Recently considerable interest has developed about the degree to which anthropological approaches to kinship can be used for the study of the long-term development of European history. From the late middle ages to the dawn of the twentieth century, kinship - rather than declining, as is often assumed - was twice reconfigured in dramatic ways and became increasingly significant as a force in historical change, with remarkable similarities across European society. Applying interdisciplinary approaches from social and cultural history and literature and focusing on sibling relationships, this volume takes up the challenge of examining the systemic and structural development of kinship over the long term by looking at the close inner-familial dynamics of ruling families (the Hohenzollerns), cultural leaders (the Mendelssohns), business and professional classes, and political figures (the Gladstones)in France, Italy, Germany, and England. It offers insight into the current issues in kinship studies and draws from a wide range of personal documents: letters, autobiographies, testaments, memoirs, as well as genealogies and works of art.

Breastfeeding and child feeding at the center of nurturing practices, yet the work of nurture has escaped the scrutiny of medical and social scientists. Anthropology offers a powerful biocultural approach that examines how custom and culture interact to support nurturing practices. Our framework shows how the unique constitutions of mothers and infants regulate each other. The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

Babies are not simply born-they are made through cultural and social practices. Based on rich empirical work, this book examines the everyday experiences that mark pregnancy in the US today, such as reading pregnancy advice books, showing ultrasound "baby pictures" to friends and co-workers, and decorating the nursery in anticipation of the new arrival. These ordinary practices of pregnancy, the author argues, are significant and revealing creative activities that produce babies. They are the activities through which babies are made important and meaningful in the lives of the women and men awaiting the child's birth. This book brings into focus a topic that has been overlooked in the scholarship on reproduction and will be of interest to professionals and expectant parents alike.

Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, culture, and media, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world. These monsters hail from Aboriginal Australia, the Pacific, Asia, and Europe, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt.

Authenticity in our globalized world is a paradox: culture flows across borders with unprecedented ease while consumers demand the real thing like never before. This collection examines how authenticity relates to cultural products under globalization, looking closely at how a cuisine, musical genre, or artifact attains its aura of genuineness, of originality, when almost all traditional cultural products are invented in a certain time and place. The contributors in this volume identify how the aura - the authority of the original object - is generated in the first place. The methodologies and disciplines come from a variety of sources: cultural studies, qualitative sociology, musicology, literary studies, and beyond.

This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

Exploring the multiple communities of healing among the Tuareg people of Niger, this work examines the beliefs and practices that surround healing and the quest for medicine. In studying ideals of healing that face challenges from wider political and economic forces, the author enables us to understand these culturally and historically constructed processes. This leads us to comprehend how many Tuareg construct and deconstruct local notions of medicine and healers, how patients cope with current problems in health care, and more broadly, how medical knowledge is constructed in anthropology and ethnography.

Rasmussen reveals new perspectives on healing in systems of power and symbolism, bridging interpretive cultural and political economy approaches. This book explores the consequences and implications of the idea that in order to obtain medicine, one must submit to authority, but proceeds beyond merely demonstrating this idea, already largely a truism in anthropology. The Tuareg data show how local residents are not passive victims, but rather active agents in responding to and resisting authority structures of medicine and medical knowledge.

Internet activism is playing a crucial role in the democratic reform happening across many parts of Southeast Asia. Focusing on Subang Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, this study offers an in-depth examination of the workings of the Internet at the local level. In fact, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia's electronic governance laboratory. The author explores its field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, civil servants, politicians, online journalists and other social agents struggle over how the locality is to be governed at the dawn of the 'Information Era'. Drawing on the field theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester School of political anthropology, this study challenges the unquestioned predominance of 'network' and 'community' as the two key sociation concepts in contemporary Internet studies. The analysis extends field theory in four new directions, namely the complex articulations between personal networking and social fields, the uneven diffusion and circulation of new field technologies and contents, intra- and inter-field political crises, and the emergence of new forms of residential sociality.

This work is an examination of borderless markets where national boundaries are no longer the relevant criteria in making international marketing, economic planning, and business decisions. Understanding nonpolitical borders is especially important for products and industries that are culture bound and those that require local adaptation. Religion is one critical factor that affects economic development, demographic behavior, and general business policies around the world. Over 26,000 statistics are provided for over 70 religious groups covering a number of social, economic, and business variables. A significant review of literature is also included.

Over 3,000 years ago, in what would be northern North America, there was a cultural fluorescence. Native Americans were exchanging materials and ideas over long distances, and their shamans were overseeing treatment of the dead and conducting ceremonies to insure entry into the spirit world. The author details how archaeologists discovered their story.

The discovery, excavation, and interpretation of data on one of the most significant ancient Native American archaeological sites in the Northeast is chronicled. Research team leader Alan Leveillee outlines the regional, environmental, and cultural contexts, details the archaeological methodology, and synthesizes the results of analyses of lithics, metals, flora, fauna, and soils, and presents the on-site observations and interpretations of the Native American representative of the team.

Focusing on the discovery and subsequent archaeological approach to the first professionally excavated secondary burial complex in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Leveillee demonstrates that anthropological models enable consideration of how artifacts and features reveal 3,500-year-old ideologies, ceremonies, and social systems--the archaeology of ideas.

Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world's most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah's Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation-waiting to wait-becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.

Kecmanovic deals with the phenomenon of ethnonationalism, both as a broad, worldwide concern and as a key ingredient to the struggles in the former Yugoslavia. As in the former Yugoslavia, the rise of ethnonationalistic sentiments and attitudes coincided with the transition from a state-and party-run affair to a new, post-communist type of government and society. Drawing upon his personal experiences in Sarajevo, Kecmanovic provides a unique view of the conflict.

