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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
Childhood Deployed examines the reintegration of former child
soldiers in Sierra Leone. Based on eighteen months of
participant-observer ethnographic fieldwork and ten years of
follow-up research, the book argues that there is a fundamental
disconnect between the Western idea of the child soldier and the
individual lived experiences of the child soldiers of Sierra Leone.
Susan Shepler contends that the reintegration of former child
soldiers is a political process having to do with changing notions
of childhood as one of the central structures of society. For most
Westerners the tragedy of the idea of "child soldier" centers
around perceptions of lost and violated innocence. In contrast,
Shepler finds that for most Sierra Leoneans, the problem is not
lost innocence but the horror of being separated from one's family
and the resulting generational break in youth education. Further,
Shepler argues that Sierra Leonean former child soldiers find
themselves forced to strategically perform (or refuse to perform)
as the"child soldier" Western human rights initiatives expect in
order to most effectively gain access to the resources available
for their social reintegration. The strategies don't always work-in
some cases, Shepler finds, Western human rights initiatives do more
harm than good. While this volume focuses on the well-known case of
child soldiers in Sierra Leone, it speaks to the larger concerns of
childhood studies with a detailed ethnography of people struggling
over the situated meaning of the categories of childhood.It offers
an example of the cultural politics of childhood in action, in
which the very definition of childhood is at stake and an important
site of political contestation.
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.
Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What
People Do with Images provides a nuanced account of artistic
practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the
twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of
shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections,
travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and
Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural
studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for
artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to
installations and video art to films. Museum curators, it is
suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their
traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators
have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance,
opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic.
Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such
dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game
of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is
acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of
what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the
transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas
reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity
to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a
wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics
is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational
socio-political spheres.
Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are
socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as
this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays
show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major
component of social life - including in the nineteenth century,
which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The
collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century
sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of
emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the
contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those
regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and
effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms - political
rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema,
graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media -
with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic
implications.
At one time there were almost as many different versions of the
Quechan creation story as there were Quechan families. Now few
people remember them. This volume, presented in the Quechan
language with facing-column translation, provides three views of
the origins of the Quechan people. One synthesizes narrator George
Bryant's childhood memories and later research. The second is based
upon J. P. Harrington's A Yuma Account of Origins (1908). The third
provides a modern view of the origins of the Quechan, beginning
with the migration from Asia to the New World and ending with the
settlement of the Yuman tribes at their present locations.
In Naturopathy in South India - Clinics between Professionalization
and Empowerment, Eva Jansen offers a rich ethnographic account of
current naturopathic thinking and practices, and examines its
complex history, multiple interpretations, and antagonisms. This
book presents two major forms of Naturopathy in contemporary South
India: On one side, a scientific, professional branch models
themselves after allopathic practitioners. On the other side, a
group of ideologists uses an approach to patient treatment that is
grounded in the principles of simplicity, transparency, a critique
of globalization, and a focus on patient empowerment. Jansen
discusses the current political and medical clash between
Naturopaths in South India from the perspectives of practitioners,
employees, the media and patients.
The Environment in Anthropology presents ecology and current
environmental studies from an anthropological point of view. From
the classics to the most current scholarship, this text connects
the theory and practice in environment and anthropology, providing
readers with a strong intellectual foundation as well as offering
practical tools for solving environmental problems. Haenn, Wilk,
and Harnish pose the most urgent questions of environmental
protection: How are environmental problems mediated by cultural
values? What are the environmental effects of urbanization? When do
environmentalists' goals and actions conflict with those of
indigenous peoples? How can we assess the impact of
"environmentally correct" businesses? They also cover the
fundamental topics of population growth, large scale development,
biodiversity conservation, sustainable environmental management,
indigenous groups, consumption, and globalization. This revised
edition addresses new topics such as water, toxic waste,
neoliberalism, environmental history, environmental activism, and
REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation), and it situates anthropology in the
multi-disciplinary field of environmental research. It also offers
readers a guide for developing their own plan for environmental
action. This volume offers an introduction to the breadth of
ecological and environmental anthropology as well as to its
historical trends and current developments. Balancing landmark
essays with cutting-edge scholarship, bridging theory and practice,
and offering suggestions for further reading and new directions for
research, The Environment in Anthropology continues to provide the
ideal introduction to a burgeoning field.
