RLE Social and Cultural Anthropology brings together a collection of key titles from a range of historic imprints. From Anthropology and Nursing to Everyday Life, from The Gift Economy to Two-Dimensional Man, they form an essential reference source from a selection of acclaimed international authors.

By adopting oral history and fieldwork methods and exploring historical data, this book chronologically depicts the development of the schools and education in a village in North China over a century. The book reveals how education and school life in the rural village are being impacted not only by its own history and traditions, but also by external powers; more specifically, the development of rural schools is influenced by the tensions between Chinese and Western culture, between history and reality, between countryside and cities, and between national and local powers. In essence, villagers' educational experience is actually a battlefield for school education and local tradition - the children's lives are dominated by school education, leaving local traditions few opportunities to exert an influence. The study also discusses how school education and local traditions have influenced villagers' social mobility, a topic that has rarely been studied in previous literature. In summary, rural schools have been developing within an interactive network composed of various actors. With the fading of national power since the 1980s, local rural actors have enjoyed a much more liberal social and political space and thus now play a more active role in rural education. Presenting a microcosm that reflects the historical development of rural education in China, the book is a valuable resource for researchers in the field of in rural education, educational history, and educational anthropology, as well as for readers interested in rural education in China.

Originally published in 1914, this text describes L.T. Headland and his wife's experience in China in the early twentieth century. With a focus on home life this study explores issues such as children, marriage and education as well as food, religion and concubinage as well as presenting anecdotes and personal stories from the families Headland interacted with. This title will be of interest to students of Asian Studies and Anthropology.

Around the planet, indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in indigenous journalism, film, music and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in Nunavut and the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon.

Valerie Alia is Adjunct Professor in the Doctor of Social Sciences programme at Royal Roads University (Canada) and Visiting Professor in the Centre for Diversity in the Professions at Leeds Metropolitan University. An award-winning scholar, journalist, photographer, and poet, she was Senior Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, and Running Stream Professor of Ethics and Identity at Leeds Metropolitan University, and was a television and radio broadcaster, newspaper and magazine writer and arts reviewer in the US and Canada. Her books include: Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People; Media Ethics and Social Change; Media and Ethnic Minorities; and Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in Arctic Canada. She is a founding member of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association.

This collection of previously out-of-print titles brings togther some key texts from the early study of the anthropology of religion. An important reference collection, these books will prove invaluable to students of religion and anthropology.

An ideal book for those coming to the anthropology of drugs for the first time, filling a surprisingly big gap in the literature Includes many case studies, such as drug tourism, the opioid crisis and 'county lines' in the UK as well as global examples from the Philippines, Mexico, North America and Europe Helps connect the anthropology of drugs to issues highly relevant to professional working in drug treatment, health, social work and mental health

Love and Death are two major facets of the whole of human existence and in The Drama of Love and Death, Carpenter attempts to analyse the interplay of love and death in everyday life. Originally published in 1912, this study focuses on how love and death are perceived and treated in the history of humankind and how these views evolved up until the early twentieth century. This title will be of interest to students of Sociology and Anthropology.

Reveals a profound understanding of evolutionary biology, and an excellent up-to-date knowledge of human evolution studies. It is not only very well done, but...it is written from a novel point of view. It needs to be very widely read and I hope that it will be. Megarry is doing his subject a great service.
--Bernard Campbell University of California

Social scientists have tended to neglect prehistory in their approach to human societies. Tim Megarry's lucid and authoritative book remedies this neglect. It will be of great value to students of anthropology, psychology, and sociology.
--Paul HirstBirkbeck College, University of London

Stressing the importance of culture as a formative agent in the evolutionary emergence of modern humans, Society in Prehistory provides an impressive, interdisciplinary, and deeply informed survey of prehistory. Individual chapters focus on culture and evolution; biology and culture; primate societies; the first hominids; tools and culture; the economics of foraging; modern humans and human behavior; sex and the division of labor; and sexuality and social life. The book reveals that, while social behavior is biologically grounded, it is not biologically determined.

The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies.

