Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? Claudio Lomnitz-Adler takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the analysis of national culture. His sweeping and innovative interpretation of Mexican national ideology offers an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. Exits from the Labyrinth confronts the study of national culture through a meticulously reasoned analysis of culture and ideology in two vast, internally differentiated regions - Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico. After proposing a vocabulary and a conceptual framework for the analysis of cultural regions, Lomnitz-Adler describes many aspects of the local and regional cultures. In each case, he begins by placing the region within Mexican political and economic space (Morelos more central, in proximity to the capital, the Huasteca more peripheral). He explores key elements of Mexican cultural and intellectual history and shows that, because these regions have strikingly different ways of tying in to Mexican official history, the comparison between them has significant implications for the study of national culture. Lomnitz-Adler's informative ethnographic and historical research is then tied to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology. Provocative and profound, Exits from the Labyrinth discusses the Latin American essayist tradition in relation to contemporary anthropology and incorporates the best of both intellectual approachesinto its own exploration of Mexican nationalism. Since the subject of nationalism is extremely important now, given the upsurge of regionalism and nationalism in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, the author's emphasis on the conceptualization of culture in space will contribute to discussions in many areas.

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.

This is the first book to systematically describe the formation and historical changes of the Monpa people's area (Monyul) through its nature, society, culture, religion, agriculture and historically deep ties with Bhutan, Tibet and the Tibetan Buddhist faith. The state of Arunachal Pradesh is located in the northeastern part of India, surrounded by the borders of Assam, Bhutan, and Tibet (China). There has been a long history of conflict over the sovereignty of this area between India and China. Foreigners were prohibited from entering the state until the 1990s and the area has been veiled in secrecy until recently. Thus, there are not many academically researched works on the region. This book serves as an essential guide for anyone who would like to learn about a unique geographical area of Monpa.

This book reinvigorates the philosophical treatment of the nature, purpose, and meaning of thought in today's universities. The wider discussion about higher education has moved from a philosophical discourse to a discourse on social welfare and service, economics, and political agendas. This book reconnects philosophy with the central academic concepts of thought, reason, and critique and their associated academic practices of thinking and reasoning. Thought in this context should not be considered as a merely mental or cognitive construction, still less a cloistered college, but a fully developed individual and social engagement of critical reflection and discussion with the current pressing disciplinary, political, and philosophical issues. The editors hold that the element of thought, and the ability to think in a deep and groundbreaking way is, still, the essence of the university. But what does it mean to think in the university today? And in what ways is thought related not only to the epistemological and ontological issues of philosophical debate, but also to the social and political dimensions of our globalised age? In many countries, the state is imposing limitations on universities, dismissing or threatening academics who speak out critically. With this volume, the editors ask questions such as: What is the value of thought? What is the university's proper relationship to thought? To give the notion of thought a thorough philosophical treatment, the book is divided into in three parts. The focus moves from an epistemological perspective in Part I, to a focus on existence and values in higher education in Part II, and then to a societal-oriented focus on the university in Part III. All three parts, in their own ways, debate the notion of thought in higher education and the university as a thinking form of being.

The 16th-century conquest of Mexico and its effects are best understood as cultural manifestations of animal behavior patterns which humans share with other primates. While Nahuas and Spaniards can be distinguished on the basis of learned cultural differences, such differences only exaggerated particular expressions of the universal behavioral patterns they shared. Brutality and benevolence were used in the same way by both to establish hierarchy and cultural bonding. After the conquest, a new Mexican synthesis could be constructed because of these commonalities. Alves explores the formation of that synthesis by examining such aspects of material culture as food, clothing, and shelter-especially as they manifest such universal primate tendencies as hierarchy, reciprocity, benevolence, brutality, xenophobia, curiosity, and territoriality. Alves proposes that humans are historically best understood by using current advances in the fields of primatology and ethology. This groundbreaking book will be of great interest to Latin Americanists, historians, and anthropologists.

