The deep and abiding sectarian divide splintering Northern Ireland has been the focus of considerable attention recently. In particular, the role parades and visual displays play in underscoring opposition has come into the spotlight with the emergence of heightened tensions, close on the heels of a tentative peace. Providing penetrating insights into the historical roots of Northern Ireland's ethnic hostilities, this timely book explores the role of images and material culture in shaping present attitudes. Ritual, identity, class and memory are shown to be potent forces informing trenchant animosities -- animosities which are visually reflected in banners and murals for unionists and nationalists alike. The pivotal role of the Twelfth of July parade in Belfast, when an estimated 100,000 either parade or watch the Orangemen, is highlighted. Anyone interested in the future of Northern Ireland and concerned about escalating conflict across the globe will warmly welcome this impressive study.

The deep and abiding sectarian divide splintering Northern Ireland has been the focus of considerable attention recently. In particular, the role parades and visual displays play in underscoring opposition has come into the spotlight with the emergence of heightened tensions, close on the heels of a tentative peace. Providing penetrating insights into the historical roots of Northern Ireland's ethnic hostilities, this timely book explores the role of images and material culture in shaping present attitudes. Ritual, identity, class and memory are shown to be potent forces informing trenchant animosities -- animosities which are visually reflected in banners and murals for unionists and nationalists alike. The pivotal role of the Twelfth of July parade in Belfast, when an estimated 100,000 either parade or watch the Orangemen, is highlighted. Anyone interested in the future of Northern Ireland and concerned about escalating conflict across the globe will warmly welcome this impressive study.

Carnival songs resemble a tabloid newspaper in their verve, spirit and range of themes. They are a measure of social change and an annual summary of events and opinion. The songs involve considerable artistry and are renowned as well for their raucous humor and vulgar concerns. (Promiscuity and sexual misalliances are common subjects.)
Banned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the Cá diz carnival began a revival in the 1960's following decades of repression. This fascinating book examines carnival song and society during the last years of the Franco dictatorship and the succeeding period of the new constitutional monarchy, when the Andalusians found their voice and Carnival enjoyed an extraordinary florescence. Songs from rural and urban carnivals in several locales throughout the province of Cá diz provide a compelling picture of Andalusian life in both troubled and more flourishing times.

Carnival songs resemble a tabloid newspaper in their verve, spirit and range of themes. They are a measure of social change and an annual summary of events and opinion. The songs involve considerable artistry and are renowned as well for their raucous humor and vulgar concerns. (Promiscuity and sexual misalliances are common subjects.)
Banned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the Cádiz carnival began a revival in the 1960's following decades of repression. This fascinating book examines carnival song and society during the last years of the Franco dictatorship and the succeeding period of the new constitutional monarchy, when the Andalusians found their voice and Carnival enjoyed an extraordinary florescence. Songs from rural and urban carnivals in several locales throughout the province of Cádiz provide a compelling picture of Andalusian life in both troubled and more flourishing times.

Sociology on the Menu is an accessible introduction to the sociology of food. Highlighting the social and cultural dimensions of the human food system, from production to consumption, it encourages us to consider new ways of thinking about the apparently mundane, everyday act of eating. The main areas covered include:
* The origins of human subsistence and the development of the modern food system
* Food, the family and eating out
* Diet, health and the body image
* The meanings of meat and vegetarianism.
Sociology on the Menu provides a comprehensive overview of the literature, particularly helpful in this interdisciplinary field. It focuses on key texts and studies to help students identify major concerns and themes for further study. It urges us to re-appraise the taken for granted and familiar experiences of selecting, preparing and sharing food and to see our own habits and choices, preferences and aversions in their broader cultural context.

Textiles play a decisive role in history: attire not only indicates status, gender, ethnicity, and religion but illustrates how such boundaries are continuously being negotiated, shifted, and recreated. Fashionable Traditions captures the complex reality of Asian handmade textile production and consumption. From traditionalist discourse and cultural authenticity to fashion and market trends, the contributors to this collection demonstrate the multilayered influence of often contradictory forces. In-depth, ethnographic case studies reveal the entangled relationships between local artisans, external interventions, and consumers, while acknowledging the broader frameworks in which such relationships are situated. Together these stories offer a vivid account of the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics in various parts of Asia and emphasize that fashion is neither a Western prerogative nor do its roots reside solely in the West.