Anthropology has long shied away from examining how human beings may lead happy and fulfilling lives. This book, however, shows that the ethnographic examination of well-being-defined as "the optimal state for an individual, a community, and a society"-and the comparison of well-being within and across societies is a new and important area for anthropological inquiry. Distinctly different in different places, but also reflecting our common humanity, well-being is intimately linked to the idea of happiness and its pursuits. Noted anthropological researchers have come together in this volume to examine well-being in a range of diverse ways and to investigate it in a range of settings: from the Peruvian Amazon, the Australian outback, and the Canadian north, to India, China, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States.

Gordon Mathews is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996) and Global Culture /Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), and co-written Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2007); he has co-edited Consuming Hong Kong (2001) and Japan's Changing Generations (2004). Carolina Izquierdo is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has centered on health and well-being among the Matsigenka in the Peruvian Amazon, the Mapuche in Chile, and middle-class families in the United States.

By conversing with the main bodies of relevant literature from Migration Studies and Memory Studies, this overview highlights how analysing memories can contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of migrant incorporation. The chapters consider international case studies from Europe, North America, Australia, Asia and the Middle East.

It has often been asserted that Greek civilization underwent a transition from myth to reason. But what does such an assertion mean? And how much truth is there in it? Were the Greeks special in having evolved our sort of reason, or is that a mirage? In this book, some of the world's leading experts on ancient Greek myth, religion, philosophy, and history reconsider these fundamental issues. Among the problems they explore are: the history of the Mythos/Logos opposition; myth and reason in practice; logic(s) of myth; intersections involving myth/philosophy, myth/history, myth/ethnography, and myth/technology. Some contributors are more sceptical than others about whether the myth/reason polarity has any future as a tool for the understanding of Greek society - or any society. But what they all agree on is that a reconsideration of the Greek case can help us to clarify much broader debates, for example the debate about the cross-cultural viability (or not) of myth and reason/rationality.

This book is a lively indictment of American culture's pervasive use of the psychotherapeutic metaphor to explain behaviors. Throop argues that the use of psychotherapy and excessive individualism is profoundly unjust, working only to ensure the continuance of social problems.

..".contains fascinating material on the social, political, nutritional, and evolutionary aspects of human food choice...Scholars and students in food studies will find Consuming the Inedible useful for its variety of approaches to 'unusual' eating practices, and several of the chapters should also find their way onto reading lists for courses in the anthropology of food." . JRAI

Throughout the world, everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners.

This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across a diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences--biological, mineral, social or spiritual--of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them.

Jeremy M. MacClancy is Professor of Anthropology, C. Jeya Henry is Professor of Nutrition and Helen M. Macbeth is an Honorary Research Fellow in Anthropology, all at Oxford Brookes University."

In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design-from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments-currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an "autonomous design" that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design's principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.

Now that nearly twenty years have passed since the collapse of the Soviet bloc there is a need to understand what has taken place since that historic date and where we are at the moment. Bringing together authors with different historical, cultural, regional and theoretical backgrounds, this volume engages in debates that address new questions arising from recent developments, such as whether there is a need to reject or uphold the notion of post-socialism as both a necessary and valid concept ignoring changes and differences across both time and space. The authors' firsthand ethnographies from their own countries belie such a simplistic notion, revealing, as they do, the cultural, social, and historical diversity of countries of Central and Southeastern Europe.

This book is about our appreciation for order and meaningfulness. It offers a new theory of that feeling inspired by Durkheim and Marx, then derives other theories to answer a range of questions: why we like to make ourselves orderly (in Chapter Three s theory of identity and commitment), why create shared orders of meaning (in Chapter Four s theory of culture); how we create those orders collaboratively through conversation (Chapter Five), and also through narrative, symbolic, and ritualistic formats (Chapter Six), and how orders of meaning are created in response to social structural position (Chapter Seven). In the end, this book shows how our sense of order both integrates and segregates us into productive associations with one another. And so, Explaining Culture is able to explain two patterns common to all growth: expansion and centralization. We see how our desire for novelty disperses us for resources, and that for familiarity draws us together to create meaningful order from them. Indeed, this book may offer a new approach to answering one of the most basic questions in both social and natural science: the question of how organic systems like society are created and maintained. Explaining Culture is an important new step in answering our most basic questions about culture, social interaction, and the emergence of order. The unique contribution of this work is in identifying the determinants of meaningfulness, and the ways we make the world meaningful by ordering it. Our valuing of order is rarely mentioned in sociology, but this book shows how it is the key influence in how we order ourselves and each other.

