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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > 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.
Imperial frontiers are a fascinating stage for studying the
interactions of people, institutions, and their environments. In
one of the first books to explore the Inka frontier through
archaeology, Sonia Alconini examines part of present-day Bolivia
that was once a territory at the edge of the Inka empire. Along
this frontier, one of the New World's most powerful polities came
into repeated conflict with tropical lowland groups that it could
never subject to its rule. Using extensive field research, Alconini
explores the multifaceted socioeconomic processes that transpired
in the frontier region. Her unprecedented study shows how the Inka
empire exercised control over vast expanses of land and peoples in
a territory located hundreds of miles away from the capital city of
Cusco, and how people on the frontier navigated the cultural and
environmental divide that separated the Andes and the Amazon.
Anglo-Indians form the human legacy created and left behind on the
Indian subcontinent by European imperialism. When Independence was
achieved from the British Raj in 1947, an exodus numbering an
estimated 50,000 emigrated to Great Britain between 1948-62, under
the terms of the British Nationality Act of 1948. But sixty odd
years after their resettlement in Britain, the "First Wave"
Anglo-Indian immigrant community continues to remain obscure among
India's global diaspora. This book examines and critiques the
convoluted routes of adaptation and assimilation employed by
immigrant Anglo-Indians in the process of finding their niche
within the context of globalization in contemporary multi-cultural
Britain. As they progressed from immigrants to settlers, they
underwent a cultural metamorphosis. The homogenizing labyrinth of
ethnic cultures through which they negotiated their way-Indian,
Anglo-Indian, then Anglo-Saxon-effaced difference but created yet
another hybrid identity: British Anglo-Indianness. Through
meticulous ethnographic field research conducted amidst the
community in Britain over a decade, Rochelle Almeida provides
evidence that immigrant Anglo-Indians remain on the cultural
periphery despite more than half a century. Indeed, it might be
argued that they have attained virtual invisibility-in having
created an altogether interesting new amalgamated sub-culture in
the UK, this Christian minority has ceased to be counted: both,
among South Asia's diaspora and within mainstream Britain. Through
a critical scrutiny of multi-ethnic Anglophone literature and
cinema, the modes and methods they employed in seeking integration
and the reasons for their near-invisibility in Britain as an
immigrant South Asian community are closely examined in this
much-needed volume.
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.
In Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: Bridging
Worlds, Sabina Owsianowska and Magdalena Banaszkiewicz examine the
limitations of the anthropological study of tourism, which stem
from both the domination of researchers representing the Anglophone
circle as well as the current state of tourism studies in Central
and Eastern Europe. This edited collection contributes to the wider
discussion of the geopolitics of knowledge through its focus on the
anthropological background of tourism studies and its inclusion of
contributors from Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, and Poland.
Taste is recognized as one of the most evocative senses. The
flavors of food play an important role in identity, memory,
emotion, desire, and aversion, as well as social, religious and
other occasions. Yet despite its fundamental role, taste is often
mysteriously absent from discussions about food. Now in its second
edition, The Taste Culture Reader examines the sensuous dimensions
of eating and drinking and highlights the centrality of taste in
human experience. Combining both classic and contemporary sources
from anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history, science, and
beyond, the book features excerpts from texts by David Hume,
Immanuel Kant, Pierre Bourdieu, Brillat-Savarin, Marcel Proust,
Sidney Mintz, and M.F.K. Fisher as well as original essays by
authors such as David Sutton, Lisa Heldke, David Howes, Constance
Classen, and Amy Trubek. This edition has been revised
substantially throughout to include the latest scholarship on the
senses and features new introductions from the editor as well as 10
new chapters. The perfect introduction to the study of taste, this
is essential reading for students in food studies, anthropology,
sensory studies, philosophy, and culinary arts.
Activism through Music during the Apartheid Era and Beyond
documents the grassroots activism of Sharon Katz and the Peace
Train against the backdrop of enormous diversity and the volatile
social and political climate in South Africa in the early 1990s.
Among the intersections of race, healing and the "soft power" of
music, Katz offers a vision of the possibilities of national
identity and belonging as South Africans grappled with the
transition from apartheid to democracy. Through extensive fieldwork
across two countries (South Africa and the United States) and
drawing on personal experiences as a South African of color,
Ambigay Yudkoff reveals a compelling narrative of multigenerational
collaboration. This experience creates a sense of community
fostering relationships that develop through music, travel,
performances, and socialization. In South Africa and the United
States, and recently in Cuba and Mexico, the Peace Train's journey
in musical activism provides a vehicle for racial integration and
intercultural understanding.
Juarez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s,
and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's
most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon
that traveled from person to person, across rivers and
borders-wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place.
From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the
street, Julian Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the
words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juarez,
creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the
city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries
consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English
definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from
interviews-stories that put the terms in context and provide a
personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters,
and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs's evocative
illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein's famous
Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions
in ABCedario de Juarez both document and interpret the everyday
violence of this vital border city.
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.
From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 US Presidential
Election describes voting in the 2020 election, from the
presidential nomination to new voting laws post-election. Election
officials and voters navigated the challenging pandemic to hold the
highest turnout election since 1900. President Donald Trump's
refusal to acknowledge the pandemic's severity coupled with
frequent vote fraud accusations affected how states provided safe
voting, how voters cast ballots, how lawyers fought legal battles,
and ultimately led to an unsuccessful insurrection.
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.
