Marcel Mauss's writings on techniques and technology are at the forefront of an important anthropological and sociological research tradition, and they also highlight the theoretical and ideological challenges surrounding this field of study. A selection of Mauss's texts - including his major statements on methodology, on body techniques, on practical reason, on nation and civilisation, on progress, and so forth - are here translated and presented together for the first time, with a discussion of their context, impact and implications. This book will interest scholars and students dealing with the French sociological tradition, and also more generally those concerned with technology and material culture studies in archaeological, anthropological or contemporary settings

In the early 21st century, intellectual and cultural resources emerge on all sides as candidates for ownership claims. Members of an anthropological research team investigating emergent economic relations in a part of the world renowned for its innovative approach to resources and transactions, wish to open up the vocabulary. In this unique volume, they bring an unexpected comparative perspective to global debates on intellectual and cultural property rights (IPR and CPR). The contributors bring from Melanesia their collective experience of people initiating, limiting and rationalizing claims through transactions in ways that challenge many of the assumptions behind the international language. In a bold theoretical move, "property" is put alongside two other terms: "transactions" and "creations." The former have a place in the anthropological tradition that now needs to be brought into the foreground. In turn, increasing interest in protecting intellectual and cultural resources means that questions about creativity have suddenly become pertinent to what is or is not being transacted. Yet is creativity a special preoccupation of modernity? How are we to talk about people's creative practices, when innovation becomes the basis for ownership claims? This book is full of surprises

Notions of magic and healing have been changing over past years and are now understood as reflecting local ideas of power and agency, as well as structures of self, subjectivity and affect. This study focuses on contemporary urban Russia and, through exploring social conditions, conveys the experience of living that makes magic logical. By following people's own interpretations of the work of magic, the author succeeds in unraveling the logic of local practice and local understanding of affliction, commonly used to diagnose the experiences of illness and misfortune.

Nowadays, a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.

This book brings together a range of anthropological writings that are inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault and examine Foucault's contribution to current theories of modernity.
Treats modernity as an ethnographic object by focusing on its concrete manifestations.
Tackles issues of broad interest: from colonialism and globalization to war, genetics, and AIDS.
Draws on work from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.
Contributors include James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Aihwa Ong, Paul Rabinow, and Rayna Rapp.

The idea of the "project" crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as "projects," remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the "project." This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.

Johnnie Gratton is the holder of the 1776 Chair of French at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Expressivism: The Vicissitudes of a Theory in the Writing of Proust and Barthes (Legenda, 2000), and has written widely on modern French fiction and autobiography.
Michael Sheringham is Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, University of Oxford. He has worked extensively on Surrealism, modern fiction, poetry, and autobiography and related genres. His publications include French Autobiotraphy: Devices and Desires (OUP 1993) and Parisian Fields (ed, Raktion Books, 1996).

"Through a sequence of theoretically stimulating and ethnographically diverse contributions, the volume engages with 'chaos models' developed by mathematicians and natural scientists studying complex dynamic systems." . Anthropological Forum

"I have rarely seen such an excellent collection of articles. And it cannot be more timely. Within the covers of this volume we find some of the most original and brightest minds in anthropology today...this is a truly unique volume that will make a major and original contribution to anthropology and far beyond." . Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney

Over the past two decades, "chaos theory" - the perception of order previously hidden in phenomena of apparent randomness and disorder - has fundamentally transformed the natural sciences. In recent years, numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities have attempted to adapt the insights of chaos theory to their studies of human cultural and social systems. Several of the world's leading anthropologists, such as Roy Wagner, Marshall Sahlins, Marilyn Strathern, and Arjun Appadurai - have similarly drawn upon particular elements of chaos theory for their inspiration, but as yet there is no focused, comprehensive treatment of the applicability of chaos theory to anthropology's distinctive ethnographic and cross-cultural materials. This edited volume fills the gap, with both accessible theoretical discussions of chaos theory applications in anthropology and detailed ethnographic and historical illustrations from Africa and Melanesia.

