In post-1991 Macedonia, Barok furniture came to represent affluence and success during a period of transition to a new market economy. This furniture marked the beginning of a larger Baroque style that influenced not only interior decorations in people's homes but also architecture and public spaces. By tracing the signifier Baroque, the book examines the reconfiguration of hierarchical relations among (ethnic) groups, genders, and countries in a transnational context. Investigating how Baroque has come to signify larger social processes and transformations in the current rebranding of the country, the book reveals the close link between aesthetics and politics, and how ethno-national conflicts are reflected in visually appealing ornamentation.

Rozita Dimova is Associate Professor of South East European Languages and Culture at Ghent University (Belgium) and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Slavonic Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany). She is guest co-editor of the issue of "History and Anthropology" (Winter 2013, vol. 24), entitled "Contested Nation-building within the International 'Order of Things': Performance, Festivals and Legitimization in South-Eastern Europe." Currently, she is completing a book manuscript on borders and neoliberalism in South-Eastern Europe.

Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in northeast Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention is paid to the impact of modern weaponry, new technologies, religious conversion, food and land shortages, international borders, civil war, and displacement on group identities. Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, historians and geographers, these volumes provide a significant account of a society profoundly shaped by identity politics and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of conflict and war, and forms of alliance and peacemaking, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of this troubled region.

Forms of group identity play a prominent role in everyday lives and politics in north-east Africa. These volumes provide an interdisciplinary account of the nature and significance of ethnic, religious, and national identity in north-east Africa. Case studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya illustrate the way that identities are formed and change over time, and how local, national, and international politics are interwoven. Specific attention is paid to the impact of modern weaponry, new technologies, religious conversion, food and land shortages, international borders, civil war, and displacement on group identities. Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, historians and geographers, these volumes provide a significant account of a society profoundly shaped by identity politics and contribute to a better understanding of the nature of conflict and war, and forms of alliance and peacemaking, thus providing a comprehensive portrait of this troubled region.

Contemporary accounts of Malay culture that focus on shamanism, dance, medicine and performance reveal only a partial view of Malay mysticism. However, given knowledge of the Malay martial art (silat) a more comprehensive understanding of Malay mysticism, religion, sorcery and magic becomes possible. Recognizing the silat master's (guru silat) role in Malay mysticism recon? gures the social anth- pology of Malay religion, sorcery and magic. Hence this account explores Malay mysticism, shamanism and sorcery from the perspective of silat, which may be considered as a kind of embodied war magic or warrior religion. Shadows of the Prophet: Martial Arts and Su Mysticism is based upon my d- toral dissertation (Farrer 2006b). Part I of the book, re ections, outlines the meth- ological and theoretical base of the research. Chapter 1 outlines the ? eldwork method of performance ethnography used to investigate a transnational silat organization called Seni Silat Haqq Melayu. This group are an offshoot of the Islamic Haqqani- Naqshbandi Su? Order headed internationally by Shaykh Nazim, and led in Sou- east Asia by a Malay Prince; H. R. H. Shaykh Raja Ashman. Readers who prefer to delve directly into the ethnographic materials may skip Chapter 2, which contains an extensive academic literature review of anthropological theories of art, embo- ment, magic, and performance read alongside Malay animism, shamanism, ritual and theatre.

Though many still think that we live in an information economy, Ernest Sternberg asserts that the driving force in 21st-century capitalism is not information, but image. Through studies of food processing, real estate development, tourism, movies, and labor performances, he examines how businesses endow products with evocative meaning.

It has become common wisdom that we live in a postindustrial information society in which data and calculation underlie wealth. But now that information is as routinely produced as industrial or agricultural goods, businesses are discovering that they best achieve competitive advantage by producing what consumers most dearly seek--personal meaning. The 21st-century economy produces just that: not merely information, but evocative images; not just commodities, but meaning-laden icons. As Sternberg shows, foods now appeal through their sensuality and nostalgia; houses and stores draw customers through their exoticism; people sell their labor through the deliberate performance of the self for the market; and tourist destinations offer up carefully crafted thematic experiences. Whereas farms, factories, and information processors once stood at the core of the economy, now movie studios do, producing the product valued above all, meaningful content, from which downstream firms acquire the themes that animate desire.

Now that meaning pervades production, Sternberg argues, modes of inquiry once reserved for the humanities make sense in the study of the economy. Drawing on art history and aesthetics, he introduces iconography as a mode of cultural analysis adapted to the study of commercial production. Through comparative studies of diverse economic sectors, ranging from food processing to tourism, Sternberg carries out an iconographic analysis of the new economy. This is a provocative study for scholars, students, and professionals dealing with marketing and consumer research, culture and media studies, socio-economics, and economic geography.

