Armed with cheap digital technologies and a fiercely independent spirit, millions of young people from around the world have taken cultural production into their own hands, crafting their own clothing lines, launching their own record labels, and forging a vast, collaborative network of impassioned amateurs more interested in making than consuming.
"DIY Style" tells the story of this international do-it-yourself (DIY) movement through a major case study of one of its biggest, but least known contingents: the "indie" music and fashion scene of the predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia. Through rich ethnographic detail, in-depth historical analysis, and cutting-edge social theory, the book chronicles the rise of DIY culture in Indonesia, and also explores the phenomenon in Europe and the United States, painting an evocative portrait of vibrant communities who are not only making and distributing popular culture on their own terms, but working to tear down the barriers between production and consumption, third and first world, global and local. What emerges from the book is a cautiously optimistic view of the future of global capitalism - a creative, collectivist alternative built from the ground up.
This exciting and original study is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, fashion, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

The "extensive wilderness" of Zambia's central Luangwa Valley is the homeland of the Valley Bisa whose cultural practices have enriched this environment for centuries. Beginning with the intrusions of warlords and later British colonials, successive generations have experienced the callousness and challenges of colonialism. Their homeland, a slender corridor surrounded by three national parks and an escarpment, is a microcosm of the political, economic and cultural battlefields surrounding most African protected areas today. The story of the Valley Bisa diverges from the myths that conservationists, administrators, and philanthropists, tell about Africa's environmental and wildlife crises.

For the Orang Rimba of Sumatra - and tropical foragers in general - life in the forest engenders a kind of "connectedness" that is contingent not only on harmonious relations between people, but also between people and the non-human environment, including those supernatural agencies of the forest that people depend on for their spiritual and emotional wellbeing. Exploring this world, anthropologist Ramsey Elkholy treats embodied action and perception as the basis of shared experience and shows how various forms of embodied experience constitute the very foundations of human culture. In a unique methodological contribution, Elkholy adopts a set of body-centered approaches that reflect and capture the day-to-day, moment-to-moment ways in which people engage with the world. Being and Becoming is an important contribution to phenomenological anthropology, hunter-gatherer studies, and to Southeast Asian ethnography more generally.

When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics opened its doors in 1927, it could rely on wide political approval, ranging from the Social Democrats over the Catholic Centre to the far rightwing of the party spectrum. In 1933 the institute and its founding director Eugen Fischer came under pressure to adjust, which they were able to ward off through Selbstgleichschaltung (auto-coordination). The Third Reich brought about a mutual beneficial servicing of science and politics. With their research into hereditary health and racial policies the institutea (TM)s employees provided the Brownshirt rulers with legitimating grounds. At international meetings they used their scientific standing and authority to defend the abundance of forced sterilizations performed in Nazi Germany. Their expertise was instrumental in registering and selecting/eliminating Jews, Sinti and Roma, a oeRhineland bastardsa, Erbkranke and FremdvAlkische. In return, hereditary health and racial policies proved to be beneficial for the institute, which beginning in 1942, directed by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, performed a conceptual change from the traditional study of races and eugenics into apparently modern phenogenetics a" not least owing to the entgrenzte (unrestricted) accessibility of people in concentration camps or POW camps, in the ghetto, in homes and asylums. In 1943/44 Josef Mengele, a student of Verschuer, supplied Dahlem with human blood samples and eye pairs from Auschwitz, while vice versa seizing issues and methods of the institute in his criminal researches. The volume at hand traces the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity andEugenics between democracy and dictatorship. Special attention is turned to the transformation of the research program, the institutea (TM)s integration into the national and international science panorama, and its relationship to the ruling power as well as its interconnection to the political crimes of Nazi Germany.

