This book offers new perspectives on global phenomena that play a major role in today's society and deeply shape the actions of individuals, organizations and nations. In a complex and rapidly changing environment, decision-makers need to gain a better understanding of global phenomena to adapt and to anticipate the evolution of the global context. The authors-ten renowned international scholars of anthropology, economics, law, management and political science-propose an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to social sciences. They analyse how international phenomena, such as globalisation or transnationalisation, transform the disciplines of social sciences from an epistemological standpoint. Explaining what 'global' means in difference disciplines, the authors analyse several global phenomena that characterise today's international environment such as the circulation of norms and ideas, the linkages between war and globalization, corporate governance, and the impact of multinational enterprises on sustainable development and poverty reduction. Providing examples of analytical disciplinary approaches and guidelines for decision-makers in a fast-changing global context this book will be useful to scholars and students of anthropology, economics, law, management and political science as well as practitioners in the private and public sectors.

Material religion is a rapidly growing field, and this volume offers an accessible, critical entry into these new areas of research. Each "key term" uses case studies and is accompanied by a color image - an object, practice, space, or site. The entries cut across geographies, histories, and traditions, offering a versatile and engaging text for the classroom. Key topics covered include: - Icon, ritual, magic, gender, race - Sacred, spirit, technology, - Space, belief, body, brain - Taste, touch, smell, sound, vision Each entry demonstrates in clear and jargon-free prose how the key term figures prominently in understanding the materiality of religion. Written by leading international scholars, all entries are linked by the ways materiality stands at the forefront of the understanding of religion, whether that comes from humanistic, social scientific, artistic, curatorial, or other perspectives. Brent Plate brings his expertise and extensive teaching experience to the comprehensive introduction which introduces students to the themes and methods of the material cultural study of religion. Key Terms in Material Religion provides a much-needed resource for courses on theory and method in religious studies, the anthropology of religion, and the ever-increasing number of courses focused on material religion.

This highly acclaimed book brings the cumulative results of a century and a half of kinship studies in anthropology into the focus of current debates on the origin of modern humans in Africa and on an entangled bit of human evolutionary history commonly subsumed under the heading of the "peopling of the Americas." This erudite study is based on a database of some 2,500 kinship vocabularies representing roughly 600 African languages, 140 Australian languages, 500 Austronesian languages, 200 Papuan languages, 350 languages of Eurasia (excluding Indo-Europeans), 440 North and Middle American Indian languages, and 200 South American languages. This valuable reference will take the reader to the dawn of kinship studies in the 19th century Western science in order to elicit the wider context of anthropological interest in kinship systems and the interdisciplinary salience of the phenomenon of kinship. The book also examines the founder of kinship studies in anthropology, American lawyer and Iroquois ethnographer, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the circumstances of his life that generated his interest in human kinship. The study ventures into the intricacies of scientific and quasi-scientific debates in the 19th century, and treats 19th century science as embedded in a myth featuring divinity, humanity and animality as principal characters. This account is divided into four sections, each of which is structured as a triad (philosophy, psychology and physiology; logic, semiotics and reproduction; religion, hermeneutics and evolution; law, grammar and speech). This far-reaching historical journey aims at formulating an idea of what human kinship might be all about, especially in the light of the widespread uncertainties about this question caused by the constructivist turn in anthropology. Eventually our ideas regarding human origins, ancient population dispersals and the homeland of modern humans are inextricably linked to our ideas about kinship. As a book that brings together evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology, The Genius of Kinship will be a critical addition for all Anthropology collections.

In this significant scholarly contribution to the study of ethnic minorities, Chalsa Loo documents a distinctive American community--Chinatown, San Francisco. Based on an interview survey of residents of Chinatown, Loo's study tests prevailing psychological and sociological theories, and ultimately dispels stereotypes about Asian Americans, replacing them with empirically derived realities of American life. "Chinatown: Most Time, Hard Time" comprehensively covers a range of significant areas of life, integrating several disciplines and combining the rigor of scientific analysis with the richness of individual experience through the use of photographs and personal vignettes.

