

  Elite Malay Polygamy

  Wives, Wealth and Woes in Malaysia

  Zeitzen, M. K.

  Elite Malay women’s polygamy narratives are multiple and varied, and their sentiments regarding the practice are conflicted, as they are often torn between personal and religious convictions. This volume explores the ways in which this increasingly prominent practice impacts Malay gender relations. As Muslims, elite Malay women may be forced to accept polygamy, but they mostly condemn it as women and wives, as it forces them to manage their lives and loves under the “threat” of polygamy from a husband able to marry another woman without their knowledge or consent; a husband that is married but available.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2013

  Elusive Promises

  Planning in the Contemporary World

  Abram, S. & Weszkalnys, G. (eds)

  Planning in contemporary democratic states is often understood as a range of activities, from housing to urban design, regional development to economic planning. This volume sees planning differently—as the negotiation of possibilities that time offers space. It explores what kind of promise planning offers, how such a promise is made, and what happens to it through time. The authors, all leading anthropologists, examine the time and space, creativity and agency, authority and responsibility, and conflicting desires that plans attempt to control. They show how the many people involved with planning deal with the discrepancies between what is promised and what is done. The comparative essays offer insight into the expected and unexpected outcomes of planning (from visionary utopias to bureaucratic dystopia or something in-between), how the future is envisioned at the outset, and what actual work is done and how it affects people’s lives.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• November 2008

  Embodied Communities

  Dance Traditions and Change in Java

  Hughes-Freeland, F.

  Court dance in Java has changed from a colonial ceremonial tradition into a national artistic classicism. Central to this general transformation has been dance’s role in personal transformation, developing appropriate forms of everyday behaviour and strengthening the powers of persuasion that come from the skillful manipulation of both physical and verbal forms of politeness. This account of dance’s significance in performance and in everyday life draws on extensive research, including dance training in Java, and builds on how practitioners interpret and explain the repertoire. The Javanese case is contextualized in relation to social values, religion, philosophy, and commoditization arising from tourism. It also raises fundamental questions about the theorization of culture, society and the body during a period of radical change.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2021

  Embracing Landscape

  Living with Reindeer and Hunting among Spirits in South Siberia

  Küçüküstel, S.

  Examining human-animal relations among the reindeer hunting and herding Dukha community in northern Mongolia, this book focuses on concepts such as domestication and wildness from an indigenous perspective. By looking into hunting rituals and herding techniques, the ethnography questions the dynamics between people, domesticated reindeer, and wild animals. It focuses on the role of the spirited landscape which embraces all living creatures and acts as a unifying concept at the center of the human and non-human relations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• July 2017

  Emptiness and Fullness

  Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China

  Bregnbæk, S. & Bunkenborg, M. (eds)

  As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2020

  An Enchantment of Digital Archaeology

  Raising the Dead with Agent-Based Models, Archaeogaming and Artificial Intelligence

  Graham, S.

  The use of computation in archaeology is a kind of magic, a way of heightening the archaeological imagination. Agent-based modelling allows archaeologists to test the ‘just-so’ stories they tell about the past. It requires a formalization of the story so that it can be represented as a simulation; researchers are then able to explore the unintended consequences or emergent outcomes of stories about the past. Agent-based models are one end of a spectrum that, at the opposite side, ends with video games. This volume explores this spectrum in the context of Roman archaeology, addressing the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of a formalized approach to computation and archaeogaming.

  Subjects: Archaeology Media Studies Heritage Studies Anthropology (General)

• July 2009

  Encounter, Transformation, and Identity

  Peoples of the Western Cameroon Borderlands, 1891-2000

  Fowler, I. & Fanso, V. (eds)

  Bringing together key historical and innovative ethnographic materials on the peoples of the South-West Province of Cameroon and the Nigerian borderlands, this volume presents critical and analytical approaches to the production of ethnic, political, religious, and gendered identities in the region. The contributors examine a range of issues relating to identity, including first encounters and conflict as well as global networking, trans-national families, enculturation, gender, resistance, and death. In addition to a number of very striking illustrations of ethnographic and material culture, this volume contains key maps from early German sources and other original cartographical materials.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• September 2011

  Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices

  Anthropological Reflections

  Fedele, A. & Blanes, R. L. (eds)

  Social scientists and philosophers confronted with religious phenomena have always been challenged to find a proper way to describe the spiritual experiences of the social group they were studying. The influence of the Cartesian dualism of body and mind (or soul) led to a distinction between non-material, spiritual experiences (i.e., related to the soul) and physical, mechanical experiences (i.e., related to the body). However, recent developments in medical science on the one hand and challenges to universalist conceptions of belief and spirituality on the other have resulted in “body” and “soul” losing the reassuring solid contours they had in the past. Yet, in “Western culture,” the body–soul duality is alive, not least in academic and media discourses. This volume pursues the ongoing debates and discusses the importance of the body and how it is perceived in contemporary religious faith: what happens when “body” and “soul” are un-separated entities? Is it possible, even for anthropologists and ethnographers, to escape from “natural dualism”? The contributors here present research in novel empirical contexts, the benefits and limits of the old dichotomy are discussed, and new theoretical strategies proposed.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  Encounters with Emotions

  Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity

  Gammerl, B., Nielsen, P., & Pernau, M. (eds)

  Spanning Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Encounters with Emotions investigates experiences of face-to-face transcultural encounters from the seventeenth century to the present and the emotional dynamics that helped to shape them. Each of the case studies collected here investigates fascinating historiographical questions that arise from the study of emotion, from the strategies people have used to interpret and understand each other’s emotions to the roles that emotions have played in obstructing communication across cultural divides. Together, they explore the cultural aspects of nature as well as the bodily dimensions of nurture and trace the historical trajectories that shape our understandings of current cultural boundaries and effects of globalization.

  Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 1999

  The End of the Refugee Cycle?

  Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction

  Black, R. & Koser, K. (eds)

  At the start of the 1990s, there was great optimism that the end of the Cold War might also mean the end of the "refugee cycle" - both a breaking of the cycle of violence, persecution and flight, and the completion of the cycle for those able to return to their homes. The 1990s, it was hoped, would become the "decade of repatriation." However, although over nine million refugees were repatriated worldwide between 1991 and 1995, there are reasons to believe that it will not necessarily be a durable solution for refugees. It certainly has become clear that "the end of the refugee cycle" has been much more complex, and ultimately more elusive, than expected. The changing constructions and realities of refugee repatriation provide the backdrop for this book which presents new empirical research on examples of refugee repatriation and reconstruction. Apart from providing up-to-date material, it also fills a more fundamental gap in the literature which has tended to be based on pedagogical reasoning rather than actual field research. Adopting a global perspective, this volume draws together conclusions from highly varied experiences of refugee repatriation and defines repatriation and reconstruction as part of a wider and interrelated refugee cycle of displacement, exile and return. The contributions come from authors with a wealth of relevant practical and academic experience, spanning the continents of Africa, Asia, Central America, and Europe.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2008

  Enduring Socialism

  Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation

  West, H. G. & Raman, P. (eds)

  Against the historical backdrop of successive socialist and post-socialist claims to have completely remade society, the contributors to this volume explore the complex and often paradoxical continuities between diverse post-socialist presents and their corresponding socialist and pre-socialist pasts. The chapters focus on ways in which: pre-socialist economic, political, and cultural forms in fact endured an era of socialism and have found new life in the post-socialist present, notwithstanding revolutionary socialist claims; continuities with a pre-socialist past have been produced within the historical imaginary of post-socialism; and socialist economic, political, and cultural forms have in fact endured in a purportedly postsocialist era, despite the claims of neo-liberal reformers.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• March 2016

  Enduring Uncertainty

  Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life

  Hasselberg, I.

  Focusing on the lived experience of immigration policy and processes, this volume provides fascinating insights into the deportation process as it is felt and understood by those subjected to it. The author presents a rich and innovative ethnography of deportation and deportability experienced by migrants convicted of criminal offenses in England and Wales. The unique perspectives developed here – on due process in immigration appeals, migrant surveillance and control, social relations and sense of self, and compliance and resistance – are important for broader understandings of border control policy and human rights.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2022

  Engaging Environments in Tonga

  Cultivating Beauty and Nurturing Relations in a Changing World

  Perminow, A. A.

  On March 11, 2011, a tsunami warning was issued for Tonga in Polynesia. On the low and small island of Kotu, people were unperturbed in the face of impending catastrophe. The book starts out from the puzzle of peoples’ responses and reactions to this warning as well as their attitudes to a gradual rise of sea level and questions why people seemed so unconcerned about this and the accompanying loss of land. The book is an ethnography of the relationship between people and their environment based on fieldwork over three decades.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies

• eBook available March 2012

  Engaging the Spirit World

  Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia

  Endres, K. W. & Lauser, A. (eds)

  In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the “spirited modernities” that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available January 2016

  Engaging with Strangers

  Love and Violence in the Rural Solomon Islands

  McDougall, D.

  The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available October 2022

  Enlightening Encounters

  The Journeys of an Anthropologist

  Gudeman, S.

  One of the world's top anthropologists recounts his formative experiences doing fieldwork in this accessible memoir ideal for anyone interested in anthropology.

  Drawing on his research in five Latin American countries, Steve Gudeman describes his anthropological fieldwork, bringing to life the excitement of gaining an understanding of the practices and ideas of others as well as the frustrations. He weaves into the text some of his findings as well as reflections on his own background that led to better fieldwork but also led him astray.
  
  This readable account, shorn of technical words, complicated concepts, and abstract ideas shows the reader what it is to be an anthropologist enquiring and responding to the unexpected.
  
  From the Preface:
  Growing up I learned about making do when my family was putting together a dinner from leftovers or I was constructing something with my father. In fieldwork I saw people making do as they worked in the fields, repaired a tool, assembled a meal or made something for sale. Much later, I realized that making do captures some of my fieldwork practices and their presentation in this book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2012

  Environment and Citizenship in Latin America

  Natures, Subjects and Struggles

  Latta, A. & Wittman, H. (eds)

  Scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has only recently begun to coalesce around citizenship as both an empirical site of inquiry and an analytical frame of reference. This has led to a series of new insights and perspectives, but few efforts have been made to bring these various approaches into a sustained conversation across different social, temporal and geographic contexts. This volume is the result of a collaborative endeavour to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Providing a window onto leading scholarship in the field, the book also sets an ambitious agenda to spark further research.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2013

  Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia

  Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages

  Lockyer, J. & Veteto, J. R. (eds)

  In order to move global society towards a sustainable “ecotopia,” solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors—scholar-activists and activist-practitioners— examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2010

  Envisioning Eden

  Mobilizing Imaginaries in Tourism and Beyond

  Salazar, N.

  As tourism service standards become more homogeneous, travel destinations worldwide are conforming yet still trying to maintain, or even increase, their distinctiveness. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Arusha, Tanzania, this book offers an in-depth investigation of the local-to-global dynamics of contemporary tourism. Each destination offers examples that illustrate how tour guide narratives and practices are informed by widely circulating imaginaries of the past as well as personal imaginings of the future.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2012

  Ethical Consumption

  Social Value and Economic Practice

  Carrier, J. G. & Luetchford, P. G. (eds)

  Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people’s ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• October 2013

  Ethno-Baroque

  Materiality, Aesthetics and Conflict in Modern-Day Macedonia

  Dimova, R.

  In post-1991 Macedonia, Barok furniture came to represent affluence and success during a period of transition to a new market economy. This furniture marked the beginning of a larger Baroque style that influenced not only interior decorations in people’s homes but also architecture and public spaces. By tracing the signifier Baroque, the book examines the reconfiguration of hierarchical relations among (ethnic) groups, genders, and countries in a transnational context. Investigating how Baroque has come to signify larger social processes and transformations in the current rebranding of the country, the book reveals the close link between aesthetics and politics, and how ethno-national conflicts are reflected in visually appealing ornamentation.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• January 2001

  Ethnoarchaeology of Andean South America

  Contributions to Archaeological Method and Theory

  Kuznar, L. A. (ed)

  Andean South America offers significant anthropological insights into highland and arid zone adaptations, including pastoralist economy and ecology, settlement patterns, site formation processes, tool manufacture, and the cultural meanings of landscapes. The papers in this volume present detailed studies of highland and lowland pastoralists and horticulturalists, taphonomy, and sacred landscapes. The epistomological foundations of ethnoarchaeology, archaeological uses of ethnoarchaeology, and the relationship between environment and culture are key theoretical themes. This volume will be of use to anyone who studies human adaptations to highland or arid environments, and to those interested in pastoral societies, as well as Andean South America.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2010

  Ethnobotany in the New Europe

  People, Health and Wild Plant Resources

  Pardo-de-Santayana, M., Pieroni, A. & Puri, R. (eds)

  The study of European wild food plants and herbal medicines is an old discipline that has been invigorated by a new generation of researchers pursuing ethnobotanical studies in fresh contexts. Modern botanical and medical science itself was built on studies of Medieval Europeans’ use of food plants and medicinal herbs. In spite of monumental changes introduced in the Age of Discovery and Mercantile Capitalism, some communities, often of immigrants in foreign lands, continue to hold on to old recipes and traditions, while others have adopted and enculturated exotic plants and remedies into their diets and pharmacopoeia in new and creative ways. Now in the 21st century, in the age of the European Union and Globalization, European folk botany is once again dynamically responding to changing cultural, economic, and political contexts. The authors and studies presented in this book reflect work being conducted across Europe’s many regions. They tell the story of the on-going evolution of human-plant relations in one of the most bioculturally dynamic places on the planet, and explore new approaches that link the re-evaluation of plant-based cultural heritage with the conservation and use of biocultural diversity.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2022

  Ethnographers Before Malinowski

  Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork, 1870-1922

  Rosa, F. & Vermeulen, H. F. (eds)

  Focusing on some of the most important ethnographers in early anthropology, this volume explores twelve defining works in the foundational period from 1870 to 1922. It challenges the assumption that intensive fieldwork and monographs based on it emerged only in the twentieth century. What has been regarded as the age of armchair anthropologists was in reality an era of active ethnographic fieldworkers, including women practitioners and Indigenous experts. Their accounts have multiple layers of meaning, style, and content that deserve fresh reading. This reference work is a vital source for rewriting the history of anthropology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Colonial History

• eBook available June 2014

  The Ethnographic Experiment

  A.M. Hocart and W.H.R. Rivers in Island Melanesia, 1908

  Hviding, E. & Berg, C. (eds)

  In 1908, Arthur Maurice Hocart and William Halse Rivers Rivers conducted fieldwork in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Island Melanesia that served as the turning point in the development of modern anthropology. The work of these two anthropological pioneers on the small island of Simbo brought about the development of participant observation as a methodological hallmark of social anthropology. This would have implications for Rivers’ later work in psychiatry and psychology, and Hocart’s work as a comparativist, for which both would largely be remembered despite the novelty of that independent fieldwork on remote Pacific islands in the early years of the 20th Century. Contributors to this volume—who have all carried out fieldwork in those Melanesian locations where Hocart and Rivers worked—give a critical examination of the research that took place in 1908, situating those efforts in the broadest possible contexts of colonial history, imperialism, the history of ideas and scholarly practice within and beyond anthropology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available February 2003

  Ethnographies of Conservation

  Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege

  Anderson, D. & Berglund, E. (eds)

  Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2018

  Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space

  Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland

  Komarova, M. & Svašek, M. (eds)

  Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2021

  Ethnographies of Power

  A Political Anthropology of Energy

  Loloum, T., Abram, S., & Ortar, N. (eds)

  Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political organization. They shape the contours of states and international bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their material existence and their fears and idealisations of the future. Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available April 2021

  Ethnography in the Raw

  Life in a Luzon Village

  Moeran, B.

  Ethnography in the Raw describes the author’s encounters with the Philippine family into which he has married, his wife’s friends and acquaintances, and their lives in a remote rural village in the rice basin of Luzon, about 130 miles northeast of Manila. The book links detailed descriptions of his Philippine family with cultural practices such as circumcision, marriage and cockfights combined with theoretical musings on the concepts of sacrifice, social exchange, patron-client relations, food, and religious symbolism. It is both anthropological fieldwork ‘in the raw,’ and an incisive analysis of contemporary Philippine society and culture.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available August 2017

  European Anthropologies

  Barrera-González, A., Heintz, M. & Horolets, A. (eds)

  In what ways did Europeans interact with the diversity of people they encountered on other continents in the context of colonial expansion, and with the peasant or ethnic ‘Other’ at home? How did anthropologists and ethnologists make sense of the mosaic of people and societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when their disciplines were progressively being established in academia? By assessing the diversity of European intellectual histories within sociocultural anthropology, this volume aims to sketch its intellectual and institutional portrait. It will be a useful reading for the students of anthropology, ethnology, history and philosophy of science, research and science policy makers.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Colonial History

• September 2015

  European Products

  Making and Unmaking Heritage in Cyprus

  Welz, G.

  On the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, rural villages, traditional artefacts, even atmospheres and experiences are considered heritage. Heritage making not only protects, but also produces, things, people, and places. Since the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, heritage making and Europeanization are increasingly intertwined in Greek-Cypriot society. Against the backdrop of a long-term ethnographic engagement, the author argues that heritage emerges as an increasingly standardized economic resource, a “European product.” Implemented in historic preservation, rural tourism, culinary traditions, nature protection, and urban restoration projects, heritage policy has become infused with transnational market regulations and neoliberal property regimes.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies

• eBook available September 2015

  The Event of Charlie Hebdo

  Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

  Zagato, A. (ed)

  The January 2015 shooting at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de-France region were staggeringly violent events. They sparked an enormous discussion among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. By analyzing the effects the attacks have had in various spheres of social life, including the political, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, this collection of essays aims to serve as a contribution as well as a critical response to that discussion. The volume observes that the events being attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond sensationalist reports of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2021

  Evil Eye in Christian Orthodox Society

  A Journey from Envy to Personhood

  Souvlakis, N.

  Evil eye is a phenomenon observed globally and has to do with the misfortune and calamities that we can cause to someone else out of jealousy of their possessions. The book engages with evil eye beliefs in Corfu and investigates the Christian Orthodox influences on the phenomenon and how it affects individuals’ reactions to it. Developing an interdisciplinary dialogue, it offers a fresh view of evil eye as a facilitator of wellbeing rather than a generator of calamities.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• July 2023

  Exceptional Experiences

  Engaging with Jolting Events in Art and Fieldwork

  Rethmann, P. & Wulff, H. (eds)

  Looking at encounters that can puncture or jolt us, this volume uses art as a lens through which to register and understand exceptional experiences. The volume also includes the fieldworker’s experience of unexpected events that can lead to key understandings, as well as revelatory moments that happen during artistic creation and while looking at art. By exploring exceptional experiences through art, the volume asks probing questions for anthropology. In recognizing that art is all-encompassing – including, as it does, narrative, performance, dance and images – Exceptional Experiences situates itself within a number of conversations on methodological and conceptual issues in anthropology and beyond.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available April 2021

  Exchanging Objects

  Nineteenth-Century Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution

  Nichols, C. A.

  As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2018

  Expeditionary Anthropology

  Teamwork, Travel and the ''Science of Man''

  Thomas, M. & Harris, A. (eds)

  The origins of anthropology lie in expeditionary journeys. But since the rise of immersive fieldwork, usually by a sole investigator, the older tradition of team-based social research has been largely eclipsed. Expeditionary Anthropology argues that expeditions have much to tell us about anthropologists and the people they studied. The book charts the diversity of anthropological expeditions and analyzes the often passionate arguments they provoked. Drawing on recent developments in gender studies, indigenous studies, and the history of science, the book argues that even today, the ‘science of man’ is deeply inscribed by its connections with expeditionary travel.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Travel and Tourism

• eBook available May 2018

  The Experience of Neoliberal Education

  Urciuoli, B. (ed)

  The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package.

  Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2021

  Experiencing Materiality

  Museum Perspectives

  Gamberi, V.

  Representing a cutting-edge study of the junction between theoretical anthropology, material culture studies, religious studies and museum anthropology, this study examines the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in a museum setting usually defined as ‘non-Western’, ‘non-scientific’ and ‘religious.’ Combining an on-site analysis of exhibitive spaces with archival research and interviews with museum curators, the chapters highlight contradictions of museum practices, and suggests that museum practitioners use museum spaces and artefacts as a way of formulating new theoretical stances in material culture studies, thus viewing museums as producers of theories together with affective engagements.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• November 2007

  Experiencing New Worlds

  Wassmann, J. & Stockhaus, K. (eds)

  The many different localities of the Pacific region have a long history of transformation, under both pre- and post-colonial conditions. More recently, rates of local transformation have increased tremendously under post-colonial regimes. The forces of globalization, which rapidly distribute commodities, images, and political and moral concepts across the region, have presented Pacific populations with an unprecedented need and opportunity to fashion new and expanded understandings of their cultural and individual identities.

  This volume, the first in a new series, examines the forces of globalization at different levels, as they manifest themselves and operate across cultural, cognitive and biographical dimensions of human life in the Pacific. While posing familiar questions, it offers new answers through the integration of cultural and psychological methods. The contributors draw on practice theory, cognitive science and the anthropology of space and place while exploring the key analytical rubrics of human agency, memory and landscape.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2018

  Experimental Collaborations

  Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices

  Estalella, A. & Sánchez Criado, T. (eds)

  In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• eBook available March 2007

  Exploring Gypsiness

  Power, Exchange and Interdependence in a Transylvanian Village

  Engebrigtsen, A.

  Romania has a larger Gypsy population than most other countries but little is known about the relationship between this group and the non-Gypsy Romanians around them. This book focuses on a group of Rom Gypsies living in a village in Transylvania and explores their social life and cosmology. Because Rom Gypsies are dependent on and define themselves in relation to the surrounding non-Gypsy populations, it is important to understand their day-to-day interactions with these neighbors, primarily peasants to whom they relate through extended barter. The author comes to the conclusion that, although economically and politically marginal, Rom Gypsies are central to Romanian collective identity in that they offer desirable and repulsive counter images, incorporating the uncivilized, immoral and destructive "other". This interdependence creates tensions but it also allows for some degree of cultural and political autonomy for the Roma within Romanian society.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• April 2008

  Exploring Regimes of Discipline

  The Dynamics of Restraint

  Dyck, N.

  The pursuit and practice of discipline have become near ubiquitous elements of contemporary social life and parlance, as discipline has become a commonplace and ever sought-after social technology. From the celebrated “discipline of the market” proclaimed by neo-liberal politicians, to self-actualizing experiences of embodied discipline proffered by martial arts instructors, this volume showcases highly varied and complex disciplinary practices and relationships in a set of ethnographic studies. Interrogating the respective fields of work, religion, governance, leisure, education and child rearing, together the essays in this volume explore and offer new ways of thinking about discipline in everyday life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available February 2019

  Extinct Monsters to Deep Time

  Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls

  Marsh, D. E.

  Via the Smithsonian Institution, an exploration of the growing friction between the research and outreach functions of museums in the 21st century.

  Describing participant observation and historical research at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as it prepared for its largest-ever exhibit renovation, Deep Time, the author provides a grounded perspective on the inner-workings of the world’s largest natural history museum and the social processes of communicating science to the public.

  From the introduction:

  In exhibit projects, the tension plays out between curatorial staff—academic, research, or scientific staff  charged with content—and exhibitions, public engagement, or educational staff—which I broadly group together as “audience advocates” charged with translating content for a broader public. I have heard Kirk Johnson, Sant Director of the NMNH, say many times that if you look at dinosaur halls at different museums across the country, you can see whether the curators or the exhibits staff  has “won.” At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it was the curators. The hall is stark white and organized by phylogeny—or the evolutionary relationships of species—with simple, albeit long, text panels. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Johnson will tell you, it was the “exhibits people.” The hall is story driven and chronologically organized, full of big graphic prints, bold fonts, immersive and interactive spaces, and touchscreens. At the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where Johnson had previously been vice president and chief curator, “we actually fought to a draw.” That, he says, is the best outcome; a win on either side skews the final product too extremely in one direction or the other. This creative tension, when based on mutual respect, is often what makes good exhibitions.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

• November 2011

  Extreme Heritage Management

  The Practices and Policies of Densely Populated Islands

  Baldacchino, G. (ed)

  Conflicting and competing claims over the actual and imagined use of land and seascapes are exacerbated on islands with high population density. The management of culture and heritage is particularly tested in island environments where space is finite and the population struggles to preserve cultural and natural assets in the face of the demands of the construction industry, immigration, high tourism and capital investment. Drawn from extreme island scenarios, the ten case studies in this volume review practices and policies for effective heritage management and offer rich descriptive and analytic material about land-use conflict. In addition, they point to interesting, new directions in which research, public policy and heritage management intersect.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

• December 2021

  Extremism, Society, and the State

  Loperfido, G. (ed)

  Extremism does not happen in a vacuum. Rather, extremism is a relative concept that often emerges in crisis situations, taking shape within the tense and contradictory relations that tie marginal spaces, state orders, and mainstream culture. This collected volume brings together leading anthropologists and cultural analysts to offer a concise look at the narratives, symbolic, and metaphoric fields related to extremism, systematizing an approach to extremism, and placing these ideologies into historical, political, and geo-systemic contexts.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2020

  Facing the Crisis

  Ethnographies of Work in Italian Industrial Capitalism

  D'Aloisio, F. & Ghezzi, S. (eds)

  Among the founding nations of the European Union, no nation has experienced a more devastating affect from the 2008 economic crisis than Italy. Although its recovery has recently begun, Italy has fallen even further behind EU economic leaders and the EU average. Looking at how and why this happened, Facing the Crisis brings together ethnographic material from anthropological research projects carried out in various Italian industrial locations. With its wide breadth of locations and industries, the volume looks at all corners of the diverse Italian manufacturing system.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

• March 2013

  Factions, Friends and Feasts

  Anthropological Perspectives on the Mediterranean

  Boissevain, J.

  Drawing on field research in Malta, Sicily and among Italian emigrants in Canada, this book explores the social influence of the Mediterranean climate and the legacy of ethnic and religious conflict from the past five decades. Case studies illustrate the complexity of daily life not only in the region but also in more remote academe, by analysing the effects of fierce family loyalty, emigration and the social consequences of factionalism, patronage and the friends-of-friends networks that are widespread in the region. Several chapters discuss the social and environmental impact of mass tourism, how locals cope, and the paradoxical increase in religious pageantry and public celebrations. The discussions echo changes in the region and the related development of the author’s own interests and engagement with prevailing issues through his career.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2022

  Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus

  Tinted Glasses, Fetishes, and the Politics of Seeing

  Doerr, N. M.

  Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fetish and Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: “tinted glasses”, through which we see the world; “unit-thinking”, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units; and “coherants”, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Theory and Methodology

• June 2013

  Family Upheaval

  Generation, Mobility and Relatedness among Pakistani Migrants in Denmark

  Rytter, M.

  Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructive–productive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicion—launched in the name of “integration”—escalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2019

  Fate Calculation Experts

  Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China

  Li, G.

  Having long been stigmatized as an immoral and even illegal “superstition”, the popular practice of divination is experiencing a revival in contemporary China. Fate Calculation Experts explores how diviners attempt to achieve legitimation in a society which identifies strongly with modernity, science, and rationality. As well as associating with modern knowledge production systems, diviners build a positive social image for their occupation via claims to moral authority and appeals to “tradition”. Beyond matters of image management, diviners’ efforts towards legitimation also figure in the social relationships and fundamental cultural values they develop in their practice.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• March 2023

  Feeding Anxieties

  The Politics of Children's Food in Poland

  Boni, Z.

  Focusing on the underlying politics behind children’s food, this book highlights the variety of social relationships, expectations and emotions ingrained in feeding children in Poland. With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools, the food industry and state agencies shape and experience feeding anxieties, and how such anxiety is at the heart of a new form of sociality. The book complicates our understanding of health and modern subjectivity and unpacks what and how we feed children today.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Sociology

• August 2023

  The Feeling of the Fall

  An Ethnographic Writing Experiment between the Belize Barrier Reef and the Edges of Toronto, Ontario

  Taccone, I.