(c) Wallstein Verlag, GAttingen 2003. 'Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933'

Food and drink have provided fascinating insights into cultural patterns in consumer societies. There is an intimate relationship between food and identity but processes of identity formation through food are far from clear. This book adds a new perspective to the existing body of scholarship by addressing pivotal questions: is food central or marginal to identity construction? Does food equally matter for all group(ing)s? Why would, in people's experience, food become especially important at one moment, or, on the contrary, lose its significance?The origin of food habits is also interrogated. Contributors investigate how, when, why and by whom cooking, eating and drinking were used as a means of distinction. Leading historians and sociologists look at concepts of authenticity, adjustment, invention and import, as well as food signs and codes, and why they have been accepted or rejected. They examine a wide range of periods and topics: the elderly, alcohol and identity in Early Modern Europe; food riots and national identity; noble families, eating and drinking in eighteenth-century Spain; consumption and the working class in the nineteenth century; commensality; the meaning of Champagne in Belle-Epoque France; the narrative of food in Norway; wine and bread in French Algeria; food and identity in post-war Germany.This intriguing book brings together new, comparative insights and research that allow a better understanding of processes of integration and segregation, the role of food in the construction of identity, and the relationship between old and new food habits.

With the growing interest in the great number of culturally, linguistically, and ethnically different families entering the United States, it is essential for researchers and mental health practitioners to acquire a working knowledge that can aid in a healthier adjustment of these families. Although it is impossible for any therapist to understand the traditions, values, and languages of all immigrant groups, a therapist may be guided by a conceptual operational principle that can be implemented across diverse groups and circumstances. Dr. Gopaul-McNicol introduces a model for assessment; the techniques and strategies proposed by this model range from cognitive behavioral interventions to multimodal and multisystems approaches to treatment.

The book covers historical and contemporary perspectives of the influence of culture on an individual's functioning. Assessment issues include intellectual, educational and visual motor assessment and its applicability with culturally diverse clients. The author also highlights ways of misassessing the personality of culturally different individuals and examines the major treatment approaches in counseling the culturally different.

Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other's morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit and focused attention until recently, when accelerated globalization often resulted in the collision of different value systems. Observing, describing and assessing values cross-culturally, the authors propose various methodological approaches to the study of moralities, illustrated with rich ethnographic accounts, thus offering a valuable guide for students of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies and for professionals concerned with the empirical and cross-cultural study of values.

Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies. This breadth - with its explicit move from the local to the global, from the realm of everyday reproductive practice to international programs and policies - illuminates most effectively the workings of power, the tensions between women s and men s reproductive agency, and various cultural and structural inequalities in reproductive health. Marcia C. Inhorn is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies. A specialist on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in the Muslim Middle East, she is the author or editor of four books on the subject. Her publications include Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, winner of Eileen Basker Prize for outstanding research in gender and health), Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) and Local Babies, Global Science: Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization in Egypt (Routledge Press, 2003)."

Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining order within the political and legal spheres and in contrasting local settings, the papers in this volume highlight its complex and contested nature. Elaborate displays of order seem necessary to legitimate the institutionalization of violence by military and legal establishments, yet violent behaviour can be incorporated into the social order by the development of boundaries, rituals and established processes of conflict resolution. Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest. Case studies from Siberia, India, Indonesia, Tibet, West Africa, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire show that local responses are often inconsistent in their valorization, acceptance and condemnation of disorder.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is head of the project group 'Legal Pluralism' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. She is Professor of Anthropology of Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Honorary Professor at the universities of Leipzig and Halle. Her research focuses on legal pluralism, disputing, decentralization, social security and natural resources in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Publications include "Changing Properties of Property," co-edited with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie Wiber (Berghahn 2006).

Fernanda Pirie is Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. She has carried out research into conflict and its resolution in both Ladakh and among the nomads of Amdo in eastern Tibet. Her writings focus on order and disorder and the relations between law and religion. She is the author of the forthcoming "Peace and conflict in Ladakh: the construction of a fragile web of order" (Brill 2006).

