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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics > Biological anthropology
Modern urban spaces are, by definition, mixed socio-spatial configurations. In many ways, their enduring success and vitality lie in the richness of their ethnic texture and ongoing exchange of economic goods, cultural practices, political ideas and social movements. This mixture, however, is rarely harmonious and has often led to violent conflict over land and identity. Focusing on mixed towns in Israel/Palestine, this insightful volume theorizes the relationship between modernity and nationalism and the social dynamics which engender and characterize the growth of urban spaces and the emergence therein of inter-communal relations. For more than a century, Arabs and Jews have been interacting in the workplaces, residential areas, commercial enterprises, cultural arenas and political theatres of mixed towns. Defying prevailing Manichean oppositions, these towns both exemplify and resist the forces of nationalist segregation. In this interdisciplinary volume, a new generation of Israeli and Palestinian scholars come together to explore ways in which these towns have been perceived as utopian or dystopian and whether they are best conceptualized as divided, dual or colonial. Identifying ethnically mixed towns as a historically specific analytic category, this volume calls for further research, comparison and debate.
For many years anthropologists have speculated about primitive warfare, its place in a particular culture, its form, and its consequences on other tribes. This full-scale ethnography of the Dugum Dani centers on the issue of hostility between groups of human beings and the place and function of violence. Warfare, like rituals and kinship alliances, is part of a total culture, and for this reason Professor Heider has approached the Dani from a holistic point of view. Other aspects of Dani life and organization are shown in interrelationship with the institution of warfare, such as the social, ecological, and technological elements in the Dani way of life. Professor Heider examines particularly the role of warfare itself in terms of the particular needs, and lack of them. The first section of this book documents the Dani and their warfare and provides one of the most detailed accounts of tribal life available. The second section focuses on the material aspects of Dani culture, to explore the interrelationships of the material objects with the other aspects of Dani culture; this analysis is especially interesting since the Dani moved from a stone-age culture to steel tools during the period of study itself. Professor Heider also notes the distinctive aspects of Dani culture; the paucity of color, number, and other attribute terms, the near absence of art; their five-year post-partum sexual abstinence, and other traits that seem to suggest that the Dani have little interest in intellectual elaboration or sex, and that despite their warfare, they are not a particularly aggressive people. Including previously unpublished photographs and descriptions of tribal life and warfare, this book provides anthropologists with a full and vivid account of Dani culture and with new insights into the general problems of human aggression. "Karl G. Heider" has done extensive field research in New Guinea, at the Mayan site of Tikal in Guatemala, and in Thailand, France, Arizona, and South Dakota. He was a member of the Harvard-Peabody Expedition in 1961 that documented the Dani in the film "Dead Birds" and was co-author of the book "Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age." Professor Heider has contributed articles to the "Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Man, Anthropos, and American Anthropologist." He is currently Associate provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of South Carolina. He has served as Chair on the committee of ethics for the American Anthropological Association as well as President of the general Anthropology division of AAA.
This is a book about silences. And land. Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic. Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences. He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land - and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism. In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity - as well as hope.
In this work John Bone provides a lively and engaging insight into the social world of direct selling organizations. He investigates these under-researched organizations via a detailed ethnography of two home improvement companies selling products such as fitted kitchens, double glazing and conservatories, as well as developing wider sociological debates on trust and interaction. These organizations tend to be loosely ordered and internally competitive collectives whose sole aim is to maximize short term profits through sales strategies that routinely employ the calculative exploitation of consumer norms and expectations. John Bone uses his findings to argue that amid the wave of increasing deregulation and liberalization that has supplanted the planned and regulated form of capitalism that predominated until the 1970s, such conditions are now becoming prevalent in mainstream contemporary organizations, threatening to unleash a latent disorder that underlies the rationality of 'modern' business.
A major contribution to the literature of Burmese history and politics, this book traces the rich and tragic history of the Mon people of Burma and Thailand, from the pre-colonial era to the present day. This vivid account of ethnic politics and civil war situates the story of Mon nationalism within the 'big picture' of developments in Burma, Thailand and the region. Primarily an empirical study, it also addresses issues of identity and anticipates Burmese politics in the new millennium. A particular feature of the book is its first-hand descriptions of insurgency and displacement, drawn from the author's experiences as an aid worker in the war zone.
Drawing upon anthropological studies that document culturally specific ways of perceiving ethic Others in Greece and Cyprus, this book explores the cultural boundaries of the categories 'Greek' and 'Turk', and compares views on what it means to be one of these ethnic groups or both. The contributors examine the opinions of diverse social groups, such as ordinary middle-class citizens, intellectuals, army officers, children, villagers, refugees from Asia Minor, and Greek-and-Turkisj-Cypriots. They also investigate the local attitudes to international politics and highlight the contextual - as opposed to immutable and essentialist - meaning of evaluations about nations, such as Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, and their citizens. When Greeks think about Turks carefully unpacks the cultural meaning of popular metaphors, stereotypes and versions of history as these are articulated in the context of discussions about the Turks in Greece. It sets the template for understanding how local perceptions of resemblance and difference provide a conceptual framework for defining and negotiating ethnic identity at the local, national and international level. It sheds valuable light on the politics of identity-making and the constitution of nationalism in Greece and Cyprus. This book was previously published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.
