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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General
Social capital theorists have shown that inequality arises in part
because some people enjoy larger, more supportive or otherwise more
useful networks. But why do some people have better networks than
others? Unanticipated Gains argues that the answer lies less in
people's deliberate "networking" than in the institutional
conditions of the colleges, firms, gyms, and other organizations in
which they happen to participate routinely. The book introduces a
model of social inequality that takes seriously the embeddedness of
networks in formal organizations, proposing that what people gain
from their connections depends on where those connections are
formed and sustained. It studies an unlikely case: the experiences
of mothers whose children were enrolled in New York City childcare
centers. As a result of the routine practices and institutional
conditions of the centers-from the structure of their parents'
associations, to apparently innocuous rules such as pick-up and
drop-off times--many of these mothers dramatically increased their
social capital and measurably improved their wellbeing. Yet how
much they gained depended on how their centers were organized. The
daycare centers also brokered connections to other people and
organizations, affecting not only the size of mothers' networks but
also the resources available through them. Social inequality then
arises not merely out of differences in skills or deliberate
investments - as the conventional social scientific and political
wisdom would have it - but also out of the differences in the
routine organizations in which people belong. In addition to
childcare centers, Small also identifies the social forces at work
in many other organizations, including beauty salons, bath houses,
gyms, and churches.
As Senegal prepares to celebrate fifty years of independence from
French colonial rule, academic and policy circles are engaged in a
vigorous debate about its experience in nation building. An
important aspect of this debate is the impact of globalization on
Senegal, particularly the massive labor migration that began
directly after independence. From Tokyo to Melbourne, from Turin to
Buenos Aires, from to Paris to New York, 300,000 Senegalese
immigrants are simultaneously negotiating their integration into
their host society and seriously impacting the development of their
homeland.
This book addresses the modes of organization of transnational
societies in the globalized context, and specifically the role of
religion in the experience of migrant communities in Western
societies. Abundant literature is available on immigrants from
Latin America and Asia, but very little on Africans, especially
those from French speaking countries in the United States. Ousmane
Kane offers a case study of the growing Senegalese community in New
York City. By pulling together numerous aspects (religious, ethnic,
occupational, gender, generational, socio-economic, and political)
of the experience of the Senegalese migrant community into an
integrated analysis, linking discussion of both the homeland and
host community, this book breaks new ground in the debate about
postcolonial Senegal, Muslim globalization and diaspora studies in
the United States. A leading scholar of African Islam, Ousmane Kane
has also conducted extensive research in North America, Europe and
Africa, which allows him to provide an insightful historical
ethnography of the Senegalese transnational experience.
Why is there a resurgence of racism in contemporary societies? How
do ideas about race and ethnicity serve to construct forms of
social and political identity? These are some of the key questions
addressed in this important book. Drawing on comparative sources,
this study analyses some of the most important aspects of racism
within the context of contemporary social relations, introducing
both students and practitioners to questions of key importance in
the study of racism.
This book describes one of our closest relatives, the orangutan,
and the only extant great ape in Asia. It is increasingly clear
that orangutan populations show extensive variation in behavioral
ecology, morphology, life history, and genes. Indeed, on the
strength of the latest genetic and morphological evidence, it has
been proposed that orangutans actually constitute two species which
diverged more than a million years ago - one on the island of
Sumatra the other on Borneo, with the latter comprising three
subspecies.
This book has two main aims. The first is to carefully compare data
from every orangutan research site, examining the differences and
similarities between orangutan species, subspecies and populations.
The second is to develop a theoretical framework in which these
differences and similarities can be explained. To achieve these
goals the editors have assembled the world's leading orangutan
experts to rigorously synthesize and compare the data, quantify the
similarities or differences, and seek to explain them.
Orangutans is the first synthesis of orangutan biology to adopt
this novel, comparative approach. It analyses and compares the
latest data, developing a theoretical framework to explain
morphological, life history, and behavioral variation.
Intriguingly, not all behavioral differences can be attributed to
ecological variation between and within the two islands; relative
rates of social learning also appear to have been influential. The
book also emphasizes the crucial impact of human settlement on
orangutans and looks ahead to the future prospects for the survival
of critically endangered natural populations.
Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect
of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as
Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia.