This book is a study of Salpuri-Chum, a traditional Korean dance
for expelling evil spirits. The authors explore the origins and
practice of Salpuri-Chum. The ancient Korean people viewed their
misfortunes as coming from evil spirits; therefore, they wanted to
expel the evil spirits to recover their happiness. The music for
Salpuri-Chum is called Sinawi rhythm. It has no sheet music and
lacks the concept of metronomic technique. In this rhythm, the
dancer becomes a conductor. Salpuri-Chum is an artistic performance
that resolves the people's sorrow. In many cases, it is a form of
sublimation. It is also an effort to transform the pain of reality
into beauty, based on the Korean people's characteristic merriment.
It presents itself, then, as a form of immanence. Moreover,
Salpuri-Chum is unique in its use of a piece of white fabric. The
fabric, as a symbol of the Korean people's ego ideal, signifies
Salpuri-Chum's focus as a dance for resolving their misfortunes.
George Pitt-Rivers began his career as one of Britain's most
promising young anthropologists, conducting research in the South
Pacific and publishing articles in the country's leading academic
journals. With a museum in Oxford bearing his family name,
Pitt-Rivers appeared to be on track for a sterling academic career
that might even have matched that of his grandfather, one of the
most prominent archaeologists of his day. By the early 1930s,
however, Pitt-Rivers had turned from his academic work to politics.
Writing a series of books attacking international communism and
praising the ideas of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler,
Pitt-Rivers fell into the circles of the anti-Semitic far right. In
1937 he attended the Nuremberg Rally and personally met Adolf
Hitler and other leading Nazis. With the outbreak of war in 1940
Pitt-Rivers was arrested and interned by the British government on
the suspicion that he might harm the war effort by publicly sharing
his views, effectively ending his academic career. This book traces
the remarkable career of a man who might have been remembered as
one of Britain's leading 20th century anthropologists but instead
became involved in a far-right milieu that would result in his
professional ruin and the relegation of most of his research to
margins of scientific history. At the same time, his wider legacy
would persist far beyond the academic sphere and can be found to
the present day.
This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that
fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury
aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in
village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion
soirees, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's
dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over
India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation.
In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the
influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage
luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire.
Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic
has become a significant force in the attempt to define
contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital
in businesswomen's dress to a discussion of masculinity and
muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian
Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of
luxury and power in India. Luxury Indian Fashion is essential
reading for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology
and visual culture.
Home cooking is a multibillion-dollar industry that includes
cookbooks, kitchen gadgets, high-end appliances, specialty
ingredients, and more. Cooking-themed programming flourishes on
television, inspiring a wide array of celebrity chef-branded goods
even as self-described ""foodies"" seek authenticity by pickling,
preserving, and canning foods in their own home kitchens. Despite
this, claims that ""no one has time to cook anymore"" are common,
lamenting the slow extinction of traditional American home cooking
in the twenty-first century. In Look Who's Cooking: The Rhetoric of
American Home Cooking Traditions in the Twenty-First Century,
author Jennifer Rachel Dutch explores the death of home cooking,
revealing how modern changes transformed cooking at home from an
odious chore into a concept imbued with deep meanings associated
with home, family, and community. Drawing on a wide array of
texts-cookbooks, advertising, YouTube videos, and more-Dutch
analyzes the many manifestations of traditional cooking in America
today. She argues that what is missing from the discourse around
home cooking is an understanding of skills and recipes as a form of
folklore. Dutch's research reveals that home cooking is a powerful
vessel that Americans fill with meaning because it represents both
the continuity of the past and adaptability to the present. Home
cooking is about much more than what is for dinner; it's about
forging a connection to the past, displaying the self in the
present, and leaving a lasting legacy for the future.
How would our understanding of museums change if we used the
Vintage Wireless Museum or the Museum of Witchcraft as examples -
rather than the British Museum or the Louvre? Although there are
thousands of small, independent, single-subject museums in the UK,
Europe and North America, the field of museum studies remains
focused almost exclusively on major institutions. In this
ground-breaking new book, Fiona Candlin reveals how micromuseums
challenge preconceived ideas about what museums are and how they
operate. Based on extensive fieldwork and analysis of more than
fifty micromuseums, she shows how they offer dramatically different
models of curation, interpretation and visitor experience, and how
their analysis generates new perspectives on subjects such as
display, objects, collections, architecture, and the public sphere.
The first-ever book dedicated to the subject, Micromuseology
provides a platform for radically rethinking key debates within
museum studies. Destined to transform the field, it is essential
reading for students and researchers in museum studies,
anthropology, material culture studies, and visual culture.
In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis'
personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These
personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on
broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory
experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the
devotees' own interpretive framework provides continuity within a
paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive
insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique
insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power,
remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the
meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant
and ultimately transformative of the devotee's self.
Embodying Ecological Heritage in a Maya Community: Health,
Happiness, and Identity provides an ethnographic account of life in
a rural farming village in southern Belize, focusing on the
connections between traditional ecological practices and the health
and wellness of the Maya community living there. It discusses how
complex histories, ecologies, and development practices are
negotiated by individuals of all ages, and the community at large,
detailing how they interact with their changing environments. The
study has wide applicability for indigenous communities fighting
for rights to manage their lands across the globe, as well as for
considering how health is connected to heritage practices in
communities worldwide.
The retail trade has undergone tremendous changes over the course
of the 20th century in the United States, and media narratives have
reflected these changes. Media Representations of Retail Work in
America explores representations of retail workers in popular
media. Offering close readings of various texts including films,
television shows, advertisements, and internet memes, Brittany
Clark traces the development of the trade as a career opportunity
that required a distinct set of skills in the early twentieth
century until today, when the job has been deskilled and retail
workers struggle with low pay and lack of benefits.
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