Horses with riders trailed by foot processionals, silver bands and pipe bands, furling medieval banners, lavish costumes, and singers and actors--the "Common Riding" is an elaborate, little-studied ritual phenomenon of the border towns of Scotland. In this vividly written and insightful analysis, Gwen Kennedy Neville uses this civic ceremony as a window for glimpsing the process of ritual, symbol, and experience in the development of the concept of "the town" in Western culture.
Based on extensive fieldwork in the town of Selkirk, The Mother Town looks at the Common Riding in detail, uncovering pre-Reformation symbolism and pageantry--often medieval and Catholic--in a region that has been Protestant for over four hundred years. Neville shows how the ceremony is a model of the way civic ritual serves to construct a system of towns which gives rise to the modern world. Further, she contends that these civic rituals create a ceremonial setting in which the contradictions between tradition and modernity can be temporarily resolved and where past and present live side by side.
Neville offers a provocative and illuminating study of how the ritual of Common Riding makes a dramatic statement about local strife, communal independence, and Protestantism in the towns of the Scottish Borders.

"Amply illustrated, this volume offers us a look at Christmas Past and a chance to understand why Christmas Present is the way it is."
--"Wilson Library Bulletin"

In days of old, Christmas was defined by the custom of exchanging simple handmade gifts. Today, it has become a multi-billion industry, synonymous with commercialism and consumption. How did this transformation occur?

In this incisive and engaging examination of how Christmas has evolved since 1880, Waits chronicles the history of the holiday, from its origin to its current form. The book is illustrated with dozens of historical photographs and will be of interest to cultural and social historians alike.

Christmas was a relatively modest occasion in the English- speaking world, celebrated by the exchange of modest handmade gifts, until the Victorians invested the holiday with immense significance as part of a larger effort to celebrate home, family, and a mythic past of well-ordered communities. By the late 19th century, Christmas had become a major American festival. Today, it is a multi-billion dollar industry and easily the most important seasonal event of the year.

In this survey of the modern American Christmas, William Waits shows us how this holiday emerged, tracing its evolution from the days prior to 1880 when people presented one another with simple crafted presents to the turn of the century when industrialization brought with it waves of inexpensive, tawdry gimcracks. In the early twentieth century, reform-minded Americans reflecting on the new Christmas prompted a backlash against this cheapening of the Yule tradition, and the Christmas card was born. Henceforth, family members and close friendsexchanged useful, costly items, while cards were sent to acquaintances and distant relatives. These reformers also persuaded retail stores to keep their regular hours of business during the holiday, rather than lengthening them, to give trade workers the opportunity to join in the celebration. They also rationalized the collection and distribution of holiday charity, resulting in the Christmas celebration we have today. Waits's book clearly illustrates that the notion that Christmas is uncontrollable is simply untrue.

An incisive and engaging history of giftgiving, "The Modern Christmas in America"also examines the differing traditions of giftgiving to friends, employees, the poor, and among entire communities. Handsomely illustrated with dozens of historical photographs, this book is not only the perfect holiday gift but will also be of interest to any student of American history and culture.

This book explores the interrelations between food, technology and knowledge-sharing practices in producing digital food cultures. Digital Food Cultures adopts an innovative approach to examine representations and practices related to food across a variety of digital media: blogs and vlogs (video blogs), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, technology developers' promotional media, online discussion forums and self-tracking apps and devices. The book emphasises the diversity of food cultures available on the internet and other digital media, from those celebrating unrestrained indulgence in food to those advocating very specialised diets requiring intense commitment and focus. While most of the digital media and devices discussed in the book are available and used by people across the world, the authors offer valuable insights into how these global technologies are incorporated into everyday lives in very specific geographical contexts. This book offers a novel contribution to the rapidly emerging area of digital food studies and provides a framework for understanding contemporary practices related to food production and consumption internationally.

