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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > General
Some of the most prominent social and cultural anthropologists have come together in this volume to discuss Maurice Godelier's work. They explore and revisit some of the highly complex practices and structures social scientists encounter in their fieldwork. From the nature-culture debate to the fabrication of hereditary political systems, from transforming gender relations to the problems of the Christianization of indigenous peoples, these chapters demonstrate both the diversity of anthropological topics and the opportunity for constructive dialogue around shared methodological and theoretical models.
Washington provides a detailed guide to the philosophy of Alain Locke, one of the most influential African American thinkers of our time. The work gives special attention to what Washington calls Destiny Studies, an approach which allows a people to concentrate on their past, present, and future possibilities, and to view the experience of a race as a coherent unity, rather than a set of fragmented historical happenings. In providing a broad vision of Locke's ideas, Washington considers the views of Booker T. Washington and his contemporaries, the theories of anthropologists concerning race and ethnicity, and many of the social issues current in our own age. By doing so, Washington affirms the importance of Locke as a philosopher and demonstrates the impact of Locke on the destiny of African Americans.
Based on one of the most extensive scientific surveys of race ever conducted, this book investigates the relationship between racial perceptions and policy choices in America. The contributors-leading scholars in the fields of public opinion, race relations, and political behavior-clarify and explore images of African-Americans that white Americans hold and the complex ways that racial stereotypes shape modern political debates about such issues as affirmative action, housing, welfare, and crime. The authors make use of the largest national study of public opinion on racial issues in more than a generation-the Race and Politics Study (RPS) conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of California. The RPS employed methodological improvements made possible by Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, a technique that enables analysts to combine the internal validity of laboratory experiments with the external validity of probability sampling. Taking full advantage of these research methods, the authors offer highly nuanced analyses of subjects ranging from the sources of racial stereotypes to the racial policy preferences of Democrats and Republicans to the reasons for resistance to affirmative action. Their findings indicate that while crude and explicit forms of racial prejudice may have declined in recent decades, racial stereotypes persist among many whites and exert a powerful influence on the ways they view certain public policies.
Among both male and female young urban professionals in Nairobi, sexuality is a key to achieving a 'modern' identity. These young men and women see themselves as the avant garde of a new Africa, while they also express the recurring worry of how to combine an 'African' identity with the new lifestyles with which they are experimenting. By focusing on public debates and their preoccupations with issues of African heritage, gerontocratic power relations and conventional morality on the one hand, and personal sexual relationships, intimacy and self-perceptions on the other, this study works out the complexities of sexuality and culture in the context of modernity in an African society. It moves beyond an investigation of a health or development perspective of sexuality and instead examines desire, pleasure and eroticism, revealing new insights into the methodology and theory of the study of sexuality within the social sciences. Sexuality serves as a prism for analysing how social developments generate new notions of self in postcolonial Kenya and is a crucial component towards understanding the way people recognize and deal with modern changes in their personal lives.
This volume of essays by scholars and activists focuses on the political and social relations between blacks, Latinos, and Asians in key urban centers. Collectively, the essays examine the particular status of relations between these groups, the reasons for conflict or consensus, and the prospects for future relations. While a number of cities are examined, the book focuses on Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Miami as particularly instructive case studies. Urban eruptions in these cities are examined in terms of the nature of political relations between blacks, Latinos, and Asians. These essays provide analyses within a sociohistorical context and offer the kind of political activism that might ensure consensus, rather than conflict, between these groups in urban America. As Luis Fuentes observes, This book should be read by all activists and scholars interested in changing the face of urban and ultimately, national America; for if communities of color can come together for progressive political action, then it will only be a matter of time before America finally begins to look like, and act like, what it has been preaching for generations.
For centuries, Whiteness has been the invisible norm in the West, a transparent, yet ubiquitous frame of reference so pervasive that most Whites consider themselves absolved from race matters. In recent years activists, scholars, and writers have been challenging this cultural and political monolith by investigating Whiteness in its many manifestations. Yet, once it is rendered visible, Whiteness proves to be perilous and paradoxical: we single out Whiteness to expose its status as an unexamined center, yet the more we single it out, the more attention we invariably draw to it, once again at the expense of marginalized cultures. Organized into sections on white politics, white culture, white bodies, and white theory, this anthology collects much of the most important work on Whiteness to date. Such writers as David Roediger, Eric Lott, E. Ann Kaplan, Fred Pfeil, Amitava Kumar, and Henry A. Giroux serve up what is, in essence, a second generation of writing on Whiteness, moving past acknowledgment of its heretofore invisible nature, to in-depth analysis of its resilience and alleged disintegration. Taking on film, literature, music, militias, even Rush Limbaugh, Whiteness: A Critical Reader is a crucial contribution to discussions of race, politics, and culture in the U.S. today.
