The book selects some past events and experiences, national and international, and wonders what lessons were missed, learnt, or are yet to be learnt from them.

Tragedies happen again and again because we fail to learn from the past. The past is rich with valuable lessons – rich pickings. The reader is taken back into the past in search of some of those lessons, many of which, regrettably, we failed – and continue failing – to learn. As we dig into the past for those rich pickings, there will be moments to laugh, cry or even weep; but that is exactly how lessons are learnt in life.

Other similar incidents learnt from, both abroad and at home, relate to the author’s own experiences in South Africa, including as a Judge who heard amnesty applications as a member of the Amnesty Committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The book hopes to show that capacity for evil is not peculiar to any nation or race; it also discusses the dangers of tribalism.

The chapter ‘Beyond the Frontiers’ takes the reader into the rest of Africa. A lot is revealed, including divisions the author witnessed – while serving as an AU judge based in Tanzania – within the AU along the languages of, ironically, colonial masters; also referenced is the sorry state of human rights in Africa. Have we seized the opportunity to learn all the valuable lessons which that great teacher, ‘The Past’, offered?

The author leaves it to readers to make their own final judgement after reading the book as to whether, at the individual and collective levels, we have learnt those lessons and taken them to heart for the good of our individual and collective destiny.

This close media study considers how, squeezed in the moral vice of past and present, Afrikaners look in a mirror that reflects only a beautiful people.

It is an image of upstanding, hard-working citizens. To hold on to that image requires blinkers, sleights of hand and contortion. Above all, it requires an inversion of the liberation narrative in which the wretched of South Africa are the historical oppressors, besieged in their language, their homes, their jobs.

They are the new `grievables', an identity that requires intricate moral manoeuvres, and elision as much of the past as of transformation.

What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human in the perfect read for these unprecedented times.

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.

In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going.

‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates

‘Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama

First people communities are the groups of huntergatherers and herders, representing the oldest human lineages in Africa, who migrated from as far as East Africa to settle across southern Africa, in what is now Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. These groups, known today as the Khoisan, are represented by the Bushmen (or San) and the Khoe (plural Khoekhoen).

In First People, archaeologist Andrew Smith examines what we know about southern Africa’s earliest inhabitants, drawing on evidence from excavations, rock art, the observations of colonial-era travellers, linguistics, the study of the human genome and the latest academic research.

Richly illustrated, First People is an invaluable and accessible work that reaches from the Middle and Late Stone Age to recent times, and explores how the Khoisan were pushed to the margins of history and society. Smith, who is an expert on the history and prehistory of the Khoisan, paints a knowledgeable and fascinating portrait of their land occupation, migration, survival strategies and cultural practices.

How are we to explain the resurgence of customary chiefs in contemporary Africa? Rather than disappearing with the tide of modernity, as many expected, indigenous sovereigns are instead a rising force, often wielding substantial power and legitimacy despite major changes in the workings of the global political economy in the post–Cold War era—changes in which they are themselves deeply implicated.

This pathbreaking volume, edited by anthropologists John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises—from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers–but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that “traditional” authority enjoys in the late modern world.

Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the twenty-first century.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER! Waterstones nonfiction Book of the Month (June)! A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2016! SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE! `The political book of the year' - Sunday Times! `You will not read a more important book about America this year' Economist!

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance's grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Journalist Lesley Mofokeng investigates the life of his remarkable grandfather, Mongangane Wilfred Mofokeng, a prominent Dutch Reformed Church evangelist, who built a thriving community out of the dust of the far Northwest.

The journey takes him from Joburg’s Marabi-soaked townships of the 1930s to his childhood home of Gelukspan near Lichtenburg and then to the rural Free State and the remote mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In what becomes a spiritual quest, he traces the inspirational footsteps of his ancestors and the legendary King Moshoeshoe.

In the process, Mofokeng proudly claims his heritage and also uncovers a long-lost chapter of South African history and the church of the apartheid regime.