This valuable analysis serves as a model of comprehensive, quantitative multidomain interview sample survey research. It provides data on the major domains of life for all Americans, but particularly for ethnic Americans: neighborhood, crowding, health, mental health, employment, language and cultural barriers, quality of life, and differences between men and women. This book is scholarly yet readable, and will be particularly useful to social scientists, educators, researchers, human service professionals, and policy planners.

This book examines the clothing worn by African Americans in the southern United States during the thirty years before the American Civil War. Drawing on a wide range of sources, most notably oral narratives recorded in the 1930s, this rich account shows that African Americans demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the role clothing played in demarcating age, sex, status, work, recreation, as well as special secular and sacred events. Testimonies offer proof of African Americans' vast technical skills in producing cloth and clothing, which served both as a fundamental reflection of the peoples' Afrocentric craftsmanship and aesthetic sensibilities, and as a reaction to their particular place in American society. Previous work on clothing in this period has tended to focus on white viewpoints, and as a consequence the dress worn by the enslaved has generally been seen as a static standard imposed by white overlords. This excellent study departs from conventional interpretations to show that the clothing of the enslaved changed over time, served multiple functions and represented customs and attitudes which evolved distinctly from within African American communities. In short, it represents a vital contribution to African American studies, as well as to dress and textile history, and cultural and folklore studies.

Estamos proyectando el analisis de una metamorfosis global en la actualidad, como los cambios de identidades en el proceso de transformacion cultural. En consecuencia, buscamos un concepto de intercambio cultural, como una sintesis de diferentes factores y dimensiones en el mundo multi e intercultural. Igualmente, queremos enfocar los elementos etnoecologicos, tanto regionales como globales, para el establecimiento de una vision holistica y armoniosa. Ademas, planeamos desarrollar criterios para una Didactica de la Cosmovision con paradigmas nuevos del Metabolismo Cultural como una opcion frente al camino actual en el marco de la globalizacion, concebido como unidimensional y unidireccional, que conduce a un callejon sin salida por la realizacion de cierta monocultura, una tendencia central, monopolica, racional, fragmentada y material que cosifica el mundo. Lograrlo implica investigar horizontes hacia una concientizacion y la busqueda de una convivencia integrativa, armonica e interrelacionada, complementaria que sirva de inspiracion en el sentido de un Metabolismo Cultural, como una formula y sintesis para convivir en un marco globalizante, sin perder la heterogeneidad de las singularidades del regionalismo biologico y cultural, algo propio de las unidades, que da sentido y funcion de la sustentabilidad contundente en una totalidad (Holon) continua.

This book presents a new way to understand human-animal interactions. Offering a profound discussion of topics such as human identity, our relationship with animals and the environment, and our culture, the author channels the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The research presents a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences. It challenges the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. Readers discover a vision of the human as a species informed by an intertwining with animals. The human being is not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid. The argument it presents interests scholars, thinkers, and researchers. It also appeals to anyone who wants to delve into the deep animal-human bond and its philosophical, cultural, political instances. The author is a veterinarian, ethologist, and philosopher. He uses cognitive science, zooanthropology, and philosophy to engage in a series of empirical, theoretical, and practice-based engagements with animal life. In the process, he argues that animals are key to human identity and culture at all levels.

The body has been the focus of much recent critical attention, but the clothed body less so. In answering the need to theorize dress, this book provides an overview of recent scholarship and presents an original theory of what dress means in relation to the body. Identity relies on boundaries to individuate the self. Dress challenges boundaries: it frames the body and serves both to distinguish and connect self and 'Other'. The authors argue that clothing is, then, both a boundary and not a boundary, that it is ambiguous and produces a complex relation between self and 'not self'. In examining the role of dress in social structures, the authors argue that clothing can be seen as both restricting and liberating individual and collective identity. In proposing that dress represents 'a deep surface, ' a manifestation of the unconscious at work through apparently superficial phenomena, the book also questions the relationship between surface and depth and counters the notion of dress as disguise or concealment. The concept of the gaze and the role of gender are approached through a discussion of masks and veils. The authors argue that masks and veils paradoxically combine concealment and revelation, 'truth' and 'deception'. Here the body and dress are both seen as forms of absence, with dress concealing not the body, but the absence of the physical body.This provocative book is certain to become a landmark text for anyone interested in the intersection of dress, the body and critical theory.

