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The Anthropology of Media: A ReaderBrings together key writings in the emergent field of the anthropology of media for the first timeIntegrates key themes in the anthropology of media by means of editorial commentaryExplores the theoretical issues that have arisen from ethnographic studies of media" offers a critical overview of how mass media represents and constructs both Western and non-Western cultures. Moving beyond earlier anthropological preoccupation with ethnographic film and drawing on the recent explosion of creative studies of culture and media, this volume heralds the emergence of a new field - the anthropology of media - and brings its key literature together for the first time.

This book tries to answer the question how different communities in such an arid area as the Iranian central plateau could have shared their limited water resources in a perfect harmony and peace over the course of history. They invented some indigenous technologies as well as cooperative socio-economic systems in order to better adapt themselves to their harsh environment where the scarce water resources had to be rationed among the different communities as sustainably as possible. Those stories hold some lessons for us on how to adjust our needs to our geographical possibilities while living side by side with other people. This work gives insight into the indigenous adaptation strategies through the territorial water cooperation, and describes how water can appear as a ground for cooperation. It explains the water supply systems and social aspects of water in central Iran. Topics include the territorial water cooperation, qanat's, the traditional water management and sustainability, the socio-economic context, the sustainable management of shared aquifers system and more.

In today's European arts and sciences most of the time we see not only other, but also our own cultural traditions and the different forms of modernity like a dim image in a mirror. And the future of our own and other cultures seems to be shrouded in mystery, because our gift of knowledge and inspired messages are only partial. The question this book addresses is whether it is possible to get an almost face-to-face intimacy with various forms of cultural tradition and modernity by using our experiences and our powers of imagination, i.e. our expectations, in a more fruitful way.
The contributors to this book try to give answers to this weighty question by taking as a guideline Erasmus's famous motto "ad fontes, i.e. always go to the sources. Without, however, nursing the illusion that our partial knowledge will ever be complete. Is there, they ask, a real chasm between the 'modern' West and the 'traditional' East, as so many authors have argued? And if so, how deep is the chasm and how is it to be bridged? How much do people in the West know about their own cultural tradition and the modern times they live in? How much do they know of the traditions and the modernities of the East and how much do they need to know in order to cope with what the future will probably bring? Are our images of cultural tradition and modernity in East and West, in Past and Present so blurred that we look at them as through a glass, darkly? What the contributors to this book argue for is the necessity of looking at developments both in East and West, both in Past and Present from a wider perspective, of taking a global point of departure. They argue for greater understanding and communication betweencultures, for cultural pluralism (as distinct from cultural relativism). They argue for the open, tolerant, non-dogmatic and critical thought that was the most important characteristic of Erasmus's philosophy.
The chapters in this book can be useful to a broad audience and a range of social scientists and historians who are interested in the understanding of the relation between Past and Present, Tradition and Modernity, East and West.

Recent literature has identified modern "parenting" as an expert-led practice-one which begins with pre-pregnancy decisions, entails distinct types of intimate relationships, places intense burdens on mothers and increasingly on fathers too. Exploring within diverse historical and global contexts how men and women make-and break-relations between generations when becoming parents, this volume brings together innovative qualitative research by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists. The chapters focus tightly on inter-generational transmission and demonstrate its importance for understanding how people become parents and rear children.

A Linguistic History of Arabic presents a reconstruction of proto-Arabic by the methods of historical-comparative linguistics. It challenges the traditional conceptualization of an old, Classical language evolving into the contemporary Neo-Arabic dialects. Professor Owens combines established comparative linguistic methodology with a careful reading of the classical Arabic sources, such as the grammatical and exegetical traditions. He arrives at a richer and more complex picture of early Arabic language history than is current today and in doing so establishes the basis for a comprehensive, linguistically-based understanding of the history of Arabic. The arguments are set out in a concise, case by case basis, making it accessible to students and scholars of Arabic and Islamic culture, as well as to those studying Arabic and historical linguists.

Exploring the dispersion of populations and cultures across many geographic regions and spheres, diaspora studies has emerged as a vibrant area of research amid rapidly increasing transnationalism and globalization. "Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader" presents in a single volume the most influential and critically well-received essays that have shaped the trajectory of diaspora studies and contemporary theorizations of diaspora as a specific terrain within, and beyond, postcolonial studies.

The book offers classic statements that have defined the field by such scholars as Appadurai, Gilroy, Radhakrishnan, and Hall. Essays tackle a number of subjects and diasporic configurations across the globe: Chinese, Black African, Jewish, South Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean.

Marking multinational and interdisciplinary theorizations of diaspora, and reflecting disciplinary modalities and methodologies of the humanities and social sciences, "Theorizing Diaspora" is a central resource for understanding diaspora as an emergent and contested theoretical space.

