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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology
With thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey
from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a
defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the
island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately
remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are
frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social
justice. Island of Hope sheds light on the emergence of social
solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and
noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and
mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years
of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily,
anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold
significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the
material and affective well-being of society at large.
During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became
obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and
their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and
artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life,
highlighting African-styled voodoo networks, positioning beating
drums and blood sacrifices as essential elements of black folk
culture. Inspired by this curious mix of influences, researchers
converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to
seek support for their theories about ""African survivals."" The
legacy of that body of research is the area's contemporary
identification as a Gullah community and a set of broader notions
about Gullah identity. This wide-ranging history upends a long
tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island
by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them.
Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections
between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during
the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss
and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country.
What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people's
heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly
divergent ends over the decades.
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.
Heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States,
affects people from all walks of life, yet who lives and who dies
from heart disease still depends on race, class, and gender. While
scientists and clinicians understand and treat heart disease more
effectively than ever before, and industrialized countries have
made substantial investments in research and treatment over the
past six decades, patterns of inequality persist. In Heart-Sick,
Janet K. Shim argues that official accounts of cardiovascular
health inequalities are unconvincing and inadequate, and that
clinical and public health interventions grounded in these accounts
ignore many critical causes of those inequalities. Examining the
routine activities of epidemiology--grant applications, data
collection, representations of research findings, and
post-publication discussions of the interpretations and
implications of study results--Shim shows how social differences of
race, social class, and gender are upheld by the scientific
community. She argues that such sites of expert knowledge
routinely, yet often invisibly, make claims about how biological
and cultural differences matter--claims that differ substantially
from the lived experiences of individuals who themselves suffer
from health problems. Based on firsthand research at epidemiologic
conferences, conversations with epidemiologists, and in-depth
interviews with people of color who live with heart disease, Shim
explores how both scientists and lay people define "difference" and
its consequences for health. Ultimately, Heart-Sick explores the
deep rifts regarding the meanings and consequences of social
difference for heart disease, and the changes that would be
required to generate more convincing accounts of the significance
of inequality for health and well-being.
Hasidic Art and the Kabbalah presents eight case studies of
manuscripts, ritual objects, and folk art developed by Hasidic
masters in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, whose
form and decoration relate to sources in the Zohar, German Pietism,
and Safed Kabbalah. Examined at the delicate and difficult to
define interface between seemingly simple, folk art and complex
ideological and conceptual outlooks which contain deep, abstract
symbols, the study touches on aspects of object history,
intellectual history, the decorative arts, and the history of
religion. Based on original texts, the focus of this volume is on
the subjective experience of the user at the moment of ritual,
applying tenets of process philosophy and literary theory -
Wolfgang Iser, Gaston Bachelard, and Walter Benjamin - to the
analysis of objects.
This timely and fascinating feminist ethnography is the first of
its kind to focus on commercial surrogacy workers in Russia and
from other countries of the former Soviet Union. Examining
surrogacy workers' reproductive labour, and experiences of
stratification and migration, the study presents innovative
insights into current research on global surrogacy practices and
travels for assisted reproduction. It links to wider fields of
studies, such as ethnicity, feminism, women's and gender studies in
the post-Soviet sphere. Weis expertly brings together rigorous
ethnographic research, feminist debates and anthropological theory
to explore the attributed significance of origin, citizenship,
race, ethnicity and religion, and the cultural framing and social
organization of surrogacy as an economic exchange; thereby
challenging and contributing to the discourse of surrogacy as a
gift, a labour of love, a maternal sacrifice or work. Tracing
surrogacy workers' journeys for surrogacy work across Russia, Weis
introduces geographic and geopolitical stratifications as two new
lenses of stratified reproduction to analyse how surrogacy in
Russia builds on and propels surrogacy workers' mobility and
results in reproductive migrations. Given the rapid global increase
in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised
nature, Weis's research has implications for surrogacy users,
medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers
concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy, reproductive
stratifications and reproductive justice. Shortlisted for the
Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize 2022
Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty
interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author
Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into
young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In
chapters entitled ""Unbreak my heart,"" ""I miss you like a desert
missing rain,"" and ""You're just playing with my head,"" she
invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments,
and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday
difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and
possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of
Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and
anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic
precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates
young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities
experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people
from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. ""They
arrested me for loving a school girl"" is the title of a chapter on
controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends
for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting
their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle
between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among
international donors and community elders, transforming the
youthful female body into a platform for public critique and
concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently
executed critical anthropology of intervention.
