The socio-economic transformations of the 1990s have forced many people in Poland into impoverishment. Practitioners of Powerlessness gives a dramatic account of life after this degradation, tracking the experiences of ex-miners, former factory workers, impoverished farmers, and collective farm workers. Contrary to the images of passivity, resignation, and helplessness that have become powerful tropes in Polish journalism and academic writing, Tomasz Rakowski traces the ways in which people actively reconfigure their lives, creating new kinds of semi-legal workplaces, and grappling with the loss of their former status and privileges.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

For many people, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia evokes images of deserts, camels, and oil, along with rich sheikh in white robes, oppressed women in black veils, and terrorists. But when Loring Danforth traveled through the country in 2012, he found a world much more complex and inspiring than he could have ever imagined. With vivid descriptions and moving personal narratives, Danforth takes us across the Kingdom, from the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the country's national oil company on the Persian Gulf, to the centuries-old city of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast with its population of undocumented immigrants from all over the Muslim world. He presents detailed portraits of a young woman jailed for protesting the ban on women driving, a Sufi scholar encouraging Muslims and Christians to struggle together with love to know God, and an artist citing the Quran and using metal gears and chains to celebrate the diversity of the pilgrims who come to Mecca. Crossing the Kingdom paints a lucid portrait of contemporary Saudi culture and the lives of individuals, who like us all grapple with modernity at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

In his gripping and provocative debut, anthropologist Jason De Leon sheds light on one of the most pressing political issues of our time-the human consequences of US immigration policy. The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology, De Leon uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of "Prevention through Deterrence," the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death. For two decades, this policy has failed to deter border crossers while successfully turning the rugged terrain of southern Arizona into a killing field. In harrowing detail, De Leon chronicles the journeys of people who have made dozens of attempts to cross the border and uncovers the stories of the objects and bodies left behind in the desert. The Land of Open Graves will spark debate and controversy.

Four anthropologists, Elise Edwards, Ann Elise Lewallen, Bridget Love and Tomomi Yamaguchi, draw on their fieldwork experiences in Japan to demonstrate collectively the inadequacy of both the Code of Ethics developed by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the dictates of Institutional Review Boards (IRB) when dealing with messy human realities. The four candidly and critically explore the existential dilemmas they were forced to confront with respect to this inadequacy, for the AAA 's code and IRBs consider neither the vulnerability and powerlessness of ethnographers nor the wholly unethical (and even criminal) deportment of some informants. As Jennifer Robertson points out in her Introduction, whereas the AAA 's Code tends to perpetuate the stereotype of more advantaged fieldworkers studying less advantaged peoples, IRBs appear to protect their home institutions (from possible litigation) rather than living and breathing people whose lives are often ethically compromised irrespective of the presence of an ethnographer. In her commentary, Sabine Fr hst ck, who incurred ample experience with ethical dilemmas in the course of her pathbreaking ethnographic research on Japan 's Self-Defense Forces, situates the four articles in a broader theoretical context, and emphasizes the link between political engagement and ethnographic accuracy.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

The figure of the Polish plumber or builder has long been a well-established icon of the British national imagination, uncovering the UK's collective unease with immigration from Central and Eastern Europe. But despite the powerful impact the UK's second largest language group has had on their host country's culture and politics, very little is known about its members. This painstakingly researched book offers a broad perspective on Polish migrants in the UK, taking into account discursive actions, policies, family connections, transnational networks, and political engagement of the diaspora. Born out of a decade of ethnographic studies among various communities of Polish nationals living in London, Michal P. Garapich documents the changes affecting both Polish migrants and British society, offering insight into the inner tensions and struggles within what is often assumed to be a uniform and homogeneous category. From Polish financial sector workers to the Polish homeless population, this groundbreaking book provides a street-level account of cultural and social determinants of Polish migrants as they continually rework their relation to class and ethnicity.