Read Chapter One. "Initiate[s] a useful and innovative dialogue. . . . A very
important book, especially in its opening up a discussion of
methodological issues around current research on racism and racial
grouping." "Essential reading for all those whose research explicitly
engages racial issues-and for all those who do not realize that
their work inevitably engages racial issues." "Absolutely critical reading. This volume powerfully explores
how scholars' own racial background shapes the analytical lens with
which they view whiteness, blackness . . . the exoticism and
eroticism of racial 'others' and the domain of white
privilege." "Timely and challenging, this innovative book engages questions
and dilemmas that researchers on race and racism rarely talk about
in public. Refreshingly clear and comparative in scope, it is a
must reading in all courses about race and ethnic relations,
calling for a fundamental rethinking of research agendas in this
field." "Points to the ethical dilemmas of researchers researching race
among communities that are at once 'victims' ofracism and active in
the continued process of racialization." "A remarkable collection of essays interrogating the political,
methodological and ethical dilemmas of conducting research in
racially stratified societies. These theoretically astute and
ethnographically rich case studies compellingly demonstrate how the
production of knowledge is framed and mediated by the racialized
subject positions held by social scientists. Racing Research,
Researching Race will no doubt incite a critical and long overdue
discussion of the racial politics of ethnographic fieldwork." A white woman studies upper-class eighth grade girls at her alma mater on Long Island and finds a culture founded on misinformation about its own racial and class identity. A black American researcher is repeatedly assumed by many Brazilian subjects to be a domestic servant or sex worker. Racing Race, Researching Race is the first volume of its kind to explore how ideologies of race and racism intersect with nationality and gender to shape the research experience. Critical work in race studies has not adequately addressed how racial positions in the field--as inflected by nationality, gender, and age--generate numerous methodological dilemmas. Racing Research, Researching Race begins to fill this gap by infusing critical race studies with more empirical work and suggesting how a critical race perspective might improve research methodologies and outcomes. The contributors to the volume encompassa wide range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, women=s studies, political science, and Asian American studies.
Routledge is delighted to be re-issuing 79 volumes originally published between 1931 and 1988 in association with the International African Institute. Unavailable outside a few key libraries, many of these republished volumes were at the cutting edge of a fieldwork and ethnographic revolution in African anthropology in the decades after 1930. It involved the production of a wide body of fieldwork-based ethnographic documentation about the cultures of the different societies in Africa. Secondly, it saw a methodological turn to intense, localized investigations of cultural tradition and social change in a rapidly modernizing context. These investigations involved a more sustained and systematic, more professional and 'scientific' form of immersion and participant observation, than anything that had gone before. The sites of engagement were urban as well as rural; the pioneering researchers were female as well as male. No longer was the journal essay the repository of the latest research in the discipline, but rich ethnographies running into hundreds of pages. The volumes are supplemented with maps, which will be available to view on https://www.routledge.com/ or available as pdfs from the publishers.
This bibliography is a comprehensive record of doctoral dissertations on religion and American society. Included are 4,240 citations for dissertations written through June 1991. Each work discusses the historical dimension of America's religious experience between 1620 and 1900, and the bibliography provides order numbers for all dissertations available from University Microfilms, Inc. In addition to biographical and denominational studies, the volume contains citations on communal societies, fraternal orders, literature, pragmatism, science, slavery, and temperance. Also included are titles pertaining to church-affiliated institutions of higher education. A preface overviews the scope of the work, criteria for inclusion, and research methodology. A section of bibliographic entries for denominations and movements follows. Entries in this section are grouped in clusters for particular movements and denominations, and the clusters are arranged alphabetically for ease of use. The next section contains bibliographic entries arranged in topical clusters, with topics presented in alphabetical order. The volume concludes with detailed author and subject indexes.
This is the first book to look at the quasi-religious aspects of
the romantic cult of Shakespeare. Focusing on England, Hungary, and
some other European countries, the book explores the latent
religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the
1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of 1864. Surveying both
the verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Shakespeare cult,
the author highlights their analogies with those of traditional
religious cults and shows the appropriation of Shakespeare and his
texts to be inseparable from quasi-religious acts of reverence such
as literary pilgrimages, relic worship, the erection and dedication
of monuments, and public celebrations of anniversaries. This cult
made use of some important romantic notions (genius, originality,
imagination, transcendental analogies of artistic creation), and
the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was to be utilized for
political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a
comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of
literature.
