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by Subject: Development Studies

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• eBook available April 2011

  Adventures in Aidland

  The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development

  Mosse, D. (ed)

  Anthropological interest in new subjects of research and contemporary knowledge practices has turned ethnographic attention to a wide ranging variety of professional fields. Among these the encounter with international development has perhaps been longer and more intimate than any of the others. Anthropologists have drawn critical attention to the interfaces and social effects of development’s discursive regimes but, oddly enough, have paid scant attention to knowledge producers themselves, despite anthropologists being among them. This is the focus of this volume. It concerns the construction and transmission of knowledge about global poverty and its reduction but is equally interested in the social life of development professionals, in the capacity of ideas to mediate relationships, in networks of experts and communities of aid workers, and in the dilemmas of maintaining professional identities. Going well beyond obsolete debates about ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology, the book examines the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and practices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy making knowledge.

  Subjects: Applied Anthropology Development Studies

• eBook available April 2022

  African Political Systems Revisited

  Changing Perspectives on Statehood and Power

  Bošković, A. & Schlee, G. (eds)

  Reexamining a classical work of social anthropology, African Political Systems (1940), edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, this book looks at the colonial and academic context from which the work arose, as well as its reception and its subject matter, and looks at how the work can help with analysis of current politics in Africa. This book critically reflects upon the history of anthropology. It also contributes to a political anthropology which is aware of its antecedents, self-reflexive as a discipline, conscious of pitfalls and biases, and able to locate itself in its academic, social and political environment.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Colonial History Development Studies

• 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 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 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

• 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 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

• 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)

• eBook available August 2021

  Constructing Risk

  Disaster, Development, and the Built Environment

  Bender, S. O.

  Reviewing current policies and practices, the book assesses the financial, economic and physical risk of building in hazardous areas, and looks at how societies approach economic development while trying to create a more resilient built environment in spite of the dangers. It examines the vulnerability of economic and social infrastructure to natural hazard events, looks at policies which imperil infrastructure, and proposes new development approaches to be undertaken by sovereign states, international development banks, NGOs, and bilateral aid agencies.

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

• eBook available August 2021

  Contemporary Megaprojects

  Organization, Vision, and Resistance in the 21st Century

  Schindler, S., Fadaere, S., Brockington, D. (eds)

  Contemporary megaprojects have evolved from the discreet, modernist projects undertaken in the past by centralized authorities to encompass everything from large-scale construction to space exploration. Contemporary Megaprojects explores how these projects have been impacted by cutting-edge technology, the private sector, and the processes of decentralization and dematerialization. With case studies ranging from mega-plantations in Southeast Asia to ocean mapping to sports events, the contributions in this collected volume demonstrate the increasing ambition and pervasiveness of these projects, as well as their significant impact on both society and the environment.

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

• 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 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 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 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)

• 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 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 October 2001

  Fear in Bongoland

  Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania

  Sommers, M.

  Spurred by wars and a drive to urbanize, Africans are crossing borders and overwhelming cities in unprecedented numbers. At the center of this development are young refugee men who migrate to urban areas.

  This volume, the first full-length study of urban refugees in hiding, tells the story of Burundi refugee youth who escaped from remote camps in central Tanzania to work in one of Africa's fastest-growing cities, Dar es Salaam. This steamy, rundown capital would seem uninviting to many, particularly for second generation survivors of genocide whose lives are ridden with fear. But these young men nonetheless join migrants in "Bongoland" (meaning "Brainland") where, as the nickname suggests, only the shrewdest and most cunning can survive.

  Mixing lyrics from church hymns and street vernacular, descriptions of city living in cartoons and popular novels and original photographs, this book creates an ethnographic portrait of urban refugee life, where survival strategies spring from street smarts and pastors' warnings of urban sin, and mastery of popular youth culture is highly valued. Pentecostalism and a secret rift within the seemingly impenetrable Hutu ethnic group are part of the rich texture of this contemporary African story. Written in accessible prose, this book offers an intimate picture of how Africa is changing and how refugee youth are helping to drive that change.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Development Studies

• eBook available August 2019

  Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities

  Grounding Global HIV Treatment in Tanzania

  Mattes, D.

