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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
Why should the church be concerned about cultures? Louis J.
Luzbetak began to answer this question twenty-five years ago with
the publication of The Church and Cultures: An Applied Anthropology
for the Religious Worker. Reprinted six times and translated into
five languages, it became an undisputed classic in the field. Now,
by popular demand, Luzbetak has thoroughly rewritten his work,
completely updating it in light of contemporary anthropological and
missiological thought and in face of current world conditions.
Serving as a handbook for a culturally sensitive ministry and
witness, The Church and Cultures introduces the non-anthropologist
to a wealth of scientific knowledge directly relevant to pastoral
work, religious education social action and liturgy - in fact, to
all forms of missionary activity in the church. It focuses on a
burning theological issue: that of contextualization, the process
by which a local church integrates its understanding of the Gospel
("text") with the local culture ("context").
This exciting book brings the often-overlooked southern Maya region
of Guatemala into the spotlight by closely examining the ""lost
city"" of Chocola. Jonathan Kaplan and Federico Paredes Umana prove
that Chocola was a major Maya polity and reveal exactly why it was
so influential. In their fieldwork at the site, Kaplan and Paredes
Umana discovered an extraordinarily sophisticated underground
water-control system. They also discovered cacao residues in
ceramic vessels. Based on these and other findings, the authors
believe that cacao was consumed and grown intensively at Chocola
and that the city was the center of a large cacao trade. They
contend that the city's wealth and power were built on its abundant
supply of water and its command of cacao, which was significant not
just to cuisine and trade but also to Maya ideology and cosmology.
Moreover, Kaplan and Paredes Umana detail the ancient city's
ceramics and add over thirty stone sculptures to the site's
inventory. Because the southern Maya region was likely the origin
of Maya hieroglyphic writing and the Long Count calendar, scholars
have long suspected the area to be important. This pioneering field
research at Chocola helps explain how and why the region played a
leading role in the rise of the Maya civilization.
In gay bars and nightclubs across America, and in gay-oriented
magazines and media, the buff, macho, white gay man is exalted as
the ideal-the most attractive, the most wanted, and the most
emulated type of man. For gay Asian American men, often viewed by
their peers as submissive or too 'pretty,' being sidelined in the
gay community is only the latest in a long line of
racially-motivated offenses they face in the United
States.Repeatedly marginalized by both the white-centric queer
community that values a hyper-masculine sexuality and a homophobic
Asian American community that often privileges masculine
heterosexuality, gay Asian American men largely have been silenced
and alienated in present-day culture and society. In Geisha of a
Different Kind, C. Winter Han travels from West Coast Asian drag
shows to the internationally sought-after Thai kathoey, or
"ladyboy," to construct a theory of queerness that is inclusive of
the race and gender particularities of the gay Asian male
experience in the United States. Through ethnographic observation
of queer Asian American communities and Asian American drag shows,
interviews with gay Asian American men, and a reading of current
media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans, Han argues
that gay Asian American men, used to gender privilege within their
own communities, must grapple with the idea that, as Asians, they
have historically been feminized as a result of Western domination
and colonization, and as a result, they are minorities within the
gay community, which is itself marginalized within the overall
American society. Han also shows that many Asian American gay men
can turn their unusual position in the gay and Asian American
communities into a positive identity. In their own conception of
self, their Asian heritage and sexuality makes these men unique,
special, and, in the case of Asian American drag queens, much more
able to convey a convincing erotic femininity. Challenging
stereotypes about beauty, nativity, and desirability, Geisha of a
Different Kind makes a major intervention in the study of race and
sexuality in America.
This book argues that neither theories of secularisation nor
theories of lived religion offer satisfactory accounts of religion
and social change. Drawing from Deleuze and Gauttari's idea of the
assemblage, Paul-Francois Tremlett outlines an alternative.
Informed by classical and contemporary theories of religion as well
as empirical case studies and ethnography conducted in Manila and
London, this book re-frames religion as spatially organised flows.
Foregrounding the agency of hon-human actors, it offers a
compelling and original account of religion and social change.