The first decade of the 21st century has seen a proliferation of North American and European films that focus on African politics and society. While once the continent was the setting for narratives of heroic ascendancy over self (The African Queen, 1951; The Snows of Kilimanjaro, 1952), military odds (Zulu, 1964; Khartoum, 1966) and nature (Mogambo, 1953; Hatari!,1962; Born Free, 1966; The Last Safari, 1967), this new wave of films portrays a continent blighted by transnational corruption (The Constant Gardener, 2005), genocide (Hotel Rwanda, 2004; Shooting Dogs, 2006), 'failed states' (Black Hawk Down, 2001), illicit transnational commerce (Blood Diamond, 2006) and the unfulfilled promises of decolonization (The Last King of Scotland, 2006). Conversely, where once Apartheid South Africa was a brutal foil for the romance of East Africa (Cry Freedom, 1987; A Dry White Season, 1989), South Africa now serves as a redeemed contrast to the rest of the continent (Red Dust, 2004; Invictus, 2009). Writing from the perspective of long-term engagement with the contexts in which the films are set, anthropologists and historians reflect on these films and assess the contemporary place Africa holds in the North American and European cinematic imagination.

With "The Relevance of Philosophy to Life," eminent American philosopher John Lachs reminds us that philosophy is not merely a remote subject of academic research and discourse, but an ever-changing field which can help us navigate through some of the chaos of late twentieth-century living. It provides a clear-eyed look at important philosophical issues--the primacy of values, rationality and irrationality, society and its discontents, life and death, and the traits of human nature--as related to the human condition in the modern world.

Vecsey, a professor of religion and Native American studies at Colgate University, concludes his trilogy on Native American Catholicism with a study of how Indian Catholics have tried to follow the route of two separate traditions, each with its own expectations and identities. He examines the lives of American Indian Catholics who have been leaders in their communities and in the Church and considers how these men and women have brought together their Indian and Catholic identities to accomplish a cultural and religious syncretism within themselves.

For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.

No longer can scholars and practitioners ignore the influence the African American male has on all facets of American culture and academia. Currently, there are over 16.6 million African American Males in the U.S. population who are largely ignored and misrepresented. This volume of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science is being published to help rectify that problem.

"Dope addicts," "welfare pimps," home boys," "bloods" - the images of the African American male portrayed throughout the American media have been distorted to say the least. The neglected part of the story is that black males in America are products of a rich African heritage. They are sons of African kings and queens and have made enormous and valuable contributions to Western civilization. African American men are not only pioneers in sport, but have proven themselves in all walks of life including the sciences, medicine, law, engineering, and the American Armed Forces. It is clearly time for African American male studies to be realized as a legitimate field of academic inquiry."

The African American Male in American Life and Thought "addresses several questions in relation to this: Who are the black males? How do we define this population? What are their demographic characteristics? What impact does the black American male have on American life and thought?

To examine these and related questions, a group of nationally recognized scholars and practitioners has been assembled, and represent several disciplines and areas of expertise in American studies. In this volume, scholarly research has been combined with thoughtful original essays to bring together a well-rounded view of the African American male experience within the context of American life and history.

Have you ever wondered what could happen when we discover another communicating species outside the Earth? This book addresses this question in all its complexity. In addition to the physical barriers for communication, such as the enormous distances where a message can take centuries to reach its recipient, the book also examines the biological problems of communicating between species, the problems of identifying a non-Terrestrial intelligence, and the ethical, religious, legal and other problems of conducting discussions across light years. Most of the book is concerned with issues that could impinge on your life: how do we share experiences with ETI? Can we make shared laws? Could we trade? Would they have religion? The book addresses these and related issues, identifying potential barriers to communication and suggesting ways we can overcome them. The book explores this topic through reference to human experience, through analogy and thought experiment, while relying on what is known to-date about ourselves, our world, and the cosmos we live in.

In Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia Lee Wilson offers an innovative study of nationalism and the Indonesian state through the ethnography of the martial art of Pencak Silat. Wilson shows how technologies of physical and spiritual warfare such as Pencak Silat have long played a prominent role in Indonesian political society. He demonstrates the importance of these technologies to the display and performance of power, and highlights the limitations of theories of secular modernity for understanding political forms in contemporary Indonesia. He offers a compelling argument for a revisionist account of models of power in Indonesia in which authority is understood as precarious and multiple, and the body is politically charged because of its potential for transformation.

