Organisational Anthropology is a pioneering analysis of doing ethnographic fieldwork in different types of complex organisations, focusing on the process of initiating contact, establishing rapport and gaining the trust of an organisation's members. The thirteen contributors work from the premise that doing fieldwork in an organisation shares essential characteristics with fieldwork in more 'classical' anthropological environments, but that it also poses some particular challenges to the ethnographer, with barriers including the ideological or financial interests of the organisations, protection of resources and competition between organisations. A number of organisational contexts - including corporations, EU policy arenas, think tanks and the public sector - are explored in case studies from the UK, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Mexico and the USA.

Red States examines how the recurrent use of Native American history in southern cultural and literary texts produces ideas of ""feeling southern"" that have consequences for how present-day conservative political discourses resonate across the United States. Assembling a newly constituted archive that includes theatrical and musical performances, pre-Civil War literatures, and contemporary novels, Gina Caison argues that notions of Native American identity in the U.S. South can be understood by tracing how audiences in the region came to imagine indigeneity through texts ranging from the nineteenth-century Cherokee Phoenix to the Mardi Gras Indian narratives of Treme. Policy issues such as Indian Removal, biracial segregation, land claim, and federal termination frequently correlate to the audience consumption of such texts, and therefore the reception histories of this archive can be tied to shifts in the political claims of--and political possibilities for--Native people of the U.S. South. This continual appeal to the political issues of Indian Country ultimately generates what we see as persistent discourses about southern exceptionality and counternationalism.

Deconstructing Prehumanity is an investigation into the role of archaeological perception in the construction of race. It explores how social knowledge and disciplinary subjectivity have shaped our organization of the human past and how this organization and its lexicon have fueled racialism. The idea of an African prehuman hierarchy powers American race relations in a damaging way. Scientific physical distinctions used in ethnological studies quantified and qualified physical and "racial" differences among so-called African prehumans, all of which plague human social relations as they extend harmful ideas about peoples of African descent. This book delves into the evolution of terms and utilizes Africana studies to present the systematic reconstruction of a black past. By reviewing ethnological studies, nomenclature, and how such processes play a role in conceiving African origins, the multidisciplinary work supplies explanations about notions of African nature, culture, and race as prehuman. It explicates paleoanthropological categories and connects them to racialized inferences. Deconstructing Prehumanity is intended for readers looking to understand how perceptions about human origins add to racialization as it proffered a utilitarian past.

This book approaches the issue of rural-urban inequality through fieldwork conducted in a specific township (Zuogang) in Qinggang County, part of Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China. Presenting painstaking fieldwork in a single location, it successfully illuminates fundamental aspects of the reality and the complexity of rural-urban inequality that cannot be found in macro-level studies, most of which are prepared by economists. The book offers a unique combination of rigorous economic analysis with insightful social and anthropological analysis, as well as revealing interviews with local government officials. This approach provides a rich tapestry of rural perceptions of rural-urban inequality. With in-depth analysis and empirical evidence on questions concerning the development and root causes of urban-rural disparities, the book significantly enriches our understanding of the widely discussed issue of rural-urban income inequality, but from the unique perspective of rural China.

This is a book about social differentiation and distinction in one of the ethnically and politically most complex regions of the world, dealing with crucial issues in currently renewed debates on cultural pluralism, nationalism, irredentism and ethnic dispersal. The themes are given a regional and historical focus by treating peoples within the Tai-speaking regions of mainland South East Asia, namely the two basically Tai states, Thailand and Laos, and Tai areas in Burma, China, Vietnam and Malaysia. The book examines representations of non-Tai peoples by various Tai, and representations of Tai by others, and the related experiences of each as they have interacted with different Tai political spaces. The historical scope includes contemporary policy debates on 'nationalities; of 'minorities; policy in the light of earlier colonial and pre-colonial situations.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Shamanism has always been of great interest to anthropologists. More recently it has been "discovered" by westerners, especially New Age followers. This book breaks new ground byexamining pristine shamanism in Greenland, among people contacted late by Western missionaries and settlers. On the basis of material only available in Danish, and presented herein English for the first time, the author questions Mircea Eliade's well-known definition of the shaman as the master of ecstasy and suggests that his role has to be seen as that of a master of spirits. The ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age movement. After presenting descriptions of their organizations and accounts by participants, the author critically analyses the role of neo-shamanic courses and concludes that it is doubtful to consider what isoffered as shamanism.