In 2008 China plans to use the Olympic Games to remake its national identity in the global marketplace. In so doing China treads the path blazed by the United States. For more than a century the U.S. has used the Olympic Games to construct national identity, create communal memory, and craft patriotic mythology. From opening parades where the American team refuses to dip its flag in order to signal American exceptionalism to the closing ceremonies where the U.S. media trumpet that their team owes its medals not to superior athleticism but to the nation's peerless social and political systems, Olympic Games have served as sites to bolster American nationalism. More than any other nation, the United States has politicized its Olympic participation. In the process a host of myths about American superiority in global encounters has emerged through the Olympics. In memorializing and mythologizing their Olympic teams Americans have revealed the contours of the racial, gender, and class dynamics that animate their peculiar nationhood. These essays explore the history of expressions of American national identity in Olympic arenas. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The idea of 'national identity' is an ambiguous one for Hong Kong. Returned to the national embrace of China on 1 July 1997 after 150 years as a British colony, the concept of national identity and what it means to "belong to a nation" is a matter of great tension and contestation in Hong Kong. Written by three academic specialists on Hong Kong cultural identity, social history, and mass media, this book explores the processes through which the people of Hong Kong are "learning to belong to a nation" by examining their relationship with the Chinese nation and state in the recent past, present, and future. It considers the complex meanings of and debates over national identity in Hong Kong over the past fifty years and especially during the last decade following Hong Kong's return to China. It also places these arguments within a larger, global perspective, to ask what Hong Kong can teach us about national identity and its potential transformations. Multidisciplinary in its approach, Hong Kong and China explores national identity in terms of theory, mass media, survey date, ethnography and history, and will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, cultural studies, and nationalism.

This book fills a significant research gap in how to integrate quality of life data into relevant clinical care plans, and to broaden its applicability to pharmacoeconomic studies of antipsychotic medications and health policy decision-making. It also presents an argument for reformulating the concept of health-related quality of life in schizophrenia as a bio-psycho-social construct, which provides an opportunity to better explore the many factors underpinning the concept itself. Internationally renowned experts from different scientific backgrounds and scopes of expertise each make arguments for the need to invigorate quality of life as a concept in schizophrenia, by broadening its usefulness for clinical and research efforts. The book represents an important addition to the extensive contributions of its editors, Dr. A. George Awad and Dr. Lakshmi N.P. Voruganti, to the field of quality of life.

South Eastern Huastec, a Mayan language from Mexico, has never before been written down. Although the master storytellers of the language are long gone, today's older generations preserve the vast knowledge of their culture in speech. That spoken heritage in South Eastern Huastec - ranging from traditional house-building techniques to herbal remedies and funerary practices - is gathered here and transcribed for the first time. Collected and recorded by Ana Kondic in the village of San Francisco Chontla in La Sierra de Otontepec, Veracruz, Mexico, between 2007 and 2011, and translated into English and Spanish, the accounts in this landmark trilingual collection provide a rare opening into South Eastern Huastec traditions, oral literature, and daily life. Kondic divides South Eastern Huastec Narratives into five thematic sections: traditional practices, contemporary life, stories, songs, and customary foodways. Within these categories, eighteen Huastec narrators describe local beliefs, religion, rituals, and cosmology as observed in cleansing ceremonies and celebrations. They detail building methods and traditional craftsmanship, the care of children, daily routines, and use of the South Eastern Huastec language itself. They recount stories and legends - of killer coyotes, drunken horsemen, and encounters with death - and explain the preparation of tamales, coffee, and hand-pressed tortillas. Wherever possible, Kondic retains in her transcriptions the unique characteristics of each speaker's voice - the self-corrections, repetitions, and pauses. Her morphological analysis of South Eastern Huastec will help experts understand the language more deeply. An accompanying audio-video DVD-ROM allows readers the rare chance to hear and see these narrators tell their stories in their own language. Of the approximately 100,000 people who speak the Huastec language, only about 12,000 use the South Eastern variety presented here. As the only book recording and analyzing this endangered language, this collection of narratives is a crucial document for preserving the South Eastern Huastec language, and the remarkable culture it conveys. The book includes a CD-ROM with both audio and video tracks.

'Remarkable... a rich, novelistic account based on diligent reporting ... An empathetic, even intimate account, but not a dewy-eyed one ... Wonderful' Daily Telegraph 'I absolutely loved this magnificent book' Sebastian Junger 'A monumental achievement' Mitchell Zuckoff '[An] immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable first book ... The Last Whalers has the texture and colouring of a first-rate novel' New York Times At a time when global change has eradicated thousands of unique cultures, The Last Whalers tells the stunning inside story of the Lamalerans, an ancient tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a volcanic island so remote it is known by other Indonesians as "The Land Left Behind." They have survived for centuries by taking whales with bamboo harpoons, but now are being pushed toward collapse by the encroachment of the modern world. Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, who lived with the Lamalerans across three years, weaves together their stories with novelistic flair to usher us inside this hidden drama. Jon, an orphaned apprentice whaler, strives to earn his harpoon and feed his ailing grandparents. Ika, Jon's indomitable younger sister, struggles to forge a modern life in a tradition-bound culture and realize a star-crossed love. Ignatius, a legendary harpooner entering retirement, labors to hand down the Ways of the Ancestors to his son, Ben, who would rather become a DJ in the distant tourist mecca of Bali. With brilliant, breathtaking prose and empathetic, fast-paced storytelling, Clark details how the fragile dreams of one of the world's dwindling indigenous peoples are colliding with the irresistible upheavals of our rapidly transforming world, and delivers to us a group of families we will never forget.