The author proposes that the four earliest British North American colonies in the United States promoted the development of distinct regional identities and that this cultural legacy affected identity development as well as behavioral patterns differently in each region. He compares data from the North American colonies to the situation in England and discovers that the findings in the latter's eight standard regions are very similar to those in the United States.

Although modernity's understanding of nature and culture has now been superseded by that of environmentalism, the power to define the meaning of both, and hence the meaning of the world itself, remains in the same (Western) hands. This bold argument is at the center of this provocative book that challenges the widespread assumption that environmentalism reflects a radical departure from modernity. Our perception of nature may have changed, the author maintains, but environmentalism remains a thoroughly modernist project. It reproduces the cultural logic of modernity, a logic that finds meaning in unity and therefore strives to efface difference, and to reconfirm the position of the West as the source of all legitimate signification.

Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world. In Recipes for Immortality, Richard Weiss illuminates their continued success by examining the ways in which siddha medical practitioners in Tamil South India win the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient's physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community.
Weiss analyzes the success of siddha doctors, focusing on how they have successfully garnered authority and credibility. While shedding light on their lives, vocations, and aspirations, Weiss also documents the challenges that siddha doctors face in the modern world, both from a biomedical system that claims universal efficacy, and also from the rival traditional medicine, ayurveda, which is promoted as the national medicine of an autonomous Indian state. Drawing on ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, he presents an in-depth study of this traditional system of knowledge, which serves the medical needs of millions of Indians.
Weiss concludes with a look at traditional medicine at large, and demonstrates that siddha doctors, despite resent trends toward globalization and biomedicine, reflect the wider political and religious dimensions of medical discourse in our modern world. Recipes for Immortality proves that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities, conceptions of history, secrecy, loss, and utopian promise.

Unique local transformations of the practice of established religions in Asia and the Pacific are juxtaposed with the emergence of new religious movements whose incidence is growing across the region. In "Flows of Faith," the contributing authors take as their starting point questions of how religions manifest outside their cultural boundaries and provide the basis for new social identities, political movements and social transformations.

With fresh insights into the globalization of beliefs, their local inflections, and their institutionalization, the authors explore how old and new religions work in different settings, and how their reception and membership challenge orthodox understandings of religion and culture.

The chapters - set in Asia, the Pacific, Australia, and the US - illustrate the contrasts and commonalities of these belief systems, and their allegiances and networks in the region and beyond. They include new religious movements - Falun Gong, Brahma Kumaris, the Hare Krishna movement, based in East and South Asia with outreach posts in Australia and the U.S. - and established 'old' religions - Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam - that are revitalized and recreated in different settings and places.

"Flows of Faith" describes the transnational reaches of faith. Religious practices and their local manifestations track the movement of peoples, through mission outreach, flight, migration, and pilgrimage. In each new setting, religions are shaped by and in turn shape political and cultural forces, proving that they are resilient and generative, originary and distinctive.

The volume is a major contribution, providing readers with a fresh and creative approach into the living experience of religious communities in a contemporary globalised world.

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Originally published between 1920-70,The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings: * Prehistory and Historical Ethnography Set of 12: 0-415-15611-4: GBP800.00 * Greek Civilization Set of 7: 0-415-15612-2: GBP450.00 * Roman Civilization Set of 6: 0-415-15613-0: GBP400.00 * Eastern Civilizations Set of 10: 0-415-15614-9: GBP650.00 * Judaeo-Christian Civilization Set of 4: 0-415-15615-7: GBP250.00 * European Civilization Set of 11: 0-415-15616-5: GBP700.00