This book examines the clothing worn by African Americans in the southern United States during the thirty years before the American Civil War. Drawing on a wide range of sources, most notably oral narratives recorded in the 1930s, this rich account shows that African Americans demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the role clothing played in demarcating age, sex, status, work, recreation, as well as special secular and sacred events. Testimonies offer proof of African Americans' vast technical skills in producing cloth and clothing, which served both as a fundamental reflection of the peoples' Afrocentric craftsmanship and aesthetic sensibilities, and as a reaction to their particular place in American society. Previous work on clothing in this period has tended to focus on white viewpoints, and as a consequence the dress worn by the enslaved has generally been seen as a static standard imposed by white overlords. This excellent study departs from conventional interpretations to show that the clothing of the enslaved changed over time, served multiple functions and represented customs and attitudes which evolved distinctly from within African American communities. In short, it represents a vital contribution to African American studies, as well as to dress and textile history, and cultural and folklore studies.

Democracy is on the run, and elected governments are suffering from a legitimacy crisis. Legislatures are increasingly seen as unrepresentative. To give legitimacy to democratic government, experts argue that we need more democracy and more opportunities for direct citizen participation. Representative democracy needs to be complemented by forms of direct engagement, such as referendums, popular votes, the recall, citizens' juries, eDemocracy, etc. This is what we term Complementary Democracy. In this book experts from the worlds of practice and theory come together to explain - and occasionally critique - these complements to representative democracy. The volume provides an invaluable starting point for anyone who wants to know more about the new directions of democratic governance, and hopes to inspire those who seek to build stronger democracies.

Terrorism threatens to destroy the world, corruption runs rampant, and natural resources are being depleted. Will these problems ever be solved? If events continue on their current course, these issues could destroy us. It is imperative that we take steps to understand evolutionary natural selection and the processes that have shaped world affairs over the past forty thousand years. Only by learning about social evolution and how ideologies have shaped societies will we be able to play active roles in trying to solve society's problems. Author Charles Brough covers topics such as basic behavior, the development of the first patriarchal system, barbarism and the rise of religions, and possible alternatives to Western civilization. Learn why the green revolution is falling behind, the implications of climate change, and how lagging energy supplies will affect the world. This social approach to studying evolution and humanity is different than anything you've ever encountered. You must be willing to understand the function that ideologies serve without believing in any of them to gain a deeper perspective on what may be The Last Civilization.

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

Considering the different traditions of cosmopolitan thinking and experimentation, this cutting edge volume examines the contemporary revival of cosmopolitanism as a response to the challenges of living in an interdependent world. Through a unique multidisciplinary approach, it takes the debate beyond the one-sided universalism of the Euro-American world and explores the multiverse of transformations which confront cosmopolitanism. The collection highlights central questions of cosmopolitan responsibility, global citizenship and justice as well as the importance of dialogue among civilizations, cultures, religions and traditions. Exploring the ethical and political dimensions of globalization, it outlines the pathways of going beyond cosmopolitanism by striving for a post-colonial cosmopolis characterized by global justice, trans-civilizational dialogues and dignity for all.

The world's "great" religions depend on traditions of serious scholarship, dedicated to preserving their key texts but also to understanding them and, therefore, to debating what understanding itself is and how best to do it. They also have important public missions of many kinds, and their ideas and organizations influence many other important institutions, including government, law, education, and kinship. The Anthropology of Western Religions: Ideas, Organizations, and Constituencies is a comparative survey of the world's major religious traditions as professional enterprises and, often, as social movements. Documenting the principle ideas behind Western religious traditions from an anthropological perspective, Murray J. Leaf demonstrates how these ideas have been used in building internal organizations that mobilize or fail to mobilize external support.