Traces labor migration of women from Eastern Caribbean to oil-producing countries such as Venezuela, Trinidad, Curaðcao, and especially Aruba. Discusses women's participation in the labor force, gender relations, domestic service, the social and economic position of the migrants, and motherhood. Argues that US investments are an important factor in the migration of Caribbean women"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

This sweeping history of the Serbian people starts with the settlement of the Slavs on the Balkan Peninsula in the seventh century and ends with the dissolution of Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth. Drawing on his own research and on contemporary literature, Sima Cirkovic looks at how the Serbs have fared through the ages - struggling for independence against Byzantium, suffering as slaves of the Ottoman sultans, and modernizing in a troubled corner of south-eastern Europe.

Cirkovic's detailed account provides a counter-balance to traditionally one-sided political histories of the Serbs, paying close attention to the nation's socio-economic development. His narrative gives equal weight to the medieval and modern periods, but draws from the processes of both integration and disintegration that have characterized Serbian history. The book gives readers the historical background to the Serbs, providing an essential insight into recent events.

This book offers an in-depth exploration of the international phenomenon of enlightened paternalist capitalism and social engineering in the golden age of capitalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Erik de Gier shows how utopian socialist, religious, and craft-based ideas influenced the welfare work and educations programmes offered by paternalistic businesses in different ways from nation to nation, looking closely at sites like the Pullman community in Chicago and Port Sunlight in the UK. De Gier brings the book fully up to date with a brief comparison to contemporary welfare capitalism in our highly flexible working world.

This is the first ethnography to be written about a Campeche Maya community. It examines the surviving Maya traditional technologies and sacred cosmologies and discusses the potential for combining these with modern knowledge and technologies to form an efficient new system that will not only provide for ecologically responsible development but will also make possible the cultural survival of this threatened indigenous population.

The racially charged stereotype of "welfare queen"--an allegedly promiscuous waster who uses her children as meal tickets funded by tax-payers--is a familiar icon in modern America, but as Gunja SenGupta reveals in From Slavery to Poverty, her historical roots run deep. For, SenGupta argues, the language and institutions of poor relief and reform have historically served as forums for inventing and negotiating identity.

Mining a broad array of sources on nineteenth-century New York City's interlocking network of private benevolence and municipal relief, SenGupta shows that these institutions promoted a racialized definition of poverty and citizenship. But they also offered a framework within which working poor New Yorkers--recently freed slaves and disfranchised free blacks, Afro-Caribbean sojourners and Irish immigrants, sex workers and unemployed laborers, and mothers and children--could challenge stereotypes and offer alternative visions of community. Thus, SenGupta argues, long before the advent of the twentieth-century welfare state, the discourse of welfare in its nineteenth-century incarnation created a space to talk about community, race, and nation; about what it meant to be "American," who belonged, and who did not. Her work provides historical context for understanding why today the notion of "welfare"--with all its derogatory "un-American" connotations--is associated not with middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, but rather with programs targeted at the poor, which are wrongly assumed to benefit primarily urban African Americans.

Third in the series Sociocultural Studies of Educational Policy Formation and Appropriation, this volume brings together scholars from North America, South America, and Europe to examine the relationship between ethnographic research and educational policy. The product of papers and discussions originally taking place at the Interamerican Symposium on Ethnographic Educational Research, the book presents both original empirical research reports and theoretical-methodological proposals for using ethnography to study and influence educational policy. After an introduction and opening chapter that highlight the different ways of conceptualizing education, education policy, and diversity across American borders, five full chapters address the relationship between ethnography and educational policy through sustained empirical attention to specific research sites and projects.

