This book constitutes a status report on health conditions (including nutrition and freshwater supply) in the Pacific Island Nations. The report is based on investigations carried out over the past decade by the Pacific Science Association and includes ethnic, demographic, historic, economic, political, climatological and ecological aspects. As such, it will serve as an important decision-making tool with respect to criteria for future development, taking into account the very special carrying capacities of the island territories concerned.

The vernacular architecture of the Minangkabau in Sumatra constitutes one of the most popular and well-known building traditions in contemporary Indonesia. Yet, despite its fame, Minangkabau architecture has received remarkably little scholarly attention. What is known about the building tradition does not go beyond the romanticized popular image (of high-rising roof spires, floor elevations, and colourful woodcarvings) promoted by the government, the tourist industry, and the media. This image leaves too many questions about the meaning of Minangkabau architecture unanswered. Constituting Unity and difference refines, supplements, and revises the popular image. Focusing on the construction, design, and spatial use of vernacular houses in one region of West Sumatra, and taking into account historical developments and geographical variation, the author explores how vernacular Minangkabau houses are instrumental in the constitution, perpetuation, and manipulation of socio-political relationships and identities. He concludes that the current popular image of Minangkabau architecture is seriously in need of revision.

Heikki Mikkeli charts the history of the idea of Europe and European identity. The first part introduces the various attempts to unify Europe from antiquity to the European Union. In the second part the relationship of Europe with America and Russia is considered, as well as the ambivalent role of Central Europe. The possibility of a common European identity is also discussed; a theme which may have an impact on the ways European history is written in the future.

Although there has been intense interest in racial minorities and public policy, most research has focused on the implementation of policies after legislative passage or on the consequent effects of those policies. Few studies have focused on the definitional stage of the policy process--agenda setting--or have examined the way issues of concern to minority populations are raised. This volume fills that void by examining where policy issues originate and the impact of racial, ethnic, and other minority groups on the agenda setting process and the formulation of public policy. The work will be of interest to scholars in public policy, ethnic studies, government, and politics.

This unusual sociological study examines the issue of enchantment in terms of habitus and charisma. It seeks to overcome a fated notion of disenchantment in a culture of postmodernity. Crossing between theological and sociological self-understandings of culture, the study criticizes conventions of secularisation so as to defend the viability of theological forms of enchantment. Through a reading of Bourdieu, Simmel and the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the book attempts to supply theology with its own sociological self-understanding of religious belief and culture, but also to give to sociology a basis of theological reflexivity.

Siberia has no history of independent political existence, no claim to a separate ethnic identity, and no clear borders. Yet, it could be said that the elusive country 'behind the Urals' is the most real and the most durable part of the Russian landscape. For centuries, Siberia has been represented as Russia's alter ego, as the heavenly or infernal antithesis to the perceived complexity or shallowness of Russian life. It has been both the frightening heart of darkness and a fabulous land of plenty; the 'House of the Dead' and the realm of utter freedom; a frozen wasteland and a colourful frontier; a dumping ground for Russia's rejects and the last refuge of its lost innocence. The contributors to Between Heaven and Hell examine the origin, nature, and implications of these images from historical, literary, geographical, anthropological, and linguistic perspectives. They create a striking, fascinating picture of this enormous and mysterious land.

Why did the ancient artists create paintings and engravings? What did the images mean? This careful study of rock art motifs in the Trans-Pecos area of Texas and a small area in South Africa demonstrates that there are archaeological and anthropological ways of accessing the past in order to investigate and explain the significance of rock art motifs. Using two disparate regions shows the possibility of comparative rock art studies and highlights the importance of regional studies and regional variations. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers.

Drawing on official sources in the Russian language, this book presents new factual information about Russian society before and after the attempted coup of August 1991.

Possession and Ownership brings together linguists and anthropologists in a series of cross-linguistic explorations of expressions used to denote possession and ownership, concepts central to most if not all the varied cultures and ideologies of humankind. Possessive noun phrases can be broadly divided into three categories - ownership of property, whole-part relations (such as body and plant parts), and blood and affinal kinship relations. As Professor Aikhenvald shows in her extensive opening essay, the same possessive noun or pronoun phrase is used in English and in many other Indo-European languages to express possession of all three kinds - as in "Ann and her husband Henry live in the castle Henry's father built with his own hands" - but that this is by no means the case in all languages. In some, for example, the grammar expresses the inalienability of consanguineal kinship and sometimes also of sacred or treasured objects. Furthermore the degree to which possession and ownership are conceived as the same (when possession is 100% of the law) differs from one society to another, and this may be reflected in their linguistic expression. Like others in the series this pioneering book will be welcomed equally by linguists and anthropologists.

Ethnobiology and ethnoecology have become very popular in recent years. Particularly in the last 20 years, many manuals of methods have published the most classical approaches to the subject. There have been, however, many advances in research as a result of interaction with different disciplines, but also due to more recent results, new original and interesting questions. This handbook provides the current state of the art methods and techniques in ethnobiology and ethnoecology, and related fields. This new volume, besides bringing new and original aspects of what is found in the literature, fills some of the gaps in volume one by including the most systematic and extensive treatment of methods and techniques in qualitative research. Along with the various methods covered in the individual chapters, the handbook also includes an extensive bibliography that details the current literature in the field.