Estamos proyectando el analisis de una metamorfosis global en la actualidad, como los cambios de identidades en el proceso de transformacion cultural. En consecuencia, buscamos un concepto de intercambio cultural, como una sintesis de diferentes factores y dimensiones en el mundo multi e intercultural. Igualmente, queremos enfocar los elementos etnoecologicos, tanto regionales como globales, para el establecimiento de una vision holistica y armoniosa. Ademas, planeamos desarrollar criterios para una Didactica de la Cosmovision con paradigmas nuevos del Metabolismo Cultural como una opcion frente al camino actual en el marco de la globalizacion, concebido como unidimensional y unidireccional, que conduce a un callejon sin salida por la realizacion de cierta monocultura, una tendencia central, monopolica, racional, fragmentada y material que cosifica el mundo. Lograrlo implica investigar horizontes hacia una concientizacion y la busqueda de una convivencia integrativa, armonica e interrelacionada, complementaria que sirva de inspiracion en el sentido de un Metabolismo Cultural, como una formula y sintesis para convivir en un marco globalizante, sin perder la heterogeneidad de las singularidades del regionalismo biologico y cultural, algo propio de las unidades, que da sentido y funcion de la sustentabilidad contundente en una totalidad (Holon) continua.

Japan remains one of the most intriguing yet least understood nations. In a much needed, balanced and comprehensive analysis, among other remarkable revelations, this book presents for the first time a vital key to understanding the organisation of Japan's society and the behaviour of its people. The Japanese are not driven by a universal morality based on Good and Evil, but by broad aesthetic concepts based on Pure and Impure. What they include as 'impure' will surprise many readers.

For all peoples on all continents and for all times, water has been the blood of life. It is fitting then, that this book about the peoples of the Southwest be dedicated to an examination of water in a land that has historically been dry, making the need to locate water supplies essential. The Southwest became an important frontier for Spanish and then Anglo explorers and colonizers who battled with native occupants for strategic locations. Each one of these groups who made the Southwest their home were ethnically quite different. They represented diverse histories, cultures, nationalities, classes, religions and world views.

Beginning with discussion of innovative prehistoric land and water use, the book describes the ways in which early farmers learned how to harness the precious drops of water for their fields. The story then continues with views from the Pueblos and beyond as the living sacredness of earth's resource is described by native peoples. This emic view, however, is often in conflict with the various legal definitions of resources carved by federal, state and local officials and developers. The book goes on to examine the background of contemporary land conflicts and water litigation between numerous contestants: Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo. The book ends with articles that attest to the clever ways in which ethnicity is configured and boldly proclaimed in order to reclaim privilege.

A study of peasant land-owning and its attendant social and economic changes during the making of modern Egypt. This digital edition was derived from ACLS Humanities E-Book's (http: //www.humanitiesebook.org) online version of the same title

Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality explores the growing centrality and power of the medical professional and lay practices within the field of human reproduction as they entangle with political economic processes, providing examples from multiple countries. Throughout the collection the authors address the issues of abortion, sterilization, 'natural' childbirth, breastfeeding, surrogacy, pregnancy loss, IVF, disability and parenting, whilst focusing both on the mechanisms through which reproductive behaviours are shaped and controlled, and on the socially and culturally constructed bodies' materiality. The chapters analyse how reproductive governances are inherently attached to different social life aspects, such as gender, industry, and religion, residing within complex political domains and how these features are embodied through practices, care, rituals, and gestures. Rather than assuming corporeal materiality - the 'flesh' - as something stable and pre-given, this collection shows how different bodies are defined and shaped by local biologies, institutional practices and reproductive subjects inside and outside the Euro-American space. This is essential reading for researchers of social, cultural and medical anthropology, sociology, and education.

This study focuses on the field of security studies through the prism of migration. Using ethnographic methods to illustrate an experiential theory of security taken from the perspective of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe, it effectively offers a means of moving beyond state-based and state-centric theories in International Relations.

An investigation into the education of women in the religious Zionist community and its influence on Orthodox Judaism.