Citizens are asked to buy, and asked to consider to buy, goods of all sizes and all prices, nearly all of the time. Appeals to political decision-making are less common. In The Consumer Citizen, Ethan Porter investigates how the techniques of everyday consumer experiences can shape political behavior. Drawing on more than a dozen original studies, he shows that the casual conflation of consumer and political decisions has profound implications for how Americans think about politics. Indeed, Porter explains that consumer habits can affect citizens' attitudes about their government, their taxes, their politicians, and even whether they purchase government-sponsored health insurance. The consumer citizen approaches government as if it were just an ordinary firm. Of course, government is not an ordinary firm--far from it--and the disjunction between what government is, and the consumer apparatus that citizens bring to bear on their evaluations of it, offers insight into several long-unanswered questions in political behavior and public opinion. How do many Americans make sense of the political world? The Consumer Citizen offers a novel answer: By relying on the habits and tools that they learn as consumers.

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site (Ammunition Hill National Memorial Site), and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed.

In 2009, Chicago spent millions of dollars to create programs to prevent gang violence in some of its most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Yet in spite of the programs, violence has grown worse in some of the very neighborhoods that the violence prevention programs were intented to help. While public officials and social scientists often attribute the violence - and the failure of the programs - to a lack of community in poor neighborhoods, closer study reveals another source of community division: local politics. Through an ethnographic case study of Chicago's Little Village neighborhood, Wounded City dispells the popular belief that a lack of community is the primary source of violence, arguing that competition for political power and state resources often undermine efforts to reduce gang violence. Robert Vargas argues that the state, through the way it governs, can contribute to distrust and division among community members, thereby undermining social cohesion. The strategic actions taken by police officers, politicians, nonprofit organizations, and gangs to collaborate or compete for power and resources can vary block by block, triggering violence on some blocks while successfully preventing it on others. A rich blend of urban politics, sociology, and criminology, Wounded City offers a cautionary tale for elected officials, state agencies, and community based organizations involved with poor neighborhoods.

The discipline of religious studies has, historically, tended to focus on discrete ritual mistakes that occur in the context of individual performances outlined in ethnographic or sociological studies, and scholars have largely dismissed the fact that there are extensive discussions of ritual mistakes in many indigenous traditions' religious literature. And yet ritual mistakes (ranging from the simple to the complex) happen all the time, and they continue to carry ritual "weight," even when no one seriously doubts their impact on the efficacy of a ritual. In Ritual Gone Wrong, Kathryn McClymond approaches ritual mistakes as an integral part of ritual life and argues that religious traditions can accommodate mistakes and are often prepared for them. McClymond shows that many traditions even incorporate the regular occurrence of errors into their ritual systems, developing a substantial literature on how rituals can be disrupted, how these disruptions can be addressed, and when disruptions have gone too far. Using a series of case studies ranging from ancient India to modern day Iraq, and from medieval allegations of child sacrifice to contemporary Olympic ceremonies, McClymond explores the numerous ways in which ritual can go wrong, and demonstrates that the ritual is by nature fluid, supple, and dynamic-simultaneously adapting to socio-cultural conditions and, in some cases, shaping them.

The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently "dialogical." No speaker speaks alone, because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves, but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on "the monologic imagination" gives us new insights into languages' political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.

With applications throughout the social sciences, culture and psychology is a rapidly growing field that has experienced a surge in publications over the last decade. From this proliferation of books, chapters, and journal articles, exciting developments have emerged in the relationship of culture to cognitive processes, human development, psychopathology, social behavior, organizational behavior, neuroscience, language, marketing, and other topics. In recognition of this exponential growth, Advances in Culture and Psychology is the first annual series to offer state-of-the-art reviews of scholarly research in the growing field of culture and psychology. The Advances in Culture and Psychology series is: * Developing an intellectual home for culture and psychology research programs * Fostering bridges and connections among cultural scholars from across the discipline * Creating a premier outlet for culture and psychology research * Publishing articles that reflect the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological diversity in the study of culture and psychology * Enhancing the collective identity of the culture and psychology field Comprising chapters from internationally renowned culture scholars and representing diversity in the theory and study of culture within psychology, Advances in Culture and Psychology is an ideal resource for research programs and academics throughout the psychology community.

