Crude Domination is an innovative and important book about a critical topic - oil. While there have been numerous works about petroleum from 'experience-far' perspectives, there have been relatively few that have turned the 'experience-near' ethnographic gaze of anthropology on the topic. Crude Domination does just this among more peoples and more places than any other volume. Its chapters investigate nuances of culture, politics and economics in Africa, Latin America, and Eurasia as they pertain to petroleum. They wrestle with the key questions vexing scholars and practitioners alike: problems of the economic blight of the resource curse, underdevelopment, democracy, violence and war. Additionally they address topics that may initially appear insignificant - such as child witches and lionmen, fighting for oil when there is no oil, reindeer nomadism, community TV - but which turn out on closer scrutiny to be vital for explaining conflict and transformation in petro-states. Based upon these rich, new worlds of information, the text formulates a novel, domination approach to the social analysis of oil.

How far back can you trace your family tree? Most people cannot go beyond their great-great-grandparents. The oldest written records recount only our most recent past. The farther back in time we go, the fewer the surviving traces. How can we know about the lives of our ancestors who lived 30,000 - or 300,000 - or 3 million years ago? In The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins, Piero and Alberto Angela address the many difficulties and challenges in assembling a truly complete picture of human evolution. In tracing our origins, different "documents" and "evidence" must be used: rock sediments, footprints, and fossils that were petrified in the folds of the earth over the course of millennia but have become the object of scientific study only in recent decades. To piece together the intriguing puzzle of human origins it is necessary to study all clues that are made available by multidisciplinary research, including paleontology, bio-chemistry, geology, genetics, physics, and climatology. Like so many Sherlock Holmeses, researchers seek all possible clues and analyze them meticulously in hopes of being able to reconstruct the past. Just as a cigarette butt, a hair, or a button may provide the key to identifying the "culprit" in a detective story, so can the layer of a fossil, the way a rock has been chipped, or the detail of a joint offer important information on the life, appearance, and behavior of our ancestors. These pieces are few and fragmentary, ranging from the footprints left in volcanic ash 3.7 million years ago by hominids who walked exactly as we do, to a "Y" pattern on molars and mitochondrial DNA. But they all provide information on the diet, diseases, hunting techniques, and art of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, the Neanderthal, and the first Homo sapiens sapiens. Written in an accessible but authoritative style, this study includes many lively reconstructions of the everyday life of our earliest ancestors based on the most reliable data. The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins makes available to a wide audience a unique look inside the exciting world of research into the study of the beginnings of human life on earth.

Precarious office friendships and email romance; delicate status politics; multiple femininities and masculinities; changing employment practices and career pathways; temporal and spatial practices of regulation, detection and slipping free - these analytical themes comprise the core of Tomoko Kurihara's ethnography, "Japanese Corporate Transition in Time and Space." A skillful analysis of the subtleties of language and embodiment discloses the various knowledges and practices that reinforce and subvert ideology and culture within the workplace community. This fieldstudy brings the work of continental theorists Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau into conversation with the anthropology of Japan. It is a significant contribution to the new specialist areas in anthropology, of organizations, and of management practices.

This book studies the cheap printed literature which was read in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland and the cultures of its audience. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to a little-known topic, pursuing comparisons with other regions such as Brittany and Scotland. By addressing questions such as language shift and the unique social configuration of Ireland in this period, it adds a new dimension to the growing body of studies of popular culture in Europe.

One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell's Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell's work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory - from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change - the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.

What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.

This volume examines the creation of forms of individual and group identity in Taiwan, the relationship between these forms of identity, and patterns of Taiwanese religion, politics, and culture. The contributors explore the Taiwanese sense of self, attempting to discern how Taiwanese identify themselves as individuals and as collectivities. Ranging from the local to the national level and within the larger Chinese cultural and religious universe, these essays explore the complex nature of identity/role and the processes of identity formation which have shaped Taiwan's multi-leveled past and its many faceted present.

