Border Lives offers an in-depth account of how people in Arsal, a northeastern town on the border of Lebanon with Syria, experienced postwar sociality, and how they grappled with living in the margins of the Lebanese state in the period following the 1975-1990 war. In a rich ethnography of 'changing times,' Michelle Obeid shows how restrictions in cross-border mobility, transformations in physical and social spaces, burgeoning new industries and shifting political alliances produced divergent ideologies about domesticity and the family, morality and personhood. Attending to metaphors of modernity in a rural border context, Border Lives broadens the sites in which modernity and social change can be investigated.

Co-published by Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, University of California, Berkeley & National Taiwan University Press. Taiwan Since Martial Law epitomizes the reinvigoration of cultural pluralism, which characterizes the dynamic processes of democratized Taiwan. With the lifting of martial law in 1987, people have awakened to their respective cultural identities and contributed to a sociopolitical renaissance strengthening the island's sense of national destiny and commitment to self-determination. Nineteen chapters highlight Taiwan's social and cultural diversity and the complexities of its politics and economy. The preface by Bo Tedards depicts the avenues of Taiwan's democratization with his 'trajectories' of political alternatives. The opening chapter by the editor David Blundell traces his personal experiences during the martial law transition and his reflections on an emerging Taiwan "sense of place." Pro-democracy activists organized to demand free elections, human rights, respect for local heritages, and environmental sustainability.

This book reveals the structures of poverty, power, patriarchy and imperialistic health policies that underpin what the World Health Organization calls the "hidden disease" of vaginal fistulas in Africa. By employing critical feminist and post-colonial perspectives, it shows how "leaking black female bodies" are constructed, ranked, stratified and marginalised in global maternal health care, and explains why women in Africa are at risk of developing vaginal fistulas and then having adequate treatment delayed or denied. Drawing on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 30 Kenyan women, it paints a rare social portrait of the heartbreaking challenges for Kenyan women living with this most profound gender-related health issue - an experience of shame, taboo and abjection with severe implications for women's wellbeing, health and sexuality. In absolutely groundbreaking depth, this book shows why research on vaginal fistulas must incorporate feminist understandings of bodily experience to inform future practices and knowledge.

This collection of readings provides the reader with a basic introduction to the topic and concepts of cultural diversity as it has come to characterize the culture of the United States. Particular attention is given to the practice of racial, ethnic, and special interest group characterizations. No other book is as complete in its coverage of the diverse cultural groupings that make up the American culture. This unique work serves as a first step in beginning the quest for greater understanding and appreciation of diversity.

Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.

Fridays of Rage reveals Al Jazeera's surprising rise to that most respected of all Western media positions: the watchdog of democracy. Al Jazeera served as the nursery for the Arab world's democratic revolutions, promoting Friday as a "day of rage" and popular protest. This book gives readers a glimpse into how Al Jazeera has strategically cast its journalists as martyrs in the struggle for Arab freedom while promoting itself as the mouthpiece and advocate of the Arab public. In addition to heralding a new era of Arab democracy, Al Jazeera has become a major influence over Arab perceptions of American involvement in the Arab World, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the rise of global Islamic fundamentalism, and the expansion of the political far right. Al Jazeera's blueprint for "Muslim-democracy" was part of a vision announced by the network during its earliest broadcasts. The network embarked upon a mission to reconstruct the Arab mindset and psyche. Al Jazeera introduced exiled Islamist leaders to the larger Arab public while also providing Muslim feminists a platform. The inclusion and consideration of Westerners, Israelis, Hamas, secularists and others earned the network a reputation for pluralism and inclusiveness. Al Jazeera presented a mirror to an Arab world afraid to examine itself and its democratic deficiencies. But rather than assuming that Al Jazeera is a monolithic force for positive transformation in Arab society, Fridays of Rage examines the potentially dark implications of Al Jazeera's radical re-conceptualization of media as a strategic tool or weapon. As a powerful and rapidly evolving source of global influence, Al Jazeera embodies many paradoxes-the manifestations and effects of which we are likely only now becoming apparent. Fridays of Rage guides readers through this murky territory, where journalists are martyrs, words are weapons, and facts are bullets.