Mexican statues and paintings of figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Lord of Chalma are endowed with sacred presence and the power to perform miracles. Millions of devotees visit these miraculous images to request miracles for health, employment, children, and countless everyday matters. When requests are granted, devotees reciprocate with votive offerings. Collages, photographs, documents, texts, milagritos, hair and braids, clothing, retablos, and other representative objects cover walls at many shrines. Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico studies such petitionary devotion-primarily through extensive fieldwork at several shrines in Guanajuato, Jalisco, Queretaro, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas. Graziano is interested in retablos not only as extraordinary works of folk art but: as Mexican expressions of popular Catholicism comprising a complex of beliefs, rituals, and material culture; as archives of social history; and as indices of a belief system that includes miraculous intercession in everyday life. Previous studies focus almost exclusively on commissioned votive paintings, but Graziano also considers the creative ex votos made by the votants themselves. Among the many miraculous images treated in the book are the Cristo Negro de Otatitlan, Nino del Cacahuatito, Senor de Chalma, and the Virgen de Guadalupe. The book is written in two voices, one analytical to provide an understanding of miracles, miraculous images, and votive offerings, and the other narrative to bring the reader closer to lived experiences at the shrines. This book appears at a moment of transition, when retablos are disappearing from church walls and beginning to appear in museum exhibitions; when the artistic value of retablos is gaining prominence; when the commercial value of retablos is increasing, particularly among private collectors outside of Mexico; and when traditional retablo painters are being replaced by painters with a more commercial and less religious approach to their trade. Graziano's book thus both records a disappearing tradition and charts the way in which it is being transformed.

Written in a conversational style that transforms complex ideas into accessible ones, this international best-selling textbook provides an interdisciplinary review of the theories and research in cross-cultural psychology. The text's unique critical thinking framework, including Critical Thinking boxes, helps students develop analytical skills. Exercises interspersed throughout promote active learning and encourage class discussion. Case in Point sections review controversial issues and opinions about behavior in different cultural contexts. Cross-Cultural Sensitivity boxes underscore the importance of empathy in communication. Numerous applications prepare students for working in various multicultural contexts such as teaching, counseling, health care, and social work. New to the 7th Edition: over 190 recent references, particularly on studies of non-Western regions such as the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the United States and Europe. broader discussion of gender roles and health behaviors across cultures. new discussions related to the psychological fallout of both globalization and anti-globalization tendencies. greater attention shifted from general psychological theories to specific challenges of cross-cultural psychology. new or revised chapter openings that draw upon current events. more examples related to the experiences of international students in the United States and indigenous people. updated figures, tables, and graphs that are also available for download for instructors to utilize in their online teaching. new research on global trends, nationalism, gender, race, religious beliefs, parenting styles, sexual orientation, ethnic identity and stereotypes, immigration, intelligence, substance abuse, states of consciousness, DSM-5, cultural customs, evolutionary psychology, treatment of psychological disorders, and acculturation. online resources for instructors and students. The dynamic author team brings a diverse set of experiences in writing this text that provides cross-cultural perspectives on topics such as sensation, perception, consciousness, intelligence, human development, emotion, motivation, social perception, personality, psychological disorders, and various applied topics.

Written in a conversational style that transforms complex ideas into accessible ones, this international best-selling textbook provides an interdisciplinary review of the theories and research in cross-cultural psychology. The text's unique critical thinking framework, including Critical Thinking boxes, helps students develop analytical skills. Exercises interspersed throughout promote active learning and encourage class discussion. Case in Point sections review controversial issues and opinions about behavior in different cultural contexts. Cross-Cultural Sensitivity boxes underscore the importance of empathy in communication. Numerous applications prepare students for working in various multicultural contexts such as teaching, counseling, health care, and social work. New to the 7th Edition: over 190 recent references, particularly on studies of non-Western regions such as the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the United States and Europe. broader discussion of gender roles and health behaviors across cultures. new discussions related to the psychological fallout of both globalization and anti-globalization tendencies. greater attention shifted from general psychological theories to specific challenges of cross-cultural psychology. new or revised chapter openings that draw upon current events. more examples related to the experiences of international students in the United States and indigenous people. updated figures, tables, and graphs that are also available for download for instructors to utilize in their online teaching. new research on global trends, nationalism, gender, race, religious beliefs, parenting styles, sexual orientation, ethnic identity and stereotypes, immigration, intelligence, substance abuse, states of consciousness, DSM-5, cultural customs, evolutionary psychology, treatment of psychological disorders, and acculturation. online resources for instructors and students. The dynamic author team brings a diverse set of experiences in writing this text that provides cross-cultural perspectives on topics such as sensation, perception, consciousness, intelligence, human development, emotion, motivation, social perception, personality, psychological disorders, and various applied topics.

Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of varmakkalai, or "the art of the vital spots," a South Indian esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts. Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian Government's medically pluralistic health-care system, very little of a reliable nature has been written about it. Drawing on a diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in different religious traditions-such as Yoga and Ayurveda-and within various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are among the important focal points of Sieler's study. Practitioners protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of "lure and withdrawal"--a performance of secrecy--because secrecy functions as what might be called "symbolic capital." Sieler argues that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice; knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit, non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a "moral economy." It is not merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge. Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to students of religion, medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, indologists, and martial arts and performance studies.

While most research on inequality focuses on impoverished communities, it often ignores how powerful communities and elites monopolize resources at the top of the social hierarchy. In Privilege at Play, Hugo Ceron-Anaya offers an intersectional analysis of Mexican elites to examine the ways affluent groups perpetuate dynamics of domination and subordination. Using ethnographic research conducted inside three exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Ceron-Anaya focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege in contemporary Mexico. His detailed analysis of social life and the organization of physical space further considers how the legacy of imperialism continues to determine practices of exclusion and how social hierarchies are subtlety reproduced through distinctions such as fashion and humor, in addition to the traditional indicators of wealth and class. Adding another dimension to the complex nature of social exclusion, Privilege at Play shows how elite social relations and spaces allow for the resource hoarding and monopolization that helps create and maintain poverty.

This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal settings by situating the study of language and law within contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as suspects and witnesses. However the chapters do this work through the conceptual lens of 'textual travel', or the way that texts move across space and time and are transformed along the way. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and legal life. With contributions from leading experts in language and law, Legal-Lay Communication explores such 'textual travel' themes as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of recontextualization in processes of judicial decision-making, and the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication.

Rituals combining healing with spirit possession and court-like proceedings are found around the world and throughout history. A person suffers from an illness that cannot be cured, for example, and in order to be healed performs a ritual involving a prosecution and a defense, a judge and witnesses. Divine beings then speak through oracles, spirits possess the victim and are exorcized, and local gods intervene to provide healing and justice. Such practices seem to be the very antithesis of modernity, and many modern, secular states have systematically attempted to eliminate them. What is the relationship between healing, spirit possession, and the law, and why are they so often combined? Why are such rituals largely absent from modern societies, and what happens to them when the state attempts to expunge them from their health and justice systems, or even to criminalize them? Despite the prevalence of rituals involving some or all of these elements, this volume represents the first attempt to compare and analyze them systematically. The Law of Possession brings together historical and contemporary case studies from East Asia, South Asia, and Africa, and argues that despite consistent attempts by modern, secular states to discourage, eliminate, and criminalize them, these types of rituals persist and even thrive because they meet widespread human needs.

Even in the twenty-first century some two-thirds of the world's peoples-the world's social majority-quietly live in non-modern, non-cosmopolitan places. In such places the multitudinous voices of the spirits, deities, and other denizens of the other-than-human world continue to be heard, continue to be loved or feared or both, continue to accompany the human beings in all their activities. In this book, Frederique Apffel-Marglin draws on a lifetime of work with the indigenous peoples of Peru and India to support her argument that the beliefs, values, and practices of such traditional peoples are ''eco-metaphysically true.'' In other words, they recognize that human beings are in communion with other beings in nature that have agency and are kinds of spiritual intelligences, with whom humans can be in relationship and communion. Ritual is the medium for communicating, reciprocating, creating and working with the other-than-humans, who daily remind the humans that the world is not for humans' exclusive use. Apffel-Marglin argues moreover, that when such relationships are appropriately robust, human lifeways are rich, rewarding, and in the contemporary jargon, environmentally sustainable. Her ultimate objective is to ''re-entangle'' humans in nature-she is, in the final analysis, promoting a spirituality and ecology of belonging and connection to nature, and an appreciation of animistic perception and ecologies. Along the way she offers provocative and poignant critiques of many assumptions, including of the ''development'' paradigm as benign (including feminist forms of development advocacy), of the majority of anthropological and other social scientific understandings of indigenous religions, and of common views about peasant and indigenous agronomy. She concludes with a case study of the fair trade movement, illuminating both its shortcomings (how it echoes some of the assumptions in the development paradigms) and its promise as a way to rekindle community between humans as well as between humans and the other-than-human world.

