Aristocratic Encounters, first published in 1999, relates how an aristocratic discourse on American Indians took shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Titled and educated French and German visitors to North America, mindful of the French Revolution, developed a new belief in their affinity with the warrior elites of Indian societies, whom they viewed as fellow aristocrats. The book includes chapters on major figures, such as Chateaubriand and de Tocqueville, and on lesser, often instructive, travelers. For European historians, the book offers fresh evidence for the creation of a post-Revolutionary 'aristocratic' culture through overseas travel. To the interdisciplinary audience of readers interested in colonial encounters, it opens up a Romantic vision of aristocrats from two worlds struggling to defend their code of valor and honor in an age of democratic politics. Aristocratic Encounters is a contribution to a burgeoning form of historical writing; it moves across national boundaries to ask how Europeans understood cultures vastly different from their own.

Since the Iraq war, the Middle East has been in continuous upheaval, resulting in the displacement of millions of people. Arriving from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Syria in other parts of the world, the refugees show remarkable resilience and creativity amidst profound adversity. Through careful ethnography, this book vividly illustrates how refugees navigate regimes of exclusion, including cumbersome bureaucracies, financial insecurities, medical challenges, vilifying stereotypes, and threats of violence. The collection bears witness to their struggles, while also highlighting their aspirations for safety, settlement, and social inclusion in their host societies and new homes.

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.

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.

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.

This book vividly depicts Somalia from its pre-colonial period to the present day, documenting the tumultuous history of a nation that has faced many challenges. Somalia is a nation with a history that stretches back more than ten millennia to the beginnings of human civilization. This book provides sweeping coverage of Somalia's history ranging from the earliest times to its modern-day status as a country of ten million inhabitants, providing a unique social-scientific treatment of the nation's key issues across ethnic and regional boundaries. The book addresses not only Somali sociocultural and political history but also covers Somalia's administration and economy, secessionist movements, civil and regional wars, and examines the dynamics of state collapse, democratization, terrorism, and piracy in contemporary times. The author details the extremely rich history of the Somali people and their customs while documenting past history, enabling readers to make meaning out of the country's ongoing crisis.

This book employs a broad analysis of Chinese patriliny to propose a distinctive theoretical conceptualization of the role of desire in culture. It utilizes a unique synthesis of Marxian and psychoanalytic insights in arguing that Chinese patriliny is best understood as, simultaneously, "a mode of production of desire" and as "instituted fantasy." The argument advances through discussions and analyses of kinship, family, gender, filial piety, ritual, and (especially) mythic narratives. In each of these domains, P. Steven Sangren addresses the complex sentiments and ambivalences associated with filial relations. Unlike most earlier studies which approach Chinese patriliny and filial piety as irreducible markers of cultural difference, Sangren argues that Chinese patriliny is better approached as a topic of critical inquiry in its own right.

The United States and India--the most powerful and the most populous constitutional democracies, respectively--have more in common than is apparent from a casual comparison of life in, say, Agra and Omaha. While the material circumstances of an average family in the one city may be dramatically different from the circumstances of its counterpart in the other, the political cultures that protect and sometimes encroach upon the freedoms of each family are in many ways remarkably similar. The arrogant ambitions of one of Agra's representatives in New Delhi can likely find a match in the designs of one of Omaha's legislators in Washington, D.C. So, too, could we expect to find sincere concern for their constituents in the hearts of other political figures on Capitol Hill and in the Subcontinent. In this probing critical comparison of political culture in the United States and India, Professor Brij Mohan argues that much can be learned about the parochial roots and global expansion of representative government by studying both the successes and the failures--both the promise and disappointment--of these two great experiments in constitutional democracy.

This book interrogates the existing theories of convergence culture and audience engagement within the media and communication disciplines by providing grounded examples of social media use as a social mobilization tool within the media industries. As digital influencers garner large audiences across platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, they sway opinions and tastes towards often-commercial interests. However, this everyday social media practice also presents an opportunity for socially and morally motivated intermediaries to impact on public issues. Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation in Media Organisations is intended to provide an explicit overview of how one notable media organization, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), incorporates participation into its production methodology, while maintaining its role as a public service media organisation. The book provides several cases studies of successful audience participation across socially motivated projects. Finally, the book provides an updated framework to understand how cultural intermediation can facilitate authentic audience participation in media organisations.