  Set in Tanga, a city on the Tanzanian Swahili coast, Dominik Mattes examines the implementation of antiretroviral HIV-treatment (ART) in the area, exploring the manifold infrastructural and social fragilities of treatment provision in public HIV clinics as well as patients’ multi-layered struggles of coming to terms with ART in their everyday lives. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book shows that, notwithstanding the massive rollout of ART, providing treatment and living a life with HIV in settings like Tanga continue to entail social, economic, and moral challenges and long-term uncertainties, which contradict the global rhetoric of the “normalization of HIV”.

  Subjects: Medical Anthropology Development Studies

• 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)

• eBook available August 2009

  Gardening the World

  Agency, Identity and the Ownership of Water

  Strang, V.

  Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies

• 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 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

• 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 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 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 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 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 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

• 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 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 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 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 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

• 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)

• eBook available February 2012

  Nordic Paths to Modernity

  Árnason, J. P. & Wittrock, B. (eds)

  Within the growing attention to the diverse forms and trajectories of modern societies, the Nordic countries are now widely seen as a distinctive and instructive case. While discussions have centred on the ‘Nordic model’ of the welfare state and its record of adaptation to the changing global environment of the late twentieth century, this volume’s focus goes beyond these themes. The guiding principle here is that a long-term historical-sociological perspective is needed to make sense of the Nordic paths to modernity; of their significant but not complete convergence in patterns, which for some time were perceived as aspects of a model to be emulated in other settings; and of the specific features that still set the five countries in question (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland) apart from one another. The contributors explore transformative processes, above all the change from an absolutistmilitary state to a democratic one with its welfarist phase, as well as the crucial experiences that will have significant implications on future developments.

  Subjects: Development Studies History (General) Sociology

• 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 January 2018

  The Partial Revolution

  Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal

  Hoffmann, M.

  Located in the far-western Tarai region of Nepal, Kailali has been the site of dynamic social and political change in recent history. The Partial Revolution examines Kailali in the aftermath of Nepal’s Maoist insurgency, critically examining the ways in which revolutionary political mobilization changes social relations—often unexpectedly clashing with the movement’s ideological goals. Focusing primarily on the end of Kailali’s feudal system of bonded labor, Hoffmann explores the connection between politics, labor, and Mao’s legacy, documenting the impact of changing political contexts on labor relations among former debt-bonded laborers.

  Subjects: Political and Economic Anthropology Development Studies 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 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 July 2010

  Politics of Innocence

  Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life

  Turner, S.

  Based on thorough ethnographic fieldwork in a refugee camp in Tanzania this book provides a rich account of the benevolent “disciplining mechanisms” of humanitarian agencies, led by the UNHCR, and of the situated, dynamic, indeterminate, and fluid nature of identity (re)construction in the camp. While the refugees are expected to behave as innocent, helpless victims, the question of victimhood among Burundian Hutu is increasingly challenged, following the 1993 massacres in Burundi and the Rwandan genocide. The book explores how different groups within the camp apply different strategies to cope with these issues and how the question of innocence and victimhood is itself imbued with ambiguity, as young men struggle to recuperate their masculinity and their political subjectivity.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Peace and Conflict Studies Development 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)

• eBook available June 2004

  Refugees and the Transformation of Societies

  Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics

  Essed, P., Frerks, G. & Schrijvers, J. (eds)

  The refusal or reception of refugees has had serious implications for the social policies and social realities of numerous countries in east and west. Exploring experiences, interpretations and practices of 'refugees,' 'the internally displaced' and 'returnees' in or emerging from societies in violent conflict, this volume challenges prevailing orthodoxies and encourages new developments in refugee studies. It also addresses the ethics and politics of interventions by professionals and policy makers, using case studies of refugees from or in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Americas. These illustrate the dynamic nature of situations where refugees, policy- makers and practitioners interact in trying to construct new livelihoods in transforming societies.

  Without a proper understanding of this dynamic nature, so the volume argues overall, it is not possible to develop successful strategies for the accommodation and integration of refugees.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies Peace and Conflict Studies

• eBook available July 2004

  Resistance in an Amazonian Community

  Huaorani Organizing against the Global Economy

  Ziegler-Otero, L.