This book reflects the best of contemporary scholarship on the history of the American South. Each contributor is an authority--one a Pulitzer Prize winner. The essays examine what life was like for the slaves; for the victims of terror and lynchings; for workers who dared strike and demand fairness; and for dissenters who challenged the accepted truths. The essays are grouped around three major research areas: history and the social sciences, history and biography, and the new labor history.

This is a unique collection of essays by some of the world's leading historians of the South, together with work by younger scholars. All contributors, however, are working at the cutting edge of their particular methodological approaches. The book, for example, includes both an essay by Pulitzer Prize winner Rhys Isaac, and one by Rutgers University graduate student Beth Hale. Yet, both have a common concern to explore the reaches of the Southern past through the dimension of ethnography.

The essays in the book are grouped according to theme. The largest section, the social sciences and Southern history, includes essays drawing heavily on the insights of anthropology of ethnography and of statistical analysis. Each essay in the second section is designed to illustrate how life history can be used to illuminate much larger histoical themes and processes. The essays in the last section on labor in the new South all illustrate, among other things, the importance of drawing on the insights of historians of women in order to redress the masculinist presuppositons of labor historians. All the essays in the book, in fact, reflect current concerns with gender and race in the re-interpretation of the Southern past.

Over time, the role of nature in anthropology has evolved from being a mere backdrop for social and cultural diversity to being viewed as an integral part of the ontological entanglement of human and nonhuman agents. This transformation of the role of nature offers important insight into the relationships between diverse anthropological traditions. By highlighting natural-cultural worlds alongside these traditions, Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies explores the potential for creating more sophisticated conjunctions of anthropological knowledge and practice.

"At Home in the Chinese Diaspora" explores issues of memory and how memories are deployed and negotiated to re-establish a sense of belonging. This volume breaks new ground in analyzing the relationships between migrants' adjustment, assimilation, and remembering home through the focal point of memories. Some chapters focus conceptually on memories as social expressions, a locus of place, cultural capital, and imagination. Others explore the tensions and conflicts in representing and renegotiating memories through the world of literature and cinema.

Geir Henning Presterudstuen provides an ethnographic account of howmen in the multicultural urban centres of Fiji perceive, construct andperform masculinities in the context of rapid social change. Theoreticallyinformed by critical feminist theories, postcolonialism, R.W. Connell's workon masculinities and a Bourdieuan conceptualization of the body, thisbook explores how notions of masculinity, manhood and the male bodyare shaped by the conflicting social forces of Fijian tradition, modernity,commercialization and urbanization.The book provides a timely intervention, from the grassroots level in theglobal south, into an ongoing discourse about men and masculinities thathas long been dominated by voices from Europe and the US. Combiningclassic ethnography with innovative social analysis, Presterudstuen'sbook is suitable for students and academics with an interest in genderand social change, and for scholars across a variety of disciplinesincluding anthropology, gender studies, sociology, pacific studies andinternational development.

Anthropology is changing. Traditionally seen as the comparative study of cultural diversity, Anthropology now faces an increasingly globalised world, a world in which societies are not discrete or unique but are all, to some degree, connected. The role of the anthropologist is now less the comparative study of specific cultures than the study of the flow of goods, persons and ideas in the contemporary world. The World of the Anthropologist is a guide to this changing world, revealing what Anthropology is today and what anthropologists do now. This book explains what remains of a traditional Anthropology - such as the anthropological construction of kinship, politics, religion and economics as well as the continuing centrality of fieldwork -- and also explores the newer territory which Anthropology is studying, such as performance, science, sexuality, media, ethics, and visual culture. Clearly explaining the key ideas and methods which underpin the subject -- from fieldwork through to the construction of knowledge itself - The World of the Anthropologist offers a fascinating insight into and overview of Anthropology today.

Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

In the past decade, psychology has increasingly acknowledged the importance of considering the role of culture for understanding human development. One of the major issues now confronting those interested in this issue is how cultural meanings, values, and practices are appropriated by persons growing up and living in concrete contexts. The general theme addressed in this volume concerns how enactments of cultural understandings in social interactions form the fabric of individual experience and the specificities of individual development.