Bringing together a team of history and media researchers from across Britain and Europe, this volume provides readers with a themed discussion of the range and variety of the media's engagement with history, and a close study of the relationship between media, history and national identity.

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro's residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what the author calls Brazil's "comfortable racial contradiction," where embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country's history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) "read" the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features-including skin color, hair texture, and facial features-but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech commonly described as giria (slang). Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a "good appearance"), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and "be cordial" (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.

Should babies sleep alone in cribs, or in bed with parents? Is talking to babies useful, or a waste of time? A World of Babies provides different answers to these and countless other childrearing questions, precisely because diverse communities around the world hold drastically different beliefs about parenting. While celebrating that diversity, the book also explores the challenges that poverty, globalization and violence pose for parents. Fully updated for the twenty-first century, this edition features a new introduction and eight new or revised case studies that directly address contemporary parenting challenges, from China and Peru to Israel and the West Bank. Written as imagined advice manuals to parents, the creative format of this book brings alive a rich body of knowledge that highlights many models of baby-rearing - each shaped by deeply held values and widely varying cultural contexts. Parenthood may never again seem a matter of 'common sense'.

Understanding Children's Development is the UK's best-selling developmental psychology textbook and has been widely acclaimed for its international coverage and rigorous research-based approach. This dynamic text emphasizes the practical and applied implications of developmental research. It begins by introducing the ways in which psychologists study developmental processes before going on to consider all major aspects of development from conception through to adolescence. New to the 6th Edition: * Increased coverage in many areas, including ethics; children s rights; participatory research methods; three models of human plasticity; breastfeeding and cognitive development; fostering; non-resident or absent fathers; parenting styles in China; effects of domestic violence on children; physical punishment, and child maltreatment; the development and fostering of emotional intelligence; homophobic bullying and cyberbullying; and developing intercultural competence through education. * There are entirely new sections on immigration, acculturation, and friendships in multicultural settings; disruptive behaviour and oppositional defiant disorder; sexting; and adolescent bedtimes. * The Adolescence chapter has been extensively revised, covering work on the social brain, insights from neuroscience, evolutionary perspectives on risk-taking and peer relationships, romantic development, and use of mobile phones and the internet.

The sun, the moon, the seasons, our Arapaho way of life,"" writes foreworder Jordan Dresser. ""When you look around, you see circles everywhere. And that includes the lens Sara Wiles uses to capture these intimate moments of our Arapaho journeys."" In The Arapaho Way, Wiles returns to Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation, whose people she so gracefully portrayed in words and photographs in Arapaho Journeys (2011). She continues her journey of discovery here, photographing the lives of contemporary Northern Arapaho people and listening to their stories that map the many roads to being Arapaho. In more than 100 pictures, taken over the course of thirty-five years, and Wiles's accompanying essays, the history of individuals and their culture unfold, revealing a continuity, as well as breaks in the circle. Mixing traditional ways with new ideas - Catholicism, ranching, cowboying, school learning, activism, quilting, beadwork, teaching, family life - the people of Wind River open a rich world to Wiles and her readers. These are people like Helen Cedartree, who artfully combines Arapaho ways with the teaching of the mission boarding schools she once attended; like the Underwood family, who live off the land as gardeners and farmers and value family and hard work above everything; and like Ryan Gambler and Fred Armajo, whose love of horses and ranching keep them close to home. And there are others who have ventured into the non-Indian world, people like James Large, who brings home tenets of Indian activism learned in Denver. There are also, inevitably, visions of violence and loss as The Arapaho Way depicts the full life of the Wind River Indian Reservation, from the traditional wisdom of the elder to the most forward-looking youth, from the outer reaches of an ancient culture to the last-minute challenges of an ever-changing world.

The focus of the book is the wide stretch of water- and sea-ways connecting the coasts of Bengal and Sri Lanka to the coast of Vietnam. The authors address three broad issues through an interdisciplinary perspective. The first relates to boat-building traditions and the communities who traversed these waters. The challenge is to use the ethnographic present and mobility of the fishing and sailing groups for an understanding of the history of the sea and the extent to which knowledge of the waters was vital to the construction of identity of a maritime society. Linked to this movement across the waters, are the narratives of trans-locality inherent in memories of groups in the region. Long-distance pilgrimage and devotional networks have been consistent features of the cultural life of South and Southeast Asia. A third issue relates to European intervention, starting with the Portuguese and the Dutch. The engagement of the English East India Company with the countries of the Bay of Bengal was of a different order from that of its predecessors, as the Company sought to establish a maritime empire. The eighteenth century thus, raised a different set of issues with the colonisation of large parts of South and Southeast Asia. How did notions of a maritime empire impact the study of the regions past? It is these themes that we address in the volume thereby shifting the focus from chronological markers and national histories to communities who crossed the waters and the changes that these underwent in time.