This book boldly states and deeply analyzes a commonplace observation about us all: our mothers play a powerful role in making us the kind of people we are. By the age of three, four, or five, virtually all children have learned to walk, talk, eat, sleep, control bodily functions, interact with other people, be male, or be female-insofar as these things are learned-from their mothers (or a mother surrogate who is female). Every mother has known and knows this. Most social analysts, according to the author, both know it and ignore it. If our mothers are asymmetrically influential in shaping our initial years, and our fathers usually in the background, what does it reveal about the social sources of human sex roles, including the universal precedence of males over females in all known societies? These are fundamental, normative, and often deeply emotional matters. Professor Levy seeks to consider them in a scientific spirit, clear the path for better understandings of the role of mothers, and inspire new research on early socialization. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Fieldwork has long been seen as central to anthropology as a critical source of ethnographic data and analytic insight. In the late 1970s, earlier assumptions about fieldwork method and epistemological grounding were challenged in so-called reflexive ethnographies. These ethnographies, specifically focused on the field project, were part of the general interpretive turn in American social science which itself was concurrent with the turmoil in American society in the late 1960s. This work reflects on the reflexive ethnographies, their method, intention, and claims, and situates them as incipient postmodern anthropological practice, as well as linking them to the American context of their production.

Trencher examines American intellectual, political, and economic contexts from 1960 to 1980, as reconstructed through disciplinary and professional sources in Anthropology. This cultural context is then linked to changes in American ethnographic practice. Selected works are analyzed as cultural productions, the form and content of which was permeated by and revealed characteristically American constructs for interpreting social reality.

Today, we are bombarded with calls for change, as if all change was an improvement over the status quo. Dr. Gastil challenges this view in a thorough examination of concepts of change and progress. He asserts that our cultural world is divided between those who believe in one version of the 19th-century vision of progress, and those who see progress as a failed concept--either because they view change as regressive or believe that all values are relative.

Gastil insists that we need to overcome this cleavage by developing an analysis that incorporates the widest variety of positions on the subject. Until we do, it will be impossible to make any sense of policy debate. To reconstruct the debate, the author believes the first requirement is one or more proper definitions of progress so that we can better understand which meaning is being addressed. Then we need to construct a broad, humanistic basis or framework that incorporates values identified with utility, justice, achievement, and reverence. After proposing definitions and a framework for analysis, Gastil considers cultural change across a wide variety of fields, including art and literature, violence, political organizations, and the significance of human life. In doing so, he provides a stimulating volume of value to all concerned with economic, social, cultural, and political development or change.

Roy Ellen's The Nuaulu World of Plants is the culmination of anthropological fieldwork on the eastern Indonesian island of Seram, and of comparative enquiries into the bases of human classificatory activity through the study of ethnobiological knowledge over a fifty year period. This rich account of the ways plants feature in the worldview and lifeways of the Nuaulu, recognizes that plant knowledge is embedded in plural local and historical contexts: in swiddens, garden crops, managed fallow, village spaces and pathways; in the trees, and the ecological, conceptual and experiential relationships to forest; in plants' roles as healing agents, raw materials, fuels and in ritual; and in historical flux, with the introduction of exotic plants and the impact of colonial and post-colonial ways of seeing the plant world. Ellen's contemporary examination of Nuaulu classificatory practices, in the light of comparable observations made by the seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist Rumphius, allows us to better see how scientific taxonomy emerges from folk knowledge. The comprehensive study of local plant classification based on robust datasets and long-term fieldwork presented here is a rare achievement, and comprises an outstanding resource for regional ethnology. But this book offers a further dimension, evaluating the theoretical consensus on the relationship between so-called 'natural' classifications and utilitarian schemes, and thereby highlights, and addresses, some of the problems of Berlin and Atran's highly influential framework for studying folk knowledge systems. It emphasizes the difficulties of simple claims for universality versus relativity, cultural models versus individual contextual schemata, and of two-dimensional taxonomies. Ellen persuasively argues that classification is a dynamic and living process of cultural cognition that links knowledge to practice, and is not easily reducible to graphical representations or abstract generalizations. Moreover, he draws attention to recent radical approaches to ontology and epistemology, specifically those focusing upon 'convergence metaphysics', arguing these present new challenges for the field. 'This book will undoubtedly become a landmark study in the field of ethnobotany. It represents anthropology at its best ... Roy Ellen has an outstanding reputation and is recognised globally as a leading ethnoscientist, and this rich volume further confirms his status.' Paul Sillitoe FBA, Professor of Anthropology, Durham University This will be a must read for students interested in conducting ethnobiological fieldwork and, more broadly, comparative analysis of cognition... Nuggets of gold come in every chapter. Thomas Thorton, Associate Professor & Senior Associate Research Fellow, University of Oxford

Indigenous peoples have passed down vital knowledge for generations from which local plants help cure common ailments, to which parts of the land are unsuitable for buildings because of earthquakes. Here, Hendry examines science through these indigenous roots, problematizing the idea that Western science is the only type that deserves that name.