India in Art in Ireland is the first book to address how the relationship between these two ends of the British Empire played out in the visual arts. It demonstrates that Irish ambivalence about British imperialism in India complicates the assumption that colonialism precluded identifying with an exotic other. Examining a wide range of media, including manuscript illuminations, paintings, prints, architecture, stained glass, and photography, its authors demonstrate the complex nature of empire in India, compare these empires to British imperialism in Ireland, and explore the contemporary relationship between what are now two independent countries through a consideration of works of art in Irish collections, supplemented by a consideration of Irish architecture and of contemporary Irish visual culture. The collection features essays on Rajput and Mughal miniatures, on a portrait of an Indian woman by the Irish painter Thomas Hickey, on the gate lodge to the Dromana estate in County Waterford, and a consideration of the intellectual context of Harry Clarke's Eve of St. Agnes window. This book should appeal not only to those seeking to learn more about some of Ireland's most cherished works of art, but to all those curious about the complex interplay between empire, anti-colonialism, and the visual arts.
In recent years, the saliency of conflicts pitting different ethnic, racial and religious groups against one another has increased dramatically. The world of nation-states is much more diverse than previously realized; only a small number of the 185 independent countries are truly homogeneous. With the end of the cold war, the relative importance of ethnic conflicts as a threat to international peace and stability is far greater. An international set of scholars collaborate in this volume to explore policy alternatives which can contribute towards the accommodation of cultural diversity.
Mediterranean islands exhibit many similarities in their biotic ecological, physical and environmental characteristics. There are also many differences in terms of their human colonization and current anthropogenic pressures. This book addresses in three sections these characteristics and examines the major environmental changes that the islands experienced during the Quaternary period. The first section provides details on natural and cultural factors which have shaped island landscapes. It describes the environmental and cultural changes of the Holocene and their effects on biota, as well as on the current human pressures that are now threats to the sustainability of the island communities. The second section focuses on the landscapes of the largest islands namely Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Cyprus, Crete, Malta and the Balearics. Each island chapter includes a special topic reflecting a particular characteristic of the island. Part three presents strategies for action towards sustainability in Mediterranean islands and concludes with a comparison between the largest islands. Despite several published books on Mediterranean ecosystems/landscapes there is no existing book dealing with Mediterranean islands in a collective manner. Students, researchers and university lecturers in environmental science, geography, biology and ecology will find this work invaluable as a cross-disciplinary text while planners and politicians will welcome the succinct summaries as background material to planning decisions.
Why is talk about television forbidden at certain schools? Why does a mother feel guilty about watching Star Trek in front of her four-year-old child? Why would retired men turn to daytime soap operas for entertainment? Cliches about television mask the complexity of our relationship to media technologies. Through case studies, the author explains what audience research tells us about the uses of technologies in the domestic sphere and the classroom, the relationship between gender and genre, and the varied interpretation of media technologies and media forms. Television and New Media Audiences reviews the most important research on television audiences and recommends the use of ethnographic, longitudinal methods for the study of media consumption and computer use at home as well as in the workplace.
Besides the erroneous assumption that tropical fisheries are open access, the cases demonstrate that pre-existing systems (1) are concerned with the community of fishers and ensuring community harmony and continuity; (2) involve flexible, multiple and overlapping rights adapted to changing needs and circumstances; (3) that fisheries are just one component of a community resource assemblage and depend on both the good management of linked upstream ecosystems and risk management to ensure balanced nutritional resources of the community; and (4) pre-existing systems are greatly affected by a constellation of interacting external pressures.
Arguing that society has pursued short-run approaches to decision-making that in the long term are counterproductive, On Systemic Balance presents a multidimensional and interdisciplinary alternative to problem solving. The usual method of dealing with problems such as housing shortages and environmental protection is a narrow, simplistic, quick, and intrusive solution. This type of solution ultimately ignores the many interrelationships within a system. The long term effect is imbalance and destabilization. The author reinforces his argument with economic and environmental examples. He then introduces alternative approaches to decision making and applies them to several settings. By stressing slow incremental intrusions, regard for interrelationships, and longer term balance, the author suggests that we might redefine problems more appropriately, develop less harmful and more enduring solutions, and provide a more stable environment. Goldberg maintains that we cannot truly predict the consequences of our actions, particularly large-scale actions taken over a short period of time. He presents his argument first by equipping the reader with a set of multidisciplinary tools and second by demonstrating the poor results of our present decision-making style. He then introduces an alternative approach which borrows from biology, economics, management, and anthropology and applies it to three distinct settings.