This book is Lash's most comprehensive statement in social and cultural theory. It is a book addressed to sociologists and philosophers, to students of urban life, modern languages, cultural studies and the visual arts.

Alongside the Enlightenment has emerged another modernity. This second modernity has - in opposition to the Enlightenment rationality of progress, order, homogeneity and cognition - initiated a different rationality of uncertainty, transience, experiment, and the unknowable. This second, this other modernity, is present in notions of 'difference' and 'reflexivity' so central to the contemporary world-view. The logic, however, of such notions can, itself, lead to the same unhappy abstraction of the first modernity. What is forgotten, Scott Lash argues, is the dimension of the ground. This book consists of explorations into this ground: as place, community, belonging, sociality, tradition, life-world; as symbol, sensation, in the tactile character of the sign. The book addresses the other modernity's forgotten ground.

The first and second modernities co-existed in a state of irresolvable tension along the history of western industrial capitalism. This is thrown into crisis, Lash argues, with the turn of the twenty-first century emergence of the global information culture. What are the implications of this explosion of first and second modernities into today's technological culture? When the previously existing third space of difference is exploded into the general indifference of information and communication flows? How might we lead our lives in an age in which difference - and indeed the ground itself - become primarily a matter for memory, for mourning?

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of 'race'. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for 'race', a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933-1974) and the production of academic literature on 'race' in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.

With the growing incidence of fragility fractures in Europe and North America over the last three decades, bone loss and osteoporosis have become active areas of research in skeletal biology. Bone loss is associated with aging in both sexes and is accelerated in women with the onset of menopause. However, bone loss is related to a suite of complex and often synergistically related factors including genetics, pathology, nutrition, mechani cal usage, and lifestyle. It is not surprising that its incidence and severity vary among populations. There has been increasing interest to investigate bone loss and osteoporosis from an anthropological perspective that utilizes a biocultural approach. Biocultural approaches recognize the inter-relationship between biological, cultural, and environmental variables. Anthropological studies also highlight the value of evolutionary and population approaches to the study of bone loss. These approaches are particularly suited to elucidate the multifactorial etiology of bone loss. The idea for this volume came out of a symposium organized by the editors at the 70th annual meeting of The American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Kansas City, Missouri. Many of the symposium participants, along with several additional leading scientists involved in bone and osteoporosis research, are brought together in this volume. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of bone loss and fragility with a fresh and stimulating perspective."

AMIDST THE OTHER religious, political, and technological changes in seventeenth-century England, the ready availability of printed books was the most significant sign of the disappearance of old ways of thinking. The ability to read granted new independence as the interactions between reader, text, and author moved from the public forums of church and court to the privacy and solitude of the home.

Privacy and Print proposes that the emergence of the concept of privacy as a personal right, as the very core of individuality, is connected in a complex fashion with the history of reading. Cecile M. Jagodzinski attempts to recover the experience of readers past by examining representations of reading and readers (especially women) in five genres of seventeenth-century literature: devotional books, conversion narratives, personal letters, drama, and the novel. The discussion ranges from the published letters of Charles I and John Donne to Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister and Margaret Cavendish's literary activities. The author examines how the resulting shifts in religious and literary practices due to the printed book influenced the development of the literary canon. She also addresses women's ambiguous roles in print culture, trying to pinpoint how privacy became gendered in the early modern period.

Debates about privacy and individualism still rage in today's computerized society. Jagodzinski's important and well-written book speaks to these present-day concerns and offers a historical example of the effect of new technologies on popular culture.

Although the Israeli state subscribes to the principles of administrative fairness and equality for Jews and Arabs before the law, the reality looks very different. Focusing on Arab land loss inside Israel proper and the struggle over development resources, this study explores the interaction between Arab local authorities, their Jewish neighbors, and the agencies of the national government in regard to developing local and regional industrial areas. The author avoids reduction to simple models of binary domination, revealing instead a complex, multi-dimensional field of relations and ever-shifting lines of political maneuver and confrontation. He examines the prevailing concept of ethnic traditionalism and argues that the image of Arab traditionalism erects imaginary boundaries around the Arab localities, making government incursion disappear from view, while underpinning and rationalizing the exclusion of the Arab towns from development planning. Moreover, he shows how images of environmental protection mesh with and support such exclusion. The study includes a chronology of events, tables, maps, and photographs. This revised paperback edition with a new epilogue brings accounts of Arab land loss and struggles for economic development up to date. The author also deals with the challenges of life and research in Israel and examines the possibilities of sharing the land as the homeland of both Jews and Palestinians.