A concise exploration into the ways Islam in western Europe has developed from early immigration and settlement to the point where a native generation is developing ways of being European and Muslim. England is given special attention as a case study, but as the discussion moves into the present and the future, reference is made to all of western Europe. Factors in this process not only arise from the Muslim communities themselves but also from the inherited structures of European society and state. Although the issues are complex and tense, the author is generally optimistic about the outcome.

Now a global and transnational phenomenon, hip hop culture continues to affect and be affected by the institutional, cultural, religious, social, economic and political landscape of American society and beyond. Over the past two decades, numerous disciplines have taken up hip hop culture for its intellectual weight and contributions to the cultural life and self-understanding of the United States. More recently, the academic study of religion has given hip hop culture closer and more critical attention, yet this conversation is often limited to discussions of hip hop and traditional understandings of religion and a methodological hyper-focus on lyrical and textual analyses. Religion in Hip Hop: Mapping the Terrain provides an important step in advancing and mapping this new field of Religion and Hip Hop Studies. The volume features 14 original contributions representative of this new terrain within three sections representing major thematic issues over the past two decades. The Preface is written by one of the most prolific and founding scholars of this area of study, Michael Eric Dyson, and the inclusion of and collaboration with Bernard 'Bun B' Freeman fosters a perspective internal to Hip Hop and encourages conversation between artists and academics.

With its exalted emotionality, Pentecostalism is a widespread religious movement in Latin America and Africa. It is a blend of Methodism and African religious culture which arouses the passions of the poorest Brazilian masses. Pentecostal conversion is experienced as a sudden break which radically transforms the life of these sectors of the population. Pentecostalism is an Utopia of equality, love and emotion, which is staged during the worship service. However, it is also characterized by authoritarian features. Pentecostalism is slowly eroding the foundation of Western political categories.

In late 20th-century Europe, both national and regional loyalties have retained a surprising strength and topicality, despite the advance of supra-national integration. This volume addresses some specific aspects of this phenomenon that lay at the centre of the interdisciplinary work of the first "European Forum" of the European University Institute in Florence during the academic year 1993/1994. It aims at contributing to a better understanding of the origins and the nature of territorially-based identities in Europe, and it also offers some analysis of current problems arising at various levels of the relationships between regional, national and international structures. The contributions to this volume refer to three major fields of historical and contemporary research: the study of the factors that constitute "territorially-based imagined communites"; the analysis of the mechanisms by which particular group interests (social, political or cultural) are "translated" into narratives of regional or national identity; and an enquiry into the relationship between national and regional identities.

This volume of Studies in Law, Politics and Society examines the contribution of ethnography to our understanding of contemporary legal and political phenomena, with a particular focus on how it enables us to make sense of modern life under conditions of post-colonialism and globalization. Through the examination of case studies such as affirmative action at the University of Michigan, the US government and tribal consultations, the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem, and freedom of speech on campus, this edited volume demonstrates the value of ethnography as a method of scholarly investigation within law and politics. Written by an impressive group of interdisciplinary scholars, this book will prove invaluable to students and researchers in the fields of law and politics.

Museums are public institutions with various sets of obligations to, and legacies of, individuals and communities. This volume considers theoretically and geographically varied implications of these interactions. One thread considers particular sets of objects and the historical and social pathways they have moved along: Zuni cultural objects that remain uniquely and intrinsically sacred to their originating community, despite repeated movements and decontextualizations; West African collections in the Manchester Museum that embody historical connections between their places of origin and the northwest of England; and the movement of archaeological and ethnographic artifacts associated with Olov R. T. Janse against a variety of political backdrops, including colonialism, nationalism, and the Cold War. Other contributions consider the museum experience: challenges presented to the heritage sector by digital materials; how visitors find meaning in exhibitions; problems in the public articulation of history in Dubai, a city seen as lacking a material past; and the ongoing development of contemporary art biennials. A forum centered on museums and mental health begins with a Taiwanese study of the museum experiences of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, followed by responses from an international range of curatorial and academic voices. The volume is rounded out by reports and reviews of recent and current exhibits and scholarship.

