This book examines comprehensively for the first time, the scope and accuracy of indigenous environmental knowledge. It shows that in some spheres, including agriculture, house design, fuel and water manipulation, the high reputation of local observers is well deserved and often sufficiently insightful to warrant wider imitation. However it also reveals that in certain matters, notably some aspects of health care and wild-species population management, local knowledge systems are conspicuously unsound. Not all the difficulties are of the communities own making, some stem from external factors outside their control. However in either case, remedial measures can be suggested and this book describes, especially for the benefit of practitioners, what steps might be taken in rural communities to improve the quality of life. The possibility of useful transfers of information from local settings to Western ones is not ignored and forms the subject of the book's final chapter.

The volume was inspired by the Children and Anthropology conference at the 14th International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnological Sciences, which was held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, in July of 1998. It was there that the contributing researchers/authors presented an argument aimed at changing the face of both anthropology and the study of children. They contend that anthropologists could and should contribute to a revitalized framework for the study of children and that childhood and youth culture are important sites for developing a more innovative and integrated anthropology.

As anthropologists struggle with competing research paradigms and agendas in this post-industrial, post-structural, late-modern world, it is argued here that research on children is an important arena for demonstrating the value of an anthropology that is both integrative (across sub-fields) and comparative. It seems clear that children in the 21st century will confront a range of both new and continuing problems that anthropologists are well-situated to address, such as the exploitation of Third World child labor, AIDS and other epidemics affecting children world-wide, and the impact of immigration as well as forced relocations due to war, natural disasters, and other social and environmental ills.

These ethnographically-based studies of diverse urban experiences across the world present cutting edge research and stimulate an empirically-grounded theoretical reconceptualization. The essays identify ethnography as a powerful tool for making sense of life in our rapidly changing, complex cities. They stress the point that while there is no need to fetishize fieldwork-or to view it as an end in itself -its unique value cannot be overstated. These active, engaged researchers have produced essays that avoid abstractions and generalities while engaging with the analytical complexities of ethnographic evidence. Together, they prove the great value of knowledge produced by long-term fieldwork to mainstream academic debates and, more broadly, to society.

The longstanding European conception that Roma and non-Roma are separated by unambiguous socio-cultural distinctions has led to the construction of Roma as "non-belonging others." Challenging this conception, Textures of Belonging explores how Roma negotiate and feel belonging at the everyday level. Inspired by material culture, sensorial anthropology, and human geography approaches, this book uses ethnographic research to examine the role of domestic material forms and their sensorial qualities in nurturing connections with people and places that transcend socio-political boundaries.

At a time of rising global economic precarity and social inequality, the field of economic anthropology offers solutions through the study of local and contextualized economic practices. This book is made up of an exciting collection of succinct essays authored by leading scholars primarily from the field of economic anthropology, but also featuring contributions from sociology and history. The chapters engage with debates at the cutting edge of research on the topics of Eurasia, the anthropology of postsocialism and the embeddedness of economic practices.

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.

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.

Setting the context for the upheavals and transformations of contemporary China, this text provides a re-assessment of Max Weber's celebrated sociology of China. Returning to the sources drawn on by Weber in The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, it offers an informed account of the Chinese institutions discussed and a concise discussion of Weber's writings on 'the rise of modern capitalism'. Notably it subjects Weber's argument to critical scrutiny, arguing that he drew upon sources which infused the central European imagination of the time, constructing a sense of China in Europe, whilst European writers were constructing a particular image of imperial China and its Confucian framework. Re-examining Weber's discussion of the role of the individual in Confucian thought and the subordination, in China, of the interests of the individual to those of the political community and the ancestral clan, this book offers a cutting edge contribution to the continuing debate on Weber's RoC in East Asia today, against the background of the rise of modern capitalism in the "little dragons" of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, and the "big dragons" of Japan and the People's Republic of China.

Winner of the 2011 ALLA Book Award honorable mention
Labor and Legality: An Ethnography of a Mexican Immigrant Network is an ethnography of undocumented immigrants who work as busboys at a Chicago-area restaurant. Ruth Gomberg-Munoz introduces readers to the Lions, ten friends from Mexico committed to improving their fortunes and the lives of their families. Set in and around "Il Vino," a restaurant that could stand in for many places that employ undocumented workers, Labor and Legality reveals the faces behind the war being waged over "illegal aliens" in America. Gomberg-Munoz focuses on how undocumented workers develop a wide range of social strategies to cultivate financial security, nurture emotional well-being, and promote their dignity and self-esteem. She also reviews the political and historical circumstances of undocumented migration, with an emphasis on post-1970 socioeconomic and political conditions in the United States and Mexico.
Labor and Legality is one of several volumes in the Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology series, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups. Ideal for introductory anthropology courses-and as supplements for a variety of upper-level courses-these texts seamlessly combine portraits of an interconnected and globalized world with narratives that emphasize the agency of their subjects."