  As an inquiry into engagements with forces of loss and threat, this work explores experimental ways to write about climate crisis in anthropology. From Belize to Ontario and back, this ambitious piece of ethnographic writing set during a time “beyond ruin” in a fictional, ecotourist community in the year 2040. Here, loss is taken up through an inventive form of ethnographic storytelling that brings together people, animals, landscapes, and the weather in a world beyond the climate crisis right now where new entanglements with things which have fallen to ruin emerge in imagined milieus in which loss and life converge.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Urban Studies

• eBook available December 2007

  Fetishes and Monuments

  Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20^th Century

  Sansi, R.

  One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candomblé were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2020

  Fifty Years of Peasant Wars in Latin America

  Binford, L., Gill, L., & Striffler, S. (eds)

  Informed by Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, published in 1969, this book examines selected peasant struggles in seven Latin American countries during the last fifty years and suggests the continuing relevance of Wolf’s approach. The seven case studies are preceded by an Introduction in which the editors assess the continuing relevance of Wolf’s political economy. The book concludes with Gavin Smith’s reflection on reading Eric Wolf as a public intellectual today.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• July 2015

  Figuration Work

  Student Participation, Democracy and University Reform in a Global Knowledge Economy

  Nielsen, G. B.

  What role should students take in shaping their education, their university, and the wider society? These questions have assumed new importance in recent years as universities are reformed to become more competitive in the “global knowledge economy.” With Denmark as the prism, this book shows how negotiations over student participation — influenced by demands for efficiency, flexibility, and student-centered education — reflect broader concerns about democracy and citizen participation in increasingly neoliberalised states. Combining anthropological and historical research, Gritt B. Nielsen develops a novel approach to the study of policy processes and opens a timely discussion about the kinds of future citizens who will emerge from current reforms.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• August 2015

  Figurations of the Future

  Forms and Temporalities of Left Radical Politics in Northern Europe

  Krøijer, S.

  Built around key events, from the eviction of a self-managed social centre in Copenhagen in 2007 to the Climate Summit protests in 2009, this book contributes to anthropological literature on contemporary Euro-American politics foreshadowing recent waves of public dissent. Stine Krøijer explores political forms among left radical and anarchist activists in Northern Europe focusing on how forms of action engender time. Drawing on anthropological literature from both Scandinavia and the Amazon, this ethnography recasts theoretical concerns about body politics, political intentionality, aesthetics, and time.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2020

  Financialization

  Relational Approaches

  Hann, C. & Kalb, D. (eds)

  Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History (General)

• eBook available May 2020

  Finding Ways Through Eurospace

  West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside

  Schapendonk, J.

  Studying the im/mobility trajectories of West Africans in the EU, this book presents a new approach to West African migrants in Europe. It argues that a migration lens is not necessarily the best starting point to understand these dynamic im/mobility processes. Rather than seeing migrancy as the primary marker of their lives, this book positions these trajectories in a wider social script of mobility and discusses how African migrants are confronted with rigid mobility regimes, but also how they manage to transgress and circumvent them.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2007

  Fire in the Dark

  Telling Gypsiness in North East England

  Buckler, S.

  Anthropologists who are employed to change the worlds they are researching find themselves in a potentially contradictory position. Combining the various roles and expectations involved in working with Gypsies and local government at the same time as conducting anthropological research, provides the overall perspective of this study. It is an unusual and effective balance of insightful ethnography and anthropological theory with the perspective of someone employed to carry out applied work. An effective and creative use of metaphor structures the entire work and allows complex ideas to be conveyed in an accessible way. Drawing upon traditional anthropological approaches such as kinship and story telling and engaging with the works of major social theorists such as Weber, Bourdieu and Foucault as well as the work of contemporary anthropologists, this work demonstrates the use of anthropology in understanding changing situations and in deciding how best to manage such situations.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2022

  Fire on the Island

  Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu

  Bratrud, T.

  In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision’. However, it ended dramatically when two men believed to be sorcerers and responsible for much of the society’s problems were hung by persons fearing for the island’s future security. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on Ahamb between 2010 and 2017, this book investigates how upheavals like the Ahamb revival can emerge to address and sometimes resolve social problems, but also carry risks of exacerbating the same problems they arise to address.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• December 2008

  Fishers and Scientists in Modern Turkey

  The Management of Natural Resources, Knowledge and Identity on the Eastern Black Sea Coast

  Knudsen, S.

  Through the ethnography and history of fish production, seafood consumption, state modernizing policies and marine science, this book analyzes the role of local knowledge in the management of marine resources on the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey. Fishing, science and other ways of knowing and relating to fish and the sea are analyzed as particular ways of life conditioned by history, ideology and daily practice. The approach adopted here allows for a broader analysis of the role knowledge plays in the management of common pool resources (CPR) than is provided in much of the contemporary CPR debate that tends to have a somewhat narrow focus on institutions and rules. By contrast, the author argues that also local knowledge and the larger historical and ideological context of production, as manifest in state modernization policies and consumption patterns, should be taken into account when trying to explain the current management regime in Turkish Black Sea fisheries.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• March 2015

  Flexible Capitalism

  Exchange and Ambiguity at Work

  Kjaerulff, J. (ed)

  Approaching “work” as at heart a practice of exchange, this volume explores sociality in work environments marked by the kind of structural changes that have come to define contemporary “flexible” capitalism. It introduces anthropological exchange theory to a wider readership, and shows how the perspective offers new ways to enquire about the flexible capitalism’s social dimensions. The essays contribute to a trans-disciplinary scholarship on contemporary economic practice and change by documenting how, across diverse settings, “gift-like” socialities proliferate, and even sustain the intensified flexible commoditization that more commonly is touted as tearing social relations apart. By interrogating a keenly debated contemporary work regime through an approach to sociality rooted in a rich and distinct anthropological legacy, the volume also makes a novel contribution to the anthropological literature on work and on exchange.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2021

  Floating Economies

  The Cultural Ecology of the Dal Lake in Kashmir, India

  Casimir, M. J.

  In the Himalayas of the Indian part of Kashmir three communities depend on the ecology of the Dal lake: market gardeners, houseboat owners and fishers.  Floating Economies describes for the first time the complex intermeshing economy, social structure and ecology of the area against the background of history and the present volatile socio-political situation. Using a holistic and multidisciplinary approach, the author deals with the socioeconomic strategies of the communities whose livelihoods are embedded here and analyses the ecological condition of the Dal, and the reasons for its progressive degradation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  Food and Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century

  Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

  Collinson, P., Young, I., Antal, L., & Macbeth, H. (eds)

  Sustainability is one of the great problems facing food production today. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives from international scholars working in social, cultural and biological anthropology, ecology and environmental biology, this volume brings many new perspectives to the problems we face.  Its cross-disciplinary framework of chapters with local, regional and continental perspectives provides a global outlook on sustainability issues. These case studies will appeal to those working in public sector agencies, NGOs, consultancies and other bodies focused on food security, human nutrition and environmental sustainability.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• May 1996

  Food and the Status Quest

  An Interdisciplinary Perspective

  Wiessner, P. & Schiefenhövel, W. (eds)

  The use of food to negotiate status is found in all human societies. Here, for the first time, a single book brings together contributions from different disciplines to investigate, from ethological and anthropological perspectives, behavior that appears to have biological roots such as the tendency to seek status through the medium of food. It explores the limits that our biological heritage places on cultural expressions of such behavior, as well as the multiplicity of ways in which biologically based tendencies can be transformed by culture. Finally, it addresses the impact of status-seeking on nutritional programs in developing countries.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2022

  Food Connections

  Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration

  Abranches, M.

  Food Connections follows the movement of food from its production sites in West Africa to its final spaces of consumption in Europe. It is an ethnographic study of economic and social life amongst a close-knit community of food producers, traders and consumers and a wide range of small intermediaries that operate in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. By investigating the way meanings of food and land are embedded in everyday experiences and relationships in the various phases of the movement, on both sides of the migration, it reveals the connections that transnational processes of food production, exchange and consumption generate between two lifeworlds.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available February 2017

  Food Culture

  Anthropology, Linguistics and Food Studies

  Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

  This volume offers a comprehensive guide to methods used in the sociocultural, linguistic and historical research of food use. This volume is unique in offering food-related research methods from multiple academic disciplines, and includes methods that bridge disciplines to provide a thorough review of best practices. In each chapter, a case study from the author's own work is to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore the methods.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition

• September 2000

  Food for Health, Food for Wealth

  Ethnic and Gender Identities in British Iranian Communities

  Harbottle, L.

  Food and eating practices are central to current sociological and anthropological concerns about the body, health, consumption, and identity. This study explores the importance of these themes as they intersect with processes of globalization and cultural production within a specific group of consumers, British Sh'ite Iranians. Through the analysis of the consumption practices of this particular migrant group, this book illustrates how both the nutritional value and symbolic significance of food contribute to its health-giving properties and how gender and ethnic identities are preformed and reinforced through the medium of food-work in public and private spheres. At the same time, as this study demonstrates, migration modifies and transfigures such identities and produces hybrid cultures and cuisines.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2017

  Food Health

  Nutrition, Technology, and Public Health

  Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

  Nutritional Anthropology and public health research and programming have employed similar methodologies for decades; many anthropologists are public health practitioners while many public health practitioners have been trained as medical or biological anthropologists. Recognizing such professional connections, this volume provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming using anthropological best practices. To illustrates the rationale for use of particular methods, each chapter elaborates a case study from the author's own work, showing why particular methods were adopted in each case.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition

• eBook available September 2014

  Food in Zones of Conflict

  Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

  Collinson, P. and Macbeth, H. (eds)

  The availability of food is an especially significant issue in zones of conflict because conflict nearly always impinges on the production and the distribution of food, and causes increased competition for food, land and resources Controlling the production of and access to food can also be used as a weapon by protagonists in conflict. The logistics of supply of food to military personnel operating in conflict zones is another important issue. These themes unite this collection, the chapters of which span different geographic areas. This volume will appeal to scholars in a number of different disciplines, including anthropology, nutrition, political science, development studies and international relations, as well as practitioners working in the private and public sectors, who are currently concerned with food-related issues in the field.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• November 1997

  Food Preferences and Taste

  Continuity and Change

  Macbeth, H.

  Food preferences and tastes are among the fundamentals affecting human existence; the sociocultural, physiological and neurological factors involved have therefore been widely researched and are well documented. However, information and debate on these factors are scattered across the academic literature of different disciplines. In this volume cross-disciplinary perspectives are brought together by an international team of contributors that includes socialand biological anthropologists, ethologists and ethnologists, psychologists, neurologists and zoologists in order to provide access to the different specialisms on the topic.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2017

  Food Research

  Nutritional Anthropology and Archaeological Methods

  Chrzan, J. & Brett, J. (eds)

  Biocultural and archaeological research on food, past and present, often relies on very specific, precise, methods for data collection and analysis. These are presented here in a broad-based review. Individual chapters provide opportunities to think through the adoption of methods by reviewing the history of their use along with a discussion of research conducted using those methods. A case study from the author's own work is included in each chapter to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore those methods.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition Archaeology

• eBook available January 2012

  Foodscapes, Foodfields, and Identities in the YucatÁn

  Ayora-Diaz, S. I.

  The state of Yucatán has its own distinct culinary tradition, and local people are constantly thinking and talking about food. They use it as a vehicle for social relations but also to distinguish themselves from “Mexicans.” This book examines the politics surrounding regional cuisine, as the author argues that Yucatecan gastronomy has been created and promoted in an effort to affirm the identity of a regional people and to oppose the hegemonic force of central Mexican cultural icons and forms. In particular, Yucatecan gastronomy counters the homogenizing drive of a national cuisine based on dominant central Mexican appetencies and defies the image of Mexican national cuisine as rooted in indigenous traditions. Drawing on post-structural and postcolonial theory, the author proposes that Yucatecan gastronomy - having successfully gained a reputation as distinct and distant from ‘Mexican’ cuisine - is a bifurcation from regional culinary practices. However, the author warns, this leads to a double, paradoxical situation that divides the nation: while a national cuisine attempts to silence regional cultural diversity, the fissures in the project of a homogeneous regional identity are revealed.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2013

  Foodways and Empathy

  Relatedness in a Ramu River Society, Papua New Guinea

  Poser, A. von

  Through the sharing of food, people feel entitled to inquire into one another’s lives and ponder one another’s states in relation to their foodways. This in-depth study focuses on the Bosmun of Daiden, a Ramu River people in an under-represented area in the ethnography of Papua New Guinea, uncovering the conceptual convergence of local notions of relatedness, foodways, and empathy. In weaving together discussions about paramount values as passed on through myth, the expression of feelings in daily life, and the bodily experience of social and physical environs, a life-world unfolds in which moral, emotional, and embodied foodways contribute notably to the creation of relationships. Concerned with unique processes of “making kin,” the book adds a distinct case to recent debates about relatedness and empathy and sheds new light onto the conventional anthropological themes of food production, sharing, and exchange.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• June 2017

  Footprints in Paradise

  Ecotourism, Local Knowledge, and Nature Therapies in Okinawa

  Murray, A. E.

  The economic imperative of sustainable tourism development frequently shapes life on small subtropical islands. In Okinawa, ecotourism promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. Footprints in Paradise explores the transformation in community and sense of place as Okinawans come to view themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist consumer, and as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as treasured and vulnerable resources. The rediscovery and revaluing of local ecological knowledge strengthens Okinawan or Uchinaa cultural heritage, despite the controversial presence of US military bases amidst a hegemonic Japanese state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2016

  The Forest People without a Forest

  Development Paradoxes, Belonging and Participation of the Baka in East Cameroon

  Lueong, G. M.

  Development interventions often generate contradictions around questions of who benefits from development and which communities are targeted for intervention. This book examines how the Baka, who live in Eastern Cameroon, assert forms of belonging in order to participate in development interventions, and how community life is shaped and reshaped through these interventions. Often referred to as ‘forest people’, the Baka have witnessed many recent development interventions that include competing and contradictory policies such as ‘civilize’, assimilate and integrate the Baka into ‘full citizenship’, conserve the forest and wildlife resources, and preserve indigenous cultures at the verge of extinction.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• March 2023

  Former Neighbors, Future Allies?

  German Studies and Ethnography in Dialogue

  Weber, A. D. (ed)

  Although German studies scholars from various disciplines often use and reference ethnography, German studies rarely emphasizes ethnography as a core methodology and research approach. Through recent dialogue among Germanists, Former Neighbors, Future Allies shows the necessity of assessing the growing momentum in German studies for engaging in methods and theories of ethnography from a variety of perspectives including literature, folklore, history, sociology, and anthropology. By increasing the visibility of the pervasiveness of ethnography, this multi-modal volume illustrates how ethnography represents a transdisciplinary and international bridging of research.

  Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2017

  Foucault's Orient

  The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan

  Lazreg, M.

  Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures.  Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• October 2004

  Foundations of National Identity

  From Catalonia to Europe

  Llobera, J.

  Since it emergence in the 19th century in response to feudalism, nationalism has been a mixed blessing. Originally seen as a positive force, often enough it has resulted in warfare and persecution of minorities, so much so that, over time, it has been considered a social evil whose apparent decline has been greeted as a positive development. The author disputes this or rather, he maintains that the picture that emerges is more complex: nationalism is not disappearing but has taken on a different form. What we are experiencing is an increasing autonomy of ethnonations, i.e. nations without a state, in the wake of a weakening of the multinational states and the transfer of their sovereignty upwards, in the case of Europe to the federation of the European Union, and downwards to the "ethnonations."

  Catalonia is the major case study in this book but it is embedded in a comprehensive theoretical framework as well as the historical and contemporary reality of Europe, opening up a new perspective. The author, one of the foremost scholars in this field, brilliantly succeeds in developing an original, clear and comprehensive vision of nationalism that is accessible to a wide readership.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• December 2005

  Fracturing Resemblances

  Identity and Mimetic Conflict in Melanesia and the West

  Harrison, S.

  Western societies draw crucially on concepts of the 'individual' in constructing their images of the ethnic group and nation and define these in terms of difference. This study explores the implications of these constructs for Western understanding of social order and ethnic conflicts. Comparing them with the forms of cultural identity characteristic of Melanesia as they have developed since pre-colonial times, the author arrives at a surprising conclusion: he argues that these kinds of identities are more properly and adequately viewed as forms of disguised or denied resemblance, and that it is these covert commonalities that give rise to, and prolong, social divisions and conflicts between groups.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2013

  Framing Africa

  Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema

  Eltringham, N. (ed)

  The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), ‘failed states’ (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

  Subjects: Film and Television Studies Anthropology (General) History (General)

• eBook available August 2016

  The France of the Little-Middles

  A Suburban Housing Development in Greater Paris

  Cartier, M., Coutant, I., Masclet, O., & Siblot, Y.

  The Poplars housing development in suburban Paris is home to what one resident called the “Little-Middles” – a social group on the tenuous border between the working- and middle- classes. In the 1960s The Poplars was a site of upward social mobility, which fostered an egalitarian sense of community among residents. This feeling of collective flourishing was challenged when some residents moved away, selling their homes to a new generation of upwardly mobile neighbors from predominantly immigrant backgrounds. This volume explores the strained reception of these migrants, arguing that this is less a product of racism and xenophobia than of anxiety about social class and the loss of a sense of community that reigned before.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• April 2015

  The Franco-Mauritian Elite

  Power and Anxiety in the Face of Change

  Salverda, T.

  Mauritian independence in 1968 marked the end of a regime favorable to the Franco-Mauritians, the island’s white colonial elite. Now, in postcolonial Mauritius, this group is faced with a much more diverse power constellation and often feels in competition with others vying for their privileges. Though this is a clear departure from the colonial heydays, Franco-Mauritians have been able to continue their elite position into the early twenty-first century. This book focuses on the power of white elites still lingering on in postcolonial realities, and with regards to elites and power in general, addresses anew how an elite group aims to prolong its position over time.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available January 2022

  Françoise Héritier

  Gaillard, G.

  Follows the life of French anthropologist Françoise Héritier, who had a lasting impact on a generation of French anthropologists that continues to this day.

  A great intellectual figure, Françoise Héritier succeeded Claude Lévi-Strauss as the Chair of Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1982. She was an Africanist, author of magnificent works on the Samo population, the scientific progenitor of kinship studies, the creator of a theoretical base to feminist thought and an activist for many causes.

  “I read this intellectual biography of Françoise Héritier with great pleasure. Though highly regarded in France, she is not yet well known in English-language academic circles, but she certainly should be. This book will be a revelation to many anthropologists and feminist scholars.”—Adam Kuper, London School of Economics

  From the Forword by Michelle Perrot:
  I came to know her at the National Council for HIV, that she chaired from 1989 to 1994…. Her theoretical concerns were also crucial to the understanding of pandemics, but we did not then realise that HIV/AIDS was also a precursor and a warning of pandemics to come. She grasped the importance of conceptions of bodily ‘humours’—blood, semen, milk—that seemed to play a role in the horrific spread of an epidemic of which we knew nothing, except that it resulted in an appalling mortality rate, particularly among young men…. she was a remarkable chair, concerned to share her insights into the illness and to anchor—necessary—interventions within a framework that would be respectful of human rights.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2022

  Francophone Migrations, French Islam and Wellbeing

  The Soninké Foyer in Paris

  Accoroni, D.

  Addressing several issues of significance in the fields of Anthropology of Migration, Politics of Healthcare, Religious and Francophone Studies, this book pursues an unprecedented line of research by bringing to the fore the geopolitical dimension of francophonie, understood as a political construct, as much as a cultural, artistic and a linguistic space, with French as common language. The book is based on participant observation carried out in Paris in a foyer among Soninké migrants, the principal ethnographic focus, and at the secondary field-site based at the Mouride Islamic Centre of Taverny, which serves to show an important facet of the so-called Francophone Islam.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available December 2021

  Franz Baermann Steiner

  A Stranger in the World

  Adler, J. & Fardon, R.

  Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years.

  This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner’s concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Literary Studies

• May 2014

  Friendship, Descent and Alliance in Africa

  Anthropological Perspectives

  Guichard, M., Grätz, T., & Diallo, Y. (eds)

  Friendship, descent and alliance are basic forms of relatedness that have received unequal attention in social anthropology. Offering new insights into the ways in which friendship is conceptualized and realized in various sub-Saharan African settings, the contributions to this volume depart from the recent tendency to study friendship in isolation from kinship. In drawing attention to the complexity of the interactions between these two kinds of social relationships, the book suggests that analyses of friendship in Western societies would also benefit from research that explores more systematically friendship in conjunction with kinship.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• November 2017

  From Clans to Co-ops

  Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily

  Rakopoulos, T.

  From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management. The book contributes to broader debates about cooperativism, how labor might be salvaged from market fundamentalism, and to emergent discourses about the ‘human’ economy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Food & Nutrition

• eBook available January 2023

  From Missionaries to Main Street

  The Story of One Sgaw Karen Family in the United States

  Gilhooly, D.

  The Htoo family, who are Sgaw Karen and originally from Burma, resettled in Georgia in the United States refugee resettlement program in 2007. This book chronicles their life in their new country. While the Htoo family’s story is singular, the family’s experiences in Burma, Thai refugee camps, and their experiences in the US are representative of other refugees from Burma and beyond. The book provides historical and cultural information on the Sgaw Karen people against the backdrop of the Htoo family’s path from Burma to Thailand. It also explores the Htoo children’s home and school learning experiences and their relationship with the author as teacher, collaborator, and friend.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available December 2018

  From Storeroom to Stage

  Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore

  Urdea, A.

  Departing from an ethnographic collection in London, From Storeroom to Stage traces the journey of its artefacts back to the Romanian villages where they were made 70 years ago, and to other places where similar objects are still in use. The book explores the role that material culture plays in the production of value and meaning by examining how folk objects are mobilized in national ideologies, transmissions of personal and family memory, museological discourses, and artistic acts.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Museum Studies Heritage Studies

• June 2023

  From Village Commons to Public Goods

  Graduated Provision in Urbanizing China

  Trémon, A.-C.

  Illuminating the complex processes of China’s uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi’an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities. 

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Urban Studies Sociology

• eBook available June 2018

  Frontiers of Civil Society

  Government and Hegemony in Serbia

  Mikuš, M.

  In Serbia, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the rise of “civil society” was expected to support a smooth transformation to Western models of liberal democracy and capitalism. More than twenty years after the Yugoslav wars, these expectations appear largely unmet. Frontiers of Civil Society asks why, exploring the roles of multiple civil society forces in a set of government “reforms” of society and individuals in the early 2010s, and examining them in the broader context of social struggles over neoliberal restructuring and transnational integration.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available September 2011

  Funerals in Africa

  Explorations of a Social Phenomenon

  Jindra, M. & Noret, J. (eds)

  Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2007

  The Future of Indigenous Museums

  Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific

  Stanley, N. (ed)

  Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

• June 2013

  The Gaddi Beyond Pastoralism

  Making Place in the Indian Himalayas

  Wagner, A.

  The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists’ adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people “make” place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi’s engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2017

  Gender in Georgia

  Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation, and History in the South Caucasus

  Barkaia, M. & Waterston, A. (eds)

  As Georgia seeks to reinvent itself as a nation-state in the post-Soviet period, Georgian women are maneuvering, adjusting, resisting and transforming the new economic, social and political order. In Gender in Georgia, editors Maia Barkaia and Alisse Waterston bring together an international group of feminist scholars to explore the socio-political and cultural conditions that have shaped gender dynamics in Georgia from the late 19th century to the present. In doing so, they provide the first-ever woman-centered collection of research on Georgia, offering a feminist critique of power in its many manifestations, and an assessment of women’s political agency in Georgia.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2022

  Gender, Power, and Non-Governance

  Is Female to Male as NGO Is to State?

  Timmer, A. D. & Wirtz, E. (eds)

  Using Sherry Ortner’s analogy of Female/Nature, Male/Culture, this volume interrogates the gendered aspects of governance by exploring the NGO/State relationship. By examining how NGOs/States perform gendered roles and actions and the gendered divisions of labor involved in different types of institutional engagement, this volume attends to the ways in which gender and governance constitute flexible, relational, and contingent systems of power. The chapters in this volume present diverse analyses of the ways in which projects of governance both reproduce and challenge binaries.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available October 2022

  Gentrifications

  Views from Europe

  Chabrol, M., Collet, A., Giroud, M., Launay, L., Rousseau, M., Minassian, H. ter

  Offering an original discussion of the gentrification phenomenon in Europe, this book provides new theoretical insights into classical works on the subject. Using a thorough analysis of the diversity of the forms, places and actors of gentrification in an attempt to isolate its ‘DNA’, the book addresses the place of social groups in cities, their competition over the appropriation of space, the infrastructure unequally offered to them by economic and political actors and the stakes of everyday social relationships.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2013

  The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living

  Argyrou, V.

  European thought is often said to be a gift to the rest of the world, but what if there is no gift as such? What if there is only an economy where every giving is also a taking, and every taking is also a giving? This book extends the question of economies by making a case for an “economy of thought” and a “political economy.” It argues that all thinking and doing presupposes taking, and therefore giving, as the price to pay for taking; or that there exists a “cost of living,” which renders the idea of free thinking and living untenable. The argument is developed against the Enlightenment directive to think for oneself as the means of becoming autonomous and shows that this “light,” given to the rest of the world as a gift, turns out to be nothing.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available July 2019

  The Girl in the Text

  Smith, A. (ed)

  How are girls represented in written and graphic texts, and how do these representations inform our understanding of girlhood? In this volume, contributors examine the girl in the text in order to explore a range of perspectives on girlhood across borders and in relation to their positionality. In literary and transactional texts, girls are presented as heroes who empower themselves and others with lasting effect, as figures of liberating pedagogical practice and educational activism, and as catalysts for discussions of the relationship between desire and ethics. In these varied chapters, a new notion of transnationalism emerges, one rooted not only in the process through which borders between nation-states become more porous, but through which cultural and ethnic imperatives become permeable.

  Subjects: Literary Studies Sociology Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• December 2003

  Girl Making

  A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of Growing Up Female

  Bloustien, G.

  Through the innovative methodology of asking them to record their experiences on videotape, this book offers an evocative and fascinating cross-cultural exploration into the everyday lives of a number of teenage girls from their own broad social, cultural and ethnic perspectives. The use of the video camera by the girls themselves reveals their exploration and experimentation with possible identities, highlighting their awareness that the self is not ready made but rather constituted in the process of continuous performance. The result is an active self-conscious exploration of the continuous "art" of self-making. Through their play, the teenagers are shown to strategically test out various possibilities, while keeping such explorations within the bounds of what is acceptable and permissible in their own micro-cultural worlds. The resulting material challenges previous findings in those feminist and youth anthropological studies based on too narrow a concept of class, ethnicity or populist approaches to culture.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• January 2016

  Girlhood and the Politics of Place

  Mitchell, C. & Rentschler, C. (eds)

  Examining context-specific conditions in which girls live, learn, work, play, and organize deepens the understanding of place-making practices of girls and young women worldwide. Focusing on place across health, literary and historical studies, art history, communications, media studies, sociology, and education allows for investigations of how girlhood is positioned in relation to interdisciplinary and transnational research methodologies, media environments, geographic locations, history, and social spaces. This book offers a comprehensive reading on how girlhood scholars construct and deploy research frameworks that directly engage girls in the research process.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2023

  Glimpses of Hope

  The Rise of Industrial Labor at the Urban Margins of Nepal

  Hoffmann, M.