This monograph - which was very well received when originally published in France - contains a great deal of detailed information about the attitudes towards learning and written culture among members of the nobility in different parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. An encounter between a warring knight and the world of learning could seem a paradox. It is nonetheless related with the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, an essential intellectual movement for western history. Knights not only fought in battles, but also moved in sophisticated courts. Knights were interested on Latin classics and reading, and writing poetry. Supportive of "jongleurs" and minstrels, they enjoyed literary conversations with clerics who would attempt to reform their behaviour, which was often brutal. These lettered warriors, while improving their culture, learned to repress their own violence and were initiated to courtesy: selective language, measured gestures, elegance in dress, and manners at the table. Their association with women, who were often learned, became more gallant. A revolution of thought occurred among lay elites who, in contact with clergy, began to use their weapons for common welfare.This new conduct was a tangible sign of Medievalist society's leap forward towards modernity.

"Impatient with popular and academic hand-wringing over 'prolonged adolescence' (or young people's unwillingness to grow up), Blatterer in this overdue sociological treatise on the changing nature of adulthood in Western society counters that such judgments unfairly draw on obsolete norms of adulthood... Blatterer's writing is eloquent...his arguments are well considered, important, and thought-provoking."- Choice

Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the "storm and stress" period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey's end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imagination and neglected as an area of sociological investigation, something that has been noted by sociologists over the last four decades. Going beyond the overwhelmingly psychological literature, this book draws on original qualitative research and theories of social recognition and thus presents a first step towards filling an important gap in our understanding of the meaning of adulthood.

Harry Blatterer is Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University where he teaches introductory sociology, social theory and courses on the life course, generations and intimacy.

Migration studies is an area of increasing significance in musicology as in other disciplines. How do migrants express and imagine themselves through musical practice? How does music help them to construct social imaginaries and to cope with longings and belongings? In this study of migration music in postsocialist Albania, Eckehard Pistrick identifies links between sound, space, emotionality and mobility in performance, provides new insights into the controversial relationship between sound and migration, and sheds light on the cultural effects of migration processes. Central to Pistrick's approach is the essential role of emotionality for musical creativity which is highlighted throughout the volume: pain and longing are discussed not as a traumatising end point, but as a driving force for human action and as a source for cultural creativity. In addition, the study provides a fascinating overview about the current state of a rarely documented vocal tradition in Europe that is a part of the mosaic of Mediterranean singing traditions. It refers to the challenges imposed onto this practice by heritage politics, the dynamics of retraditionalisation and musical globalisation. In this sense the book constitutes an important study to the dynamics of postsocialism as seen from a musicological perspective. Winner of the 2017 Stavro Skendi Book Prize for Achievement in Albanian Studies, Society for Albanian Studies Dr. Pistrick's book, in the committee's judgment, impressively connects ethnomusicology, anthropology and migration studies. Linking sound with space and emotionality, it offers a new understanding of the role of the oral tradition within Albanian communities, in particular its ability to deal creatively with painful experiences and the realities of migration. Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies

Ethnographic fieldwork is one of the most fundamental tools for anthropological study. The step-by-step exercises in Ken Guest's Cultural Anthropology Fieldwork Journal encourage students to apply the concepts they are learning in class and observe, question and generate their own data about the places, relationships, and networks that they may take for granted in everyday life: from friendships, family dynamics and consumption habits to classrooms, places of worship, TV screens and their own homes.

What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past.

Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound--music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio--is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity.

Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made--the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice--how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs."

Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age," Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.