On November 5, 2008, the nation awoke to a New York Times headline that read triumphantly: OBAMA. Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout. But new events quickly muted the exuberant declarations of a postracial era in America: from claims that Obama was born in Kenya and that he is not a true American, to depictions of Obama as a Lyin African and conservative cartoons that showed the new president surrounded by racist stereotypes like watermelons and fried chicken. Despite the utopian proclamations that we are now live in a color-blind, postracial country, the grim reality is that implicit racial biases are more entrenched than ever. In Wrongs of the Right, Matthew W. Hughey and Gregory S. Parks set postracial claims into relief against a background of pre- and post-election racial animus directed at Obama, his administration, and African Americans. They provide an analysis of the political Right and their opposition to Obama from the vantage point of their rhetoric, a history of the evolution of the two-party system in relation to race, social scientific research on race and political ideology, and how racial fears, coded language, and implicit racism are drawn upon and manipulated by the political Right. Racial meanings are reservoirs rich in political currency, and the Right's replaying of the race card remains a potent resource for othering the first black president in a context rife with Nativism, xenophobia, white racial fatigue, and serious racial inequality. And as Hughey and Parks show, race trumps politics and policies when it comes to political conservatives' hostility toward Obama.

At a time when traditional dating practices are being replaced with new ways to meet potential partners, this book provides fresh insights into how are men responding to new ways of dating. Drawing upon original research, this book examines a wide range of contemporary dating practices that includes speed dating, holiday romances, use of dating apps, online sex seeking and dogging. It reveals the ways in which men draw upon traditional models of masculinity to negotiate these changes; but also, the extent to which men are responding by elaborating new masculinities. Through an investigation of the dynamics of heterosexuality and masculinity, this book highlights the importance attached to authenticity, and the increasing marketization and commodification of dating. It argues that in a post-truth world, men must also come to terms with a post-trust dating landscape. Combining rich empirical material with keen theoretical analysis, this innovative work will have interdisciplinary appeal for students and scholars of sociology, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

Western medicine, including psychiatry and psychology, has had a virtual monopoly of the health industry. This has led to economic incentives that literally keep people sick. Anthropologists, because of their holistic and comparative base, are in a unique position to apply their knowledge within clinical settings. Written for anthropologists, but useful to all clinicians, Rush's book offers a new model for understanding health and illness, provides a review of techniques found in many cultures for reducing individual and system stress, and offers processes for recovering health and individual and social balance. Rush establishes a model outlining the development of emotional problems and then offers the clinicial tools and techniques for helping individuals, families, and groups reduce stress and retranslate traumatic or distressing events. The reader will discover a very different view of emotional and physical stress; the approach taken is informational and anthropological in nature. From this approach arise numerous techniques designed to help clients achieve stress reduction and enhanced healing.

El autor de esta colactanea considera que la etnologia es una disciplina que debe recurrir a otras, principalmente en la arqueologia y en la linguistica. Hizo sus primeros estudios en la Escuela Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, de orientacion pedagogica fuertemente humboldtiana, en Ciudad de Mexico. Posteriormente se doctoro en la Facultad de Filosofia y Letras de Koln, de orientacion completamente humboldtiana. Este libro es la recopilacion de veintitres notas de etnologia y arqueologia en distintas revistas academicas. De ellas, 16 son investigaciones propias con lo que esto supone de aportes personales y 7 son resenas bibliograficas muy informativas acerca de libros del ramo. La casi totalidad de estos articulos fue escrita en los anos mozos del autor, epoca de la cual es tambien este retrato. En lo geografico, esas notas abarcan desde Europa Oriental ("Guerra de razas y reaccion gitana," "Origen y ocaso de tadtl monoteista," "Serbokroatische Volkskunde," "Pasteurs nomades mediterraneens"), y, pasando por sitios de ocupacion paleolitica en Europa Central y Occidental, llegan a la actualidad en la Peninsula berica ("El chozo en Extremadura," "La vivienda rustica en Espana"), para dar el gran salto a Austroamerica ("Existet-il le maitre des bois en Argentine?," "Tigres de papel y tigres verdaderos," "Cuentos chilenoargentinos." En seguida, estas Analectas presentan trabajos que se refi eren al Ecuador y a Colombia ("Diccionario del Folklore Ecuatoriano," "Ceramica erotica de Tumaco, y otras, descifrada"), desde donde el autor encuentra puentes hacia America Media ("Parturienta de Tumaco, y otras, descifrada"), hasta incluir un analisis, hecho de estudiante, de "Dos capas de elementos paleoliticos entre los cazadores de Mejico." El resto de esta coleccion se ocupa de cuestiones teoricas ("Exigencias de una ciencia cultural: la Prehistoria," "Anthropologists in the Field," y otros).