  Over the last decade, Nepal has witnessed significant urban growth and an expanding urban middle class. Glimpses of Hope tells the story of the people who enable some of the middle-class consumer practices in urban Nepal. The book focuses on workers in areas such as modern food-processing, water-bottling, housebuilding, and sand-mining industries and explores how workers see such forms of work, where union organization can help, and how work opportunities emerge along lines of gender and ethnicity. Although global labor relations have been mostly in decline for decades, this ethnography offers insights and glimpses of hope in terms of labor dynamics and the opportunities various jobs may afford.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2018

  The Global Life of Austerity

  Comparing Beyond Europe

  Rakopoulos, T. (ed)

  Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available March 2018

  Global Sustainability and Communities of Practice

  Maida, C. A. & Beck, S, (eds)

  Collaboration between experts and the public is vital for effective community engagement aimed at improving the lives of the most vulnerable in society, whether at the local or global level. Using case-based and theoretical chapters that examine rural and urban communities of practice, this volume illustrates how participatory researchers and students, as well as policy and community leaders, find ways to engage with the broader public when it comes to global sustainability research and practice.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2002

  Globalization in Southeast Asia

  Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives

  Yamashita, S. & Eades, J.S. (eds)

  The rapid postwar economic growth in the Southeast Asia region has led to a transformation of many of the societies there, together with the development of new types of anthropological research in the region. Local societies with originally quite different cultures have been incorporated into multi-ethnic states with their own projects of nation-building based on the creation of "national cultures" using these indigenous elements. At the same time, the expansion of international capitalism has led to increasing flows of money, people, languages and cultures across national boundaries, resulting in new hybrid social structures and cultural forms.

  This book examines the nature of these processes in contemporary Southeast Asia with detailed case studies drawn from countries across the region, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. At the macro-level these include studies of nation-building and the incorporation of minorities. At the micro-level they range from studies of popular cultural forms, such as music and textiles to the impact of new sects and the world religions on local religious practice. Moving between the global and the local are the various streams of migrants within the region, including labor migrants responding to the changing distribution of economic opportunities and ethnic minorities moving in response to natural disaster.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• May 2008

  God-botherers and Other True-believers

  Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right

  Bailey, F. G.

  When reason fails to guide us in our everyday lives, we turn to faith, to religion; we close our minds; we reject austere reasoning. This rejection, which is a faith-based social and intellectual malignancy, has two unfortunate consequences: it blocks the way to knowledge that might enhance the quality of life and it opens the way to charlatans who exploit the faith of others. Examining two unquestionable malignancies of “the Christian Right” in present-day politics in the United States and the “secular religion” of Hitler’s National Socialism, as well as the third, more complex case of Gandhi, the author asserts that we need religion, but we also need to make sure it does no harm.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2017

  A Goddess in Motion

  Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza

  Canals, R.

  The current practice of the cult of María Lionza is one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela. Based on long-term fieldwork, this book explores the role of images and visual culture within the cult. By adopting a relational approach, A Goddess in Motion shows how the innumerable images of this goddess—represented as an Indian, white or mestizo woman—move constantly from objects to bodies, from bodies to dreams, and from the religion domain to the art world. In short, this book is a fascinating study that sheds light on the role of visual creativity in contemporary religious manifestations.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2020

  Going Forward by Looking Back

  Archaeological Perspectives on Socio-Ecological Crisis, Response, and Collapse

  Riede, F. & Sheets, P. (eds)

  Catastrophes are on the rise due to climate change, as is their toll in terms of lives and livelihoods as world populations rise and people settle into hazardous places. While disaster response and management are traditionally seen as the domain of the natural and technical sciences, awareness of the importance and role of cultural adaptation is essential. This book catalogues a wide and diverse range of case studies of such disasters and human responses. This serves as inspiration for building culturally sensitive adaptations to present and future calamities, to mitigate their impact, and facilitate recoveries.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

• February 2019

  Going to Pentecost

  An Experimental Approach to Studies in Pentecostalism

  Eriksen, A. Blanes, R. L., MacCarthy, M.

  Co-authored by three anthropologists with long–term expertise studying Pentecostalism in Vanuatu, Angola, and Papua New Guinea/the Trobriand Islands respectively, Going to Pentecost offers a comparative study of Pentecostalism in Africa and Melanesia, focusing on key issues as economy, urban sociality, and healing. More than an ordinary comparative book, it recognizes the changing nature of religion in the contemporary world – in particular the emergence of “non-territorial” religion (which is no longer specific to places or cultures) – and represents an experimental approach to the study of global religious movements in general and Pentecostalism in particular.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available November 2021

  Good Enough Mothers

  Practicing Nurture and Motherhood in Chiapas, Mexico

  López, JM

  Motherhood in Mexico is profoundly shaped by the legacy of colonialism. This ethnography situates motherhood in a critical global health analysis of maternal health inequalities and interventions in the southeast state of Chiapas. Using a transitional life course framework, it demonstrates how the transition to motherhood is never complete. Once a good mother is defined, she becomes undefined, the goal posts moved, and the rules confronted.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2017

  The Good Holiday

  Development, Tourism and the Politics of Benevolence in Mozambique

  Baptista, J. A.

  Drawing on ethnographic research in the village of Canhane, which is host to the first community tourism project in Mozambique, The Good Holiday explores the confluence of two powerful industries: tourism and development, and explains when, how and why tourism becomes development and development, tourism. The volume further explores the social and material consequences of this merging, presenting the confluence of tourism and development as a major vehicle for the exercise of ethics, and non-state governance in contemporary life.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Travel and Tourism

• eBook available May 2017

  Grace after Genocide

  Cambodians in the United States

  Mortland, C. A.

  Grace after Genocide is the first comprehensive ethnography of Cambodian refugees, charting their struggle to transition from life in agrarian Cambodia to survival in post-industrial America, while maintaining their identities as Cambodians. The ethnography contrasts the lives of refugees who arrived in America after 1975, with their focus on Khmer traditions, values, and relations, with those of their children who, as descendants of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, have struggled to become Americans in a society that defines them as different. The ethnography explores America’s mid-twentieth-century involvement in Southeast Asia and its enormous consequences on multiple generations of Khmer refugees.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• May 2022

  Grazing Communities

  Pastoralism on the Move and Biocultural Heritage Frictions

  Bindi, L. (ed)

  Pastoralism is a diffused and ancient form of human subsistence and probably one of the most studied by anthropologists at the crossroads between continuities and transformations. The present critical discourse on sustainable and responsible development implies a change of practices, a huge socio-economic transformation, and the return of new shepherds and herders in different European regions. Transhumance and extensive breeding are revitalized as a potential resource for inner and rural areas of Europe against depopulation and as an efficient form of farming deeply influencing landscape and functioning as a perfect eco-system service. This book is an occasion to reconsider grazing communities’ frictions in the new global heritage scenario.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies

• October 2011

  Great Expectations

  Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism

  Skinner, J. & Theodossopoulos, D. (eds)

  The negotiation of expectations in tourism is a complex and dynamic process – one that is central to the imagination of cultural difference. Expectations not only affect the lives and experiences of tourists, but also their hosts, and play an important part in the success or failure of the overall tourism experience. It is for this reason, the authors argue, that special attention should be given to how expectations constitute and sustain tourism. The case studies presented here explore what fuels the desires to visit particular places, to what degree expectations inform the experience of the place, and the frequent disjunctions between tourist expectations and experiences. Careful attention is paid to how the imagination of the visitor inspires the imagination of the host, and vice-versa; how tourists and host communities actively imagine, re-imagine, and shape each other’s lives. This realization, has profound consequences, not solely for academic analysis, but for all those who participate in and work within the tourism industry.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• November 1998

  The Great Immigration

  Russian Jews in Israel

  Siegel, D.

  More than 750,000 Russian Jews arrived in Israel between 1988 and 1996. However, this Great Immigration, as it has been called, has gone largely unnoticed in Israeli public life. Information about this significant event has been sketchy and largely characterized by stereotypes and simplistic generalizations. Based on a number of case studies, this book offers the first in-depth analysis of the life of the new Russian-Jewish immigrants and of the interaction between them and other Israeli citizens. The author explores the peculiar set of problems that the immigrants from the former Soviet Union have been facing and shows how the newcomers, by sheer number, were able to exploit their skills and capacity for political mobilization, to resist bureaucratic control and cultural assimilation. Adaptation did take place but resulted in new institutions and formations of class and leadership. The integration of such vast numbers of immigrants over a relatively short period is a considerable challenge for a society by any standards, but must certainly be considered a unique phenomenon for a relatively small country such as Israel.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Jewish Studies Anthropology (General)

• February 2015

  The Great Reimagining

  Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a 'New' Northern Ireland

  Hocking, B. T.

  While sectarian violence has greatly diminished on the streets of Belfast and Derry, proxy battles over the right to define Northern Ireland’s identity through its new symbolic landscapes continue. Offering a detailed ethnographic account of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict visual transformation, this book examines the official effort to produce new civic images against a backdrop of ongoing political and social struggle. Interviews with politicians, policymakers, community leaders, cultural workers, and residents shed light on the deeply contested nature of seemingly harmonized urban landscapes in societies undergoing radical structural change. Here, the public art process serves as a vital means to understanding the wider politics of a transforming public sphere in an age of globalization and transnational connectivity.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• April 2013

  Greek Whisky

  The Localization of a Global Commodity

  Bampilis, T.

  In many contexts of Greek social life, Scotch whisky has coincidentally become a symbol of “Greekness,” national identity, modernity, and the middle class. This ethnographic study follows the social life of Scotch in Greece through three distinct trajectories in time and space in order to investigate how the meanings of the beverage are projected, negotiated, and acquired by various different networks. By examining the mediascapes of the Greek cultural industry, the Athenian nightlife and entertainment, and the North Aegean drinking habits, the study illustrates how Scotch became associated with modernity, popular music and culture, a lavish style, and an antidomestic masculine mentality.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• June 2006

  Green Encounters

  Shaping and Contesting Environmentalism in Rural Costa Rica

  Vivanco, L. A.

  Since the 1970s and 1980s, Monte Verde, Costa Rica has emerged as one of the most renowned sites of nature conservation and ecotourism in Costa Rica, and some would argue, Latin America. It has received substantial attention in literature and media on tropical conservation, sustainable development, and tourism. Yet most of that analysis has uncritically evaluated the Monte Verde phenomenon, using celebratory language and barely scratching the surface of the many-faceted socio-cultural transformations provoked by and accompanying environmentalism. Because of its stature, Monte Verde represents an ideal case study to examine the socio-cultural and political complexities and dilemmas of practicing environmentalism in rural Costa Rica. Based on many years of close observation, this book offers rich and original material on the ongoing struggles between environmental activists and of collective and oppositional politics to Monte Verde’s new “culture of nature.”

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• August 2013

  Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships

  Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea

  Coupaye, L.

  What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the ‘finished product’ that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal ‘sociology’. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of ‘technology’ within anthropology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Heritage Studies

• eBook available June 2011

  Growing Up in Central Australia

  New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence

  Eickelkamp, U. (ed)

  Surprisingly little research has been carried out about how Australian Aboriginal children and teenagers experience life, shape their social world and imagine the future. This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region. Focusing on the remote communities – roughly 1,200 across the continent – the volume includes case studies of language and family life in small country towns and urban contexts. These studies expertly show that forms of consciousness have changed enormously over the last hundred years for Indigenous societies more so than for the rest of Australia, yet equally notable are the continuities across generations.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2017

  Growing Up in Transit

  The Politics of Belonging at an International School

  Tanu, D.

  “[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration….[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts.”—Social Anthropology

  In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being “international” that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus.

  By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called “Third Culture Kids”, to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities.

  From the introduction:
  When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as “Third Culture Kids” or “global nomads.” … I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of “global citizens” and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Educational Studies

• November 2015

  Gypsy Economy

  Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century

  Brazzabeni, M., Ivone Cunha, M., & Fotta, M. (eds)

  Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2010

  The Hadrami Diaspora

  Community-Building on the Indian Ocean Rim

  Manger, L.

  The Hadramis of South Yemen and the emergence of their diasporic communities throughout the Indian Ocean region are an intriguing facet of the history of this region’s migratory patterns. In the early centuries of migration, the Yemeni, or Hadrami, traveler was both a trader and a religious missionary, making the migrant community both a “trade diaspora” and a “religious diaspora.” This tradition has continued as Hadramis around the world have been linked to networks of extremist, Islamic-inspired movements—Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda and descendant of a prominent Hadrami family, as the most infamous example. However, communities of Hadramis living outside Yemen are not homogenous. The author expertly elucidates the complexity of the diasporic process, showing how it contrasts with the conventional understanding of the Hadrami diaspora as an unchanging society with predefined cultural characteristics originating in the homeland. Exploring ethnic, social, and religious aspects, the author offers a deepened understanding of links between Yemen and Indian Ocean regions (including India, Southeast Asia, and the Horn of Africa) and the emerging international community of Muslims.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• November 2006

  Heart of Lightness

  The Life Story of an Anthropologist

  Turner, E.

  "Edith and Victor Turner were among the most influential researchers and teachers and social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. Together they, and Edie alone after Vic's death, raised the idea of participant observation (and indeed of team learning) to heights and depth most anthropologists never achieve." [From the Foreword]

  This fascinating memoir is a lively testimony to a remarkable partnership and to Edie Turner's own achievements during more than two decades after Victor's untimely death.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• July 1996

  The Hegemonic Male

  Masculinity in a Portuguese Town

  Vale de Almeida, M.

  The construction of masculinity is becoming a field of growing interest because it is opening up new and fascinating perspectives, thus adding a further dimension to Gender Studies. However, so far the analysis has focused mostly on homosexuality. By contrast, the author examines social processes and relations that constitute hegemonic masculinity, the central model that attempts to subordinate alternative masculinities, and which is the model of male domination, compulsory monogamy, heterosexuality and reproduction. It is fascinating to follow the author as he gradually unfolds this kind of masculinity in its nearly pure state. Moreover, he involves the reader in his critical reflections on the material and invites him or her to give some thought to such wider questions as whether the hegemonic male is more resistant to change in oral cultures than in urban settings, or up to which point the agents of domination are also its victims. In fact, the author concludes that the hegemonic male is an ideal model practically unattainable by any single man, which exerts over all men a strong controlling power and often forces on them ritualization of everyday behavior that leads to an impoverishment of their lives.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2020

  Heirs of the Bamboo

  Identity and Ambivalence among the Eurasian Macanese

  Gaspar, M. C.

  In 1999 Macao, previously a territory under Portuguese rule, was handed over to the People’s Republic of China and transformed into one of the gambling capitals of the world. These political and economic phenomena were accompanied by unprecedented social changes that, ultimately, have redefined the Macanese identity. This book is about the Macanese living in Portugal and their intimate social networks in loco and interactions with their counterparts in Macao and elsewhere in the diaspora, by the use of Internet. Memory and ambivalence, deeply associated with kinship, language, food and heritage, are the cornerstones of this research, which overturns colonial stereotypes and concepts of Macanese cultural purity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• August 1998

  Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe

  The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus

  Hirschon, R.

  The war between Greece and Turkey ended in 1922 in what Greeks call the Asia Minor catastrophe, a disaster greater than the fall of Constantinople in 1453, for it marked the end of Hellenism in the ancient heartland of Asia Minor. In 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne ratified the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, involving the movement of some 1.5 million persons. Well over one million Greek refugees entered the Greek state in two years, increasing its population by about a quarter. Given the far-reaching consequences for both Greece and Turkey, surprisingly few studies exist of the numerous people so drastically affected by this uprooting. Over half a century later a large section of the urban refugee population in Greece still claimed a separate Asia Minor identity, despite sharing with other Greeks a common culture, religion, and language.

  Based on the author's long-term fieldwork, this ethnography of Kokkinia - an urban quarter in Piraeus - reveals how its inhabitants' sense of separate identity was constructed, an aspect of continuity with their well-defined identity as an Orthodox Christian minority in the Ottoman Empire. This rare study of an urban refugee group fifty years after settlement provides new insights into the phenomenon of ethnicity both structural and cultural. In detailed analysis of values, symbolic dimensions, and of social organization the book illustrates the strength and efficacy of cultural values in transcending material deprivation.

  The reprint of this study in paperback is particularly timely, marking as it does the 75th anniversary of this major event in the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2023

  Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe

  The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus

  Hirschon, R.

  Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe is a landmark work in the areas of anthropology and migration studies. Since its first publication in 1989, this classic study has remained in demand. The third edition is published to mark the centenary of the 1923 Lausanne Convention which led to the movement of some 1.5 million persons between Greece and Turkey at the conclusion of their war. It includes updated material with a new Preface, Afterword by Ayhan Aktar, and map of the wider region. The new Preface provides the context in which the original research took place, assesses its innovative aspects and explores the dimensions of history and identity which are predominant themes in the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available November 2020

  The Helmand Baluch

  A Native Ethnography of the People of Southwest Afghanistan

  Amiri, G. R.

  In the 1970s, in his capacity as government representative from the Afghan Institute of Archaeology, Ghulam Rahman Amiri accompanied a joint Afghan-US archaeological mission to the Sistan region of southwest Afghanistan. The results of his work were published in Farsi as a descriptive ethnographic monograph. The Helmand Baluch is the first English translation of Amiri’s extraordinary encounters. This rich ethnography describes the cultural, political, and economic systems of the Baluch people living in the lower Helmand River Valley of Afghanistan. It is an area that has received little study since the early 20th Century, yet is a region with a remarkable history in one of the most volatile territories in the world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Archaeology

• October 2016

  The Heritage Arena

  Reinventing Cheese in the Italian Alps

  Grasseni, C.

  In Europe a number of production and communication strategies have long tried to establish local products as resources for local development. At the foot of the Alps, this scenario appears in all its contradictions, especially in relation to cheese production. The Heritage Arena focuses on the saga of Strachitunt, a cheese that has been designated an EU Protected Designation of Origin after years of negotiation and competition involving cheese-makers, merchants, and Slow Food activists. The book explores how the reinvention of cheese as a form of heritage is an ongoing and dynamic process rife with conflict and drama.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition

• eBook available November 2019

  Heritage Movements in Asia

  Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity

  Mozaffari, A. & Jones, T. (eds)

  Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Museum Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2018

  Hierarchy and Value

  Comparative Perspectives on Moral Order

  Hickel, J. & Haynes, N. (eds)

  Globalization promised to bring about a golden age of liberal individualism, breaking down hierarchies of kinship, caste, and gender around the world and freeing people to express their true, authentic agency. But in some places globalization has spurred the emergence of new forms of hierarchy—or the reemergence of old forms—as people try to reconstitute an imagined past of stable moral order. This is evident from the Islamic revival in the Middle East to visions of the 1950s family among conservatives in the United States. Why does this happen and how do we make sense of this phenomenon? Why do some communities see hierarchy as desireable? In this book, leading anthropologists draw on insightful ethnographic case studies from around the world to address these trends. Together, they develop a theory of hierarchy that treats it both as a relational form and a framework for organizing ideas about the social good.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2014

  Hindi Is Our Ground, English Is Our Sky

  Education, Language, and Social Class in Contemporary India

  LaDousa, C.

  A sea change has occurred in the Indian economy in the last three decades, spurring the desire to learn English. Most scholars and media venues have focused on English exclusively for its ties to processes of globalization and the rise of new employment opportunities.  The pursuit of class mobility, however, involves Hindi as much as English in the vast Hindi-Belt of northern India.  Schools are institutions on which class mobility depends, and they are divided by Hindi and English in the rubric of “medium,” the primary language of pedagogy. This book demonstrates that the school division allows for different visions of what it means to belong to the nation and what is central and peripheral in the nation. It also shows how the language-medium division reverberates unevenly and unequally through the nation, and that schools illustrate the tensions brought on by economic liberalization and middle-class status.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2020

  Homo Itinerans

  Towards a Global Ethnography of Afghanistan

  Monsutti, A.

  Afghan society has been marked in a lasting way by war and the exodus of part of its population. While many have emigrated to countries across the world, they have been matched by the flow of experts who arrive in Afghanistan after having been in other war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Palestine or East Timor. This book builds on more than two decades of ethnographic travels in some twenty countries, bringing the readers from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to Europe, North America and Australia. It describes the everyday life and transnational circulations of Afghan refugees and expatriates.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available October 2016

  Honour and Violence

  Gender, Power and Law in Southern Pakistan

  Shah, N.

  The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available September 2021

  Hope and Insufficiency

  Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison

  Douglas-Jones, R. & Shaffner, J. (eds)

  A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the concept’s role in a variety of different settings including government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories, assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed critical purchase on its persuasive power.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2017

  House of the Waterlily

  A Novel of the Ancient Maya World

  Carmean, K.

  Set in the Maya civilization’s Late Classic Period House of the Waterlily is a historical novel centered on Lady Winik, a young Maya royal. Through tribulations that mirror the political calamities of the Late Classic world, Winik’s personal story immerses the reader not only in her daily life, but also in the difficult decisions Maya men and women must have faced as they tried to navigate a rapidly changing world. Kelli Carmean’s novel brings to life a people and an era remote from our own, yet recognizably human all the same.

  Subjects: Archaeology Literary Studies Memory Studies Anthropology (General)

• July 2006

  Household Archaeology on the Northwest Coast

  Sobel, E. A., Gahr, D. A. T., & Ames, K. A. (eds)

  Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume is the cumulative result of more than a decade of research focusing on household archaeology as a means to gain understanding of the evolution of social complexity, regardless of underlying economy.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2021

  How is a Man Supposed to be a Man?

  Male Childlessness – a Life Course Disrupted

  Hadley, R. A.

  The global trend of declining fertility rates and an increasingly ageing population has serious implications for individuals and institutions alike. Childless men are mostly excluded from ageing, social science and reproduction scholarship and almost completely absent from most national statistics. This unique book examines the lived experiences of a hidden and disenfranchised population: men who wanted to be fathers. It explores the complex intersections that influence childlessness over the life course.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2021

  How Kinship Systems Change

  On the Dialectics of Practice and Classification

  Parkin, R.

  Using some of his landmark publications on kinship, along with a new introduction, chapter and conclusion, Robert Parkin discusses here the changes in kinship terminologies and marriage practices, as well as the dialectics between them. The chapters also focus on a suggested trajectory, linking South Asia and Europe and the specific question of the status of Crow-Omaha systems. The collection culminates in the argument that, whereas marriage systems and practices seem infinitely varied when examined from a very close perspective, the terminologies that accompany them are much more restricted.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  How Materials Matter

  Design, Innovation and Materiality in the Pacific

  Were, G.

  How does design and innovation shape people’s lives in the Pacific? Focusing on plant materials from the region, How Materials Matter reveals ways in which a variety of people – from craftswomen and scientists to architects and politicians – work with materials to transform worlds. Recognizing the fragile and ephemeral nature of plant fibres, this work delves into how the biophysical properties of certain leaves and their aesthetic appearance are utilized to communicate information and manage different forms of relations. It breaks new ground by situating plant materials at the centre of innovation in a region.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available December 2010

  Human Diet and Nutrition in Biocultural Perspective

  Past Meets Present

  Moffat, T. & Prowse, T. (eds)

  There are not many areas that are more rooted in both the biological and social-cultural aspects of humankind than diet and nutrition. Throughout human history nutrition has been shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces, and in turn, access to food and nutrition has altered the course and direction of human societies. Using a biocultural approach, the contributors to this volume investigate the ways in which food is both an essential resource fundamental to human health and an expression of human culture and society. The chapters deal with aspects of diet and human nutrition through space and time and span prehistoric, historic, and contemporary societies spread over various geographical regions, including Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia to highlight how biology and culture are inextricably linked.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Archaeology

• eBook available December 2016

  Human Origins

  Contributions from Social Anthropology

  Power, C., Finnegan, M. & Callan, H. (eds)

  Human Origins brings together new thinking by social anthropologists and other scholars on the evolution of human culture and society. No other discipline has more relevant expertise to consider the emergence of humans as the symbolic species. Yet, social anthropologists have been conspicuously absent from debates about the origins of modern humans. These contributions explore why that is, and how social anthropology can shed light on early kinship and economic relations, gender politics, ritual, cosmology, ethnobiology, medicine, and the evolution of language.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2016

  Humour, Comedy and Laughter

  Obscenities, Paradoxes, Insights and the Renewal of Life

  Sciama, L.D. (ed)

  Anthropological writings on humor are not very numerous or extensive, but they do contain a great deal of insight into the diverse mental and social processes that underlie joking and laughter. On the basis of a wide range of ethnographic and textual materials, the chapters examine the cognitive, social, and moral aspects of humor and its potential to bring about a sense of amity and mutual understanding, even among different and possibly hostile people. Unfortunately, though, cartoons, jokes, and parodies can cause irremediable distress and offence. Nevertheless, contributors’ cross-cultural evidence confirms that the positive aspects of humor far outweigh the danger of deepening divisions and fueling hostilities

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies

• December 2010

  Hunters in the Barrens

  The Naskapi on the Edge of the White Man's World

  Henriksen, G.

  This comprehensive study of the Naskapi Indians of Labrador is based on an anthropologist’s life with them between 1966 and 1968, when families still followed the traditional pattern of hunting on the barrens during the winter and returning to their costal settlements in the summer. Now the Naskapi live in coastal settlements; no longer in possession of their own culture, they have become sedentaries under white tutelage. This description of two antithetical worlds provides valuable insights for anyone interested in contemporary native rights issues.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available October 2016

  Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness

  An Ethnography of the Degraded in Postsocialist Poland

  Rakowski, T.

  The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Hunters, Gatherers, and Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of unemployed miners, scrap collectors, and poverty-stricken village residents. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives. As it turns out, the initial sense of degradation and helplessness often gives way to images of resourcefulness that reveal unusual hunting-and-gathering skills.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2014

  Hunters, Predators and Prey

  Inuit Perceptions of Animals

  Laugrand, F. & Oosten, J.

  Inuit hunting traditions are rich in perceptions, practices and stories relating to animals and human beings. The authors examine key figures such as the raven, an animal that has a central place in Inuit culture as a creator and a trickster, and qupirruit, a category consisting of insects and other small life forms. After these non-social and inedible animals, they discuss the dog, the companion of the hunter, and the fellow hunter, the bear, considered to resemble a human being. A discussion of the renewal of whale hunting accompanies the chapters about animals considered ‘prey par excellence’: the caribou, the seals and the whale, symbol of the whole. By giving precedence to Inuit categories such as ‘inua’ (owner) and ‘tarniq’ (shade) over European concepts such as ‘spirit ‘and ‘soul’, the book compares and contrasts human beings and animals to provide a better understanding of human-animal relationships in a hunting society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• October 2008

  I Dreamed the Animals

  Kaniuekutat: The Life of an Innu Hunter

  Henriksen, G.

  This is Kaniuekutat's book. In it, he tells the story of his life and that of Innu culture in the northern parts of Labrador. The pages of this book are filled with the voice of Kaniuekutat giving his account of an Innu hunter's life and the problems and distress that have been caused by sedentarization and village life. Kaniuekutat invites us to see Innu society and culture from the inside, the way he lives it and reflects upon it. He was greatly concerned that young Innu may lose their traditional culture and the skills necessary to make a living as hunters, and wanted to convey a message: the Innu must take care of their language, their culture and their traditions.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• December 2002

  Identities

  Time, Difference and Boundaries

  Friese, H. (ed)

  "Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.

  Subjects: History (General) Literary Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• August 1997

  Identity, Gender and Poverty

  New Perspectives on Caste and Tribe in Rajasthan

  Unnithan-Kumar, M.

  Most studies of the so-called tribal communities in India stress their social, economic, and political differences from communities that are organized on the basis of caste. It was this apparent contrast between tribal and caste lifestyle and, moreover, the paucity of material on tribal groups, that motivated the author to undertake this study of a poor "tribal" community, the Girasia, in northwestern India.