As the former capital of two great empires-Eastern Roman and Ottoman-Istanbul has been home to many diverse populations, a condition often glossed as cosmopolitanism. The Greek-speaking Christian Orthodox community (Rum Polites) is among the oldest in the urban society, yet their leading status during the centuries of imperial cosmopolitanism has faded. They have even been brought to the brink of disappearance in their home city. Scattered around the world as a result of the homogenizing tendencies of nationalism, the Rum Polites in the diaspora of Istanbul ("the City" or Poli) continue to identify with its cosmopolitan legacy, as vividly shown through their everyday practices of distinction and cultural memory. By exploring the shifting meaning of cosmopolitanism in spatial and temporal contexts, Diaspora of the City examines how experiences of forced displacement can highlight changing conceptualizations of what constitutes a local, diasporic, minority, or migrant community in different multicultural urban settings, past and present.

If you drive through Mpumalanga with an eye on the landscape flashing by, you may see, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above and in the valleys below, fragments of building in stone as well as sections of stone-walling breaking the grass cover. Endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stone passages, cover the landscape stretching from Ohrigstad to Carolina, connecting over 10 000 square kilometres of the escarpment into a complex web of stone-walled homesteads, terraced fields and linking roads. Oral traditions recorded in the early twentieth century named the area Bokoni - the country of the Koni people. Few South Africans or visitors to the country know much about these settlements, and why today they are deserted and largely ignored. A long tradition of archaeological work which might provide some of the answers remains cloistered in universities and the knowledge vacuum has been filled by a variety of exotic explanations - invoking ancient settlers from India or even visitors from outer space - that share a common assumption that Africans were too primitive to have created such elaborate stone structures. Forgotten World defies the usual stereotypes about backward African farming methods and shows that these settlements were at their peak between 1500 and 1820, that they housed a substantial population, organised vast amounts of labour for infrastructural development, and displayed extraordinary levels of agricultural innovation and productivity. The Koni were part of a trading system linked to the coast of Mozambique and the wider world of Indian Ocean trade beyond. Forgotten World tells the story of Bokoni through rigorous historical and archaeological research, and lavishly illustrates it with stunning photographic images.

This book is novel not only in its theoretical framework, which places racialisation in post-communist societies and their modernist political projects at the centre of processes of global racism, but also in being the first account to examine both these new national contexts and the interconnections between racisms in these four regions of the Baltic states, the Southern Caucasus, Central Asia and Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, and elsewhere. Assessments of the significance of the contemporary geopolitical contexts of armed conflict, economic transformation and political transition for racial discourse are central themes, and the book highlights the creative, innovative and persistent power of contemporary forms of racial governance which has central significance for understanding contemporary societies. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of racism and ethnicity studies. "What an important and much-needed addition to the growing, but still grossly insufficient, body of work on Soviet racial thinking and its impact on Soviet and post-Soviet racisms. At the time of renewed racial tensions in the West and the growing racial anxieties underlying a variety of nation-building projects in the former Soviet spaces it is important to understand the often ignored linkages between Communist paternalism and Western views of race and racial difference. Even though its focus remains the former Soviet Union this book contains a valuable analytical toolkit for the scholars of race and racism across political and geographical boundaries." -Maxim Matusevich, Seton Hall University, USA "Post-Soviet Racisms is the first comprehensive comparative study of the politics of race in post-Soviet states. Why do racialising or overtly racist theories at times become central to the construction of post-Soviet identities? How do racisms of the dominant national groups and minorities compare? How does the process of the transnational circulation of racist and racialising discourses work? These are some of the important questions which are addressed in this ground-breaking book that enriches our understanding of the complexity of the current developments in the region." -Vera Tolz, University of Manchester, UK

World's fairs contributed mightily to defining a relationship between religion and the wider world of human culture. Even at the base level of popular culture found on the midways of the earliest international expositions--where Victorian ladies gawked at displays of non-Western, "primitive" life--the concept of religion as an independent field of study began to take hold in public consciousness. The World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago exposition of 1893 did as much as any other single event to introduce the idea that religion could be viewed as simply one concern among many within the rapidly diversifying modern lifestyle.