  Like many other indigenous groups, the Huaorani of eastern Ecuador are facing many challenges as they attempt to confront the globalization of capitalism in the 21st century. In 1991, they formed a political organization as a direct response to the growing threat to Huaorani territory posed by oil exploitation, colonization, and other pressures. The author explores the structures and practices of the organization, as well as the contradictions created by the imposition of an alien and hierarchical organizational form on a traditionally egalitarian society. This study has broad implications for those who work toward "cultural survival" or try to "save the rainforest."

  Subjects: Development Studies Sociology

• eBook available March 2019

  Rethinking and Unthinking Development

  Perspectives on Inequality and Poverty in South Africa and Zimbabwe

  Mpofu, B. & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (eds)

  Development has remained elusive in Africa. Through theoretical contributions and case studies focusing on Southern Africa’s former white settler states, South Africa and Zimbabwe, this volume responds to the current need to rethink (and unthink) development in the region. The authors explore how Africa can adapt Western development models suited to its political, economic, social and cultural circumstances, while rejecting development practices and discourses based on exploitative capitalist and colonial tendencies. Beyond the legacies of colonialism, the volume also explores other factors impacting development, including regional politics, corruption, poor policies on empowerment and indigenization, and socio-economic and cultural barriers.

  Subjects: Development Studies Political and Economic Anthropology

• eBook available November 2008

  Slipping Away

  Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean

  Moberg, M.

  During the 1990s, the Eastern Caribbean was caught in a bitter trade dispute between the US and EU over the European banana market. When the World Trade Organization rejected preferential access for Caribbean growers in 1998 the effect on the region’s rural communities was devastating. This volume examines the “banana wars” from the vantage point of St. Lucia’s Mabouya Valley, whose recent, turbulent history reveals the impact of global forces. The author investigates how the contemporary structure of the island’s banana industry originated in colonial policies to create a politically “stable” peasantry, followed by politicians’ efforts to mobilize rural voters. These political strategies left farmers dependent on institutional and market protection, leaving them vulnerable to any alteration in trade policy. This history gave way to a new harsh reality, in which neoliberal policies privilege price and quantity over human rights and the environment. However, against these challenges, the author shows how the rural poor have responded in creative ways, including new social movements and Fair Trade farming, in order to negotiate a stronger position for themselves in the in a shifting global economy.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

• eBook available July 2015

  Social Quality Theory

  A New Perspective on Social Development

  Herrmann, P. & Lin, K. (eds)

  Social quality thinking emerged from a critique of one-sided policies by breaking through the limitations previously set by purely economistic paradigms. By tracing its expansion and presenting different aspects of social quality theory, this volume provides an overview of a more nuanced approach,  which assesses societal progress and introduces proposals that are relevant for policy making. Crucially, important components emerge with research by scholars from Asia, particularly China, eastern Europe, and other regions beyond western Europe, the theory’s place of origin. As this volume shows, this rich diversity of approaches and their cross-national comparisons reveal the increasingly important role of social quality theory for informing political debates on development and sustainability.

  Subjects: Sociology Development Studies

• eBook available July 2015

  The State and the Grassroots

  Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents

  Portes, A. & Fernández-Kelly, P. (eds)

  Whereas most of the literature on migration focuses on individuals and their families, this book studies the organizations created by immigrants to protect themselves in their receiving states. Comparing eighteen of these grassroots organizations formed across the world, from India to Colombia to Vietnam to the Congo, researchers from the United States, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Spain focus their studies on the internal structure and activities of these organizations as they relate to developmental initiatives. The book outlines the principal positions in the migration and development debate and discusses the concept of transnationalism as a means of resolving these controversies.

  Subjects: Refugee and Migration Studies Development Studies

• eBook available August 2014

  Sustainable Development

  An Appraisal from the Gulf Region

  Sillitoe, P. (ed)

  With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world’s resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable development is arguably the prominent issue of the 21st century.  This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world’s insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates. Sustainable Development has an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America -- including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners -- to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography. 

  Subjects: Environmental Studies (General) Development Studies

• eBook available February 2015

  Trapped in the Gap

  Doing Good in Indigenous Australia

  Kowal, E.