  While carrying out her fieldwork, the author soon became aware that the traditional tribe-caste categories needed to be revised; in fact, she found them more often than not to be constructs by outsiders, mostly academic. Of greater importance for an understanding of the Girasia was the wider and more complex issue of self-perception and identification by others that must be seen in the context of their poverty as well as in the strategic and shifting use of kinship, gender and class relations in the region.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2017

  Images from Paradise

  The Visual Communication of the European Union's Federalist Utopia

  Salgó, E.

  Drawing upon the disciplines of politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and cinema studies, Salgó presents a new way of looking at the “art of European unification.” The official visual narratives of the European Union constitute the main object of inquiry – the iconography of the new series of euro banknotes and the videos through which the supranational elite seek to generate “collective effervescence,” allow for a European carnival to take place, and prompt citizens to pledge allegiance to the sacred dogma of the “ever closer union,” thereby strengthening the mythical sources of the organization’s legitimacy. The author seeks to illustrate how and why the federalist utopia turned into a political soteriology after the outbreak of the 2008 crisis.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Media Studies

• eBook available July 2011

  Imagining the Post-Apartheid State

  An Ethnographic Account of Namibia

  Friedman, J. T.

  In northwest Namibia, people’s political imagination offers a powerful insight into the post-apartheid state. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, this book focuses on the former South African apartheid regime and the present democratic government; it compares the perceptions and practices of state and customary forms of judicial administration, reflects upon the historical trajectory of a chieftaincy dispute in relation to the rooting of state power and examines everyday forms of belonging in the independent Namibian State. By elucidating the State through a focus on the social, historical and cultural processes that help constitute it, this study helps chart new territory for anthropology, and it contributes an ethnographic perspective to a wider set of interdisciplinary debates on the State and state processes.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available December 2016

  The Imbalance of Power

  Leadership, Masculinity and Wealth in the Amazon

  Brightman, M

  Amerindian societies have an iconic status in classical political thought. For Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau, the native American ‘state of nature’ operates as a foil for the European polity. Challenging this tradition, The Imbalance of Power demonstrates ethnographically that the Carib speaking indigenous societies of the Guiana region of Amazonia do not fit conventional characterizations of ‘simple’ political units with ‘egalitarian’ political ideologies and ‘harmonious’ relationships with nature. Marc Brightman builds a persuasive and original theory of Amerindian politics: far from balanced and egalitarian, Carib societies are rife with tension and difference; but this imbalance conditions social dynamism and a distinctive mode of cohesion. The Imbalance of Power is based on the author’s fieldwork in partnership with Vanessa Grotti, who is working on a companion volume entitled Living with the Enemy: First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• February 1999

  Immigrants and Bureaucrats

  Ethiopians in an Israeli Absorption Center

  Hertzog, E.

  Since Israel is primarily a country of immigrants, the state takes on the responsibility for the settlement and integration of each new group. It therefore sees its role as benevolent and indispensable to the welfare of the immigrants. This be true to some extent. However, the overwhelming effect, the author argues, is exactly the opposite: in her study of Ethiopian immigrants she reaches the conclusion that the absorption centers, which are central to Israeli immigration policy, present an extreme case of bureaucratic control over immigrants; they hinder rather than facilitate integration through the creation of power-dependence relations, with immigrants - whose lives and social structures are constantly interfered with by the officials - being cast as weak, defenseless and needy. They are reduced to helpless charges of these officials whose main goals are to expand and perpetuate their respective organizations and to consolidate their own positions within them. Thus the absorption centers, rather than furthering integration, create dependence on state control and social segregation.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2008

  The Impact of Electricity

  Development, Desires and Dilemmas

  Winther, T.

  How does everyday life change when electricity becomes available to a group of people for the first time? Why do some groups tend to embrace this icon of development while other groups actively fight against it? This book examines the effects of electricity’s arrival in an African, rural community. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar at different points in time, the author provides a compelling account of the social implications in question. The rhythm of life changes and life is speeding up. Sexuality and marriage patterns are affected. And a range of social relations, e.g. between generations and genders, as well as relations between human beings and spirits, become modified. Despite men and women’s general appreciation of the new services electricity provides, new dilemmas emerge. By using electricity as a guide through the social landscape, the particularities of social and cultural life in this region emerge. Simultaneously, the book invites readers to understand the ways that electricity affects and becomes implicated in our everyday life.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2021

  In Memory of Times to Come

  Ironies of History in Southeastern Papua New Guinea

  Demian, M.

  Drawing on twenty years of research, this book examines the historical perspective of a Pacific people who saw “globalization” come and go. Suau people encountered the leading edge of missionization and colonialism in Papua New Guinea and were active participants in the Second World War. In Memory of Times to Come offers a nuanced account of how people assess their own experience of change over the course of a critical century. It asks two key questions: What does it mean to claim that global connections are in the past rather than the present or the future, and what does it mean to claim that one has lost one’s culture, but not because anyone else took it away or destroyed it?

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  In Pursuit of Belonging

  Forging an Ethical Life in European-Turkish Spaces

  Rottmann, S, B.

  Belonging is a not a state that we achieve, but a struggle that we wage. The struggle for belonging is more difficult if one is returning to a homeland after many years abroad. In Pursuit of Belonging is an ethnography of Turkish migrants’ struggle for understanding, intimacy and appreciation when they return from Germany to their Turkish homeland. Drawing on an established tradition of life story writing in anthropology, Rottmann conveys the struggle to forge an ethical life by relating the experiences of a second-generation German-Turkish woman named Leyla.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Sociology

• eBook available January 2016

  In Search of Legitimacy

  How Outsiders Become Part of the Afro-Brazilian Capoeira Tradition

  Griffith, L. M.

  Every year, countless young adults from affluent, Western nations travel to Brazil to train in capoeira, the dance/martial art form that is one of the most visible strands of the Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition. In Search of Legitimacy explores why “first world” men and women leave behind their jobs, families, and friends to pursue a strenuous training regimen in a historically disparaged and marginalized practice. Using the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage—studying with a local master at a historical point of origin—the author examines how non-Brazilian capoeiristas learn their art and claim legitimacy while navigating the complexities of wealth disparity, racial discrimination, and cultural appropriation.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• August 2006

  In Search of Salt

  Changes in Beti (Cameroon) Society, 1880-1960

  Quinn, F.

  Relatively recent Bantu-speaking migrants to central Cameroon, the Beti have had an eventful history. Based on extensive interviews and traditional Beti (Fang) poetry, in addition to German and French archival sources, the author of this readable study recreates the social structure of the Beti and their self-perceptions in pre-colonial times, their disruptive encounters with first German (1880-1918) and then French (1918-1960) colonialism, until Cameroon’s independence.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available September 2015

  In the Absence of the Gift

  New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community

  Rasmussen, A. E.

  By adopting ideas like “development,” members of a Papua New Guinean community find themselves continuously negotiating what can be expected of a relative or a community member. Nearly half the people born on the remote Mbuke Islands become teachers, businessmen, or bureaucrats in urban centers, while those who stay at home ask migrant relatives “What about me?” This detailed ethnography sheds light on remittance motivations and documents how terms like “community” can be useful in places otherwise permeated by kinship. As the state withdraws, Mbuke people explore what social ends might be reached through involvement with the cash economy.

  Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2015

  In the Event

  Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments

  Meinert, L. & Kapferer, B. (eds)

  Events are “generative moments” in at least three senses: events are created by and condense larger-scale social structures; as moments, they spark and give rise to new social processes; in themselves, events may also serve to analyze social situations and relationships. Based on ethnographic studies from around the world—varying from rituals and meetings over protests and conflicts to natural disasters and management—this volume analyzes generative moments through events that hold the key to understanding larger social situations. These events—including the Ashura ritual in Bahrain, social cleavages in South Africa, a Buddhist cave in Nepal, drought in Burkina Faso, an earthquake in Pakistan, the cartoon crisis in Denmark, corporate management at Bang & Olufsen, protest meetings in Europe, and flooding and urban citizenship in Mozambique—are not simply destructive disasters, crises, and conflicts, but also generative and constitutive of the social.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• March 2023

  In the Meantime

  Toward an Anthropology of the Possible

  Masquelier, A. & Durham, D. (eds)

  The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• January 2001

  In the Mind's Eye

  Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Evolution of Human Cognition

  Nowell, A. (ed)

  The last decade has witnessed a sophistication and proliferation in the number of studies focused on the evolution of human cognition, reflecting a renewed interest in the evolution of the human mind in anthropology and in many other disciplines. The complexity and enormity of this topic requires the coordinated efforts of many researchers. This volume brings together the disciplines of palaeontology, psychology, anatomy, and primatology. Together, they address a number of issues, including the evolution of sex differences in spatial cognition, the role of archaeology in the cognitive sciences, the relationships between brain size, cranial reorganization and hominid cognition, and the role of language and information processing in human evolution.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• October 2007

  Inclusionary Rhetoric/Exclusionary Practices

  Left-wing Politics and Migrants in Italy

  Però, D.

  Migration and multiculturalism are hotly discussed in public debates across Europe. Whereas ethnographic research has begun to examine the Right in this context, the Left remains largely unexplored. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Bologna – the show-case city of the Italian Left – this book provides fresh perspectives on how the contemporary Left "frames" these issues in practice and how such framing has changed in recent decades. By focusing on the official rhetoric grassroots discourses, policy and civil societal practices of the Left as well as on the immigrants' own views, this book timely offers a comprehensive, vivid, and critical account of changing ideas about ethnicity, class, identity and difference in "progressive" politics and of the implications that such ideas have for the incorporation of migrants in Europe.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2018

  Indeterminacy

  Waste, Value, and the Imagination

  Alexander, C. & Sanchez, A. (eds)

  What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2017

  Indigeneity and the Sacred

  Indigenous Revival and the Conservation of Sacred Natural Sites in the Americas

  Sarmiento, F. & Hitchner, S. (eds)

  This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

• eBook available December 2017

  Indigeneity on the Move

  Varying Manifestations of a Contested Concept

  Gerharz, E., Uddin, N., & Chakkarath, P. (eds)

  “Indigeneity” has become a prominent yet contested concept in national and international politics, as well as within the social sciences. This edited volume draws from authors representing different disciplines and perspectives, exploring the dependence of indigeneity on varying sociopolitical contexts, actors, and discourses with the ultimate goal of investigating the concept’s scientific and political potential.

  Subjects: Theory and Methodology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2017

  Indigenist Mobilization

  Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala

  Steur, L.

  In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of indigenous identity. Why did a notion of indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles? Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available August 2011

  Indigenous Peoples and Demography

  The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics

  Axelsson, P. & Sköld, P. (eds)

  When researchers want to study indigenous populations they are dependent upon the highly variable way in which states or territories enumerate, categorise and differentiate indigenous people. In this volume, anthropologists, historians, demographers and sociologists have come together for the first time to examine the historical and contemporary construct of indigenous people in a number of fascinating geographical contexts around the world, including Canada, the United States, Colombia, Russia, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Australia. Using historical and demographical evidence, the contributors explore the creation and validity of categories for enumerating indigenous populations, the use and misuse of ethnic markers, micro-demographic investigations, and demographic databases, and thereby show how the situation varies substantially between countries.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2008

  Indigenous Peoples, Civil Society, and the Neo-liberal State in Latin America

  Fischer, E. F. (ed)

  In recent years the concept and study of “civil society” has received a lot of attention from political scientists, economists, and sociologists, but less so from anthropologists. A ground-breaking ethnographic approach to civil society as it is formed in indigenous communities in Latin America, this volume explores the multiple potentialities of civil society’s growth and critically assesses the potential for sustained change. Much recent literature has focused on the remarkable gains made by civil society and the chapters in this volume reinforce this trend while also showing the complexity of civil society - that civil society can itself sometimes be uncivil. In doing so, these insightful contributions speak not only to Latin American area studies but also to the changing shape of global systems of political economy in general.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• September 1997

  Indigenous Rights and Development

  Self-Determination in an Amazonian Community

  Gray, A.

  The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of the southeastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s, they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the last fifteen years, Arakmbut survival has been under threat from a goldrush that has attracted hundreds of colonists onto their territories. This trilogy of books traces the ways in which the Arakmbut overcome the dangers that surround them: their mythology and cultural strength; their social flexibility; and their capacity to incorporate non-indigenous concepts and activities into their defence strategies. Each area is punctuated by the constant presence of the invisible spirit, which provides a seamless theme connecting the books to eachother.

  Over a period of about two decades the indigenous movement has grown into an international force, making a marked impact on the United Nations and the International Labor Organization. In this volume, the author looks at the growing consciousness among the Arakmbut who are increasingly demanding that their rights to their territories and resources should be respected in tandem with the growing development of indigenous rights internationally. However, the author points to a significant difference of perception: whereas non-indigenous human-rights legislation receives its legitimacy by judicial means, the Arakmbut find their legal system legitimized through the spirit world. The invisibility of this world makes it appear non-existent to non-indigenous observers. However, to overlook its importance prevents outsiders from understanding and appreciating its significance in the Arakmbut struggle for survival.

  Buy all three volumes for 20% discount

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2009

  Indispensable Eyesores

  An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings

  Hoorn, M. v der

  Collapsing concrete colossuses, run-down overgrown skeletons, immutable architectural misfits: the outcasts from our built environment, which we are dying to dispose of — and yet cannot do without — have inspired many ghost stories, crime novels and urban legends. Such narratives reveal the significance of architectural eyesores for the people who live or work in or near them. After exploring various approaches to building lives and deaths, the author presents a rich variety of undesired edifices in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and investigates the different methods used to dispose of them: eliminating, damaging, transforming or ‘reframing’ them, abandoning them to progressive dilapidation or virtually rejecting them. Discarding an edifice, however, need not bring its social life to an end. This analysis continues with a reflection on the afterlife of unwanted buildings, and concludes with a discussion on the life expectancy of buildings, their multi-sensory materiality and ‘thingly’ agency.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available March 2018

  Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism

  Precarity, Class, and the Neoliberal Subject

  Hann, C. & Parry, J. (eds)

  Bringing together ethnographic case studies of industrial labor from different parts of the world, Industrial Labor on the Margins of Capitalism explores the increasing casualization of workforces and the weakening power of organized labor. This division owes much to state policies and is reflected in local understandings of class. By exploring this relationship, these essays question the claim that neoliberal ideology has become the new ‘commonsense’ of our times and suggest various propositions about the conditions that create employment regimes based on flexible labor.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• July 2023

  Innovation and Implementation

  Critical Reflections on New Approaches to Historic Mortuary Data Collection, Analysis and Dissemination

  Veit, R. & Mytum, H. (eds)

  Providing a comprehensive set of guidance to assist researchers wishing to carry out, curate and disseminate field research at a historic burial ground, chapters offer up to date methods for surface and subsurface survey and for the recording and archiving of burial monument data. Divided into three parts considering documentary research and recording of mortuary landscapes, reflections on memorial recording projects, and archiving and wider dissemination of data and interpretations. Also included is the archaeological potential of pet cemeteries and other pet memorials. Discussions therefore include how methodologies may or may not be applicable to both human and animal subjects.

  Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)

• July 1996

  Insiders and Outsiders

  Paradise and Reality in Mallorca

  Waldren, J.

  The indigenous population of Deià has lived side by side with increasing numbers of foreigners over the past century, and what has occurred there over this period offers an example of how the population of one Mediterranean village has gained full advantage from the economic opportunities opened up by foreign investments, without losing the fabric of social relations, the meaning and values of their culture. Deià has been able to continue as a community with its own symbolic boundaries and identity, not in spite of the outsiders (some of whom are well-known literary personalities, artists and musicians) but because of their presence. This study shows how, under the impact of wars, migration, national politics, global economic and technological developments and especially tourism, the categories of Insider and Outsider are contracted and expanded, and reinterpreted to fit the constantly changing "reality" of the society; they assume different meanings at different times. The conflicts and resulting compromises over a hundred-year period have provided a sense of history that allows each group to define, develop, adapt and sustain their sense of belonging to their own communities.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2020

  Institutionalised Dreams

  The Art of Managing Foreign Aid

  Drążkiewicz, E.

  Using examples from Poland, Elżbieta Drążkiewicz explores the question of why states become donors and  individuals decide to share their wealth with others through foreign aid. She comes to the conclusion that the concept of foreign aid requires the establishment of a specific moral economy which links national ideologies and local cultures of charitable giving with broader ideas about the global political economy. It is through these processes that faith in foreign aid interventions as a solution to global issues is generated. The book also explores the relationship linking a state institution with its NGO partners, as well as international players such as the EU or OECD.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• April 2023

  Integrating Strangers

  Sherbro Identity and The Politics of Reciprocity along the Sierra Leonean Coast

  Ménard, A.

  Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies

• eBook available May 2014

  Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics

  Essays in Historical Realism

  Smith, G.

  Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available May 2018

  Intimate Mobilities

  Sexual Economies, Marriage and Migration in a Disparate World

  Groes, C. & Fernandez, N. T. (eds)

  As globalization and transnational encounters intensify, people’s mobility is increasingly conditioned by intimacy, ranging from love, desire, and sexual liaisons to broader family, kinship, and conjugal matters. This book explores the entanglement of mobility and intimacy in various configurations throughout the world. It argues that rather than being distinct and unrelated phenomena, intimacy-related mobilities constitute variations of cross-border movements shaped by and deeply entwined with issues of gender, kinship, race, and sexuality, as well as local and global powers and border restrictions in a disparate world.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available October 2019

  Inward Looking

  The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective

  Marinov, A. G.

  At present, Roma are an integral part of Europe, though they face structural and social inequalities and different forms of exclusion and discrimination. Inward Looking seeks to understand the relationship between Romani identity, performance and migration. Particularly, it studies the idea of ‘Romanipe’ through the prism of the personal accounts of Romani migrants. It also seeks to understand the relationships between the Romani groups in Europe, due to their increased travel and convergence, and predict the effects of migration on (new) Romani consciousness. The findings are based on qualitative data gathered from Romani migrants from three towns in Bulgaria.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available April 2013

  Irish/ness Is All Around Us

  Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland

  Zenker, O.

  Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Cultural Studies (General)

• June 2008

  Iron in the Soul

  Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus

  Loizos, P.

  In his vivid, lively account of how Greek Cypriot villagers coped with a thirty-year displacement, Peter Loïzos follows a group of people whom he encountered as prosperous farmers in 1968, yet found as disoriented refugees when revisiting in 1975. By providing a forty year in-depth perspective unusual in the social sciences, this study yields unconventional insights into the deeper meanings of displacement. It focuses on reconstruction of livelihoods, conservation of family, community, social capital, health (both physical and mental), religious and political perceptions. The author argues for a closer collaboration between anthropology and the life sciences, particularly medicine and social epidemiology, but suggests that qualitative life-history data have an important role to play in the understanding of how people cope with collective stress.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• January 2018

  Island Historical Ecology

  Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean

  Siegel, P. (ed)

  In the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.

  Subjects: Archaeology Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2019

  It Happens Among People

  Resonances and Extensions of the Work of Fredrik Barth

  Wu, K. & Weller, R. P. (eds)

  Written by eleven leading anthropologists from around the world, this volume extends the insights of Fredrik Barth, one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century, to push even further at the frontiers of anthropology and honor his memory. As a collection, the chapters thus expand Barth’s pioneering work on values, further develop his insights on human agency and its potential creativity, as well as continuing to develop the relevance for his work as a way of thinking about and beyond the state. The work is grounded on his insistence that theory should grow only from observed life.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2010

  The Ju/’hoan San of Nyae Nyae and Namibian Independence

  Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Southern Africa

  Biesele, M. & Hitchcock, R. K.

  The Ju/’hoan San, or Ju/’hoansi, of Namibia and Botswana are perhaps the most fully described indigenous people in all of anthropology. This is the story of how this group of former hunter-gatherers, speaking an exotic click language, formed a grassroots movement that led them to become a dynamic part of the new nation that grew from the ashes of apartheid South West Africa. While coverage of this group in the writings of Richard Lee, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and films by John Marshall includes extensive information on their traditional ways of life, this book continues the story as it has unfolded since 1990. Peopled with accounts of and from contemporary Ju>/’hoan people, the book gives newly-literate Ju/’hoansi the chance to address the world with their own voices. In doing so, the images and myths of the Ju/’hoan and other San (previously called “Bushmen”) as either noble savages or helpless victims are discredited. This important book demonstrates the responsiveness of current anthropological advocacy to the aspirations of one of the best-known indigenous societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available June 2016

  Keywords of Mobility

  Critical Engagements

  Salazar, N. B. & Jayaram, K. (eds)

  Scholars from various disciplines have used key concepts to grasp mobilities, but as of yet, a working vocabulary of these has not been fully developed. Given this context and inspired in part by Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976), this edited volume presents contributions that critically analyze mobility-related keywords: capital, cosmopolitanism, freedom, gender, immobility, infrastructure, motility, and regime. Each chapter provides an historical context, a critical analysis of how the keyword has been used in relation to mobility, and a conclusion that proposes future usage or research.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism

• July 1996

  Kingdom on Mount Cameroon

  Studies in the History of the Cameroon Coast 1500-1970

  Ardener, E.

  The Bakweri people of Mount Cameroon, an active volcano on the coast of West Africa a few degrees north of the equator, have had a varied and at times exciting history which has brought them into contact, not only with other West African peoples, but with merchants, missionaries, soldiers and administrators from Portugal, Holland, England, Jamaica, Sweden, Germany and more recently France.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• August 2006

  The Kinning of Foreigners

  Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective

  Howell, S.

  Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of ‘the best interest of the child’, and how the part played by the ‘psycho.technocrats’ effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available October 2007

  Kinship in Europe

  Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900)

  Sabean, D. W., Teuscher, S., & Mathieu, J. (eds)

  Since the publication of Philippe Ariès’s book, Centuries of Childhood, in the early 1960s, there has been great interest among historians in the history of the family and the household. A central aspect of the debate relates the story of the family to implicit notions of modernization, with the rise of the nuclear family in the West as part of its economic and political success. During the past decade, however, that synthesis has begun to break down. Historians have begun to examine kinship - the way individual families are connected to each other through marriage and descent - finding that during the most dynamic period in European industrial development, class formation, and state reorganization, Europe became a “kinship hot” society. The essays in this volume explore two major transitions in kinship patterns - at the end of the Middle Ages and at the end of the eighteenth century - in an effort to reset the agenda in family history.

  Subjects: History: Medieval/Early Modern Anthropology (General) History: 18th/19th Century

• December 2014

  Kinship, Community, and Self

  Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean

  Coy, J., Marschke, B., Poley, J., & Verhoeven, C. (eds)

  David Warren Sabean was a pioneer in the historical-anthropological study of kinship, community, and selfhood in early modern and modern Europe. His career has helped shape the discipline of history through his supervision of dozens of graduate students and his influence on countless other scholars. This book collects wide-ranging essays demonstrating the impact of Sabean’s work has on scholars of diverse time periods and regions, all revolving around the prominent issues that have framed his career: kinship, community, and self. The significance of David Warren Sabean’s scholarship is reflected in original research contributed by former students and essays written by his contemporaries, demonstrating Sabean’s impact on the discipline of history.

  Subjects: History (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2022

  Land and the Mortgage

  History, Culture, Belonging

  Rodima-Taylor, D. & Shipton, P. (eds)

  The mortgaging of land is not just economic and legal but also social and cultural. Here, anthropologists, historians, and economists explore origins, variations, and meanings of the land mortgage, and the risks to homes and livelihoods. Combining findings from archives, printed records, and live ethnography, the book describes the changing and problematic assumptions surrounding mortgage.  It shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. The outcomes of mortgage in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America challenge economic development orthodoxies, calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2021

  Lands of the Future

  Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa

  Gabbert, E. C., Gebresenbet, F., Galaty, J. G., & Schlee, G. (eds)

  Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

  Subject: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available February 2010

  Landscape Ethnoecology

  Concepts of Biotic and Physical Space

  Johnson, L. M. & Hunn, E. S. (eds)

  Although anthropologists and cultural geographers have explored “place” in various senses, little cross-cultural examination of “kinds of place,” or ecotopes, has been presented from an ethno-ecological perspective. In this volume, indigenous and local understandings of landscape are investigated in order to better understand how human communities relate to their terrestrial and aquatic resources. The contributors go beyond the traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) literature and offer valuable insights on ecology and on land and resources management, emphasizing the perception of landscape above the level of species and their folk classification. Focusing on the ways traditional people perceive and manage land and biotic resources within diverse regional and cultural settings, the contributors address theoretical issues and present case studies from North America, Mexico, Amazonia, tropical Asia, Africa and Europe.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available April 2009

  Landscape, Process and Power

  Re-evaluating Traditional Environmental Knowledge

  Heckler, S. (ed)

  In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people’s day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2012

  Landscapes Beyond Land

  Routes, Aesthetics, Narratives

  Árnason, A., Ellison, N., Vergunst, J. & Whitehouse, A. (eds)

  Land is embedded in a multitude of material and cultural contexts, through which the human experience of landscape emerges. Ethnographers, with their participative methodologies, long-term co-residence, and concern with the quotidian aspects of the places where they work, are well positioned to describe landscapes in this fullest of senses. The contributors explore how landscapes become known primarily through movement and journeying rather than stasis. Working across four continents, they explain how landscapes are constituted and recollected in the stories people tell of their journeys through them, and how, in turn, these stories are embedded in landscaped forms.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• April 2011

  Landscapes of Relations and Belonging

  Body, Place and Politics in Wogeo, Papua New Guinea

  Anderson, A.

  Wogeo Island is well-known to anthropologists of Papua New Guinea through the work of Ian Hogbin. Based on substantial fieldwork, the author builds on and expands previous research by showing how Wogeos establish and maintain social relationships and identities connected to place and movement in the physical landscape. This innovative study demonstrates how Wogeo worldviews and social organization can be described in relation to terms of movements, flows and placements in the landscape while, in turn, the landscape is constituted and made meaningful through people’s activities and buildings. The author not only addresses some of the key issues in contemporary anthropology concerning place, gender, kinship, knowledge and power but also fills an important gap in Melanesian ethnography.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• November 2015

  Language and Identity Politics

  A Cross-Atlantic Perspective

  Späti, C. (ed)

  In an increasingly multicultural world, the relationship between language and identity remains a complicated and often fraught subject for most societies. The growing political salience of questions relating to language is evident not only in the expanded implementation of new policies and legislation, but also in heated public debates about national unity, collective identities, and the rights of linguistic minorities. By taking a comprehensive approach that considers both the inclusive and exclusive dimensions of linguistic identity across Europe and North America, the studies assembled here provide a sophisticated look at one of the global era’s defining political dynamics.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General)

• December 2016

  Languid Bodies, Grounded Stances

  The Curving Pathway of Neoclassical Odissi Dance

  Sikand, N.

  Widely believed to be the oldest Indian dance tradition, odissi has transformed over the centuries from a sacred temple ritual to a transnational genre performed—and consumed—throughout the world. Building on ethnographic research in multiple locations, this book charts the evolution of odissi dance and reveals the richness, rigor, and complexity of the form as it is practiced today. As author and dancer-choreographer Nandini Sikand shows, the story of odissi is ultimately a story of postcolonial India, one in which identity, nationalism, tradition, and neoliberal politics dramatically come together.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• March 1997

  The Last Shaman

  Change in an Amazonian Community

  Gray, A.

  The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of the southeastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s,they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the last fifteen years, Arakmbut survival has been under threat from a goldrush that has attracted hundreds of colonists onto their territories. This trilogy of books traces the ways in which the Arakmbut overcome the dangers that surround them: their mythology and cultural strength; their social flexibility; and their capacity to incorporate non-indigenous concepts and activities into their defence strategies. Each area is punctuated by the constant presence of the invisible spirit, which provides a seamless theme connecting the books to each other.

  The death of a shaman in 1980 had an enormous spiritual and political consequences for one of the Arakmbut communities, resulting in a shift in its social organization from comparative hierarchy to a more egalitarian system. The author uses this case as an illustration to challenge the idea that indigenous peoples live in fossilized, static worlds. He shows that political activities in conjunction with shamanic communication with the spirit world provide the impetus and context for change.