The study of ancestor worship has an eminent pedigree in two disciplines: social anthropology and folklore (Goody 1962: 14-25; Newell 1976; Fortes 1976; Takeda 1976). Despite obvious differences in geographical specialization and intellectual orientation, researchers in both fields have shared a common approach to this subject: both have tried to relate the ancestor cult of a given society to its family and kin-group organization. Such a method is to be expected of social anthropologists, given the nature of their discipline; but even the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio, whose approach to folk culture stems from historical and nationalist concerns, began his work on ancestors with a discussion of Japan's descent system and family structure (Yanagita 1946). Indeed, connections between ancestor cults and social relations are obvious. As we pursue this line of analysis, we shall see that rural Koreans themselves are quite sophisticated about such matters. Many studies of ancestor cults employ a combination of social and psychological approaches to explain the personality traits attributed to the dead by their living kin. Particular attention has long been given to explaining the hostile or punitive character of the deceased in many societies (Freud 1950; Opler 1936; Gough 1958; Fortes 1965). Only recently, however, has the popularity of such beliefs been recognized in China, Korea, and Japan (Ahern 1973; A. Wolf 1974b; Kendall 1977; 1979; Yoshida 1967; Kerner 1976; Lebra 1976). The earliest and most influential studies of ancestor cults in East Asia, produced by native scholars (Hozumi 1913; Yanagita 1946; Hsu 1948), overemphasize the benign and protective qualities of ancestors. Some regional variations notwithstanding, this earlier bias appears to reflect a general East Asian reluctance to acknowledge instances of ancestral affliction. Such reticence is not found in all societies with ancestor cults, however; nor, in Korea, China, and Japan, is it equally prevalent among men and women. Therefore, we seek not only to identify the social experiences that give rise to beliefs in ancestral hostility, but to explain the concomitant reluctance to acknowledge these beliefs and its varying intensity throughout East Asia. In view of the limited amount of ethnographic data available from Korea, we have not attempted a comprehensive assessment of the ancestor cult in Korean society; instead we have kept our focus on a single kin group. We have drawn on data from other communities, however, in order to separate what is apparently true of Korea in general from what may be peculiar to communities like Twisongdwi, a village of about three hundred persons that was the site of our fieldwork. In this task, we benefited substantially from three excellent studies of Korean ancestor worship and lineage organization (Lee Kwang-Kyu 1977a; Choi Jai-seuk 1966a; Kim Taik-Kyoo 1964) and from two recent accounts of Korean folk religion and ideology (Dix 1977; Kendall 1979). Yet we are still a long way from a comprehensive understanding of how Korean beliefs and practices have changed over time, correlate with different levels of class status, or are affected by regional variations in Korean culture and social organization. Because we want to provide a monograph accessible to a rather diverse readership, we avoid using Korean words and disciplinary terminology whenever possible. Where a Korean term is particularly important, we give it in parentheses immediately after its English translation. Korean-alphabet orthographies for these words appear in the Character List, with Chinese-character equivalents for terms of Chinese derivation. As for disciplinary terminology, we have adopted only the anthropological term "lineage," which is of central importance to our study. We use "lineage" to denote an organized group of persons linked through exclusively male ties (agnatically) to an ancestor who lived at least four generations ago. (A married woman could be said to have an informal membership in her husband's lineage until her death.) Thus, the term "Twisongdwi lineage" designates the agnatic kin group located in the village of Twisongdwi. This term does not refer to a line of ancestry. Smaller lineages may collectively constitute a larger lineage; for example, the descendants of two brothers may form two lineages but also ritually observe their common descent from an earlier agnatic forebear.

This lecture deals with the three domains of food which raise complex epistemological, political and moral issues. Through an examination of a wide range of material drawn from anthropology, history, literature and political economy, there is discussion of the relationship between food and entitlement, gender, notions of the body, and development. Food is shown to be a powerful metaphor for our sense of self, our social and political relations, our cosmology and our global system.

India in the Italian Renaissance provides a systematic, chronological survey of early Italian representations of India and Indians from the late medieval period to the end of the 16th century, and their resonance within the cultural context of Renaissance Italy. The study focuses in particular on Italian attitudes towards the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent and questions how Renaissance Italians, schooled in the admiration of classical antiquity, responded to the challenge of this contemporary pagan world. Meera Juncu draws from a wide-ranging selection of contemporary travel literature to trace the development of Italian ideas about Indians both before and after Vasco Da Gama's landing in Calicut. After an introduction to the key concepts and a survey of inherited notions about India, the works of a diverse range of writers and editors, including Marco Polo, Petrarch and Giovanni Battista Ramusio, are analysed in detail. Through its discussion of these texts, this book examines whether 'India' came in any way to represent a pagan civilization comparable to the classical antiquity celebrated in Italy during the Renaissance. India in the Italian Renaissance offers a new and exciting perspective on this fascinating period for students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance and the history of India.

