Modernity dissolves absolute certainties; late modernity dissolves them absolutely. In the modern world system there appears to be no firm, unchallenged ground on which to construct a meaningful canopy. But around the world, many individuals and groups long for a kind of cultural coherence that they believe once existed. They search for fundamentals. While these may be sought in religious traditions, many also aspire to new secular certainties. In their various new forms and contexts the contemporary quests for meaning in turn transform the societies in which they occur. The rich comparative examples in The Search for Fundamentals are used to analyze the sources and consequences of several cultural movements. The book also offers theoretical reflections on the difficulties they experience and on the message they carry for students of modernity. Audience: A broad readership of scholars and advanced students in the social sciences and humanities.

How a community in Cairo, Egypt, has adapted the many systems required for clean water. Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In Well Connected, anthropologist Tessa Farmer details how one community in Cairo, Egypt, has worked collaboratively to adapt the many systems required to facilitate clean water in their homes and neighborhoods. As a community that was originally not included in Cairo's municipal systems, the residents of Ezbet Khairallah built their own potable water and wastewater infrastructure. But when the city initiated a piped sewage removal system, local residents soon found themselves with little to no power over their own water supply or wastewater removal. Throughout this transition, residents worked together to collect water at the right times to drink, bathe, do laundry, cook, and clean homes. These everyday practices had deep implications for the health of community members, as they struggled to remain hydrated, rid their children of endemic intestinal worms, avoid consuming water contaminated with sewage, and mediate the impact of fluctuating water quality. Farmer examines how the people of Cairo interact with one another, with the government, and with social structures in order to navigate the water systems (and lack thereof) that affect their day-to-day lives. Farmer's extensive ethnographic fieldwork during the implementation of the Governorate of Cairo's septic system shines through in the compelling stories of community members. Well Connected taps into the inherent sociality of water through social contacts, moral ideology, interpersonal relationships, domestic rhythms, and the everyday labor of connecting.

Through careful historical and ethnographic research and extensive use of local scholarly works, this book provides a persuasive and careful analysis of the production of knowledge in Central Asia. The author demonstrates that classical theories of science and society are inadequate for understanding the science project in Central Asia. Instead, a critical understanding of local science is more appropriate.

In the region, the professional and political ethos of Marxism-Leninism was incorporated into the logic of science on the periphery of the Soviet empire. This book reveals that science, organizes and constructed by Soviet rule, was also defined by individual efforts of local scientists. Their work to establish themselves 'between Marx and the market' is therefore creating new political economies of knowledge at the edge of the scientific world system.

This volume contains a collection of seminal articles and recent research which are important reading for anyone wanting to understand current theoretical developments within the field of language and literacy studies. The collection reflects a growing recognition over the past decade of the importance of social factors in language and literacy development. The focus has shifted from talking about skills and competences to investigating the relationships between language and literacy practices, personal identities and social and cultural processes. It provides an important resource of classic articles (some of which are not easily obtainable) and up-to-date research for teachers, students and researchers working in language studies, anthropology and education.

This is the second volume of an interdisciplinary publication, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history and English.

Whenever a new language is learned, a new culture is also learned. Swiderski provides instructive examples of language learning situations by describing multilingual events using more than twenty of the world's languages. All aspects of language learning from the physical environment of the classroom to the perceptions of events and emotions that languages express are considered. Australian aboriginal languages and Native American languages are analyzed to illustrate the world of differences of which English, Chinese, and Russian are also a part. The politics of language teaching and the effect of language policy in the classroom are brought out in concrete examples. This study will be of interest to language teachers and the general international community as well.

Newfoundland lies at the intersection of arctic and more temperate regions and, commensurate with this geography, populations of two Amerindian and two Paleoeskimocultural traditions occupied Port au Choix, in northern Newfoundland, Canada, for centuries and millennia. Over the past two decades The Port au Choix Archaeology Project has sought a comparative understanding of how these different cultures, each with their particular origin and historical trajectory, adapted to the changing physical and social environments, impacted their physical surroundings, and created cultural landscapes. This volume brings together the research of Renouf, her colleagues and her students who together employ multiple perspectives and methods to provide a detailed reconstruction and understanding of the long-term history of Port au Choix. Although geographically focussed on a northern coastal area, this volume has wider implications for understanding archaeological landscapes, human-environment interactions and hunter-gatherer societies. "

Plantation membership, an important association that continues to carry meaning in today's African-American communities on the Sea Islands, depends on one's residence between the ages of two and 12. This is the time when one "catches sense," or learns the difference between right and wrong and the meaning of social relationships. Plantation membership confers rights and duties to its members for life, particularly in the areas of dispute settlement, adjudication, and status confirmation. The praise house system, which was the focal point of plantation life, is analyzed historically and in terms of the ethnographic present. Guthrie, an African-American anthropologist, believes that much of what she witnessed on St. Helena during her field research was a response to the experience of slavery when identity was derived from plantation residency rather than from mother, father, or place of birth.