Today, all industrialized states are multinational. However, as Political Sociologist Feliks Gross points out, there remains considerable debate and experimentation on how to organize a multiethnic, democratic, and humane state. Gross examines various types of multiethnic states as well as their early origins and prospects for success. In the past, minorities were usually formed as a consequence of conquest or migration; minorities tended to have an inferior status, subordinated to the ruling, dominant ethnic class.

While Athens provides an early example of a state formed by alliance and association, the Romans advanced this concept when they extended to subjected peoples the status by means of citizenship. After the fall of Rome, citizenship continued in Italian and other continental cities. In England, subjectship associated with individual freedom had native roots. The American and French Revolutions revived and created the modern definition of citizenship. Along with Rome, however, only the United States provides an example of a successful multiethnic state of continental dimensions.

In the current model of health dispensation in South Africa there are two major paradigms, the spirit-inspired tradition of izangoma sinyanga and biomedicine. These operate at best in parallel, but more often than not are at odds with one another. This book, based on the author's personal experience as a practitioner of traditional African medicine, considers the effects of the absence of spirit in biomedicine on collaborative relationships. Given the unprecedented challenge of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country, the author suggests that more cooperation is vital. Taking a critical look at the role of anthropology in this endeavor, she proposes the development of a "language of spirit" by means of which the spirit-inspired aetiology of izangoma sinyanga may be made comprehensible to academic scientists and applicable to medical interventions. The author discusses white izangoma in the context of current debates on healing and hybridity and insists that there exists a powerful role for izangoma in the realm of societal healing. Above all, the book constitutes a start in what the author hopes will develop into an ongoing intellectual conversation between traditional African healing, academe, and biomedicine in South Africa.

Based on three years of ethnographic research with Bruce Springsteen fans, and informed by the author's own experiences as a fan, Tramps Like Us is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which ordinary people form special, sustained attachments to Bruce Springsteen and his music and how those attachments function in people's daily lives to create meaning, shape identity, and create community. An insider's narrative about Springsteen fans -- who they are, what they do, and why they do it -- it is also about the phenomenon of fandom in general. The text moves back and forth between fans' stories and ideas and the author's own anecdotes, commentary, and analysis. Cavicchi argues that music fandom is a useful and meaningful behaviour that enables people to shape identity, create community, and make sense of the world.

Peter Worsley's studies at Cambridge were interrupted by war service as a communist officer in the colonial forces in Africa and India, which got him interested in anthropology. He then went into mass education in Tanganyika, studied with Max Gluckman at Manchester, and won the Curl Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, but, in the McCarthy epoch, was banned from Africa, so went to Australia where he was again banned, this time from New Guinea, but did field-research for his Ph.D. on an Australian Aboriginal tribe. His subsequent book on 'Cargo' cults in Melanesia is now regarded as a classic, but his left-wing politics ensured that he could not get a job in anthropology, so he switched to sociology, returning to Manchester as the first Professor of Sociology, just in time to join a British Government Mission to Tanzania - and to be deeply involved in the student revolution. His book on The Third World introduced that term into the English language, while the Penguin edition of Introducing Sociology sold over half a million copies. He went to China a few months after Nixon. On retirement as Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester, he taught in New York, where he wrote Knowledges.

This is the ethnography of the "Mykoniots d'election," a 'gang' of romantic adventurers who have been visiting the island of Mykonos for the last thirty-five years and have formed a community of dispersed friends. Their constant return to and insistence on working, acting and creating in a tourist space, offers them an extreme identity, which in turn is aesthetically marked by the transient cultural properties of Mykonos. Drawing semiotically from its ancient counterpart Delos, whose myth of emergence entails a spatial restlessness, contemporary Mykonos also acquires an idiosyncratic fluidity. In mythology Delos, the island of Apollo, was condemned by the gods to be an island in constant movement. Mykonos, as a signifier of a new form of ontological nomadism, semiotically shares such assumptions. "The Nomads of Mykonos" keep returning to a series of alternative affective groups largely in order to heal a split: between their desire for autonomy, rebellion and aloneness and their need to affectively belong to a collectivity. Mykonos for the "Mykoniots d'election" is their permanent 'stopover'; their regular comings and goings discursively project onto Mykonos' space an allegorical (discordant) notion of 'home'.

Pola Bousiou was born and educated in Thessaloniki, Greece, and later at the London School of Economics where she received her PhD in social anthropology. Subsequently she has turned to film-making; in her current research she is exploring the relationship between anthropology and film by deconstructing her auto-ethnographic text into an experimental film narrative.

"This book is an important stimulus to ongoing debate, and showcases some of the best of recent approaches and challenges to the ways we know what we know." . Ethos

This volume examines some crucial issues in the conduct of fieldwork and ethnography and provides new insights into the problems of constructing anthropological knowledge. How is anthropological knowledge created from fieldwork, whose knowledge is this, who determines what is of significance in any ethnographic context, and how is the fieldsite extended in both time and place?