A chronicle of the emergence and development of religion as a field of intellectual inquiry, Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851-1893 is an extensive survey of world's fairs from the inaugural Great Exhibition in London to the Chicago Columbian Exposition and World's Parliament of Religions. As the first broad gatherings of people from across the world, these events were pivotal as forums in which the central elements of a field of religion came into contact with one another.

John Burris argues that comparative religion was the focal point for early attempts at comparative culture and that both were defined more by the intercultural politics and material exchanges of colonialism than by the spirit of objective intellectual inquiry. Equally a work of American and British religious history and a cultural history of the emerging field of religion, this book offers definitive theoretical insights into the discipline of religious studies in its early formation.

In the late 1800s W.E.B. Dubois asked what it really means to be black in America. He raised the spectre of divided loyalties and the blurring of individuality that he called "Double Consciousness". This volume offers an insight into this "dilemma of identity" by asking the seemingly rhetorical question, what does O.J. Simpson have in common with the participants in the Million Man March, the jury that set him free, the people who inexplicably cheered his acquittal, the prosecuting attorney, the black Muslim Louis Farrakhan, or with his own children? Each case involves cross-cutting currents of age, sex, religion, race, ethnicity, class and ideology. But what they share among themselves, and with the rest of the nation, is the firm conviction that they are black. The author aims to reveal the importance of this imaginary bond, this ethnic ethic, this myth of black ethnicity. He explores its creation, its evolution and its role in linking together the many generations of blacks in America. Dr Davis also seeks to show: how this myth connects the slave huts of Alabama to O.J.'s Brentwood estate; how it connects him to his jury emancipators; how it connects Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to discussions of affirmative action; and how it connects an ancient Juffure villager named Kunta Kinte to contemporary slum dwellers in Harlem. The book argues that it is not race that ties these diverse millions together, but a co-operatively developed paradigm shared by blacks and non-blacks alike as to what constitutes an authentic black existence. By de-bunking the myth, the author seeks to point the way to a fuller recognition of the individual differences that blacks have always had but that are becoming more apparent as the opportunity to express them becomes more prevalent.

This book is about a divided nation and polarized nationhood. Its principal purpose is to examine division and polarization as forms of imagining that are configured within culture and framed by history. This is what bivocality signifies-two distinct discursive voices through which nationhood is articulated; voices that are nonetheless grounded in a culturally common symbolic field. The volume offers an ethnographically centered analysis of the ways in which Georgians make use of these voices in critical discourses of nationhood. By illuminating the cultural semantics behind these discourses, Nutsa Batiashvili offers a new constellation of conceptual terms for understanding modern forms of nationalism and nation-building in the marginal or liminal landscapes between the Orient and the Occident.

In 1991, the centrifugal forces of ethnic nationalism destroyed the Soviet Union. Religious and ethnic issues will be the defining principles of political life in East Europe, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia for the next decade. Yet when most Americans and Europeans read, for instance, of the Ossetians and Ingush, they have no idea who these peoples are or why they are fighting. This volume will provide a ready reference for students, researchers, and librarians who are trying to sort out the political and social struggles in that part of the world. Focusing on ethnolinguistic groups rather than peoples with purely religious orientations, Olson provides entries on over 450 ethnic groups, with appropriate cross-references. Each entry concludes with references, and the volume includes a selected bibliography of English-language titles. The volume also includes a chronology, several appendixes providing statistical information, and an appendix essay on Islam in Russia and the Soviet Union.

This is the first book to explore how religious movements and actors shape and are shaped by aspects of global city dynamics. Theoretically grounded and empirically informed, Religion and the Global City advances discussions in the field of urban religion, and establishes future research directions. David Garbin and Anna Strhan bring together a wealth of ethnographically rich and vivid case studies in a diversity of urban settings, in both Global North and Global South contexts. These case studies are drawn from both 'classical' global cities such as London and Paris, and also from large cosmopolitan metropolises - such as Bangalore, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Singapore and Hong Kong - which all constitute, in their own terms, powerful sites within the informational, cultural and moral networked economies of contemporary globalization. The chapters explore some of the most pressing issues of our times: globalization and the role of global neo-liberal regimes; urban change and in particular the dramatic urbanization of Global South countries; and religious politics and religious revivalism associated, for instance, with transnational Islam or global Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity.

Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Relationships and Environmental Variations in Indonesia examines biosocial change in the Austronesian community of the Kodi by examining multispecies interactions between select biota and abiota. Cynthia T. Fowler describes how the Kodi people coordinate their mundane and ritual practices with polychaetes and celestial bodies, and how this synchrony encourages and is encouraged by social and ecological variations. Fowler grounds her anthropogenic environmental research with information from geospatial science, marine ecology, astronomy, physics, and astrophysics.

Guiding the reader through the development of sex education in Poland, Agnieszka Koscianska looks at how it has changed from the 19th century to the present day. The book compares how sex was described in school textbooks, including those scrapped by the communists for fear of offending religious sentiments, and explores how the Catholic church retained its power in Poland under various regimes. The book also identifies the women and men who changed the way sex was written about in the country, and how they established the field of Polish sex education.

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.

Unlike textbooks that emphasize the memorization of facts, Asking Questions About Cultural Anthropology: A Concise Introduction, Third Edition, teaches students how to think anthropologically, helping them view cultural issues as an anthropologist might. This approach demonstrates how anthropological thinking can be used as a tool for deciphering everyday experiences. The book covers the essential concepts, terms, and history of cultural anthropology, introducing students to the widely accepted fundamentals and providing a foundation that can be enriched by the use of ethnographies, a reader, articles, lectures, field-based activities, and other kinds of supplements. It balances concise coverage of essential content with a commitment to an active, learner-centered pedagogy.

First published in 1940 and this edition in 1987, this book is a comparative study of African political institutions. It describes different types of social organisation that are found in a number of African societies and analyses the principles underlying these traditional forms of government. The volume represents the results of field studies carried out by trained investigators in a number of areas, and was compiled and edited under the auspices of the International African Institute. It will be of interest to students, anthropologists and administrators.

Uniforms are not unique to Japan, but their popularity there suggests important linkages: material culture, politico-economic projects, bodily management, and the construction of subjectivity are all connected to the wearing of uniforms. This book examines what the donning of uniforms says about cultural psychology and the expression of economic nationalism in Japan. Conformity in dress is especially apparent amongst students, who are required to wear uniforms by most schools. Drawing on concrete examples, the author focuses particularly on student uniforms, which are key socializing objects in Japan's politico-economic order, but also examines 'office ladies' (secretaries), 'salary men' (white collar workers), service personnel, and housewives, who wear a type of uniformed dress. Arguing that uniforms can be viewed as material markers of a life cycle managed by powerful politico-economic institutions, he also shows that resistance to official state projects is expressed by 'anti-uniforming' modes of self.

What affect does Islamic political culture have on democracy and human rights practices? It has been argued that Islam facilitates authoritarianism, contradicts the values of Western societies, and significantly affects important political outcomes in Muslim countries. This view, Price argues, is based primarily on analysis of Islamic political theory and ad-hoc studies of individual countries, which do not consider other factors. Through rigorous evaluation of the relationship between Islam, democracy, and individual rights at the cross-national level, Price suggests that too much emphasis is being placed on the power of Islam as a political force. Comparative case studies, which focus on factors relating to the interplay between Islamic groups and regimes, economic influences, ethnic cleavages and societal development, are used to explain the variance in the influence of Islam on politics across eight nations.

Price argues that much of the political power that is attributed to Islam can be better explained by other factors. Indeed, the increasing strength of Islamic political groups has often been associated with democratization. To test these assertions, an index of Islamic political culture based on the extent to which Islamic law is utilized and how Western ideas, institutions, and technologies are implemented, has been constructed. This indicator is used in statistical analysis to analyze the relationship between Islam, democracy, and individual rights across 23 predominantly Muslim countries and a control group of non-Muslim developing nations. The results provide strong evidence that Islamic political culture does not have a significant influence on levels of democracy and the protection of individual rights in predominantly Muslim countries.