A volume in Education Policy in Practice: Critical Cultural Studies Series Editors Bradley A. U. Levinson, and Margaret Sutton, Indiana University Sally Anderson's book on sport, cultural policy, and ""civil sociality"" in Denmark has been a long time in coming, but it's well worth the wait. Based on many years of familiarity with Danish society, and countless hours of intensive fieldwork, Dr. Anderson provides us with a unique anthropological perspective on the process by which state cultural policy actively engages civil society in a quest to shape social relations in the public sphere. The particular domain of policy and social activity is nonschool, voluntary sport, in its various forms. By definition, of course, such activity takes place outside the regular Danish school curriculum, but it is not for this reason any less ""educational."" Indeed, although it is very broadly attended and institutionalized, perhaps because Danish after-school sport is not compulsory, it is all the more compelling for children and youth, and therefore more powerful in certain ways. Indeed, Dr.Anderson has a signal talent for showing us how afterschool sport in Denmark both transmits and produces social knowledge, and powerfully shapes social relations.

In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict and tribal hostilities simmered for months. "Yemen" "Chronicle "is his extraordinary report both on events that ensued and on the many theoretical--let alone practical--difficulties of doing ethnography in such circumstances. Caton also offers a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.

Since the early 1990s, the seventeen-fold growth in South African sport hunting has made the South African wildlife ranching industry the sixth largest contributor to South Africa's agricultural sector, bringing in $680 million per annum. Biltong Hunting as a Performance of Belonging in Post-Apartheid South Africa links biltong hunting's rapid growth to the 1990s disassembly of the apartheid state and analyzes how the hierarchy, and belonging that biltong hunters associate with it, emerges anew in the post-apartheid context. It examines the narrative and embodied strategies employed by hunters and farmers to create a space that naturalizes the mythic Afrikaner nationalist past in the post-apartheid present.

Bernard Scott has met a long-felt need by authoring a book that shows the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). Scott provides user-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. He explains how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. He provides an account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. He also recounts how encountering cybernetics transformed his thinking and his understanding of life in general.

Exploring some of the ways in which repair practices and perceptions of brokenness vary culturally, Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough argues that repair is both a process and also a consequence which is sought out-an attempt to extend the life of things as well as an answer to failures, gaps, wrongdoings, and leftovers. This volume develops an open-ended combination of empirical and theoretical questions including: What does it mean to claim that something is broken? At what point is something broken repairable? What are the social relationships that take place around repair? And how much tolerance for failure do our societies have?

The community of Agua Blanca, deep within the Machalilla National Park on the coast of Ecuador, found itself facing the twenty-first century with a choice: embrace a booming tourist industry eager to experience a preconceived notion of indigeneity, or risk losing a battle against the encroaching forces of capitalism and development. The facts spoke for themselves, however, as tourism dollars became the most significant source of income in the community. Thus came a nearly inevitable shock, as the daily rhythms of life--rising before dawn to prepare for a long day of maintaining livestock and crops; returning for a late lunch and siesta; joining in a game of soccer followed by dinner in the evening--transformed forever in favor of a new tourist industry and the compromises required to support it. As Practically Invisible demonstrates, for Agua Blancans, becoming a supposedly ""authentic"" version of their own indigenous selves required performing their culture for outsiders, thus becoming these performances within the minds of these visitors. At the heart of this story, then, is a delicate balancing act between tradition and survival, a performance experienced by countless indigenous groups.

Professor Linda M. Fedigan, Member of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has made major contributions to our understanding of the behavioural ecology of primates. Furthermore, Linda Fedigan pioneered and continues to advance scholarship on the role of women in science, as well as actively promoting the inclusion of women in the academy. A symposium in honour of her career was held in Banff (Alberta, Canada) in December 2016, during which former and current students and collaborators, as well as scientists with similar research interests, presented and discussed their work and their connections to Linda Fedigan. These presentations and discussions are here presented as chapters in this festschrift. The original works presented in this book are organized around four major research areas that have been greatly advanced and influenced by Linda Fedigan: Primate life histories Sex roles, gender, and science Primate-environment interactions Primate adaptation to changing environments

Rational exercise of our responsibility requires us to relate the globalization process to the ends and purposes that properly befit human life and human community. Economic 'ends' are merely the 'means' to ends of a higher order, which can only be specified in terms of moral duty and ethical purpose. The contributors to this book explore political-ethical issues of globalization, including terrorism, institutional change and distribution in the world economy, the role of the United Nations and international financial institutions, the regimes of international trade and technology transfer, the effects of regionalism in the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the failure of Russia, human rights enforcement in Africa, and the prospects for global governance. This book was originally published as Volume 4 no. 3-4 (2005) of Brill's journal "Perspectives on Global Development and Technology,"

Is a person sitting next to a grave of a loved one, talking to the deceased person, engaging in a religious act? Many traditional definitions of religion would probably say no. However, the research that forms the basis of this book suggests that such activity is very widespread in contemporary Britain and the author aims to argue that it is probably much more typical of a fundamental religious act than much of what happens in churches, synagogues or mosques. Beginning with the definitions of religion provided by a number of anthropologists and sociologists this book claims that the large majority of these definitions have been influenced by Christian thinking, so leading to definitions that stress the systematic nature of religion, the importance of the transcendental and the transformative activity of religion. Through a detailed exploration of a number of ethnographic studies of religious activity in various parts of England, these aspects of traditional definitions are challenged. Martin Stringer argues, borrowing Durkheim's language, that the most elementary form of religious life in many Western societies today, and by implication in many other societies around the world, is situational, mundane and concerned with helping people to cope with their day to day lives.