Psychologist Hans Askenasy has put together the first comprehensive history of a subject combining violence, horror, and exotic customs. In Part One of his study, Dr. Askenasy gives a historical and geographic overview of humankind's practice of and attitudes toward cannibalism.
Part Two discusses motivational factors for cannibalism, including famines (natural and man-made), survival in extreme situations, magic, ritual, and madness. Among the people and events covered are the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis; the wreckage of the frigate Medusa; the Donner Party; the notorious nineteenth-century "Colorado Man-Eater," Alferd Packer; the Andes plane crash of 1972; Elizabeth Bathory (b. 1560), the "Vampire Lady of the Carpathians"; and Georg Haarmann, who ground up his victims and sold them as potted meat.
In Part Three, "Cannibalism in Culture and Society," Askenasy addresses our continuing fascination with cannibals, man-eating witches, werewolves, and vampires in literature, myth, and the media, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola's film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles to the blood curdling events surrounding the cases of Issei Sagawa, Jeffrey Dahmer, and the Russian schoolteacher-turned torturer, Andrei Romanovitsch Chikatilo.

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.

The name "AIDS" is an accusation. It implies punishment for sin--homosexuality and promiscuity. AIDS is a moral judgement masquerading as a scientific name, which is at the very heart of discrimination against the infected. At the bottom are drug users, victims of the War On Drugs, condemned to contract AIDS by using contaminated syringes necessitated by scarcity resulting from restrictive policies. A rational way to control HIV is to liberalize drug paraphernalia policies as in Europe. The U.S. has not taken this simple step, thus unleashing the AIDS epidemic among drug users, their sexual partners, and neonates. While this policy neglect can be understood in the context of AIDS prevention dominated by moral, political, and religious ideologies rather than epidemiological facts, there are critical racial implications. The ethnic divide separating the white researchers and the infected who belong to minorities has fuelled comparisons of AIDS with the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and some preventive strategies have been called genocidal plots. Recent research indicating the ineffectiveness of bleach to disinfect paraphernalia has exposed the deadly consequences of a nonchalant attitude to research and compromises for political expediency.

Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the OtherOCOs morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit and focused attention until recently, when accelerated globalization often resulted in the collision of different value systems. Observing, describing and assessing values cross-culturally, the authors propose various methodological approaches to the study of moralities, illustrated with rich ethnographic accounts, thus offering a valuable guide for students of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies and for professionals concerned with the empirical and cross-cultural study of values."

Drawing from extended fieldwork in La Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, the author suggests an innovative re-reading of different concepts of magic that emerge in the global cultural economics of tourism. Following the making and unmaking of the tropical island tourism destination of La Reunion, he demonstrates how destinations are transformed into magical pleasure gardens in which human life is cultivated for tourist consumption. Like a gardener would cultivate flowers, local development policy, nature conservation, and museum initiatives dramatise local social life so as to evoke modernist paradigms of time, beauty and nature. Islanders who live in this 'human garden' are thus placed in the ambivalent role of 'human flowers', embodying ideas of authenticity and biblical innocence, but also of history and social life in perpetual creolisation.

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.

What gives artefacts their power and beauty? This ethnographic study of the decorated long yams made by the Nyamikum Abelam in Papua New Guinea examines how these artefacts acquire their specific properties through processes that mobilise and recruit diverse entities, substances and domains. All come together to form the 'finished product' that is displayed, representing what could be an indigenous form of non-verbal 'sociology'. Engaging with several contemporary anthropological topics (material culture, techniques, arts, aesthetics, rituals, botany, cosmology, Melanesian ethnography), the text also discusses in depth the complex position of the study of 'technology' within anthropology.

Ludovic Coupaye is a Lecturer in Material Culture Studies at the Department of Anthropology of University College London, a member of the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Oceanie (CREDO, Marseille), and teaches anthropology of Pacific Arts at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. He has been a teaching fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit (UEA) and assistant curator at the Musee du quai Branly in Paris.

Surprisingly little research has been carried out about how Australian Aboriginal children and teenagers experience life, shape their social world and imagine the future. This volume presents recent and original studies of life experiences outside the institutional settings of childcare and education, of those growing up in contemporary Central Australia or with strong links to the region. Focusing on the remote communities - roughly 1,200 across the continent - the volume includes case studies of language and family life in small country towns and urban contexts. These studies expertly show that forms of consciousness have changed enormously over the last hundred years for Indigenous societies more so than for the rest of Australia, yet equally notable are the continuities across generations. Ute Eickelkamp is ARC Future Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Sydney."

Anthropology is particularly well suited to explore the contemporary predicament in the coming of age of young men. Its grounded and comparative empiricism provides the opportunity to move beyond statistics, moral panics, or gender stereotypes in order to explore specific aspects of life course transitions, as well as the similar or divergent barriers or opportunities that young men in different parts of the world face. Yet, effective contextualization and comparison cannot be achieved by looking at male youths in isolation. This volume undertakes to contextualize male youths' circumstances and to learn about their lives, perspectives, and actions, and in turn illuminates the larger structures and processes that mediate the experiences entailed in becoming young men. The situation of male youths provides an important vantage point from which to consider broader social transformations and continuities. By paying careful attention to these contexts, we achieve a better understanding of the current influences encountered and acted upon by young people.

