The question of ignorance occupies a central place in anthropological theory and practice. This volume argues that the concept of ignorance has largely been pursued as the opposite of knowledge or even its obverse. Though they cover wide empirical ground - from clients of a fertility treatment center in New York to families grappling with suicide in Greenland - contributors share a commitment to understanding the concept as a productive, social practice. Ultimately, The Anthropology of Ignorance asks whether an academic commitment to knowledge can be squared with lived significance of ignorance and how taking it seriously might alter anthropological research practices.

Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: "race-mixture" has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as "multicultural." Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.

This book paints an image of sociality in duress, describing how new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) bring possible changes in political engagement and civic-ness. The political branch of the field of ICT-for-Development (ICT4D) is firmly convinced that this translates in civic engagement and democratisation. This book questions this conception, by showing that mistrust greatly increases through new ICT in a society where mistrust has been internalised. These processes are examined in the society encountered in Sokode, the capital of the Central Region of Togo, in the period between 2015 and 2020, when the mobile phone became widespread among young people. This ethnographic research provides a snapshot of the changes brought about by new ICT in the social fabrics and the lives of these young people. The place and period are highly relevant for getting a better understanding of the forms that civic engagement can take, and the roles that new ICT can play in settings of political repression. Togo has been ruled by the same family for over half a century, and Sokode is one of the rare places of fierce political opposition. However, young people do not persevere in massive street protests like in other countries, even though they appear to have every reason to do so. How can the circumstances and social processes be understood that are leading to this 'political silence', and how do frustration and anger find their way? The link between new ICT and civic engagement has more often been made, but mostly quantitative and volatile, lacking empirical grounding. This book demonstrates that there is indeed a connection between new ICT and social change. Through their phones, young people inform themselves in different ways, and they react differently to social and political changes. Their reflection on politics has also altered, minimal as it may seem. By closely regarding the context and mechanisms by which the trustworthiness of information is valued, this book contributes to the nascent research field of communication and political anthropology.

Nursing home reform, Professor Farmer asserts, calls for increased emphasis upon issues related to life rather than care. Organizational climate, which reflects the nursing home's unique position to impact life issues, provides a conceptual framework for effective interventions, evaluations, and ultimately meaningful reform.

The general atmosphere of most nursing homes remains overwhelmingly negative in spite of those few homes that are credited with excellence. Professor Farmer believes that the concept of organizational climate holds promise for better understanding the complexities and impact of atmosphere in any one nursing home. At the same time, organizational climate as a concept is poorly understood. There is a need to rethink the concept and return to the original notion of weather as its metaphor. Farmer attempts this in her case study by describing organizational climate where it can best be captured.

Practitioners of long-term care, from the fields of administration, geronotology, nursing, nutrition, policy makers, occupational and physical therapy, social work, and therapeutic recreation will find the insights of this study of great value, as will graduate students, scholars, and others concerned with organizational studies and issues in gerontology.

Japanese culture is inscrutable-but then, so is American culture seen from the viewpoint of the Japanese. As Hayashi and Kuroda make clear, the problem is one of perspective. Neither is really an enigma if the viewer can free him- or herself from the mother culture and look at the other culture from within its own context. Along the way, the authors answer many questions about Japan from the never-ending nature of its trade disputes to the reasons for the misconceptions of many Western writers. The authors challenge those who think every culture perceives, thinks, and expresses alike. They also challenge those who believe that Japanese culture has changed significantly in recent years. Hayashi and Kuroda look at ancient poems and 7th-century documents as well as the writings of Japan's Nobel laureate, Oe, to show that the essence of Japanese culture remains unchanged. By examining the use of language as well as analyzing modern statistical data, Hayashi and Kuroda show how the Japanese concept of self is indistinct and how the Japanese live in a mental world of multiple truths. Along the way the authors provide new interpretations and insights that are invaluable to all students of Japan, from policy makers to poets and painters.