The Republic of Kalmykia is situated in the South East of the
European part of the Russian Federation. The Kalmyks occupy a
unique position among the peoples of Europe in several respects,
most conspicuously as being the only Buddhist people group in
Europe.
Plants Matter explores how plants and people live together. This is not only a book about the importance of plants and how people use them, but it argues also that knowing the world is achieved-with plants. In addition to populating the landscape, plants alter human physiology in multiple material ways, through gatherings or through sensorial conversations using the chemistry of taste, perfume, colour, sound and textures. The chapters gathered in this volume offer a range of interdisciplinary perspectives that use ethnographic and ethnobotanical information to explore how the behaviours and capacities of certain plants around the world have enticed, excited and even seduced people to pay attention.
Landscape and Race in the United States is the definitive volume on racialized landscapes in the United States. Edited by Richard Schein, each essay is grounded in a particular location but all of the essays are informed by the theoretical vision that the cultural landscapes of America are infused with race and America's racial divide. While featuring the black/white divide, the book also investigates other social landscapes including Chinatowns, Latino landscapes in the Southwest and white suburban landscapes. The essays are accessible and readable providing historical and contemporary coverage.
Landscape and Race in the United States is the definitive volume on racialized landscapes in the United States. Edited by Richard Schein, each essay is grounded in a particular location but all of the essays are informed by the theoretical vision that the cultural landscapes of America are infused with race and America's racial divide. While featuring the black/white divide, the book also investigates other social landscapes including Chinatowns, Latino landscapes in the Southwest and white suburban landscapes. The essays are accessible and readable providing historical and contemporary coverage.
Debates about the Black Atlantic have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual African-American focus of the field, presenting fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to:
Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies."
Debates about the 'Black Atlantic' have alerted us to an experience of modernization that diverges from the dominant Western narratives of globalization and technological progress. This outstanding volume expands the concept of the Black Atlantic by reaching beyond the usual African-American focus of the field, presenting fresh perspectives on postcolonial experiences of technology and modernization. A team of renowned contributors come together in this volume in order to: redefine and expand ideas of Black Atlantic challenge unified concepts of modernization from a postcolonial perspective question fashionable concepts of the transnational by returning to the local and the national offer new approaches to cross-cultural mechanisms of exchange explore utopian uses of technology in the postcolonial sphere. Exploring a variety of national, diasporan and transnational counternarratives to Western modernization, Beyond the Black Atlantic makes a valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial, literary and cultural studies.
Despite their small area, the southern islands of Japan can be
seen as stepping stones towards a more nuanced view of cultural
osmosis between Japan and the outside world. This book presents an
ethnographic portrayal of the people of the Southern Ryukyu Islands
and their world. In particular it explores the mind of the
islanders, their relationship with the natural world, their social
relationships, and the rituals which represent and give expression
to these relationships. Based on extensive original research, including participant observation, the book allows the authentic voices of the Ryukyu Island worlds to speak for themselves as well as setting the work in the wider context of anthropology, Japanese Studies and Pacific Island studies.
Ethos and Identity asks the ever-puzzling question: What is ethnicity and how is it to be explained? In a new introduction to this work, Athena Leoussi describes Epstein's response to this challenging age-old query, and demonstrates why this classic volume is of continuing importance. Originally published thirty years ago, Ethos and Identity still fascinates the twenty-first century reader. Epstein's volume explains ethnic revivals of the past century, while the new introduction discusses those that occurred after the book's original publication, such as during the collapse of the communist Eastern bloc in the 1990s. Epstein offers insight into other ethnic reawakenings, such as that experienced during the late 1960s and early 1970s after the collapse of post-colonial east Asia. Prior to this, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, following World War II and the establishment of the United Nations, it was expected that ethnic identifications would be superseded by a more modern, universalistic, rational, civic- or class-based form. This did not occur. Instead, as nations collapsed and were reborn in new forms, people continued to identify with their ethnicity in describing themselves, even when their countries, at least as they knew them, no longer existed. In short, people and their cultures live on long after political and national boundaries have disappeared and been redrawn. Epstein's decisive contribution to the understanding of ethnicity proposes a "social anthropology of affect." People incorporate the social structure of ethnicity into the makeup of their personality and, thus, self-identification. Ethos and Identity is sure to interest students of anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and ethnicity. A. L. Epstein, anthropologist, professor, and writer, held research fellowships and appointments at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Lansaka, Northern Rhodesia, the University of Manchester, the Australian National University in Canberra, the University of Sussex, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in Wessenaar.
The number of poor people in China is huge, despite recent economic
advances. The minorities in China constitute less than ten per cent
of the entire population, yet they represent forty to fifty per
cent of the absolute poor. This compelling book investigates the
problem of poverty and inequality in among Chinese ethnic, focusing
in particular on two important questions: Have the minorities
shared the fruits of spectacular economic growth in China during
the past two decades? Is their backwardness due to ethnic and
cultural factors or to extremely low incomes?