  In Australia, a ‘tribe’ of white, middle-class, progressive professionals is actively working to improve the lives of Indigenous people. This book explores what happens when well-meaning people, supported by the state, attempt to help without harming. ‘White anti-racists’ find themselves trapped by endless ambiguities, contradictions, and double binds — a microcosm of the broader dilemmas of postcolonial societies. These dilemmas are fueled by tension between the twin desires of equality and difference: to make Indigenous people statistically the same as non-Indigenous people (to 'close the gap') while simultaneously maintaining their ‘cultural’ distinctiveness. This tension lies at the heart of failed development efforts in Indigenous communities, ethnic minority populations and the global South. This book explains why doing good is so hard, and how it could be done differently. 

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available December 2007

  Traveling Cultures and Plants

  The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Human Migrations

  Pieroni, A. & Vandebroek, I. (eds)

  The tremendous increase in migrations and diasporas of human groups in the last decades are not only bringing along challenging issues for society, especially related to the economic and political management of multiculturalism and culturally effective health care, but they are also creating dramatic changes in traditional knowledge, believes and practices (KBP) related to (medicinal) plant use. The contributors to this volume – all internationally recognized scholars in the field of ethnobiology, transcultural pharmacy, and medical anthropology – analyze these dynamics of traditional knowledge in especially 12 selected case studies.

  Ina Vandebroek, features in Nova's "Secret Life of Scientists", answering the question: just what is ethnobotany?

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

• eBook available November 2009

  United in Discontent

  Local Responses to Cosmopolitanism and Globalization

  Theodossopoulos, D. & Kirtsoglou, E. (eds)

  Cosmopolitanism is often discussed in a critical and disapproving manner: as a concept complicit with the interests of the powerful, or as a notion related to Western political supremacy, the ills of globalization, inequality, and capitalist economic penetration. Seen as the moral justification for embracing or tolerating cultural difference, ethnically and socially diverse communities unenthusiastic with change, develop an acknowledgement of their common position vis-à-vis a western, “universal” political point of view. By means of exploring the idiosyncratic form of political intimacy generated by anti-cosmopolitanism, and assuming an analytical and critical stance towards the concepts of parochialism and localism, this volume examines the political consciousness of such negatively predisposed actors, and it attempts to explain their reservation towards the sincerity of international politics, their reliance on conspiracy theories or nationalist narratives, their introversion.

  Subjects: Development Studies Anthropology (General)

• eBook available August 2010

  Urban Pollution

  Cultural Meanings, Social Practices

  Dürr, E. & Jaffe, R. (eds)

  Re-examining Mary Douglas’ work on pollution and concepts of purity, this volume explores modern expressions of these themes in urban areas, examining the intersections of material and cultural pollution. It presents ethnographic case studies from a range of cities affected by globalization processes such as neoliberal urban policies, privatization of urban space, continued migration and spatialized ethnic tension. What has changed since the appearance of Purity and Danger? How have anthropological views on pollution changed accordingly? This volume focuses on cultural meanings and values that are attached to conceptions of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, purity and impurity, healthy and unhealthy environments, and addresses the implications of pollution with regard to discrimination, class, urban poverty, social hierarchies and ethnic segregation in cities.

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

• eBook available November 2009

  Virtualism, Governance and Practice

  Vision and Execution in Environmental Conservation

  Carrier, J. C. & West, P. (eds)

  Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.

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

• eBook available February 2016

  Who Knows Tomorrow?

  Uncertainty in North-Eastern Sudan

  Calkins, S.

  Although uncertainty is intertwined with all human activity, plans, and aspirations, it is experienced differently: at times it is obsessed over and at times it is ignored. This ethnography shows how Rashaida in north-eastern Sudan deal with unknowns from day-to-day unpredictability to life-threatening dangers. It argues that the amplification of uncertainty in some cases and its extenuation in others can be better understood by focusing on forms that can either hold the world together or invite doubt. Uncertainty, then, need not be seen solely as a debilitating problem, but also as an opportunity to create other futures.

  Subjects: Anthropology (General) Development Studies

• eBook available October 2022

  Ӧmie Sex Affiliation

  A Papuan Nature

  Rohatynskyj, M.

  The practice of affiliating the female child with the mother and the male child with the father was considered a rare and inexplicable practice in Papua New Guinean ethnography at the time the original data was collected some forty years ago. Marta Rohatynskyj undertakes a shift in her analytical concepts of kinship studies to reveal the deep-seated disjuncture between female and male that this practice represents. The author argues that this practice is associated with a totemic/animistic ontology and has currency in a particular type of Melanesian society.

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