The next section of the book presents shorter position statements that relate specific research or policymaking experiences and reflect on the ways that ethnography can be involved in a project of formulating or revising policy. In this section, edited transcriptions of workshop discussions give the reader a vibrant sense of the challenging issues facing educational ethnographers attempting to address policy. The book closes with a commentary by a veteran educational ethnographer. Of interest to educators, researchers, and policymakers across the Americas, this volume contributes to an ongoing dialogue about how ethnographic research can intersect advantageously with the policymaking enterprise.

Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is. She offers a new understanding of how we have lost much of our natural well-being and shows us practical ways to regain it for our children and for ourselves.

Psyche-Genetics, as the title implies, is concerned with the intimate atomic relationship between the body and soul of MAN: It examines the on-going cycle of mankind's social and spiritual evolution - from the infancy of our Stone Age, all the way to the end of our cycle as transcendental Cosmic sages in a future Age yet to come, when no more children will be born: It provides a unique portrait of all three Great Houses of MAN and the journey through Time and Space that we are taking. It tells us who we are; why we exist; and where we are going: It brings attention to the nuclear threat of the present moment and the great difficulty we are all having in letting go of the pseudo-intellectual teenage arguments and reckless gambles of a dying Steel Age.

Most of the literature dealing with the origins of modern humans concentrates on the European sequence, where the Levant is referred to in passing as being problematic because it does not fit with the sequence of events documented in Europe. This is the first book that attempts to examine the issues specifically from the Levant, viewing it as central rather than peripheral to the problem. It also discusses in some depth the ramifications of possible interactions between the different hominids in the region.

Rather than viewing the transition from the Middle to Upper Paleolithic as the time at which fully modern adaptive systems came to the forefront, emphasis is placed on the Middle Paleolithic itself in order to test hypotheses that hominids of this period were culturally archaic. Through an analysis of the archaeological evidence, it is concluded that by at least 100,000 years ago people of the period, usually regarded as being somewhat less than human were, on the contrary, fully modern in terms of their behavioral and cultural systems. This conclusion applies to both the Neanderthals and their anatomically modern contemporaries. The author further concludes that the cultural and behavioral differences between the two types were minimal and that there was a potential for interaction and acculturation between them. The possibility is raised that the Near East is the region in which modern human cultural adaptation arose and then dispersed to other regions.

This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of "the state."
Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the "state."
Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.

The yearning to remember who we are is not easily detected in the qualitative dimensions of focus groups and ethnographic research methods; nor is it easily measured in standard quantified scientific inquiry. It is deeply rooted, obscured by layer upon layer of human efforts to survive the impact of historical amnesia induced by the dominant policies and practices of advanced capitalism and postmodern culture. Darder's introduction sets the tone by describing the formation of Warriors for Gringostroika and The New Mestizas. In the words of Anzaldua, those who cross over, pass over . . . the confines of the normal.' Critical essays follow by Mexicanas, poets, activists, and educators of all colors and persuasions. The collection coming out of the good work of the Southern California University system relates to all locales and spectrums of the human condition and will no doubt inspire excellent creativity of knowing and remembering among all who chance to read any part thereof.

This book explores how culture functions and intersects with religious groups, particularly Christians. It explores the way electronic communications, especially film and television, shape our world of meaning. Using the theories of British thinker Raymond Williams as his framework, Warren focuses on the actual process by which versions of reality are produced, the production of signification. He also draws on the ideas of Paulo Freire pointing out that cultural agency happens when individuals decide to exercise some judgment and control over the kinds of cultural material they will accept or resist.

If culture is a signifying system, says Warren, then religion is too. Contrasting values from the wider culture create dilemmas for those trying to follow a religious life. Choices either mirror the wider culture or reflect a culture of resistance. Warren seeks to help the reader develop the skills of cultural analysis by paying attention to the images that support culture, examining the life structures that support culture, and paying attention to how any particular aspect of culture is produced. Beyond all this, however, the author calls for a stance of resistance to all that violates human dignity and unity--all the aspects of culture that persons with high religious ideals cannot accept.