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Cosmopolitanisms
(Hardcover)
Bruce Robbins, Paulo Lemos Horta; Afterword by Kwame Anthony Appiah
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R2,653
Discovery Miles 26 530
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to
belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan
was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when
Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a "kosmo-polites," or citizen
of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses-on the one
hand, a detachment from one's place of origin, while on the other,
an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling
collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is
more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists
cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which
all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather,
cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of
life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments
and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by
major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas
Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among
others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms
have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged
might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to
their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and
the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which
asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south,
which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan
scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This
book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking
arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.
At a time when an emphasis on productivity in higher education
threatens to undermine well-crafted research, these highly
reflexive essays capture the sometimes profound intellectual
effects that may accompany disrupted scholarship. They reveal that
over long periods of time relationships with people studied
invariably change, sometimes in dramatic ways. They illustrate how
world events such as 9/11 and economic cycles impact individual
biographies.
Some researchers describe how disruptions prompted them to expand
the boundaries of their discipline and invent concepts that could
more accurately describe phenomena that previously had no name and
no scholarly history. Sometimes scholars themselves caused the
disruption as they circled back to work they had considered "done"
and allowed the possibility of rethinking earlier findings.
Explores the role of stories in criminal culture and justice
systems around the world Stories are much more than a means of
communication-stories help us shape our identities, make sense of
the world, and mobilize others to action. In Narrative Criminology,
prominent scholars from across the academy and around the world
examine stories that animate offending. From an examination of how
criminals understand certain types of crime to be less moral than
others, to how violent offenders and drug users each come to
understand or resist their identity as 'criminals', to how cultural
narratives motivate genocidal action, the case studies in this book
cover a wide array of crimes and justice systems throughout the
world. The contributors uncover the narratives at the center of
their essays through qualitative interviews, ethnographic
fieldwork, and written archives, and they scrutinize narrative
structure and meaning by analyzing genres, plots, metaphors, and
other components of storytelling. In doing so, they reveal the
cognitive, ideological, and institutional mechanisms by which
narratives promote harmful action. Finally, they consider how
offenders' narratives are linked to and emerge from those of
conventional society or specific subcultures. Each chapter reveals
important insights and elements for the development of a framework
of narrative criminology as an important approach for understanding
crime and criminal justice. An unprecedented and landmark
collection, Narrative Criminology opens the door for an exciting
new field of study on the role of stories in motivating and
legitimizing harm.
In this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the
first time that Africans played significant creative roles in
establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so
doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history
of land, labor, property, and commerce in the Atlantic world.
Sluyter shows that Africans' ideas and creativity helped to
establish a production system so fundamental to the environmental
and social relations of the American colonies that the consequences
persist to the present. He examines various methods of cattle
production, compares these methods to those used in Europe and the
Americas, and traces the networks of actors that linked that
Atlantic world. The use of archival documents, material culture
items, and ecological relationships between landscape elements make
this book a methodologically and substantively original
contribution to Atlantic, African-American, and agricultural
history.
In this highly original work, Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih
present a dialogic account of the lingering effects of the
terroristic attacks that occurred in Paris in November 2015.
Situating the events within broader histories of state violence in
metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors
interweave narrative accounts and photographs to explore a range of
related phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on
terrorism, the political work of archives, police and military
apparatuses of control and anti-terror deterrence, the histories of
wounds, and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality
of lives and deaths. Traces of Violence is a moving work that aids
our understanding of the afterlife of violence and offers an
innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and
sociology.