  Buy all three volumes for 20% discount

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

• August 2006

  Le Malaise Creole

  Ethnic Identity in Mauritius

  Boswell, R.

  How does one explain the poverty and marginalization of a group that lives in a remarkably successful economy and peaceful society? A native anthropologist, the author provides critical insight into the dynamics of contemporary Mauritian society. In her meticulously researched study of ethnic, gender and racial discrimination in Mauritius, she addresses debates carried out in many developing societies on subaltern identities, ethnicity, poverty and social injustice. The book therefore also offers important empirical material for scholars interested in the wider Indian Ocean region and beyond.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2012

  Learning From the Children

  Childhood, Culture and Identity in a Changing World

  Waldren, J. & Kaminski, I.-M. (eds)

  Children and youth, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, are experiencing lifestyle choices their parents never imagined and contributing to the transformation of ideals, traditions, education and adult–child power dynamics. As a result of the advances in technology and media as well as the effects of globalization, the transmission of social and cultural practices from parents to children is changing. Based on a number of qualitative studies, this book offers insights into the lives of children and youth in Britain, Japan, Spain, Israel/Palestine, and Pakistan. Attention is focused on the child’s perspective within the social-power dynamics involved in adult–child relations, which reveals the dilemmas of policy, planning and parenting in a changing world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Mobility Studies

• February 2014

  Learning Senegalese Sabar

  Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar

  Bizas, E.

  Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in New York and Dakar, this book explores the Senegalese dance-rhythms Sabar from the research position of a dance student. It features a comparative analysis of the pedagogical techniques used in dance classes in New York and Dakar, which in turn shed light on different aesthetics and understandings of dance, as well as different ways of learning, in each context. Pointing to a loose network of teachers and students who travel between New York and Dakar around the practice of West African dance forms, the author discusses how this movement is maintained, what role the imagination plays in mobilizing participants and how the ‘cultural flow’ of the dances is ‘punctuated’ by national borders and socio-economic relationships. She explores the different meanings articulated around Sabar’s transatlantic movement and examines how the dance floor provides the grounds for contested understandings, socio-economic relationships and broader discourses to be re-choreographed in each setting.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• March 2015

  Learning Under Neoliberalism

  Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education

  Hyatt, S. B., Shear, B. W., & Wright, S. (eds)

  As part of the neoliberal trends toward public-private partnerships, universities all over the world have forged more intimate relationships with corporate interests and more closely resemble for-profit corporations in both structure and practice.  These transformations, accompanied by new forms of governance, produce new subject-positions among faculty and students and enable new approaches to teaching, curricula, research, and everyday practices. The contributors to this volume use ethnographic methods to investigate the multi-faceted impacts of neoliberal restructuring, while reporting on their own pedagogical responses, at universities in the United States, Europe, and New Zealand.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2016

  Leaving Footprints in the Taiga

  Luck, Spirits and Ambivalence among the Siberian Orochen Reindeer Herders and Hunters

  Brandišauskas, D.

  Nowhere have recent environmental and social changes been more pronounced than in post-Soviet Siberia. Donatas Brandišauskas probes the strategies that Orochen reindeer herders of southeastern Siberia have developed to navigate these changes. “Catching luck” is one such strategy that plays a central role in Orochen cosmology -- luck implies a vernacular theory of causality based on active interactions of humans, non-humans, material objects, and places.  Brandišauskas describes in rich details the skills, knowledge, ritual practices, storytelling, and movements that enable the Orochen to “catch luck” (or not, sometimes), to navigate times of change and upheaval.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2013

  The Legacies of a Hawaiian Generation

  From Territorial Subject to American Citizen

  Schachter, J.

  Through the voices and perspectives of the members of an extended Hawaiian family, or `ohana, this book tells the story of North American imperialism in Hawai`i from the Great Depression to the new millennium. The family members offer their versions of being “Native Hawaiian” in an American state, detailing the ways in which US laws, policies, and institutions made, and continue to make, an impact on their daily lives. The book traces the ways that Hawaiian values adapted to changing conditions under a Territorial regime and then after statehood. These conditions involved claims for land for Native Hawaiian Homesteads, education in American public schools, military service, and participation in the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Based on fieldwork observations, kitchen table conversations, and talk-stories, or mo`olelo, this book is a unique blend of biography, history, and anthropological analysis.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History: 20th Century to Present

• July 2015

  Legal Dissonance

  The Interaction of Criminal Law and Customary Law in Papua New Guinea

  Larcom, S.

  Papua New Guinea’s two most powerful legal orders — customary law and state law —undermine one another in criminal matters. This phenomenon, called legal dissonance, partly explains the low level of personal security found in many parts of the country. This book demonstrates that a lack of coordination in the punishing of wrong behavior is both problematic for legal orders themselves and for those who are subject to such legal phenomena Legal dissonance can lead to behavior being simultaneously promoted by one legal order and punished by the other, leading to injustice, and, perhaps more importantly, undermining the ability of both legal orders to deter wrongdoing.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2011

  Legends of People, Myths of State

  Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia

  Kapferer, B.

  The civil war in Sri Lanka and the part that nationalism seemed to play in it inspired the writing of this book some twenty-three years ago. The argument was developed through a comparative analysis of nationalism in Sri Lanka with the author’s native Australia. At the time this constituted an innovative approach to comparison in anthropology, as well as to nationalism and its possibilities. It was not based on differences but on the way in which perspectives from within the two nationalisms, when seen side-by-side, could present an understanding of their implication in producing the violence of war, racism, and social exclusion. The book has lost none of its importance and urgency as proven by the chapters in the Appendix, written by top scholars working in Sri Lanka and in Australia. These contributions bring together new material and critically explore the book’s themes and their continued relevance to the various trajectories in nationalist processes since the first publication of the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• December 2006

  Lela in Bali

  History through Ceremony in Cameroon

  Fardon, R.

  Lela in Bali tells the story of an annual festival of eighteenth-century kingdoms in Northern Cameroon that was swept up in the migrations of marauding slave-raiders during the nineteenth century and carried south towards the coast. Lela was transformed first into a mounted durbar, like those of the Muslim states, before evolving in tandem with the German colonial project into a festival of arms. Reinterpreted by missionaries and post-colonial Cameroonians, Lela has become one of the most important of Cameroonian festivals and a crucial marker of identity within the state. Richard Fardon’s recuperation of two hundred years of history is an essential contribution not only to Cameroonian studies but also to the broader understanding of the evolution of African cultures.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies Colonial History

• eBook available July 2019

  Lewis Henry Morgan's Comparisons

  Reassessing Terminology, Anarchy and Worldview in Indigenous Societies of America, Australia and Highland Middle India

  Pfeffer, G.

  About 150 years ago Lewis Henry Morgan compared relationship terminologies, societal forms and ideas of property to recognize the interdependence of the three domains. From a new perspective, the book re-examines, confirms and criticizes Morgan’s findings to conclude that reciprocal affinal relations determine most ‘classificatory’ terminologies and regulate many non-state societies, their property notions and their rituals. Apart from references to American and Australian features, such holistic socio-cultural constructs are exemplified by elaborate descriptions of little known contemporary Indigenous societies in Highland Middle India, altogether comprising many millions of members.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2016

  Life as a Hunt

  Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape

  Marks, S. A.

  The "extensive wilderness" of Zambia’s central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa’s environmental and wildlife crises.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available January 2023

  Life with Durham Cathedral

  A Laboratory of Community, Experience and Building

  Calvert, A. J.

  An ethnographic account of daily life in Durham Cathedral, this book examines the processes of negotiation and change between a community and their cathedral. Focusing on the role of sound, light, time, space, building and dwelling, the author argues that Durham Cathedral is much more than just cannot merely be a backdrop to everyday life. Rather, through the constant processes of negotiation and change, it is a fully engaged participant in the daily lives of those who use Durham Cathedral. As such, it is not a place in which life happens, but a place with which life happens.

  Subjects: Heritage Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available April 2021

  Liminal Moves

  Traveling along Places, Meanings, and Times

  Cangià, F.

  Moving, slowing down, or watching others moving allows people to cross physical, symbolic, and temporal boundaries. Exploring the imaginative power of liminality that makes this possible, Liminal Moves looks at the (im)mobilities of three groups of people - street monkey performers in Japan, adolescents writing about migrants in Italy, and men accompanying their partners in Switzerland for work. The book explores how, for these ‘travelers’, the interplay of mobility and immobility creates a ‘liminal hotspot’: a condition of suspension and ambivalence as they find themselves caught between places, meanings and times.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available August 2006

  The Limits of Meaning

  Case Studies in the Anthropology of Christianity

  Engelke, M. & Tomlinson, M. (eds)

  Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2011

  Liquid Bread

  Beer and Brewing in Cross-Cultural Perspective

  Schiefenhövel, W. and Macbeth, H. (eds)

  “This important volume sheds new light on the social, political, and economic role of beer in society.... Highly Recommended.”—Choice

  A Choice Outstanding Academic Book of The Year 2011
  Winner of the 2011 Gourmand World Cookbook UK Award

  Beer is an ancient alcoholic drink which, although produced through a more complex process than wine, was developed by a wide range of cultures to become internationally popular. This book is the first multidisciplinary, cross-cultural collection about beer. It explores the brewing processes used in antiquity and in traditional societies; the social and symbolic roles of beer-drinking; the beliefs and activities associated with it; the health-promoting effects as well as the health-damaging risks; and analyses the modern role of large multinational companies, which own many of the breweries, and the marketing techniques that they employ.

  From the introduction:
  What made you pick up this book? Was it the thought of that foaming pint while you relaxed in a British pub, a German beer garden, a Czech restaurant, an American or ‘Continental’ bar, on a beach or ski slope or in front of the television at home? Wherever your beer was purchased, in much of the world you would have been offered choice. The choice might only have been between different brand names of bottled beer, or it might have been between a wide range of ales, lagers, wheat and other beers from a cask, a keg, cans or bottles. Even people who do not drink beer will be aware of this diversity….the editors believe that this collation of perspectives on beer will also intrigue many readers in the general public.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2015

  The Living Ancestors

  Shamanism, Cosmos and Cultural Change among the Yanomami of the Upper Orinoco

  Jokic, Z.

  This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the “part is equal to the whole,” which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans’ relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available August 2017

  Living Before Dying

  Imagining and Remembering Home

  Davies, J.

  This in-depth description of life in a nursing/care home for 70 residents and 40 staff highlights the daily care of frail or ill residents between 80 and 100 years of age, including people suffering with dementia. How residents interact with care assistants is emphasised, as are the different behaviours of men and women observed during a year of daily conversations between the author, patients and staff, who share their stories of the pressures of the work. Living Before Dying shows a world where, in extreme old age, people have to learn how to cope with living communally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• April 2015

  Living Kinship in the Pacific

  Toren, C. & Pauwels, S. (eds)

  Unaisi Nabobo-Baba observed that for the various peoples of the Pacific, kinship is generally understood as “knowledge that counts.” It is with this observation that this volume begins, and it continues with a straightforward objective to provide case studies of Pacific kinship. In doing so, contributors share an understanding of kinship as a lived and living dimension of contemporary human lives, in an area where deep historical links provide for close and useful comparison. The ethnographic focus is on transformation and continuity over time in Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa with the addition of three instructive cases from Tokelau, Papua New Guinea, and Taiwan. The book ends with an account of how kinship is constituted in day-to-day ritual and ritualized behavior.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available October 2022

  Living on a Time Bomb

  Local Negotiations of Oil Extraction in a Mexican Community

  Schöneich, S.

  Providing a holistic understanding of extensive oil extraction in rural Mexico, this book focuses on a campesino community, where oil extraction is deeply inscribed into the daily lives of the community members. The book shows how oil shapes the space where it is extracted in every aspect and produces multiple uncertainties. The community members express these uncertainties using the metaphor of the time bomb. The book shows how they find ways to "live off the time bomb" by using mechanisms of short-term coping and long-term adaptation and thus, developing the capability to determine their lives despite the ever-changing challenges.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available July 2016

  Living on Thin Ice

  The Gwich'in Natives of Alaska

  Dinero, S. C.

  The Gwich’in Natives of Arctic Village, Alaska, have experienced intense social and economic changes for more than a century. In the late 20th century, new transportation and communication technologies introduced radically new value systems; while some of these changes may be seen as socially beneficial, others suggest a weakening of what was once a strong and vibrant Native community. Using quantitative and qualitative data gathered since the turn of the millennium, this volume offers an interdisciplinary evaluation of the developments that have occurred in the community over the past several decades.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Urban Studies

• eBook available July 2018

  Living Under Austerity

  Greek Society in Crisis

  Doxiadis, E. & Placas, A. (eds)

  Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity, with no apparent end in sight. This volume explores the effects of policies pursued by the Greek state since then (under the direction of the Troika), and how Greek society has responded. In addition to charting the actual effects of the Greek crisis on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, the book both examines and challenges the “crisis” era as the context for changing attitudes and developments within Greek society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Political and Economic Anthropology

• December 2006

  Local Science Vs Global Science

  Approaches to Indigenous Knowledge in International Development

  Sillitoe, P. (ed)

  While science has achieved a remarkable understanding of nature, affording humans an astonishing technological capability, it has led, through Euro-American global domination, to the muting of other cultural views and values, even threatening their continued existence. There is a growing realization that the diversity of knowledge systems demand respect, some refer to them in a conservation idiom as alternative information banks. The scientific perspective is only one. We now have many examples of the soundness of local science and practices, some previously considered “primitive” and in need of change, but this book goes beyond demonstrating the soundness of local science and arguing for the incorporation of others’ knowledge in development, to argue that we need to look quizzically at the foundations of science itself and further challenge its hegemony, not only over local communities in Africa, Asia, the Pacific or wherever, but also the global community. The issues are large and the challenges are exciting, as addressed in this book, in a range of ethnographic and institutional contexts.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• August 2011

  Localizing the Internet

  An Anthropological Account

  Postill, J.

  Internet activism is playing a crucial role in the democratic reform happening across many parts of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this study offers an in-depth examination of the workings of the Internet at the local level. In fact, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia’s electronic governance laboratory. The author explores its field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, civil servants, politicians, online journalists and other social agents struggle over how the locality is to be governed at the dawn of the ‘Information Era’. Drawing on the field theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester School of political anthropology, this study challenges the unquestioned predominance of ‘network’ and ‘community’ as the two key sociation concepts in contemporary Internet studies. The analysis extends field theory in four new directions, namely the complex articulations between personal networking and social fields, the uneven diffusion and circulation of new field technologies and contents, intra- and inter-field political crises, and the emergence of new forms of residential sociality.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• September 2005

  The Logic of Environmentalism

  Anthropology, Ecology and Postcoloniality

  Argyrou, V.

  Although modernity’s understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2023

  The Long Shore

  Archaeologies and Social Histories of Californias Maritime Cultural Landscapes

  Meniketti, M. (ed)

  The archaeology of maritime cultural landscapes offers insights into cultural traditions, social transitions, and cultural relationships that reach beyond the narrow confines of waterfronts and beach strands and helps construct meaningful social histories. The long shore of California is not limited to the land that borders the Pacific Ocean, but includes the navigable waters that reach inland, the off-shore islands, and the riverways flow to the sea. Authors investigate the multifaceted character of maritime landscapes and maritime oriented communities in California’s equally diverse cultural landscape; viewed through an archaeological lens, and emphasizing social behavior and community as material culture in order to reveal intersections and commonalities.

  Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2010

  The Long Way Home

  The Meaning and Values of Repatriation

  Turnbull, P. & Pickering, M. (eds)

  Indigenous peoples have long sought the return of ancestral human remains and associated artifacts from western museums and scientific institutions. Since the late 1970s their efforts have led museum curators and researchers to re-evaluate their practices and policies in respect to the scientific uses of human remains. New partnerships have been established between cultural and scientific institutions and indigenous communities. Human remains and culturally significant objects have been returned to the care of indigenous communities, although the fate of bones and burial artifacts in numerous collections remains unresolved and, in some instances, the subject of controversy. In this book, leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences reflect critically on the historical, cultural, ethical and scientific dimensions of repatriation. Through various case studies they consider the impact of repatriation: what have been the benefits, and in what ways has repatriation given rise to new problems for indigenous people, scientists and museum personnel. It features chapters by indigenous knowledge custodians, who reflect upon recent debates and interaction between indigenous people and researchers in disciplines with direct interests in the continued scientific preservation of human remains.

  In this book, leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences reflect critically on the historical, cultural, ethical and scientific dimensions of repatriation. Through various case studies they consider the impact of repatriation: what have been the benefits, and in what ways has repatriation given rise to new problems for indigenous people, scientists and museum personnel. It features chapters by indigenous knowledge custodians, who reflect upon recent debates and interaction between indigenous people and researchers in disciplines with direct interests in the continued scientific preservation of human remains.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies

• December 2010

  Lost to the State

  Family Discontinuity, Social Orphanhood and Residential Care in the Russian Far East

  Khlinovskaya Rockhill, E.

  Childhood held a special place in Soviet society: seen as the key to a better future, children were imagined as the only privileged class. Therefore, the rapid emergence in post-Soviet Russia of the vast numbers of vulnerable ‘social orphans’, or children who have living relatives but grow up in residential care institutions, caught the public by surprise, leading to discussions of the role and place of childhood in the new society. Based on an in-depth study the author explores dissonance between new post-Soviet forms of family and economy, and lingering Soviet attitudes, revealing social orphans as an embodiment of a long-standing power struggle between the state and the family. The author uncovers parallels between (post-) Soviet and Western practices in child welfare and attitudes towards ‘bad’ mothers, and proposes a new way of interpreting kinship where the state is an integral member.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• September 2023

  Love, Loyalty and Deceit

  Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men

  Firth, H. & Brown, L.

  How much do we really know about our parents’ lives? What secrets lie in plain sight? This is the true story of hidden love within a small circle of some of the most acclaimed anthropologists of the 20th century.

  Told by Rosemary and Raymond Firth's son, and the daughter of Edmund Leach, the man Rosemary loved all her life, this part love-story, part biography, part social history is the story of a small circle of social anthropologists in Britain from the 1930s, through the Second World War, to the end of the century.

  The book explores their early influences, their insecurities, their flaws, struggles and achievements. It is a story of passion and commitment, but also of deceit and betrayal, including the inexplicable disappearance, death and possible murder of a very close friend.

  From the Prologue:
  Rosemary loved many people in many different ways, but she loved two men in particular throughout most of her life. One was her husband, Raymond Firth, regarded by some as among the founding fathers of social anthropology. Yet she also retained a passionate devotion to her first love, Edmund Leach, who would subsequently become the public intellectual face of social anthropology in the later 1960s. Both separately and together they were part of the process of defining the nature of this still growing discipline in the first part of the mid-twentieth century.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2018

  Lullabies and Battle Cries

  Music, Identity and Emotion among Republican Parading Bands in Northern Ireland

  Rollins, J.

  Set against a volatile political landscape, Irish republican culture has struggled to maintain continuity with the past, affirm legitimacy in the present, and generate a sense of community for the future. Lullabies and Battle Cries explores the relationship between music, emotion, memory, and identity in republican parading bands, with a focus on how this music continues to be utilized in a post-conflict climate. As author Jaime Rollins shows, rebel parade music provides a foundational idiom of national and republican expression, acting as a critical medium for shaping new political identities within continually shifting dynamics of republican culture.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2016

  Made In Egypt

  Gendered Identity and Aspiration on the Globalised Shop Floor

  Chakravarti, L. Z.

  This ground-breaking ethnography of an export-orientated garment assembly factory in Egypt examines the dynamic relationships between its managers – emergent Mubarak-bizniz (business) elites who are caught in an intensely competitive globalized supply chain – and the local daily-life realities of their young, educated, and mixed-gender labour force. Constructions of power and resistance, as well as individual aspirations and identities, are explored through articulations of class, gender and religion in both management discourses and shop floor practices. Leila Chakravarti’s compelling study also moves beyond the confines of the factory, examining the interplay with the wider world around it.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2023

  A Magpie’s Tale

  Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives on the Kazakh of Western Mongolia

  Portisch, A. O.

  Telling the story of the author's time living with a Kazakh family in a small village in western Mongolia, this book contextualizes the family’s personal stories within the broader history of the region. It looks at the position of the  Kazakh over time in relation to Tsarist Russian, Soviet, Chinese and Mongolian rule and influence. These are stories of migration across generations, bride kidnappings and marriage, domestic violence and alcoholism, adoption and family, and how people have coped in the face of political and economic crisis, poverty and loss, and, perhaps most enduringly, how love and family persist through all of this.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available October 2015

  Making Ubumwe

  Power, State and Camps in Rwanda's Unity-Building Project

  Purdeková, A.

  Since the end of the Rwandan genocide, the new political elite has been challenged with building a unified nation. Reaching beyond the better-studied topics of post-conflict justice and memory, the book investigates the project of civic education, the upsurge of state-led neo-traditional institutions and activities, and the use of camps and retreats shape the “ideal” Rwandan citizen. Rwanda’s ingando camps offer unique insights into the uses of dislocation and liminality in an attempt to anchor identities and desired political roles, to practically orient and symbolically place individuals in the new Rwandan order, and, ultimately, to create additional platforms for the reproduction of political power itself.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

• January 2015

  Making a Difference?

  Social Assessment Policy and Praxis and its Emergence in China

  Price, S. & Robinson, K. (eds)

  Social assessment for projects in China is an important emerging field. This collection of essays — from authors whose formative work has influenced the policies that shape practice in development-affected communities — locates recent Chinese experience of the development of social assessment practices (including in displacement and resettlement) in a historical and comparative perspective. Contributors — social scientists employed by international development banks, national government agencies, and sub-contracting groups — examine projects from a practitioner’s perspective. Real-life experiences are presented as case-specific praxis, theoretically informed insight, and pragmatic lessons-learned, grounded in the history of this field of development practice. They reflect on work where economic determinism reigns supreme, yet project failure or success often hinges upon sociopolitical and cultural factors.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2022

  Making Better Lives

  Hope, Freedom and Home-Making among People Sleeping Rough in Paris

  Lenhard, J.

  In this ethnographic study, Johannes Lenhard observes the daily practices, routines and techniques of people who are sleeping rough on the streets of Paris. The book focusses on their survival practises, their short-term desires and hopes, how they earn money through begging, how they choose the best place to sleep at night and what role drugs and alcohol play in their lives. The book also follows people through different institutional settings, including a homeless day centre, a needle exchange, a centre for people with alcohol problems and a homeless shelter.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Urban Studies

• eBook available June 2012

  The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama

  Religion, Media and Gender in Kinshasa

  Pype, K.

  How religion, gender, and urban sociality are expressed in and mediated via television drama in Kinshasa is the focus of this ethnographic study. Influenced by Nigerian films and intimately related to the emergence of a charismatic Christian scene, these teleserials integrate melodrama, conversion narratives, Christian songs, sermons, testimonies, and deliverance rituals to produce commentaries on what it means to be an inhabitant of Kinshasa.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Media Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available January 2020

  Management and Morality

  An Ethnographic Exploration of Management Consultancy Seminars

  Henningsen, E.

  Drawing on extended ethnographic studies of management consultancies in the Oslo region of Norway, this book seeks to find a richer understanding of their role in contemporary work life and the attraction their practices exert on people. The author shows that management consultancy is an arena of meaning that should be analysed as a ‘cultural space’. With a detailed investigation into consultancy as a cultural phenomenon, Henningsen argues that  its services can be viewed as a ‘micro-utopian’ vision which can lead to  a happier working environment for individuals.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

• eBook available May 2019

  Management by Seclusion

  A Critique of World Bank Promises to End Global Poverty

  Cochrane, G.

  50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest.  Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington’s “management by seclusion,” poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available July 2017

  Managing Ambiguity

  How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina

  Brković, Č.

  Why do people turn to personal connections to get things done? Exploring the role of favors in social welfare systems in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, this volume provides a new theoretical angle on links between ambiguity and power. It demonstrates that favors were not an instrumental tactic of survival, nor a way to reproduce oneself as a moral person. Instead, favors enabled the insertion of personal compassion into the heart of the organization of welfare.

  Managing Ambiguity follows how neoliberal insistence on local community, flexibility, and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back, and how this fostered a specific mode of power.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies History: 20th Century to Present

• eBook available July 2021

  Margaret Mead

  Shankman, P.

  This short volume is an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about, arguably, the most famous anthropologist of the twentieth century.

  “Since her death, a steady drip of books about Mead, one of the most significant women in twentieth century social science and American society, has appeared, some interesting, many quite a bit less so. While Shankman’s biography makes use of them, it nevertheless stands out among the better ones, not only for its well-informed and balanced view of Mead, but also for its concision.”—Times Literary Supplement

  Tracing Mead’s career as an ethnographer, as the early voice of public anthropology, and as a public figure, this elegantly written biography links the professional and personal sides of her career. The book looks at Mead’s early career through the end of World War II, when she produced her most important anthropological works, as well as her role as a public figure in the post-war period, through the 1960s until her death in 1978. The criticisms of Mead are also discussed and analyzed.

  From the introduction:
  After her death, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter…. On the other side of the world, Mead’s passing was remembered in a very different context. On the island of Manus off the coast of New Guinea, the people of Pere village also mourned her death. Mead first studied the people of Pere in the late 1920s, returning in the 1950s with further visits thereafter. Over a span of five decades, she touched their lives, and they touched hers. Such was Mead’s stature that they commemorated her death with a ceremony befitting a great leader.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  Market Frictions

  Trade and Urbanization at the Vietnam-China Border

  Endres, K. W.

  Based on ethnographic research conducted over several years, Market Frictions examines the tensions and frictions that emerge from the interaction of global market forces, urban planning policies, and small-scale trading activities in the Vietnamese border city of Lào Cai. Here, it is revealed how small-scale traders and market vendors experience the marketplace, reflect upon their trading activities, and negotiate current state policies and regulations. It shows how “traditional” Vietnamese marketplaces have continually been reshaped and adapted to meet the changing political-economic circumstances and civilizational ideals of the time.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available May 2019

  Marketing Hope

  Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in Siberia

  Schiffauer, L.

  Multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes promote the idea that participants can easily become rich. These popular economies turn ordinary people into advocates of their interests and missionaries of the American Dream. Marketing Hope looks at how different types of get-rich-quick schemes manifest themselves in a Siberian town. By focusing on their social dynamics, Leonie Schiffauer provides insights into how capitalist logic is learned and negotiated, and how it affects local realities in a post-Soviet environment.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General) Sociology

• September 2023

  Mary Douglas

  Richards, P. & 6, P.

  This handy, concise biography covers the life of Mary Douglas, one of the most important anthropologists of the second half of the 20th century.

  Her work focused on how human groups classify each other, and how they resolve the anomalies that then arise. Classification, she argued, emerges from practices of social life, and is a factor in all deep and intractable human disputes.

  This biography offers an introduction to how her distinctive approach developed across a long and productive career and how it applies to current pressing issues of social conflict and planetary survival.

  From the Preface:

  The influence of Professor Dame Mary Douglas (1921-2007) upon each of the social sciences and many of the disciplines in the humanities is vast. The list of her works is also vast, and this presents a problem of choice for the many readers who want to get a general idea of what she wrote and its significance, but who are somewhat baffled about where to begin. Our book offers a short overview and suggests why her key writings remain significant today.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology

• July 2015

  Masks and Staffs

  Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields

  Pelican, Michaela

  The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups – Grassfields societies, Mbororo, and Hausa – provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s, local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• September 1998

  Mastering Soldiers

  Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Army Unit

  Ben-Ari, E.