As the historic capital of the country and the stronghold of the nation's most celebrated traditions, the city of Kyoto holds a unique place in the Japanese imagination. Widely praised for the beauty of its townscape and natural environments, it is both a popular destination for tourists and home to one and a half million inhabitants. There has been a sustained, lively debate about how best to develop the city, with a large number of local government officials, citizen activists, urban planners, real-estate developers, architects, builders, proprietors, academic researchers, and ordinary Kyotoites involved in discussions, forming a highly peculiar social arena that has no match elsewhere in Japan. This book, based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, provides an ethnographic study of this particular social field. It analyses how people in Kyoto deal with their most cherished traditions, such as the traditional town houses and the famous Gion matsuri festival, which calls into question several of the standard social scientific assumptions about the functions of cultural heritage for present-day societies. The book looks at the way concerned citizens, government bureaucrats, and other important players interact with each other over contentious modern buildings, often with the best intentions but constrained by set role expectations and by the superior power of national-level regulations and agencies. This book contributes to debates on the social uses of tradition and heritage, and the question of how to create sustainable, liveable urban environments.

Mexico comprises 32 diverse states, and this reference is the first to succinctly profile each. Each chapter devoted to one of the states provides a contemporary snapshot of the most important information to know about the state, with essay sections on its characteristics, flora and fauna, cultural groups and languages, history, economy, social customs, arts, noteworthy places, and cuisine with representative recipes. Familiar and noteworthy names in Mexican culture are highlighted in the applicable sections. The format is perfect for students studying Spanish and travelers and general readers wanting a different angle from that provided in guidebooks and more authoritativeness than they can offer. Readers learn about the pulsing metropolis of Mexico City to the jungle isolation found in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Considering the huge political, social, and economic focus on Mexico and the number of Mexican immigrants in the United Status today, Americans need to know more about Mexico and the homeland of these new immigrants. Make this one of the sources you recommend to your patrons to get a quick yet substantial feel for the states and their people. A map and photo accompany each chapter, and the volume contains a chronology, glossary, and selected bibliography.

First published in 1987, this book presents contributions from international authorities reviewing major themes in variant sexuality. Genetic and evolutionary arguments are presented for the preponderance of paraphilia in males, whilst Freudian and psychoanalytic theories are shown to have limited scientific basis. These and other topics are reviewed in an interesting book, which will be of particular value to students of the psychology of sexuality, evolutionary biology and psychiatry, as well as those with a more general interest in the social, behavioural and biological aspects of sexuality.

Papajohn provides a collection of detailed case histories used to explore the effect of culture change on the psychological functioning of white Americans who derive from different ethnic backgrounds. Both individual and marital conflicts are analyzed to highlight the impact of one's cultural heritage on adjustments to mainstream American society. This book is designed to provide therapists with important insights in treating hyphenated Americans, who are the grandchildren (third generation) of the original immigrants. It will also be of interest to laypersons since it is written in a clear and jargonless language.

The modes of thinking, feeling, and acting of the original immigrants are shown to persist over generations and to impact on their children's children. Kluckhohn's theory of variations in orientation is employed to examine the culture change that children and grandchildren of immigrants undergo in interfacing with American society. This is done in the context of intensive psychotherapy with individuals and couples who derive from different ethnic backgrounds. Three individual and three marital therapy cases are analyzed. A culturally enlightened conceptualization by the therapist is shown to enhance the treatment process and lead to a more effective therapeutic resolution.

The "cultural turn" has been a multifarious and pervasive phenomenon in Western universities and modes of social knowledge since the early 1980s. This volume focuses on the conjunction of two disciplines where both the analytic promises as well as the difficulties involved in the meeting of humanist and social science approaches soon became obvious. Anthropologists and historians have come together here in order to recapture, elaborate, and criticize pre-Cultural Turn and non-Cultural Turn modes of analysing structures of experience, feeling, subjectivity and action in human societies and to highlight the still unexploited possibilities developed among others in the work of scholars such as Norbert Elias, Max Gluckman, Eric Wolf, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.