This volume features bioarchaeological research that interrogates the human skeleton in concert with material culture, ethnographic data and archival research. This approach provides examples of how these intersections of inquiry can be used to consider the larger social and political contexts in which people lived and the manner in which they died. Bioarchaeologists are in a unique position to develop rich interpretations of the lived experiences of skeletonized individuals. Using their skills in multiple contexts, bioarchaeologists are also situated to consider the ethical nature and inherent humanity of the research collections that have been used because they represent deceased for whom there are records identifying them. These collections have been the basis for generating basic information regarding the human skeletal transcript. Ironically though, these collections themselves have not been studied with the same degree of understanding and interpretation that is applied to archaeological collections.

A collection of 11 papers on issues of representation, power and identity within the British countryside. Researchers in this area have looked beyond the ideas of tradition, power, order and conformity, to groups who feel themselves to be marginalized or excluded from the dominant ideologies in the countryside, such as New Age travellers, road protestors, anti-hunt groups, smallholders and low-income groups. These papers highlight the initial fruits of this research and attempt to reveal other "rural others" - different ideas about the countryside, different uses of rural space, and transgressions of and challenges to notions of mainstream rural lifestyles.

This book is an ethnographic study of the martial art of taijiquan (or 'tai chi') as it is practiced in China and the United States. Drawing on recent literature on ethnicity, critical race theory, the phenomenology of race, and globalization, the author discusses identity in terms of sensual experience and the transmission or receipt of knowledge. The book concludes with a discussion of how processes of individual experience, urban life, nationalism, and globalization inhabit the body, contribute to the sensual experience of identify, and, ultimately, raise fundamental questions about the relationship between 'doing' and 'being' .

With the rise of nationalism in the Republic of Korea, music has come to play a central role in the discourse of identity. This volume asks what Koreans consider makes music Korean, and how meaning is ascribed to musical creation. Keith Howard explores specific aspects of creativity that are designed to appeal to a new audience that is increasingly westernized yet proud of its indigenous heritage - updates of tradition, compositions, and collaborative fusions. He charts the development of the Korean music scene over the last 25 years and interprets the debates, claims and statistics by incorporating the voices of musicians, composers, scholars and critics. Koreanness is a brand identity with a discourse founded on heritage, hence Howard focuses on music that is claimed to link to tradition, and on music compositions where indigenous identity is consciously incorporated. The volume opens with SamulNori, a percussion quartet known throughout the world that was formed in 1978 but is rooted in local and itinerant bands stretching back many centuries. Parallel developments in vocal genres, folksongs and p'ansori ('epic storytelling through song') are considered, then three chapters explore compositions written both for western instruments and for Korean instruments, and designed both for Korean and international audiences. Over time, Howard shows how the two musical worlds - kugak, traditional music, and yangak, western music - have collided, and how fusions have emerged. This volume documents how identity has been negotiated by musicians, composers and audiences. Until recently, references to tradition were common and, by critics and musicologists, required. Western music increasingly encroached on the market for Korean music and doubts were raised about the future of any music identifiably Korean. Today, Korean musical production exudes a resurgent confidence as it amalgamates Korean and western elements, as it arranges and incorporates the old in the new, and as it creates a music suitable for the contemporary world.

It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.

A rich and fascinating ethnography of domestic architecture and activities among the high caste Chhetris of Kholagaun in Nepal, this book focuses on the spatial organization, everyday activities and ritual performances that generate and display Chhetri houses as 'mandalas', sacred diagrams that are both maps of the cosmos and machines for revelation. Describing the orientation and layout of the Chhetri house and surrounding compound; it shows how the orientation and distribution of everyday social activities with the domestic mandala shape people's experience of the enigmas of their lifeworld as householders; and analyses the double significance of rituals that take place in the domestic mandala. By treating the Nepali house as more than just the background of people's everyday life, the author reveals the Chhetri everyday lifeworld as a revelation of Hindu tantric cosmology, its enigmatic illusion, and the path to liberation from it. The themes addressed in the book make a unique contribution to the fields of anthropology, architecture and human geography.

The twelve papers featured in this book focus on codeswitching as an urban language-contact phenomenon. Some papers seek to distinguish codeswitching from other contact phenomenon such as borrowing or language mixing, while others look at the effect codeswitching has on one's position in society. The papers discuss such topics as the politics of codeswitching, the role of using more than one language in social identity, attitudes toward multi-language use, and the way codeswitching may occur as a community norm. The editor, Carol Eastman, is also author of "Aspects of Language and Culture", "Language Planning", and "Linguistic Theory and Language Description".