This book draws together 13 distinctive and original explorations of how dominant cultural mainstreams and margins are formed and resisted, how they stabilize and shift, and how they permeate and define each other. The chapters speak to central problems of cultural politics that represent critical challenges for theory, research, and action in the social world. The authors develop and advance new approaches for interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary cultural issues. Drawing on and extending scholarship in communication, political science, sociology, women's studies, critical cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies, they analyze what happens when marginal groups meet mainstream forces. The chapters will enliven academic debates over what constitutes a cultural mainstream or margin. This volume explores theories, problems, and contemporary struggles over identity and representation, ideology and hegemony, and discourse and action. The essays focus on critical questions covering postcolonial theory, primitivism, feminism, sexuality, the body, art, multiculturalism, the environmental crisis, the mass media, and social movements. The authors examine diverse issues, ranging from the writing of women prisoners to how media policy is embedded in cultural history, to the political implications of cultural representations in cross-cultural contexts. Altogether, the diversity and depth of the text will help us develop new and complementary ways of thinking about critical questions in the politics of culture.

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health. While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

Anthropology is by definition about "others," but in this volume the phrase refers not to members of observed cultures, but to "significant others"--spouses, lovers, and others with whom anthropologists have deep relationships that are both personal and professional. The essays in this volume look at the roles of these spouses and partners of anthropologists over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially their work as they accompanied the anthropologists in the field. Other relationships discussed include those between anthropologists and informants, mentors and students, cohorts and partners, and parents and children. The book closes with a look at gender roles in the field, demonstrated by the "marriage" in the late nineteenth century of the male Anthropological Society of Washington to the Women's Anthropological Society of America. Revealing relationships that were simultaneously deeply personal and professionally important, these essays bring a new depth of insight to the history of anthropology as a social science and human endeavor.

Identity Politics and the Third World revisits the theories of identification in challenging existing methods of ascertaining developing world identities on the grounds of objectivity and universality. The construction of postcolonial identities refers to the creation of systems of identification. This construction is undertaken at two levels: by the colonizer, in the form of myths about the subject races and a simultaneous belief in the notion that the subject cannot represent him/herself; and subsequently, by the colonized in an attempt to resist colonization and establish a sense of solidarity against the rulers. In the global context, the third world becomes a market place where identities are framed by the laws of consumer dynamics. Identities are again constructed here on two levels: by the forces of multinational economics, in the form of essentially hybrid, homogenously differentiated communities, and, in counterpoint, by the myths of unique national cultures. This book is designed to describe and critically analyse the structuring of identity and culture and the politics that informs them. Centering on the concepts of `polarity' and `in-betweenness', the idea of cosmopolitan or global identity is deconstructed in the wake of capitalist consumerism and multinational politics using the theories of identity construction and representation as formulated by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha for understanding colonialist politics and the postcolonial condition.

This edited volume brings together the voices of different academics to illuminate the role of culture in determining the character and quality of the social and professional lives of mobile academics. The book examines specific issues on cultural diversity and the management of the heterogeneous classroom and diverse teaching/learning contexts. Teaching, learning, and research are processes carried out in situated contexts and within constructed, inherited, and negotiated cultural milieu, contexts that invariably affect the performance of the immigrant academics in their new homes and host academic institutions. The chapters in this volume provide analyses, reflections, and synthesis of intercultural and cross-cultural experiences. They include how migrant and expatriate scholars or students negotiate their cultural identities in new environments, how they engage with issues of differences in language accents, and how they navigate issues of minority versus majority status. They look at how immigrant scholars modulate their natal cultures in their new homes, how they work and rework their pedagogical beliefs and practices to suit the new and diverse classroom situations, and how native academics and the larger members of the receiving societies encompass the new challenges and opportunities of their now diverse society in a framework that they can understand. As the educational landscape goes increasingly global by the minute, studies such as these that deliver much insight on how migrant, immigrant, and expatriate academics, in their interaction with their hosts and with other immigrants, negotiate and resolve various psychosocial and socioeconomic challenges and dissonances, provide valuable and much-needed perspectives. This unique book provides an important discourse on the mobility across the boundaries of cultures and their primary subject of examination--to which the concepts of culture, change, and mobility are applied--is the mobile or sojourning academic (as students, teachers, and researchers). This is an important book for those in cross-cultural studies and education.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, continues to struggle with socioeconomic and political development. "Culture and Customs of the Congo" provides the full context of traditional culture and modern practices against a backdrop of a turbulent history. The volume opens up a land and peoples little known in the United States. Written expressly to meet the needs of students and the general audience, the work will inform about the geography, economy, political history, and history from the slave trade to dictatorship; ancestral religions and inroads of western faiths; ancestral literary heritage and communication; art, architecture, and housing; diet and dress; marriage, family, and women; lifestyles and life events, and traditional and modern music and dance.

