The Question of the Gift is the first collection of new interdisciplinary essays on the gift. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, including anthropology, literary criticism, economics, philosophy and classics, it provides new paradigms and poses new questions concerning the theory and practice of gift exchange. In addressing these questions, contributors not only challenge the conventions of their fields, but also combine ideas and methods from both the social sciences and humanities to forge innovative ways of confronting this universal phenomenon.

.We 'meet' Kadi on the morning she is to be circumcised when she is still blissfully ignorant of what is about to happen to her. We see her at home, going about her daily chores, eating her breakfast and then accompany her on the journey to the village where the operation is to take place. Photos depict the sacrifice of a chicken as a precursor to her own circumcision and then we witness as Kadi is taken by the buankisa (circumciser), made to undress, held down and then cut.

While the photographs are very confronting, they are portrayed with sensitivity and delicacy, yet evoke sadness and anger, which we hope will serve to rally readers against this practice. A prologue by Dr Olayinka Koso-Thomas, renowned for her work in Africa to end FGM, gives a context for FGM historically and now, and an explanatory text outlines what female genital mutilation actually is.

The practice of female genital cutting, sometimes referred to as female circumcision and common in a number of African states, has attracted increasing attention in recent years and mobilized strong international opposition. While it typically produces a visceral response of horror and revulsion in Westerners, the practice is widely regarded in some cultures as essential for proper development into womanhood and is defended by women who have themselves experienced it and who have had the procedure performed on their own daughters. It is also perceived in many Islamic communities as religiously prescribed, although most Islamic clerics do not condone the practice.

In this study, sociologist Elizabeth Boyle examines this controversial issue from the perspectives of the international system, governments, and individuals. Drawing on previous scholarship, records of international organizations, demographic surveys, and the popular media, Boyle examines how the issue is perceived and acted upon at international, national, and individual levels. Grounding her work in the sociological theory of neoinstitutionalism, Boyle describes how the choices made by governments and individual women are influenced by the often conflicting principles of individual human rights and sovereign autonomy. She concludes that while globalization may exacerbate such conflicts, it can ultimately lead to social change.

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.

As featured in the New York Times and Reader’s Digest "An eye-opener into the pitfalls awaiting the unaware traveler." —Washington Post "Can save the innocent abroad from great gobs of serious trouble." —Chicago Tribune Before you raise your hand to signal the waiter, extend your thumb to hitchhike, or flash the "O.K." sign with thumb and forefinger, Stop! Think of where you are and exactly what you are trying to say—otherwise you could create an international incident. Remember when President Bush thought he was flashing the "V" for Victory sign to cheering Australians? (See inside.) Exploring the ins and outs of body language from head to toe, this newly revised and expanded edition of Roger Axtell’s indispensable guide takes you all around the world of gestures—what they mean, how to use them, and when to avoid them. This latest edition includes:

• Updates about the 200 most popular gestures and signals—and dozens of new examples
• New sections covering special gestures—from American Sign Language and tai chi to flirting and kissing
• Information to guide you through gestures country by country—from Switzerland to Japan, Nigeria to the Netherlands
• Amusing anecdotes and helpful hypothetical scenarios

The West feels lost. Brexit, Trump, the coronavirus: we hurtle from one crisis to another, lacking definition, terrified that our best days are behind us. The central argument of this book is that we can only face the future with hope if we have a proper sense of tradition - political, social and religious. We ignore our past at our peril. The problem, argues Tim Stanley, is that the Western tradition is anti-tradition, that we have a habit of discarding old ways and old knowledge, leaving us uncertain how to act or, even, of who we really are. In this wide-ranging book, we see how tradition can be both beautiful and useful, from the deserts of Australia to the court of nineteenth-century Japan. Some of the concepts defended here are highly controversial in the modern West: authority, nostalgia, rejection of self and the hunt for spiritual transcendence. We'll even meet a tribe who dress up their dead relatives and invite them to tea. Stanley illustrates how apparently eccentric yet universal principles can nurture the individual from birth to death, plugging them into the wider community, and creating a bond between generations. He also demonstrates that tradition, far from being pretentious or rigid, survives through clever adaptation, that it can be surprisingly egalitarian. The good news, he argues, is that it can also be rebuilt. It's been done before. The process is fraught with danger, but the ultimate prize of rediscovering tradition is self-knowledge and freedom.

This text recreates the daily life of the bar room from 1870 to 1920, exploring what it was like to be a "regular" in the old-time saloon of pre-prohibition industrial America. It examines saloon-goers across America, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco, as well as smaller cities such as Sioux City, Shoshone and Oakland. The book takes a look at the rich lore of the bar room - its games, stories, songs, free lunch customs and elaborate system of drinking rituals. It shows how urban workers used saloons as a place to promote their political, social and economic objectives; saloons where union leaders first organized their members, politicians cultivated the working man's vote, and immigrants sought the assistance of their countrymen. It also discusses how gender, ethnicity and class played roles in determining club membership. The author concludes that an underlying code of reciprocity and peer group honour in saloon life unified the regulars and transformed them into a voluntary association. Thus, amid the fumes of beer and cigars, the regulars were able to cultivate the dual benefits of communal companionship and marketplace clout, making the old-time saloon one of the most versatile, ubiquitous and controversial institution in American history.