In spite of Islam's long history in Europe and the growing number of Muslims resident in Europe, little research exists on Muslim pilgrimage in Europe. This collection of eleven chapters is the first systematic attempt to fill this lacuna in an emerging research field. Placing the pilgrims' practices and experiences centre stage, scholars from history, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, and art history examine historical and contemporary hajj and non-hajj pilgrimage to sites outside and within Europe. Sources include online travelogues, ethnographic data, biographic information, and material and performative culture. The interlocutors are European-born Muslims, converts to Islam, and Muslim migrants to Europe, in addition to people who identify themselves with other faiths. Most interlocutors reside in Albania, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Norway. This book identifies four courses of developments: Muslims resident in Europe continue to travel to Mecca and Medina, and to visit shrine sites located elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. Secondly, there is a revival of pilgrimage to old pilgrimage sites in South-eastern Europe. Thirdly, new Muslim pilgrimage sites and practices are being established in Western Europe. Fourthly, Muslims visit long-established Christian pilgrimage sites in Europe. These practices point to processes of continuity, revitalization, and innovation in the practice of Muslim pilgrimage in Europe. Linked to changing sectarian, political, and economic circumstances, pilgrimage sites are dynamic places of intra-religious as well as inter-religious conflict and collaboration, while pilgrimage experiences in multiple ways also transform the individual and affect the home-community.

A vivid look at China's shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China's mass manufacturing and "copycat" production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China's governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a "new frontier" of innovation. Lindtner's investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces-makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends-in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production-tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a "new" optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Spru th Magers

Japanese weddings have become thoroughly commercial affairs, with the vast majority now conducted at specialized establishments that offer, at great cost, lavish services for the Shinto ceremony and the ensuring reception. The postwar expansion of the industry providing these services is explained in part by its aggressive promotion, by its promise of 'a story ceremony of love ... wrapped in the warm blessings of loved ones, in harmony and splendor'. This book focuses on Japanese weddings as a window on contemporary values, analyzing the relation between the commercialization of these services and their symbolic content. Weddings mark the attainment of fully adult status in Japan; the commercial industry celebrates this passage with idealized images of the marital state, images whose significance runs deep. To say what it means to be a model husband and wife engages more general ideas about relations between the sexes. To say what it means to be fully adult also of society, thereby touching on fundamental notions about society itself and the individual's place within it. The book begins with historical background on the Japanese wedding and the development of its modern form. We then follow the wedding couple and the events involving them and their parents through their engagement and marriage ceremony. The Japanese continue to distinguish between two types of marriage, the arranged and the love match, and the author examines differences in the two forms. As part of his research, the author worked for ten months in a commercial wedding hall, and he gives a backstage look at the roles played by various personnel in the wedding industry. The author analyzes the symbolic content of the wedding as portraying the basic Japanese concepts of gender, person, and society, and finally summarizes the effects of the wedding's commercialization.

The Orthodox Christian tradition has all too often been sidelined in conversations around contemporary religion. Despite being distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism in both theology and practice, it remains an underused setting for academic inquiry into current lived religious practice. This collection, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance by investigating modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender. Starting with the traditional teachings and discourses around gender in the Orthodox Church, the book moves on to demonstrate the diversity of responses to those narratives that can be found among Orthodox populations in Europe and North America. Using case studies from several countries, with both large and small Orthodox populations, contributors use an interdisciplinary approach to address how gender and religion interact in contexts such as, iconography, conversion, social activism and ecumenical relations, among others. From Greece and Russia to Finland and the USA, this volume sheds new light on the myriad ways in which gender is manifested, performed, and engaged within contemporary Orthodoxy. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that employing the analytical lens of gender enables new insights into Orthodox Christianity as a lived tradition. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of both Religious Studies and Gender Studies.

