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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
For those interested in continuing the struggle for decolonization,
the word "multiculturalism" is mostly a sad joke. After all,
institutionalized multiculturalism today is a managerial muck of
buzzwords, branding strategies, and virtue signaling that has
nothing to do with real struggles against racism and colonialism.
But Decolonize Multiculturalism unearths a buried history.
Decolonize Multiculturalism focuses on the story of the student and
youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by global
movements for decolonization and anti-racism, who aimed to
fundamentally transform their society, as well as the violent
repression of these movements by the state, corporations, and
university administrations. Part of the response has been sheer
violence-campus policing, for example, only began in the 1970s,
paving the way for the militarized campuses of today-with
institutionalized multiculturalism acting like the velvet glove
around the iron fist of state violence. But this means that today's
multiculturalism also contains residues of the original radical
demands of the student and youth movements that it aims to repress:
to open up the university, to wrench it from its settler colonial,
white supremacist, and patriarchal capitalist origins, and to
transform it into a place of radical democratic possibility.
Jan Ken Po, Ai Kono Sho"" ""Junk An'a Po, I Canna Show"" These
words to a simple child's game brought from Japan and made local,
the property of all of Hawaii's people, symbolize the cultural
transformation experienced by Hawaii's Japanese. It is the story of
this experience that Dennis Ogawa tells so well here.
Neumann and Wigen counter Euro-centrism in the study of
international relations by providing a full account of political
organisation in the Eurasian steppe from the fourth millennium BCE
up until the present day. Drawing on a wide range of archaeological
and historical secondary sources, alongside social theory, they
discuss the pre-history, history and effect of what they name the
'steppe tradition'. Writing from an International Relations
perspective, the authors give a full treatment of the steppe
tradition's role in early European state formation, as well as
explaining how politics in states like Turkey and Russia can be
understood as hybridising the steppe tradition with an increasingly
dominant European tradition. They show how the steppe tradition's
ideas of political leadership, legitimacy and concepts of
succession politics can help us to understand the policies and
behaviour of such leaders as Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey.
As researchers become increasingly interested in studying the lives
of children in antiquity, this volume argues for the importance of
a collaborative biocultural approach. Contributors draw on fields
including skeletal biology and physiology, archaeology,
sociocultural anthropology, pediatrics, and psychology to show that
a diversity of research methods is the best way to illuminate the
complexities of childhood. Contributors and case studies span the
globe with locations including Egypt, Turkey, Italy, England,
Japan, Peru, Bolivia, Canada, and the United States. Time periods
range from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution. Leading
experts in the bioarchaeology of childhood investigate
breastfeeding and weaning trends of the past 10,000 years; mortuary
data from child burials; skeletal trauma and stress events; bone
size, shape, and growth; plasticity; and dietary histories.
Emphasizing a life course approach and developmental perspective,
this volume's interdisciplinary nature marks a paradigm shift in
the way children of the past are studied. It points the way forward
to a better understanding of childhood as a dynamic lived
experience both physically and socially.
Investigating the efforts of the Kichwa of Tena, Ecuador to reverse
language shift to Spanish, this book examines the ways in which
indigenous language can be revitalized and how creative bilingual
forms of discourse can reshape the identities and futures of local
populations. Based on deep ethnographic fieldwork among urban,
periurban, and rural indigenous Kichwa communities, Michael
Wroblewski explores adaptations to culture contact, language
revitalization, and political mobilization through discourse.