This open access book argues that contrary to dominant approaches
that view nationalism as unaffected by globalization or
globalization undermining the nation-state, the contemporary world
is actually marked by globalization of the nation form. Based on
fieldwork in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and drawing,
among others, on Peter van der Veer's comparative work on religion
and nation, it discuss practices of nationalism vis-a-vis
migration, rituals of sacrifice and prayer, music, media,
e-commerce, Islamophobia, bare life, secularism, literature and
atheism. The volume offers new understandings of nationalism in a
broader perspective. The text will appeal to students and
researchers interested in nationalism outside of the West,
especially those working in anthropology, sociology and history.
Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume
explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich
narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and
cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new
means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It
focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the
areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding
areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the
Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the
recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the
narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address
grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the
narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These
include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist,
mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors
also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and
evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial
experience and new means of communication via social media. The
volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition
across indigenous languages.
In this pioneering study of the ways in which the first settlers defined the power, prerogatives, and responsibilities of the sexes, one of our most incisive historians opens a window onto the world of Colonial America. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary documents, Mary Beth Norton tells the story of the Pinion clan, whose two-generation record of theft, adultery, and infanticide may have made them our first dysfunctional family. She reopens the case of Mistress Ann Hibbens, whose church excommunicated her for arguing that God had told husbands to listen to their wives. And here is the enigma of Thomas, or Thomasine Hall, who lived comfortably as both a man and a woman in 17th century Virginia. Wonderfully erudite and vastly readable, Founding Mothers & Fathers reveals both the philosophical assumptions and intimate domestic arrangements of our colonial ancestors in all their rigor, strangeness, and unruly passion.
"An important, imaginative book. Norton destroys our nostalgic image of a 'golden age' of family life and re-creates a more complex past whose assumptions and anxieties are still with us."--Raleigh News and Observer
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.
This unique work is an article-by-article drafting history of the
ICC Statute containing all versions of every article in the Statute
as it evolved from 1994 to 1998. It also integrates in the
Statute's provisions the "Elements of the Crimes" and the "Rules of
Procedure and Evidence" adopted by the preparatory Commission
(1998-2000). Other relevant documents are also included, such as
those concerning the privileges and immunities and financial
regulations of the Court, as well as its relationship with the
United Nations. This documentation constitutes the most
comprehensive treatment available of the ICC's applicable law. It
also offers an insightful first-hand account of the drafting
process both prior to and during the Rome Diplomatic Conference,
along with a detailed historical survey of the efforts to establish
the ICC. Each article of the Rome Statute is presented
chronologically, along with all its prior versions. These versions
comprise the texts transmitted between the Drafting Committee and
the Committee of the Whole at the Rome Diplomatic Conference; the
text proposed by the 1998 Preparatory Committee on the
Establishment of an ICC; the text completed by the Intersessional
meeting in Zutphen; the text proposed by the 1995 Ad Hoc Committee
on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court; the text
proposed by the International Law Commission in 1994. It also
contains government proposals made during the 1995-1998 sessions of
the Ad Hoc and Preparatory Committees, most of which have not been
made public documents. This organization of the legislative history
permits the reader to see the complete textual evolution of each
article. A description of the ICC mechanisms andinstitutions
precedes this article-by-article legislative history. Government
officials, judges, practitioners, and scholars seeking to interpret
and understand the ICC Statute will find this three-volume
publication unmatched for completeness and ease of use. Published
under the Transnational Publishers imprint.
In Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century, Helen Creese examines the
nature of the earliest sustained cross-cultural encounter between
the Balinese and the Dutch through the eyewitness accounts of
Pierre Dubois, the first colonial official to live in Bali. From
1828 to 1831, Dubois served as Civil Administrator to the Badung
court in southern Bali. He later recorded his Balinese experiences
for the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in a series of
personal letters to an anonymous correspondent. This first
ethnography of Bali provides rich, perceptive descriptions of early
nineteenth-century Balinese politics, society, religion and
culture. The book includes a complete edition and translation of
Dubois' Legere Idee de Balie en 1830/Sketch of Bali in 1830.
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