Japanese weddings have become thoroughly commercial affairs, with the vast majority now conducted at specialized establishments that offer, at great cost, lavish services for the Shinto ceremony and the ensuring reception. The postwar expansion of the industry providing these services is explained in part by its aggressive promotion, by its promise of 'a story ceremony of love ... wrapped in the warm blessings of loved ones, in harmony and splendor'. This book focuses on Japanese weddings as a window on contemporary values, analyzing the relation between the commercialization of these services and their symbolic content. Weddings mark the attainment of fully adult status in Japan; the commercial industry celebrates this passage with idealized images of the marital state, images whose significance runs deep. To say what it means to be a model husband and wife engages more general ideas about relations between the sexes. To say what it means to be fully adult also of society, thereby touching on fundamental notions about society itself and the individual's place within it. The book begins with historical background on the Japanese wedding and the development of its modern form. We then follow the wedding couple and the events involving them and their parents through their engagement and marriage ceremony. The Japanese continue to distinguish between two types of marriage, the arranged and the love match, and the author examines differences in the two forms. As part of his research, the author worked for ten months in a commercial wedding hall, and he gives a backstage look at the roles played by various personnel in the wedding industry. The author analyzes the symbolic content of the wedding as portraying the basic Japanese concepts of gender, person, and society, and finally summarizes the effects of the wedding's commercialization.

Bridewealth and dowry have certain obvious similarities in that they both involve the transmission of property at marriage, the usual interpretation suggesting that what distinguishes them is the direction in which the property travels - in the case of bridewealth, from the husband and his kin to the wife and her kin, and in the case of dowry, vice versa. The authors of these 1973 papers criticise this interpretation as oversimplified, and analyse the two institutions in the contexts of Africa, with its preponderance of bridewealth, and South Asia, where dowry is the commoner institution. Dr Goody seeks to explain these geographical differences in terms of the basic structure of the societies and the rules governing the inheritance of property. Dr Tambiah considers these institutions in India, Ceylon and Burma as two kinds of property transfer, examining Indian juridical concepts, and relating these to the concepts and practices of Ceylon and Burma.

Elaine Chiew's stories are interlaced with humour, compassion and the importance of food and cooking, and the memories that meals evoke, as her characters negotiate unfamiliar worlds, raise children in another country or introduce parents to partners who don't speak their language. In the title story, four writers find their cultural bonds of friendship tested when a handsome young Asian man joins their group. In other stories, a brother searches for his sister forced to serve as a comfort woman during World War Two; three Singaporean sisters run a French gourmet restaurant in New York; a woman raps about being a Tiger Mother in Belgravia; and a filmmaker struggles to document the lives of samsui women-Singapore's thrifty, hardworking construction workers. Elaine Chiew drills below the surface of her characters' circumstances with exemplary narrative skill and subtlety. Her stories are as varied, worldly and emotionally resonant as the characters themselves. This is a fabulous debut collection and heralds an exciting new literary talent.