This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging
account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture
within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of
identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and
critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth
culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural
and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the
ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource
by young people, using as a springboard a series of original
ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock.
Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised
within a wider international literature on youth styles, local
spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically
how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are
appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social
spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young
people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve
to construct the social world in which their identities operate.
With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its
important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is
essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in
sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music
studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University
of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of
youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and
ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review,
Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently
co-editing a book on guitar cultures.
A classic question in studies of ritual is how ritual performances
achieve-or fail to achieve-their effects. In this pathbreaking
book, Matt Tomlinson argues that participants condition their own
expectations of ritual success by interactively creating distinct
textual patterns of sequence, conjunction, contrast, and
substitution. Drawing on long-term research in Fiji, the book
presents in-depth studies of each of these patterns, taken from a
wide range of settings: a fiery, soul-saving Pentecostal crusade;
relaxed gatherings at which people drink the narcotic beverage
kava; deathbeds at which missionaries eagerly await the signs of
good Christians' "happy deaths"; and the monologic pronouncements
of a military-led government determined to make the nation speak in
a single voice. In each of these cases, Tomlinson also examines the
broad ideologies of motion which frame participants' ritual
actions, such as Pentecostals' beliefs that effective worship
requires ecstatic movement like jumping, dancing, and clapping, and
nineteenth-century missionaries' insistence that the journeys of
the soul in the afterlife should follow a new path. By approaching
ritual as an act of "entextualization"-in which the flow of
discourse is turned into object-like texts-while analyzing the ways
people expect words, things, and selves to move in performance,
this book presents a new and compelling way to understand the
efficacy of ritual action.
Singing the Right Way enters the world of Orthodox Christianity in
Estonia to explore the significance of musical style in worship,
cultural identity, and social imagination. Through a series of
ethnographic and historical chapters, author Jeffers Engelhardt
focuses on how Orthodox Estonians give voice to the religious
absolute in secular society to live Christ-like lives. Approaching
Orthodoxy through local understandings of correct practice and
correct belief, Engelhardt shows how religious knowledge, national
identity, and social transformation illuminate in the work of
singing: how to "sing the right way" and thereby realize the
fullness of their faith. In some parishes, this meant preserving a
local, Protestant-influenced tradition of congregational singing
from the 1920s and 30s. In others, it meant adapting Byzantine
melodies and vocal styles encountered abroad. In still others, it
meant continuing a bilingual, multi-ethnic Estonian-Russian oral
tradition despite ecclesiastical and political struggle. Based on a
decade of fieldwork and singing in choirs, Singing the Right Way
traces the sounds of Orthodoxy in Estonia through the Russian
Empire, interwar national independence, the Soviet-era, and
post-Soviet integration into the European Union to describe the
dynamics of religion and secularity in singing style and repertoire
- what Engelhardt calls secular enchantment. Ultimately, Singing
the Right Way is an innovative model of how the musical poetics of
contemporary religious forms are rooted in both sacred tradition
and the contingent ways individuals inhabit the secular. This
landmark study is sure to be an essential text for scholars
studying the ethnomusicology of religion.
Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to
reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia.
Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the
successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia
from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants
of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to
each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar
diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial
political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the
peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book
particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China's
tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms
of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far
west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized
cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of
Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the
more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants. This
interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal to
readers of comparative and world history, especially those
interested in medieval warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.
This high-interest informational text will help students gain
science content knowledge while building their literacy skills and
nonfiction reading comprehension. This appropriately leveled
nonfiction science reader features hands-on, simple science
experiments and full-color images and graphics. Fourth grade
students will learn all about how sensory systems differ among
animals through this engaging text that is aligned to the Next
Generation Science Standards and supports STEM education.
Words have determinable sense only within a complex of unstated
assumptions, and all interpretation must therefore go beyond the
given material. This book addresses what is man's place in the
Aristotelian world. It also describes man's abilities and prospects
in managing his life, and considers how far Aristotle's treatment
of time and history licenses the sort of dynamic interpretation of
his doctrines that have been given. The ontological model that
explains much of Aristotle's conclusions and methods is one of
life-worlds, in which the material universe of scientific myth is
no more than an abstraction from lived reality, not its
transcendent ground.
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