Congolese society comprises hundreds of ethnic groups, such as the Luba, the Kongo, and the Kuba. The countryside is largely based on the hunting and gathering, herding, and farming lifestyles. The city is marked by lifestyles reflecting the prevalence of small business activities and increasing cultural sycretism of customs from different parts of the Congo and Western imports. Mukenge's narrative gives the diverse perspectives of their cultures with their fascinating juxtapositions to our familiar western ways. Examples of this are found in the Religion and Worldview chapter, which discusses ancestral religions, the spirits of the land, and supernatural power practitioners. The Literature chapter covers verbal competition and game songs. Congolese cuisine is based on starches such as the cassava root, the corn, and the plantain; green vegetables, insects, fish and, to a lesser extent, meat. Other chapters cover topics from the distinct Congolese dress and symbolic adornments, all-important family lines, to ceremonial music and dance. A chronology and glossary are added value.

In an age when innovative scholarly work is at an all-time high, the academy itself is being rocked by structural change. Funding is plummeting. Tenure increasingly seems a prospect for only the elite few. Ph.D.'s are going begging for even adjunct work. Into this tumult steps Cary Nelson, with a no- holds-barred account of recent developments in higher education.

Eloquent and witty, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical urges academics to apply the theoretical advances of the last twenty years to an analysis of their own practices and standards of behavior. In the process, Nelson offers a devastating critique of current inequities and a detailed proposal for change in the form of A Twelve-Step Program for Academia.

La comunidad Latina, the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, has long been told that assimilation is the only way to succeed in American society. This book challenges that generally accepted view and concludes instead that transformation as a way of life is the only viable option for the Latino community as a whole, regardless of racial, class, regional, or religious differences. It highlights how in the everyday life of la comunidad Latina the members of the community can recognize the underlying ways of life, the stories, and the patterns of relationships that cripple them, and how to break with these ways of life, stories, and relationships to create fundamentally more loving and compassionate alternatives.

Along with all men and women, Latinos and Latinas face four choices: retaining a blind loyalty to a romanticized past, assimilating, violating each other, or transforming their ethnic and racial group for the better. This examination of the underlying sacred meaning of the stories of the Latino culture attempts to determine whether these stories are destructive or creative. Now coming of age, la comunidad Latina, previously wounded by assimilation, continues to tell its story in art, literature, history, and religion so that the world may, perhaps for the first time, see its personal, political, historical, and sacred faces. The most important story now being lived is that of Latina women and Latino men who are making choices that will determine the ultimate meaning of a new Latino culture in this nation.

Beginning with the myth of origin that joins every young Zaramo woman to her origins as she is initiated into the secrets of life and womanhood, the book then provides us with an historical account of the Tanzanian coast around Dar es Salaam as a background to the persistence of the cultural institutions to which the reader is introduced. Statements and narrations by Salome as a representative of the modern educated Zaramo people intersperse the author's descriptions of the rituals of womanhood, of individual and social healing, and of the ways conflict is symbolically manipulated and managed. Rituals are seen in their vibrant role, not as remnants of tradition, but as means of handling encroaching external pressures on the community. These pressures include, commercialization of livelihood, development thrust in the form of villagization, or the ongoing process of losing land rights. The book shows that a people will counteract the threat of social disintegration by overemphasizing their core values in an attempt to create strong communication forces and instruments of power. A good introduction to contemporary African issues, Third World women's studies, and ethnographic anthropology.

Focusing on ten islands through the Caribbean, this ethnography examines how charismatic religious leaders develop creative transnational religious networking strategies that help spread the movement and increase its potential to become a greater force in shaping the future in the English-speaking Caribbean. The large and explosive global Charismatic movement spread in powerful ways in the small and tranquil English-speaking Caribbean. It is here in the deep Caribbean world of demonic possessions, spiritual demons, and supernatural healers where the Charismatic movement continues to shape a resilient culture. Placing the Charismatic movement in the realm of culture provides some highly surprising findings that reveal the potential of a religious movement and its ability for change in a late-modern social world.