The study of ancestor worship has an eminent pedigree in two disciplines: social anthropology and folklore (Goody 1962: 14-25; Newell 1976; Fortes 1976; Takeda 1976). Despite obvious differences in geographical specialization and intellectual orientation, researchers in both fields have shared a common approach to this subject: both have tried to relate the ancestor cult of a given society to its family and kin-group organization. Such a method is to be expected of social anthropologists, given the nature of their discipline; but even the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio, whose approach to folk culture stems from historical and nationalist concerns, began his work on ancestors with a discussion of Japan's descent system and family structure (Yanagita 1946). Indeed, connections between ancestor cults and social relations are obvious. As we pursue this line of analysis, we shall see that rural Koreans themselves are quite sophisticated about such matters. Many studies of ancestor cults employ a combination of social and psychological approaches to explain the personality traits attributed to the dead by their living kin. Particular attention has long been given to explaining the hostile or punitive character of the deceased in many societies (Freud 1950; Opler 1936; Gough 1958; Fortes 1965). Only recently, however, has the popularity of such beliefs been recognized in China, Korea, and Japan (Ahern 1973; A. Wolf 1974b; Kendall 1977; 1979; Yoshida 1967; Kerner 1976; Lebra 1976). The earliest and most influential studies of ancestor cults in East Asia, produced by native scholars (Hozumi 1913; Yanagita 1946; Hsu 1948), overemphasize the benign and protective qualities of ancestors. Some regional variations notwithstanding, this earlier bias appears to reflect a general East Asian reluctance to acknowledge instances of ancestral affliction. Such reticence is not found in all societies with ancestor cults, however; nor, in Korea, China, and Japan, is it equally prevalent among men and women. Therefore, we seek not only to identify the social experiences that give rise to beliefs in ancestral hostility, but to explain the concomitant reluctance to acknowledge these beliefs and its varying intensity throughout East Asia. In view of the limited amount of ethnographic data available from Korea, we have not attempted a comprehensive assessment of the ancestor cult in Korean society; instead we have kept our focus on a single kin group. We have drawn on data from other communities, however, in order to separate what is apparently true of Korea in general from what may be peculiar to communities like Twisongdwi, a village of about three hundred persons that was the site of our fieldwork. In this task, we benefited substantially from three excellent studies of Korean ancestor worship and lineage organization (Lee Kwang-Kyu 1977a; Choi Jai-seuk 1966a; Kim Taik-Kyoo 1964) and from two recent accounts of Korean folk religion and ideology (Dix 1977; Kendall 1979). Yet we are still a long way from a comprehensive understanding of how Korean beliefs and practices have changed over time, correlate with different levels of class status, or are affected by regional variations in Korean culture and social organization. Because we want to provide a monograph accessible to a rather diverse readership, we avoid using Korean words and disciplinary terminology whenever possible. Where a Korean term is particularly important, we give it in parentheses immediately after its English translation. Korean-alphabet orthographies for these words appear in the Character List, with Chinese-character equivalents for terms of Chinese derivation. As for disciplinary terminology, we have adopted only the anthropological term "lineage," which is of central importance to our study. We use "lineage" to denote an organized group of persons linked through exclusively male ties (agnatically) to an ancestor who lived at least four generations ago. (A married woman could be said to have an informal membership in her husband's lineage until her death.) Thus, the term "Twisongdwi lineage" designates the agnatic kin group located in the village of Twisongdwi. This term does not refer to a line of ancestry. Smaller lineages may collectively constitute a larger lineage; for example, the descendants of two brothers may form two lineages but also ritually observe their common descent from an earlier agnatic forebear.

Originally published in 1971 this book argues that certain aspects of traditional African social systems have been misunderstood because of a failure to appreciate what is implied by important differences between the technologies of the major traditional African states and those of Europe and Asia. Differences in the modes of agricultural production were connected with differences in other aspects of the social system such as the relations between subjects and chiefs. This means that comparisons with the feudal systems of Western Europe or the monarchies of Asiatic states have definite limitations. Differences in technology not only affected not only the means of production but also of destruction. The importance of differential access to the means of domination is stressed as a critical factor in African political systems. This is an aspect which has been obscured in many studies that have relied largely on material gathered after the establishment of colonial rule.

This study, a history of the kind of people who are supposed to have one, challenges the fashionable view that so-called primitives live in a timeless present. The conventional wisdom, that such societies are static, is shown by the author to be an artifact of anthropological method. By piecing together extended oral histories and written history records, the author found that headhunting among the Ilongots of Northern Luzon, Philippines, was not an unchanging ancient custom, but a cultural practice that has shifted dramatically over the course of the past century. Headhunting stopped, resumed, and stopped again; its victims at various periods were fellow Ilongots, Japanese soldiers, and lowland Christian Filipinos; it took place as surprise attack, planned vendetta, or distant raid against strangers. Placing headhunting in its social, cultural, and historical contexts requires a novel sense of how to use biography, recorded history, and narrative in the analysis of small-scale, non-literate local communities. This study combines historical and ethnographic method and documents the inherent orchestration of structure, events, time, and consciousness. The book is illustrated with 34 photographs.

This interdisciplinary study explores how classical ideals of generosity influenced the writing and practice of gift giving in medieval Europe. In assuming that medieval gift giving was shaped by oral 'folk models', historians have traditionally followed in the footsteps of social anthropologists and sociologists such as Marcel Mauss and Pierre Bourdieu. This first in-depth investigation into the influence of the classical ideals of generosity and gift giving in medieval Europe reveals to the contrary how historians have underestimated the impact of classical literature and philosophy on medieval culture and ritual. Focusing on the idea of the gift expounded in the classical texts read most widely in the Middle Ages, including Seneca the Younger's De beneficiis and Cicero's De officiis, Lars Kjaer investigates how these ideas were received, adapted and utilised by medieval writers across a range of genres, and how they influenced the practice of generosity.