Astronomers around the world are pointing their telescopes toward the heavens, searching for signs of intelligent life. If they make contact with an advanced alien civilization, how will humankind respond? In thinking about first contact, the contributors to this volume present new empirical and theoretical research on the societal dimensions of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Archaeologists and astronomers explore the likelihood that extraterrestrial intelligence exists, using scientific insights to estimate such elusive factors as the longevity of technological societies. Sociologists present the latest findings of novel surveys, tapping into the publicOCOs attitudes about life beyond Earth to show how religion and education influence beliefs about extraterrestrials. Scholars from such diverse disciplines as mathematics, chemistry, journalism, and religious studies offer innovative solutions for bridging the cultural gap between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, while recognizing the tremendous challenges of communicating at interstellar distances. At a time when new planets are being discovered around other stars at an unprecedented rate, this collection provides a much needed guide to the human impact of discovering we are not alone in the universe."

Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, these essays by art historians and museum professionals argue for a more complex understanding of the relationship between objects and subjects in gendered terms. The objects under consideration range from the quotidian to the exotic, including beds, guns, fans, needle paintings, prints, drawings, mantillas, almanacs, reticules, silver punch bowls, and collage. These material goods may have been intended to enforce and affirm gendered norms, however as the essays demonstrate, their use by subjects frequently put normative formations of gender into question, revealing the impossibility of permanently fixing gender in relation to material goods, concepts, or bodies. This book will appeal to art historians, museum professionals, women's and gender studies specialists, students, and all those interested in the history of objects in everyday life.

Originally published as Negotiating Language, Constructing Race, 1998, in the series titled Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 79, sociologist Nirmala Srirekam PuruShotam discusses language as a social phenomenon, focusing specifically on the configuration of nation in Singapore. Annotat

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Few things tell us more of a nation's general well-being than the development of the life-expectancy of its citizens; the rising standards of health that they come to demand; and how evenly that improvement is shared throughout society. Helen Jones examines the record of twentieth-century Britain in these respects. She has much heartening progress to record - yet stark inequalities remain. Her book is thus both a review of, and contribution to, the current debates over gender, class and ethnic inequalities in standards of health in Britain today.

Reviews of Not Saussure and The Explicit Animal: Not Saussure - 'I greatly enjoyed it...' - Bernard Bergonzi 'The Explicit Animal - '...his books are genuine contributions to professional debate...' - Stephen R.L. Clarke, Times Literary Supplement;Newton's Sleep examines the complementary roles of science and art in human life. Science has been criticised for being at best useful but spiritually derelict, and art for attempting to answer the spiritual needs of humankind while ignoring the material needs of millions who live in want. Newton's Sleep deals with the charges that science is spiritually empty and that art fails in its civilising mission by relating these aspects of human culture to the physical and metaphysical hungers of an explicit animal who lives in both the Kingdom of Means and the Kingdom of Ends. 'Tallis can, and frequently does, write extremely well. He also writes with considerable passion...Tallis...is perhaps best seen as an exceptionally interesting and broad-minded heir to Huxley, preaching the cause of the Church Scientific...' Richard Webster

This supplement focuses on the NBA with particular reference to pay and performance. In-depth analyses of positional pay variations, player negotiations, supply and demand and econometric models of pay and performance seek to give a much clearer picture of why, how and when pay is awarded in the sports industry and particularly in the NBA. The volume concludes with a retrospective of the 1995 All-Star Players.

Across Africa, funerals and events remembering the dead have become larger and even more numerous over the years. Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event. Though officials may try to regulate them, the popularity of these events often makes such efforts fruitless, and the elites themselves spend tremendously on funerals. This volume brings together scholars who have conducted research on funerary events across sub-Saharan Africa. The contributions offer an in-depth understanding of the broad changes and underlying causes in African societies over the years, such as changes in religious beliefs, social structure, urbanization, and technological changes and health.

The core aim of this book is to determine how anthropology and demography can be used in conjunction in the field of population and development.

The boundaries of demography are not as clearly defined or as stable as one might think, especially in view of the tension between a formal demography centered on the core of procedures and references and a more open form of demography, generally referred to as Population Studies.

Many rapprochements, missed opportunities and isolated attempts marked the disciplinary history of anthropology and demography, both disciplines being founded on distinct and highly differentiated traditions and practices. Moreover, the role and the place assigned to epistemology differ significantly in ethnology and demography. Yet, anthropology and demography provide complementary models and research instruments and this book shows that neither discipline can afford to overlook their respective contributions.

Based on research conducted in West Africa over more than twenty years, it is a defense of field demography that makes case for a continuum ranging from the initial conception of fieldwork and research to its effective implementation and to data analysis. Changes in behaviors relating to fertility, poverty or migration cannot be interpreted without invoking the cultural factor at some stage. Representations in their collective and individual dimensions also fit into the extended explanatory space of demography.

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