Expanding the ethnographic picture of native Amazonians and their
traditional discourse practices, this book focuses attention on
Kichwas' diverse engagements with rural and urban ways of living,
local and global ways of speaking, and indigenous and dominant
intellectual traditions. Wroblewski reveals the composite nature of
indigenous words and worlds through conversational interviews, oral
history narratives, political speechmaking, and urban performance
media, showing how discourse is a critical focal point for studying
cultural adaptation. Highlighting how Kichwas assert autonomy
through creative forms of self-representation, Remaking Kichwa
moves the study of indigenous language into the globalized era and
offers innovative reconsiderations of indigeneity, discourse, and
identity.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mortality crisis which affected
Eastern Europe and the republics of the former USSR at the time of
the transition to a market economy was arguably the major peacetime
health crisis of recent decades. Chernobyl and the Mortality Crisis
in Eastern Europe and the Old USSR discusses the importance of that
crisis, surprisingly underplayed in the scientific literature, and
presents evidence suggesting a potential role of the Chernobyl
disaster among the causes contributing to it.
Interdisciplinary research is a rewarding enterprise, but there are
inherent challenges, especially in current anthropological study.
Anthropologists investigate questions concerning health, disease,
and the life course in past and contemporary societies,
necessitating interdisciplinary collaboration. Tackling these 'big
picture' questions related to human health-states requires
understanding and integrating social, historical, environmental,
and biological contexts and uniting qualitative and quantitative
data from divergent sources and technologies. The crucial interplay
between new technologies and traditional approaches to anthropology
necessitates innovative approaches that promote the emergence of
new and alternate views. Beyond the Bones: Engaging with Disparate
Datasets fills an emerging niche, providing a forum in which
anthropology students and scholars wrestle with the fundamental
possibilities and limitations in uniting multiple lines of
evidence. This text demonstrates the importance of a multi-faceted
approach to research design and data collection and provides
concrete examples of research questions, designs, and results that
are produced through the integration of different methods,
providing guidance for future researchers and fostering the
creation of constructive discourse. Contributions from various
experts in the field highlight lines of evidence as varied as
skeletal remains, cemetery reports, hospital records, digital
radiographs, ancient DNA, clinical datasets, linguistic models, and
nutritional interviews, including discussions of the problems,
limitations, and benefits of drawing upon and comparing datasets,
while illuminating the many ways in which anthropologists are using
multiple data sources to unravel larger conceptual questions in
anthropology.
Many Americans still envision India as rigidly caste-bound, locked
in traditions that inhibit social mobility. In reality, class
mobility has long been an ideal, and today globalization is
radically transforming how India's citizens perceive class. Living
Class in Urban India examines a nation in flux, bombarded with
media images of middle-class consumers, while navigating the
currents of late capitalism and the surges of inequality they can
produce. Anthropologist Sara Dickey puts a human face on the issue
of class in India, introducing four people who live in the
""second-tier"" city of Madurai: an auto-rickshaw driver, a graphic
designer, a teacher of high-status English, and a domestic worker.
Drawing from over thirty years of fieldwork, she considers how
class is determined by both subjective perceptions and objective
conditions, documenting Madurai residents' palpable day-to-day
experiences of class while also tracking their long-term impacts.
By analyzing the intertwined symbolic and economic importance of
phenomena like wedding ceremonies, religious practices,
philanthropy, and loan arrangements, Dickey's study reveals the
material consequences of local class identities. Simultaneously, it
highlights the poignant drive for dignity in the face of moralizing
class stereotypes. Through extensive interviews, Dickey scrutinizes
the idioms and commonplaces used by residents to justify class
inequality and, occasionally, to subvert it. Along the way, Living
Class in Urban India reveals the myriad ways that class status is
interpreted and performed, embedded in everything from cell phone
usage to religious worship.
Tooth modification has been practiced throughout many time periods
and places to convey information about individual people, their
societies, and their relationships to others. This volume
represents the wide spectrum of intentional dental modification in
humans across the globe over the past 16,000 years. These essays
draw on research from the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and
Europe. Through archaeological studies, historical and ethnographic
sources, and observations of contemporary people, they examine
instances of tooth filing, inlays, dyeing, and removal.
Contributors discuss how to distinguish between purposeful
modifications of teeth and normal wear and tear or disease. This
collection demonstrates what patterns of tooth modification can
reveal about people and their cultures in the past and present.
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