A process through which skills, knowledge, and resources are
expanded, capacity building, remains a tantalizing and pervasive
concept throughout the field of anthropology, though it has
received little in the way of critical analysis. By exploring the
concept's role in a variety of different settings including
government lexicons, religious organizations, environmental
campaigns, biomedical training, and fieldwork from around the
globe, Hope and Insufficiency seeks to question the histories,
assumptions, intentions, and enactments that have led to the
ubiquity of capacity building, thereby developing a much-needed
critical purchase on its persuasive power.
The most famous long-distance hiking trail in North America, the
2,181-mile Appalachian Trail - the longest hiking-only footpath in
the world - runs along the Appalachian mountain range from Georgia
to Maine. Every year about 2,000 individuals attempt to
""thru-hike"" the entire trail, a feat equivalent to hiking Mount
Everest sixteen times. In Walking on the Wild Side, sociologist
Kristi M. Fondren traces the stories of forty-six men and women
who, for their own personal reasons, set out to conquer America's
most well known, and arguably most social, long-distance hiking
trail. In this fascinating in-depth study, Fondren shows how, once
out on the trail, this unique subculture of hikers lives mostly in
isolation, with their own way of acting, talking, and thinking;
their own vocabulary; their own activities and interests; and their
own conception of what is significant in life. They tend to be
self-disciplined, have an unwavering trust in complete strangers,
embrace a life of poverty, and reject modern-day institutions. The
volume illuminates the intense social intimacy and bonding that
forms among long-distance hikers as they collectively construct a
long-distance hiker identity. Fondren describes how long-distance
hikers develop a trail persona, underscoring how important a sense
of place can be to our identity, and to our sense of who we are.
Indeed, the author adds a new dimension to our understanding of the
nature of identity in general. Anyone who has hiked - or has ever
dreamed of hiking - the Appalachian Trail will find this volume
fascinating. Walking on the Wild Side captures a community for whom
the trail is a sacred place, a place to which they have become
attached, socially, emotionally, and spiritually.
Systems of belonging, including ethnicity, are not static,
automatic, or free of contest. Historical contexts shape the ways
which we are included in or excluded from specific classifications.
Building on an amazing array of sources, David L. Schoenbrun
examines groupwork-the imaginative labor that people do to
constitute themselves as communities-in an iconic and influential
region in East Africa. His study traces the roots of nationhood in
the Ganda state over the course of a millennia, demonstrating that
the earliest clans were based not on political identity or language
but on shared investments, knowledges, and practices. Grounded in
Schoenbrun's skillful mastery of historical linguistics and
vernacular texts, The Names of the Python supplements and redirects
current debates about ethnicity in ex-colonial Africa and beyond.
This timely volume carefully distinguishes past from present and
shows the many possibilities that still exist for the creative
cultural imagination.
In The Roots of Western Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital
in the Ancient World, Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg take an
anthropological approach to credit. They suggest that financial
activities occur in a complex milieu, in which specific parties,
with particular motives, achieve their goals using a form of
social, cultural, or economic agency. They examine the imbrication
of finance and hidden interests in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt,
classical Greece and Rome, the early Judeo-Christian traditions,
and the Islamic world to illuminate the ties between social,
ethical, and financial institutions. This unique breadth of
research provides new perspectives on Mesopotamian ways of
incentivizing production through financial arrangements, the source
of Egyptian surpluses, linguistics and usury, metrological
influences on finance, and the enduring importance of honor and
social capital. This book not only illustrates the particular
cultural logics that drove these ancient economies, it also depicts
how modern society's financial techniques, ethics, and concerns
with justice are attributable to a rich multicultural history.
Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Relationships and
Environmental Variations in Indonesia examines biosocial change in
the Austronesian community of the Kodi by examining multispecies
interactions between select biota and abiota. Cynthia T. Fowler
describes how the Kodi people coordinate their mundane and ritual
practices with polychaetes and celestial bodies, and how this
synchrony encourages and is encouraged by social and ecological
variations. Fowler grounds her anthropogenic environmental research
with information from geospatial science, marine ecology,
astronomy, physics, and astrophysics.
Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce
enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories
every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life
as to verge on the miraculous. "The Big Ratchet" is the story of
how it happened, of the ratchets--the technologies and innovations,
big and small--that propelled our species from hunters and
gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of
the supermarket.
The Big Ratchet itself came in the twentieth century, when a range
of technologies--from fossil fuels to scientific plant breeding to
nitrogen fertilizers--combined to nearly quadruple our population
in a century, and to grow our food supply even faster. To some,
these technologies are a sign of our greatness; to others, of our
hubris. MacArthur fellow and Columbia University professor Ruth
DeFries argues that the debate is the wrong one to have. Limits do
exist, but every limit that has confronted us, we have surpassed.
That cycle of crisis and growth is the story of our history;
indeed, it is the essence of "The Big Ratchet." Understanding it
will reveal not just how we reached this point in our history, but
how we might survive it.
This volume brings together renowned scholars and early
career-researchers in mapping the ways in which European cinema
-whether arthouse or mainstream, fictional or documentary, working
with traditional or new media- engages with phenomena of precarity,
poverty, and social exclusion. It compares how the filmic
traditions of different countries reflect the socioeconomic
conditions associated with precarity, and illuminates similarities
in the iconography of precarious lives across cultures. While some
of the contributions deal with the representations of marginalized
minorities, others focus on work-related precarity or the
depictions of downward mobility. Among other topics, the volume
looks at how films grapple with gender inequality, intersectional
struggle, discriminatory housing policies, and the specific
problems of precarious youth. With its comparative approach to
filmic representations of European precarity, this volume makes a
major contribution to scholarship on precarity and the
representation of social class in contemporary visual culture.
Watch our talk with the editors Elisa Cuter, Guido Kirsten and
Hanna Prenzel here: https://youtu.be/lKpD1NFAx2o
"Raising the Dead" is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary
exploration of death's relation to subjectivity in
twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia
Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected
intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through "the space of
death" gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate
metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies,
discourses, and communities collide.
Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans,
women, queers, and other "minorities" in society is, like death,
"almost unspeakable." She gives voice to--or raises--the dead
through her examination of works such as the movie "Menace II
Society, " Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved, " Leslie Marmon Silko's
"Almanac of the Dead, " Randall Kenan's "A Visitation of Spirits, "
and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band
Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary
investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with
each other, Holland forges connections among African-American
literature and culture, queer and feminist theory.
"Raising the Dead" will be of interest to students and scholars of
American culture, African-American literature, literary theory,
gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.
In this book, James B. Greenberg and Thomas K. Park take an
anthropological approach to the economic history of the past one
thousand years and define credit as a potentially transformative
force involving inequalties, rather than an exchange of equal
valued commodites. Guiding readers through the medieval period all
the way to the modern day, and tracking through the Mediterranean
and Europe, Greenberg and Park reorient financial history and
position social capital and ethical thought at its center. They
examine the multicultural origins of credit and finance, from
banking to credit cards and predatory lending, and bringing us up
to date, they explore the forces that led to the collapse of global
credit markets in 2007-2008. This book is recommended for scholars
of anthropology, history, economics, religion, and sociology.
This book provides students and researchers with clear guidance
through this tricky, but fundamental aspect of qualitative,
ethnographic research. The chapters provide a concise overview that
clarifies, illustrates and develops a highly popular methodological
principle. To some extent, the book is critical of some
contemporary approaches, particularly those that portray
reflexivity as an optional, virtuous extra. Drawing on a broad
range of anthropological, sociological and other sources, it
illuminates through example as well as by precept.
The edited collection is a fresh contribution to the
anthropological, sociological, and geographical explorations of
time-space in Southeast Europe and Albania in particular. By
delving into various levels of people's daily lives, such as
literature, relation to the environment, the urbanization process,
art, photography, trauma and remembering, processes of modernity,
the volume vividly portrays various realms that are lived and
perceived. It largely builds on the premise that structural
resemblances of the past continuously reappear in particular social
and cultural moments and seek to restore and build the individual
and collective lives in contemporary Albania.
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