Gilbert L. Wilson, gifted ethnologist and field collector for the
American Museum of Natural History, thoroughly enjoyed the study of
American Indian life and folklore. In 1902 he moved to Mandan,
North Dakota and was excited to find he had Indian neighbors. His
life among them inspired him to write books that would accurately
portray their culture and traditions. Wilson's charming
translations of their oral heritage came to life all the more when
coupled with the finely-detailed drawings of his brother, Frederick
N. Wilson. "Myths of the Red Children" (1907) and "Indian Hero
Tales" (1916) have long been recognized as important contributions
to the preservation of American Indian culture and lore. Here, for
the first time ever, both books are included in one volume,
complete with their supplemental craft sections and ethnological
notes. While aimed at young folk, the books also appeal to anyone
wishing to learn more about the rich and culturally significant
oral traditions of North America's earliest people. Nearly 300
drawings accompany the text, accurately depicting tools, clothing,
dwellings, and accoutrements. The drawings for this edition were
culled from multiple copies of the original books with the best
examples chosen for careful restoration. The larger format allows
the reader to fully appreciate every detail of Frederick Wilson's
remarkable drawings. This is not a mere scan containing torn or
incomplete pages, stains and blemishes. This new Onagocag
Publishing hardcover edition is clean, complete and unabridged. In
addition, it features an introduction by Wyatt R. Knapp that
includes biographical information on the Wilson brothers, as well
as interesting details and insights about the text and
illustrations. Young and old alike will find these books a
thrilling immersion into American Indian culture, craft, and lore.
Onagocag Publishing is proud to present this definitive centennial
edition.
Although human beings are technically part of the ecosystem, there
still remains a conceptual conflict between technology and nature.
These concerns highlight the idea of human superiority in which the
priority is given to technology versus living in synchronization
with nature. Technology versus Ecology: Human Superiority and the
Ongoing Conflict with Nature explores the issues revolving around
the conflict between technology versus human beings, the concern
for the separation of human beings in the ecosystem, and the
negative consequences that may follow as ecosystems are being
damaged. This book is a significant reference source for
researchers, instructors, and students interested in the constant
evolution of technology and ecology.
Pascal D. Bazzell brings the marginal ecclesiology of a Filipino
ecclesial community facing homelessness (FECH) into contemporary
ecclesiological conversation in order to deepen the ecumenical
understanding of today's ecclesial reality. He contributes relevant
data to support a theory of an ecclesial-oriented paradigm that
fosters ecclesial communities within homeless populations. There is
an extensive dialogue occurring between ecclesiologies, church
planting theories or urban missions and the urban poor. Yet the
situation with the homeless population is almost entirely
overlooked. The majority of urban mission textbooks do not
acknowledge an ecclesial-oriented state of being and suggest that
the street-level environment is a place where no discipleship can
occur and no church should exist. By presenting the FECH's case
study Bazzell emphasizes that it is possible to live on the streets
and to grow in the faith of God as an ecclesial community. To be
able to describe the FECH's ecclesial narrative, Bazzell develops a
local ecclesiological methodology that aims to bridge the gap
between more traditional systematic and theoretical (ideal)
ecclesiology and practical oriented ecclesiology (e.g.
congregational studies) in order to hold together theological and
social understandings of the church in its local reality. He
articulates a theological framework for the FECH to reflect on who
they are (the essence of identity studies), who they are in
relationship to God (the essence of theological studies), and what
that means for believers in that community as they relate to God
and to each other in ways that are true to who they are and to who
God intends them to be (the essence of ecclesial studies). The
research provides a seldom-heard empirical tour into the FECH's
social world and communal identity. The theological findings from
the FECH's hermeneutical work on the Gospel of Mark reveal an
understanding of church being developed as gathering around Jesus
that creates a space for God's presence to be embodied in their
ordinary relationships and activities and to invite others to
participate in that gathering. Moreover, it addresses ecclesial
issues of the supernatural world; honor/shame values; and further
develop the neglected image of the familia Dei in classical
ecclesiology that encapsulates well the FECH's nature, mission and
place.
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