Behind every leader is an instructive life story. It often promotes a public image that inspires others to live by it. And, sometimes, even to live or to die for it. As leadership qualities and image issues gain significance in the public discourse, the psychological study of leadership is a critical factor in any discussion. With its trenchant insights into leaders past and present, The Leader: Psychological Essays, Second Edition, updates a pioneering text in this field and provides a solid basis for ongoing dialogue on this important subject. Within the context of the ever-evolving disciplines of psychoanalysis and psychodynamics, this thought-provoking volume examines the lives of several prominent leaders from ancient Greece through the start of the 21st century. The authors explore how these leaders imposed their individual missions and mystiques on others, thereby fulfilling -- and, sometimes, creating -- distinct needs in their followers. The volume brings into vivid focus issues with the potential for devastating consequences on the global stage. Coverage includes: * Biblical times, ancient Greeks and the seeds of leadership. * Lincoln during the 1850s, leading a dividing nation. * Thomas A. Kohut on Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German national character. * George W. Bush, atonement/redemption narratives and the American Dream. * Bin Laden, man and myth. * A study of paranoid leadership and its implications for future politics and policy. This must-have Second Edition is indispensable reading for researchers, professors, and graduate students across many disciplines, including political psychology, psychoanalysis, history and political science, psychiatry, anthropology, and personality and social psychology. It is important reading for anyone with an interest in the life stories of leaders past and present and how they affect our world even long after they are gone.

New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman ignited a ferocious controversy in 1983 when he denounced the research of Margaret Mead, a world-famous public intellectual who had died five years earlier. Freeman's claims caught the attention of popular media, converging with other vigorous cultural debates of the era. Many anthropologists, however, saw Freeman's strident refutation of Mead's best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa as the culmination of a forty-year vendetta. Others defended Freeman's critique, if not always his tone. Truth's Fool documents an intellectual journey that was much larger and more encompassing than Freeman's attack on Mead's work. It peels back the prickly layers to reveal the man in all his complexity. Framing this story within anthropology's development in Britain and America, Peter Hempenstall recounts Freeman's mission to turn the discipline from its cultural-determinist leanings toward a view of human culture underpinned by biological and behavioral drivers. Truth's Fool engages the intellectual questions at the center of the Mead Freeman debate and illuminates the dark spaces of personal, professional, and even national rivalries.

50 years ago, World Bank President Robert McNamara promised to end poverty. Alleviation was to rely on economic growth, resulting in higher incomes stimulated by Bank loans processed by deskbound Washington staff, trickling down to the poorest. Instead, child poverty and homelessness are on the increase everywhere. In this book, anthropologist and former World Bank Advisor Glynn Cochrane argues that instead of Washington's "management by seclusion," poverty alleviation requires personal engagement with the poorest by helpers with hands-on local and cultural skills. Here, the author argues, the insights provided by anthropological fieldwork have a crucial role to play.

Pursues the hypothesis that fictional literature has been instrumental in the development and dissemination of European anti-Americanism from the early 1800s to today. Focusing on Britain, France and Germany, it offers analyses of a range of canonical literary works in which resentful hostility towards the United States is a predominant feature.

American society is culturally diverse with a variety of religious denominations, sects, cults, and self-help groups vying for members. This volume analyzes nine of these groups, chosen both for their intrinsic interest and because they illustrate a variety of sociological concepts. The groups included in this study are: Heaven's Gate, Jesus People USA, the Love Family, The Farm, Amish Women, Scientology, El Nino Fidencio, Santeria, and Freedom Park. The contributors are social scientists with first-hand knowledge of the groups they examine.

This is the first book to consider the major implications for culture of the new science of biosemiotics. The volume is mainly aimed at an audience outside biosemiotics and semiotics, in the humanities and social sciences principally, who will welcome elucidation of the possible benefits to their subject area from a relatively new field. The book is therefore devoted to illuminating the extent to which biosemiotics constitutes an 'epistemological break' with 'modern' modes of conceptualizing culture. It shows biosemiotics to be a significant departure from those modes of thought that neglect to acknowledge continuity across nature, modes which install culture and the vicissitudes of the polis at the centre of their deliberations. The volume exposes the untenability of the 'culture/nature' division, presenting a challenge to the many approaches that can only produce an understanding of culture as a realm autonomous and divorced from nature.

"This is a very good book which will certainly become one of the essential works of reference for the jazz enthusiast. It covers the ragtime to swing period by way of 250 LPs, each of which is afforded full discographical information on dates, titles, and personnels. . . . The quality of the writing is extemely high, as indeed one has a right to expect from authors of this calibre. . . . Harrison, Fox, and Thacker have produced some beautifully composed essays on artistes such as Billie Holliday, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, etc. . . . It is a book which needs to be dipped into frequently, a volume to keep close to one's record collection. . . . It will increase immeasurably anyone's knowledge of, and appreciation for, jazz." The Gramophone

Most studies of ageing have been done by the non-aged. To correct this imbalance, Hazan enlisted the resources of an unusual and innovative group of elderly persons in Cambridge, England. Gathering together in a structured curriculum of seminars and discussion groups and calling themselves the University of the Third Age, the elders intellectually reexamine the spectrum of sociocultural and epistemological principles starting with basics. Hazan's careful observation, description and transcription of the words of the Third Agers demonstrates that cognition and discourse go through transformations and permutations as individuals attain the so-called wisdom years. Alone in the literature on ageing, Hazan's contribution lights the way for much new thinking and research on and among our older population.