The behaviour of politicians and public servants often strikes outside observers as erratic, inconsistent and sometimes foolish. One way of understanding their behaviour is political anthropology. This book focuses on the everyday life of ministers and senior public servants in different countries, describing their world through their eyes. It analyses how such practices are embedded in political and administrative traditions. It explores how their beliefs, practices and traditions create meaning in politics and public policy making. It provides unique data on the everyday life government elites and practical advice on how to conduct such fieldwork.

Of the estimated 12 million refugees in the world, more than 7 million have been confined to camps, effectively "warehoused," in some cases, for 10 years or more. Holding refugees in camps was anathema to the founders of the refugee protection regime. Today, with most refugees encamped in the less developed parts of the world, the humanitarian apparatus has been transformed into a custodial regime for innocent people. Based on rich ethnographic data, Rights in Exile exposes the gap between human rights norms and the mandates of international organisations, on the one hand, and the reality on the ground, on the other. It will be of wide interest to social scientists, and to human rights and international law scholars. Policy makers, donor governments and humanitarian organizations, especially those adopting a "rights-based" approach, will also find it an invaluable resource. But it is the refugees themselves who could benefit the most if these actors absorb its lessons and apply them.

What went wrong in Free French relations with Americans during World War Two? Two peoples, presumably sharing a common cause in a war to defeat the axis powers, often found themselves locked in bitter disputes that exposed fundamental differences in outlook and intentions, creating a profound misunderstanding or mesentente that was a major source of Franco-American conflict during the war and has persisted since then. The site for this dispute was the South Pacific colony of New Caledonia. By documenting carefully French policy toward the American presence in New Caledonia during the war, the author demonstrates the existence of a deep-seated suspicion, fear, even paranoia about the Americans that colored almost every phase of Free French policy. Revising traditional views, the author lays bare the roots of the antagonism, which stem from perceptions and biases.

Attempting to reconstruct the life of early societies, particular emphasis is laid upon social behaviour among primates, as well as approaches from ethnology, prehistoric archaeology, geography, genetics, human stress biology and psychology. First published in 1962.

This volume provides an up-to-date and in-depth summary and analysis of the political practices of pre-Columbian communities of the Araucanians or Mapuche of south-central Chile and adjacent regions. This synthesis draws upon the empirical record documented in original research, as well as a critical examination of previous studies. By applying both archaeological and ethnohistorical approaches, the latter including ethnography, this volume distinguishes itself from many other studies that explore South American archaeology. Archaeological and traditional-historical narratives of the pre-European past are considered in their own terms and for the extent to which they can be integrated in order to provide a more rounded and realistic understanding than otherwise of the origins and courses of ecological, economic, social and political changes in south-central Chile from late pre-Hispanic times, through the contact period and up to Chile s independence from Spain (ca. AD 1450-1810). Both the approach and the results are discussed in the light of similar situations elsewhere.

Throughout its treatment, the volume continually comes back to two central questions: (1) how did the varied practices, institutions and worldviews of the Mapuche s ancient communities emerge as a historical process that resisted the Spanish empire for more than 250 years? and (2) how were these communities reproduced and transformed in the face of ongoing culture contact and landscape change during the early Colonial period? These questions are considered in light of contemporary theoretical concepts regarding practice, landscape, environment, social organization, materiality and community that will make the book relevant for students and scholars interested in similar processes elsewhere."

Gathering together under a single cover material from a wide range of African societies, this volume allows similarities and differences to be easily perceived and suggests social correlates of these in terms of age, sex, marital status, social grading and wealth. It includes material on both traditional and modern cults.

An insightful new work, Function, Phylogeny, and Fossils integrates two practices in paleobiology which are often separated - functional and phylogenetic analysis. The book summarizes the evidence on paleoenvironments at the most important Miocene hominoid sites and relates it to the pertinent fossil record. The contributors present the most up-to-date statements on the functional anatomy and likely behavior of the best known hominoids of this crucial period of ape and human evolution. A key feature is a comprehensive table listing 240 characteristics among 13 genera of living and extinct hominoids.