In a style accessible to students and general readers, he traces the transformations of leading principles, value systems, behavioral patterns, and views of people in times of severe ethnic tensions. At times nearly novelistic, the book examines epidemic ethnonationalism and individual manifestations such as violence toward members of other groups, beliefs that ethnic differences are genetic, a need to aggrandize and even manufacture differences between communities.

Monasteries are one of the few types of communities that have been able to exist without the family. In this intimate, first-hand study of the daily life in a Trappist monastery, Hillery concludes that what binds this unusual and highly successful community together is its emphases on freedom and agape love. "The Monastery" reintegrates sociology with its allied disciplines in an attempt to understand the monastery on its own terms, and at the same time link that with sociology. Hillery delves into the history, the importance of the Rule of Benedict, the strictness of the Trappist interpretation, and the significance of the Second Vatican Council. Throughout, he uses a holistic anthropological approach.

The work begins with a detailed sociological analysis of freedom, love, and community. Other topics include ways in which candidates enter the monastery, their relation to their families, economic activities, politics, prayer, asceticism, recreation, illness, death, and deviance. Comparisons are made with nine of the other eleven Trappist monasteries in the United States. Anthropologists and sociologists, especially those interested in community, comparative analysis, and religion are challenged by "The Monastery" to move beyond the arbitrary limits they have placed on themselves, which maintain that all knowledge must be capable of being physically perceived and statistically measured.

The study of literature and the environment evokes and promotes this highly original eco-critical collection and its contributions to evaluating the preservation of nature and human attachment and to situate it at a local, communitarian, or bio-regional level. Revisiting eco-literature can aid our exploration of numerous global issues and challenges through a literary rendition of the natural world in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Reflecting on different works will prompt the readers to intensify their search for viable and effective choices and healthy alternatives in a confusing world.

Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism, and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history, intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual, applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory - Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin - to the analysis of objects.

This work is an examination of borderless markets where national boundaries are no longer the relevant criteria in making international marketing, economic planning, and business decisions. Understanding nonpolitical borders is especially important for products and industries that are culture bound and those that require local adaptation. Ethnic culture is one critical factor that affects economic development, demographic behavior, and general business policies around the world. Over 120,000 statistics are provided for over 400 ethnic groups covering a number of social, economic, and business variables. A significant review of literature is also included.

This book presents a long-term study in genetic isolates of indigenous small ethnics of Dagestan, located in the North-East part of Caucasus in Russia. Dagestan is characterized by extreme cultural and linguistic differences in a small geographic area and contains 26 indigenous ethnic groups. According to archeological data these indigenous highland ethnics have been living in the same area for more than ten thousand years. Our long-term population-genetic study of Dagestan indigenous ethnic groups indicates their close relation to each other and suggests that they evolved from one common ancestral meta-population. Dagestan has an extremely high genetic diversity between ethnic populations and a low genetic diversity within them. Such genetic isolates are exceptional resources for the detection of susceptibility genes for complex diseases because of the reduction in genetic and clinical heterogeneity. The founder effect and gene drift in these primary isolates may have caused aggregation of specific haplotypes with limited numbers of pathogenic alleles and loci in some isolates relative to others. The book presents a study in four ethnically and demographically diverse genetic isolates with aggregation of schizophrenia that we ascertained within our Dagestan Genetic Heritage Research Project. The results obtained support the notion that mapping genes of any complex disease (e.g., schizophrenia) in demographically older genetic isolates may be more time and cost effective due to their high clinical and genetic homogeneity, in comparison with demographically younger isolates, especially with genetically heterogeneous outbred populations.

The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

Uncovers the systemic problems that expose poor communities to environmental hazards From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the 'paths of least resistance,' there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience. Taking stock of the recent environmental justice scholarship, Toxic Communities examines the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards. Renowned environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor focuses on the locations of hazardous facilities in low-income and minority communities and shows how they have been dumped on, contaminated and exposed. Drawing on an array of historical and contemporary case studies from across the country, Taylor explores controversies over racially-motivated decisions in zoning laws, eminent domain, government regulation (or lack thereof), and urban renewal. She provides a comprehensive overview of the debate over whether or not there is a link between environmental transgressions and discrimination, drawing a clear picture of the state of the environmental justice field today and where it is going. In doing so, she introduces new concepts and theories for understanding environmental racism that will be essential for environmental justice scholars. A fascinating landmark study, Toxic Communities greatly contributes to the study of race, the environment, and space in the contemporary United States.

This book is a detailed ethnography of traditional, predominantly upper-caste, sequestered Hindu women in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, a state in eastern India. It elaborates on a distinctive paradigm of domesticity and explicates a particular model of human wellbeing among this category. Part of the growing literature in "third wave" or "multicultural feminism", it seeks to broaden the parameters of feminist discourse by going beyond questions of individual liberty or gender equality to examine the potential for female empowerment that exists in the context of these women's lives. Its aims are twofold: first, to represent these women in ways that they themselves would recognize; and, second, to interpret, rather than merely "translate", the beliefs and practices of the temple town such that their underlying logic becomes readily accessible to readers, even those unfamiliar with the Hindu world.

This study compares household energy use, environmental awareness, and consumerism among residents of small towns in Sweden and America. The author, a cultural anthropologist, uses quantitative and qualitative data from fieldwork to formulate a holistic analysis. The study considers broader questions about the uses of energy, consumer goods, quality of life, and the environment. The industrial worldview is critiqued at both individual and institutional levels. It concludes with a call for a more spiritual approach to environmentalism and social issues.