This volume brings together leading scholars in the area of symbolic interactionism to offer a broad discussion of issues including identity, dialogue and legitimacy. Authors move the concept of interaction order into new interpretive spaces, marking the unique contributions of symbolic interactionism to the contractions that define the postmodern social order.

Jean Muteba Rahier examines the cultural politics of Afro-Ecuadorian populations within the context of the Andean region's recent pivotal history and the Latin American 'multicultural turn" of the past two decades, bringing contemporary political trends together with questions of race, space, and sexuality. Organized around eight ethnographic vignettes, the book looks at race and Ecuadorian popular culture; Afro-Ecuadorian cultural politics, cultural traditions, and political activism; "mestizaje" and the non-inclusion of blackness in official imaginations of national identity ('the ideological biology of national identity'); race, gender relations, and anti-black racism; stereotypes of black female hypersexuality and sexual self-constructions; blackness and beauty contest politics; the passage from 'monocultural "mestizaje"' to multiculturalism in the 1990s, which got a second life following the "revolucion ciudadana" (citizen revolution) and the election of Rafael Correa to the Ecuadorian presidency in late 2006; and blackness, racism, sports, and national pride in multicultural Ecuador.

Examines the importance of fetishism in nineteenth-century cultural theory

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

Little work has been done to explicate the motivational factors of agency, particularly in cases where an artifact initially deemed ineffective or superfluous becomes an everyday necessity, such as the automobile at the turn of the twentieth century. Farmers saw it as a "devil wagon" but later adopted it for use as an all-around device and power source. What makes a social group change its position about a particular artifact? How did the devil wagon overcome its notoriety to become a prosaic mainstream device? These questions direct the research in this book. While they may have been asked before, author Imes Chiu (PhD, Cornell University) brings a different and refreshing approach to the problem of newness. Preexisting practices and work routines used as explanatory devices have something interesting to say about diffusion strategies and localization measures. This innovative study examines the conversion of users. To understand the motivating factors in mass adoption, the study focuses on perceptions and practices associated with horses and motorcars in three different settings during three different periods. All three cases begin with the motorcar in the periphery: all three end with it achieving ubiquity. This multiple-case design is used for the purpose of theoretical replication. Results in all three cases show that a contrived likeness to its competitor-the horse-contributed to the motorcar's success. The motorcar absorbed the technical, material, structural, and conceptual resources of the technology it displaced. This book, which includes several rare photographs, will be an important resource for those who wish to study the history of transportation and technology adaptation.

A wide range of research and review articles are presented. Topic areas include mental and physical health, personality correlates of spirituality, validity evidence for the ASPIRES, and the role of religious values on socio-political attitudes. Also included in this volume are studies examining women's issues surrounding body image and disordered eating. Another paper addresses Christian Serpent handlers, a very understudied group, and the legal, religious, and moral issues surrounding this practice. There is also a special section, edited by Dr. Christopher Boyatzis, that addresses specific issues around adolescant spirituality. This volume provides a diverse snapshot of cutting edge research in the field across multiple disciplines. Readers will come away with an appreciation for the broad interests that characterize this field and the fascinating empirical findings that continue to draw professional interest in numinous constructs.

Mobile money, e-commerce, cash cards, retail credit cards, and more-as new monetary technologies become increasingly available, the global South has cautiously embraced these mediums as a potential solution to the issue of financial inclusion. How, if at all, do new forms of dematerialized money impact people's everyday financial lives? In what way do technologies interact with financial repertoires and other socio-cultural institutions? How do these technologies of financial inclusion shape the global politics and geographies of difference and inequality? These questions are at the heart of Money at the Margins, a groundbreaking exploration of the uses and socio-cultural impact of new forms of money and financial services.

Popular music in the twenty-first century is increasingly divided into niche markets. How do fans, musicians, and music industry executives define their markets' boundaries? What happens when musicians cross those boundaries? What can Christian music teach us about commercial popular music? In God Rock, Inc., Andrew Mall considers the aesthetic, commercial, ethical, and social boundaries of Christian popular music, from the late 1960s, when it emerged, through the 2010s. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped this evolving market and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.