In this significant scholarly contribution to the study of ethnic minorities, Chalsa Loo documents a distinctive American community--Chinatown, San Francisco. Based on an interview survey of residents of Chinatown, Loo's study tests prevailing psychological and sociological theories, and ultimately dispels stereotypes about Asian Americans, replacing them with empirically derived realities of American life. "Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time" comprehensively covers a range of significant areas of life, integrating several disciplines and combining the rigor of scientific analysis with the richness of individual experience through the use of photographs and personal vignettes.

This valuable analysis serves as a model of comprehensive, quantitative multidomain interview sample survey research. It provides data on the major domains of life for all Americans, but particularly for ethnic Americans: neighborhood, crowding, health, mental health, employment, language and cultural barriers, quality of life, and differences between men and women. This book is scholarly yet readable, and will be particularly useful to social scientists, educators, researchers, human service professionals, and policy planners.

The first English-language social science book to comprehensively explore hitchhiking in the contemporary era in the West, this volume covers a lot of ground-it goes to and fro, in an echo of the modus operandi of most hitchhiking journeys. As scarification, piercings, and tattoos move from the counter-culture to popular culture, hitchhiking has remained an activity apart. Yet, with the assistance of virtual platforms and through its ever-growing memorialisation in literature and the arts, hitchhiking persists into the 21st century, despite the many social anxieties surrounding it. The themes addressed here thus include: adventure; gender; fear and trust; freedom and existential travel; road and transport infrastructures; communities of protest and resistance; civic surveillance and risk ecologies.

The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"--an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers--is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity.

Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers--recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children--could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"--with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations--is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.

Globalization can sometimes seem like an abstract concept, an unconscious aspect of our everyday existence. What impact does it have on the reality of our daily lives? How does it shape our experiences, perspectives and identities? Narratives of Globalization explores how a range of key ideas in the study of globalization are made manifest in the lives of people all over the world. Each chapter explores a key theme in globalization studies that is explored through a narrative that draws on the contributors own personal experience. It draws together a collection of experiences from across the globe including Chinese migration to Australia, the influence of the internet on education and the popularity of K-pop. These personal perspectives on culture, identity, development and politics attempt to better understand contemporary issues within the global frame and illustrate how ordinary people can engage with and influence processes of globalization.

Rituals of Manhood provides some of the most dramatic and richly textured accounts of ritual passages known to anthropologists of the late twentieth century. When in an earlier time anthropologists and sociologists described collective initiation rituals, the political and gender aspects of these practices were seldom underscored. Today, the power relationships of the body and domination, and the social arena of gender politics are widely regarded as critical to the cultural meaning and interpretation. Gilbert H. Herdt is the editor.

El Salvador's civil war began in 1980 and ended twelve bloody years later.It saw extreme violence on both sides, including the terrorising and targetingof civilians by death squads, recruitment of child soldiers, and the death anddisappearance of more than 75,000 people. Examining El Salvador's vibrantlife-story literature written in the aftermath of this terrible conflict-includingmemoirs and testimonials-Erik Ching seeks to understand how thewar has come to be remembered and rebattled by Salvadorans and what thatmeans for their society today. Ching identifies four memory communities that dominate nationalpostwar views: civilian elites, military officers, guerrilla commanders, andworking class and poor testimonialists. Pushing distinct and divergent stories,these groups are today engaged in what Ching terms a "narrative battle"for control over the memory of the war. Their ongoing publications in themarketplace of ideas tend to direct Salvadorans' attempts to negotiate thewar's meaning and legacy, and Ching suggests that a more open, coordinatedreconciliation process is needed in this postconflict society. In the meantime,El Salvador, fractured by conflicting interpretations of its national trauma,is hindered in dealing with the immediate problems posed by the nexus ofneoliberalism, gang violence, and outmigration.