It is commonly acknowledged that anthropologists use personal experiences to inform their writing. However, it is often assumed that only fieldwork experiences are relevant and that the personal appears only in the form of self-reflexivity. This book takes a step beyond anthropology at home and auto-ethnography and shows how anthropologists can include their memories and experiences as ethnographic data in their writing. It discusses issues such as authenticity, translation and ethics in relation to the self, and offers a new perspective on doing ethnographic fieldwork.

The last century has seen radical social changes in Ireland, which have impacted all aspects of local life but none more so than traditional Irish music, an increasingly important identity marker both in Ireland and abroad. The author focuses on a small village in County Clare, which became a kind of pilgrimage site for those interested in experiencing traditional music. He begins by tracing its historical development from the days prior to the influx of visitors, through a period called "the Revival," in which traditional Irish music was revitalized and transformed, to the modern period, which is dominated by tourism. A large number of incomers, locally known as "blow-ins," have moved to the area, and the traditional Irish music is now largely performed and passed on by them. This fine-grained ethnographic study explores the commercialization of music and culture, the touristic consolidation and consumption of "place," and offers a critique of the trope of "authenticity," all in a setting of dramatic social change in which the movement of people is constant.

Cosmopolitanism is often discussed in a critical and disapproving manner: as a concept complicit with the interests of the powerful, or as a notion related to Western political supremacy, the ills of globalization, inequality, and capitalist economic penetration. Seen as the moral justification for embracing or tolerating cultural difference, ethnically and socially diverse communities unenthusiastic with change, develop an acknowledgement of their common position vis-a-vis a western, "universal" political point of view. By means of exploring the idiosyncratic form of political intimacy generated by anti-cosmopolitanism, and assuming an analytical and critical stance towards the concepts of parochialism and localism, this volume examines the political consciousness of such negatively predisposed actors, and it attempts to explain their reservation towards the sincerity of international politics, their reliance on conspiracy theories or nationalist narratives, their introversion.

Many people investigating the operation of large-scale environmentalist organizations see signs of power, knowledge and governance in their policies and projects. This collection indicates that such an analysis appears to be justified from one perspective, but not from another. The chapters in this collection show that the critics, concerned with the power of these organizations to impose their policies in different parts of the world, appear justified when we look at environmentalist visions and at organizational policies and programs. However, they are much less justified when we look at the practical operation of such organizations and their ability to generate and carry out projects intended to reshape the world.

James G. Carrier has taught and done research in Papua New Guinea, the United States and Great Britain. For the past decade he has studied the relationship among local fishers, conservationists and the tourism sector in Jamaica. He has published extensively on this research and on environmental protection generally.

Paige West is Tow Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. She had conducted research on the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood and produced, and production, distribution, and consumption of various commodities. Her work is focused on Papua New Guinea.

The "managerial revolution," or the rise of management as a distinct and vital group in industrial society, might be identified as a major development of the modernization processes, similar to the scientific and industrial revolutions. Studying "transnational" or "global" corporate management at the post-millennium moment provides a suitable focal point from which to investigate globalized (post)modernity and capitalism especially, and as such this book offers an anthropology of global capitalism at its moment of crisis. This study provides ethnographically rich descriptions of managerial practices in a set of international corporate investment projects. Drawing also on historical and statistical data, it renders a comprehensive perspective on management, corporations, and capitalism in the late modern globalized economy. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, the book spans the fields of organization, business, and management, and asserts that now, in this period of financial crisis, is the time for anthropology to yet again engage with political economy.