  Studies of the military that deal with the actual experience of troops in the field are still rare in the social sciences. In fact, this ethnographic study of an elite unit in the Israeli Defense Force is the only one of its kind. As an officer of this unit and a professional anthropologist, the author was ideally positioned for his role as participant observer. During the eight years he spent with his unit he focused primarily on such notions as "conflict", "the enemy", and "soldiering" because they are, he argues, the key points of reference for "what we are" and "what we are trying to do" and form the basis for interpreting the environment within which armies operate. Relying on the latest anthropological approaches to cognitive models and the social constructions of emotion and masculinity, the author offers an in-depth analysis of the dynamics that drive the men's attitudes and behavior, and a rare and fascinating insight into the reality of military life.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• September 2012

  A Matter of Belief

  Christian Conversion and Healing in North-East India

  Joshi, V.

  ‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical. This study focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available May 2021

  Mattering the Invisible

  Technologies, Bodies, and the Realm of the Spectral

  Espírito Santo, D. & Hunter, J. (eds)

  Exploring how technological apparatuses “capture” invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• July 2009

  Meaningful Inconsistencies

  Bicultural Nationhood, the Free Market, and Schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand

  Doerr, N. M.

  School differentiates students-and provides differential access to various human and material resources-along a range of axes: from elected subjects and academic "achievement" to ethnicity, age, gender, or the language they speak. These categorizations, affected throughout the world by neoliberal reforms that prioritize market forces in transforming educational institutions, are especially stark in societies that recognize their bi- or multicultural makeup through bilingual education. A small town in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with its contemporary shift toward official biculturalism and extensive free-marketization of schooling, is a prime example. Set in the microcosm of a secondary school with a bilingual program, this important volume closely examines not only the implications of categorizing individuals in ethnic terms in their everyday life but also the shapes and meaning of education within the discourse of academic achievement. It is an essential resource for those interested in bilingual education and its effects on the formations of subjectivities, ethnic relations, and nationhood.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2006

  Media and Nation Building

  How the Iban became Malaysian

  Postill, J.

  With the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of civil wars and "regime changes," the question of nation building has acquired great practical and theoretical urgency. From Eastern Europe to East Timor, Afghanistan and recently Iraq, the United States and its allies have often been accused of shirking their nation-building responsibilities as their attention — and that of the media -- turned to yet another regional crisis. While much has been written about the growing influence of television and the Internet on modern warfare, little is known about the relationship between media and nation building. This book explores, for the first time, this relationship by means of a paradigmatic case of successful nation building: Malaysia. Based on extended fieldwork and historical research, the author follows the diffusion, adoption, and social uses of media among the Iban of Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo and demonstrates the wide-ranging process of nation building that has accompanied the Iban adoption of radio, clocks, print media, and television. In less than four decades, Iban longhouses ('villages under one roof') have become media organizations shaped by the official ideology of Malaysia, a country hastily formed in 1963 by conjoining four disparate territories.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2020

  Media Practices and Changing African Socialities

  Non-media-centric Perspectives

  Helle-Valle, J. & Strom-Mathiesen, A. (eds)

  Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context. The contributions to this collection provide fresh ethnographic descriptions of how new media practices can affect socialities in significant but unpredictable ways.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available January 2022

  Mediated Lives

  Waiting and Hope among Iraqi Refugees in Jordan

  Twigt, M.

  Using the example of Iraqi refugees in Jordan's capital of Amman, this book describes how information and communication technologies (ICTs) play out in the everyday experiences of urban refugees, geographically located in the Global South, and shows how interactions between online and offline spaces are key for making sense of the humanitarian regime, for carving out a sense of home and for sustaining hope. This book paints a humanizing account of making do amid legal marginalization, prolonged insecurity, and the proliferation of digital technologies.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• eBook available September 2018

  Medicinal Rule

  A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa

  Stroeken, K.

  As soon as Europeans set foot on African soil, they looked for the equivalents of their kings – and found them. The resulting misunderstandings have lasted until this day. Based on ethnography-driven regional comparison and a critical re-examination of classic monographs on some forty cultural groups, this volume makes the arresting claim that across equatorial Africa the model of rule has been medicine – and not the colonizer’s despotic administrator, the missionary’s divine king, or Vansina’s big man. In a wide area populated by speakers of Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo cluster, both cult and dynastic clan draw on the fertility shrine, rainmaking charm and drum they inherit.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History

• eBook available July 2008

  Melanesian Odysseys

  Negotiating the Self, Narrative, and Modernity

  Josephides, L.

  In a series of epic self-narratives ranging from traditional cultural embodiments to picaresque adventures, Christian epiphanies and a host of interactive strategies and techniques for living, Kewa Highlanders (PNG) attempt to shape and control their selves and their relentlessly changing world. This lively account transcends ethnographic particularity and offers a wide-reaching perspective on the nature of being human. Inverting the analytic logic of her previous work, which sought to uncover what social structures concealed, Josephides focuses instead on the cultural understandings that people make explicit in their actions and speech. Using approaches from philosophy and anthropology, she examines elicitation (how people create their selves and their worlds in the act of making explicit) and mimesis (how anthropologists produce ethnographies), to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: that knowledge of self and other alike derives from self-externalization rather than self-introspection.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• December 2002

  Memoirs of a Mbororo

  The Life of Ndudi Umaru: Fulani Nomad of Cameroon

  Bocquene, H.

  This remarkable book recounts the life of Ndudi Umaru, a pastoral nomadic Fulani, who was born in the Nigeria-Cameroon border zone, but spent most of his life in Cameroon where he was treated for leprosy. Left to his own devices at an early age—his illness having separated him from his kith and kin—Ndudi is befriended by Père Boquené, a French missionary who takes him on as a field assistant. Working closely with the young man, Père Boquené realizes Ndudi is a keen observer of his own pastoral society, with its links to a wider social setting, and suggests he record his observations on tape. The result is a rare and sensitive collaboration, which sheds new insight into the world of the Mbororo and the complex and ever-changing social mosaic of West African savanna societies. Ndudi's leprosy and his efforts to find a cure grant him the necessary perspective to analyze this complex world, while still remaining a part of it.

  For the western public, the Mbororo have often been the photogenic subjects of "Disappearing World" documentaries or glossy coffee table books. However, this account renders "the exotic" comprehensible, preserving the cultural authenticity of Ndudi's story while making this unique world more accessible to outsiders.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Memory Studies Literary Studies

• November 2006

  The Men We Loved

  Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture

  Kaplan, D.

  Some semi-public, exclusive male settings, most noticeably in the military, encourage the production of intimacy and desire. Yet whereas in most instances this desire is displaced through humor and aggressive gestures, it becomes acknowledged and outright declared once associated with sites of heroic death. In his provocative study of interrelations between friendship in everyday life and national sentiments in Israel, the author follows selected stories of friendship ranging over early childhood, school, the workplace, and some unique war experiences. He explores the symbolism of friendship in rituals for the fallen soldiers, the commemoration of Prime Minister Yzhak Rabin, and the national infatuation with recovering bodies of missing soldiers. He concludes that the Israeli case offers an extreme instance of a much broader cultural phenomenon: declaring the friendship for the dead epitomizes the political “blood pact” between men, taking precedence over the traditional blood ties of kinship and heterosexual unions. The book underscores nationalism as a homosocial-based emotion of commemorative desire.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available February 2018

  Messy Europe

  Crisis, Race, and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World

  Loftsdóttir, K., Smith, A. L., & Hipfl, B. (eds)

  Using the economic crisis as a starting point, Messy Europe offers a critical new look at the issues of race, gender, and national understandings of self and other in contemporary Europe. It highlights and challenges historical associations of Europe with whiteness and modern civilization, and asks how these associations are re-envisioned, re-inscribed, or contested in an era characterized by crises of different kinds. This important collection provides a nuanced exploration of how racialized identities in various European regions are played out in the crisis context, and asks what work “crisis talk” does, considering how it motivates public feelings and shapes bodies, boundaries and communities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available May 2017

  Methodologies of Mobility

  Ethnography and Experiment

  Elliot, A., Norum, R., & Salazar, N. B. (eds)

  Research into mobility is an exciting challenge for the social sciences that raises novel social, cultural, spatial and ethical questions. At the heart of these empirical and theoretical complexities lies the question of methodology: how can we best capture and understand a planet in flux? Methodologies of Mobility speaks beyond disciplinary boundaries to the methodological challenges and possibilities of engaging with a world on the move. With scholars continuing to face different forms and scales of mobility, this volume strategically traces innovative ways of designing, applying and reflecting on both established and cutting-edge methodologies of mobility.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Theory and Methodology

• eBook available May 2016

  Migration by Boat

  Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion and Survival

  Mannik, L. (ed)

  At a time when thousands of refugees risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys by boat across the Mediterranean, this multidisciplinary volume could not be more pertinent. It offers various contemporary case studies of boat migrations undertaken by asylum seekers and refugees around the globe and shows that boats not only move people and cultural capital between places, but also fuel cultural fantasies, dreams of adventure and hope, along with fears of invasion and terrorism. The ambiguous nature of memories, media representations and popular culture productions are highlighted throughout in order to address negative stereotypes and conversely, humanize the individuals involved.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology Transport Studies

• eBook available January 2022

  Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space

  Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions

  Bouzas, A. M. & Casini, L. (eds)

  Combining visual and literary analyses and original ethnographic studies as part of a more general political reflection, Migration in the Making of Gulf Space examines the role of migrants and non-citizens in the processes of settling in the Arab States of the Gulf region. The contributions underscore the aspirational character of the Gulf as a place where migrant recognition can be attained while also reflecting on practices of exclusion. The book is the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars and includes an original contribution by the acclaimed author of the novel Temporary People, Deepak Unnikrishnan.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available October 2017

  Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters

  Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations

  Mageo, J. & Hermann, E. (eds)

  How do images circulating in Pacific cultures and exchanged between them and their many visitors transform meanings for all involved? This fascinating collection explores how through mimesis, wayfarers and locales alike borrow images from one another to expand their cultural repertoire of meanings or borrow images from their own past to validate their identities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available April 2009

  The Mirage of China

  Anti-Humanism, Narcissism, and Corporeality of the Contemporary World

  Liu, X.

  Today’s world is one marked by the signs of digital capitalism and global capitalist expansion, and China is increasingly being integrated into this global system of production and consumption. As a result, China’s immediate material impact is now felt almost everywhere in the world; however, the significance and process of this integration is far from understood. This study shows how the a priori categories of statistical reasoning came to be re-born and re-lived in the People’s Republic - as essential conditions for the possibility of a new mode of knowledge and governance. From the ruins of the Maoist revolution China has risen through a mode of quantitative self-objectification.

  As the author argues, an epistemological rift has separated the Maoist years from the present age of the People’s Republic, which appears on the global stage as a mirage. This study is an ethnographic investigation of concepts - of the conceptual forces that have produced and been produced by - two forms of knowledge, life, and governance. As the author shows, the world of China, contrary to the common view, is not the Chinese world; it is a symptomatic moment of our world at the present time.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2018

  Mirrors of Passing

  Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time

  Seebach, S. & Willerslev, R. (eds)

  Without exception, all people are faced with the inevitability of death, a stark fact that has immeasurably shaped societies and individual consciousness for the whole of human history. Mirrors of Passing offers a powerful window into this oldest of human preoccupations by investigating the interrelationships of death, materiality, and temporality across far-flung times and places. Stretching as far back as Ancient Egypt and Greece and moving through present-day locales as diverse as Western Europe, Central Asia, and the Arctic, each of the richly illustrated essays collected here draw on a range of disciplinary insights to explore some of the most fundamental, universal questions that confront us.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available December 2019

  Mixed Harvest

  Stories from the Human Past

  Swigart, R.

  Short stories about the deep past and those who lived through millennia of exploration, hardship, and uncertainty during the evolution of farming.

  Winner of the 2019 Nautilus Book Award, Multicultural and Indigenous

  “Swigart is to be congratulated for giving us a series of connected short stories that are both entertaining and educational. The book is accurately grounded in archaeological facts, and its individual stories are thoroughly believable. Its particular format should be emulated by all those wishing to blend fact and fiction, not just as entertainment but as education, too.”—Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies

  In unforgettable stories of the human journey, a combination of compelling storytelling and well-researched archaeology underscore an excavation into the deep past of human development and its consequences. Through a first encounter between a Neanderthal woman and the Modern Human to the emergence and destruction of the world’s first cities, Mixed Harvest tells the tale of the Neolithic Revolution, also called the (First) Agricultural Revolution, the most significant event since modern humans emerged. Rob Swigart’s latest work humanizes the rapid transition to agriculture and pastoralism with a grounding in the archaeological record.

  From the introduction:
  In the space of a few thousand years agriculture dominated the earth. We live with it all around us. History began, cities soared, the landscape was crisscrossed with roads…. Each story is prefaced by a short introduction and followed by some context in order to stitch the narrative together. Some stories are linked, but most are independent. The stories are gathered into three chapters: “Shelter,” “House,” and “Home.” These represent a progression in where we lived, a series of transformations in technology and consciousness.

  Subjects: Archaeology Literary Studies Memory Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2019

  Mobile Urbanity

  Somali Presence in Urban East Africa

  Carrier, N. & Scharrer, T. (eds)

  The increased presence of Somalis has brought much change to East African towns and cities in recent decades, change that has met with ambivalence and suspicion, especially within Kenya. This volume demystifies Somali residence and mobility in urban East Africa, showing its historical depth, and exploring the social, cultural and political underpinnings of Somali-led urban transformation. In so doing, it offers a vivid case study of the transformative power of (forced) migration on urban centres, and the intertwining of urbanity and mobility. The volume will be of interest for readers working in the broader field of migration, as well as anthropology and urban studies.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Urban Studies

• eBook available April 2009

  Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia

  Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives

  Alexiades, M. N. (ed)

  Contrary to ingrained academic and public assumptions, wherein indigenous lowland South American societies are viewed as the product of historical emplacement and spatial stasis, there is widespread evidence to suggest that migration and displacement have been the norm, and not the exception. This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia. Drawing on a wide range of historical time frames (from pre-conquest times to the present) and ethnographic contexts, different chapters examine the complex and important links between migration and the classification, management, and domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as the incorporation and transformation of environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies and identities.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

• October 2012

  Modalities of Change

  The Interface of Tradition and Modernity in East Asia

  Wilkerson, J. & Parkin, R. (eds)

  While in some cases modernity may dominate 'traditional' forms of expression, in others, the modern is embraced as a welcome source of new ideas that can modify 'tradition' while still keeping it within its own bounds. Maintaining a strong and distinct cultural identity with the help of modernity helps representatives of that identity cope with the modern world more generally. By contrast, assimilation to a dominant culture marked as modern is clearly associated with not only the loss of a distinct identity, but also its specific forms of cultural expression. This book explores the consequences of the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The contributors examine how traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further cultural developments, and to what extent this approach is likely to help a tradition survive.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• March 2023

  Modeling the Past

  Archaeology, History, and Dynamic Networks

  Terrell, J., Golitko, M., Dawson, H., and Kissel, M.

  How do researchers use dynamic network analysis (DYNA) to explore, model, and try to understand the complex global history of our species? Reduced to bare bones, network analysis is a way of understanding the world around us — a way called relational thinking — that is liberating but challenging. Using this handbook, researchers learn to develop historical and archaeological research questions anchored in DYNA. Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professional historians and archaeologists can consult on issues that range from hypothesis-driven research to critiquing dominant historical narratives, especially those that have tended ignore the diversity of the archaeological record.

  Subjects: Archaeology History (General) Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2007

  Modern Crises and Traditional Strategies

  Local Ecological Knowledge in Island Southeast Asia

  Ellen, R. (ed)

  The 1990s have seen a growing interest in the role of local ecological knowledge in the context of sustainable development, and particularly in providing a set of responses to which populations may resort in times of political, economic and environmental instability. The period 1996-2003 in island southeast Asia represents a critical test case for understanding how this might work. The key issues explored in this book are the creation, erosion and transmission of ecological knowledge, and hybridization between traditional and scientifically-based knowledge, amongst populations facing environmental stress (e.g. 1997 El Niño), political conflict and economic hazards. The book will also evaluate positive examples of how traditional knowledge has enabled local populations to cope with these kinds of insecurity.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2020

  Modernity and the Unmaking of Men

  Schubert, V.

  Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender. It argues that as a critical consequence of demographic rupture, changing values and societal shifts, aging bachelorhood illuminates and challenges conceptualizations of performativity and social presence.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available July 2018

  Momentous Mobilities

  Anthropological Musings on the Meanings of Travel

  Salazar, N. B.

  Grounded in scholarly analysis and personal reflection, and drawing on a multi-sited and multi-method research design, Momentous Mobilities disentangles the meanings attached to temporary travels and stays abroad and offers empirical evidence as well as novel theoretical arguments to develop an anthropology of mobility. Both focusing specifically on how various societies and cultures imagine and value boundary-crossing mobilities “elsewhere” and drawing heavily on his own European lifeworld, the author examines momentous travels abroad in the context of education, work, and spiritual quests and the search for a better quality of life.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General) Travel and Tourism

• eBook available January 2019

  Monetising the Dividual Self

  The Emergence of the Lifestyle Blog and Influencers in Malaysia

  Hopkins, J.

  Combining theoretical and empirical discussions with shorter “thick description” case studies, this book offers an anthropological exploration of the emergence in Malaysia of lifestyle bloggers – precursors to current social media “microcelebrities” and “influencers.” It tracks the transformation of personal blogs, which attracted readers with spontaneous and authentic accounts of everyday life, into lifestyle blogs that generate income through advertising and foreground consumerist lifestyles. It argues that lifestyle blogs are dialogically constituted between the blogger, the readers, and the blog itself, and challenges the assumption of a unitary self by proposing that lifestyle blogs can best be understood in terms of the “dividual self.”

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• eBook available March 2018

  Money at the Margins

  Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design

  Maurer, B., Musaraj, S., & Small, I. V. (eds)

  Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more—as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people’s everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2019

  Money Games

  Gambling in a Papua New Guinea Town

  Pickles, A. J.

  Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2017

  Money in a Human Economy

  Hart, K. (eds)

  A human economy puts people first in emergent world society. Money is a human universal and now takes the divisive form of capitalism. This book addresses how to think about money (from Aristotle to the daily news and the sexual economy of luxury goods); its contemporary evolution (banking the unbanked and remittances in the South, cross-border investment in China, the payments industry and the politics of bitcoin); and cases from 19th century India and Southern Africa to contemporary Haiti and Argentina. Money is one idea with diverse forms. As national monopoly currencies give way to regional and global federalism, money is a key to achieving economic democracy.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2017

  Moral Engines

  Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life

  Mattingly, C., Dyring, R., Louw, M., & Schwarz Wentzer, T. (eds)

  In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2021

  The Moral Work of Anthropology

  Ethnographic Studies of Anthropologists at Work

  Mogensen, H. & Hansen, B. G. (eds)

  Looking at anthropologists at work, this book investigates what kind of morality they perform in their occupations and what the impact of this morality is. The book includes ethnographic studies in four professional arenas: health care, business, management and interdisciplinary research. The discussion is positioned at the intersection of ‘applied or public anthropology’ and ‘the anthropology of ethics’ and analyses the ways in which anthropologists can carry out ‘moral work’ both inside and outside of academia.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Applied Anthropology

• June 2014

  Morality and Economic Growth in Rural West Africa

  Indigenous Accumulation in Hausaland

  Clough, P.

  The land, labor, credit, and trading institutions of Marmara village, in Hausaland, northern Nigeria, are detailed in this study through fieldwork conducted in two national economic cycles - the petroleum-boom prosperity (in 1977-1979), and the macro-economic decline (in 1985, 1996 and 1998). The book unveils a new paradigm of economic change in the West African savannah, demonstrating how rural accumulation in a polygynous society actually limits the extent of inequality while at the same time promoting technical change.  A uniquely African non-capitalist trajectory of accumulation subordinates the acquisition of capital to the expansion of polygynous families, clientage networks, and circles of trading friends.  The whole trajectory is driven by an indigenous ethics of personal responsibility. This model disputes the validity of both Marxian theories of capitalist transformation in Africa and the New Institutional Economics.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• January 2001

  Morals of Legitimacy

  Between Agency and the System

  Pardo, I. (ed)

  With the growing fragmentation of western societies and disillusionment with the political process, the question of legitimacy has become one of the key issues of contemporary politics and is examined in this volume in depth for the first time. Drawing on ethnographic material from the U.S., Europe, India, Japan, and Africa, anthropologists and legal scholars investigate the morally diversified definitions of legitimacy that co-exist in any one society. Aware of the tensions between state morality and community morality, they offer reflections on the relationship between agency - individual and collective - and the legal and political systems. In a situation in which politics has only too often degenerated into vacuous rhetoric, this volume demonstrates how critical the relationship between trust and legitimacy is for the authoritative exercise of power in democratic societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available June 2016

  Mortuary Dialogues

  Death Ritual and the Reproduction of Moral Community in Pacific Modernities

  Lipset, D. & Silverman, E. K. (eds)

  Mortuary Dialogues presents fresh perspectives on death and mourning across the Pacific Islands. Through a set of rich ethnographies, the book examines how funerals and death rituals give rise to discourse and debate about sustaining moral personhood and community amid modernity and its enormous transformations. The book’s key concept, “mortuary dialogue,” describes the different genres of talk and expressive culture through which people struggle to restore individual and collective order in the aftermath of death in the contemporary Pacific.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• September 2016

  Moving Places

  Relations, Return and Belonging

  Gregorič Bon, N. & Repič, J. (eds)

  Moving Places draws together contributions from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exploring practices and experiences of movement, non-movement, and place-making. The book centers on “moving places”: places with locations that are not fixed but relative. Locations appearing to be reasonably stable, such as home and homeland, are in fact always subject to practices, imaginaries, and politics of movement. Bringing together original ethnographic contributions with a clear theoretical focus, this volume spans the fields of anthropology, human geography, migration, and border studies, and serves as teaching material in related programs.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies Mobility Studies Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2012

  Moving Subjects, Moving Objects

  Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions

  Svašek, M. (ed)

  In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how ‘emotions’ can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Mobility Studies Sociology

• March 2008

  Multiculturalism in the New Japan

  Crossing the Boundaries Within

  Graburn, N., Ertl, J. & Tierney, R. K. (ed)

  Like other industrial nations, Japan is experiencing its own forms of, and problems with, internationalization and multiculturalism. This volume focuses on several aspects of this process and examines the immigrant minorities as well as their Japanese recipient communities. Multiculturalism is considered broadly, and includes topics often neglected in other works, such as: religious pluralism, domestic and international tourism, political regionalism and decentralization, sports, business styles in the post-Bubble era, and the education of immigrant minorities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• April 2015

  Multidimensional Change in Sudan (1989–2011)

  Reshaping Livelihoods, Conflicts and Identities

  Casciarri, B., Assal, M.A.M. & Ireton, F. (eds)

  Based on fieldwork largely collected during the CPA interim period by Sudanese and European researchers, this volume sheds light on the dynamics of change and the relationship between microscale and macroscale processes which took place in Sudan between the 1980s and the independence of South Sudan in 2011. Contributors’ various disciplinary approaches—socio-anthropological, geographical, political, historical, linguistic—focus on the general issue of “access to resources.” The book analyzes major transformations which affected Sudan in the framework of globalization, including land and urban issues; water management; “new” actors and “new conflicts”; and language, identity, and ideology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available September 2011

  Multiple Moralities and Religions in Post-Soviet Russia

  Zigon, J. (ed)

  In the post-Soviet period morality became a debatable concept, open to a multitude of expressions and performances. From Russian Orthodoxy to Islam, from shamanism to Protestantism, religions of various kinds provided some of the first possible alternative moral discourses and practices after the end of the Soviet system. This influence remains strong today. Within the Russian context, religion and morality intersect in such social domains as the relief of social suffering, the interpretation of history, the construction and reconstruction of traditions, individual and social health, and business practices. The influence of religion is also apparent in the way in which the Russian Orthodox Church increasingly acts as the moral voice of the government. The wide-ranging topics in this ethnographically based volume show the broad religious influence on both discursive and everyday moralities. The contributors reveal that although religion is a significant aspect of the various assemblages of morality, much like in other parts of the world, religion in postsocialist Russia cannot be separated from the political or economic or transnational institutional aspects of morality.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2019

  Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies

  Bruun Jensen, C. & Morita, A. (eds)

  Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the relationships between diverse anthropological traditions. By highlighting natural-cultural worlds alongside these traditions, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies explores the potential for creating more sophisticated conjunctions of anthropological knowledge and practice.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Theory and Methodology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available August 2019

  The Museum of Mankind

  Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department

  Burt, B.

  The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997. This memoir is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures. Issues of changing museum theory and practice are raised in a detailed case-study that also focuses on the social life of the museum community. This is the first history of a remarkable museum and a memorable interlude in the long history of one of the world’s oldest and greatest museums. Although not presented as an academic study, it should be useful for museum and cultural studies as a well as a wider readership interested in the British Museum.

  Subjects: Museum Studies Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• December 2005

  Music and Manipulation

  On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music

  Brown, S. & Volgsten, U. (eds)

  Since the beginning of human civilization, music has been used as a device to control social behavior, where it has operated as much to promote solidarity within groups as hostility between competing groups. Music is an emotive manipulator that influences attitude, motivation and behavior at many levels and in many contexts. This volume is the first to address the social ramifications of music’s behaviorally manipulative effects, its morally questionable uses and control mechanisms, and its economic and artistic regulation through commercialization, thus highlighting not only music’s diverse uses at the social level but also the ever-fragile relationship between aesthetics and morality.

  Subjects: Cultural Studies (General) Media Studies Sociology Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2019

  Muted Memories

  Heritage-Making, Bagamoyo, and the East African Caravan Trade

  Lindström, J.

  In the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of porters carried ivory every year from the African interior to Bagamoyo, a port town at the Indian Ocean. In the opposite direction, they carried millions of meters of cloth, manufactured in the USA, Europe, and India. This book examines the centrality of the caravan trade, both culturally and economically, to Bagamoyo’s development and cosmopolitan character, while also exploring how this history was silenced when Bagamoyo was instead branded as a slave route town in 2006 in an attempt to qualify it for the UNESCO World Heritage List.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Heritage Studies Development Studies

• eBook available June 2017

  The Myth of Self-Reliance

  Economic Lives Inside a Liberian Refugee Camp

  Omata, N.

  For many refugees, economic survival in refugee camps is extraordinarily difficult. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative research , this volume challenges the reputation of a ‘self-reliant’ model given to Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana and sheds light on considerable economic inequality between refugee households.By following the same refugee households over several years, The Myth of Self-Reliance also provides valuable insights into refugees’ experiences of repatriation to Liberia after protracted exile and their responses to the ending of refugee status for remaining refugees in Ghana.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2022

  Mythology and Symbolism of Eurasia and Indigenous Americas

  Manifestations in Artifacts and Rituals

  Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, M.

  A system of myths, symbols, and rituals, dating back to the Paleolithic and Neolithic, survives in present-day imagery. In exploring this system, special attention is drawn to the linkage between ancient and contemporary civilizations of Eurasia and Mesoamerica, as seen in their cosmology, and expressed in common mythological and iconographic themes. The author examines contemporary Middle American and eastern European textiles, especially women’s garments, that contain an elaborated sacred code of symbols, and include remnants of the four horizontal directions, and the three vertical worlds that portray the structure of the universe. The cosmology contained in patterns around the world denotes striking parallels that attest to internal connections between different cultures, beyond time and place.

  Subjects: Archaeology Anthropology (General)

• September 1996

  Mythology, Spirituality, and History

  Gray, A.