Music for Life: Music Participation and Quality of Life of Senior Citizens presents a fresh, new exploration of the impact of musical experiences on the quality of life of senior citizens, and charts a new direction in the facilitation of the musical lives of people of all ages. Authors Fung and Lehmberg clearly define the issues surrounding music education, music participation, quality of life, and senior citizens, discussing the most relevant research from the fields of music education, adult learning, lifelong learning, gerontology, medicine, music therapy, and interdisciplinary studies. At the heart of the book is Evergreen Town, a retirement community in the southeastern U.S.A., that serves as the backdrop for three original research studies. The first of these is in two phases, a survey and a focus group interview, that examines the histories and rationales for the music participations and non-participations of community residents. The second and third case studies take an in-depth look at a church choir and a bluegrass group, two prominent musical groups in the community, and include the perspectives of the authors themselves as group members and participant-observers. Fung and Lehmberg conclude with a challenge for the profession of music education: to act on this research and on the current advances in the field, to enable all people to benefit from the richness of music as a substantial contributor to quality of life.

A surging movement for Catalan political independence from Spain has brought renewed urgency to questions about what it means, personally and politically, to speak or not to speak Catalan and to claim Catalan identity. This book develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and uses it to illuminate the politics of language in Catalonia, where Catalan jostles with Castilian for legitimacy. Kathryn Woolard's longitudinal research across decades of political autonomy contextualizes this ethnographic study of the social meaning of Catalan in the 21st century. Part I lays out the ideologies of linguistic authenticity, anonymity, and naturalism that underpin linguistic authority in the modern western world, and gives an overview of a shift in the ideological grounding of linguistic authority in contemporary Catalonia. Part II examines discourses in the media surrounding three public linguistic controversies: an immigrant president's linguistic competence, a municipal festival, and an international book fair. Part III explores individuals' linguistic practices and views, drawing on classroom ethnographies and interviews with two generations of young people from the same high school. Woolard argues that there is an ongoing shift at both public and personal levels away from the ethnolinguistic authenticity that powered relations in the early transition to political autonomy, and toward new discourses of anonymity, rooted cosmopolitanism, and authenticity understood as a project rather than a matter of origins and essence.

Jacob Kinnard offers an in-depth examination of the complex dynamics of religiously charged places. Focusing on several important shared and contested pilgrimage places-Ground Zero and Devils Tower in the United States, Ayodhya and Bodhgaya in India, Karbala in Iraq-he poses a number of crucial questions. What and who has made these sites important, and why? How are they shared, and how and why are they contested? What is at stake in their contestation? How are the particular identities of place and space established? How are individual and collective identity intertwined with space and place? Challenging long-accepted, clean divisions of the religious world, Kinnard explores specific instances of the vibrant messiness of religious practice, the multivocality of religious objects, the fluid and hybrid dynamics of religious places, and the shifting and tangled identities of religious actors. He contends that sacred space is a constructed idea: places are not sacred in and of themselves, but are sacred because we make them sacred. As such, they are in perpetual motion, transforming themselves from moment to moment and generation to generation. Places in Motion moves comfortably across and between a variety of historical and cultural settings as well as academic disciplines, providing a deft and sensitive approach to the topic of sacred places, with awareness of political, economic, and social realities as these exist in relation to questions of identity. It is a lively and much needed critical advance in analytical reflections on sacred space and pilgrimage.