An essentially contested notion, society is viewed by some as the most important level of human reality, while others deny its existence outright. Taking the example of France between the Enlightenment and the Second World War, this book recounts the debates among thinkers and scholars on the nature of the social. By way of an original analysis of the work of many key figures in the history of French thought, the author convincingly demonstrates the strength of the connection between social theories and political projects. He pays particular attention to conceptual and terminological developments, thereby shedding a new light on the history of some core concepts of the human sciences, such as "society," "culture," and "civilisation."

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography provides an expansive overview of the challenges presented by qualitative, and particularly ethnographic, enquiry. The chapters reflect upon the means by which ethnographers aim to gain understanding, make sense of what they learn and the way they represent their finished work. The Handbook offers urgent insights relevant to current trends in the growth of imprisonment worldwide. In an era of mass incarceration, human-centric ethnography provides an important counter to quantitative analysis and the audit culture on which prisons are frequently judged. The Handbook is divided into four parts. Part I ('About Prison Ethnography') assesses methodological, theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the use of ethnographic and qualitative enquiry in prisons. Part II ('Through Prison Ethnography') considers the significance of ethnographic insights in terms of wider social or political concerns. Part III ('Of Prison Ethnography') analyses different aspects of the roles ethnographers take and how they negotiate their research settings. Part IV ('For Prison Ethnography') includes contributions that convincingly extend the value of prison ethnography beyond the prison itself. Bringing together contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in criminology and prison studies, this authoritative volume maps out new directions for future research. It will be an indispensable resource for practitioners, students, academics and researchers who use qualitative social research methods to further their understanding of prisons.

A provocative, and timely, solution for ridding America of the traces of Jim Crow policies to create a truly post-racial landscape When America inaugurated its first African American president, in 2009, many wondered if the country had finally become a "post-racial" society. Was this the dawning of a new era, in which America, a nation nearly severed in half by slavery, and whose racial fault lines are arguably among its most enduring traits, would at last move beyond race with the election of Barack Hussein Obama? In Ghosts of Jim Crow, F. Michael Higginbotham convincingly argues that America remains far away from that imagined utopia. Indeed, the shadows of Jim Crow era laws and attitudes continue to perpetuate insidious, systemic prejudice and racism in the 21st century. Higginbotham's extensive research demonstrates how laws and actions have been used to maintain a racial paradigm of hierarchy and separation-both historically, in the era of lynch mobs and segregation, and today-legally, economically, educationally and socially. Using history as a roadmap, Higginbotham arrives at a provocative solution for ridding the nation of Jim Crow's ghost, suggesting that legal and political reform can successfully create a post-racial America, but only if it inspires whites and blacks to significantly alter behaviors and attitudes of race-based superiority and victimization. He argues that America will never achieve its full potential unless it truly enters a post-racial era, and believes that time is of the essence as competition increases globally.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead garnered fame and generated controversy in a full life that spanned most of the 20th century. She was a maverick with a strong and sometimes difficult personality, and this biography follows her from childhood years in Pennsylvania, to college days with her pals nicknamed the Ash Can Cats, to tutelage under the preeminent anthropologist, Franz Boas, at Columbia, and her fieldwork in the South Pacific, starting in Samoa when she was 22 years of age. Private and public are interwoven, with coverage of her marriages, close friendships, writings, and career progression. Mead has special appeal to teens because of her work with and theories on this age group.

Readers will be inspired by Mead's individualism and career in anthropology in its golden age. They will also appreciate the insights into her writings, including her autobiography. Mead's viewpoints on myriad topics are presented, with a final note on her impact and an imagining of what she would say about the world today. A chronology and glossary supplement the text.

The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. It is not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, but epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders. This volume illuminates these issues from various disciplinary viewpoints. It starts by exploring historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Besides the patterns of prejudice with which these groups are confronted, the book also deals with various kinds of fear of contamination from outside of the nation state. The contributors address the implementation of medical techniques at state borders in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as the presently practiced measures of medical and biometric screening of migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and in the medical and biological disciplines developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders across the globe, from the early eighteenth century up to the present day. -- .