This work presents original and critical papers on the life and sociological contributions of Oliver C. Cox. The unique features of this volume include an analysis of Cox's enigmatic career as a sociologist, his links with Marx, Weber and Mills, his contributions to world system theory, and his legacy with and exclusion from the Chicago School.

Should we take the idea of play seriously? Since the publication of Huizinga's "Homo Ludens" in 1938, a provocative literature has developed in philosophy and social science that does. Combs argues that we should understand play both as a generic concept with considerable power to explain human activity, and as a contemporary procept that demystifies some of the puzzling trends and innovations emerging in the quickly developing new social world of the 21st century.

Combs explores the thesis that play has a central role in our understanding of human activity and social and political organization in the new millennium. He argues that the human desire for play is strong and given the continuation of certain major historical innovations now shaping the world, it may well be that 21st-century people will increasingly exercise their desire for play and that the world will increasingly be organized around the principle and practice of play. It may now seem a truism that people prefer to have fun, but that has not always been the case. If, as Combs argues, the preference for fun is becoming central to human activity, we need to explore why that preference is becoming dominant and what kind of social organization and consequences such a change entails. A provocative look at social change in the 20th century that will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers of sociology and anthropology.

What was it like to live on the edges of ancient empires, at the boundaries of the known world?

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of his world was where civilisation ceased to exist. Our fascination with the Greek and Roman world, and the abundance of writing that we have from it, means that we usually explore the ancient world from this perspective too. Was Ovid's exile really as bad as he claimed? What was it truly like to live on the edges of these empires, on the boundaries of the known world?

Thanks to archaeological excavations, we now know that the borders of the empires we consider the 'heart' of civilisation were in fact thriving, vibrant cultures - just not ones we might expect. This is where the boundaries of 'civilised' and 'barbarians' began to dissipate; where the rules didn't always apply; where normally juxtaposed cultures intermarried; and where nomadic tribes built their own cities.

Taking us along the sandy caravan routes of Morocco to the freezing winters of the northern Black Sea, from Co-Loa in the Red River valley of Vietnam to the rain-lashed forts south of Hadrian's Wall, Owen Rees explores the powerful empires and diverse peoples in Europe, Asia and Africa beyond the reaches of Greece and Rome. In doing so, he offers us a new, brilliantly rich lens with which to understand the ancient world.

The Ju/'hoan San, or Ju/'hoansi, of Namibia and Botswana are perhaps the most fully described indigenous people in all of anthropology. This is the story of how this group of former hunter-gatherers, speaking an exotic click language, formed a grassroots movement that led them to become a dynamic part of the new nation that grew from the ashes of apartheid South West Africa. While coverage of this group in the writings of Richard Lee, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and films by John Marshall includes extensive information on their traditional ways of life, this book continues the story as it has unfolded since 1990. Peopled with accounts of and from contemporary Ju>/'hoan people, the book gives newly-literate Ju/'hoansi the chance to address the world with their own voices. In doing so, the images and myths of the Ju/'hoan and other San (previously called "Bushmen") as either noble savages or helpless victims are discredited. This important book demonstrates the responsiveness of current anthropological advocacy to the aspirations of one of the best-known indigenous societies.

Salvadoran refugee women tell their stories of escape from El Salvador during some of the worst years of civil unrest (1979-1981) and their subsequent adaptation to refugee life in Costa Rica. These stories--called "testimonios"--are interwoven against the backdrop of their children's daycare center. The women's complex relationships with one another and the ambiguous nature of their interactions with the author as ethnographer are examined. The author's voice is used in the text to place the women in their historical and cultural context.

The daily lives and the "testimonios" of the refugees serve as an eloquent expression of the multidimensional feminism that has developed in Latin America. In contrast to mainstream feminism in the United States that focuses primarily on the power relationships between men and women, the concern of Latin American feminism is with power asymmetries in socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as gender. The women, whose daycare center is supported by international funding, rely on their cultural traditions to survive in the face of tragedy and oppression.