In traditional Jewish societies of previous centuries, literacy education was mostly a male prerogative. Even more recently, women have not been taught the traditional male curriculum that includes the Talmud and midrashic books. But the situation is changing, partly because of the special emphasis that modern Judaism places on learning its philosophy and traditions and on broadening its circle of knowers. In Next Year I Will Know More, the distinguished Israeli anthropologist Tamar El-Or explores the spreading practice of intensive Judaic studies among women in the religious Zionist community -- a revolutionary phenomenon that will transform Orthodox Judaism over time.

Focusing on the experiences of religious women who participated in a midrasha at Bar-Ilan University, the author, a secular Jew, succeeded in gaining their confidence and penetrating their world. El-Or observed these women in a learning context where they debated Jewish orthodox views of women, a process that enriched her understanding of their identity formation. She explores their own learning experience through discourse analysis and through conversations with them and their male instructors.

Feminist literacy, notes El-Or, will alter gender relations and the construction of gender identities of the members of the religious community. This in turn could effect theological and Jewish legal changes. In an engaging narrative that offers rare insights into a traditional society in the midst of a modern world, the author points to a community that will be more feminist -- and even more religious.

This book frames our biological and psychological capacity to make friends as an evolved ability, comparing friendship to other evolved traits of human beings such as walking upright on two legs, having opposable thumbs and a prominent chin, and possessing the capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Professor John Terrell investigates how the human brain has evolved to perform two functions essential to friendship that, at first glance, appear to be at odds with one another: remaking the outside world to suit our collective needs, and escaping into our own inner thoughts and imagining how things might and ought to be. We must all deal with our species' hereditary legacy-that we are social animals who need to include others in our lives for our biological and psychological survival. Yet we are also able to exercise the cognitive freedom to detach from the adaptive realities and demands of life. These thought patterns have important consequences for how we understand aggression and cooperation. Terrell claims that conflict is best understood in terms of friendship-as challenges that emerge when we are forced to reconcile the inner, private worlds of our imaginations with the experienced realities of our daily lives and each other.

This book discusses Asia's rapid pace of urbanization, with a particular focus on new spaces created by and for everyday religiosity. The essays in this volume - covering topics from the global metropolises of Singapore, Bangalore, Seoul, Beijing, and Hong Kong to the regional centers of Gwalior, Pune, Jahazpur, and sites like Wudang Mountain - examine in detail the spaces created by new or changing religious organizations that range in scope from neighborhood-based to consciously global. The definition of "spatial aspects" includes direct place-making projects such as the construction of new religious buildings - temples, halls and other meeting sites, as well as less tangible religious endeavors such as the production of new "mental spaces" urged by spiritual leaders, or the shift from terra firma to the strangely concrete effervesce of cyberspace. With this in mind, it explores how distinct and blurred, and open and bounded communities generate and participate in diverse practices as they deliberately engage or disengage with physical landscapes/cityscapes. It highlights how through these religious organizations, changing class and gender configurations, ongoing political and economic transformations, continue as significant factors shaping and affecting Asian urban lives. In addition, the books goes further by exploring new and often bittersweet "improvements" like metro rail lines, new national highways, widespread internet access, that bulldoze - both literally and figuratively - religious places and force relocations and adjustments that are often innovative and unexpected. Furthermore, this volume explores personal experiences within the particularities of selected religious organizations and the ways that subjects interpret or actively construct urban spaces. The essays show, through ethnographically and historically grounded case studies, the variety of ways newly emerging religious communities or religious institutions understand, value, interact with, or strive to ignore extreme urbanization and rapidly changing built environments.

Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa examines the gendered and generational conflicts surrounding social change in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape roughly twenty years after the end of Apartheid. In post-Aparatheid South Africa, rights-based public discourse and state practices promote liberal, autonomous, and egalitarian notions of personhood, yet widespread unemployment and poverty demand that people rely closely on one another and forge relationships that disrupt the gendered and generational hierarchies framed as traditional and culturally authentic. Kathleen Rice examines the ways these tensions and restructurings lead to uncertainties about how South Africans should live together in their daily lives. Focusing particularly on the women of the village of Mhlambini, Rights and Responsibilities in Rural South Africa offers compelling portraits of how they experience and navigate widespread social and economic change and presents their experiences as a way of understanding how people navigate the moral ambiguities of contemporary South African life.