In this stimulating and timely book, Scott Bailey, an American teaching Russian and Eurasian history in Japan, traces the history of the dynamic Russian Geographical Society, which carried out major research expeditions to Central Eurasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The immediate goal of its expeditions was to collect ethnographic, geographic, and natural-scientific information on these regions and their peoples. Their wider benefits established and extended Russia's imperial control in Central Eurasia, including some regions under direct or indirect Chinese control. These expeditions served the acquisition of social and scientific information to benefit the Russian Empire's colonization efforts. Their leaders were often elites trained in ethnography, geography, and natural science subjects, and a major objective of this book is to give a fuller picture of the diverse biographies of these figures, not all of whom were Russian or European males. In the `Wild Countries' moves chronologically from the founding of the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 to the beginning of the revolutionary period in Russia in 1905. During these decades, research missions became more overtly "imperial" and coincided with the consolidation of Russian hegemony over Central Eurasia and an increasing Russian interest in territories in the western and northern regions of the Chinese Q'ing Empire. The book also addresses wider moves toward imperial projects worldwide.

Durkheimian Studies Etudes Durkheimiennes

W. Watts Miller

SECTION I

Cinq comptes rendus de Durkheim a decouvrir "Dominique Merllie"

Cinq comptes rendus "Emile Durkheim"

Lettres d'Emile Durkheim a Salomon Reinach Introduction "Rafeal Faraco Benthien"

Lettres a Salomon Reinach "Emile Durkheim"

Personal Recollections of Durkheim, Mauss, the Family and Others "Claudette Kennedy"

SECTION II

Durkheim and Approaches to the Study of War "Irene Eulriet"

Durkheim: une sociologie d'Etat "Catherine Colliot-Thelene"

Les archives de Marcel Mauss ont-elles une specificite? - le cas de la collaboration de Marcel Mauss et Henri Hubert "Jean-Franccois Bert"

Gustave Belot, Critic and Admirer of Durkheim: An Introduction "W. S. F. Pickering"

SECTION III REVIEW ARTICLES BOOK REVIEWS"

SECTION I The Mystery of Some 'Last Things' of Emile Durkheim: Notes for a Research Project W.S.F. Pickering Decouverte d'une archive: l' Esquisse d'une theorie de la magie Jean-Francois Bert Durkheim's Lost Argument (1895-1955): Critical Moves on Method and Truth Stephane Baciocchi and Jean-Louis Fabiani Lecon inaugurale: Pragmatisme et Sociologie / Inaugural Lecture: Pragmatism and Sociology, 1913 Emile Durkheim edited and translated by Stephane Baciocchi, Jean-Louis Fabiani and Willie Watts Miller Introduction Transcription Translation SECTION II Durkheim's 'Dualism of Human Nature': Personal Identity and Social Links Giovanni Paoletti From Ideas to Ideals: Effervescence as the Key to Understanding Morality Raquel Weiss Echange, don, reciprocite l'acte de 'donner' chez Simmel et Durkheim Luca Guizzardi and Luca Martignani SECTION III REVIEW ARTICLE Les carrieres de Durkheim en Amerique, Angleterre et France Matthieu Bera BOOK REVIEWS Emile Durkheim, Hobbes a l'agregation. Un cours d'Emile Durkheim suivi par Marcel Mauss, J-F. Bert (ed.) Jean Terrier Emile Durkheim, Les Regles de la methode sociologique, Laurent Mucchielli (ed.) Dominique Merllie Philippe Steiner. Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology, trans. Keith Tribe A.M.C. Waterman Jean Terrier, Visions of the Social: Society as a Political Project in France 1750-1950 Susan Stedman Jones Jean-Francois Bert, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert et la sociologie des religions. Penser et ecrire a deux Nick Allen Derek Robbins, French Post-War Social Theory Mike Gane Anni Greve, Sanctuaries of the City: Lessons from Tokyo Caitlin Meagher

Taiwanese society is in the midst of an immense, exciting effort to define itself, seeking to erect a contemporary identity upon the foundation of a highly distinctive history. This book provides a thorough overview of Taiwanese cultural life. The introduction familiarizes students and interested readers with the island's key geographical and demographic features, and provides a chronological summary of Taiwanese history. In the following chapters, Davison and Reed reveal the uniqueness of Taiwan, and do not present it simply as the laboratory of traditional Chinese culture that some anthropologists of the 1950s through the 1970s sought when mainland China was not accessible. The authors examine how religious devotion in Taiwan is different from China in that the selected deities are those most relevant to the needs of the Taiwanese people. Literature and art, particularly of the 20th century, reflect the Taiwanese quest for identity more than the grand Chinese tradition. The Taiwanese architecture, festivals and leisure activities, music and dance, cuisine and fashion, are also highlighted topics. The final chapter presents the most recent information regarding children and education, and explores the importance of the Taiwanese family in the context of meaningful relationships amongst acquaintances, friends, and institutions that make up the social universe of the Taiwanese. This text is a lively treatment of one of the world's most dynamic societies.