Nine anthropologists examine these problems, drawing on diverse case studies. These range from the dilemmas of the religious refashioning of the ethnographer in contemporary Indonesia to the embodied knowledge of ballet performers, and from ignorance about post-colonial ritual innovations by the anthropologist in highland Papua to the skilled visions of slow food producers in Italy. It is a key text for new fieldworkers as much as for established researchers. The anthropological insights developed here are of interdisciplinary relevance: cultural studies scholars, sociologists and historians will be as interested as anthropologists in this re-evaluation of fieldwork and the project of ethnography.

Narmala Halstead is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of East London and was awarded a Teaching Fellowship by this university. She was a lecturer at Cardiff University and also taught at Brunel University. She has carried out research in Guyana, the U.S. and the UK . She has published numerous articles examining fieldwork encounters, belonging, violence and related issues.

Eric Hirsch is a Reader in Social Anthropology at Brunel University. He has conducted research in Papua New Guinea and Greater London. His most recent book is the co-edited Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia (Berghahn, 2004).

Judith Okely, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Hull University, is Deputy Director of the International Gender Studies Centre and Research Associate, School of Anthropology, Oxford University. She co-edited Anthropology and Autobiography (1992) and is researching Anthropological Practice. Other publications include The Traveller-Gypsies (1983), Own or Other Culture (1996) and (co-ed) Identity and Networks (2007).

American cities are today more diverse than at any time in history. The continuing flow of new immigrants has settled in urban and suburban areas that have undergone visible change in population and neighborhoods. While Chicago long served as the convenient and well-studied model for urban sociology, for many Los Angeles has become the focal point for study of the postmodern heteropolis. It is interesting that for sociologists New York City, especially its outer boroughs such as Brooklyn and Queens, has largely remained outside the intense gaze of urban study. As the nation's largest city New York has long had a mosaic of social worlds comparable to that of Chicago, and displays an ethnic diversity comparable to that of Los Angeles. Because New York City presents us with a less easily recognizable mosaic and a more free form scattering of ethnic social spaces, it is seldom thought of as a pre or post-modern "model" for other metropolitan areas. The eight articles presented in this volume represent both older and established ethnic and racial communities as well as new and emerging groups in New York City. These include Italian communities, African American, as well as newer Jewish, Caribbean, and Asian groups.

The Sculpture Machine portrays the dramatic revolution in bodily representation, ideas and pleasures that characterized the century encompassing the twilight of Romanticism and the dawn of Totalitarianism. It explains how character, environment and morality were linked through bodies by prominent social reformers, politicians, military leaders and innovative entrepreneurs. With a thought provoking analysis, it illustrates how ideas about bodies influenced the building of social, gender and sexual identities in concert with the construction of a larger consumer culture.

For more than three decades the author has been concerned with issues to do with emotion, suffering and healing. This volume presents ethnographic studies of South Wales, Maharashtra and post-Soviet Latvia connected by a theoretical interest in healing, emotion and subjectivity. Exploring the uses of narrative in the shaping of memory, autobiography and illness and its connections with the master narratives of history and culture, it focuses on the post-Soviet clinic as an arena in which the contradictions of a liberal economy are translated into a medical language.

Offering a uniquely broad-based overview of the role of language choice in the construction of national, cultural, and personal identity, this textbook examines a wide range of specific cases from various parts of the world in order to arrive at some general principles concerning the links between language and identity. It will benefit students and researchers in a wide range of fields where identity is an important issue, and who currently lack a single source to turn to for an overview from sociolinguistics.

Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind analyses techniques of searching for ultimate wisdom in ancient Greece. The Greeks perceived mental experiences of exceptional intensity as resulting from divine intervention. They believed that to share in the immortals' knowledge, one had to liberate the soul from the burden of the mortal body by attaining an altered state of consciousness, that is, by merging with a superhuman being or through possession by a deity. These states were often attained by inspired mediums, impresarios of the gods' - prophets, poets, and sages - who descended into caves or underground chambers. Yulia Ustinova juxtaposes ancient testimonies with the results of modern neuropsychological research. This novel approach enables an examination of religious phenomena not only from the outside, but also from the inside: it penetrates the consciousness of people who were engaged in the vision quest, and demonstrates that the darkness of the caves provided conditions vital for their activities.

The collective inquiries in this volume address ethnicity in ancient Africa as social fact and political artifact along numerous dimensions. Is ethnicity a useful analytic? What can archaeology say about the kinds of deeper time questions which scholars have asked of identities in Africa? Eleven authors engage with contemporary anthropological, historical and archaeological perspectives to examine how ideas of self-understanding, belonging, and difference in Africa were made and unmade. They examine how these intersect with other salient domains of social experience: states, landscapes, discourses, memory, technology, politics, and power. The various chapters cover broad geographic and temporal ground, following an arc across Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and East Africa, spanning from prehistory to the colonial period.