This book examines how computer-based programs can be used to acquire 'big' digital cultural heritage data, curate, and disseminate it over the Internet and in 3D visualization platforms with the ultimate goal of creating long-lasting "digital heritage repositories.' The organization of the book reflects the essence of new technologies applied to cultural heritage and archaeology. Each of these stages bring their own challenges and considerations that need to be dealt with. The authors in each section present case studies and overviews of how each of these aspects might be dealt with. While technology is rapidly changing, the principles laid out in these chapters should serve as a guide for many years to come. The influence of the digital world on archaeology and cultural heritage will continue to shape these disciplines as advances in these technologies facilitate new lines of research. serif">The book is divided into three sections covering acquisition, curation, and dissemination (the major life cycles of cultural heritage data). Acquisition is one of the fundamental challenges for practitioners in heritage and archaeology, and the chapters in this section provide a template that highlights the principles for present and future work that will provide sustainable models for digital documentation. Following acquisition, the next section highlights how equally important curation is as the future of digital documentation depends on it. Preservation of digital data requires preservation that can guarantee a future for generations to come. The final section focuses on dissemination as it is what pushes the data beyond the shelves of storage and allows the public to experience the past through these new technologies, but also opens new lines of investigation by giving access to these data to researchers around the globe. Digital technology promises significant changes in how we approach social sciences, cultural heritage, and archaeology. However, researchers must consider not only the acquisition and curation, but also the dissemination of these data to their colleagues and the public. Throughout the book, many of the authors have highlighted the usefulness of Structure from Motion (SfM) work for cultural heritage documentation; others the utility and excitement of crowdsourcing as a 'citizen scientist' tool to engage not only trained students and researchers, but also the public in the cyber-archaeology endeavor. Both innovative tools facilitate the curation of digital cultural heritage and its dissemination. Together with all the chapters in this volume, the authors will help archaeologists, researchers interested in the digital humanities and scholars who focus on digital cultural heritage to assess where the field is and where it is going.

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.

The book presents an integrative review of paleoneurology, the study of endocranial morphology in fossil species. The main focus is on showing how computed methods can be used to support advances in evolutionary neuroanatomy, paleoanthropology and archaeology and how they have contributed to creating a completely new perspective in cognitive neuroscience. Moreover, thanks to its multidisciplinary approach, the book addresses students and researchers approaching human paleoneurology from different angles and for different purposes, such as biologists, physicians, anthropologists, archaeologists and computer scientists. The individual chapters, written by international experts, represent authoritative reviews of the most important topics in the field. All the concepts are presented in an easy-to-understand style, making them accessible to university students, newcomers and also to anyone interested in understanding how methods like biomedical imaging, digital anatomy and computed and multivariate morphometrics can be used for analyzing ontogenetic and phylogenetic changes according to the principles of functional morphology, morphological integration and modularity.

Chechens: Culture and Society is an ethnography that elaborates the lived experiences of Chechens, focusing primarily on relationships and socio-cultural norms within the context of the current conflict in the Chechen Republic.

From July 3-6, 1986, Americans hailed the 4th of July and the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in a celebration that became officially known as Liberty Weekend. In this study, David Procter analyzes the process of enacting political culture by examining how various political, religious, and ethnic groups transformed the experience of Liberty Weekend into a validation of their own individual social and political agendas. Broader in scope than any previous published work on political culture and the political ideal of liberty, Procter's work vividly demonstrates the rhetorical process by which American politicians, pundits, and community spokespersons convert political celebration into motivation for sociopolitical goals.