"Multiculturalism and Citizenship" investigates the European
dimension of multiculturalism and immigration. This book argues
that the political theory discourse of multiculturalism and
resulting policies in this area assume an interpretation of
liberalism that has developed from the American experience, rather
than the European, and that this issue must be addressed. Much of
the theoretical debate up to now understates the normative power of
majority/state nationality, and overlooks the diverse societal and
political contexts that may condition multicultural debates in
different countries. Most seriously, such debate misses out the
central feature of the multicultural challenge in Western Europe
today: the assertion of religious-communal, especially Muslim,
identities in polities whose self image is secular. This book
argues, therefore, that a European theory must focus on different
normative and political dilemmas than a North American one and must
interrogate the claims for and against secularism.
"Multiculturalism and Citizenship" investigates the European
dimension of multiculturalism and immigration. This book argues
that the political theory discourse of multiculturalism and
resulting policies in this area assume an interpretation of
liberalism that has developed from the American experience, rather
than the European, and that this issue must be addressed. Much of
the theoretical debate up to now understates the normative power of
majority/state nationality, and overlooks the diverse societal and
political contexts that may condition multicultural debates in
different countries. Most seriously, such debate misses out the
central feature of the multicultural challenge in Western Europe
today: the assertion of religious-communal, especially Muslim,
identities in polities whose self image is secular. This book
argues, therefore, that a European theory must focus on different
normative and political dilemmas than a North American one and must
interrogate the claims for and against secularism.
This revealing book explores the processes of racialization, class and gender, and examines how these processes play out in the everyday lives of white women living in London with young children. Bridget Byrne analyzes the flexibility of racialized discourse in everyday life, whilst simultaneously arguing for a radical deconstruction of the notions of race these discourses create. Byrne focuses on the experience of white mothers and their children, as a key site in the reproduction of class, race and gender subjectivities, offering a compelling account of both the experience of motherhood and ideas of white identity. Byrne's research is unique in its approach of exploring whiteness in the context of practices of mothering. She adopts a broad perspective, and her approach provides a suggestive framework for analyzing the racialization of everyday life. The book's multi-layered analysis shifts expertly from intimate acts to those which engage with local and national discourses in more public spaces. Reconsidering white identities through white experiences of race, White Lives encompasses many disciplines, making valuable reading for those studying sociology, anthropology, race and ethnicity, and cultural studies. Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2007
This revealing book explores the processes of racialization, class and gender, and examines how these processes play out in the everyday lives of white women living in London with young children. Bridget Byrne analyzes the flexibility of racialized discourse in everyday life, whilst simultaneously arguing for a radical deconstruction of the notions of race these discourses create. Byrne focuses on the experience of white mothers and their children, as a key site in the reproduction of class, race and gender subjectivities, offering a compelling account of both the experience of motherhood and ideas of white identity. Byrne's research is unique in its approach of exploring whiteness in the context of practices of mothering. She adopts a broad perspective, and her approach provides a suggestive framework for analyzing the racialization of everyday life. The book's multi-layered analysis shifts expertly from intimate acts to those which engage with local and national discourses in more public spaces. Reconsidering white identities through white experiences of race, White Lives encompasses many disciplines, making valuable reading for those studying sociology, anthropology, race and ethnicity, and cultural studies. Winner of the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2007
First published in 2006. Who and what are the 'indigenous people'? The question has become highly contentious in India today, where eighty million peoples belonging to the state category of 'scheduled tribes' are attempting to gain international recognition as indigenous people as a part of struggle for recognition and rights in land and resources. This volume interrogates the politics surrounding the category of peoples in India known as 'tribals' or 'adivasis' and more recently 'indigenous peoples'.
The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe brought widespread fear of a 'tidal wave' of immigrants from the East into Western Europe. Quite apart from the social and political importance, East-West migration also poses a challenge to established theories of migration, as in most cases the migrant flow cannot be categorised as either refugee movement or a labour migration. Indeed much of the trans-border movement is not officially recognised, as many migrants are temporary, commuting, 'tourists' or illegal, and remain invisible to the authorities. This book focuses on Russian migration into Western Europe following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Helen Kopnina explores the concept of 'community' through an examination of the lives of Russian migrants in two major European cities, London and Amsterdam. In both cases Kopnina finds an 'invisible community', inadequately defined in existing literature. Arguing that Russian migrants are highly diverse, both socially and in terms of their views and adaptation strategies, Kopnina uncovers a community divided by mutual antagonisms, prompting many to reject the idea of belonging to a community at all. Based on extensive interviews, this fascinating and unique ethnographic account of the 'new migration' challenges the underlying assumptions of traditional migration studies and post-modern theories. It provides a powerful critique for the study of new migrant groups in Western Europe and the wider process of European identity formation.
Today there is a preoccupation among development agencies and researchers with getting policy right; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world. But what if development practice is not driven by policy at all? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy which legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impractical and impossible to implement? By focusing in detail on the activities of a development project in tribal western India over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development. David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development. |
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