  The Arakmbut are an indigenous people who live in the Madre de Dios region of thesoutheastern Peruvian rain forest. Since their first encounters with missionaries in the 1950s,they have shown resilience and a determination to affirm their identity in the face of many difficulties. During the last fifteen years, Arakmbut survival has been under threat from a goldrush that has attracted hundreds of colonists onto their territories. This trilogy of books traces the ways in which the Arakmbut overcome the dangers that surround them: their mythology and cultural strength; their social flexibility; and their capacity to incorporate non-indigenous concepts and activities into their defence strategies. Each area is punctuated by the constant presence of the invisible spirit, which provides a seamless theme connecting the books to each other.

  Following the Arakmbuts' recommendation, the author uses their three greatest myths to introduce social, cultural and historical aspects of their lives. He ends with a discussion of the relationship between myth and history showing how the Arakmbut recreate their myths at the dramatic moments of their history.

  Buy all three volumes for 20% discount

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Development Studies Literary Studies

• November 2006

  Names and Nunavut

  Culture and Identity in the Inuit Homeland

  Alia, V.

  On the surface, naming is simply a way to classify people and their environments. The premise of this study is that it is much more — a form of social control, a political activity, a key to identity maintenance and transformation. Governments legislate and regulate naming; people fight to take, keep, or change their names. A name change can indicate subjugation or liberation, depending on the circumstances. But it always signifies a change in power relations. Since the late 1970s, the author has looked at naming and renaming, cross-culturally and internationally, with particular attention to the effects of colonisation and liberation. The experience of Inuit in Canada is an example of both. Colonisation is only part of the Nunavut experience. Contrary to the dire predictions of cultural genocide theorists, Inuit culture — particularly traditional naming — has remained extremely strong, and is in the midst of a renaissance. Here is a ground-breaking study by the founder of the discipline of political onomastics.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2012

  Narrating the Future in Siberia

  Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny

  Ulturgasheva, O.

  The wider cultural universe of contemporary Eveny is a specific and revealing subset of post-Soviet society. From an anthropological perspective, the author seeks to reveal not only the Eveny cultural universe but also the universe of the children and adolescents within this universe. The first full-length ethnographic study among the adolescence of Siberian indigenous peoples, it presents the young people’s narratives about their own future and shows how they form constructs of time, space, agency and personhood through the process of growing up and experiencing their social world. The study brings a new perspective to the anthropology of childhood and uncovers a quite unexpected dynamic in narrating and foreshadowing the future while relating it to cultural patterns of prediction and fulfillment in nomadic cosmology.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• April 2014

  Narrating Victimhood

  Gender, Religion and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia

  Schäuble, M.

  Mythologies and narratives of victimization pervade contemporary Croatia, set against the backdrop of militarized notions of masculinity and the political mobilization of religion and nationhood. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Dalmatia in the Croatian-Bosnian border region, this book provides a unique account of the politics of ambiguous Europeanness from the perspective of those living at Europe’s margins. Examining phenomena such as Marian apparitions, a historic knights tournament, the symbolic re-signification of a massacre site, and the desolate social situation of Croatian war veterans, Narrating Victimhood traces the complex mechanisms of political radicalization in a post-war scenario. This book provides a new perspective for understanding the ongoing processes of transformation in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available November 2016

  Narratives in the Making

  Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present

  Gallinat, A.

  Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.

  Subjects: History: 20th Century to Present Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available November 2020

  Nature Wars

  Essays Around a Contested Concept

  Ellen, R.

  Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• May 2006

  Navigating Terrains of War

  Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau

  Vigh, H.

  Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2014

  Negotiating Identity in Scandinavia

  Women, Migration, and the Diaspora

  Akman, H. (ed)

  Gender has a profound impact on the discourse on migration as well as various aspects of integration, social and political life, public debate, and art. This volume focuses on immigration and the concept of diaspora through the experiences of women living in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Through a variety of case studies, the authors approach the multifaceted nature of interactions between these women and their adopted countries, considering both the local and the global. The text examines the “making of the Scandinavian” and the novel ways in which diasporic communities create gendered forms of belonging that transcend the nation state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available February 2022

  Neoliberalizing Diversity in Liberal Arts College Life

  Urciuoli, B.

  As neoliberalism has expanded from corporations to higher education, the notion of “diversity” is increasingly seen as the contribution of individuals to an organization. By focusing on one liberal arts college, author Bonnie Urciuoli shows how schools market themselves as “diverse” communities to which all members contribute. She explores how students of color are recruited, how their lives are institutionally organized, and how they provide the faces, numbers, and stories that represent schools as diverse. In doing so, she finds that unlike students’ routine experiences of racism or other social differences, neoliberal diversity is mainly about improving schools’ images.

  Subjects: Educational Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2022

  A New African Elite

  Place in the Making of a Bridge Generation

  Pellow, D.

  Focusing on a sub-set of the Dagomba of northern Ghana, this book looks at the first generation to go through secondary school in the north. After university and post-graduate education, they relocate to Accra, the capital, hundreds of miles south. They crossed social and physical space and have become cosmopolitan while holding on to tradition and attachment to their home town. This bridge generation are patrons to those living up north. This book charts their path into elite status and argues that they use the tools gained through education and social connections to influence politics back home.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Mobility Studies Development Studies

• January 2001

  The New Age in Glastonbury

  The Construction of Religious Movements

  Prince, R. & Riches, D.

  The New Age movement is a twentieth-century socio-cultural phenomenon in the Western world with Glastonbury as one of its major centers. Through experimenting with a number of ways of analyzing this movement, the authors were able to develop a novel theory of social religious movements of broad applicability. Based around contradictions relating to such central anthropological concepts as communitas, egalitarianism, individualism, holism, and autonomy, it reveals the processes by which, having abandoned a mainstream lifestyle, people come to build up a counter-culture way of life. Drawing on their own work on tribal shamanistic religions, the authors are able to point out interesting similarities between the latter and the Glastonbury New Age movement. Not only that: their model allows them to explain such wide-ranging social and religious movements as the Hutterites, the Kibbutz, and Green communes. In fact, the authors argue, these movements may be regarded as variations of the Glastonbury type.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available January 2010

  The New Media Nation

  Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

  Alia, V

  Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2022

  New Perspectives on Moral Change

  Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage with Transformations of Life Worlds

  Eriksen, C. & Hämäläinen, N. (eds)

  The world we live in is constantly changing. Climate change, transforming gender conceptions, emerging issues of food consumption, novel forms of family life and technological developments are altering central areas of our forms of life. This raises questions of how to cope with and understand the moral changes implicit in such alterations. This volume is the first to address moral change as such. It brings together anthropologists and philosophers to discuss how to study and theorize the change of norms, concepts, emotions, moral frameworks and forms of personhood.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• October 2007

  New Regionalism and Asylum Seekers

  Challenges Ahead

  Kneebone, S. & Rawlings-Sanaei, F. (eds)

  Taking the context of forced migration, this book addresses the role that regional, in contrast to national or global, institutions and relationships play in shaping asylum policies and procedures. It examines the causes of forced migration movements; the direction of forced migration flows and its effect upon the immediate region; policy responses towards forced migration (in particular ASEAN and the European Community); cooperative arrangements and agreements between regional states; and the protection of human rights. The book also considers the role that regional responses are likely to play in determining the direction of asylum policy in receiving states and procedures in the future.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2010

  News as Culture

  Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions

  Rao, U.

  At the turn of the millennium, Indian journalism has undergone significant changes. The rapid commercialization of the press, together with an increase in literacy and political consciousness, has led to swift growth in the newspaper market but also changed the way news makers mediate politics. Positioned at a historical junction where India is clearly feeling the effects of market liberalization, this study demonstrates how journalists and informants interactively create new forms of political action and consciousness. The book explores English and Hindi newsmaking and investigates the creation of news relations during the production process and how they affect political images and leadership traditions. It moves beyond the news-room to outline the role of journalists in urban society, the social lives of news texts and the way citizens bring their ideas and desires to bear on the news discourse.

  This important volume contributes to an emerging debate about the impact of the media on Indian society. Furthermore, it convincingly demonstrates the inseparable link between media related practices and dynamic cultural repertoires.

  Subjects: Media Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available June 2021

  NGOs and Lifeworlds in Africa

  Transdisciplinary Perspectives

  Kalfelis, M. C. & Knodel, K. (eds)

  Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become ubiquitous in the development sector in Africa and attracting more academic attention. However, the fact that NGOs are an integral part of the everyday lives of men and women on the continent has been overlooked thus far. In Africa, NGOs are not remote, but familiar players, situated in the midst of cities and communities. By taking a radical empirical stance, this book studies NGOs as a vital part of the lifeworlds of Africans. Its contributions are immersed in the pasts, presents and futures of personal encounters, memories, decision-making and politics.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• April 2008

  The Nomads of Mykonos

  Performing Liminalities in a 'Queer' Space

  Bousiou, P.

  This is the ethnography of the Mykoniots d’élection, a ‘gang’ of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant movement. Mykonos, as a signifier of a new form of ontological nomadism, semiotically shares such assumptions. The Nomads of Mykonos keep returning to a series of alternative affective groups largely in order to heal a split: between their desire for autonomy, rebellion and aloneness and their need to affectively belong to a collectivity. Mykonos for the Mykoniots d’élection is their permanent ‘stopover’; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos’ space an allegorical (discordant) notion of ‘home’.

  Subjects: Gender Studies and Sexuality Travel and Tourism Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2018

  Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

  Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs

  Rivera Andía, J. J. (ed)

  Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2020

  Nourishing Life

  Foodways and Humanity in an African Town

  Huhn, A.

  In this accessible ethnography of a small town in northern Mozambique, everyday cultural knowledge and behaviors about food, cooking, and eating reveal the deeply human pursuit of a nourishing life. This emerges less through the consumption of specific nutrients than it does in the affective experience of alimentation in contexts that support vitality, compassion, and generative relations. Embedded within central themes in the study of Africa south of the Sahara, the volume combines insights from philosophy and food studies to find textured layers of meaning in a seemingly simple cuisine.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available November 2019

  Nourishing the Nation

  Food as National Identity in Catalonia

  Johannes, V.

  In the early twenty-first century, nationalism has seen a surprising resurgence across the Western world. In the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain, this resurgence has been most apparent in widespread support for Catalonia’s pro-independence movement, and the popular assertion of Catalan symbols, culture and identity in everyday life. Nourishing the Nation provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food. As a crucial element of Catalan cultural life, a focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• December 2006

  Nursing Stories

  Life and Death in a German Hospice

  Eschenbruch, N.

  At a time, when the section of the older population is increasing in all western societies, more and more attention needs to be paid to the growing number of people who live with and die of drawn-out terminal illnesses, cancer being one of the most common ones. This study focuses on terminally ill people in a German hospice and addresses the question how meaningful experience is constructed for these patients in an attempt to preserve their dignity as persons. It is based on detailed and sometimes moving material from diary texts and active participation of the author in the role of a nurse, which allowed him to watch closely the behaviour of patients and nurses in routine situations and to look at the underlying emotions, values, and assumptions within such interaction. This book goes well beyond this particular case and reaches conclusions about death narratives that are significant for the social sciences more generally.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available April 2022

  Nurturing the Other

  First Contacts and the Making of Christian Bodies in Amazonia

  Grotti, V.

  Combining archival research, oral history and long-term ethnography, this book studies relations between Amerindians and outsiders, such as American missionaries, through a series of contact expeditions that led to the 'pacification' of three native Amazonian groups in Suriname and French Guiana. The author examines and contrasts Amerindian and non-Amerindian views on this process of social transformation through the lens of the body, notions of peacefulness and kinship, as well as native warfare and shamanism. The book addresses questions of change and continuity, and the little explored links between first contacts, capture and native conversion to Christianity in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Colonial History Anthropology of Religion

• February 2015

  Objects and Imagination

  Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning

  Fuglerud, Ø. & Wainwright, L. (eds)

  Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Museum Studies

• February 2003

  Oceanic Socialities and Cultural Forms

  Ethnographies of Experience

  Hoëm, I. & Roalkvam, S. (eds)

  In anthropology, theoretical approaches attempting to come to terms with experiences of social interaction, often inspired by phenomenology, have come to the fore in opposition to the previously favored emphasis on symbolic and social structures. These essays attempt a new kind of ethnographic description of social life that treats structure and practice as aspects of the same reality. This is achieved through attention to indigenous conceptualizations of the way society itself is generated.

  With Jonathan Friedman and Fredrik Barth providing overviews, this series of innovative ethnographies highlights ways of forming social relations specific to Oceania as a cultural area, exemplifying a new kind of comparative approach and making a major contribution to general social theory.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• April 2023

  Of Jaguars and Butterflies

  Metalogues on Issues in Anthropology and Philosophy

  Lloyd, G. & Vilaça, A.

  What are we to make of statements that jaguars see themselves as humans, or of doubts about the boundary between dreams and waking? Jointly authored by an anthropologist and a philosopher, this book investigates some of the most puzzling ideas and practices reported in modern ethnography and ancient philosophy, concerning humans, animals, persons, spirits, agency, selfhood, consciousness, nature, life, death, disease and health. The study’s twin aims are first to explore the possibility of achieving a better understanding of the materials we discuss and then to see what lessons we can draw from them to challenge and revise our own fundamental assumptions.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• eBook available December 2018

  Of Life and Health

  The Language of Art and Religion in an African Medical System

  Tengan, A. B.

  An anthropological study of the health system of the Dagara people of northern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso, Of Life and Health develops a cultural and epistemological lexicon of Dagara life by examining its religious, ritual, and artistic expressions. Consisting of ethnographic descriptions and analyses of six Dagara cultic institutions, each of which deals with different aspects of sustaining and transmitting life, the volume gives a holistic account of the Dagara knowledge system.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

• September 2012

  Ogata-Mura

  Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village

  Wood, D. C.

  Following the Second World War, a massive land reclamation project to boost Japan’s rice production capacity led to the transformation of the shallow lagoon of Hachirogata in Akita Prefecture into a seventeen-thousand-hectare expanse of farmland. In 1964, the village of Ogata-mura was founded on the empoldered land inside the lagoon and nearly six hundred pioneers from across the country were brought to settle there. The village was to be a model of a new breed of highly mechanized, efficient rice agriculture; however, the village’s purpose was jeopardized when the demand for rice fell, and the goal of creating an egalitarian farming community was threatened as individual entrepreneurialism took root and as the settlers became divided into political factions that to this day continue to struggle for control of the village. Based on seventeen years of research, this book explores the process of Ogatamura’s development from the planning stages to the present. An intensive ethnographic study of the relationship between land reclamation, agriculture, and politics in regional Japan, it traces the internal social effects of the village’s economic transformations while addressing the implications of national policy at the municipal and regional levels.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Anthropology (General)

• June 2015

  Oikos and Market

  Explorations in Self-Sufficiency after Socialism

  Gudeman, S. & Hann, C. (eds)

  Self-sufficiency of the house is practiced in many parts of the world but ignored in economic theory, just as socialist collectivization is assumed to have brought household self-sufficiency to an end. The ideals of self-sufficiency, however, continue to shape economic activity in a wide range of postsocialist settings. This volume’s six comparative studies of postsocialist villages in Eastern Europe and Asia illuminate the enduring importance of the house economy, which is based not on the market but on the order of the house. These formations show that economies depend not only on the macro institutions of markets and states but also on the micro institutions of families, communities, and house economies, often in an uneasy relationship.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• September 1999

  Olympic Games as Performance and Public Event

  The Case of the XVII Winter Olympic Games in Norway

  Klausen, A. (ed)

  Sports, and in particular the Olympic Games, are enjoying a rapid increase in interest among social scientists worldwide, who see them as important "public events." This volume offers the first analysis of the Winter Olympic Games, primarily based on the Lillehammer Games of 1994. The authors identify "olympism" as a key agent in the modernization process and, more specifically, ask how the winter games, as a mega-event, relate to Norwegian culture and ethos.

  The authors of these specially commissioned papers examine various aspects of this encounter, including problems such as gender as related to nature and culture, masculinity and heroism, national identity and invention of tradition, the impact of venue construction on a traditional cultural landscape, the ideological criticism of the I.O.C. as it emerged, dramatically, before the opening of the Games and the conflict between the Norwegians and the Greeks over the ritual status of the two flames used during the torch relay, one from Olympia and one from Morgedalin Telemark, "the cradle of skiing."

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2003

  On Prayer

  Text and Commentary

  Mauss, M.

  Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) never completed his Doctoral thesis on prayer. Yet his scarcely mentioned introduction (Books I and II) of 176 pages and privately printed in 1909, can be seen as some of his most important work. His argument that much of prayer is a social act will be of great interest to anthropologists, sociologists and theologians.

  Here, the first English translation to be published, is preceded by a general introduction by W.S.F.Pickering and finally a specific commentary on Mauss's use of ethnographic material.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Anthropology of Religion Sociology

• eBook available April 2017

  On Retaliation

  Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of a Basic Human Condition

  Turner, B. & Schlee, G. (eds)

  Retaliation is associated with all forms of social and political organization, and retaliatory logics inform many different conflict resolution procedures from consensual settlement to compensation to violent escalations. This book derives a concept of retaliation from the overall notion of reciprocity, defining retaliation as the human disposition to strive for a reactive balancing of conflicts and injustices. On Retaliation presents a synthesized approach to both the violence-generating and violence-avoiding potentials of retaliation. Contributors to this volume touch upon the interaction between retaliation and violence, the state’s monopoly on legitimate punishment and the factors of socio-political frameworks, religious interpretations and economic processes.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available February 2020

  On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise

  Affect, Tourism, Belize

  Little, K.

  There are beastly forces in Belize. Forces that are actively involved in making paradise impossible. On the Nervous Edge of an Impossible Paradise is a collection of seven stories about local lives in the fictional village of Wallaceville. They turn rogue in the face of runaway forces that take the form and figure of a Belize beast-time, which can appear as a comic mishap, social ruin, tragic excess, or wild guesses. Inciting the affective politics of life in the region, this fable of emergence evokes the unnerving uncertainties of life in the tourist state of Belize.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Literary Studies

• July 2023

  Once Upon a Time is Now

  A Kalahari Memoir

  Biesele, M.

  Fifty years after her first fieldwork with Ju/'hoan San hunter-gatherers, anthropologist Megan Biesele has written this exceptional memoir based on personal journals she wrote at the time.

  The treasure trove of vivid learning experiences and nightly ponderings she found has led to a memoir of rare value to anthropology students and academics as well as to general readers. Her experiences focus on the long-lived healing dance, known to many as the trance dance, and the intricate beliefs, artistry, and social system that support it.

  She describes her immersion in a creative community enlivened and kept healthy by that dance, which she calls "one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind."

  From the Preface:
  A few years ago I finally got around to looking back into the box of personal field journals I had not opened for over forty years. I found a treasure trove. It was an overwhelming experience. So much that I had forgotten came vividly alive: I laughed, wept, and was terrified all over again at my temerity in taking on what I had taken on. To do justice to the richness of these notebooks, I realized, I would have to do a completely different sort of writing from anything I had ever done before.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies

• eBook available September 2016

  The Online World of Surrogacy

  Berend, Z.

  Zsuzsa Berend presents a methodologically innovative ethnography of SurroMomsOnline.com, the largest surrogacy support website in the United States. Surrogates’ views emerge from the stories, debates, and discussions that unfold online. The Online World of Surrogacy documents these collective meaning-making practices and explores their practical, emotional, and moral implications. In doing so, the book works through themes of interest across the social sciences, including definitions of parenthood, the symbolic role of money, reproductive loss, altruism, and the moral valuation of relationships.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available February 2008

  Order and Disorder

  Anthropological Perspectives

  Benda-Beckmann, K. von & Pirie, F. (eds)

  Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining order within the political and legal spheres and in contrasting local settings, the papers in this volume highlight its complex and contested nature. Elaborate displays of order seem necessary to legitimate the institutionalization of violence by military and legal establishments, yet violent behaviour can be incorporated into the social order by the development of boundaries, rituals and established processes of conflict resolution. Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest. Case studies from Siberia, India, Indonesia, Tibet, West Africa, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire show that local responses are often inconsistent in their valorization, acceptance and condemnation of disorder.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available June 2012

  Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes

  An Anthropology of Everyday Religion

  Schielke, S. & Debevec, L. (eds)

  Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available February 2023

  Other Worlds, Other Bodies

  Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing

  Pierini, E., Groisman, A., & Espírito Santo, D. (eds)

  When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of “other” worlds that may intersect with the so-called “material” or “physical” worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the “unknown”—be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an “other”—shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology

• eBook available June 2020

  Ours Once More

  Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece

  Herzfeld, M.

  When this work – one that contributes to both the history and anthropology fields – first appeared in 1982, it was hailed as a landmark study of the role of folklore in nation-building. It has since been highly influential in reshaping the analysis of Greek and European cultural dynamics.  In this expanded edition, a new introduction by the author and an epilogue by Sharon Macdonald document its importance for the emergence of serious anthropological interest in European culture and society and for current debates about Greece’s often contested place in the complex politics of the European Union.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) History (General)

• eBook available October 2021

  Outsiders

  Memories of Migration to and from North Korea

  Bell, M.

  In this unique and insightful book, Markus Bell explores the hidden histories of the men, women, and children who traveled from Japan to the world’s most secretive state—North Korea. Through vivid ethnographic details and interviews with North Korean escapees, Outsiders: Memories of Migration to and from North Korea reveals the driving forces that propelled thousands of ordinary people to risk it all in Kim Il-Sung’s “Worker’s Paradise”, only to escape back to Japan half a century later.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available May 2016

  Ownership and Nurture

  Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations

  Brightman, M., Fausto, C. & Grotti, V. (eds)

  The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• July 2014

  Pacific Futures

  Projects, Politics and Interests

  Rollason, W. (ed)

  The Pacific region presents a huge diversity of cultural forms, which have fuelled some of the most challenging ethnographic work undertaken in the discipline. But this challenge has come at a cost. Culture, often reconfigured as ‘custom’, has often served to trap the people of the Pacific in the past of cultural reproduction, where everything is what it has always been, or worse—outdated, outmoded and destined for modernization.

  Pacific Futures asks how our understanding of social life in the Pacific would be different if we approached it from the perspective of the futures which Pacific people dream of, predict or struggle to achieve, not the reproduction of cultural tradition. From Christianity to gambling, marriage to cargo cult, military coups to reflections on childhood fishing trips, the contributors to this volume show how Pacific people are actively shaping their lives with the future in mind.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available November 2018

  Pacific Realities

  Changing Perspectives on Resilience and Resistance

  Dousset, L. & Nayral, M. (eds)

  Throughout the Pacific region, people are faced with dramatic changes, often described as processes of “glocalization”; individuals and groups espouse multilayered forms of identity, in which global modes of thinking and doing are embedded in renewed perceptions of local or regional specificities. Consequently, new forms of resistance and resilience – the processes by which communities attempt to regain their original social, political, and economic status and structure after disruption or displacement – emerge. Through case studies from across the Pacific which transcend the conventional “local-global” dichotomy, this volume aims to explore these complex and interwoven phenomena from a new perspective.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available October 2022

  Pacific Spaces

  Translations and Transmutations

  Engels-Schwarzpaul, A.-C., Lopesi, L., & Refiti, A. L. (eds)

  Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book – architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians – show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergence is created for something that goes beyond both, enhancing both fields of potentialities.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Development Studies

• eBook available June 2020

  Pacing Mobilities

  Timing, Intensity, Tempo and Duration of Human Movements

  Amit, V. & Salazar, N. B. (eds)

  Turning the attention to the temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimensions of mobility, this volume focuses on the momentum for and temporal composition of mobility, the rate at which people enact or deploy their movements as well as the conditions under which these moves are being marshalled, represented and contested. This is an anthropological exploration of temporality as a form of action, a process of actively modulating or responding to how people are moving rather than the more usual focus in mobility studies on where they are heading.

  Subjects: Mobility Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2003

  Papua New Guinea's Last Place

  Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison

  Reed, A.

  What kind of experience is incarceration? How should one define its constraints? The author, who conducted extensive fieldwork in a maximum-security jail in Papua New Guinea, seeks to address these questions through a vivid and sympathetic account of inmates' lives.

  Prison Studies is a growing field of interest for social scientists. As one of the first ethnographic studies of a prison outside western societies and Japan, this book contributes to a reinterpretation of the field's scope and assumptions. It challenges notions of what is punitive about imprisonment by exploring the creative as well as negative outcomes of detention, separation and loss. Instead of just coping, the prisoners in Papua New Guinea's Last Place find themselves drawing fresh critiques and new approaches to contemporary living.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• July 2013

  Pastoralism in Africa

  Past, Present and Future

  Bollig, M., Schnegg, M., & Wotzka, H.-P. (eds)

  Pastoralism has shaped livelihoods and landscapes on the African continent for millennia. Mobile livestock husbandry has generally been portrayed as an economic strategy that successfully met the challenges of low biomass productivity and environmental variability in arid and semi-arid environments. This volume focuses on the emergence, diversity, and inherent dynamics of pastoralism in Africa based on research during a twelve-year period on the southwest and northeast regions. Unraveling the complex prehistory, history, and contemporary political ecology of African pastoralism, results in insight into the ingenuity and flexibility of historical and contemporary herders.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• July 2005

  Pathways to Heaven

  Contesting Mainline and Fundamentalist Christianity in Papua New Guinea

  Jebens, H.

  How does global Christianity relate to processes of globalisation and modernization and what form does it take in different local settings? These questions have lately proved to be of increasing interest to many scholars in the social sciences and humanities. This study examines the tensions, antagonisms and outright confrontations that can occur within local Christian communities upon the arrival of global versions of fundamentalism and it does so through a rich and in-depth ethnographic study of a single case: that of Pairundu, a small and remote Papua New Guinean village whose population accepted Catholicism, after first being contacted in the late 1950s, and subsequently participated in a charismatic movement, before more and more members of the younger generation started to separate themselves from their respective catholic families and to convert to one of the most radical and fastest growing religious groups not only in contemporary Papua New Guinea but world-wide: the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. This case study of local Christianity as a lived religion contributes to an understanding of the social and cultural dynamics that increasingly incite and shape religious conflicts on a global scale.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available January 2017

  The Patient Multiple

  An Ethnography of Healthcare and Decision-Making in Bhutan

  Taee, J.

  In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, medical patients engage a variety of healing practices to seek cures for their ailments. Patients use the expanding biomedical network and a growing number of traditional healthcare units, while also seeking alternative practices, such as shamanism and other religious healing, or even more provocative practices. The Patient Multiple delves into this healthcare complexity in the context of patients’ daily lives and decision-making processes, showing how these unique mountain cultures are finding new paths to good health among a changing and multifaceted medical topography.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Medical Anthropology Anthropology of Religion

• August 2012

  Patients and Agents

  Mental Illness, Modernity and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh

  Callan, A.

  Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh most closely associated with overseas migration, has seen an increase in remittances sent home from abroad, introducing new inequalities.  Social change has also been mediated by the global forces of Western biomedicine and orthodox Islam.  This book examines the effects of these modernizing trends on mental health and on local, traditional healing as the new inequalities have exacerbated existing social tensions and led to increased vulnerability to mental illness.  It is the young women of Sylhet who are most affected.  The global economy has increased competition for resources and led to marriage being seen as a route to economic advancement.  Parents prefer to give their daughters in marriage to families that will widen their social contacts and enhance their economic and social standing.  Accordingly, the young wife’s outsider status (and hence vulnerability to mental illness) has increased as it is no longer customary to give daughters in marriage to local kin.  Yet, patients and their families do not work out tensions passively.  They are active agents in the construction of their own diagnosis.  The extent to which patients act or are acted upon is an investigation that runs throughout the book.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality Medical Anthropology

• May 2011

  Patrons of Women

  Literacy Projects and Gender Development in Rural Nepal

  Hertzog, E.

  Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

  Subject: Gender Studies and Sexuality Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2019

  PC Worlds

  Political Correctness and Rising Elites at the End of Hegemony

  Friedman, J.