Following an introductory chapter on the relationship between symbols and culture, Procter provides an overview of the analysis of political culture as well as general comments on Liberty Weekend itself. Subsequent chapters analyze how specific groups used the weekend to further their own sociopolitical goals. Procter explains how blacks transformed the celebration into competing statements of community identity, explores how Ronald Reagan converted the event into a celebration of his Revolution, and examines how a nationalist group cast the event into a motive for an involved or confrontational American foreign policy. He then synthesizes the significant themes and symbolic clusters from these three chapters to determine what these webs of discourse can tell us about American political culture. Procter concludes that each group called on the ideograph Liberty to justify their specific, yet diverse, political agendas and that these disparate groups were able to use this common symbol because fundamentally Liberty represents America's cultural persona of pursuing a dream of success and achievement. Ideal as supplemental reading for courses in political communication and rhetorical criticism, this book represents a major contribution to our understanding of the complex nature of American political culture.

Africa is known for its multi-faceted immaterial culture, manifested in highly original music, oral texts, artistic performances and sporting events. These cultural expressions are increasingly regulated by intellectual property rights, as orally transmitted stories are written down, traditional songs broadcast and ownership claimed, and sporting activities once part of village life become national media events. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of legal experts, anthropologists and literary scholars to explore, from an African point of view, what happens to intangible cultural goods when they are confronted with large-scale commodification and distribution through media technologies, and globalized and divergent judicial systems, institutions and cultural norms. These transformations are observed in contexts that range from Senegalese wrestling contests to beauty pageants in Mali, from Kenyan hip-hop to the Nigerian novel, from the vuvuzela horn to Cameroonian masks. Contributors address the role of the state and the legacy of the European origination of IP laws, as well as the forms of ownership, technologies of mediation and degrees of commercialization that existed pre-colonially in different African societies. Resisting a single narrative of the imposition of a Western legal regime displacing older African modes, a more complex picture is revealed of the intricate interconnections between pirates, artists, communities, governments and international organizations. It is only when local actors embrace technologies and regulations in a specific historical situation that these become influential forces for change. The question raised is not whether international IP norms conform to African practices, nor whether media impose Western styles, but rather what local actors do with these regulations and how both local and Western practices and technologies impact on each other and co-exist. 'Intellectual property (IP) has become central to global governance but we have little idea of how this international legislation plays out on the ground. This pioneering book shows how local actors use IP rather than the other way around. A must-read for anyone interested in intellectual property.' Isabel Hofmeyr, Visiting Global Distinguished Professor, New York University; Professor of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand 'A deeply engaging and evidence-rich analysis of the worlds into which intellectual property law, specifically copyright law, has entered in Africa and its effect on these worlds. This collection illustrates the best of what edited volumes can do: create a diverse, informed, and compelling conversation about a specific yet complex topic.' Dr. Hauke Dorsch, AMA African Music Archives, Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz

Arguing against the postmodern claim that systematic theory is unable to account for difference, "Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture" adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of cultural judgement and social change. With music as her model for theory, Hanrahan explores the role of time, the creation of meaning, the identification of difference, and the basis for judgements in cultural life, and in doing so provides a foundation for the critique of cultural objects and practices that avoids both the elitism of traditional aesthetics and the unwavering relativism of so much contemporary cultural analysis. A broad-ranging and deeply philosophical work building on the scholarship of the Frankfurt School, "Difference in Time: A Critical Theory of Culture "drives home the need for critique in the evaluation and revision of the social knowledge and institutions of democratic civic life.

In Hanrahan's analysis, the dualism of critique--that of universal judgement and relative standpoint--is false when critique is understood as a dynamic process in which both judgement and standpoint are emergent and contingent. Differences are not given or static but are articulated in time; therefore, both the categories of critique and of social theory in general must be temporalized. Hanrahan's musical model draws attention to the fundamental temporality of social life and social structure, and integrates that understanding into the structure of a new dynamic in which difference is compatible with both system and structure. Thus, Hanrahan demonstrates that it is possible to construct critical categories that do not become orthodoxies.

La felicidad se elige. Hay que ser virtuosa para tenerla y vivirla, ya que en el camino estan muchas cosas que se le puede robar.

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.