This ethnography, based on a five-year field study, presents a holistic view of a nearly invisible ethnic minority in the urban Midwest, Cambodian refugees. Hopkins begins with a brief look at Cambodian history and the reign which led these farmers to flee their homeland, and then presents an intimate portrait of ordinary family life and also of Buddhist ceremonial life. The book details their struggles to adjust in the face of the many barriers presented by American urban life, such as poverty, dangerous neighborhoods, and unemployment, and also by the conflict between their particular needs and American institutions such as schools, health care, law, and even the agencies intended to help them.

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

This collection draws insights from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who specialize in diverse methods ranging from ethnography, archival research, and oral histories, to quantitative data analysis and experiments used in the social sciences and humanities to reflect on the empirical, methodological, and practical implications of conducting research beyond one's national borders. The goal of this book is to help researchers contemplate existing orientations that dominate current research processes and consider the need for transnational multidisciplinary practices that remain aware of the inequalities which continually inform research practices. With this focus, this collection is also a resourceful initiative that seeks to share experiences as well as extract key ideas and approaches likely to overlap or resonate in different disciplines.

Transitioning: matter, gender, thought takes the body, its ontologies and temporalities, as a primary ethnographic heuristic to explore transition contexts, relations and life processes. Although in Britain the Gender Recognition Act has, since 2004, provided a framework for identity recognition for those who seek to live as a member of the opposite gender, this book draws on trans men's experiences to conceptualise transition outside this framework. Thinking through changing materialities, cultures and epistemologies of transition, the book brings together perspectives in anthropology, transgender studies, and social theory to think through how bodies happen, and the scales, assemblages, transmissions and indeterminacies in their process of becoming something other than themselves.

The Arts have always been vital in teaching, and are the primary bases for religious communication: paleolithic cave paintings and artefacts long predate many scriptural sources. This major new series is designed to provide and understanding of the world's religions through the various art forms associated with religious practice and experience - whether the visual arts, dance, drama or music. In focusing on the importance of the art form in religious teaching and its role outside galleries and museums, this distinctive series moves beyond the traditional realms of religious art literature. Given the fact that mass literacy is largely a modern 'western phenomenon', this series responds to an obvious gap in religious communication, alongside its traditional textual sources. Thus, the Religion and the Arts series presents a unique synthesis of ideas, literature and themes, to emphasise the very varied relationship between diverse religions and the art which both informs the cultures themselves and is also a vivid expression of their systems of beliefs.

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

Politics in the Human Interest presents the striking proposition that by paying attention to what's been learned about human behavior, we can develop a political agenda that is in the human interest. Du Bois and Wright, editors of Applying Sociology: Making a Better World, seek a synthesis of the disciplines by returning to the bold conversation of August Comte, Lester Ward, Robert Lynd, Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Alvin Gouldner, Ernest Becker and Alfred McClung Lee. As economist Kenneth Boulding once said, "The question for the social sciences is simply, what is better-and how do we get there?" Politics in the Human Interest provides an important foundation for the answer and explores the theoretical foundation of a humanistic sociology. It returns to the original progressive agenda-that knowledge about human behavior can be used to create social progress and a better world. Politics in the Human Interest is perfect for advanced undergraduate courses and graduate courses as well as sociology professionals.

Since the end of state socialism and the unifying efforts of the Soviet Union, questions about LGBT+ have gained increasing attention among scholars of various disciplines. In the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces, as well as by non-state actors attempting to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Understanding this context, Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities that are remaking the post-socialist world in ways that refuse domination from their own, local heteronormative expectations as well as those imposed from global LGBT+ movements that also create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. These chapters reflect a multiplicity of voices that fall into a broad community of LGBT+ people, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. These chapters are evidence of a globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.

Lewis Island in Lambertville, New Jersey, is the site of the Lewis Fishery, the last haul seine American shad fishery on the nontidal Delaware River. The Lewis family has fished in the same spot since 1888 and operated the fishery through five generations. The extended Lewis family, its fishery's crew, and the Lambertville community connect with people throughout the region, including environmentalists concerned about the river. It was a Lewis who raised the alarm and helped resurrect a polluted river and its biosphere. While this once exclusively masculine activity is central to the tiny island, today men, women, and children fish, living out a sense of place, belonging, and sustainability. In Another Haul: Narrative Stewardship and Cultural Sustainability at the Lewis Family Fishery, author Charlie Groth highlights the traditional, vernacular, and everyday cultural expressions of the family and crew to understand how community, culture, and the environment intersect. Groth argues there is a system of narrative here that combines verbal activities and everyday activities. On the basis of over two decades of participation and observation, interviews, surveys, and a wide variety of published sources, Groth identifies a phenomenon she calls ""narrative stewardship."" This narrative system, emphasizing place, community, and commitment, in turn, encourages environmental and cultural stewardship, tradition, and community. Intricate and embedded, the system appears invisible, but careful study unpacks and untangles how people, often unconsciously, foster sustainability. Though an ethnography of an occupation, the volume encourages readers to consider what arises as special about all cultures and what needs to be seen and preserved.

Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural violence. It also examines how the exercise of power in the health arena and in society overall impacts human health and well-being. Medical Anthropology and the World System: Critical Perspectives, Third Edition includes updated and expanded information on medical anthropology, resulting in an even more comprehensive resource for undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers worldwide. As in the previous versions of this text, the authors provide insights from the perspective of critical medical anthropology, a well-established theoretical viewpoint from which faculty, researchers, and students study medical anthropology. It addresses the nature and scope of medical anthropology; the biosocial and political ecological origins of disease, health inequities, and social suffering; and the nature of medical systems in indigenous and pre-capitalist state societies and modern societies. The third edition also includes new material on the relationship between climate change and health. Finally, this textbook explores health praxis and the struggle for a healthy world.

