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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
This cutting-edge Research Handbook, at the intersection of
comparative law and anthropology, explores mutually enriching
insights and outlooks. The 20 contributors, including several of
the most eminent scholars, as well as new voices, offer diverse
expertise, national backgrounds and professional experience. Their
overall approach is ''ground up'' without regard to unified
paradigms of research or objects of study. Through a pluralistic
definition of law and multidisciplinary approaches, Comparative Law
and Anthropology significantly advances both theory and practice.
The Research Handbook's expansive concept of comparative law blends
a traditional geographical orientation with historical and
jurisprudential dimensions within a broad range of contexts of
anthropological inquiry, from indigenous communities, to law
schools and transitional societies. This comprehensive and original
collection of diverse writings about anthropology and the law
around the world offers an inspiring but realistic source for legal
scholars, anthropologists and policy-makers. Contributors include:
U. Acharya, C. Bell, J. Blake, S. Brink, E. Darian-Smith, R.
Francaviglia, M. Lazarus-Black, P. McHugh, S.F. Moore, E.
Moustaira, L. Nader, J. Nafziger, M. Novakovic, R. Price, O.
Ruppel, J.A. Sanchez, W. Shipley, R. Tejani, A. Telesetsky, K.
Thomas
The Globalization of Rural Plays in the Twenty-First Century
excavates the neglected ideological substratum of peasant folk
plays. By focusing on northeastern Romania and southwest
Ukraine-two of the most ruralized regions in Europe-this work
reveals the complex landscape of peasant plays and the essential
role they perform in shaping local culture, economy, and social
life. The rapid demise of these practices and the creation of
preservation programs is analyzed in the context of the corrosive
effects of global capitalism and the processes of globalization,
urbanization, mass-mediatization, and heritagization. Just like
peasants in search of better resources, rural plays "migrate" from
their villages of origin into the urban, modern, and more dynamic
world, where they become more visible and are both appreciated and
exploited as forms of transnational, intangible cultural heritage.
This volume introduces the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model (CCIM),
a visual tool for studying the exchanges that take place between
different cultures in borderland areas or across long distances.
The model helps researchers untangle complex webs of connections
among people, landscapes, and artifacts, and can be used to support
multiple theoretical viewpoints. Through case studies, contributors
apply the CCIM to various regions and time periods, including Roman
Europe, the Greek province of Thessaly in the Late Bronze Age, the
ancient Egyptian-Nubian frontier, colonial Greenland in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Mississippian realm of
Cahokia, ancient Costa Rica and Panama, and the Moquegua Valley of
Peru in the early Middle Horizon period. They adapt the model to
best represent their data, successfully plotting connections in
many different dimensions, including geography, material culture,
religion and spirituality, and ideology. The model enables them to
expose what motivates people to participate in cultural exchange,
as well as the influences that people reject in these interactions.
These results demonstrate the versatility and analytical power of
the CCIM. Bridging the gap between theory and data, this tool can
prompt users to rethink previous interpretations of their research,
leading to new ideas, new theories, and new directions for future
study.
The concept of 'hybridity' is often still poorly theorized and
problematically applied by peace and development scholars and
researchers of resource governance. This book turns to a particular
ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's Governmentality and
investigates its usefulness to study precisely those mechanisms,
processes and practices that hybridity once promised to clarify.
Claim-making to land and authority in a post-conflict environment
is the empirical grist supporting this exploration of
governmentality. Specifically in the periphery of Bukavu. This
focus is relevant as urban land is increasingly becoming scarce in
rapidly expanding cities of eastern Congo, primarily due to
internal rural-to-urban migration as a result of regional
insecurity. The governance of urban land is also important
analytically as land governance and state authority in Africa are
believed to be closely linked and co-evolve. An ethnographic
reading of governmentality enables researchers to study
hybridization without biasing analysis towards hierarchical
dualities. Additionally, a better understanding of hybridization in
the claim-making practices may contribute to improved government
intervention and development assistance in Bukavu and elsewhere.
The essays gathered in this volume deal with representations of
blackness and the performance of black identities in various
historically determined societal contexts of the Americas, Benin,
and Spain. The book is grounded on the premise that representations
constitute, in part, the world in which we live. An important
aspect of the struggles of dominated people consists in more or
less overtly challenging, manipulating, combatting, negating, and
sometimes inverting representations of themselves reproduced in the
dominant discourse of their national society. The contributors
approach various forms of blackness within the fluctuation of
political, economic, and social processes embedded in particular
time/space contexts, which are constituted within local, regional,
national, and transnational dimensions. Identities, whatever they
may be, cannot be defined once and for all in fixed or essentialist
terms as if they were unchanging or frozen in time and space. If,
as this book proposes, identities are fluid, it is because they are
constantly enacted and reenacted, performed anew within specific
situations, and within changing socioeconomic and political
contexts that provide sites for their negotiations and
renegotiations, definitions and redefinitions. Thus, the book
approaches black identities as performances.
Herder Warfare in East Africa presents a regional analysis of the
spatial and social history of warfare among the nomadic peoples of
East Africa, covering a period of 600 years. The long duree
facilitates understanding of how warfare among pastoralist
communities in earlier centuries contributed to political, economic
and ethnic shifts across the grazing lands in East Africa. The book
discusses herder warfare from the perspective of warfare ecology,
highlighting the interrelations between environmental and cultural
causalities - including droughts, famine, floods, ritual wars,
religious wars and migrations - and the processes and consequences
of war. Regional synthesis concentrates on frontiers of conflicts
extending from the White Nile Basin in south Sudan - into the
southern savannas of East Africa, the Great East African Rift
Valley, and the northern and southern Horn of Africa - examining
historical military power shifts between diverse pastoralist
cultures. Case studies are set in the coastal hinterland of East
Africa and the Jubaland-Wajir frontiers. Warfare combined with
environmental disasters caused social-economic breakdowns and the
enslavement of defeated groups. The dynamics of herder warfare
changed after colonial entry, response to pastoralist resistance
and slave emancipation. The book is of interest to specialist and
non-specialist readers exploring pastoralism, social anthropology
and warfare and conflict studies; and is suitable for introductory
graduate courses in environmental and social history of warfare .
This impressive and inspiring volume has as its modest origins the
documentation of a contemporary collecting project for the British
Museum. Informed by curators' critiques of uneven collections
accompanied by highly variable information, Sillitoe set out with
the ambition of recording the totality of the material culture of
the Wola of the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, at a time
when the study of artefacts was neglected in university
anthropology departments. His achievements, presented in this
second edition of Made in Nuigini with a new contextualizing
preface and foreword, brought a new standard of ethnography to the
incipient revival of material culture studies, and opened up the
importance of close attention to technology and material
assemblages for anthropology. The `economy' fundamentally concerns
the material aspects of life, and as Sillitoe makes clear, Wola
attitudes and behaviour in this regard are radically different to
those of the West, with emphasis on `maker users' and egalitarian
access to resources going hand in hand with their stateless and
libertarian principles. The project begun in Made in Niugini, which
necessarily restricted itself to moveable artefacts, is continued
and extended by the newly published companion volume Built in
Niugini, which deals with immoveable structures and buildings. It
argues that the study of material constructions offers an
unparalleled opportunity to address fundamental philosophical
questions about tacit knowledge and the human condition.
Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first
systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces
the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an
'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming
environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually
achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new
religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine
establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development
is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many
Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas
of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be
extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical
and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as
community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book
shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy
internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and
ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively
engaged with international organizations devoted to the
conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry
significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and
figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre
of public space.
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