The book aims to establish the concept of attitudes as more central to the study of minority and majority languages. The strong tradition of attitude theory and research from social psychology is made relevant to language restoration and decay. Original research shows how attitude to bilingualism is conceptually distinct from attitude to a specific language. A piece of research in Wales investigates the origins of language attitudes in individual differences and in environmental attributes.

This is an original volume of critical and theoretical essays that seek to interpret the current philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thinking about African American literature and language. Some of the most significant writers and thinkers in the field have contributed to analyses, critiques, and theoretical developments in every genre of literature. The widespread debate over the canon in American literature, the issue of cultural diversity, and the need to have books with critical inquiry into African American culture make this collection suitable for scholars and students in such diverse fields as literature, linguistics, and African American Studies.

Religion on the Internet is the first systematic inquiry into the nature, scope and content of religion in cyberspace. Contributors to this volume include leading social scientists engaged in systematic studies of how organizations and individuals are presenting religion on the Internet. Their combined efforts provide a conceptual mapping of religion in cyberspace at this moment. The individual papers and collective insights found in this volume add up to a valuable agenda of research that will enrich understanding of this new phenomenon. Among the contributors are the founders of three of the most important scholarly religion web sites on the Internet: American Religion Data Archive, Religious Tolerance, and Religious Movements Homepage.
Religion and the Internet is essential reading for all who seek to understand how religion is being presented on the Internet and how this topic is likely to unfold in the years ahead.

For millennia, "the North" has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change. This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we've conceived it and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region's human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.

As France's oldest team sport, rugby football has throughout its 125-year history reflected major changes in French society. This book analyzes for the first time the complex variety of motives that have led the French to adopt and remake this rather unlikely British sport in their own image. A major site for the construction of masculine, class-based regional and national identities, France's tradition of 'Champagne rugby' continues to be as subject to dramatic upheavals as the society that produced it. The game's precocious professionalism and endemic violence have not infrequently caused the French to be cast as international pariahs. Such isolation, exacerbated by internal politics, has led the French not only to encourage the extension of the sport beyond its British imperial base (into Italy and Romania, for instance), but also to engage in some uncomfortable tactical alliances, most obviously with apartheid South Africa.Taking his analysis both on and off the field, the author tackles these issues and much more: the relationship of sport and the state (including particularly the Vichy period and the period under de Gaulle); professionalization; the persistence of colonial and postcolonial structures (including the role of ethnic minorities); and gender issues - especially masculine identities. At the same time he links the evolution of the sport to the broader context of French socio-economic, political and cultural history.This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the cultural analysis of sport or French popular culture.

Evolving for centuries in relative isolation, sport in Japan developed a unique character reflective of Japanese culture and society. In recent decades, Japan's drive towards cultural and economic modernization has consciously incorporated a modernization of its sports cultures. "Japan, Sport and Society" provides insights into this process, revealing the tensions between continuity and change, tradition and modernity, the local and the global in a culture facing the new economic and political realities of our modern world. The book explores three broad areas of interest:
- sport and modern society in Japan
- current issues in social reconstruction and reproduction through sport
- modernization, globalization and sport in Japan
Providing unprecedented access to new work from Japanese scholars, and raising key questions of globalization and cultural identity, this text represents a fascinating resource for students and researchers of sport and society.

What constitutes a resource, and how do people make claims on them? In the context of a burgeoning discourse of property, these are vital questions. Rationales of Ownership offers conceptual clarification in the context of material, intellectual and cultural resources in Papua New Guinea. The volume is a result of a major research project headed by Marilyn Strathern and Eric Hirsch, and brings together contributions from social anthropology and law. The approaches demonstrated, and conclusions reached, build upon recent understandings developed within Melanesian anthropology, but have far wider significance. The first publication sold out in Papua New Guinea due to the relevance of its approach and contents to lawyers and policy makers in that country. It is here made available to a wider readership, particularly those teaching courses on resource development, cultural and intellectual property, contemporary Pacific societies, environmental degradation, and property itself. ADVANCE PRAISE '...a unique contribution to the discipline's voice in contemporary global debates...this volume represents the best of the comparative, ethnographic tradition providing critical insight into difference and similarity on issues that entangle us all in various degrees of responsibility and care. It will be read by anthropologists, policy makers and all academic and non-academic students of what has come to be seen as the test area of the survival of cultural difference.' Marta Roahtynskyj, University of Guelph Lawrence Kalinoe is Professor and Executive Dean in the School of Law, University of Papua New Guinea. James Leach is Research Fellow, King's College and Associate Lecturer, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.