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant," colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash," to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliche. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way?
In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.

Ethnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram, in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and closed-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. The hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world, the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Early on, while undertaking fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the' dead' had a chance encounter with the author's father's death in the city. The same set of places, thereafter, spoke through the sensory logic of the author's father's death. Dead in Banaras is, thus, both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity.

"Latinx" (pronounced "La-teen-ex") is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, and the poorest but fastest-growing American group, whose political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latinx political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje, translatable as "mixedness" or "hybridity", and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding Latinx cultures and a challenge to America's infamously black-white racial regime.

This publication is the first English translation from the Italian of the fascinating contemporary account of the spectacular four-day celebrations that took place in Pesaro in May 1475 to mark the marriage of Costanzo Sforza Lord of Pesaro and Camilla d'Aragona of Naples. The event was commemorated both in manuscript and early print in an anonymous narration that describes in great detail the arrival of the bride and her welcome procession into Pesaro; the actual marriage ceremony and the celebratory banquet that followed; the pageants, presentation of gifts and fireworks that filled the third day; and the final day's excitement of jousts and yet more theatrical entertainment. The translation has been made from the early printed text (the incunable in the British Library, I.A.31753 Sforza, Costantio Signore di Pesaro, 1475) and also directly from the unique illustrated presentation manuscript in the Vatican Library (MS Vat. Urb. Lat. 899) which, though previously thought to have been produced in 1480, may in fact have been made at the same time as the incunable edition. It is not known for whom the printed books were intended (7 copies only survive), but it is likely that the prominent dignitaries among the 108 guests - who included Federico da Montefeltro, the groom's brother-in-law - would have been the recipients of the account when it was printed in November 1475.This present edition of the text includes all the images that illustrate the original manuscript - 32 full-page miniatures that depict the floats that welcomed the bride at the city gates of Pesaro; the costumed figures at the wedding banquet who represented the presiding Sun and Moon or the male and female messengers of the classical gods and goddesses who announcedthe exotic dishes of the 12-course banquet; and further colourful, unusually interesting illustrations of the ballets, fireworks and triumphs of the final two days of the celebrations. In addition to the Introduction that provides the reader with the historical background and biographical details of the protagonists and personalities of this special occasion, Dr. Bridgeman also adds helpful and highly informative annotations to the narration itself. In addition she provides full descriptions and explanations of the illustrations - all reproduced here in colour - and devotes a separate appendix to listing and explaining all the dishes served at the wedding banquet, together with their ingredients and recipes.

The Qianlong emperor, who dominated the religious and political life of 18th-century China, was in turn ruled by elaborate ritual prescriptions. These texts determined what he wore and ate, how he moved, and above all how he performed the yearly Grand Sacrifices. In this study, Angela Zito offers an analysis of the way ritualizing power was produced jointly by the throne and the official literati who dictated these prescriptions. Forging a critical cultural historical method that challenges traditional categories of Chinese studies, Zito shows that in their "performance", the ritual texts literally embodied the metaphysics upon which imperial power rested. By combining rule through the brush (the production of ritual texts), with rule through the body (mandated performance), the throne both exhibited its power and attempted to control resistance to it. Encompassing Chinese history, anthropology, religion, and performance and cultural studies, this book seeks to bring a new perspective to the human sciences.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class Americans had eating habits that were distinctly shaped by jobs, families, neighborhoods, and the tools, utilities, and size of their kitchensOCoalong with their cultural heritage. How the Other Half Ate is a deep exploration by historian and lecturer Katherine Turner that delivers an unprecedented and thoroughly researched study of the changing food landscape in American working-class families from industrialization through the 1950s.
Relevant to readers across a range of disciplinesOCohistory, economics, sociology, urban studies, womenOCOs studies, and food studiesOCothis work fills an important gap in historical literature by illustrating how families experienced food and cooking during the so-called age of abundance. Turner delivers an engaging portrait that shows how AmericaOCOs working class, in a multitude of ways, has shaped the foods we eat today."

The years between 2006 and 2015, during which Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president, have been described as a time of democratic and cultural revolution, world renewal (Pachakuti), reconstituted neoliberalism, or simply "the process of change." In A Revolution in Fragments Mark Goodale unpacks these various analytical and ideological frameworks to reveal the fragmentary and contested nature of Bolivia's radical experiments in pluralism, ethnic politics, and socioeconomic planning. Privileging the voices of social movement leaders, students, indigenous intellectuals, women's rights activists, and many others, Goodale uses contemporary Bolivia as an ideal case study with which to theorize the role that political agency, identity, and economic equality play within movements for justice and structural change.

Comprehensive and engaging, this colourful study covers the whole sweep of ritual history from the earliest written records to the present day. From May Day revels and Midsummer fires, to Harvest Home and Hallowe'en, to the twelve days of Christmas, Ronald Hutton takes us on a fascinating journey through the ritual year in Britain. He challenges many common assumptions about the customs of the past, and debunks many myths surrounding festivals of the present, to illuminate the history of the calendar year we live by today.

Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic customs over the Georgian era - most notably with the arrival of the printed valentine's card - revealing how love developed into a commercial industry. The book concludes with the rituals of disintegration when engagements went awry, and pursuit of damages for breach of promise in the civil courts. The Game of Love in Georgian England brings together love letters, diaries, valentines, and proposals of marriage from sixty courtships sourced from thirty archives and museum collections, alongside an extensive range of sources including ballads, conduct literature, court cases, material objects, newspaper reports, novels, periodicals, philosophical discourses, plays, poems, and prints, to create a vivid social and cultural history of romantic emotions. The book demonstrates the importance of courtship to studies of marriage, relationships, and emotions in history, and how we write histories of emotions using objects. Love emerges as something that we do in practice, enacted by couples through particular socially and historically determined rituals.

The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the purity of the Brahman priest and the temporal power of the dominant caste or the king.

A quarter of a century ago, Subhadra Butalia looked out from her bedroom window and saw a young woman being burned to death for not bringing enough dowry. In this book, Butalia writes of the ways in which society conspires to silence thousands of innocent young women each year, driving them to horrific deaths or lifelong servitude.

Increasingly, North Americans and Western Europeans identify as 'spiritual but not religious'. But what does 'spirituality' actually mean? And what does this recent 'spiritual turn' reveal about the nature of twenty-first century liberal democracies? Secularization theorists argue that spirituality lacks institutional support and a shared tradition, thereby evincing religious decline. Meanwhile, critical commentators contend that the spiritual turn embodies all of the ills of post-1960s liberal democracies. This book challenges these popular misconceptions. Combining cultural sociology with intellectual history and political philosophy, and drawing from first-hand interview and fieldwork data, along with discourse analysis of best-selling books, it shows that rather than reflecting religious decline, the spiritual turn marks the rise of an enduring cultural structure in Western modernity-the religion of the heart. Tracing the religion of the heart to the 1960s, The Spiritual Turn illuminates its elective affinities with the romantic liberal social imaginary that crystallized in popular consciousness during this era, and transformed the institutional spheres of Western liberal democracies, eventually giving birth to a new social order-romantic liberal modernity. Then, inspired by the Durkheimian tradition, it presents case studies of three sites where the religion of the heart is institutionalized in a specific discursive form-a Twelve Step group, a neo-Pentecostal church, and a Toastmasters public speaking club. The book concludes that while critics may have reason to disparage both spirituality and romantic liberal modernity more generally, the reality is far more complex than their criticisms suggest-and more importantly, far less hopeless.

This book explores the understudied and often overlooked subject of African presence in India. It focuses on the so-called Sidis, Siddis or Habshis who occupy a unique place in Indian history. The Sidis comprise scattered communities of people of African descent who travelled and settled along the western coast of India, mainly in Gujarat, but also in Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Sri Lanka and in Sindh (Pakistan) as a result of the Indian Ocean trade from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. The work draws from extant scholarly research and documentary sources to provide a comprehensive study of people of African descent in India and sheds new light on their experiences. By employing an interdisciplinary approach across fields of history, art, anthropology, religion, literature and oral history, it provides an analysis of their negotiations with cultural resistance, survivals and collective memory. The author examines how the Sidi communities strived to construct a distinct identity in a new homeland in a polyglot Indian society, their present status, as well as their future prospects. The book will interest those working in the fields of history, sociology and social anthropology, cultural studies, international relations, and migration and diaspora studies.

The Mirth of Nations is a social and historical study of jokes told in the principal English-speaking countries. It is based on use of archives and other primary sources, including old and rare joke books. Davies makes detailed comparisons between the humor of specific pairs of nations and ethnic and regional groups. In this way, he achieves an appreciation of the unique characteristics of the humor of each nation or group.

A tightly argued book, The Mirth of Nations uses the comparative method to undermine existing theories of humor, which are rooted in notions of hostility, conflict, and superiority, and derive ultimately from Hobbes and Freud. Instead Davies argues that humor merely plays with aggression and with rule-breaking, and that the form this play takes is determined by social structures and intellectual traditions. It is not related to actual conflicts between groups. In particular, Davies convincingly argues that Jewish humor and jokes are neither uniquely nor overwhelmingly self-mocking as many writers since Freud have suggested. Rather Jewish jokes, like Scottish humor and jokes are the product of a strong cultural tradition of analytical thinking and intelligent self-awareness.

The volume shows that the forty-year popularity of the Polish joke cycle in America was not a product of any special negative feeling towards Poles. Jokes are not serious and are not a form of determined aggression against others or against one's own group. The Mirth of Nations is readable as well as revisionist. It is written with great clarity and puts forward difficult and complex arguments without jargon in an accessible manner. Its rich use of examples of all kinds of humor entertains the reader, who will enjoy a great variety of jokes while being enlightened by the author's careful explanations of why particular sets of jokes exist and are immensely popular. The book will appeal to general readers as well as those in cultural studies.