Multiple Hopewellian monumental earthwork sites displaying timber features, mortuary deposits, and unique artifacts are found widely distributed across the North American Eastern Woodlands, from the lower Mississippi Valley north to the Great Lakes. These sites, dating from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500, almost define the Middle Woodland period of the Eastern Woodlands. Joseph Caldwell treated these sites as defining what he termed the ""Hopewell Interaction Sphere,"" which he conceptualized as mediating a set of interacting mortuary-funerary cults linking many different local ethnic communities. In this new book, A. Martin Byers refines Caldwell's work, coining the term ""Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere"" to more precisely characterize this transregional sphere as manifesting multiple autonomous cult sodalities of local communities affiliated into escalating levels of autonomous cult sodality heterarchies. It is these cult sodality heterarchies, regionally and transregionally interacting - and not their autonomous communities to which the sodalities also belonged - that were responsible for the Hopewellian assemblage; and the heterarchies took themselves to be performing, not funerary, but world-renewal ritual ceremonialism mediated by the deceased of their many autonomous Middle Woodland communities. Paired with the cult sodality heterarchy model, Byers proposes and develops the complementary heterarchical community model. This model postulates a type of community that made the formation of the cult sodality heterarchy possible. But Byers insists it was the sodality heterarchies and not the complementary heterarchical communities that generated the Hopewellian ceremonial sphere. Detailed interpretations and explanations of Hopewellian sites and their contents in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia empirically anchor his claims. A singular work of unprecedented scope, Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere will encourage archaeologists to re-examine their interpretations.

This volume examines the processes and impacts of exclusion on the Adivasis (tribal or indigenous people) in India and what repercussions these have for their constitutional rights. The chapters explore a wide range of issues connected to the idea of exclusion - land and forest resources, habitats and livelihoods, health and disease management, gender relations, language and schooling, water resources, poverty, governance, markets and technology, and development challenges - through case studies from different parts of the country. The book argues that any laws intended to safeguard the fundamental rights of Adivasis must acknowledge the fact that their diverse and complex identities are not homogenous, and that uniform laws have failed to address their systemic marginalisation since the colonial era. This work appeals for a serious and meaningful political intervention towards tribal development. The volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of tribal and Third World studies, sociology and social anthropology, exclusion studies and development studies.

Divided Spirits tells the stories of tequila and mezcal, two of Mexico's most iconic products. In doing so, the book illustrates how neoliberalism influences the production, branding, and regulation of local foods and drinks. It also challenges the strategy of relying on "alternative" markets to protect food cultures and rural livelihoods. In recent years, as consumers increasingly demand to connect with the people and places that produce their food, the concept of terroir-the taste of place-has become more and more prominent. Tequila and mezcal are both protected by denominations of origin (DOs), legal designations that aim to guarantee a product's authenticity based on its link to terroir. Advocates argue that the DOs expand market opportunities, protect cultural heritage, and ensure the reputation of Mexico's national spirits. Yet this book shows how the institutions that are supposed to guard "the legacy of all Mexicans" often fail those who are most in need of protection: the small producers, agave farmers, and other workers who have been making tequila and mezcal for generations. The consequences-for the quality and taste of tequila and mezcal, and for communities throughout Mexico-are stark. Divided Spirits suggests that we must move beyond market-based models if we want to safeguard local products and the people who make them. Instead, we need systems of production, consumption, and oversight that are more democratic, more inclusive, and more participatory. Lasting change is unlikely without the involvement of the state and a sustained commitment to addressing inequality and supporting rural development.

Spectacular and terrifyingly true' - Owen Jones

'Thought-provoking and funny' - The Times

Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are bullshit jobs. This book shows why, and what we can do about it.

In the early twentieth century, people prophesied that technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks and driving flying cars. Instead, something curious happened. Not only have the flying cars not materialised, but average working hours have increased rather than decreased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services, finance or admin: jobs that don't seem to contribute anything to society. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how, rather than producing anything, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.

This book is for anyone whose heart has sunk at the sight of a whiteboard, who believes 'workshops' should only be for making things, or who just suspects that there might be a better way to run our world.