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

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

Holocaust Education in Lithuania is based on a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic research project that was conducted to analyze the effects of the controversial policies of Holocaust education which were introduced as conditions of membership for access into post-Soviet western alliances. In order to understand how individuals take up transnational policies and programs intended to support democratization, Beresniova delves into rarely discussed issues. She looks at the means through which inherent cultural and political assumptions have had an impact on the ways in which memory and history are used in educational programs. She also scrutinizes the motivating factors for involvement in Holocaust education, such as the importance of community building, civic activism beyond the topic of the Holocaust, and the perceived power of the international community in dictating domestic education policy guidelines. Beresniova contends that educators must acknowledge the political and cultural elements in Holocaust education programs and policies, or risk undermining their own efforts. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, education, history, political science, and European studies.

The Iranian city experienced a major transformation when the Pahlavi Dynasty initiated a project of modernization in the 1920s. The Rite of Urban Passage investigates this process by focusing on the spatial dynamics of Muharram processions, a ritual that commemorates the tragic massacre of Hussein and his companions in 680 CE. In doing so, this volume offers not only an alternative approach to understanding the process of urban transformation, but also a spatial genealogy of Muharram rituals that provides a platform for developing a fresh spatial approach to ritual studies.

Spanish popular culture is one of the richest in the world. The absence of an efficient ruling class has allowed the people to stamp their personality on all major aspects of the country's life. This book describes the peculiar Spanish feeling for death and tragedy in popular religious practices, music and the bullfight; the fiesta sense of life, so foreign to the work ethic of other Western countries; the oral tradition that has managed to survive into the post-industrial age with its creative use of slang, proverbs and obscenity; popular literature, the press, radio, television and the movies.

Students and scholars will appreciate the first comprehensive treatment of Spanish popular culture in a single volume. The author has done first-hand research in all the major regions of Spain and has compiled a list of major archives and resource centers. An extensive bibliography on the major fields of popular Spanish culture is included at the end of each chapter.

This book brings an empirical social science perspective to a public issue on which observers, economists, and business gurus have freely unleashed their abstract models and jumbo schemes. Written by internationally acclaimed authors, the chapters engage empirically tractable issues that are basic to any overall understanding of the social origins, structures, and consequences of the current wave of globalization. The book brings together in one volume diverse issues related to globalization that are generally dealt with in separate publications, such as migration, social inequality, flows of capital, Americanization and cultural identities, citizenship and collective action, and global governance. The diversity of topics and up to date discussion makes this book ideal as a text or supplementary reading for courses. As an argument for greater complexity, contingency and contradiction in contemporary debates on globalization, it is essential reading for any scholar or lay reader concerned about contemporary change.

Periods of transition are often symbolically associated with death, making the latter the paradigm of liminality. Yet, many volumes on death in the social sciences and humanities do not specifically address liminality. This book investigates these "ultimate ambiguities," assuming they can pose a threat to social relationships because of the disintegrating forces of death, but they are also crucial periods of creativity, change, and emergent aspects of social and religious life. Contributors explore death and liminality from an interdisciplinary perspective and present a global range of historical and contemporary case studies outlining emotional, cognitive, artistic, social, and political implications.

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

Media Studies presents the first collection of studies of mass media texts of various genres from an ethnomethodological point of view. This distinct point of view derives from the analytical attention to the way in which sense may be made of cultural products, focusing on the logic of textual production that enables its practitioners to avoid the stipulative classifications of traditional content analysis, the sterility of hermeneutical debates, and the ethical quagmires of the critique of ideologies. This collection offers an advancement of the analytical ambitions that require close attention be paid to the details of human conduct in real time and to the articulation of descriptive vocabularies which accurately characterize the concepts, reasoning, knowledge, and upon which such conduct depends and exhibits. It furthers both media studies and ethnomethodology, providing the intellectual rigor sought after by practitioners of ethnomethodology and an extension of this kind of inquiry into the heart of media research.

In Europe a number of production and communication strategies have long tried to establish local products as resources for local development. At the foot of the Alps, this scenario appears in all its contradictions, especially in relation to cheese production. The Heritage Arena focuses on the saga of Strachitunt, a cheese that has been designated an EU Protected Designation of Origin after years of negotiation and competition involving cheese-makers, merchants, and Slow Food activists. The book explores how the reinvention of cheese as a form of heritage is an ongoing and dynamic process rife with conflict and drama.

Through revisiting and challenging what we think we know about the work of Edward Burnett Tylor, a founding figure of anthropology, this volume explores new connections and insights that link Tylor and his work to present concerns in new and important ways. At the publication of Primitive Culture in 1871, Tylor was at the centre of anthropological research on religion and culture, but today Tylor's position in the anthropological canon is rarely acknowledged. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture does not claim to present a definitive, new Tylor. The old Tylor - the founder of British anthropology; the definer of religion; the intellectualist; the evolutionist; the liberal; the utilitarian; the avatar of white, Protestant rationalism; the Tylor of the canon - remains. Part I explore debates and contexts of Tylor's lifetime, while the chapters in Part II explore a series of new Tylors, including Tylor the ethnographer and Tylor the Spiritualist, re-writing the legacy of the founder of anthropology in the process. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of religion and the anthropology of religion.

Nutritional Anthropology and public health research and programming have employed similar methodologies for decades; many anthropologists are public health practitioners while many public health practitioners have been trained as medical or biological anthropologists. Recognizing such professional connections, this volume provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming using anthropological best practices. To illustrates the rationale for use of particular methods, each chapter elaborates a case study from the author's own work, showing why particular methods were adopted in each case.