  This provocative work offers an anthropological analysis of the phenomenon of political correctness, both as a general phenomenon of communication, in which associations in space and time take precedence over the content of what is communicated, and at specific critical historical conjunctures at which new elites attempt to redefine social reality. Focusing on the crises over the last thirty years of immigration and multiculturalist politics in Sweden, the book examines cases, some in which the author was himself involved, but also comparative material from other countries.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Media Studies

• eBook available November 2017

  Peaceful Selves

  Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda

  Eramian, L.

  This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, it uncovers how conflicting moral demands emerge from the 1994 genocide, from cultural contradictions around “good” personhood, and from both state and popular visions for the future. What emerges is a profound dissonance in town residents’ selfhood. While they strive to be agents of change who can catalyze a new era of modern Rwandan nationhood, they are also devastated by the genocide and struggle to recover a sense of selfhood and belonging in the absence of kin, friends, and neighbors. In drawing out the contradictions at the heart of self-making and social life in contemporary Rwanda, this book asserts a novel argument about the ordinary lives caught in global post-conflict imperatives to remember and to forget, to mourn and to prosper.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available October 2014

  People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis

  Perspectives from the Global South

  Hart, K. & Sharp, J. (eds)

  The Cold War was fought between “state socialism” and “the free market.” That fluctuating relationship between public power and private money continues today, unfolding in new and unforeseen ways during the economic crisis. Nine case studies -- from Southern Africa, South Asia, Brazil, and Atlantic Africa – examine economic life from the perspective of ordinary people in places that are normally marginal to global discourse, covering a range of class positions from the bottom to the top of society. The authors of these case studies examine people’s concrete economic activities and aspirations. By looking at how people insert themselves into the actual, unequal economy, they seek to reflect human unity and diversity more fully than the narrow vision of conventional economics.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available September 2012

  Performing Place, Practising Memories

  Aboriginal Australians, Hippies and the State

  Henry, R.

  During the 1970s a wave of ‘counter-culture’ people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General)

• October 2013

  Peripheral Vision

  Politics, Technology, and Surveillance

  Frois, C.

  In Portugal between 2005 and 2010, “modernization through technology” was the major political motto used to develop and improve the country’s peripheral and backward condition. This study reflects on one of the resulting, specific aspects of this trend—the implementation of public video surveillance. The in-depth ethnography provides evidence of how the political construction of security and surveillance as a strategic program actually conceals intricate institutional relationships between political decision-makers and common citizens. Essentially, the detailed account of the major actors, as well as their roles and motivations, serves to explain phenomena such as the confusion between objective data and subjective perceptions or the lack of communication between parties, which as this study argues, underlies the idiosyncrasies and fragilities of Portugal’s still relatively young democratic system.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• August 2009

  Person and Place

  Ideas, Ideals and Practice of Sociality on Vanua Lava, Vanuatu

  Hess, S. C.

  Concerned with contemporary notions of personhood and the relationship between persons and places, this book, presents a detailed insight into the Vanua Lavan’s engagement with modernity, and examines how they relate to the past, make sense of the present and anticipate the future. Marilyn Strathern's claim that the Melanesian person is a dividual by and large holds for the Vanua Lavan person. But Vanua Lavans have also been exposed to, and creatively engaged with, what can be summarised under the term ‘Western individualism’. The author draws together several themes, discourses and conversations which concern Vanuatu specifically, the Pacific as a wider geographic area but also theoretical fields in anthropology: the relevance and expressions of sociality through kinship, concepts of person, issues about land and cosmology, the kastom debate, and questions about continuity and change. In doing so she provides a snapshot of contemporary notions of personhood.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• November 2007

  Picturing Pity

  Pitfalls and Pleasures in Cross-Cultural Communication.
  Image and Word in a North Cameroon Mission

  Gullestad, M.

  Picturing Pity is the first full length monograph on missionary photography. Empirically, it is based on an in-depth analysis of the published photographs taken by Norwegian evangelical missionaries in Northern Cameroon from the early nineteen twenties, at the beginning of their activities in this region, and until today. Being part of a large international movement, Norway sent out more missionaries per capita than any other country in Europe.

  Marianne Gullestad's main contention is that the need to continuously justify their activities to donors in Europe has led to the creation and maintenance of specific ways of portraying Africans. The missionary visual rhetoric is both based on earlier visualizations and has over time established its own conventions which can now also be traced within secular fields of activity such as international development agencies, foreign policy, human relief organizations and the mass media.

  Picturing Pity takes part in the present "pictorial turn" in academic teaching and research, constituting visual images as an exciting site of conversation across disciplinary lines.

  Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General)

• October 2002

  Pilgrim Voices

  Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage

  Coleman, S. & Elsner, J. (eds)

  Research on pilgrimage has traditionally fallen across a series of academic disciplines - anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, history and theology. To date, relatively little work has been devoted to the issue of pilgrimage as writing and specifically as a form of travel-writing. The aim of the interdisciplinary essays gathered here is to examine the relations of Christian pilgrimage to the numerous narratives, which it generates and upon which it depends. Authors reveal not only the tensions between oral and written accounts but also the frequent ambiguities of journeys - the possibilities of shifts between secular and sacred forms and accounts of travel. Above all, the papers reveal the self-generating and multiple-authored characteristics of pilgrimage narrative: stories of past pilgrimage experience generate future stories and even future journeys.

  Subjects: Travel and Tourism Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available July 2018

  Pilgrimage and Political Economy

  Translating the Sacred

  Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds)

  Pilgrimage has always had a tendency to follow—and sometimes create—trade routes. This volume explores how wider factors behind transnational and global mobility have impacted on pilgrimage activity across the world, and examines the ways in which pilgrimage relates to migration, diaspora, and political cooperation or conflict across nation-states. Furthermore, it brings together case studies that explore forms of mobility where pilgrimage is juxtaposed, complements, or is in intimate association with other forms of movement.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available February 2013

  Places of Pain

  Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-local Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities

  Halilovich, H.

  For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors’ places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General) Peace and Conflict Studies Memory Studies

• June 2000

  Placing London

  From Imperial Capital to Global City

  Eade, J.

  London continues to fascinate a vast audience across the world, and an extensive, diverse literature now exists describing and analyzing this metropolis. The central question - what is London? - has produced many answers but none of them, the author argues, uncovers the complex ways in which knowledge is constructed in the diverse attempts to represent places and people. On the contrary: a gulf has opened up between analysis of contemporary London as a global, postcolonial city, on the one hand, and historical accounts of the imperial capital on the other. The author shows how the gap can be bridged by combining an analysis of the representation over time by various experts of London and certain localities with an investigation of the ways in which residents have represented their communities through struggles over symbolic and material resources.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General)

• July 2011

  Playing Different Games

  The Paradox of Anywaa and Nuer Identification Strategies in the Gambella Region, Ethiopia

  Feyissa, D.

  Focusing on ethnicity and its relation to conflict, this book goes beyond sterile debates about whether ethnic identities are ‘natural’ or ‘socially constructed’. Rather, ethnic identity takes different forms. Some ethnic boundaries are perceived by the actors themselves as natural, while others are perceived to be permeable. The argument is substantiated through a comparative analysis of ethnic identity formation and ethnic conflict among the Anywaa and the Nuer in the Gambella region of western Ethiopia. The Anywaa and the Nuer are not just two ethnic groups but two kinds of ethnic groups. Conflicts between the Anywaa and Nuer are explained with reference to three variables: varying modes of identity formation, competition over resources and differential incorporation into the state system.

  Subjects: Peace and Conflict Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2019

  Playing the Marginality Game

  Identity Politics in West Africa

  Schroven, A.

  In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Development Studies

• eBook available September 2012

  Playing with Languages

  Children and Change in a Caribbean Village

  Paugh, A. L.

  Over several generations villagers of Dominica have been shifting from Patwa, an Afro-French creole, to English, the official language. Despite government efforts at Patwa revitalization and cultural heritage tourism, rural caregivers and teachers prohibit children from speaking Patwa in their presence. Drawing on detailed ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of video-recorded social interaction in naturalistic home, school, village and urban settings, the study explores this paradox and examines the role of children and their social worlds. It offers much-needed insights into the study of language socialization, language shift and Caribbean children’s agency and social lives, contributing to the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of children’s cultures. Further, it demonstrates the critical role played by children in the transmission and transformation of linguistic practices, which ultimately may determine the fate of a language.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Educational Studies Sociology

• eBook available September 2013

  A Policy Travelogue

  Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada

  Kingfisher, C.

  An ethnography of the development and travel of the New Zealand model of neoliberal welfare reform, this study explores the social life of policy, which is one of process, motion, and change. Different actors, including not only policy élites but also providers and recipients, engage with it in light of their own resources and knowledge. Drawing on two analytic frameworks of the contemporary anthropology of policy—translation and assemblage—Kingfisher situates policy as an artifact and architect of cultural meaning, as well as a site of power struggles. All points of engagement with policy are approached as sites of policy production that serve to transform it as well as reproduce it. As such, A Policy Travelogue provides an antidote to theorizations of policy as a-cultural, rational, and straightforwardly technical.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• March 1996

  The Politics of Cultural Performance

  Parkin, D., Caplan, L. & Fisher, H. (eds)

  The line between what is regarded by people as "traditional" and "modern" is constantly being altered by new configurations of power. These essays examine the ways in which such changes are both communicated and created through cultural performances in diverse ethnographic settings. Examples are drawn from a wide range of forms and expressions: divinatory sequences, spirit possession rites, state ceremonials, village feasts, pilgrimages, language-use and craft specialisms. It was Abner Cohen, to whom this volume is dedicated, who first suggested that a dialectical relationship existed between power and symbolism. This concept, as developed in his seminal work, has since become a growing area of study as reflected in this important collection. By questioning some of the directions, the authors make a major interdisciplinary contribution to the study of cultural performance as a key factor in power relationships. The principal stage is Africa, but comparative ethnographic data are drawn from Ireland, Italy, South Asia, and the United Kingdom.

  Subjects: Performance Studies Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion

• eBook available December 2022

  The Politics of Making Kinship

  Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

  Alber, E. (ed)

  The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no longer taken for granted, The Politics of Making Kinship demonstrates how political processes have shaped concepts of kinship over time and, conversely, how political projects have been shaped by specific understandings, idioms and uses of kinship. Taking vantage points from the post-Roman era to early modernity, and from colonial imperialism to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond this international set of scholars place kinship centerstage and reintegrate it with political theory.

  Subjects: History (General) Political and Economic Anthropology Anthropology (General)

• September 2014

  The Polynesian Iconoclasm

  Religious Revolution and the Seasonality of Power

  Sissons, J.

  Within little more than ten years in the early nineteenth century, inhabitants of Tahiti, Hawaii and fifteen other closely related societies destroyed or desecrated all of their temples and most of their god-images. In the aftermath of the explosive event, which Sissons terms the Polynesian Iconoclasm, hundreds of architecturally innovative churches — one the size of two football fields — were constructed. At the same time, Christian leaders introduced oppressive laws and courts, which the youth resisted through seasonal displays of revelry and tattooing. Seeking an answer to why this event occurred in the way that it did, this book introduces and demonstrates an alternative “practice history” that draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins and employs Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, improvisation and practical logic.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2012

  Post-cosmopolitan Cities

  Explorations of Urban Coexistence

  Humphrey, C. & Skvirskaja, V. (eds)

  Examining the way people imagine and interact in their cities, this book explores the post-cosmopolitan city. The contributors consider the effects of migration, national, and religious revivals (with their new aesthetic sensibilities), the dispositions of marginalized economic actors, and globalized tourism on urban sociality. The case studies here share the situation of having been incorporated in previous political regimes (imperial, colonial, socialist) that one way or another created their own kind of cosmopolitanism, and now these cities are experiencing the aftermath of these regimes while being exposed to new national politics and migratory flows of people.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available April 2019

  Post-Ottoman Topologies

  The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

  Argenti, N. (ed)

  How are historians and social scientists to understand the emergence, the multiplicity, and the mutability of collective memories of the Ottoman Empire in the political formations that succeeded it? With contributions focussing on several of the nation-states whose peoples once were united under the aegis of Ottoman suzerainty, this volume proposes new theoretical approaches to the experience and transmission of the past through time. Developing the concept of topology, contributors explore collective memories of Ottoman identity and post-Ottoman state formation in a contemporary epoch that, echoing late modernity, we might term “late nationalism”.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Memory Studies

• eBook available March 2006

  Postsocialism

  Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe

  Svasek M. (ed)

  In many parts of post-socialist Europe the tumultuous political and economic developments have generated strong emotions, ranging from hope and euphoria to disappointment, envy, disillusionment, sorrow, loneliness, and hatred. Yet these aspects have been largely neglected in analyses of the profound transformations that have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990. Based on a wide variety of ethnographic case studies focusing on Russian, Siberian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, and Polish communities, this volume proves the significance of emotions to post-socialist political processes as an inherent part of the transformations and sheds new light on the impact of local, national, and transnational political forces that have given rise to the resurgence of nationalist sentiments, increasing poverty and marginalization, conflicts arising from the restitution of state property, constitutional changes, and economic deprivation.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available September 2009

  Postsocialist Europe

  Anthropological Perspectives from Home

  Kurti, L. & Skalník, P. (Eds.)

  Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors’ firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• March 2011

  Power and Magic in Italy

  Hauschild, T.

  Based on vivid and colorful case studies about Mafiosi, priests, mothers, and migrants, the author offers new perspectives on the anthropology of religion and magic through categories of landscape, the body, human practice, and material experience. The focus on women as religious practitioners is linked to the idea of religion as a primary mode of production that creates and helps to maintain human reserves in a fast changing, male-dominated world. It is through this mechanism that the Catholic Church, the oldest existing bureaucratic agency of globalization, has maintained its power. Exploring aspects of spirit experiences, trance, the cult of saints, official ecclesiastical cults, and especially witchcraft, this book reveals the explosive, sometimes violent creativity of religion, its relation to magic, and its multi-facetted social value for humans as reflected in the religiously based, pragmatic realism of everyday life in the Mediterranean.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available September 2017

  Power in Practice

  The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira

  González Varela, S.

  Considering the concept of power in capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian ritual art form, Varela describes ethnographically the importance that capoeira leaders (mestres) have in the social configuration of a style called Angola in Bahia, Brazil. He analyzes how individual power is essential for an understanding of the modern history of capoeira, and for the themes of embodiment, play, cosmology, and ritual action. The book also emphasizes the great significance that creativity and aesthetic expression have for capoeira’s practice and performance.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Performance Studies

• eBook available May 2009

  The Power of Law in a Transnational World

  Anthropological Enquiries

  Benda-Beckmann, F. von, Benda-Beckmann, K. von & Griffiths, A. (eds)

  How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• May 2007

  The Power of Perspective

  Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu

  Rio, K, M.

  Focusing on different forms of agency in North Ambrym social life, the author demonstrates the potency of outsiders at different times and in different situations in Ambrym society. This model challenges the premises of much Western thinking about reciprocity, and suggests new directions in the analysis of Melanesian societies

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• June 2001

  Powers of Good and Evil

  Social Transformation and Popular Belief

  Clough, P. & Mitchell, J. (eds)

  A key theme in the anthropology of beliefs is the relationship between socio-economic change and changes in the belief system. It has been widely argued that rapid economic change, particularly the introduction of capitalism, leads to an increase in beliefs in, and representations of, evil and the devil. These beliefs, it is argued, constitute forms of resistance to, or rejection of, "modernity." This volume builds on these arguments, suggesting that rather than an indigenous resistance to capitalism, such representations signal a profound moral ambivalence towards the socio-economic process inherent in capitalist economy. Using a range of examples, from Surinamese zombies to American horror films, it demonstrates the extent to which evil imagery is linked to a fear of excess, particularly in situations where people find themselves, or perceive themselves, to be peripheral to the centers of political, economic, and cultural power.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Political and Economic Anthropology

• April 2011

  Practicing the Faith

  The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians

  Lindhardt, M. (ed)

  Over the past decades, Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity has arguably become the fastest growing religious movement in the world. Distinguishing features of this variant of Christianity include formal ritual activities as well as informal, experiential, and ecstatic forms of worship. This book examines Pentecostal-charismatic ritual practice in different parts of the world, highlighting, among other things, the crucial role of ritual in creating religious communities and identities.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• eBook available March 2022

  The Precarity of Masculinity

  Football, Pentecostalism, and Transnational Aspirations in Cameroon

  Kovač, U.

  Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. This book unpacks young Cameroonians' football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Gender Studies and Sexuality

• August 2012

  Problems of Conception

  Issues of Law, Biotechnology, Individuals and Kinship

  Melhuus, M.

  The Biotechnology Act in Norway, one of the most restrictive in Europe, forbids egg donation and surrogacy and has rescinded the anonymity clause with respect to donor insemination. Thus, it limits people’s choice as to how they can procreate within the boundaries of the nation state. The author pursues this significant datum ethnographically and addresses the issues surrounding contemporary biopolitics in Norway. This involves investigating such fundamental questions as the relation between individual and society, meanings of kinship and relatedness, the moral status of the embryo and the role of science, religion and ethics in state policies. Even though the book takes reproductive technologies as its focus, it reveals much about vital processes that are central to contemporary Norwegian society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Medical Anthropology

• December 2004

  Property and Equality

  Volume II: Encapsulation, Commercialization, Discrimination

  Widlok, T. & Tadesse, W.G. (eds)

  The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volumes. They bring together a wide range of authoritative researchers most of whom have worked with hunter-gatherer groups. These two volumes cover existing ethnographic and theoretical ground while maintaining a clear focus on the relation between property and equality. The book consists of the most recent work of prominent members of the original group of researchers in hunter-gatherer studies among them James Woodburn and Richard Lee, and very recent ethnography on hunter-gatherers and other egalitarian systems.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• December 2004

  Property and Equality

  Volume I: Ritualization, Sharing, Egalitarianism

  Widlok, T. & Tadesse, W.G. (eds)

  The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volumes. They bring together a wide range of authoritative researchers most of whom have worked with hunter-gatherer groups. These two volumes cover existing ethnographic and theoretical ground while maintaining a clear focus on the relation between property and equality. The book consists of the most recent work of prominent members of the original group of researchers in hunter-gatherer studies among them James Woodburn and Richard Lee, and very recent ethnography on hunter-gatherers and other egalitarian systems.

  Subject: Anthropology (General)

• May 2014

  A Prophetic Trajectory

  Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement

  Blanes, R. L.

  Combining ethnographic and historical research conducted in Angola, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, A Prophetic Trajectory tells the story of Simão Toko, the founder and leader of one of the most important contemporary Angolan religious movements. The book explains the historical, ethnic, spiritual, and identity transformations observed within the movement, and debates the politics of remembrance and heritage left behind after Toko’s passing in 1984. Ultimately, it questions the categories of prophetism and charisma, as well as the intersections between mobility, memory, and belonging in the Atlantic Lusophone sphere.

  Subjects: Anthropology of Religion Anthropology (General)

• December 2014

  Protests, Land Rights, and Riots

  Postcolonial Struggles in Australia in the 1980s

  Morris, B.

  The 1970s saw the Aboriginal people of Australia struggle for recognition of their postcolonial rights. Rural communities, where large Aboriginal populations lived, were provoked as a consequence of social fragmentation, unparalleled unemployment, and other major economic and political changes. The ensuing riots, protests, and law-and-order campaigns in New South Wales captured the tense relations that existed between indigenous people, the police, and the criminal justice system. In Protests, Land Rights, and Riots, Barry Morris shows how neoliberal policies in Australia targeted those who were least integrated socially and culturally, and who enjoyed fewer legitimate economic opportunities. Amidst intense political debate, struggle, and conflict, new forces were unleashed as a post-settler colonial state grappled with its past. Morris provides a social analysis of the ensuing effects of neoliberal policy and the way indigenous rights were subsequently undermined by this emerging new political orthodoxy in the 1990s.
   

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available November 2022

  Punching Back

  Gender, Religion and Belonging in Women-Only Kickboxing

  Rana, J.

  In the Netherlands, girls and young women are increasingly active in women-only kickboxing. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women’s sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment. Muslim women’s participation would then exemplify the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Punching Back provides a detailed ethnographic study that contests this view by showing that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities.

  Subjects: Sociology Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality

• eBook available August 2020

  Punks and Skins United

  Identity, Class and the Economics of an Eastern German Subculture

  Venstel, A.

  Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General) Political and Economic Anthropology

• July 2023

  Pure Food

  Theoretical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

  Collinson, P. & Macbeth, H. (eds)

  Food purity and nutrition has inter-disciplinary roots in anthropological, ethnological, evolutionary, psychological and applied perspectives. Pure Food presents the theoretical and cross-cultural aspects of adopting food purity. It demonstrates variations and similarities in diverse cultural beliefs, behaviours and practices in different societies that define the pure food mindset. As a subject with much contemporary relevance, Pure Food appeals to professional practitioners involved in promoting healthier food and nutrition, as well as to general readers with an interest in food purity.

  Subjects: Food & Nutrition Anthropology (General)

• eBook available November 2021

  The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work

  Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England

  Marchand, T. H. J.

  Against the backdrop of an alienating, technologizing and ever-accelerating world of material production, this book tells an intimate story: one about a community of woodworkers training at an historic institution in London’s East End during the present ‘renaissance of craftsmanship’. The animated and scholarly accounts of learning, achievement and challenges reveal the deep human desire to create with our hands, the persistent longing to find meaningful work, and the struggle to realise dreams. In its penetrating explorations of the nature of embodied skill, the book champions greater appreciation for the dexterity, ingenuity and intelligence that lie at the heart of craftwork.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  Raccomandazione

  Clientelism and Connections in Italy

  Zinn, D. L.

  The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective – as a morally ambivalent social fact – and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General) Applied Anthropology

• December 2005

  Racism in Metropolitan Areas

  Pinxten, R. & Preckler, E. (eds)

  For several decades, a political discourse, which incites exclusion and hatred againt those who are perceived as different, has been gaining ground, most notably in affluent and developed countries. Focusing on the growth of racism in large cities and urban areas, this volume presents the views of international scholars who work in the social sciences and statements by non-practicing academics such as journalists and policy makers. The contributions of the scientists and the non-academic specialists are grouped around common themes, highlighting existing debates and bringing together widely scattered information. The book explores the ways in which old forms of racism persist in the urban context, and how traditional exclusion systems like casteism can be likened to contemporary forms like racism directed at refugees.

  Subjects: Urban Studies Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available February 2015

  Re-orienting Cuisine

  East Asian Foodways in the Twenty-First Century

  Kim, K. O. (ed)

  Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Food & Nutrition

• June 2008

  (Re)constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria

  Ethno-Cultural Diversity and the State in the Aftermath of a Refugee Crisis

  Migliorino, N.

  For almost nine decades, since their mass-resettlement to the Levant in the wake of the Genocide and First World War, the Armenian communities of Lebanon and Syria appear to have successfully maintained a distinct identity as an ethno-culturally diverse group, in spite of representing a small non-Arab and Christian minority within a very different, mostly Arab and Muslim environment. The author shows that, while in Lebanon the state has facilitated the development of an extensive and effective system of Armenian ethno-cultural preservation, in Syria the emergence of centralizing, authoritarian regimes in the 1950s and 1960s has severely damaged the autonomy and cultural diversity of the Armenian community. Since 1970, the coming to power of the Asad family has contributed to a partial recovery of Armenian ethno-cultural diversity, as the community seems to have developed some form of tacit arrangement with the regime. In Lebanon, on the other hand, the Armenian community suffered the consequences of the recurrent breakdown of the consociational arrangement that regulates public life. In both cases the survival of Armenian cultural distinctiveness seems to be connected, rather incidentally, with the continuing ‘search for legitimacy’ of the state.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2004

  Rebordering the Mediterranean

  Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe

  Suárez-Navaz, L.

  Offering a rich ethnographic account, this book traces the historical processes by which Andalusians experienced the shift from being poor emigrants to northern Europe to becoming privileged citizens of the southern borderland of the European Union, a region where thousands of African immigrants have come in search of a better life. It draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork in Granada and Senegal, exploring the shifting, complementary and yet antagonistic relations between Spaniards and African immigrants in the Andalusian agrarian work place. The author's findings challenge the assumption of fixed national, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries vis-à-vis outside migration in core countries, showing how legal and cultural identities of Andalusians are constructed together with that of immigrants.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Refugee and Migration Studies

• eBook available September 2000

  Recalling the Belgian Congo

  Conversations and Introspection

  Dembour, M.-B.

  When the author embarked on her study, her aim was to approach former colonial officers with a view to analyzing processes of domination in the ex-Belgian Congo. However, after establishing a rapport with some of these officers, the author was soon forced to revise her initial assumptions, widely held in present-day Belgium: these officers were not the "baddies" she had expected to meet.

  Exploring the colonial experience through the respondents' memories resulted in a far more complex picture of the colonial situation than she had anticipated, again forcing her to question her original assumptions. This resulted not only in a more differentiated perspective on Belgian colonialist rule, but is also sensitized her as regards the question of anthropological understanding and of what constitutes historical fact.

  These two aspects of her work are reflected in this study that offers specific material on the way Belgian colonialism is remembered and reflects on its conditions of production, thus combining ethnographic analysis with a theoretical essay.

  Subjects: Colonial History Anthropology (General) Sociology

• eBook available April 2015

  Reclaiming the Forest

  The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya

  Kolås, Å. & Xie, Y. (eds)

  The reindeer herders of Aoluguya, China, are a group of former hunters who today see themselves as “keepers of reindeer” as they engage in ethnic tourism and exchange experiences with their Ewenki neighbors in Russian Siberia. Though to some their future seems problematic, this book focuses on the present, challenging the pessimistic outlook, reviewing current issues, and describing the efforts of the Ewenki to reclaim their forest lifestyle and develop new forest livelihoods. Both academic and literary contributions balance the volume written by authors who are either indigenous to the region or have carried out fieldwork among the Aoluguya Ewenki since the late 1990s.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Environmental Studies (General)

• eBook available June 2018

  Reconceiving Muslim Men

  Love and Marriage, Family and Care in Precarious Times

  Inhorn, M. C. & Naguib, N. (eds)

  This volume provides intimate anthropological accounts of Muslim men’s everyday lives in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and diasporic communities in the West. Amid increasing political turmoil and economic precarity, Muslim men around the world are enacting nurturing roles as husbands, sons, fathers, and community members, thereby challenging broader systems of patriarchy and oppression. By focusing on the ways in which Muslim men care for those they love, this volume challenges stereotypes and showcases Muslim men’s humanity.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Gender Studies and Sexuality Sociology

• November 2011

  Reconstructing the House of Culture

  Community, Self, and the Makings of Culture in Russia and Beyond

  Donahoe, B. & Habeck, J. O. (eds)

  Notions of culture, rituals and their meanings, the workings of ideology in everyday life, public representations of tradition and ethnicity, and the social consequences of economic transition— these are critical issues in the social anthropology of Russia and other postsocialist countries. Engaged in the negotiation of all these is the House of Culture, which was the key institution for cultural activities and implementation of state cultural policies in all socialist states. The House of Culture was officially responsible for cultural enlightenment, moral edification, and personal cultivation—in short, for implementing the socialist state’s program of “bringing culture to the masses.” Surprisingly, little is known about its past and present condition. This collection of ethnographically rich accounts examines the social significance and everyday performance of Houses of Culture and how they have changed in recent decades. In the years immediately following the end of the Soviet Union, they underwent a deep economic and symbolic crisis, and many closed. Recently, however, there have been signs of a revitalization of the Houses of Culture and a re-orientation of their missions and programs. The contributions to this volume investigate the changing functions and meanings of these vital institutions for the communities that they serve.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Sociology Cultural Studies (General)

• eBook available May 2017

  Redescribing Relations

  Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics

  Lebner, A. (ed)

  Marilyn Strathern is among the most creative and celebrated contemporary anthropologists, and her work draws interest from across the humanities and social sciences. Redescribing Relations bri