Islamic powers in secular countries have presented a challenge for states around the world, including Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population as well as the third largest democracy in the world. This book explores the history of the relationships between Islam, state, and society in Indonesia with a focus on local politics in Madura. It identifies and explains factors that have shaped and characterized the development of contemporary Islam and politics in Madura and recognizes and elucidates forms and aspects of the relationships between Islam and politics; between state and society; between conflicts and accommodations; between piety, tradition and violence in that area, and the forms and characters of democratization and decentralization processes in local politics. This book shows how the area's experience in dealing with Islam and politics may illuminate the socio-political trajectory of other developing Muslim countries at present living through comparable democratic transformations. Madura was chosen because it has one of the most complex relationships between Islam and politics during the last years of the New Order and the first years of the post-New Order in Indonesia, and because it is a strong Muslim area with a history of a very strong religious as well as cultural tradition than is commonly understood and is largely ignored in literature on Islam and politics. Based on extensive sets of anthropological fieldwork and historical research, this book makes an important contribution to the analysis of Islam and politics in Indonesia and future socio-political trajectory of other developing Muslim countries experiencing comparable democratic transformations. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Religion and Politics and Southeast Asian Studies, in particular Southeast Asian politics, anthropology and history.
In its most general sense, the term "Spiritual but Not Religious" denotes those who, on the one hand, are disillusioned with traditional institutional religion and, on the other hand, feel that those same traditions contain deep wisdom about the human condition. This edited collection speaks to what national surveys agree is a growing social phenomenon referred to as the "Spiritual but Not Religious Movement" (SBNRM). Each essay of the volume engages the past, present and future(s) of the SBNRM. Their collective contribution is analytic, descriptive, and prescriptive, taking stock of not only the various analyses of the SBNRM to date but also the establishment of a new ground upon which the continued academic discussion can take place. This volume is a watershed in the growing academic and public interest in the SBNRM. As such, it will vital reading for any academic involved in Religious Studies, Spirituality and Sociology.
In recent years an increasing number of scholars have incorporated a focus on emotions in their theories of material culture, transnationalism and globalization, and this book aims to contribute to this field of inquiry. It examines how 'emotions' can be theorized, and serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the interrelated mobility of humans, objects and images. Ethnographically rich, and theoretically grounded case studies offer new perspectives on the relations between migration, material culture and emotions. While some chapters address the many different ways in which migrants and migrant artists express their emotions through objects and images in transnational contexts, other chapters focus on how particular works of art, everyday objects and artefacts can evoke feelings specific to particular migrant groups and communities. Case studies also analyse how artists, academics and policy makers can stimulate positive interaction between migrants and non-migrant communities.
Many of the vestiges of the Civil Rights movement, including initiatives such as affirmative action, are increasingly under attack by those who assert that the Constitution is explicitly "color-blind." In this argument, the government is not legally permitted to take race into account in a "color conscious" manner. More than 30 years have passed since the landmark Civil Rights Acts became the law of the land. Yet, one of three African American men between the ages of 18 and 27 is in the hands of the criminal justice system, churches are burning in the South, and right-wing militia groups are flourishing. In this provocative and timely book, Leslie G. Carr suggests that the Constitution can be read as "racist," and that the concept of "color-blindness" is in fact the latest in a series of racist ideologies that have been part of the American fabric. "Color-Blind" Racism provides a thorough historical grounding in racist ideologies in the United States, and will be of great interest to anyone teaching or studying race relations, public policy, urban studies, and race and politics.
When, why, and how early humans began to eat meat are three of the most fundamental unresolved questions in the study of human origins. Before 2.5 million years ago the presence and importance of meat in the hominid diet is unkown. After stone tools appear in the fossil record it seems clear that meat was eaten in increasing quantities, but whether it was obtained through hunting or scavenging remains a topic of intense debate. This book takes a novel and strongly interdisciplinary approach to the role of meat in the early hominid diet, inviting well-known researchers who study the human fossil record, modern hunter-gatherers, and nonhuman primates to contribute chapters to a volume that integrates these three perspectives. Stanford's research has been on the ecology of hunting by wild chimpanzees. Bunn is an archaeologist who has worked on both the fossil record and modern foraging people. This will be a reconsideration of the role of hunting, scavening, and the uses of meat in light of recent data and modern evolutionary theory. There is currently no other book, nor has there ever been, that occupies the niche this book will create for itself. |
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